The Lifestyle

Chapter 1

Georgina Wagman’s life was so good she felt bad about it. Not so bad she’d change anything but bad enough she’d made it her mission to help others reach their potential in love, career, and epicurean delights. So it was with the best of intentions that she ordered four boxes of the richest, crispiest cannoli in New York City for the junior associates working late on Friday night and hand-delivered them office to office. How could she have known they’d give everyone food poisoning—the Italian bakery was A‑rated by the health department!—or that the thirtieth-floor restrooms were closed for cleaning? Building management should have waited until after hours for that. Everyone knows lawyers work through dinner.

Sweaty and groaning, the associates had scattered thirty minutes later—some to the privacy of their apartments, others to the stairwell in search of a restroom on a different floor—except one first-year associate named Meredith De Luca. When Georgina had stopped by Meredith’s office with the box of cannoli on display, she’d politely declined.

“I don’t have much of a sweet tooth,” she’d said.

“Only bad cannoli are too sweet,” Georgina had insisted.

“Anyway, I’m a vegan,” Meredith had said, and that put an end to that.

All of Georgina’s fellow partners at the law firm of Ryan, Dunn & Chandler LLP were assigned a junior associate to mentor, and Georgina had landed Meredith. While most of her colleagues fulfilled their obligation by begrudgingly taking their mentees to lunch on the firm credit card once a year after their performance reviews, Georgina considered herself a Sherpa leading Meredith on a treacherous expedition up Mount Everest. She’d framed Georgina Wagman’s Top 25 Tips for Being a Star Associate Without Missing Sleep and presented it to Meredith on her first day in a gift bag and tried not to be offended when she never hung it up. Meredith accepted her advice with grace, if not enthusiasm, but Georgina was determined their relationship would become more than a formality. If only Meredith would ask a question or two, seek her help and counsel, then she could prove her trustworthiness. But Meredith wore her red hair and tight black skirt suit like an electric fence, forcing everyone to keep out. She never attended firm happy hours or holiday parties, and she’d declined every one of Georgina’s thirty-seven lunch invitations. Was that Georgina’s fault for choosing the wrong restaurants? Now that she understood Meredith’s palate, she’d pick somewhere with salty vegetables on the menu.

If Meredith was hoping Georgina would eventually get the hint and stop trying to be her fairy godmother, she was wrong. So wrong. Georgina Wagman would not go down without a fight, especially when her intentions were good, which was always.

If only they’d been a little less good in this particular instance, Meredith De Luca wouldn’t have been the only associate to stay late in the office.

Chapter 2

Georgina looked up from her computer at a knock on her office door. Nathan smiled in his favorite gray suit and light pink tie. “I heard you tried to kill the junior associates,” he said.

Nathan was her partner in more than law. They’d met as first years—when Georgina was Meredith’s age—and married five years later. Last year, they’d both made partner. Nathan worked in the Corporate department, specifically Structured Finance. While she didn’t know per se what “structured finance” was, she had no problem faking it when she helped Nathan wine and dine clients. She’d memorized one Wall Street Journal article on solar energy securitization and found a way to work it into the conversation whenever someone mentioned the price of oil falling, which they always did. That was good enough. As long as she laughed at their jokes, those men didn’t care much what she had to say anyway.

She was a litigator. People assumed lawyers had a well-rounded practice of law, but they were wrong. Just as Nathan only spent his days “structuring finances,” her only focus was advocating—a fancy word for arguing. She advocated on conference calls, advocated over email, advocated in briefs, and occasionally advocated to a judge, although that happened a lot more on TV than in real life, it turned out. She’d become a lawyer because of Ally McBeal. It was an embarrassing but true fact, like that hummus gave her very bad gas.

She covered her face. “Don’t say that! They’re going to sue me. Oh God, are they going to sue me?”

“They won’t sue you,” Nathan said. “They’re afraid of you. Especially now that you tried to kill them.”

“Stop saying that!”

“Relax.” Nathan hitched up his pant legs and sat on the corner of her desk. “People get food poisoning. It happens.”

“Not to me.” She returned to her computer. “I’m googling remedies and bringing them to their apartments tomorrow morning. And I’ve got Dr. Frasier ready to make house calls if they need her.”

