The Rival Visit

The suitcase showed up before she did.

I want to explain that. Madeleine Greene had told me she'd take a cab from the airport, and I'd told her fine, and then for three days I'd cleaned my house like a woman expecting a health inspector. The guest room bed still sagged in the middle, but the sheets were new, and the law journals had been relocated from the living room floor to the garage, where they now threatened to fall on my car.

So when the doorbell rang on a Tuesday at 2:15, I was ready. I'd been thirty-four for six weeks and I'd spent most of those weeks telling myself it didn't matter.

I opened the door and there she was. Madeleine Greene, thirty-six years old, standing on my porch with a suitcase as large as a filing cabinet.

"That thing has wheels and a mind of its own," I said. "You realize the guest room is eight feet by ten. You'll be sleeping in the hallway."

"It expands," she said, rolling it past me into the house. It caught on the doorframe. She wiggled it free without breaking stride. "Nice place. Smaller than I pictured."

"You pictured my house?"

"I pictured everything about you, Kristin. Disappointing is a word that comes to mind."

"Two years of emails and you open with that."

"Two years of emails and you answered every one within four hours," she said. "So don't act like you weren't enjoying it."

I was. That was the annoying part. I'd told Roni, my paralegal, that I answered fast because it was efficient, and Roni had given me a look I chose to ignore.

The suitcase made it to the guest room on the third try. Madeleine unzipped it and started pulling out clothes, folding them onto the sagging bed like she owned the place. I leaned in the doorway and watched.

"The bed sags," I said.

"I noticed. I'll survive. I survived your email about the Chevron deference analysis, I can survive a mattress."

"That email was correct."

"That email was forty pages long. Nobody needs forty pages about standing."

"Everyone needs forty pages about standing. That's the problem with this field, nobody reads anymore."

She held up a dress, considered it, and put it in the closet. Then she spotted the little tray I'd set on the dresser, a mug, a spoon, a can of my coffee, and picked up the can with an expression I already hated.

"What is this," she said, reading the label. "Kristin. What is this."

"Coffee."

"This is pre-ground. It's pre-ground and it's been in a can. It says 'breakfast blend' in letters that look like a dentist's waiting room."

"It's coffee. It has caffeine. Those are the two requirements."

"I brought my own. Thank God I brought my own." She dug to the bottom of the suitcase and came up with a bag of beans and a hand grinder, and I swear she set them on the dresser like a trophy. "It's a burr grinder. Hand-cranked. Don't look at me like that."

"You packed a coffee grinder for a business trip."

"I packed a coffee grinder for a week in your house, knowing what I'd find."

"You didn't know what you'd find."

"Kristin." She turned and looked at me, hands on her hips. "You wrote an email in March with a footnote apologizing for a typo in a footnote. I knew exactly what I'd find."

I left her to unpack. This was the pattern with us. Someone scored a point, the other one walked away, and then twenty minutes later we'd start again. It had been going on since the Meridian case, when we'd both been hired as opposing consultants and discovered we hated each other's writing style and possibly each other. The emails had continued after the case closed, which neither of us had ever mentioned out loud, because mentioning it would mean admitting we'd kept going for two years with no billable reason.

The visit had been her idea, technically. She was between contracts, taking a leave, and she'd written, in her usual tone, that the only way to settle the Vance debate was to sit in the same room and go through the discovery in person. I'd said yes in four hours. Roni had seen the reply land and said, "You know what you're doing, right?" and I'd said, "Settling a debate," and she'd said nothing, which was worse.

By six I had ordered Thai food and Madeleine had claimed the couch. She'd changed into jeans and a gray sweater and she looked, unfairly, comfortable, like she'd lived in my house for years.

"You have no food," she said, going through my cabinets anyway. "You have Thai menus and a jar of pickles."

"The pickles are good pickles."

"There's one jar. It's been opened." She held it up. "There's fuzz on it."

"That's not fuzz, that's... brine. Pickle brine does things."

"Kristin. I'm staying a week. We're going grocery shopping tomorrow."

"Fine. Fine. You can drive."

"I don't have a car."

"You can drive mine, then. You can drive my car to the store and buy vegetables and I'll stay here and work."

"You'll stay here and re-read your own briefs," she said, sitting down. "I've seen your file names. 'Final v2 FINAL actual.'"

"That was one file."

"It was a folder. A folder of those."

The food came and we ate out of the cartons at my kitchen table, which had four chairs and one clear spot and had not hosted a guest since my mother visited in the spring. Madeleine ate with chopsticks she'd produced from her coat pocket, because of course she carried chopsticks, and I watched her do it and hated how sure of herself the whole thing looked.

"Stop staring," she said, not looking up.

"I'm not staring. I'm assessing."

"You're staring. You've been staring since I took the noodles out." She glanced up. "Do I have something on my face?"

"No!"

"Then what?"

"Nothing. I'm trying to figure out how a person becomes as smug as you. Is it training? A seminar?"

"Years of practice. And good coffee." She pointed a chopstick at me. "You'll see. Tomorrow morning, when you taste actual coffee for the first time in your adult life, you'll understand that half your hostility is caffeine withdrawal."

"Half my hostility is you."

"The other half?"

"Also you. It's a whole thing. Very efficient."

She laughed. She had a real laugh, sudden and low, and it did something I didn't want to catalog. She covered her mouth with the back of her hand, like she'd surprised herself, and for a second the smugness dropped and she just looked like a tired woman eating noodles in my kitchen.

