All Eyes on Her
Poonam Sharma

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Chapter twenty-one

Chapter twenty-two

Chapter twenty-three

Chapter twenty-four

Chapter twenty-five

Chapter twenty-six

Chapter twenty-seven

Epilogue

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks…

To the females who have made my life difficult, because

you taught me how to protect myself and, incidentally, gave

me another idea for a book.

To my editor Kathryn Lye, whose enthusiasm over the

evil eye concept convinced me that I was onto something.

And, of course, to my agent Lorin Rees, who although he is male, always seems to appreciate what I am trying to say.

one

IT IS BETTER TO BE ENVIED THAN IT IS TO GO UNNOTICED, MY mother’s voice echoed in the back of my mind. And I would have agreed with her on principle; however, if I leaned any farther to the left to avoid being seared by Stefanie’s jealous gaze in that Friday morning meeting, I’m sure I would’ve toppled right off of my chair. For the record, there were eight other junior associates at our Beverly Hills law firm hoping for the same two promotion slots. I was handling a key client, and I did take my career very seriously. But even I wasn’t cocky enough to believe that Stefanie’s ill will had anything to do with my superior job performance. Rather, I knew that my being the only other female candidate was the reason why she made a habit of watching me as if there were a bull’s-eye centered on my forehead.

“Interesting choice of footwear for a firm-wide meeting,” she had sneered in the elevator an hour before. As if my open-toed pumps were too much for the office. Luckily, I knew better. These emerald green Diors were as suitable as they were scrumptious.

Maybe she just didn’t like me. And if so, then I really didn’t have the time to wonder why. Being the only Indian girl in my Hermosa Beach high school taught me to let the curious stares of others roll right off my back. It was just one of the many side effects of never quite fitting in.

Although I’d never actually done anything to Stefanie the office tension was becoming a problem. How obvious could she be? And why would anyone choose to wear their emotions on their sleeve for everyone to see? To me, that would’ve been like wearing my naughty-nurse costume to a law school reunion. Or my bra as a hat. Completely illogical. It’s not that I was dead inside. It was just that I’d learned to not let my feelings run amok. The casual observer might’ve assumed that since I didn’t react, I didn’t care, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that at least my fiancé, Raj, knew better.

Or…well…he used to.

Judging by his recent silent treatment, maybe Raj needed a reminder? I glanced down at my BlackBerry for the eighth time that morning. No new messages.

Two weeks, I thought. And still not a word from him. Men are such women sometimes.

Really though, he’d completely overreacted. I had every intention of helping him understand why…just as soon as he got around to returning my call. Or calls. All right, fine. Two calls, two e-mails and one text message in the fourteen days since he took that consulting assignment in London. The thought of him cutting me out of his life so easily made me want to hurl my BlackBerry at the wall. Of course, that kind of outburst at the conference table wasn’t an option. Unless you were a client, in which case even trying to smoke the conference table itself would have been forgiven. Not to mention that nobody would ever find out about it—we at Steel Associates would make sure of that. Appearances are everything in Los Angeles, and so much more at our firm, which catered to the stars. Steel was the most sought-after marital mediation and divorce boutique in the city. Composure was our corporate culture as much as discretion was our hallmark.

“It’s true that our clients rely on us for our legal expertise. But they also expect us to help them steer clear of the headlines,” Niles, a senior partner, began. “I understand there have been some…complications with your case. Monica, would you care to elaborate?”

All eyes were on me. Silently, I berated myself for using Raj’s going AWOL as an excuse not to bother with my eyebrows. To begin with, I was a noticeably tiny brunette scurrying around in The Land Of The Seven-foot Model. Beyond that, I chose a professional career in a part of the country where “trophy wife” was considered a legitimate aspiration. I was used to the women in tight-fitting tracksuits and spray-tans who clogged the checkout lines at every Whole Foods on the west side, waiting to buy a single avocado. I was not used to being the center of this much attention. I stifled the urge to check my face in the conference-room window.

“Gladly, Niles.” I cleared my throat. “And I want to assure you all that despite recent news, this case of Camydia hasn’t been nearly as difficult to handle as some of the others I’ve had.”

