Wreathed (4 page)

I mention this to say that when I got the e-mail from my mother, I was in the bathroom, looking at my personal e-mail on my phone. (I have a rule about looking at personal e-mail or social media on my work computer, which I break about as often as anyone else.) All Mother sent me was a link to the obituary, from the website for the local Cape May paper.

I read the first paragraph, just to get the dead man’s name and to figure out where the funeral actually was, and I skipped the rest of it. Nobody believes me when I say this, but it’s the truth and I think it’s a perfectly plausible thing that happened, and if I were a man and said I was in the bathroom when I read it, nobody would think twice because that’s something people believe that men do all the time. This is what I read, all that I read:

BERKMAN, SHELDON, 67, of Cape May, passed away on Monday, March 12. He was a native of Cherry Hill, the son of the late Aaron Berkman and Hannah Berkman. He retired to Cape May four years ago. He served for twenty years in the United States Air Force, retiring as a technical sergeant. He served at Elmendorf, Dyess, and McGuire Air Force Bases. After retirement from active duty, he worked as a machinist in the engineering division of PF Avionics in Lakehurst. Funeral services will be held at First Presbyterian Church, Cape May, on Friday morning, March 17, at 10:00 a.m. He is survived by a sister, Bernice, and a nephew.

I stopped reading there, which was a mistake, but I didn’t know it at the time. I couldn’t imagine the loosest possible connection between my liberal-activist mother and a career military man. My best guess was that Pacey had been right and they had known each other at Cherry Hill High School.

What I
thought
I did with the obituary was to forward the link to my work e-mail, so I could forward it to our managing partner with a note telling him I was taking off on Friday. What I
actually
did was hit the wrong icon and posted the link to the obituary to Facebook, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I switched over to Pinterest to check out a pair of dark orange heels. A few minutes after that, I got up and went back to work and forgot all about Mother and Sheldon Berkman and the funeral.

It took me until about eight o’clock that night to finally clean out my in-box. I responded to everything except for a couple of e-mails from the cute LinkedIn guy from the day before. My guess was he was looking to share some hot investment tips, but that could wait until I got back from Cape May.

All I had left to do for tomorrow was one memo for one of the partners, and it wouldn’t take me long to finish. That meant I could sneak out early on Thursday afternoon and take Friday off without causing anyone unnecessary agita. Dinner was a plate of takeout Thai red curry left over from Monday night, which I washed down with one of my less successful attempts at mixology. It was a horrible concoction of lemon vodka, Sprite, and melon liqueur that looked like antifreeze and probably wasn’t any better for me than drinking actual antifreeze.

The only problem I would have would be if one of my clients died in the next day or so. I try not to think about death and dying, but it pervades a lot of what I do. My job is to make sure that my clients are prepared for their inevitable deaths, or at least as prepared as they can be. My goal is for the transfer of wealth and property from one generation to the next to be as pain-free as possible. Part of “pain-free” involves “tax-free,” to the extent taxes can be avoided. This irritates my mother no end, which makes it one of the other few perks of my job.

I can’t do anything to stop death. What I can do is help package it—wrap it in legal language and forms, so my client can put the reality of death up on a top shelf and leave it there until the time comes. I tell myself I’m here to help the living, not bury the dead. It helps me put distance between what I do and what is waiting for all of us at the end of our lives.

I didn’t know what had happened to Sheldon Berkman, Air Force veteran, retired aviation machinist, and native son of the Garden State. All I knew was he was dead and I wasn’t and (after another swig or two of antifreeze cocktail) I was happy about that. I figured if he were in a closed casket and his surviving relatives weren’t the type to buttonhole total strangers and ask them for tax advice at a funeral, we would get along just fine.

