Jack With a Twist

has turned this into a contentious litigation. And more importantly, why has this attitude rubbed off on my fiancé and turned him into such a jerk?

These questions may not be appropriate for the Interrogatories. Perhaps I should just focus on answering the Interrogatories that Jack has asked me.

Interrogatory 1: State the grounds for dissolving this business partnership.

Haven’t I told Jack that before? That sort of thing would have been in my Initial Complaint. As I click through my documents on my computer, though, I can’t seem to find the original document. The file names all blur together and I feel my eyes beginning to close against my will.

I’m more tired than I realized. If I could just put my head down for one tiny little minute, I bet I’d feel much better. A cat nap. That’s what I need. I just need one of those twenty-minute naps that totally revitalize and rejuvenate you. Then, I can get back to my work.

Leaning back in my ergonomically correct chair, I slowly close my eyes and take a deep breath in, deep breath out. Yes, a little sleep. This is just what I need.

I get back to my apartment and the clock on the microwave oven blinks 2:45 a.m. Too tired to hang my coat and work bag up in the closet, I take them off and just let them fall where they will in the foyer. As I walk into the apartment, I realize that an enormous red silk screen is smack dab in the middle of my living room. I know I haven’t been home much lately, but it’s just so unlike Jack to just start redecorating the place without me. And, anyway, it’s blocking my path into the bedroom.

I walk over to the screen and try to move it, but it’s stuck in place. Turning around backward and putting all of my weight into it, I lean against the screen and try to push. I give it a few good heaves and hos, but it’s no use. The thing simply won’t budge.

I call out for Jack to help me. The silk that covers the screen is extremely fine and I know that he should be able to hear me through its smooth fibers. But, he doesn’t hear me. Instead, I hear him. I hear voices, low and dim, giggling together, laughing together and then I don’t hear anything at all.

“Jack,” I cry out, “are you there?”

No response. More giggling from the bedroom. I turn around again and put my full weight onto the silk screen. I push and I push and the screen doesn’t move at all. It doesn’t move an inch.

“Jack,” I say, trying to sound composed, “what is going on over there? Help me, I’m stuck!”

But he doesn’t come. Instead, I hear more rustling from the bedroom and then a voice.

“Oh, Jack,” I hear and I can barely make out whose voice it is. I march back into the kitchen and open the drawer. Rifling around, I finally find what I need—I grab the scissors and quickly make my way back to the gigantic silk screen. I consider, for a brief second, cutting the screen slowly and carefully, only making a hole big enough for me to walk through, but then reconsider in an instant and just stab the fabric quickly. It takes a few stabs before it rips, but when it does, the entire thing opens up for me. It opens wide, like the petals of a rose awakening in the spring, and I walk through the hole toward the bedroom.

As I make my way down the hallway, I hear the voices again. I try to move quickly, but my feet feel like they are lead. The faster I try to move, the slower I seem to walk. Everything around me gets blurry and dark, and I struggle to bring things back into focus. The hallway stretches out before me, seemingly getting longer with each and every step that I take.

“Jack,” I hear the voice say again, and I rack my brain to figure out who it is. I finally get closer to the bedroom door and I reach out to grab the doorknob. In an instant, I realize whose voice it is that I’ve been hearing: Miranda Foxley’s.

“Jack!” I call out, reaching for the doorknob, but the more I try to reach for it, the further away it seems to get from my grasp.

“Jack!” I cry, “Jack!” Everything becomes so dark and blurry, I can’t even see the doorknob anymore. I float backward, further and further away from my apartment, and suddenly, I feel my head jerk upwards.

I wake up with a start and realize that I was just sleeping. It was only a dream. More like a nightmare, actually, but the important thing is that it wasn’t actually happening to me. I was only sleeping.

As I stretch out the crink in my neck from sleeping in my chair, I realize that I’ve slept for forty-five minutes and I need to get back to answering Jack’s Interrogatories immediately if I have any chance at all of getting home before the sun rises and tonight actually becomes tomorrow. And it’s so late that I can forget any chance I had of drafting my own set of Interrogatories.

But then, I look at my computer screen. Seems that I’ve already started drafting my Interrogatories. Funny, because I don’t recall writing anything at all.

But, my computer screen tells an entirely different story:

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK —————————————————————

In the matter of:

The dissolution of partnership of Index No. 54930285-NY

Monique Couture, Inc.—————————————————————

STATE OF NEW YORK

COUNTY OF NEW YORK

INTERROGATORIES

1. State the grounds for your inability to stand up to your father.

2. State the grounds, if different than your response to Interrogatory No. 1, for your inability to stand up to your family as a whole.

3. Explain the nature of your relationship to Miranda Foxley.

4. List each of the reasons you love Brooke Miller.

5. You still love Brooke Miller, don’t you?

20

“This sort of thing really doesn’t come under the umbrella of what a bride should do for her wedding videographer,” I say through the double-thick, bullet-proof glass.

“I didn’t want to call my regular guy,” Jay says, from the other side of the glass, “and the way I see it, you owe me a solid.”

Great. Now I owe one to a mobster. According to Wikipedia, “soldiers” are low-level players in the mafia family. To get to be a soldier, you have to “prove” yourself as an associate to the family first. [Insert dramatic music as you ponder the question: “What exactly does one do to prove oneself to a mafia family?”] I really wish I wasn’t an obsessive lawyer who just had to look that one up.

“But, you’re not a paparazzo,” I say, holding the phone about an inch away from my ear, for fear of catching something here at the Manhattan Detention Center.

Jay shrugs.

“So, what exactly were you doing rifling through Monique deVouvray and Jean Luc Renault’s garbage?” I ask. I’m calm and cool and collected when I ask him this—I say a silent thank you to the gods above that I’d told Monique to start shredding all of her documents on the off chance that paparazzi would start going through her trash. Otherwise, this situation would have been stressful in many, many ways. More so than the obvious, I mean.

“It’s public property,” he says into the telephone.

“Actually,” I say, “it’s not. That’s why you got arrested. Monique and Jean Luc own the property their townhouse is situated on, which includes the alley you were skulking around. That’s why they had you arrested for trespassing.”

“I wasn’t skulking,” Jay says. “Anyway, all they really had in their garbage was chantilly lace and thick silk.”