one hot summer (12 page)

Ashley Gutierrez, my firm’s receptionist, spotted me and shrieked out my name in her earsplitting, high-pitched little girl’s voice. I took a quick, instinctive look around as I stepped out of the elevator, hoping there were no clients around to hear her very unprofessional greeting. Mercifully, we were alone, which was a blessing because a moment later she enveloped me in an aggressive bear hug.

One might think from her first name that Ashley was an American, but the truth was that she was a Cuban from Hialeah. It wasn’t uncommon for first-generation Cubans to give their children American names, hoping it would help their offspring assimilate into their new country as easily and quickly as possible. Really, though, those names rarely went well with Spanish surnames. I knew a Samantha Perez, a Tiffany Gonzalez, a Sean Gomez, and a Zack Ramirez. Sometimes intermarriage resulted in Anglo first names paired with Spanish last names. The results, to my mind at least, were often hilarious.

Pamela Anderson was Ashley’s role model in life, and it showed. She resembled nothing more than a Cuban version of the former
Baywatch
temptress. Her hair was died a shocking blond, and she liked to wear it gathered on top of her head and accented with multicolored glass barrettes. Long tight curls cascaded down to the middle of her back. It was a hairstyle not often seen since the seventies. Someone seemed to have told Ashley that her black eyes looked best with smoky-colored eye shadow, so to accentuate them she applied makeup from her eyelashes up to her eyebrows. She ringed her eyes in midnight black liner and, to make sure everyone got the point, heavily coated her lashes with mascara. To balance out her eyes, Ashley wore crimson lipstick applied so heavily that her teeth almost always sported traces of red.

A firm believer in manicures and pedicures, Ashley often sneaked out to the nail salon in the basement of our building for frequent touch-ups of her two-inch-long fingernails. It was hard to type, operate the switchboard, or accomplish any of the tasks associated with being a receptionist with those beauties on the ends of her hands, and as a result she was a pretty haphazard worker. But as time passed we all got used to her ways, and by and large we saw nothing unusual in employing a receptionist who couldn’t type, answer the phone, or even effectively sign for packages. She had taught the FedEx, UPS, and DHL couriers to forge her signature so she wouldn’t have to risk chipping her nails on such a mundane task.

Ashley was tiny in stature, but her breast implants were so big it was rumored that she’d had to pay extra to her plastic surgeon, who balked at their size and grumbled about losing his license. She was so proud of her breasts that she made sure everyone could see them in all their glory. Her outfits seemed strategically designed to show as much cleavage and nipple-through-fabric as possible. Her breasts were so big that she was always tipped forward by their weight, making total exposure a constant possibility. Her miniskirts were so small that I wondered whether she was on a crusade to conserve the world’s supply of fabric. And, as everyone in the office knew from watching her bend over, she wore Victoria’s Secret panties exclusively.

But she was a good young woman. Personally, I had liked her from the moment we met, and I took her appearance and drama-queen tendencies in stride. Her peculiar ways never seemed to adversely affect the firm in any way. I think outsiders viewed Ashley with curiosity, as though our firm was flaunting its success by showing it could even employ someone like Ashley and still thrive. One of my favorite thrills upon arriving at work each morning was seeing what Ashley was wearing.

Ashley had been our receptionist for three years. She hadn’t exactly applied for the job: In fact, she was working off her husband’s legal bills. One of my partners, Miguel Blanco, represented Ashley’s husband Freddy, the owner of a chain of stores called Saints-R-Us, on an arson case. Miguel lost the case, which was no surprise to anyone. His real job was to minimize the punishment Freddy Gutierrez would receive for his actions. It was no secret that Freddy wasn’t the brightest bulb on the marquee, and it was obvious that he had torched six of his stores because they were hemorrhaging money. He had never been much of a businessman, but even Freddy should have known better than to open up stores selling Santeria relics and objects of voodoo worship in white, upper-middle-class neighborhoods. As if the fact that all six stores were torched by the same method within a two-hour period wasn’t enough to raise suspicion, Freddy had applied for the insurance money while firefighters were still trying to douse the flames in six separate locations. The partners had agreed that Miguel had an uphill climb, and that the case was a surefire loser. Still, as long as Freddy footed the hefty bills, no one minded.