Chapter 5

I slept very well that night, and didn’t have one nightmare about dead bodies coming to life and climbing out of their coffins and chasing me down the street. I know, intellectually, that dead bodies can’t do anything to harm anyone, but I packed a silver cross in my suitcase to wear to the funeral anyway, because there’s no reason not to be prepared. I had no evidence one way or another that silver crosses worked to stop the reanimated corpses of aviation mechanics, but it just might work and you never know. I got everything else I thought I needed into the suitcase and bumped it down the stairs and into the modest trunk of my Audi. I wanted to be able to get down to Cape May early enough to get dinner and a couple of drinks and prepare for the ordeal that Friday promised to be.

I had a five-minute commute, which enabled me to coordinate the demands of a high-powered legal practice with my incipient drinking problem. Admittedly, sometimes it’s a fifteen-minute commute, depending on how long the line is at Starbucks on any given morning. But I never had any problems with getting in early and staying late and racking up enough billable hours to do my share to help keep the firm afloat. I had a headache, and maybe was dehydrated, but enough coffee would take care of both of those things.

I was about halfway through my memo—a truly fascinating bit of legal arcana involving a creative attempt to undermine a prenuptial agreement—when Tim Curlin stuck his head in my door. “I need to see you for a moment, Wendy,” he said. “In my office.”

“Of course,” I said, because that is what you say to the senior partner of your firm when you are a lowly associate trying to make partner, and he is in charge of compensation and bonuses. I grabbed a legal pad and a pen and followed him to his office.

Curlin was one of those bald guys with a strong build and a quiet voice. Like all the partners, he had one of the window offices, with a panoramic view of the Watchung Mountains outside the city. His office was decorated with baseball paraphernalia, none of which meant anything to me. “Please have a seat,” he said. “If you don’t mind, close the door behind you.”

I did mind, but didn’t say so. Curlin was acting very polite and solicitous, which is not the way that he treated associates. It was, however, the way he treated attorneys who were on the other side of an important negotiation. That was not an encouraging thought. I tried to hold my legal pad in an assertive way.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Coffee?”

“I’m fine, sir. What did you need me for?”

“Ms. Jarrett, I shouldn’t have to explain to you just how much this firm prizes its reputation for discretion.”

“Of course not, sir,” I said. I tried to suppress the panic I was feeling. Was this about the Underwood contract? I’d screwed the pooch on that one, sure enough, but that had been over a year ago. I’d fixed the problem with the
inter vivos
transfer in the Cooper estate plan, and I thought I’d been yelled at enough for that screw-up as it was.

“This applies equally to our professional pursuits as well as our personal lives. Both must be above reproach at all times.”

That meant it wasn’t work-related, which was helpful but didn’t give me any clue as to what he was talking about. My personal life, such as it was, was technically “above reproach,” but that was mostly because I was too broke to lead the life of debauchery I aspired to.

What was going on?

“What you do with your time is your business,” Curlin said. “Unless it impacts the business of this firm, or our clients, or their interests. Then it becomes my business.”

“I am not aware of any problems along those lines, sir,” I said. “Certainly not recently.” I couldn’t think of much in my past that would worry Curlin at this point. Were those photos I’d let that adjunct professor at Drexel take of me when I was an undergrad at Temple out on the Internet? Or had someone told him the story of that continuing legal education conference in Bermuda two years ago?

“I am not aware of any problems along those lines, either,” he said. “All I know for certain is that our receptionist has taken twelve phone calls from various media outlets this morning, all of them either asking to speak to you or for information about you. The majority, I am told, have come from Gawker Media.”

That should have been reassuring. It was not. It was one thing to have to address something that I had done at some point. I was confident I hadn’t done anything quite so awful as to attract media attention of any sort, much less from Gawker
.
That made their sudden inexplicable interest in me a total mystery. I don’t like mysteries. They make me itch. I tried my best to look comfortable, but all I wanted to do was to run into my office and slam the door and not come out until I understood what was going on.

“There must be some mistake then,” I said. “I can’t imagine any reason that anybody at Gawker Media would have the least bit of interest in me.” Well, I could
imagine
a reason or two, but nothing that bore any relation to reality. I am a boring person and I have a dull life and I didn’t like the way this conversation was going.

