Papercut Spite

I want to start with the memo, because the memo is the whole reason for what happened on the nineteenth floor of Blaine & Rodgers on a Tuesday afternoon in October.

My name is Lulu. I am sixty-two years old, and I was an event planner for thirty-five years before I retired two years ago. My husband Aldo is sixty-four and has been a lawyer about as long as I have been putting up with him. We got married when I was twenty-seven and he was twenty-nine, so this fall makes thirty-five years. People ask us the secret and I usually say separate bathrooms, but the real answer is I still like to surprise him, and he still lets me.

Anyway. I had come downtown to bring him his reading glasses, the good pair he left on the kitchen counter, and the plan was to drop them off, steal him for lunch, and go get my hair done at three thirty. His assistant, a nice young woman named Annie, was at lunch, so I let myself past her desk like I have done a hundred times. Aldo's door was cracked open and he was on the phone, so I waited, and while I waited I read the paper sitting on top of the printer tray.

It was a draft memo about a workplace sensitivity workshop the firm was rolling out. It used words like "legacy marital frameworks" and "partnership language modernization." There was a paragraph suggesting that terms like husband and wife were, and I quote, "increasingly legacy-based and worth reexamining in internal communications."

I read it three times. Then Aldo hung up the phone and saw me standing there with the paper in my hand and his glasses in the other, and he did the smart thing, which was nothing, because there was nothing smart to do.

"Lulu," he said carefully. "What do you have there?"

"Aldo." I held the memo up like it was evidence, which in a way it was. "Legacy marital frameworks. Aldo, I have been your legacy marital framework for thirty-five years and I have never been worth reexamining in internal communications before. I am offended on a professional level. I planned four hundred weddings. Four hundred. I know a bad framework when I see one."

"That's not mine," he said, getting up from behind his desk with his hands out. "That came down from HR. Annie was supposed to file it. It's a draft, it's not even signed."

"I don't care if it's written in crayon. You work here. This is your firm's paper."

"It's voluntary," he said. "Nobody has to go to the workshop. Nobody is making anybody change anything. I didn't write it, I haven't even read the whole thing, I was going to skim it after the deposition prep I am supposed to be doing right now."

"You're supposed to be doing deposition prep and instead your wife found out she's legacy."

"Would you sit down?"

"I will not sit down." I looked at the paper again, and something in me started to warm up, the way it used to when a vendor tried to charge me twice for chair covers. Thirty-five years of marriage and the man still thought he could calm me down with a chair and a reasonable tone. "Aldo. I am going to tell you what is going to happen here."

He knows that voice. He has known it since 1987. He sat down slowly on the edge of his desk and folded his arms and waited, which is the correct response.

"You," I said, "are going to be deposed. Right here, right now, on the matter of marital terminology. I am opposing counsel. I am also the court reporter. I am also the judge. It is a small proceeding."

"We don't have a court reporter," he said, but he was already smiling a little, the corner of his mouth, the way he does when he thinks he is losing the argument and enjoys it.

"I have excellent shorthand." I walked to his office door and shut it. I turned the little lock, the one that has probably never been turned outside of client crises, and then I pulled the cord on the venetian blinds all the way down. His office went from bright October afternoon to a nice dim office-tower dusk. He watched me do all of this without saying a word, which I counted as an admission.

"Lulu," he said. "I have a call at four."

"Then we have time. Sworn deposition of Aldo Blaine, senior partner, regarding the memo." I put his glasses down on his desk, sat down across from him, and crossed my legs. "State your name for the record."

"You know my name."

"The record doesn't know your name."

"Aldo Blaine," he said, and there it was, he was playing. Thirty-five years.

"How long have you been married, Mr. Blaine?"

"Thirty-five years. To a woman named Lulu, who is, I will note for the record, in the room."

