away.
10
Th e following Monday morning, the colonel called me into his office to do a case review. It was an exercise that I wasn’t particularly fond of. He would ask me detailed questions about my cases and I’d feel pressured to answer them off-the-cuff. Analyzing cases was the part of being a lawyer that he enjoyed most, and while I enjoyed it, too, I didn’t like being peppered with questions by him.
For the past ten years, since graduating from Columbia University Law School, the colonel had been a public interest attorney, starting off at Mental Health Legal Advisors in Boston and two years later coming to our office in Worcester. After only one year as a staff attorney doing my job representing tenants in housing court, he was elevated to the position of litigation director. That put him in charge of the more complex cases that came into the office, such as those involving housing and employment discrimination. Rumor had it that his promotion resulted from his cozy relationship with the executive director, a largely absent figure who was often off attending conferences and engaging in lobbying efforts. For a relatively young and inexperienced lawyer, it was a rapid rise in the hierarchy. But he was a very smart guy and a good lawyer, and as time passed, the executive director more and more left the day-to-day operations of the office to him.
One thing always struck me as a little odd. Although he was the litigation director of the office, the colonel had only tried one case in his entire career. It was an eviction trial, and I never learned the specifics of it or whether he had won or lost. As litigation director, he had a stable of good cases that he worked up well, and the defendants tended to settle. The crappy cases that I routinely handled were the ones that often went to trial.
As usual the colonel and I got down to business without any small talk—not even a perfunctory question about our respective weekends. I didn’t have much to tell him anyway, given that I had spent the weekend alone. I had only left the apartment to go to Starbucks in the mornings to read the newspaper and drink a cup of coffee and to go out jogging in the afternoons.
Last Tuesday, Sara had mentioned that she might visit her parents for the weekend by herself. She always visited them without me, and like many times in the past, I made an issue out of it. I claimed that she wasn’t proud of our relationship, that it didn’t mean enough to her to make her stand up to her parents and tell them that her visits would have to include me coming with her. Things escalated from there into an argument and she stuck to her decision to go without me.
“You don’t understand my relationship with my parents or the position I’m in,” she said to me in an impassioned voice.
“What’s there to understand? They want you to visit them without me and you comply.”
“Yeah, because they’re crazy and they’re not nice. I hardly see them, so I just go along with it because otherwise I wouldn’t see them at all.”
I never fully understood why her parents didn’t want me to visit with her. I had been out to dinner with them a handful of times and it had always been pleasant. But apparently behind the scenes they didn’t want their contact with me to extend beyond that. Sara always chalked it up to their being crazy and unreasonable, and not anything personal having to do with me, saying that they had always acted that way with her boyfriends. But she never spelled it out for me beyond that.
In part I understood the point Sara was making—that she was between a rock and a hard place—but I also couldn’t help feeling wounded by her actions. I couldn’t help thinking that in her shoes I would’ve taken a stronger stand. After seven years together, weren’t we supposed to come first in each other’s lives?
The colonel began by inquiring about what had happened at the last CDBG meeting. I briefly paused to order my
10
Th e following Monday morning, the colonel called me into his office to do a case review. It was an exercise that I wasn’t particularly fond of. He would ask me detailed questions about my cases and I’d feel pressured to answer them off-the-cuff. Analyzing cases was the part of being a lawyer that he enjoyed most, and while I enjoyed it, too, I didn’t like being peppered with questions by him.
For the past ten years, since graduating from Columbia University Law School, the colonel had been a public interest attorney, starting off at Mental Health Legal Advisors in Boston and two years later coming to our office in Worcester. After only one year as a staff attorney doing my job representing tenants in housing court, he was elevated to the position of litigation director. That put him in charge of the more complex cases that came into the office, such as those involving housing and employment discrimination. Rumor had it that his promotion resulted from his cozy relationship with the executive director, a largely absent figure who was often off attending conferences and engaging in lobbying efforts. For a relatively young and inexperienced lawyer, it was a rapid rise in the hierarchy. But he was a very smart guy and a good lawyer, and as time passed, the executive director more and more left the day-to-day operations of the office to him.
One thing always struck me as a little odd. Although he was the litigation director of the office, the colonel had only tried one case in his entire career. It was an eviction trial, and I never learned the specifics of it or whether he had won or lost. As litigation director, he had a stable of good cases that he worked up well, and the defendants tended to settle. The crappy cases that I routinely handled were the ones that often went to trial.
As usual the colonel and I got down to business without any small talk—not even a perfunctory question about our respective weekends. I didn’t have much to tell him anyway, given that I had spent the weekend alone. I had only left the apartment to go to Starbucks in the mornings to read the newspaper and drink a cup of coffee and to go out jogging in the afternoons.
Last Tuesday, Sara had mentioned that she might visit her parents for the weekend by herself. She always visited them without me, and like many times in the past, I made an issue out of it. I claimed that she wasn’t proud of our relationship, that it didn’t mean enough to her to make her stand up to her parents and tell them that her visits would have to include me coming with her. Things escalated from there into an argument and she stuck to her decision to go without me.
“You don’t understand my relationship with my parents or the position I’m in,” she said to me in an impassioned voice.
“What’s there to understand? They want you to visit them without me and you comply.”
“Yeah, because they’re crazy and they’re not nice. I hardly see them, so I just go along with it because otherwise I wouldn’t see them at all.”
I never fully understood why her parents didn’t want me to visit with her. I had been out to dinner with them a handful of times and it had always been pleasant. But apparently behind the scenes they didn’t want their contact with me to extend beyond that. Sara always chalked it up to their being crazy and unreasonable, and not anything personal having to do with me, saying that they had always acted that way with her boyfriends. But she never spelled it out for me beyond that.
In part I understood the point Sara was making—that she was between a rock and a hard place—but I also couldn’t help feeling wounded by her actions. I couldn’t help thinking that in her shoes I would’ve taken a stronger stand. After seven years together, weren’t we supposed to come first in each other’s lives?
The colonel began by inquiring about what had happened at the last CDBG meeting. I briefly paused to order my
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