Married Sex (2 page)

Chapter 2

At nine in the morning on the second Monday in September, I knew—as I've known for a decade now—exactly where my law partner was and what she was doing.

Victoria Denham was in Wainscott, at her house overlooking Georgica Pond. In the Hamptons, it doesn't get better than that. Her neighbors include Steven Spielberg, Martha Stewart, and so many Wall Street executives that cynics call it “Goldman Pond.” But these residents shrewdly follow tradition and call their mansions “cottages.”

Victoria's house is a real cottage, an ivy-covered bungalow begging for an upgrade it will never get. She doesn't care. For her, the house is all about the view from her picture window—a large bathtub of a pond separated from the ocean by a thin strip of beach, and the ocean beyond.

Water, sand, water, sky: the most privileged view in the Hamptons.

Victoria bought her house in 1980, and not because she has a knack for real estate. She rows. A big-ass rowboat in the beginning. Then a canoe. Now she's got an Ocean Shell—a light but solid boat that's nothing like the featherweight arrows you see in regattas—that she drags from her ragged lawn to the pond. A dozen strokes take her across the pond to the beach. Then she hauls her boat over a few yards of sand to the ocean and sets off, parallel to the shore, toward East Hampton.

You can do that—row in the Atlantic—in September.

Most mornings, the ocean's dead calm, flat as the pond. The sun is gentle, and there isn't a hint of breeze. It's the best time of the year, made even better by the general absence of New Yorkers—only the very rich or indolent can be out here to enjoy it.

Victoria isn't rich or indolent, just old-fashioned New England practical. When she graduated from law school, representing women in divorce cases was like Atticus Finch defending a black man in
To Kill a Mockingbird
—going in, you knew you were going to lose. That didn't bother her at all; for Victoria, law was simply the quickest way of changing the world for women. And thanks to the prodding and lobbying of lawyers like Victoria, it became possible to build a practice—and make a nice living—getting big settlements for women, especially if the women were married to rich men on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Unlocking wealth was the least of it for Victoria. From the beginning, she took on unprofitable clients—women in jail, women on welfare, women in shelters for the battered and broken. She got them divorced, and she helped them with appeals and parole, and, even more remarkable, she hired them. For most of the last two decades, Victoria's receptionist has been a woman so well dressed and soft-spoken you'd never guess she'd escaped an abusive man or spent a decade in jail for larceny.

Every few years,
New York
magazine
runs a feature called “New York's Best Divorce Lawyers.” Ten years ago, my cousin the journalist was assigned to write it. He called Victoria. She asked who else was being considered for the list. He produced the usual names. She suggested some lawyers who represented poor and beaten women. “Talk to a few of them,” she said. “Then call me back.”

My cousin didn't reach out to those lawyers. And he didn't connect again with Victoria. But he told me about the conversation, and I got a picture of Victoria that was almost exactly who she turned out to be: savvy and openhearted, cynical and pure, knowledgeable about the man-woman game and happily retired from that messy business—a mass of interesting contradictions.

I'd spent a few unhappy years in a big corporate office. Family law struck me as a better solution than leaving the law entirely. I called Victoria.

My interview began with an excruciatingly long silence, as Victoria did what, in the old days, would have been called “taking my measure.” She wasn't shy about it—she sat next to me on the couch and looked me over as if I were a racehorse she might want to claim. I would not be surprised if she knew my dark gray two-button suit and pale blue shirt came from Brooks Brothers, that my black knit tie was Paul Stuart, and that my loafers might have been made by Lobb but weren't. Clearly, someone along the way had taught me the wisdom of a low profile. And for Victoria, that was all the information she needed for a psychological snapshot: Brooklyn-born Jew, desperate to assimilate.

What followed—our actual conversation—was brief. A few weeks later, I joined the firm. We discovered we were good together. In a year, I was Victoria's partner.

Considering the nastiness of our profession, our practice is unnaturally civilized. Before townhouses became prized real estate, Victoria bought a brownstone in the East 80s between Madison and Park. She lives on the third floor and rents out the fourth; we work on the first two. We're a small crew: Victoria; me; the receptionist; Gladys, the paralegal, who learned her trade in jail and has been on Victoria's payroll since the day of her release; and, as needed, J. T. Schmidt, a German émigré, who became Victoria's investigator in some distant, unspecified year. We call him Reboot because he seems to erase his memory every night.

Now Victoria is working less, and I handle the cases she doesn't want. And when business is slow at Denham and Greenfield—and it's generally slow in the fall because Wall Street wives who have made it through the summer without filing for divorce tend to hang on to their marriages until their husbands collect their bonuses—she takes a few extra weeks at the beach.

But she isn't really away. The first phone call of the day? Victoria, always.

“Da-vid.”

My name is always two words with Victoria.

I could hear her steady strokes and metronomic breathing through the cell phone clipped to her waist, and I smiled. A world that has a seventy-year-old woman with more than a passing resemblance to Vanessa Redgrave rowing steadily toward Europe—I call that a good world.

“How's the water today, V?”

Her name is always reduced to an initial in my mouth.

“Flat enough to walk on. And slated to continue.”

“Happy to hear it. Staying on?”

“Depends,” she said. “What's new?”

“Mary Arnold's husband announced he's moving the family to Umbria for a year.”

“What did Mary say?”

“She's going with him.”

“She can't think there's a hunky Italian lover waiting for her.”

“She left a message. I don't think she wanted our opinion.”

“Better yet. What else?”

“Amanda Carpenter called in.”

“She made weight?”

“Ninety-nine.”

Amanda Carpenter married a man who can't be seen with a woman who weighs more than a hundred pounds. Every Monday morning, by the terms of their prenup, she goes to her husband's doctor and weighs in. She always makes it. You would too if you ate cotton balls for lunch and downed a dozen Diet Cokes a day. But she pays a price. Because no fat passes her lips, she's estrogen-deprived and her chin has sprouted dark hairs, and because she's bulimic, the acid in her vomit is stripping the enamel from her teeth. Why does she submit to this? Although she looks as if she were born in purple, her father is a firefighter and her mother has a chronic disease. Like a character in an Edith Wharton novel, she sacrificed herself on the altar of money. Her husband is rich and social, and, dammit, he wants a wife who looks the part. Amanda knows her marriage is in no way secure, so she hired us to look over the doctor's shoulder.

“Also, Reboot tracked down the manager of that club in Paris. The guy remembers seeing the Stonebachs. He'll give us a deposition.”

“Excellent.”

Better than that, really. Richard Stonebach is a big-shot political fund-raiser. His new wife—his fourth—came to us right after the honeymoon. As she tells it, his idea of a good start to a marriage was to take her to Paris, bring her to a sex club, and let her watch him get a blow job. Now she wants an annulment and—prenup be damned—a settlement. With a deposition from the manager of that club, Stonebach's choices are a generous good-bye or a story on Page Six.

“What's your week like?” Victoria asked.

“The biggest thing on my calendar is an opening at an art gallery.”

“Who's the artist?”

“The Greta Garbo of photography.”

“How's her marriage?”

“Trolling for clients, V?”

“As a matter of fact, I went out for dinner over the weekend and came back with one.”

“What's she like?”

“In addition to sixty million dollars, she wants half of the frequent flyer miles. Very adamant about that.”

“Oh, dear,” I said, because I've seen enough vengeful women to know them as unbearable and, in our partnership, always mine to represent. Revenge starts with the frequent flyer miles; it doesn't end until she gets a share of the apartment where the husband meets his mistress.

“So … Garbo with a camera … Blair going?”

“No.”

“Watch yourself, young man.”

And Victoria was gone. She hates good-byes.

Chapter 3

Jean Coin's photographs are monumental: five feet by five feet. At that scale, a picture of rolled hay bales is close to life-size. Larger objects—rock formations, waterfalls, the edges of a slate roof in rural France—come at you in such sharp focus you feel they want to push through the surface of the paper. I can understand why some people are threatened by these images; they're stark, black-and-white assaults.

