Love Saves the Day

“Oh please, Laura. I couldn’t make it as a writer back when people were actually hiring writers. It won’t happen for me now when everybody’s scaling back.” He’d taken her hand and said, “Look, I don’t want you to think I’m trying to put the whole burden on you. I swear I’m going to find something else. And I know it’ll be tight, but we can manage on your salary and what’s left of our savings until then. What’s that expression? Safe as houses? Isn’t your job at the firm safe as houses?”

“Yeah,” Laura said. “Safe as houses.”

White-shoe firms like Laura’s had traditionally never engaged in major layoffs the way other companies did. In part this was a point of pride—of maintaining public confidence and public appearances—and in part it was a practical matter. Large cases were apt to spring up on short notice, and then you’d want partners and associates whose skills you knew you could rely on. Sometimes a firm would grow so large and unwieldy that it would collapse under its own weight, sucking everyone into its vortex like a black hole. Typically, though, jobs like Laura’s—even during recessions and downturns—had been safe.

But now uneasy whispers and rumors were afloat, tales of large corporate firms like Laura’s that were actually laying associates off. Laura wasn’t sure precisely when the early-morning phone calls from recruiters had stopped coming in; she only knew that one morning, when the phones were unusually quiet, she’d realized with a start that it had been some time since anybody had called to “feel her out” about her willingness to move elsewhere. At Neuman Daines, the new class of first-year associates, who in the past had always started their employment the September following their law school graduations, had seen their start dates deferred until the following spring. A handful of associates who fell onto the lower end of the billable-hours-per-month scale had been told, in the most civilized way possible, that it would be best for all concerned if they were employed elsewhere within, say, the next two months. Perry had never exactly been a jovial person, but Laura had detected an undercurrent of strain lately in their interactions. She didn’t know whether it had to with her personally, or with the firm’s larger financial outlook, but whatever its source, it was disturbing.

Nothing had been the same since Josh’s company had gone through its own round of layoffs. As soon as Laura had seen the severance agreement in Josh’s hand, she’d known what had happened. A “Chinese wall” had been erected around her at the firm. She had been deliberately excluded from anything related to Josh’s company, the paperwork the firm was preparing for it, and everything else associated with it. It was foolish, Laura knew, to take such a thing personally. Had she gone to Perry and confronted him with it, if she’d said something like, How could you not tell me? she knew exactly what Perry’s response would be. You knew what you were getting into when you started dating a client, he would say. You knew there might be complications. Probably he would have thrown in some pithy quote from the Talmud about choices and consequences for good measure. And of course he would be right. The only thing to be gained by bringing it up would be to appear naïve and overly emotional. Just another woman in business who couldn’t separate the personal from the professional.

Still, the thing hurt. Laura would look at her co-workers, particularly the other fifth-years, and wonder who had known what and when. How long before Laura had they known that her home life was about to turn upside down? What had they said about her when her name was mentioned? Growing up, Laura had always had a keen sense of being different—tall and white in an elementary school where few children were either. She had spent most of her adult life trying to fit in, and since marrying Josh she’d nearly convinced herself that this was something she no longer gave much thought to. Yet, as it turned out, it had taken very little for that feeling to come rushing back, to make her wonder if every hushed conversation that ended abruptly when she entered a room had been about her, the oddity, the one who wasn’t quite the same as the others, the associate foolish enough to marry a client—something no other Neuman Daines associate had done in the entire hundred-year history of the firm.