Trust me, it’s not what you think.

Dubbed “Camydia” by the popular press, Cameron and Lydia Johnson had started their relationship as Hollywood’s “it” couple. They had been a publicist’s dream-come-true, since they appealed to every imaginable demographic. Lydia was a feisty, buxom and ivory-skinned brunette from a South Philadelphia ghetto. She began singing in a racially diverse inner-city gospel choir and soon topped the Billboard charts. Cameron, on the other hand, was the son of a mildly successful African-American stockbroker from Harlem, and the product of a top-notch private-school education. His rebellion against his overbearing single father was to reach for a basketball in lieu of an SAT review book. The pair met at an A-list party mixing celebrities and professional athletes when each was at the height of their career. And the kind of fireworks that ensued could be seen from here to Las Vegas.

But in the two years since they’d shacked up together in a twenty-million-dollar Malibu mansion, things had taken a turn for the worse. On the release date of her latest album, Lydia’s former agent wrote a book claiming that she lip-synced on tour. And the rumor around the area locker rooms was that Cameron’s hard partying habits had landed him in danger of losing his NBA contract. Put more succinctly: few things will kill a celebrity marriage quicker than the hint that someone’s public stock is about to decline. The couple’s newly conjoined name, which did indeed rhyme with the venereal disease, was the media’s way of underscoring the fiery state of their current affairs. In particular, there were rumors that Cameron had been seen about town with an unidentified blonde.

“With that said,” I continued, “we suspect a leak from someone on Cameron and Lydia’s household staff. Paparazzi swarmed the Malibu mansion just as they were leaving in separate cars on Saturday night. Although Lydia assures me it meant nothing, since she was headed out for dinner with a girlfriend and he was meeting some buddies at the gym. The rumor in the celebrity rags this morning is that they have each been spotted with other people. So this week we’ll be focused on damage control.”

Steel Associates was the Navy SEALs of celebrity divorce law. We handled everything from counseling to mediation to divorce, depending on the case. To be sure, we earned a premium for our public-relations-minded strategies in a city where gossip was worth its weight in gold and divorce wasn’t just the topic of tragic statistics. To our clients, divorce suggested far more than a broken heart or a depleted bank account. In this city, it might spark a public-opinion shockwave. Who would get the house in Napa? Who was responsible for the ongoing psychiatric treatment of their Pomeranians? What about the care and feeding of the entourage? Just how much of a popularity drop would the divorce cost them among the 18-34-year-old female demographic, and how would it affect record sales? Would it make a difference if they waited to announce until after the Emmys?

These were serious questions, all, and that’s why the celebs came to us first. Short of an actual computer spreadsheet into which we could pump all the variables and estimate the costs to both sides, Steel gave the best advice money could buy. Because either alone or in pairs, these folks typically wanted to consider their options, estimate their settlements and minimize the potential damage to their careers.

Loosely, my job was one-part mediator, one-part lawyer and one-part marriage therapist or celebrity spin doctor. Although with Cameron and Lydia lately, that title seemed to be all celebrity babysitter all the time. Given the current state of my own engagement, the marriage therapist part was a laugh. One nice side effect of my career choice, however, was that I instinctively minimized the collateral damage in my own life, as well. I had been wearing my ring on a chain around my neck ever since my engagement three months before. As long as people still noticed the chain peeking out from my collar, I was fine. Other than my cousin Sheila, nobody knew that Raj and I were, in his words, taking some time.

“Since when do we believe everything our clients tell us?” Stefanie interrupted me, smiling widely and refusing to blink. “Have celebrities suddenly become reliable?”

Everyone laughed on cue, and so did I.

“Certainly not,” I answered graciously, as if we were all just the best of friends. “I’m simply trying to make sure everyone is up to speed on the new developments in the case. That is what we’re here for, right, gentlemen?”

