Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter [13]
Hardmann Roe was a small drug company in Connecticut that had strayed slightly outside of its field and found itself suing a large manufacturer for infringement of an obscure patent. The case was highly technical with little chance of success. The opposing lawyers had thrown up a barricade of motions and delays and the case had made its way downwards, to Frik and Frak whose offices were near the copying machines, who had time for such things, and who pondered it amid the hiss of steam. No one else wanted it and this also made it appealing.
So they worked. They were students again, sitting around in polo shirts with their feet on the desk, throwing off hopeless ideas, crumpling wads of paper, staying late in the library and having the words blur in books.
They stayed on through vacations and weekends sometimes sleeping in the office and making coffee long before anyone came to work. After a late dinner they were still talking about it, its complexities, where elements somehow fit in, the sequence of letters, articles in journals, meetings, the limits of meaning. Brenda met a handsome Dutchman who worked for a bank. Alan met Hopie. Still there was this infinite forest, the trunks and vines blocking out the light, the roots of distant things joined. With every month that passed they were deeper into it, less certain of where they had been or if it could end. They had become like the old partners whose existence had been slowly sealed off, fewer calls, fewer consultations, lives that had become lunch. It was known they were swallowed up by the case with knowledge of little else. The opposite was true—no one else understood its details. Three years had passed. The length of time alone made it important. The reputation of the firm, at least in irony, was riding on them.
Two months before the case was to come to trial they quit Weyland, Braun. Frank sat down at the polished table for Sunday lunch. His father was one of the best men in the city. There is a kind of lawyer you trust and who becomes your friend. “What happened?” he wanted to know.
“We’re starting our own firm,” Frank said.
“What about the case you’ve been working on? You can’t leave them with a litigation you’ve spent years preparing.”
“We’re not. We’re taking it with us,” Frank said.
There was a moment of dreadful silence.
“Taking it with you? You can’t. You went to one of the best schools, Frank. They’ll sue you. You’ll ruin yourself.”
“We thought of that.”
“Listen to me,” his father said.
Everyone said that, his mother, his Uncle Cook, friends. It was worse than ruin, it was dishonor. His father said that.
Hardmann Roe never went to trial, as it turned out. Six weeks later there was a settlement. It was for thirty-eight million, a third of it their fee.
His father had been wrong, which was something you could not hope for. They weren’t sued either. That was settled, too. In place of ruin there were new offices overlooking Bryant Park which from above seemed like a garden behind a dark château, young clients, opera tickets, dinners in apartments with divorced hostesses, surrendered apartments with books and big, tiled kitchens.
The city was divided, as he had said, into those going up and those coming down, those in crowded restaurants and those on the street, those who waited and those who did not, those with three locks on the door and those rising in an elevator from a lobby with silver mirrors and walnut paneling.
And those like Mrs. Christie who was in the intermediate state though looking assured. She wanted to renegotiate the settlement with her ex-husband. Frank had leafed through the papers. “What do you think?” she asked candidly.
“I think it would be easier for you to get married again.”
She was in her fur coat, the dark lining displayed. She gave a little puff of disbelief. “It’s not that easy,” she said.
He didn’t know what it was like, she told him. Not long ago she’d been introduced to someone by a couple she knew very well. “We’ll go to dinner,” they said, “you’ll love him, you’re perfect for him, he likes to talk about