"There she is," I said.

"There's what?"

"The person under the consulting voice."

"There is no person under the consulting voice. It's consulting all the way down." She put the carton down. "God, this is weird!"

"What's weird?"

"This. Sitting in your kitchen. I've spent two years imagining you as an email address."

"An email address with a law firm signature block."

"A very long signature block. You have three pronunciations of your middle name in there somewhere, I think."

"Two. There are two." I picked up my beer. "It's weird for me too. You're taller than I expected."

"Everyone says that."

"Nobody says that. Nobody's met you."

"My sister says it. She met me at birth, though, so it was a given."

"You have a sister?"

"Lena. She's thirty-one, she's in Tucson, she thinks you're a figment." She shrugged. "I mention you enough that she asked once if you were real."

I put the beer down a little too fast and it thumped on the table.

"I mention you enough," she repeated, watching me. "In a professional context."

"In what professional context do you mention opposing consultants to your sister?"

"When they write forty pages about standing. When they send an email at 11 p.m. with the subject line 'sigh.' When they..."

"Okay, that's enough."

"When they lose an argument and don't admit it for four months," she finished, and smiled at me across the cartons.

The kitchen felt small all of a sudden. Not bad-small. Just small.

"We should get an early start tomorrow," I said, standing up with the cartons. "Discovery's in the office."

"It's in your garage. I saw you move the boxes."

"The discovery is in the office."

"Kristin, I watched you put four banker's boxes next to your snow tires."

I looked at her. She looked back, entirely too pleased, and took a carton from my hand and carried it to the trash like she'd been in my house for years.

After dinner we moved to the couch, because Madeleine had claimed it the first night and I wasn't going to fight her for furniture when I could fight her about law instead. I took the armchair with my laptop and a legal pad and she stretched out across two cushions like rent was coming.

"Okay," she said. "The supplier issue. Walk me through your position again, because I want to watch your face while you say it."

"That's creepy."

"It's called reading an opposing consultant. It's a skill. Go."

I went. I laid out the whole thing, the supplier indemnity chain, the way I thought the lower court had misread the assignment clause, and she listened with her eyes closed, which was either rude or flattering, I couldn't tell.

"Okay," she said, opening her eyes. "Counterpoint."

"Ugh."

"Counterpoint, and then you can object."

She made her counterpoint. It was good. It was annoyingly good, and I said so in the least generous way possible, and she took it the way she took everything, like a compliment she'd already given herself.

"By the way," she said, reaching for her beer. "I've been meaning to ask. That email. March, two years ago? The one where you called my argument 'pretty but hollow.'"

I felt my face go warm before I'd even thought about why.

"You remember that email."

"Of course I remember that email. I printed it. I had it taped above my desk for a month."

"You taped my insult above your desk?"

"I taped the part where I proved you wrong about it later. Context matters." She took a drink. "But the phrasing always stuck with me. Pretty but hollow. Like you were doing two things in that email at once."

"I was doing one thing. I was saying your argument had no foundation."

"Were you." She was looking at me over the bottle now. "Because I reread it last year, on a flight, and I thought, huh. That's an odd word choice for a standing argument."

"It was a late night."

"It was sent at 10:52 a.m. on a Tuesday."

"You know the timestamp."

"I know every email you've ever sent me, Kristin. I've answered every one of them. Well. You answered every one of mine. Within four hours. For two years. I noticed that too."

The kitchen faucet was dripping and I listened to it instead of answering.

"That's just turnaround time," I said finally. "Roni tracks it. It's a firm thing."

"Roni your paralegal tracks your personal response speed to a rival consultant in another state."

"She tracks everything. She's very organized." I clicked my pen. "It's a professional courtesy."

"Sure." She said it the way you say sure when you don't believe a word. Then she let it go, which was worse than not letting it go, because she just settled back and looked satisfied, like someone who'd planted a flag and didn't need to stand on it.

I said, "Hollow was about the argument."

"I know what it was about."

"Good. Then we agree."

"We agree on almost nothing. It's my favorite part of the week." She pointed the bottle at the laptop. "Show me page twelve. I want to see your footnote 9, I've been dreading it all day."

* * *

We worked until eleven. Somewhere past ten the armchair got abandoned because the light in there was bad, and I ended up on the far end of the couch with the legal pad on my knees and my feet tucked under me, and Madeleine sat up properly for once with her own copy of the file. The lamp was the only light on. It made the whole thing feel like a study group, if study groups had two adults who'd spent two years being mean to each other in writing.

"No," I said. "Read the sentence. The whole sentence. You keep stopping at the semicolon."

"I'm stopping at the semicolon because everything after the semicolon is you doing interpretive gymnastics."

"It's not gymnastics if the text supports it."

"Kristin." She leaned over and put her finger on my page. "The text supports the opposite."

"The text supports my reading, which you dislike, which is different from the opposite."

She put her hand on my hand to move it, to point at something on her own copy, I think, or maybe just to hold the page down, and then she stopped pointing and we were both looking at her hand on the back of mine and the sentence about the semicolon went somewhere and didn't come back.

Neither of us moved. That's the honest version. Her hand was warm and dry and it stayed there and I let it stay there and the lamp hummed and somewhere outside a car went past.

"Page twelve," she said, but she didn't say it like page twelve.

"Page twelve," I said, not moving my hand either.

Her thumb moved once across my knuckles. Small. Deliberate.