Ryan Grady wondered if he was getting smarter, if that knock on the head had jolted back into alignment some bruised pieces of mental machinery, casualties of his youthful athletic career. Since returning from Texas he had thought differently about the magazines. Their advice, he had noticed, was not always consistent. Should one approach women with a pad and pencil, pretending to be conducting a survey on the best or worst lines heard recently? Some authorities considered this a highpercentage play; others scoffed, holding that the best technique was a simple “I just wanted to tell you I think you’re very pretty.” There was a lack of consensus, likewise, on such basic issues as which drink one should order for an attractive stranger, the proper amount of hair gel (some even recommended skipping gel entirely and substituting moisturizing lotion), and whether a suit jacket could be paired with a T-shirt. Ryan surveyed his conflicting texts with dismay. They were as bad as the law, full of irreconcilable precedents, a tangled web of rules and exceptions and fact-dependent balancing tests. And no duty of advocacy to bring clarity, no final authority, not even a magazine to tell you which magazines to read.
Then came the inspiration, the eureka moment. There might not be magazines that told you what lines would work, but there were magazines that made them work. Magazines that did not reveal the truth but shaped it, that determined, by fiat, what women would go for.
Women’s magazines.
Like all great ideas, it seemed obvious in retrospect. Why waste your time reading the same advice that every other guy in the bar could get for
four dollars, or pick up and scan for free while awaiting a haircut? Why try to master the complicated systems, the contingencies and fallback plans? There was a shorter route. For while he read these magazines and absorbed their wisdom as gospel, across the city, girls were doing the same thing. They had their own instruction books, their manuals for life, which told them what to wear, to drink, to say. Probably the magazines told them which lines they should fall for, which should elicit a light flirtatious laugh and cause them to press a hand to their neck, which deserved only a blank stare. All he had to do was read the same magazines and he would know too. There, in the glossy pages amid the perfume samples and subscription cards, in the template and crucible of their desires, he would learn what women want.
The cold enthusiasm of the secret agent burned inside him. He was going behind enemy lines. In the grocery checkout line he clutched his Cosmo like blueprints to the hostile base. Which it was, of course; that was exactly what it was. The salesclerk’s eyes held greater skepticism. “For the girlfriend?”
“Yes,” said Ryan. For the girlfriend. For all the girlfriends. In his apartment he fanned out his acquisitions. The pile was thicker this time, but the women’s magazines contained a higher percentage of advertisements, and probably many articles he could safely skip, personality tests and reviews of the hottest bras for fall. Ryan felt his excitement building. This would be quick, easy, effective. No more struggling with complicated systems, no more self-improvement tips to remind him of all the things he should change but didn’t have the time, the money, or the fortitude to address. This would be efficient. Now we’re getting somewhere, he thought. Now we’re on the same page.
Walker Eliot was checking the performance of his mutual funds on the Internet, hardly the worst of the things he did on the firm’s time, but still he started guiltily when Harold’s head poked through his office door. “Hey, wunderkind,” said Harold. “Big couple of days for us.”
More of my briefs come home to roost, thought Walker, unsure at this point whether good news or bad was more to be feared. “What’s the word?” he asked.
“Parkwell’s out,” Harold told him jubilantly. “Dismissed from the case. The judge loved your motion. Ate it right up.”
Ate it up, and in the manner of judges produced … what? “What was the reasoning?” Walker asked apprehensively.
Harold smiled. “Worried about an appeal? I think we’re pretty solid on this one. There’s no opinion; he just ruled from the bench. But it was what we said. Piercing the corporate veil requires more than the prospect that a plaintiff won’t be able to get a full recovery. You showed that there was no abuse of the corporate form, and that’s that.”
Walker nodded, cautiously pleased. “That sounds okay.”
“Okay?” Harold asked. “It’s huge. You should be very happy about this. I’m not sure how we’re going to do on class certification. Judge Preston is a split-the-baby kind of guy, and he might feel he needs to give the other side something.”
Walker frowned. “Class certification? But that’s the one we really should win. You can’t certify a mass tort.”
“You know how judges are,” said Harold, shrugging. “Preston, it’s a good day if he zips his robes. And listen to this. The day I go into court to argue class certification, there’s another Hubble case on the same motion call. Right before me. It’s a wrongful discharge claim. They fired someone for refusing to clean the inside of one of their tanks. And why did he refuse? Because a couple of years ago some poor fucker died doing the same thing. I had to twist some arms to get rid of that one. Pay him off, I told Hubble’s guys. Kill him; I don’t care. But don’t do anything to make your company look like the evil bastards you are right before I have to get up and argue for you.” He laughed. “So they did it.”
Walker was genuinely distressed. That matters?
Harold read his expression. “Don’t worry, they didn’t kill him. He got a nice settlement. And don’t worry about class certification either. Getting to Parkwell’s assets is the biggest issue here, and we nailed them. You should have heard Macey spluttering. He’s up there talking about how many people have been hurt, and the judge just cut him right off. ‘Counsel, I don’t see how that can be relevant if you don’t show me that Parkwell exerted an improper degree of control over its subsidiary’s operations.’ Stopped him in midsentence. After that, he almost has to go against us on class certification.” Walker shook his head wonderingly, and Harold’s tone softened. “I know, what about all the people who were hurt? Don’t worry, they’ll get something. Hubble’s not going to get off scot-free on this one. The facts are bad; I’d be the first to admit it.”
Harold paused for a moment. The facts were bad, and the more he saw of the files his team had brought back from Texas, the worse they got. Whoever had been in charge of waste disposal had been unimaginably reckless; whoever had left the paper trail documenting the recklessness, unimaginably stupid. “I understand that a case like this can cause you to doubt yourself,” he said. “As a lawyer, you’ll get called in to deal with a lot of bad situations. But we’re just trying to make sure that the outcome is fair. After all, what sense would it make to ruin all the people who invested in Parkwell when it didn’t have anything to do with how Hubble stored its chemicals?”
“Right,” said Walker, thinking: The world’s gone mad. The trouble with being a lawyer, it was becoming clear to him, was that it required you to think about people instead of the law. For a moment he envied Mark, hunting facts through the wilds of Virginia, taking the case law as he found it, never worrying about the precedents he might create. Never dreading that his touch would change what he sought. His touch, his very glance. I was wrong in Vendstar, Walker thought, even the way I wrote it. I believed I was right, but I wasn’t. The admission shook him; it woke the fear that something had gone unalterably wrong within him. That his mind had lost its clarity, some neutrality of vision that, like innocence, could not be restored. That he would never again look upon the true law. Walker was having trouble sleeping, waking nights now from dreams in which clients came to him in a larger office, one that in some versions had much the feeling of an upscale shoe store, asking what the law was. And he answered with the affable indifference of the heretic and the whore: The law is whatever you want.
The Parkwell brief had been right, though. It had taken some fancy footwork, but his argument had been sound. He clung to that thought, though it gave diminishing comfort. He was no longer sure he could trust his judgment, and anyway, virtuosity was less than virtue. There must be something I can do that I’d actually feel good about.
Walker’s concentration blazed to life and Harold, noticing, backed away. “Well, I can see you’ve got other things to think about. Just wanted to congratulate you.” Walker nodded, unhearing. Maybe there was something to this Harper case after all. His mind accelerated; his face assumed an expression of monastic peace. Walker’s attention was given to few things, but it was given to them entire, and it consumed them completely.