At the conclusion of the case, Freddy revealed a particularly unpleasant surprise: He’d had to liquidate the last of his possessions to pay off gambling debts, and he had no money to pay the final installment of his massive legal fees. Freddy figured he’d rather deal with us than his bookie, who apparently said that it would be no problem exacting revenge even if Freddy was in jail. To mollify us, Freddy offered the good-faith gesture of the services of his wife. We had no choice. Anyway, as someone pointed out, her breast implants alone were worth thousands. Freddy was going to be a guest of the State of Florida for the foreseeable future, so we had no choice but to accept his offer of a discount receptionist. We at the firm are nothing if not realistic.

Mauricio, our accountant, projected that, based on what a receptionist in our office earned, it would take Ashley about seventy-five years working in our firm to pay off the debt. When Miguel told Freddy, Freddy replied: “Well, she can start tomorrow. Time’s a wasting.”

Our only other option was to eat the bill, so we took on Ashley Gutierrez as our receptionist. We arranged to pay her a nominal salary—I mean, we weren’t completely heartless—and she had health insurance and benefits. Still, I had no idea how she got by. Her husband was incarcerated and, unless he was pardoned by the president, he was going to stay that way for many years. Still, Ashley maintained a consistently cheery disposition. As far as I knew, she hadn’t been involved with any other men since Freddy was sent to prison, although I’m sure there was no shortage of potential suitors. There was something about those astonishing breasts that invited curiosity.

Ashley called out my name a second time and hugged me so tight her rock-hard breasts nearly knocked the wind out of me. My instinct for self-preservation made me jump back. Ashley must have been in a
Beverly Hillbillies
mood that day—she looked like a Latina interpretation of Ellie Mae in her denim hot pants topped by scraps of lace dangerously masquerading as a blouse. We were standing a couple of feet apart, but I was still smothered in her perfume. I hated to be catty, but it smelled like Eau de Swamp.

“Ashley, how are you?” I asked. It was hard to be put off for long by someone so genuine and friendly. “Great outfit. Very Appalachian.”

“Thanks, Margarita,” Ashley frowned. “But it’s not a designer outfit. I put it together myself.”

I felt a little ashamed of myself for being so thoughtless. Being witty with Ashley always went over her head, and anything I said could be misinterpreted. I had been away from the office for ten months, and it showed. Already I felt out of sync.

Next to Ashley I felt positively matronly in my khaki skirt, white T-shirt, and black cotton blazer. I used to wear conservative suits before I made partner, or dresses with jackets or sweaters, but after I felt secure I relaxed a little and experimented with different looks. I still remembered the liberating day in August a few years before when I decided to stop wearing stockings altogether. The firm didn’t have a dress code, but there were unwritten rules that everyone was expected to follow. The men wore dark suits, both in summer and winter, but they took off their jackets and loosened their ties as the day wore on. Nonattorney men dressed more casually, in pants, button-down shirts, and ties. As for the women, there was a marked difference in how the attorneys and support staff dressed. The lawyers were expected to wear suits or dresses with jackets, stockings, and heels. The staff had a lot more latitude. In the years that I’d been with the firm, no female attorney had ever showed up for work in pants, or simply a skirt and blouse, but the staff could do so. The rules were bent out of shape for Ashley, of course. She could wear whatever she wanted, as long as she wasn’t naked.

I was the only female partner at Weber, Miranda, and I set the precedent for what was sartorially acceptable—although I knew enough to tread lightly about making any major alterations in what was conventionally acceptable. I tested the waters by chucking my stockings, and experienced no major repercussions. I was biding my time before the next step—going without a jacket on the days when I wasn’t meeting with a client. I didn’t want to show up in a sweat suit, but I liked to be comfortable.

No matter what anyone said about sexual equality, the playing field wasn’t level in the legal community, and I had to watch my step carefully in everything I did. I always worried about my actions backfiring, and doors closing without explanation. I was a full partner in my firm, but I was a woman who practiced immigration law. I was a low-priority player, and not in a position of real power. I wasn’t a high-visibility rainmaker. My position might have seemed secure, but I was always aware of its limits.

