Jack With a Twist

suppose I don’t mind.

“Miranda says that we should register for the Georgetown bowl,” Jack says, getting the scanner ready to zap.

Miranda? Why is Miranda telling him what to register for?

“Why is Miranda telling us what to register for?” I ask, taking the bowl from his grasp under the pretense of taking a closer look at it.

“She says it makes a great salad bowl,” he says, baby blues shining. He seems so excited about having suggested something for our registry that I barely have the heart to tell him that I really don’t care what Miranda thinks we should register for, since she’s not our friend. She’s just someone who works for Jack.

Not like I’m jealous of her or anything. But, really. How dare he invoke her name while we are in the temple of Tiffany and Co. (And if you don’t think that shopping at Tiffany’s is a religious experience, clearly you’ve never been there.)

“It’s at a good price point,” Jack says, smiling. “Didn’t your mother tell us that we should register for things in a wide variety of price points?”

“Zap it in,” I say, forcing a smile. I think to myself that I can always delete it off of our registry later online.

“Will do,” Jack says, and turns around to zap the totally boring Georgetown bowl into our registry.

“Gotcha!” the faux Russian guy says, coming from out of nowhere, pointing his zappy thingy at Jack. Jack clutches his chest and pretends to fall to the floor. I do what any woman in my position would do—stand there with my mouth wide open, waiting for faux Russian guy’s fiancée to arrive so that we can roll our eyes at our respective men-children.

“Brooke,” he chokes out, “just remember how much I love you. (Cough.) I want you to go on without me and live a happy life. (Cough, cough.) Don’t mourn me for the rest of your life. And—whatever you do—don’t register for that Metropolitan vase. I really hate it.” He coughs a bit more, just for good measure, and then collapses completely onto the floor, moaning all the way.

I am not amused. Again, and I really can’t stress this enough, he’s supposed to be the normal one in this relationship.

“Who are you?” I say, and take his gun and start zapping silver serving spoons indiscriminately.

“Boys and their toys,” a woman, whom I can only assume is the faux Russian fiancée says to me, rolling her eyes. “Just give them a phallus and they can play all day.” Um, okay, can’t we just call them little boys? Was that phallus remark really necessary? That comment totally ruined Tiffany and Co. for me for the day. Perhaps forever.

But, maybe they really are Russian. That post-perestroika tough-talking sort of Russian woman who simply tells it like it is. After all, she does have pitch-black straight hair, pale skin and bloodred lipstick. I ask you, what says Russian woman more than black hair, pale skin and red lipstick? And her fiancé has pale blond hair, even paler skin and a tall, skinny frame that totally screams Baryshnikov in White Nights.

Or, she could just be totally correct. There was something disturbingly phallic about the zappy guns at Tiffany’s, with their long noses and thick bases.

Eeew. Now I’ve grossed myself out.

“Let me give you a hand there,” faux Russian says to Jack, as he helps pull Jack up off of the floor.

“Thanks,” Jack says, brushing off his pants and running his hand through his hair.

“No problem,” faux Russian says. “I’m Yuri. And this is my fiancée, Natasha.”

“Nice to meet you,” I say, shaking their hands as Jack introduces us. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the edges of Jack’s mouth creep into a sly smile.

“So,” Jack says, putting his arm around my waist and giving me a squeeze, “you guys are Russian, huh?”

Jack smiles, and I must admit, I smile a bit, too, at the ridiculousness of the situation, but really, all I can think is: Who is this man and what has he done with my perfect fiancé?

11

“So, how’s the Monique case going?” Noah asks me, peeking his head into my office.

“Great,” I say, smiling at him, “just great!”

And why shouldn’t I feel great? After all, I’ve got the litigation totally under control. I’ve researched the law on dissolution of partnership, studied Monique’s partnership agreement, analyzed her non-compete clause, and even had the case fast-tracked in an effort to avoid unwanted media exposure. So, I’ve got it all in the bag.

“Litigating against your fiancé is going all right?” Noah asks, furrowing his brow. When he found out that Jack was the Gilson, Hecht partner on the matter, he wanted me to pass the case off to another associate, but I stood firm. I’m really going to prove myself on this matter and nothing’s going to stand in my way.

“Of course!” I say, “In fact, it’s even better than I could have imagined. With Monique’s husband, it would have been a bit of a challenge to negotiate a settlement. But, with Jack against me, it’ll be a piece of cake! The man is putty in my hands. I almost feel sort of sorry for him, you know?” Now, I know I was laying it on a bit thick, but Noah Goldberg is one of the founding partners of the firm and I just want to assure him that my case is going well.

And, okay, Jack may not be actual putty in my hands—he didn’t drop the case when I asked (read: begged) him to—but, I know that he’ll treat me with kid gloves in this litigation and I plan to exploit that to the fullest extent allowed by law. You see, in a normal litigation I know exactly what Jack would do. Seeing that his opposition is a firm that’s much smaller than Gilson, Hecht, with much fewer resources, he’d begin the discovery process by burying the other side in a massive document production that would take them weeks to produce. He’d request thousands of pages of documents from the other side that they, in turn, would have to get from their client, review for relevancy and attorney-client privilege, and then number, stamp and photocopy. Given that our case is fast-tracked, the deadline would be even sooner than a regular document production, and in requesting as many documents as he could think of, he’d force the other side to concentrate all of their energy into putting together the requested documents instead of working on case strategy, which would then allow him to use all of that time to work on his own case strategy and easily win the case while the other side is inundated with minutiae.

But, my Jackie would never do that to me. Thank God, really, because I have a million wedding dress appointments to go to in the next two weeks.

“Putty?” Noah says to me, “Really?”

“Yes,” I say in a stage whisper, “it’s almost embarrassing.”

“That would be embarrassing,” he says, “if you hadn’t just been served with a discovery request.” He walks over to my desk and throws a legal document on top of the case law that I was reviewing. “So much for putty.”

Served?

How can that be? Jack and I had a very romantic dinner last night and he didn’t mention a thing to me about serving me with discovery requests. How could he do this to me when I was such a fabulous fiancée last night? I even cooked for him! Well, not so much cooked as ordered a Heat-and-Eat meal from Fresh Direct, but I did totally unpack the box and then heat it up for him! And picked up a bottle of wine and a cheesecake on the way home, to boot! He is really taking this Chinese Wall thing seriously.

I don’t even need to look at the document Noah’s just dumped on my desk. I already know what it is—it’s fastened with two staples across the top, like all discovery requests, with a “blue back” attached, which, as the name implies, is a blue piece of paper secured to the back of a document that folds over the top of the first page by one inch. The fancier law firms use that one inch where blue back folds over the top to announce, in bold-faced type, the name of their law firm. I don’t even have to look to see what this familiar blue back says: