The Real Liddy James (2 page)

He nodded. “You know what you're good at?”

He did not wait for her to answer.

“Making a complicated situation look simple.”

There was something in his tone that went beyond collegial banter and into contempt.

“Someone once said to me that this business makes nice people do nasty things,” she said, stung.

Sebastian laughed rather hollowly and moved his hand to grab the brass doorknob.
“
And for always getting what she wants in the long run, commend me to a nasty woman,” he muttered, the beauty of his voice contrasting with his words.

Liddy flinched.

“Edith Wharton.
The House of Mirth
,” she said, shocked by the force of her reaction, looking at him but remembering another voice entirely, in another place, at another time.

“Precisely,” he said, but he was disconcerted. The laconic, erudite aside was something of a trademark of his; normally people responded with a knowing smile or a roll of the eyes. Liddy's eyes, however, had filled with unexpected tears and she spun away, raising her hand to her mouth. There was no point in claiming she wasn't upset, because she never cried in an understated, glamorous way, and was now red and snotty like a toddler. But before she could wipe her face with her silk jersey sleeves, Sebastian pulled a tatty, but clean, monogrammed handkerchief from his cuff.

“Liddy? . . .”

“I'm fine,” she said, seizing the handkerchief and bolting toward the corridor bathroom, her sudden grief stuck like bile in her throat. He followed.

“I'm sorry. I was rude.” His tone was gentler now.

“People have been much ruder to me than that,” she said quickly. (She had no intention of qualifying the statement, although she could have said that she was sure there were small wax effigies of her regularly burned throughout the five boroughs.
And only the previous weekend she had been shunned at a spinning class by a couple of furious first wives.)

“I can imagine.”

She turned and looked at him, askance. He continued. “I mean, it's what you said about this business. How many more times can I watch wedding videos where the happy couple vow to always smile in the sunshine or, worse, pick up guitars for their customized rendition of ‘Your Song' and know that one of them was on the phone to me seventy-two hours later? My wife says it's made me irredeemably pessimistic.”

“Not me.” Liddy paused for a moment and blotted at her eyes, although she knew it was too late to regain control of the situation. “I believe in love.”

Now it was his turn to look at her askance. They had been acquainted for over fourteen years, so why she had chosen this moment to say it she did not know; what she did know was that the statement was true. Practicing family law had not made Liddy cynical. She did not believe that most couples made those solemn vows with their fingers crossed behind their backs; she knew from experience that it was just, to misquote the old song, that love and marriage did not always go together like a horse and carriage. (In fact, in Manhattan, by conservative estimate, half the time the horse bolted through Central Park and left the carriage overturned.)

And Liddy still felt empathy for the broken ones, the people like Gloria, blown apart by divorce with no guarantee that the pieces would ever fit back together. She hoped always that kindness and friendship would triumph amid the wreckage, in the
end. But she could not deny that these days, as the economy plummeted but romantic expectations soared, negotiations were growing more and more unpleasant—as Curtis Oates was making a fortune proving.

Sebastian smiled.

“How very optimistic of you,” he said, and though she expected this comment to prefigure a further apology, Sebastian waved good-bye to his handkerchief and headed back to the conference room to escort Mrs. Vandervorst from the building without as much as a backward glance at Liddy.

In the bathroom, Liddy leaned over the sink and splashed cold water on her face, avoiding the small puddles and pile of soggy tissues Mrs. Vandervorst had left behind. But it would be a good five minutes before the angry pink blotches on her cheeks faded, so she sat down on the armchair in the corner and rested her head against the toile de Jouy wallpaper. She tried to take a breath and count to five, but her mind wandered. Of course she was annoyed with herself for sobbing in front of Stackallan—although she had occasionally used vulnerability strategically, she knew tears always left professional women open to accusations of hormonal imbalance. But who could have predicted the extraordinary coincidence of his quoting Edith Wharton? The very words her ex-husband had said to her, almost seven years ago, in the terrible aftermath of what she had done; a scene she could hardly bear to remember and that she had made her mission to forget. Liddy could sometimes be a
nasty
woman
, it was true, but up to this point in her life that fact had never made her cry.