I'd love to own one of Jean Coin's pictures, but even the smallest is so big it would dwarf everything in our living room. And even the smallest is expensive. So I enjoy them, every few years, at her dealer's gallery.

The opening was mobbed. I bobbed and weaved through the crowd, snatching a glimpse of a picture, shaking hands, and getting air-kissed by casual friends and former clients. Years of experience at gallery openings led me toward the back office, where, more often than not, you can see the multiples stacked up or find a few pictures that didn't make it into the show. There were people here too, but the groups were smaller, the conversations less buoyant. The crowd cleared out, and for what seemed like an entire minute, I stood alone with a photograph of cliffs in the Dordogne.

And then I wasn't alone. Joining me at the picture was a seriously attractive woman in a starched white shirt, faded Levis, and moccasins. She wasn't lightly bronzed but actually tanned, with hair lightened by the sun. She looked as if she'd spent the summer in a sailboat and had docked just five minutes ago.

There are no more than a dozen photographs of Jean Coin and fewer interviews. Anyone who knew anything about her would have said she was probably half a world away. But here she was. Not happy. Oh, very much not happy—scowling.

“I'm surprised to see you here,” I said. “All these people …”

“I'm leaving as soon as I figure out what to do with this picture.”

“I'm going to guess: You only see the flaws?”

“Cavemen once made their homes there,” she said, pointing at a terraced area on the cliffs. “You should feel their presence. Or absence.” She pointed lower. “Down here … a river to fish in. Do you sense anything swimming? I don't. Farther over are fields where deer grazed, fruit trees growing wild … but the picture indicates none of that. It's a dead landscape. And that was not my point.”

“How many of these pictures miss the point?”

“Really, only this. It's just … wrong.”

I'm not awestruck in the presence of artists—a few of the most successful have been our clients—but I would have expected Jean Coin to be remote, even hostile. So far, she was accessible and engaging. I pressed on.

“Your fans disagree.”

“Marketing,” she said. “Image.”

“Why aren't you out there?” I asked, gesturing toward the crowd in the next room.

“You think I came to see how they're selling?”

“It's only natural.”

“You don't understand,” she said. “My mission is last-minute quality control.” And then, almost whispering: “I never know if people think my pictures are worth owning.”

Was it possible that Jean Coin had self-esteem issues?

“You set the bar high.”

She didn't find that worthy of a response. A change of topic seemed smart.

“Why are there never any people in your pictures?”

She laughed. “Are you going to kiss every cliché on the mouth?”

“Seriously, why do you think that is?” I asked.

“
Seriously?
What is this—an interview?”

“I'm not a writer.”

“You collect?”

“School bills.”

She gave me a look that said, I'm not kidding around here, I'm taking you for someone of intelligence. That intensity aimed directly at me made me feel something—a perceptible change in the conversational climate, like a blast of oxygen.

“Seriously,” I said. “Tell me why there are no people in your pictures.”

She gestured to a bench, and we sat. The gallery opening seemed far away.

“What's your theory?” she asked.

“I don't think it's that complicated. People who live in cities crave the natural world. And here it is. Beautiful. Wild. Wild, but contained. Thus, safe. And for sale.”

I had stumbled yet again into the blur between art and commerce.

This time, there was no mistaking her sarcasm. “You think I'm that calculating? That I make these pictures to satisfy a … commercial need?”

I hesitated, considering whether to cross the line, and decided. Oh, why not.

“Actually, I think you've made a different calculation. You choose these images because you don't want to reveal yourself.”

“Jean Coin, woman of mystery?”

“If you don't want to put your emotions into your pictures, you have to find another way to reach people. You smartly chose distance. It's a powerful position.”

I was afraid she'd slap me or storm off, but this seemed to please her.

“You could be a critic,” she said.

“I appreciate the candor.”

“That's only sort of a compliment.”

Some people recognized Jean Coin and came over. Gears shifted.

“Well. A pleasure. Not that it matters—I'm David Greenfield.”

“Got a card?”

“Sure.” I produced one. “You?”

We traded the Japanese way, bowing slightly.

I thought I'd never see her again.