Stefanie was as cool as a cucumber under pressure, and she despised me for at least visibly seeming the same. Had I not known better, I would’ve sworn that one of the thick and serpentine waves of her long, brown hair actually lifted itself up off her shoulder to hiss at me. Indeed, had my superstitious Indian grandmother been in the room, she wouldn’t have hesitated to lick her finger and slide it right across my cheek, as a makeshift shield for the dreaded evil eye. Had I been anything short of convinced that it would fuel every popular corporate stereotype about a woman’s inability to play well with another, I might have chosen to react to Stefanie. But I drew a deep breath, threw my fellow female colleague a wide, bright smile, then paused and turned my attention toward Niles.

“After all, Cameron and Lydia are very important clients for our firm.”

By the time Cameron and Lydia had first contacted us, they were only in what we referred to as Phase 1. In private, they were fighting like cats and dogs and contemplating a trial separation, but were still too emotionally attached to each other to commit to it.

“I agree…” Jonathan, my fellow junior associate and co-counsel, chimed in. “As such, we’ve prepared a preliminary asset-split recommendation to present to Cameron and Lydia.”

I began passing copies of our internal brief around the table. Asking for input from everyone always reflected favorably on a Junior Associate, and Jonathan and I were working together to make a good impression. Not that he needed any of my help. Jonathan had that rare but potent blend of stalwart optimism and moral relativism that meant he was born to practice law in Los Angeles.

“But I thought this was a mediation case.” Niles feigned surprise. “When did they move into ‘division of assets’ territory?”

Snickers around the room.

“Yes, well,” I explained. “Our strategy is to show them a version of an asset split and hope they’ll take it as a wakeup call. Seeing their life divided up like this might actually force them to reconsider.”

Silent stares from every direction. Do-gooders didn’t last very long at our firm.

“Naturally, we’ll get our billable hours either way.”

The tension in the air noticeably dissipated. Niles looked up from his copy of the brief, and added, “All right, all right. I can appreciate the creativity as much as anyone else. But if that is the strategy, you should suggest they each take one of the twin pomeranians. Our clients may be too narcissistic to risk their bodies and their lifestyles by having children, but I’ll bet that the idea of splitting up the ‘mock children’ will get them divorcing in no time.”

He was right to be sarcastic. About 75% of our cases skidded right past mediation and landed in divorce. And Steel made a bigger profit in a shorter period of time when the husband and wife divorced immediately than when they opted to “reconsider.” Niles made it clear that he wanted this case closed soon, and normally I would have agreed. In fact, I probably would have nudged them not-so-gently in the direction of the courthouse because the more cases I completed in a year, the higher my bonus. But with Camydia, I wasn’t convinced. Unlike most of my uber-famous clients, these two didn’t fight like they wanted to hurt each other…they fought like they needed to hurt each other. A perfect example was the first time they had sat down at Steel Associates with Jonathan and myself.

“I told her it wasn’t me in that goddamn hot tub.” Cameron buried his face in his massive hands before running them over his bald head. “She could believe that stupid tabloid, but she can’t believe me. What the hell?”

Hunched over in a chair before us, he seemed about as helpless as any client I had ever seen. Jonathan and I simply listened, sympathetically, trying not to be blinded by the twinkling of the canary diamond solitaire on his pinky finger, or the studs the size of testicles protruding from his earlobes.

“It’d be one thing if I did it.” He licked his upper lip and wrung his hands. “But I didn’t do what they said I did. And she doesn’t even talk to me about it! She just swallows whatever her goddamn publicist feeds her! And then I have to hear it from my agent that my own wife is taking off with her girlfriends to Cabo San Lucas for a week. I got home from practice one day and she was out! How you gonna leave town without even telling your man first? Without even calling him?”

I resisted the urge to hug him, knowing as I did what it felt like to be left without a forwarding address. Instead I fingered the chain around my neck. But before I could run the risk of looking as if I was taking sides by trying to console this head-shaking, hand-wringing tree of a man, Lydia whooshed back in from the ladies’ room.

“Oh, so now I gotta tell you where I’m goin’ every minute of the day?” she spat at him, taking a seat and ripping off her white-rimmed sunglasses to reveal striking and furious blue eyes. “Do I always know where you are, Cameron? Huh? Do I? Oh, or maybe you just own me?”

After crossing her legs she brought her puffy, defiant eyes to rest on mine.