For a moment, she pondered the possibility of hormonal imbalance.

Sydney came into the bathroom to deliver the news that Mr. Vandervorst had finally arrived, only to promptly leave to await papers at his office, but not before fiddling an overfamiliar arm around her waist.

“He's repulsive. Mrs. V's better off without him” was Sydney's opinion, but she did not continue for, smitten with Sebastian, there was only one man she wanted to discuss. “But Mr. Stackallan's so cute!” she said. “And that voice. I want to close my eyes and listen to him read. Anything. Even
Constitutional Law
, 17th.”

Liddy said nothing.

“No one makes me laugh, really, but he was joking about my name. He says with so many American names, you can't tell if it's a girl or a guy,
a bird or a bloke
!” Sydney honked again.

Liddy stood up, smoothed out her skirt, checked herself in the mirror, and attempted to affect an expression of complete indifference.

“You know,” continued Sydney, “
Mackenzie
, bird or bloke?
Campbell
, bird or bloke? Last week, he was due to meet someone called Roger and it was a woman!”

“That didn't happen,” said Liddy sourly, walking into the corridor, thinking,
What is it with all the “sharing” today?
Curtis Oates, who was currently in reception barking at the girl to put on the Christmas “chill-out” album he had purchased on Liddy's instruction, would never make such mistakes.

“I asked him out on a date, but he said he was married. I said
it didn't matter, and he laughed and said I was charming but far too young for him.”

Sydney stopped and looked at Liddy uncomprehendingly. “I mean, what sort of a man says that?”

“Not me,” said Curtis Oates cheerfully, flashing his pearly veneers and running a hand through his hair transplant. “Liddy, it's four p.m., the gal from the
Times
is here.”

Over the speakers came the familiar organ introduction of “O Holy Night.” The tune did not soothe Liddy, and, still discombobulated by the contemplation of her
not-
niceness, she knew the interview would have to be postponed for the third time.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I can't do that now, Curtis.”

“Why not? It's good for business. Remember to mention our growth areas. Gays and geriatrics.”

“
Pfft . . .”
She exhaled. “It's the Style section. Do you ever read that? I won't do it. I'm not in the mood.”

He looked over at her.

“Who gives a fuck?” he replied, and pointed toward her office before sashaying into his.

“Quick.
Look at this
,” whispered Sydney, who had been googling. “I found a photo of Sebastian and his wife at their wedding.”

Liddy glanced over because she couldn't help herself. Mrs. Chloe Stackallan had straight blond hair, high cheekbones, and tiny ankles. She wore her cream lace Temperley gown as if it had been made for her, which it undoubtedly had. She had a bouquet of lily of the valley in one hand, as the other rested casually on Sebastian's arm, and she was staring up at him adoringly.

It was like the cover photograph of
Perfect Bride
magazine.

“Wow,” said Sydney mournfully. “She's . . . perfect. They look
perfect
together.”

“Nothing's perfect, Sydney,” said Liddy brusquely. “No matter how it looks.”

This cheered Sydney up a little.

“You'd better go, Liddy,” she said.

Liddy sighed. The journalist had told her that she wanted to discover “the real Liddy James,” but Liddy had just seen her real self, and wanted that Liddy kept hidden.

It's showtime!
she thought.

“I DON'T DO GUILT”

One of
New York
magazine's top ten divorce attorneys, a best-selling author, and a regular contributor to the
Huffington Post
, Liddy James navigates the choppy waters of the Manhattan matrimonial law system with ease, and she does it in slippers. Corinthia Jordan has an appointment
.

The fact that Liddy James—mother, art lover, and senior partner in the firm of Oates and Associates—is relaxing in her glorious office on the Upper East Side, dunking chocolate cookies
into her hot chocolate with her UGG-slippered feet up, is, she tells me, mainly the result of the newfound freedom she discovered in her forties.