"The record will strike the witness's editorializing." I stood back up, because sitting across the desk was all wrong for what I had in mind, and I started unbuttoning my blouse, one button at a time, from the top. "Question. Is the witness aware that the term wife appears in the memo no fewer than six times?"

"Is that so," he said. His eyes went to my collar and then back up to my face, very disciplined of him.

"It is so. Question. Does the witness consider his wife legacy?"

"No!"

"Say it properly."

"I do not consider my wife legacy. I consider my wife the best thing that ever happened to this firm's holiday parties, among other things."

I had gotten down to the fourth button. The blouse was a good one, a deep red silk I bought in the spring, and under it was the good bra, which I will admit I had put on that morning for no particular reason other than that sometimes a woman past sixty likes to be armed. "Question. What does the witness intend to do about this memo?"

"Nothing. Ignore it. Probably lose it."

"Wrong answer. The correct answer is apologize to his wife and make it up to her, since her afternoon is now ruined and her hair appointment is at three thirty and she intends to be late."

"Are you asking the court for relief?" he said.

"The court is asking you to take off your tie."

He pulled the tie loose and dropped it on the desk, and then he looked at the locked door and then at me, and the smile changed into something slower. "Counselor," he said. "The last time you locked that door was the Christmas party in 2019 and we were both younger then."

"We were both sixty at the absolute most."

"Speak for yourself."

I finished the buttons and let the blouse slide off my shoulders onto the chair back. I am sixty-two and I have earned every year of it and I have never once been embarrassed in front of that man, which is one of the great perks of a long marriage, you stop auditioning. His face did the thing it has always done, the small pause, the breath through the nose.

"Deposition is not over," I said. "Question. Does the witness consent to a settlement discussion?"

"Lulu, we're in my office. Annie is down the hall."

"Annie is at Chipotle, she takes forty-five minutes, I have watched her for two years. Also the door is locked and the blinds are closed and I checked. Answer the question, counselor. Yes or no."

"Yes," he said, not smiling now, standing up off the edge of the desk.

"Say the whole thing."

"Yes, I would like to settle. Right now. With my wife of thirty-five years, who I have never once called legacy and never will."

"Good," I said, and I reached back and unhooked the bra, and that was the end of the cross-examination for a while.

We had done this enough times over thirty-five years that I could tell you the whole choreography, but that afternoon in his office, dim behind the blinds, something about it felt new again, maybe because of the memo, maybe because I had walked in with reading glasses and walked out of my clothes instead.

His tie was on the desk. His glasses were on the desk. He came around the desk and I put a hand flat on his chest, which is as far as his chest goes these days, he has a bit of a shelf there, and I felt his heart working.

"Objection," he said. "Counselor is not wearing a blouse."

"Overruled. The blouse has been moved to evidence." I nodded at the chair back where it hung. "Next question. Is the witness aware that his wife is not wearing any underwear?"

He stopped. I mean he actually stopped, one hand on his belt, and he looked at me as if to see whether I was joking, and I was not joking. I had taken the underwear off in the parking garage bathroom before I came upstairs, because I had a plan for lunch that I had been working up to all week, long before any memo.

"You heard the question," I said.

"I heard it. I'm processing it. Give a man a minute." He sat down on the arm of the leather sofa, which is worn in all the wrong places and has survived four firm name changes. "You took your underwear off in a parking garage."

"In the ladies' room in the parking garage. Level three. There was a very startled woman at the sink."

"There would be." He rubbed his jaw. He does that when he is buying time, thirty-five years of watching him do it. "And this was before or after you read the memo?"

"Before. The memo only made it urgent."

"Well," he said. "It certainly radicalized something." He stood up and crossed the small distance between us and put his hands on my waist, slow, above the skirt, waiting, and I nodded because we had done this enough times that the nod is a whole conversation. His hands were warm. His hands have always been warm, even when he was a broke associate in an apartment with a radiator that clanked all night.

"Question," I said, and my voice was not as steady as I wanted it to be, which I will admit here because it is my story. "Does the witness