“What the hell is she talking about?” Cameron looked from me to Jonathan. “How am I supposed to deal with a woman like this?”

“What I am talk-ing about, Cam-ron,” she overenunciated, “is reality. Somethin’ you lost touch with.”

“Pshhhhhh…whatever,” Cameron protested to no one in particular, leaning back in his chair with a neck and eye roll in her direction.

“Lydia,” I jumped in. “I hear you. You want equality. And Cameron, you want communication. These are good goals. Although the first step is empathy. Lydia, Cameron was just telling us how your reaction to the tabloid article made him feel. The key in reconciliation is to separate emotions from actions, and then try to improve communication. Once you understand each other’s motivations, you can decide if and how you can function better as a couple. Now, are you willing to give this a try, Lydia?”

She sighed, fished a cigarette out of her purse and then signaled with her eyebrows for me to continue. Quoting the building’s No Smoking policy would’ve gone over as well as pointing out that her roots were emerging under that chestnut dye-job. I decided to let that battle go and picked another.

“Baby,” Cameron murmured, “what the hell? What are you doin’?”

“Nothing,” she hissed, blowing smoke in his face. “That’s what I’m doin’.”

“Do you believe this?” Cameron looked to Jonathan for some male bonding over female irrationality.

“Oh, so my smoking bothers you?” She sat upright, mocking him. “Tell ya what. Maybe you’ll get lucky and your new hot-tub girlfriend won’t feel the need to smoke after sex. Oh, wait a minute, what am I talkin’ about maybe? You already know whether or not she smokes after sex because you already had sex with her!”

“I didn’t sleep with her!” He slammed a fist down on the table beside his chair, causing me to glare a little.

“And I’m not smoking!” she fired back, breathing more smoke in his face.

“Hey, guys, clearly there’s a lot of hurt and confusion in this room. But let’s remember why we’re here. We want to be productive and try to make sense of the situation together. You’ve taken the first step by coming to us, so now let us try to help you, okay?” I asked.

Cameron nodded like a schoolboy who’d just admitted to putting glue in another child’s hair during nap time. Lydia didn’t acknowledge me.

“Cameron,” I tried, “why don’t you tell Lydia how you felt about her reaction to the story. Remember—don’t place blame, and don’t attack her actions. How did her leaving suddenly make you feel?”

Lydia rose to look out the floor-to-ceiling windows of our skyscraper. The city lay prostrate before her, and the mountains waited patiently in the distance as her husband beseeched her.

“Lydia, when you took that trash rag’s word for it, without even talkin’ to your man first, without even hearin’ his side of the story, I felt like you weren’t on my side anymore. We used to be on each other’s side. Always. I always knew you had my back.”

“And?” I led him along.

“And, I felt…abandoned.” He blinked his eyes hard and sniffed.

“Don’t do that, Cam,” she warned him, twisting around to reveal the dragon tattoo climbing up her right shoulder. “Don’t even think about it. I am not your mother. You can’t blame me for her splittin’ on you and your pops.”

“It’s not about that,” he told his hands.

She straightened before asking, “Why can’t you look me in the eye when you say it?”

“Baby, I—”

“No! Don’t give me that!” she yelled and gestured with the lit end of the cigarette. “I see the way your dumb teammates look at me. They’re laughing at me, and I don’t know why! You have the balls to say that I’m not on your side? What about you bein’ on my side for once? What about not letting them laugh at me! I’m your wife, damn it. Not some stripper you guys called up to the room in Vegas and think the wives won’t find out about it!”

“Look, it’s like I told you,” Cameron attempted to get a word in.

“Like you told me? What did you tell me, Cam? Huh? I can’t remember the last time I got a straight answer from you. Are you tellin’ me now that you were never in that hot tub with her?”

He hung his head.

“Answer me!”

“Not…” he started, his voice rising about twenty octaves “…not exactly.”

Lydia froze, and I saw a vein in her temple go live. She took a step forward, slammed down her palms, leaned forward on the conference table and dared him to finish his thought.

Cameron wouldn’t look up, and Lydia’s knuckles were turning white as she dug her lengthy, bejeweled fingernails into the taut black leather of the conference table, so I took the next step for them.

