“Can we move the appointment to this weekend?” I ask my mother.
“Again?” my mother says, “you want to move another wedding dress appointment?”
“I just have so much work to do,” I say, looking around my office at the boxes of documents that are piled high, one on top of the other.
“You always have so much work to do, BB,” my mother says, “it’s time for a break.”
“I’ll take a break as soon as I’m done with these Interrogatories,” I say, getting ready to hang up the phone. I had to skip our last wedding dress appointment since I had to meet with Monique to get the information I’d need to complete the Interrogatories, so I know that my mother is nearing her breaking point.
“That’s what you said about the document requests,” my mother says, “You said we could shop once you were done with those. But, now the wedding date is approaching quickly. Having a dress custom made is already out the door, I’ve accepted that, but at the rate we’re going, we’re not even going to have time for alterations for something off the rack.”
“We’ll find something,” I say, doing my work as I speak to her. “We always do.”
“Finding the perfect wedding dress isn’t like running to Saks to pick up a little black dress. You saw how long it took us to find Monique.”
Why does she always have to bring up the Monique thing? It drives me nuts the way she makes it out like I’ve chosen my work over my relationship just because I took on Monique’s case. When she knows that I’m just working hard to try to prove myself at work. Simple as that. Why does she have to infuse meaning into it? Why does she have to make it mean more than what it actually is?
I promise to make the appointment we have scheduled for tomorrow night and this seems to allay my mother for the moment. We hang up the phone and I turn back to my computer screen. The words seem to all blur together, and I find it hard to focus my eyes. I pick up the Interrogatories Jack served on me and try to make notes on them, but they, too, seem to have words and letters scrambled across the page.
After I finish drafting my responses, I should draft my own set of Interrogatories to serve on Jack. That’ll show him. As it is, I’ll be in the office all night working on how to answer his set of Interrogatories. Drafting a quick set of my own wouldn’t keep me here much longer. Once you’re totally sleep deprived, does an extra hour lost really matter that much, anyway?
Jack taught me how to draft Interrogatories; I should be able to do them in my sleep. First, you have to figure out what information you need in order to prove your case. Well, that one’s easy for me—I need to know why Monique’s husband is being such a jerk. I need to figure out why, in the face of a simple business matter, he has turned this into a contentious litigation? And more importantly, why has this attitude rubbed off on my fiancé and turned him into such a jerk?
These questions may not be appropriate for the Interrogatories. Perhaps I should just focus on answering the Interrogatories that Jack has asked me.
Interrogatory 1: State the grounds for dissolving this business partnership.
Haven’t I told Jack that before? That sort of thing would have been in my initial Complaint. As I click through my documents on my computer, though, I can’t seem to find the original document. The file names all blur together and I feel my eyes beginning to close against my will.
I’m more tired than I realized. If I could just put my head down for one tiny little minute, I bet I’d feel much better. A cat nap. That’s what I need. I just need one of those twenty minute naps that totally revitalize and rejuvenate you. Then, I can get back to my work.
Leaning back in my ergonomically correct chair, I slowly close my eyes and take a deep breath in, deep breath out. Yes, a little sleep. This is just what I need.
I get back to my apartment and the clock on the microwave oven blinks 2:45 a.m. Too tired to hang my coat and work bag up in the closet, I take them off and just let them fall where they will in the foyer. As I walk into the apartment, I realize that an enormous red silk screen is smack dab in the middle of my living room. I know I haven’t been home much lately, but it’s just so unlike Jack to just start re-decorating the place without me. And, anyway, it’s blocking my path into the bedroom.
I walk over to the screen and try to move it, but it’s stuck in place. Turning around backwards and putting all of my weight into it, I lean against the screen and try to push. I give it a few good heaves and hos, but it’s no use. The thing simply won’t budge.
I call out for Jack to help me. The silk that covers the screen is extremely fine and I know that he should be able to hear me through its smooth fibers. But, he doesn’t hear me. Instead, I hear him. I hear voices, low and dim, giggling together, laughing together and then I don’t hear anything at all.
“Jack,” I cry out, “are you there?”
No response. More giggling from the bedroom. I turn around again and put my full weight onto the silk screen. I push and I push and the screen doesn’t move at all. It doesn’t move an inch.
“Jack,” I say, trying to sound composed, “what is going on over there? Help me, I’m stuck!”
But he doesn’t come. Instead, I hear more rustling from the bedroom and then a voice.
“Oh, Jack,” I hear and I can barely make out whose voice it is. I march back into the kitchen and open the drawer. Rifling around, I finally find what I need—I grab the scissors and quickly make my way back to the gigantic silk screen. I consider, for a brief second, cutting the screen slowly and carefully, only making big enough of a hole for myself to walk through, but then reconsider in an instant and just stab the fabric quickly. It takes a few stabs before it rips, but when it does, the entire thing opens up for me. It opens wide, like the petals of a rose awakening in the spring, and I walk through the hole, towards the bedroom.
As I make my way down the hallway, I hear the voices again. I try to move quickly, but my feet feel like they are lead. The faster I try to move, the slower I seem to walk. Everything around me gets blurry and dark, and I struggle to bring things back into focus. The hallway stretches out before me, seemingly getting longer with each and every step that I take.
“Jack,” I hear the voice say again, and I rack my brain to figure out who it is. I finally get closer to the bedroom door and I reach out to grab the doorknob. In an instant, I realize whose voice it is that I’ve been hearing: Miranda Foxley.
“Jack!” I call out, reaching for the doorknob, but the more I try to reach for it, the further away it seems to get from my grasp.
“Jack!” I cry, “Jack!” Everything becomes so dark and blurry, I can’t even see the doorknob anymore. I float backwards, further and further away from my apartment, and suddenly, I feel my head jerk upwards.
I wake up with a start and realize that I was just sleeping. It was only a dream. More like a nightmare, actually, but the important thing is that it wasn’t actually happening to me. I was only sleeping.
As I stretch out the crink in my neck from sleeping in my chair, I realize that I’ve slept for 45 minutes and I need to get back to answering Jack’s Interrogatories immediately if I have any chance at all of getting home before the sun rises and tonight actually becomes tomorrow. And it’s so late that I can forget any chance I had of drafting my own set of Interrogatories.
But then, I look at my computer screen. Seems that I’ve already started drafting my Interrogatories. Funny, because I don’t recall writing anything at all.
But, my computer screen tells an entirely different story:
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
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In the matter of:
The dissolution of partnership of Monique Couture, Inc. |
Index No. 54930285-NY |
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STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK
INTERROGATORIES
1. State the grounds for your inability to stand up to your father.
2. State the grounds, if different than your response to Interrogatory No. 1, for your inability to stand up to your family as a whole.
3. Explain the nature of your relationship to Miranda Foxley.
4. List each of the reasons you love Brooke Miller.
5. You still love Brooke Miller, don’t you?