To keep the upper hand, she then mentioned her meeting with Jacqueline Hume, her new divorce lawyer, dropping the name as if it were a mortar round, then relaying for my benefit the self-serving opinions her mouthpiece had delivered.
'Why did you hire a lawyer?' I asked, interrupting.
'I want to make sure I'm protected.'
'And you think I would take advantage of you?'
'You're a lawyer. I want a lawyer. It's that simple.'
'You could've saved a lot of money by not hiring her,' I said, trying to be a little contentious. After all, this was a divorce.
'But I feel much better now that I have.'
She handed me Exhibit A, a worksheet of our assets and liabilities. Exhibit B was a proposed split of these. Not surprisingly, she intended to get the majority. We had cash of twelve thousand dollars, and she wanted to use half of it to pay off the bank loan on her car. I would get twenty-five hundred of the remainder. No mention of paying off the sixteen thousand owed on my Lexus. She wanted forty thousand of the fifty-one thousand dollars we had in mutual funds. I got to keep my 401K.
'Not exactly an even split,' I said.
'It's not going to be equal,' she said with all the confidence of one who had just hired a pit bull.
'Why not?'
'Because I'm not the one going through a midlife crisis.'
'So it's my fault?'
'We're not assigning fault. We're dividing the assets. For reasons known only to you, you've decided to take a cut in pay of ninety thousand dollars a year. Why should I suffer the consequences? My lawyer is confident she can convince a judge that your actions have wrecked us financially. You want to go crazy, fine. But don't expect me to starve.'
'Small chance of that.'
'I'm not going to bicker.'
'I wouldn't either if I were getting everything.' I felt compelled to cause some measure of trouble. We couldn't scream and throw things. We damned sure weren't going to cry. We couldn't make nasty accusations about affairs or chemical addictions. What kind of divorce was this?
A very sterile one. She ignored me and continued down her list of notes, one no doubt prepared by the mouthpiece. 'The aparunent lease is up June thirtieth, and I'll stay here until then. That's ten thousand in rent.'
'When would you like me to leave?'
'As soon as you'd like.'
'Fine.' If she wanted me out, I wasn't about to beg to stay. It was an exercise in one-upsmanship. Which side of the table could show more disdain than the other?
I almost said something stupid, like, 'You got someone else moving in?' I wanted to rattle her, to watch her do an instant thaw.
Instead, I kept my cool. 'I'll be gone by the weekend,' I said. She had no response, but she didn't frown.
'Why do you think you're entitled to eighty percent of the mutual funds?' I asked.
'I'm not getting eighty percent. I'll spend ten thousand in rent, another three thousand in utilities, two thousand to pay off our joint credit cards, and we'll owe about six thousand in taxes incurred together. That's a total of twenty-one thousand.'
Exhibit C was a thorough list of the personal property, beginning with the den and ending in the empty bedroom. Neither of us would dare fall into a squabble over pots and pans, so the division was quite amicable. 'Take what you want,' I said several times, especially when addressing items such as towels and bed linens. We traded a few things, doing it with finesse. My position on several assets was driven more by a reluctance to physically move them than by any pride of ownership.
I wanted a television and some dishes. Bachelorhood had been sprung suddenly upon me, and I had trouble contemplating the furnishing of a new place. She, on the other hand, had spent hours living in the future.
But she was fair. We finished the drudgery of Exhibit C, and declared ourselves to be equitably divided. We would sign a separation agreement, wait six months, then go to court together and legally dissolve our union.
Neither of us wanted any postgame chat. I found my overcoat, and went for a long walk through the streets of Georgetown, wondering how life had changed so dramatically.
The erosion of the marriage had been slow, but certain. The change in careers had hit like a bullet. Things were moving much too fast, but I was unable to stop them.
Fourteen
The sabbatical concept was killed in the executive committee. While no one was supposed to know what that group did in its private meetings, it was reported to me by a very somber Rudolph that a bad precedent could be set. With a firm so large, granting a year's leave to one associate might trigger all sorts of requests from other malcontents.
There would be no safety net. The door would slam when I walked through it.
'Are you sure you know what you're doing?' he asked, standing before my desk. There were two large storage boxes on the floor next to him. Polly was already packing my junk.
'I'm sure,' I said with a smile. 'Don't worry about me.'
'I tried.'
'Thanks, Rudolph.' He left, shaking his head. After Claire's blindside the night before, I had not been able to think about the sabbatical. More urgent thoughts cluttered my brain. I was about to be divorced, and single, and homeless myself.
Suddenly I was concerned with a new apartment, not to mention a new job and office and career. I closed the door, and scanned the real estate section of the classifieds.
I would sell the car and get rid of the four-hundredeighty-dollar-a-month payment. I'd buy a clunker, insure it heavily, and wait for it to disappear into the darkness of my new neighborhoods. If I wanted a decent apartment in the District, it became apparent that most of my new salary would go for rent.
I left early for lunch, and spent two hours racing around Central Washington looking at lofts. The cheapest was a dump for eleven hundred a month, much too much for a street lawyer.
* * *
Another file awaited me upon my return from lunch; another plain manila legal-sized one, with no writing on the outside of it. Same spot on my desk. Inside, two keys were taped to the left side, a typed note was stapled to the right. It read:
Polly appeared instantly, as she so often did; no knock, not a sound, just a sudden ghostlike presence in the room. She was pouting and ignoring me. We'd been together for four years, and she claimed to be devastated by my departure. We weren't really that close. She'd be reassigned in days. She was a very nice person, but the least of my worries.
I quickly closed the file, not knowing if she had seen it. I waited for a moment as she busied herself with my storage boxes. She didn't mention it--strong evidence that she was unaware of it. But since she saw everything in the hallway around my office, I couldn't imagine how Hector or anyone else could enter and leave without being seen.
Barry Nuzzo, fellow hostage and friend, dropped by to have a serious talk. He shut the door and stepped