“Cameron, could you clarify that for us?”

“Okay, like…here’s what it was. I mean, I was with her in that hot tub.” He reached out for his wife. “But it was before you and me even got engaged! You were on tour and it was like…two months since I even seen you. But those pictures from that magazine…they weren’t me. That party was at the same place, but it was during the playoffs, and that was waaaaaay after we already got married. It was the same girl with a different guy. I didn’t break my marriage vows with her, boo, I swear!”

Lydia was stoic, her unflinching glare burning a hole into Cameron.

After what seemed like forever, Cameron turned to me. “Monica, you said to tell her the truth.”

two

MOMENTS AFTER OUR MORNING ASSOCIATES’ MEETING I COULD feel Cassie, our team’s assistant, struggling to catch up to me. She would have been a lot more aerodynamic if she didn’t insist on wearing those five-inch heels to work every day. Besides, compared to my shrimpy five feet four inches, she was practically a giraffe in the first place. Leaping up from her desk just outside the conference room, she tailed me right into my office and kicked the door shut behind me.

“Can I help you?” I smiled conspiratorially, rounding my desk.

“God, she is such a witch!” She popped her gum aggressively for affect.

“Who?” I feigned ignorance, slipping my jacket off of my shoulders and over the back of my chair.

“Oh, shut up.” She leaned over my desk as I settled into my seat. “By the way, nice suit. Tahari?”

I nodded, logging back on to my computer. The only daughter of a Greek-American missionary and a woman from Northern India (a Peace-Corps baby, as she had originally described herself to me), Cassie had immediately adopted me as the older Indian sister she never had. Her gratefulness for any connection to the subcontinent sparked my maternal instincts toward her, ever since the first time I noticed the pride with which she ordered everything extra spicy (I’m Indian, she routinely informed any waiter within earshot.)

“Great cut.” She nodded her approval at my ensemble, which was quite the compliment considering that prior to Steel, she had been in the women’s apparel department at Nordstrom’s. “Anyway, that’s not the point. I can see everything that goes on in that meeting through the double glass doors. Stefanie was staring at you so hard that I had one hand on the fire extinguisher the whole time, in case you actually burst into flames.”

“Well, good lookin’ out?” I tried.

“I got your back.”

“It’s not that bad.” I slipped on my glasses and grabbed a stack of snail mail out of my actual in-box.

It wasn’t like I was unaware of the situation; it was more that I felt like it was my responsibility, as one of the few professional females at the firm, to maintain a certain level of decorum.

“Yes it is, Monica.” She began watering the potted ficus in the corner, and then paused as if she just realized something. “You know what it is? Baskania! It’s baskania! In Greek, you know? Evil eye? I knew I felt something horrible radiating out of her!”

I shook my head, tossed a letter from the Young Friends of the Getty Museum into the trash and reached for another envelope.

“Come on,” she said. “I know you know what I’m talking about. What do we call it in Hindi?”

Cassie’s mother had all but denied her that half of her heritage while she was growing up, as a protest against having been disowned by her family for running off with the American missionary all those years ago. Consequently, Cassie had never visited India, and spoke little if any Hindi at all. What insight Cassie could claim into any part of her family history came almost exclusively from her immigrant Greek grandparents. And it didn’t help that, according to her, the Indian girls at UCLA were less than welcoming to anyone who didn’t seem Indian enough for them. I told her they were too jealous of her beauty to allow her to play in their reindeer games, but I knew that for her it was small consolation. The way she described it Cassie had the subcontinent to thank for nothing more than her outsider mentality and her deep brown eyes. From Greece, however, came her facility with Greek cuisine, her encyclopedic knowledge of Greek mythology and her tendency to suspect everyone of everything.

Sometimes I was just glad I was on her good side.

“Yes, I know what you’re talking about, and you’re wrong.” I exhaled. “We call it nazar in Hindi. But in the old wives’ tale—and it is an old wives’ tale—they say that too many compliments to a healthy baby or a beautiful bride pisses off the gods. It makes them jealous because no human should be envied as much as a god. So the gods take revenge on the child or the bride to mitigate the hubris. And we both know that Stefanie isn’t exactly in the habit of complimenting me.”