“The junior associates are capable of buying their own Pepto Bismol,” Nathan said. “And they do not want a partner showing up unannounced at their apartments, trust me.”

Her fingers paused in their frantic search for the best nausea-quelling tea. He was probably right about that. They didn’t like it when she stopped by their offices, always hastily stacking their messy papers and putting their shoes back on while she pretended not to notice. “I have to do something. I feel awful.”

“Why don’t you get them a special treat? Hmm.” Nathan made a show of tapping his chin as he brainstormed options. “I don’t know, maybe . . . a cannoli?”

She picked up a red pen and threw it at him.

“I know what to do,” she said. “I’ll give them a sick day.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“Lawyers work on Saturdays.”

Nathan laughed and shook his head. “You work on Saturdays. Hey—” He checked his watch. “Aren’t you late for something?”

“Shit!” She stood up so fast her chair fell backward. “I have drinks with a client. Want to be my wingman?”

“I can’t.”

As she stuffed her laptop and legal pad into her briefcase, Nathan righted her chair. He helped her into her red pea coat and kissed her hair.

She turned to smile up at him. His face was pale, square, and defined, like a sandstone sculpture carved with ninety-degree angles. Every woman at the firm agreed he was handsome, which they told Georgina often. She liked to hear it—it made her proud.

“But this client has no boundaries,” she said. “Maybe if you’re there, she won’t tell me everything about her sex life.”

“Wish I could help. I’m taking three guys from Morgan Stanley to the Knicks. You can fill me in on her sex life when we get home.”

“It’s better if I drink enough wine that I can’t remember the details.”

When Nathan grinned, two parentheses appeared in his smooth cheeks. “Do you tell her about our sex life?”

“I would love to, but it’s usually tough to get a word in edgewise.” Also, there wasn’t much to tell, but she didn’t want to hurt Nathan’s feelings. Their sex life was perfectly fine, thank you very much; it just didn’t inspire stories. She didn’t tell her friends about Swiffering the kitchen, did she? Not that sex with Nathan was like Swiffering the kitchen. If given the choice between those two things, she would definitely choose sex with Nathan. Or probably. Both were rewarding in their own way. She only meant sex with Nathan was a regularly occurring activity that was productive and enjoyable but not surprising enough to talk about. But frankly, she didn’t know a single married couple whose sex life was surprising, including her client, whose stories were not so much about having sex as they were about not having sex and the vibrators she used instead.

Georgina gave her surroundings the once-over to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. When she became partner, the firm gave her a sizable budget to decorate her fancy new office. She bought mauve-colored velvet chairs, an acrylic desk, a gold-framed print of Jackson Pollock’s Lavender Mist, and a vintage Turkish rug in faded blue. Even though she’d made it her own, she felt like an imposter in there, astonished it belonged to her. That was how she felt about Nathan, too. He was too perfect. Her life was a beautiful glass ornament hanging by a thread, and somewhere scissors waited.

“You’d better go,” he said.

“Right.” She pecked his clean-shaven cheek and smelled the overpowering scent of Tide. Nathan used too much detergent, but at least he did his own laundry, unlike some husbands she knew—her best friend Norah’s, in particular.

Unfortunately, Norah’s marriage was the product of Georgina’s matchmaking prowess. On their first day of law school at Fordham, Georgina sat beside Norah in the front row of property, having noticed her quiet beauty at orientation, which she seemed determined to hide under too-long bangs, oversize sweaters, and clunky Doc Martens. For the rest of the semester, Georgina observed her taking notes by hand while other students stared at the Internet. She left her textbook closed during class and finished the midterm an hour early.

Yet never once did she raise her hand.

Norah was exactly the type of project Georgina loved to collect, so she decided to become her best friend. She swore to inspire in Norah the one thing she needed—confidence. No, bigger than that—gusto. With a little help, Norah would rule the world.

But Norah was wasting her time dating a quiet guy named Felix, who wore a backpack and grandpa cardigans, and radiated intensity like heat waves from summer asphalt. He lived in the northeast corner of the library, hunched over a textbook with a stack of note cards and a moat of crumpled granola bar wrappers, refusing to join the class at Professor Hops to rehash every exam until they were too drunk to remember the questions. While Felix was cute, with black hair he spiked slightly to the side with gel—not an atrocious hairstyle for 2005—and defined triceps peeking from beneath his short sleeves in hot weather, he was unworthy of Norah. She deserved someone compelling, someone who could make her laugh. Someone like Ari—a life-of-the-party college baseball player who looked like he’d accidentally wandered into torts on his way to an open casting call at the modeling agency. So when Ari asked to join Norah’s study group, Georgina invented the teensiest lie that Ari wanted to join because he liked her. Truthfully, she suspected Ari was failing. She’d never seen him crack a book. But who cared? There was a saying: people who get As in law school become judges, people who get Bs in law school become attorneys, and people who get Cs in law school become rich.

What Georgina hadn’t predicted was that Ari would impregnate Norah by the end of their first year, that Norah would drop out because they couldn’t afford two tuitions and a baby, and that twelve years of marriage later, Ari would still behave like a twenty-two-year-old whose greatest achievement was a grand slam in the 2002 College World Series, despite the fact that he now had three thriving, healthy children. Norah’s circumstances were drawn by Georgina’s hand, and she wished she could erase them, or at least rewrite them.

Ironically, Felix became Georgina’s second-closest friend after Norah left school. Once she’d gotten to know him—and convinced him to trade his backpack for a messenger bag—she swallowed her mistake like a dry, bitter pill. Felix’s outward intensity was the by-product of the immense pressure he put on himself to succeed, with an older brother already the top hepatologist in Los Angeles and Korean immigrant parents he couldn’t bear to disappoint. Felix was not unworthy. The world was unworthy of Felix.

His tenacity had paid off, securing him a job offer from the best corporate law firm in the world. He’d spent four years practicing in the Seoul office, where he spoke the language yet felt culturally American, and four more in the New York office, earning a quarter-million dollars a year and living in a luxury high-rise on Twenty-Third Street. But after eight straight 2,800-hour years, he’d confessed to having increasing panic attacks, terrified he’d die the next time his heart seized, his lungs emptied, and his brain drowned in static. One Tuesday, in a moment of clarity, he’d left for a sandwich and never went back. After putting his belongings in storage, he’d moved to Costa Rica for six months. Felix called it a breakdown, his mother called it a vacation, Georgina called it funemployment.

There, he’d met his girlfriend, Alina, who’d been attending a surf camp alone. They’d decided to move in together before they’d flown home. When Georgina had gently suggested they slow down, Felix insisted he needed to be with someone who lived life on her own terms and did whatever made her happy whenever the mood struck. He admired her free spirit and bravery. But when Felix started wearing Alina’s personality like he’d worn his navy suits, Georgina worried he’d replaced old pressures with new ones. First, he’d forced himself into the role of ambitious, cutthroat corporate lawyer to please his family, and now he forced himself into the role of contrarian hipster to please Alina. That was his modus operandi. He’d once loved a playwright named Salmon, for whom he’d become a sober vegan cat person. Then there was Lindsay, a second-grade teacher from Louisville, who’d convinced him to take improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and Georgina had to suffer through way too many amateur performances of “Scenes from a Hat” and “Weird Newscasters” with five-dollar PBRs from the booth in the back.

Improv was not the life that suited Felix, just as doing her husband’s laundry was not the life that suited Norah. Perhaps the life that suited them best was the one Georgina had destroyed.

In the elevator to the lobby of Georgina’s office building, she requested an Uber, and it pulled to the curb on Seventh Avenue between Forty-Second and Forty-Third Streets just as she walked outside. Ubers were usually minutes away in Manhattan. It was too easy. She preferred things to be a challenge, found gratification in fixing problems—her own and everyone else’s. In her marriage, she was the one who googled “why is my TV blue” and fiddled with the remote for an hour while Nathan told her to just call someone. Where was the fun in that?

The back seat smelled like cologne and old french fries, so she rolled down the window and held her face in the fall breeze, smiling at the neon lights of Times Square at night. If anyone asked her about working in Times Square, she’d scoff. Too crowded, too smelly, too noisy, no good food. But those lights still gave her a private little thrill. I’m here, she’d think. This is my life.