Weber, Miranda still adhered to the principles of the old boys’ network—all it took was one look at the office layout to know that was true. Our offices occupied the top three floors of the First Dade Corporation building, with the twelve partners and their personal secretaries on the penthouse floor. The offices of the other attorneys and their secretaries—which they shared—were on the floor beneath. Support staff, clerks, bookkeepers, and paralegals were on the lowest floor. All three stories were connected by spiral staircases, but no one visited the other floors much unless they had specific business. No one went up to the penthouse floor unless specifically invited by one of the partners. Until I was made partner, my office was on the middle floor. I had been a lot more at home there, and felt a lot more camaraderie than I did with the partners. But there was no choice—when you’re made partner, you come upstairs.

I moved past the cloud of Ashley’s perfume in the reception area with a smile and a wave. My worries about my professional life were a welcome distraction from thinking about Luther every waking moment. Even the feel of my shoes on the padded carpet transported me to a major part of my life that I had recently forgotten. Now that I was back, I needed to think about whether I was going to stay there. Working part time wasn’t an option. My choice was plain: quit, or resume working the same grueling hours as everyone else at the firm. Weber, Miranda didn’t believe in of counsel positions, or any halfhearted solutions. In the life of the firm, five partners had either died or retired; as soon as they did, their names were removed from the letterhead. Sentiment didn’t carry much weight at a powerful law firm. If you didn’t heap up billable hours, then you weren’t a player. Death was no excuse for failing to generate revenue. It was a tough philosophy, but one that I knew about and accepted before I joined the firm as an associate after law school.

I knew that I was living under a microscope. Once there were other female partners in the firm—whenever that happened—the old male partners would get used to them, and the climate would change. But for now, I was the only one. I had to be purer than Caesar’s wife. And, although partners were ostensibly permitted a year’s leave of absence from the firm, no one had ever used the time before for personal reasons—those who had taken leave had gone into some government post, or taught at a university somewhere for a year. I was the first to take leave to be with my family, and I had held out as long as I possibly could before filling out the paperwork for the year off.

Now, after about ten months, I saw that I was no longer as much a force in the firm as I had once been. Everyone knew that I was a mother and, partner or not, they suspected that at some point I would be derailed from becoming managing partner. I was on the mommy track, the road to powerlessness and oblivion. Taking leave had done nothing but solidify this impression.

If I left the firm, I knew, the chances of another woman being made partner would be set back for years. The firm had been around for sixty years, and no male partner had ever left his job for personal reasons. The excuse sounded wimpy even to me—it was as though I couldn’t deal with my life outside the office, and needed to drop my responsibilities in order to cope. It was called real time, and everyone knew what it meant: billable hours, the bottom-line reality that affected everyone in the firm.

I really did feel a sense of responsibility about the sort of legacy I would leave at the firm if I did, in fact, resign. I knew that my partners viewed me as a living example of their keeping up with the times, and ostensibly abolishing the glass ceiling that had traditionally kept women from climbing to the top in law firms and other high-powered businesses. If I quit, they would feel less pressure to make another woman partner. They would be off the hook, able to point to me as an example of how they had tried to cultivate a female partner only to see her resign to stay home with her kids.

The phone rang, and Ashley scampered back to her desk. I knew I had unnerved her a little bit by trying to walk across the reception area without saying a word. I had a lot on my mind, but Ashley wasn’t used to being ignored; she gave me a little wave as she pressed the speaker-phone button with a pencil, her usual means of answering calls. I heard the pencil clacking on the phone and hoped she was successful in patching the call through—her usual success rate was about fifty percent.

The reception area was truly beautiful, with floor-to-ceiling glass walls and a view of Biscayne Bay and Key Biscayne to the east, and Coconut Grove and Coral Gables to the south. The only furniture were two dark brown leather couches separated by a simple square-cut glass table bearing an always-fresh arrangement of tropical flowers. The lighting came from hidden, strategically placed high hats in the ceiling. It had taken a lot of billable hours to make such a room.