A waiting car and driver used surface streets to whisk Elle and Christopher to the law office in record time, but Trent, arriving from Laguna Niguel, called from his car phone to complain that he was “stuck on the 405 parking lot.” Even after he arrived, Henry Kohn was tied up in a conference for another twenty minutes. So as it turned out, their driver had risked the wrath of the California Highway Patrol for nothing.
Kohn & Siglery was no Miles & Slocum, Elle thought. Although the soaring modern architecture of the building was impressive, on the inside it was horrendous.
Elle overheard Trent talking to the receptionist from the waiting room, where she was sitting in an itchy Louis XIV chair covered in zebra skin. “I’ll let your attorney know that you’re waiting for him,” she said, pointing the cherub-faced designer around the corner.
Short, pudgy Trent had gained another few pounds, Elle noticed.
“Elle Woods!” Trent was surprised to see her. His eyes crinkled at the corners as he grinned widely. “Are you in trouble, you little devil? Or maybe here to sign a prenup?” he asked, kissing both of Elle’s cheeks, a lock of nearly white blonde hair brushing his forehead.
Elle jumped up, happy to see him and anxious to get out of the itchy throne. “No, Trent, I’m actually here with the lawyers, not to see one,” she said, and laughed.
“Coco Chanel would turn in her grave! Your mother told me about law school, but I simply cannot believe my eyes.” He covered his lively blue eyes and peeked through his fingers like he was watching a horror movie and was too afraid to look at the full screen. “You, with all of your creativity, my darling…a lawyer?”
“Well, not yet. I lucked into helping a lawyer,” Elle admitted humbly, indicating Christopher, who introduced himself as Brooke Vandermark’s attorney. She went on, “I heard about the murder”—Christopher cleared his throat audibly—“uh, the alleged murder,” she corrected herself, “over Christmas. Mr. Miles is kind enough to give us law students a little real-world experience through an internship.”
“And you’re still doing pinks.” He eyed Elle’s light pink Escada suit, noticing the details, the white collar and cuffs and chunky gold buttons. “Thank heavens you still find fashion exciting.” Trent breathed a long sigh of relief. As always, he was as interested in what Elle was wearing as in what she was saying.
Elle smiled and glanced down at her narrow Manolo slingbacks, which were already killing her feet. She motioned to the black leather Roche Bobois couch, which wouldn’t make her itch. “Let’s sit down and get caught up. Are you working in Laguna now?” She loved Trent’s stories.
Trent gave the couch a disapproving once-over and perched himself on the edge as if he didn’t want the offending object to contaminate his aesthetic sensibilities. “Elle.” He threw his arms skyward like a televangelist and then brought them down, hiding his face in his plump hands. “My stars! This home is an atrocity. And what she wanted me to do…it was even worse.” Trent rolled his eyes. “I say it should be a crime!”
“What did she want, Trent?”
“This woman, I kid you not, was in love with this notion of bubble-gum pink tile over black grout. Not just in the bathroom, which would have been bad enough. She led me around the house wearing a purple turban like she was something out of The Arabian Nights and told me that she wanted this bubble-gum explosion to cover the entire house and the garage! She wanted me to murder this house. Elle, I would never have decorated in this town again!”
Christopher cringed visibly at Trent’s use of the m word.
“So you turned her down?” Elle said.
“Absolutely. I told her she had such vision, that she was so fabulously talented, that I would only serve to hinder her creative process.”
“Trent, how do you make a living if you only design when it suits you?”
“Elle, I have my standards. With the exception of Brooke Vandermark’s monstrosity, I’d have to say it was the worst idea I’d ever heard.”
“Be nice,” Elle chastised. “Was Brooke’s place so awful? I thought it was written up.”
“It was. Her house was written up under the ‘Enough Already’ column in L.A. Whispers. As she kept adding more square feet, it became a preposterous joke. The house was approaching the size of Candy Spelling’s, and the only thing bigger than the Spelling house is Brooke Vandermark’s ego. I never should have taken the job, even the walk-through. I was the sixth designer. All of the others had quit or been fired. The woman’s impossible.”
“Well, at least she didn’t make you go swimming,” Elle said.
“True.” Trent cringed at the memory. “But Brooke’s house was swimming in black lacquer. I could have drowned! The walls…I had to get rid of those murderous black lacquer walls. They nearly killed me! She said they were from her ‘reflective phase.’ Some little Shinto book from one of her support groups had struck her fancy so, she insisted on turning the place into Shogun! She butchered what could have been a lovely foyer with gargoyles and vases and horrendous bonsai trees. Oh, Elle, it’s indescribable.”
Henry Kohn and Chutney entered the waiting room. Elle glanced at Chutney’s tight black dress with gold lettering around her waist, which read, “Waist of Money.” She looked more confident than her lawyer, who in his rumpled, stained suit looked as if he had been pulling a lot of all-nighters.
“You shouldn’t talk to lawyers about the case until I’m present,” Henry Kohn cautioned Trent, exchanging a weary handshake with Christopher.
Chutney glared at the entire group, her arms crossed.
Trent shrugged his shoulder. “My little doll, Elle Woods, has brightened up an otherwise tiresome event,” he said. Elle introduced herself to Henry Kohn and, feeling as if she had been chastised, told the lawyer that she had known Trent since childhood.
“We were just catching up,” she said, blushing faintly.
“Of course,” Henry said, with a second glance at Christopher that suggested he was not convinced. Elle followed the lawyers into a conference room as Trent, heading for the bathroom, promised to join them after he “freshened up.”
Brooke Vandermark was sitting at a conference table long enough to span several zip codes. Across the table sat a stenographer. Christopher turned to Henry Kohn with obvious displeasure.
“Your receptionist did not tell me that my client had already arrived,” he said, indicating Brooke.
Henry Kohn ignored the comment. “Perhaps Mrs. Vandermark would like another cup of coffee,” Henry replied, nodding at the white, lipstick-smudged mug in front of Brooke on the table. “By all means, help yourself.”
On another long table across the room were a tall silver coffee service, several mugs and glasses, a row of canned sodas, and a bucket of ice.
Christopher approached Brooke with a concerned, almost fatherly air. She stood up to greet him, and Elle saw him grip Brooke’s arm firmly at the elbow when he shook her hand.
Brooke’s head reached no higher than Christopher’s shoulder when she stood next to him, Elle noticed with surprise. She had expected Brooke to be taller. She had always seemed so controlling at the head of aerobics class. Now she didn’t appear a head taller than a parking meter.
The neutral of Brooke’s sleeveless linen Empire dress melded almost imperceptibly into her straw-colored hair. Elle recognized the dress, which she had considered ordering from J. Crew in a color other than this year’s “grain” or “almond,” shades fit only for the suntanned. A turquoise patent leather backpack that lay slouched by her chair and matching patent sandals provided the only shimmer of color until Elle caught Brooke’s curious stare. Her eyes, which mirrored Elle’s own, were a keen, inquisitive aqua blue.
“Brooke, I would have offered to have my driver pick you up, but I was running late. Almost missed the plane,” Christopher said.
“I’m glad to hear you have a driver, Christopher. I’ve driven with you before and I think I was safer in jail,” Brooke said. She gave Christopher a quiet smile, but when she sat back down, she was anything but relaxed. Her posture was rocket straight, her back not touching the chair back, her hands fidgeting nervously in her lap.
Christopher smiled. “Mea culpa. Brooke, this is my assistant, Elle Woods. She’s a student at Stanford Law School.”
Brooke nodded at Elle without standing.
Elle blushed, clearing her throat. “Hello, Brooke. I’m very pleased to see you. I went to USC.” Elle glanced at Chutney’s grumpy lawyer, who stood at his seat arranging a notepad next to a manila folder and a foam coffee cup. This was the wrong time for small talk. Christopher had introduced her as his assistant, and there she went talking about college right off the bat, as if this were a punch bowl at a college reunion.
This is serious, Elle instructed herself. Act like it. Don’t say anything. Nod and take notes. Brooke, apparently advised to do the same, hardly budged when Trent entered the room with a sulky glare. She acknowledged him, then set her gaze imperiously beyond him, a stiff pose she maintained throughout the designer’s testimony.
Elle smiled at Trent and sat down silently next to Christopher, backing her chair from the table to balance the legal pad in her lap. While she waited for Henry Kohn’s secretary to pour water into glasses from a heat-condensed silver pitcher, Elle began sketching Brooke’s earrings. Dangling from each of Brooke’s ears were small hoops in which two identical naked twins linked arms. Twins.
“Gemini,” Elle thought to herself. “Ruled by the planet Mercury. Longs for affection and understanding.” Good thing she had taken “Zodiac and You” for her planetary science requirement at school. When she had finished Brooke’s earrings, she began sketching Pisces earrings and wondered how to distinguish them from Aquarius. It occurred to her that Aquarius was an air sign, but rather than puzzle over it any longer, she drew a bull, which was definitely a Taurus. She never considered Taurus a woman’s sign, but figured she could market the earrings to men and women in Miami Beach or San Francisco.
The Libra scales reminded her of law school, and Elle began drawing earrings with a legal theme, which she felt was more appropriate given the circumstances. By the time the deposition ended, a model resembling Brooke was scribbled on Elle’s legal pad, adorned with Libra-scale earrings, a necklace pendant in the shape of a gavel, and a bracelet with various casebooks for charms.
Christopher had been right; the deposition was brief, though it was hardly as damaging as he had feared. Trent did use the offending term “murder” to describe Brooke’s assault on the interior of her house, but when asked about her personally, he only said that he found her “immature, and pitifully nouveau”; he said it almost apologetically, glancing at her Isaac Mizrahi patent leather backpack as if to prove his point.
Elle winked at Trent on the way out and promised to call him the next time she was in L.A. She followed Christopher and Brooke to the building lobby, not speaking because nobody else did. When they stepped outside into the sunlight, Brooke sighed with relief.
“You did great,” Christopher answered the question in Brooke’s eyes.
“Thanks.” Brooke swallowed hard. “I can’t believe what he said about my house. You should have heard him rave about my ‘genius’ when I proposed the idea. The mercenary! He even praised my velvet paintings, insisting that they were more than just kitsch, that such paintings were found by Marco Polo in Kashmir, where velvet was first woven by monks in the Middle Ages.”
Elle bristled, her formal allegiance to Brooke uncomfortably set against her natural affection for flamboyant, lively Trent. “Trent did my family’s house in Bel Air,” Elle said.
Brooke shot a surprised look at Elle, as if she hadn’t until that moment been visible.
“You’re from Bel Air?”
Elle nodded. “I wanted to say something to you before, but I felt weird chatting at the deposition, in front of the lawyers and especially Chutney. I went to SC, Brooke, and I took your aerobics class at Mega-Muscle.”
“And lived to tell?” Brooke said, and laughed gleefully.
“Barely,” Elle said. “It was the toughest workout.”
In the flurry of name exchanging that followed, Christopher stepped aside. He watched with approval as Elle and Brooke began to build a firm bridge toward each other on the mortar of common acquaintances, classes, enemies, and memories. Before he could suggest it, Elle had already promised to show Brooke around San Francisco, where Brooke would be moving for the duration of the trial.
They parted at the elevator, Brooke heading for her car in the garage and Elle and Christopher heading for their waiting car. Brooke folded Elle’s phone number on a piece of paper, which she tucked into her tiny turquoise backpack. “Are you sure you don’t mind my staying with you? I won’t be but a day or so until I find a place, but if you don’t have room or something…”
“Of course you can stay,” Elle said firmly. “Underdog, my Chihuahua, will be thrilled to have some company.”
In their car, Elle was surprised to find the driver headed in the opposite direction from the airport.
“I hope you like sushi, Elle. You’ve been working so hard, I thought I’d surprise you and take you to dinner away from Palo Alto, on a school night.”
Elle was equally pleased by Christopher’s recognition of her dedication to the internship.
When they pulled up to Ginza Sushi-Ko, a three-table, twenty-two-seat restaurant located on posh Via Rodeo just above Tiffany, Elle knew that Christopher had put some thought into where to take her.
Nervous, Elle launched into a story about Everett, a particularly unappealing entertainment lawyer she had a date with just before she started college. He had worked in the Fox Building, where the deposition was taken, so Elle figured it was a timely tale. Elle told Christopher how the boasting associate mentioned at least a dozen times that the Fox Building was where Die Hard was filmed.
“I met him at the office in order to preserve the freedom of having my own car, since Everett had gotten mixed reviews from friends of mine whom he had wined and dined. I didn’t expect a ninety-minute office tour where my date pointed out the desk Michael Jackson danced on, the Montblanc pen Harrison Ford wrote with, the chair Fabio sat in, and other unremarkable celebrity fingerprints. The only area he didn’t point out was the cubicle that served as his office. ‘What do you think of the office?’ he asked at dinner. I told him the office was lovely, but he should apply for a job as a tour guide at Universal Studios.”
Christopher laughed at the story. “You’ve got some tall tales, Elle Woods!”