“I spent so much of my younger life worrying what people thought of me, and let's face it, because I am a woman, worrying if they
liked
me, that it has been the greatest gift of aging to discover that I no longer care.”

Her green eyes glitter meaningfully as she says this, and with her long, auburn hair and the fair, freckled complexion of a woman half her age—the genetic gifts of her Irish parents who brought her to America when she was nine years old—as well as the distinctive lope in her stride, which, she tells me, makes high heels impossible, James exudes a blithely unaffected but charismatic air. She leans back, a
tableau vivant
of magnificent midlife, and among her botanical prints, I spy a faded Polaroid of her with her sandy-haired sons, Matty and Cal James, ages thirteen and five, and an adorable scribble picture, emblazoned with superhero stickers, declaring
BEST MOM IN THE WORLD
. To my surprise there's no treadmill desk or selfies with celebrity clients to be seen. Only the shark line drawing in the corner gives any indication of Liddy's formidable professional reputation.

“Oh, that,” she says, smiling when I point to it. “It was a present from a colleague.” I ask her if she is known as “the shark” in the office and she shrugs. “You know the amazing thing about sharks? If they stop swimming they drown. They have to move forward to survive. I totally relate to that.”

On growing up in a low-income family in suburban New Jersey, she says, “Look, my parents were twenty-one when they married and had me. They fled the economic deprivation of Ireland in the 1980s in search of a better life here, but it didn't work out exactly as they planned.” James made her escape through education. She graduated first in her class at Stanford Law School, then had her pick of any top legal firm on either coast. She chose the legendary Rosedale and Seldon in New York, where she quickly rewrote the rulebook on precourt settlements, only leaving seven years ago when Curtis Oates made her “an offer she couldn't refuse.”

Since then her career has reached new heights, including the publication of her controversial book
Equality Means in
Everything:
A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Modern Matrimony
, which came out two years ago in a blaze of
publicity that swept it to number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list. Does she regret how certain chapters were reported?

“There was certainly a lack of nuance about some points. I mean, I am a feminist, so to be portrayed as somehow anti-women was extremely hurtful. And seeking to punish a former partner through his or her wallet is far from an exclusively female pursuit! But I do stand by my view that marriage (and therefore divorce) isn't a meal ticket. Women can't pick and choose what gender equality means, and although I am well aware that nothing affects a woman's career trajectory like having children, the financial responsibilities of the home should and must be shared, as parenting should and must be shared. No able-bodied person should assume that the lifestyle they enjoy because of their marriage will continue if that marriage ends. In other words,
don't give up work, ladies
!”

One on one, James expresses her views so forcefully and articulately that resistance seems useless, but many people disagree with her views, commenting that until cultural expectations of a woman's role have changed dramatically, or women themselves are willing to relinquish the role of primary caretaker in the family, such a utopian vision of marital equality
is impractical. How, I ask her, has she managed to juggle her own brilliant career with motherhood?

“Imperfectly,” she replies cheerfully, then turns suddenly serious. “I was far too young when I first got together with my ex-husband (Peter James, a professor of English and American literature). I was a terrible wife and I broke his heart, but thanks to his fortitude, and that of his wonderful new partner, we managed a good divorce.”

“So there is such a thing?” I ask. Her response surprises me.

“Personally, I still don't believe in divorce, particularly where there are children involved.”

“What about prenups?” I ask.

She replies without hesitation. “My boss, Curtis Oates, vehemently disagrees with me, but I think that's like opening the exit doors of the plane before buckling your seat belt. If you've got doubts about getting married, don't do it. That's my advice.”

And with this, she glances at the antique Jaeger-LeCoultre clock on her desk and shrugs in a disarmingly girlish manner. “I have to go. I'm making tuna surprise for dinner,” and, interview over, she offers to drop me off at a work event on her way home to her magnificent apartment in a landmark building in Tribeca.