“So what? She smiles at you with that hateful hateful look on her face. It’s the same thing.” She made herself comfortable in the chair across from my desk. “Besides, Medusa never complimented her victims, you know. She didn’t have to. She just dried them up by looking at them and that’s why they talk about turning people into stone. She sucked all of the moisture right out of them. Seriously. So kids got diarrhea. Big, strong men became impotent. Women couldn’t nurse their babies because they couldn’t produce milk. Everybody she hated literally dried up.”

“How do you know?” I asked without looking away from my e-mail. “Were you there?”

“Seriously, the myth says that young mothers could no longer lactate!”

“Okay, yuck?” I repositioned my bra around my ribcage with my elbows.

“It may be gross, but it’s also universal, Monica. In Greece they would make Stefanie spit into holy water and then have you drink it,” she pointed out, with all the self-satisfaction of a child who’d just proven in too much detail to a roomful of adults that she knew where babies came from.

Experience had taught me that Cassie wouldn’t leave until she was ready, so I decided to humor her to speed the process along. “All right, fine. You win. Why would somebody who hated me enough to curse me be willing to help me out by spitting in holy water?”

“Well, sometimes the evil eye is unintentional. Like what you said about too much praise…too many compliments…making it accidental. Sometimes it’s Medusa, and sometimes it’s just too many compliments.”

“So being admired has roughly the same effect as being hated?” I raised my eyebrows to demonstrate that it added up. “That’s comforting.”

“In Mexico they would roll a raw egg over your entire body,” she continued, ignoring me. “And then crack it open to see if the yolk was shaped like an eye.”

“Kinky.”

“I’m serious. And drying up isn’t a good thing. First you would have dry skin…then you’d start itching, then lose your hair. Think about it, the evil eye could cause premature aging!” She snapped her fingers and pointed at me with too much satisfaction.

“Malocchio, huh?” Jonathan added, having opened the door and invited himself into the conversation. “I don’t know much about it, but I do know that when I was a kid, my grandmother used to dribble olive oil into water and then study it like tea leaves to see if we were cursed.” We both looked at him.

“Yeah, she did it whenever we visited them in Iran. She said it was because I was such a cute little boy that the people in the village were probably jealous.”

“See?” Cassie insisted.

“Malocchio…Isn’t that an Italian word? Not a Persian one?” I asked.

“Well…you know the, umm, flavor of the month?” He raised half of what would have been a unibrow were it not for the weekly waxing appointment he didn’t think I knew about. “Daniela? She’s from Milan, or Florence, or Rome or something. I can’t remember. But I know it’s in Italy. Anyway, she’s rubbing off on me because she doesn’t speak much English. Pretty soon I’ll run out of Italian restaurants to take her to on the West Side. And you know I don’t go farther east than West Hollywood. Oh well, I guess every relationship has an expiration date.”

Jonathan was the only man I knew who could be smarmy and endearing at the same time. Kind of like your horny kid brother offering to rub sunblock on your girlfriend’s back at the beach.

“Oh, right. Back to you, ladies.” He stepped away defensively. “I forgot, it’s all about you ladies. Jeez, don’t you get sick of talking about yourselves all the time?”

It may be useful to point out here that I know for a fact Jonathan actually spends more on skin care than I do. He was the perfect example of that weird hybrid of raging insecurity and blinding self-entitlement unique to a Beverly Hills upbringing. The only son of a wealthy Persian family who fled Iran in the 1970s, he had earned his bachelor’s and JD degrees at UCLA, had never lived more than five miles away from his parents, and categorically refused to date any woman who wasn’t blond and at least five inches taller than himself. The latter fact, as he had explained to me over a working lunch shortly after we both joined the firm, was because all the fun was sure to be over once he decided to grow up and settle down with a nice Persian virgin.