“I have no interest in having this firm’s good name dragged through the online scandal sheets,” Curlin said. “I hope you share that concern.”

“I share that concern fervently,” I said.

“Then we agree. You were planning on taking a long weekend, if I remember correctly?”

“Nothing exciting, I’m afraid. I have to drive my mom to Cape May tonight for a funeral tomorrow morning,” I said.

“Is there anything urgent that you’re working on today?”

“I was trying to draft that memo you wanted about that case in Kentucky and how it related to the Massey prenup.”

“Nothing urgent, then. That’s fine. You are, from this moment, on unofficial paid administrative leave. This will last until Monday morning, or whenever you are able to straighten this situation out, whichever comes first. Anyone who calls will be told that you aren’t available.”

I did not like the way that any of that sounded.

“Is this going to impact my bonus situation?” I asked. The firm always announced bonuses for associates in early April.

“I certainly hope not,” Curlin said. “Think of this as a test. If you manage to figure out what in the name of General Washington is going on, and defuse the situation, there’s no reason why your compensation package should be affected at all. If you don’t manage to do that, well, we’ll discuss that next month. Understood?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll do my best.” Since I still didn’t know
what
was going on, I couldn’t make any promises about what I could do or couldn’t do.

“So it’s settled. Turn off your computer and make tracks out of here. I hope to see you on Monday.”

“Thank you, sir.”

I was not one hundred percent certain how I got out of Curlin’s office and over to the parking garage to get in my car and back home again. I know I was hyperventilating at least part of the way down the elevator. I am not normally subject to tremors, so I must not have had any trouble driving, except for maybe a stray scream or two.

I tossed my purse and my keys on the table and dashed into the kitchen. I needed a cold drink and I had a half-empty bottle of lemon vodka chilling in the freezer. The other option was an unopened bottle of acai berry juice, purchased a couple of months ago as part of a health and wellness regimen that hadn’t been quite as regimented as maybe it should have been. I decided to pour a big glass of the acai berry juice with just the littlest tiniest drop or two of vodka, for balance. It tasted foul, and I got a big blue splash of acai berry stain on my silk blouse. I gulped it down anyway, and then poured a glass of ice water as a chaser.

When I was breathing normally and not talking to myself, I sat down at my computer and clicked on my browser. I took a quick glance at my personal e-mail account first, and recoiled when it reported that I had seventy-seven unread e-mails. That was not a good sign. That was a very bad sign. I took a two-week vacation on a cruise ship last summer and hadn’t come back to seventy-seven unread e-mails. Reading them all seemed like a lot of work to handle all at once. I opened up a new tab and pulled up Facebook, on the theory that social networking might provide the facts I was looking for in a digestible format.

I found that I had eighty new friend requests and twenty-eight new messages. The number of notifications looked more like an area code for a rural part of the country.

This is not good
, I told myself.
This is all kinds of not good. Something I did, somehow, went viral, and I can’t control it.

Find the facts.
That was my mantra at work.
Find the facts.
Once you had the facts, you could figure out what to do with them.

Not good not good not good.

Find the facts. Something has happened. You don’t know what it is.

Start with your last Facebook post. That should give you a clue.

That sounded reasonable enough. I didn’t remember what I had posted last on Facebook—likely a check-in at some bar or other—but I couldn’t imagine that anyone cared about it. Still, it made sense to check. I ignored the part of my mind that was busy panicking and clicked on my name.

About fifty or so of my closest friends and acquaintances had put a link in my Facebook timeline to a story in a blog called
Curtains,
which was a morbid offshoot of the Gawker Media empire. The story was entitled, “Get the Hankies Out: This Obituary Is the Most Maudlin Thing Ever.”

This is about Sheldon Berkman
, I thought.
Has to be. I don’t know anyone else who’s died this week.
But that didn’t make sense. Sheldon Berkman didn’t appear to be the least bit interesting. His obituary had been so boring that I hadn’t bothered to finish it.