Meanwhile, the fact that he weighed roughly 100 pounds with his pockets full of lead, in a town full of men who looked like walking G.I. Joe’s, probably had nothing to do with his need to have the latest cell phone, the newest Maybach, and the pimpin-est table at any club he ever set foot in. But Jonathan was good at what he did, we looked out for each other when the workload got too steep, and the demonstrated depth of his family values had long since mitigated some of my revulsion at the double standards by which he lived. Also, he was a good ally to have within the firm because something about his playful smarminess seemed to make our two-timing clients feel at home. Jonathan, clearly, would make partner.

“Anyway, that doesn’t mean I’m with you on this home-remedy stuff, Cassie,” he elaborated. “I could’ve done without my grandmother spitting into her hand and rubbing it onto my cheek all the time.”

“Are you wearing a pink shirt with that suit?” I squinted at him.

“Daniela said it brings out the color of my eyes,” he defended himself.

“Since when does pink bring out brown?”

“I know, I know,” he admitted, shaking his head. “I have to break up with her.”

“Hmm, I’ll get some bottled water for your office anyway,” Cassie reassured in the most serious of voices. “So you’ll have it handy in case you find yourself starting to dry up, that is.”

“Oh, gross.” Jonathan winced. “Is this a woman thing?”

“No, it’s not a woman thing, you troglodyte. It’s a superstition thing.” I shook my head, averting my eyes with a grin. “Anyway, Cassie was on her way out, so you and I should get to work.”

The problem with acknowledging another woman’s envy is that it implies you actually believe you are somehow superior. And I never saw any reason for Stefanie to envy me. She was attractive, intelligent and a formidable future litigator in my opinion. And when we had first arrived at the firm I had imagined we would be friends. Or at least convivial colleagues. Boy, did I have a lot to learn back then.

Cassie noticed my smirk. “What did you do at that meeting?”

“Nothing. I brought everyone up to speed on Cameron and Lydia’s case.” I saw her perk up like a puppy that had caught a whiff of kibble. “And I don’t plan on telling you anything about it, so scoot.”

She whimpered, which would have been annoying coming from anyone else. But since she had started working with us a year before, Cassie had become the little sister I never had. The one with the heart of gold. And the poor taste in men. And the sick fixation on every detail of the personal lives of celebrities. Naturally, it made the opportunity to work at Steel both completely irresistible and supremely frustrating for her.

“Need-to-know basis, babe.” I continued, “And you don’t need to know the specifics of their relationship. We’re lucky we can even tell you who the clients are.”

“Fine. But sometimes this attorney-client privilege stuff goes too far.” She air-parenthesied the words in protest. “Besides, I’m practically family.”

“Don’t let Niles catch you saying that.”

“That I’m family?” She looked hurt.

“That we ought to share privileged information with family,” I corrected. “Because believe me, Sheila never hears word one.”

“Sheila’s only your cousin, Monica. I’m the one who knows all your dirty little secrets,” she teased on her way out the door, oblivious to Jonathan’s eyes sparkling. “And that makes me closer than family.”

Once she was gone, Jonathan swiped my marked-up copy of the Camydia division-of-assets proposal off of my desk. He made himself comfortable on my couch, propped his feet up on the coffee table and started scanning through the notes I had made in the margins.

I seized on the chance to check my e-mail once again. Still no messages from Raj.

“Don’t worry so much, Monica.” Jonathan peered over his memo. “Whatever these dirty little secrets are, I’m sure we can have them taken care of. I know a guy.”

“I don’t have dirty little secrets, Jonathan,” I said, scowling. “I have a…problem. And I don’t think it’s anything Bruno can help me out with.”

Bruno was one of those wannabe Hugh Hefners littered across the California basin who made local news for depressing real estate prices, erecting neon signs and waving freedom of expression banners everywhere he went. His was the first case Jonathan and I worked on together, and when he came to us he was convinced that his eighteen-year-old stripper wife, Claudia’s refusal to keep dancing at his club meant that she was cheating on him. Yes, the strip-club owner was worried that the stripper was cheating on him. In much the same way as a dog owner worries that his dog might be licking itself while he’s away. I, for one, was shocked.

Before breaking the news of the impending divorce to his wife, Bruno came to us to find out how much it would cost him. Although he could have gotten the same advice for a cheaper price from any of our lesser-profiled competitors who catered to the rich, if not-so-famous, Bruno, like so many others who worshipped at the altar of celebrity, needed desperately to believe that his life mattered to the general public, and was therefore worthy of Steel-strength confidentiality.

At one point, after yet another grueling day of poring over his convoluted tax returns, Bruno invited us over to the club for some drinks. Rather than offending the client, I went along to The Cinnamon Lizard for just one drink, and then made my escape on the premise of an early appointment with my personal trainer. Honestly, I hadn’t seen that much purple neon lighting since the weekend I spent in Atlantic City. The next morning Jonathan informed me that our client’s real name was in fact Eugene Bronstein. A good Jewish kid from the tree-lined suburbs of Massachusetts, Eugene had moved to Los Angeles to reinvent himself after the collapse of his career as a stockbroker and the failure of his first marriage to his high-school sweetheart.

Emboldened by all those shots of Jim Beam, Bruno had decided to brag to Jonathan about the sophistication of his entrepreneurial operation. He gave him a personal tour of the two-story building that housed the most popular of his three strip clubs, located just off Sunset Boulevard. Below street level there were two additional floors, containing an X-rated bookstore, private lap-dance suites, bachelor party rooms, six-person showers surrounded by one-way mirrors, peep shows and even a carpentry shop where Bruno’s artisans built and repaired the peep show booths on site. None of these ancillary sources of income, it turns out, had been mentioned anywhere on Bruno’s tax returns.

According to Jonathan, their conversation had turned (as I’m sure that it so often does amidst flying G-strings, plentiful rhinestones and women whose breasts refused to shake when they did) toward religion. Being Jewish himself, and a devout temple-goer, Jonathan knew what he had to do. Somehow, before he arrived at work wearing the same suit and reeking of smoke and other people’s misery the next morning, Jonathan had managed to help a drunken and reluctant Eugene Bronstein see the ungodliness of trying to bilk Claudia out of her share of his empire.

Over the next few weeks, we worked out a private settlement that took good care of Claudia while sparing Bruno the ugliness of having to report anything new to the IRS. Yes, we were in the business of secrets, and the final one that I had to keep in the Bronstein case was the one belonging to Jonathan. It was his opinion that his big-man reputation simply couldn’t withstand the hit of his having convinced someone to do the right thing. And in a way I saw his logic. So I had taken the fall for Jonathan’s conscience, claiming to be the one who had forced Bruno to make an equitable arrangement. And I made a lifelong friend in Claudia Bronstein (the proud new owner of their house in Palm Springs, along with the third largest strip club in Hollywood) in the process.

“I still can’t believe that guy calls himself an entrepreneur,” Jonathan mused from the couch a half hour later.

“Meaning?” I looked up from my books on case law.

“Meaning—” he lowered his voice and glanced at the door to make sure that his pesky sense of morality would remain between the two of us “—in my opinion, a real entrepreneur is someone who makes something from nothing. Like my dad, who used all his savings to build an import business from scratch. He’s the perfect blend of an inventor and a salesman. But with Bruno, it doesn’t apply. He didn’t have to invent or sell anything. People are hardwired to want sex with ridiculously beautiful women, and to be fascinated with depravity, especially in this town. How much of an accomplishment is it when all you’re doing is essentially turning the lights on at the crack store to make it a little easier for the junkies, who were already looking to find it? Sure, he diversified into related businesses, but he never had to sell anything to anyone that they didn’t already want and kind of need.”

In order to keep some semblance of idealism alive within herself, a girl in L.A. has to search for signs of integrity in most men with the resolve of a drug-sniffing dog. Jonathan was one of the good ones, I had long since decided. And my resolution made it so much easier both to work with him and to recognize as a fact how influential in the upper echelons of the local legal community I had no doubt he would one day become.

“Okay. But he’s pretty damn proud of himself. As proud as I’m sure wife number three will be…just as soon as she turns eighteen and decides to apply for a job at his club, that is.”

“That guy doesn’t have much to be proud of.” He half laughed, turning his attention back to his work. “Take it from a junkie.”

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