Love Proof (Laws of Attraction)

Twenty-nine

In her second year of law school, Sarah took a night class called Negotiation, taught by an adjunct professor whose day job was as a litigator in one of the bigger law firms in L.A.

It was different from any other class she had taken so far, mainly because it was practical. He didn’t assign some textbook in negotiation. Instead he told war stories, gave specific examples from his years on the front lines, and made the students practice their skills in front of him.

So much of what he taught was the psychology of dealing with an opponent: how to assess the other lawyer’s personal weaknesses, including pride, fear, and the need to always look good.

One night it was Sarah’s turn, along with a classmate of hers named Troy, to practice a negotiation in front of the class. The professor gave them a scenario: Sarah was the defense attorney in a medical malpractice case in which the plaintiffs’ child had died during surgery. Troy represented the parents. The professor told them this was their last meeting before the trial began, and they were to try to settle the case.

Beyond that, he let them make up any facts they wanted.

Troy, a very theatrical and demonstrative guy Sarah knew from their Trial Practice class, began right away, really pouring on the pathos, reminding Sarah how devastated the parents were, how sympathetic the jury would be, how the doctor Sarah represented had absolutely no hope of leaving the courtroom room owing less than ten million dollars.

While he ranted and gesticulated, Sarah took her time pulling out a chair from behind the professor’s table, then bringing it out to the center of the arena and sitting down. She had a relaxed expression on her face as she listened to Troy and watched him expend every last ounce of energy trying to force her to pay him what he wanted.

When he finally took a breath, Sarah said quietly, “I can only get you two.”

“Two million!” Troy shouted at her. “Are you out of your friggin mind? This is a dead kid case. Do you know what those are worth? Your guy’s lucky we’ll let him walk away for eight.”

“I can get you two,” Sarah repeated calmly, and Troy went back to his rant.

Finally the professor called time.

And pointed to Sarah.

“She was going to win that negotiation—do you know why?”

Sarah could see from the faces of her classmates that no one agreed. Troy clearly had the upper hand, they must have thought, with all that power and force behind his argument.

“Status,” the professor said. “Henley had the higher status.”

“She just sat in a chair the whole time,” one of her classmates said.

“Right,” the professor answered. “She stayed calm and didn’t let herself get drawn in. She had her number, and she stuck to it. Collins here could have popped a blood vessel in his brain from arguing so hard, but Henley was never going to give in. Am I right?” he asked her.

“I might have given him a million more,” Sarah said. “But that was going to be it.”

The professor pointed at her. “She had a plan. She didn’t show up wondering what she was going to do, she already knew.”

“But that’s stupid,” someone else argued. “The whole point is to negotiate.”

“No, the point is to win a negotiation,” the professor said. “And the way you do that is to make sure you always maintain your higher status. When you shout and loom over people and try to bully them, you’re weak. The quieter you are, the less you say, the stronger you look. You want to be the rock the waves crash up against—not the puny wave. No question in my mind: Henley would have won.”

It was one of her favorite moments in law school, and one of her favorite classes. The lessons she learned helped mold her into the kind of attorney she was now. The professor taught her to think strategically in ways she never had before.

And she was about to apply one of those lessons now.

“Is it better to go to your opponent’s office for a negotiation,” the professor asked the class one night, “or make him come to you?”

“Come to you,” most of the class answered.

Sarah said nothing. Because she already knew enough of this professor to know he rarely followed conventional wisdom.

“No, you go to them,” he said. “For two reasons: first, you can leave. That means you always have the power of walking away if the other side doesn’t give you what you want. Second, it displays confidence. Since everyone believes the same thing you do—or did until now, I hope—it means one of two things will happen: they’ll either wonder why you’re so willing to go to them, which will make them suspicious and off-balance, or they’ll think you don’t understand such an obvious element of strategy, which will make them overconfident. Either way, you’re in the stronger position.”

Sarah had sat there listening with a huge smile on her face. It was as if the professor kept handing her all the keys to life.

And it was why she now wrote back to Burke: Your place.

***

Sarah stood on the threshold of his front door, studying the room behind him.

It was dark everywhere hers was light: dark hardwood floors, dark rugs, dark furniture, dark cabinets in the kitchen instead of the ones she had painted white.

“Your brooding phase?” she asked, before realizing he might not see anything wrong with it.

Joe glanced behind him. “It came decorated. I don’t have the touch, as you know.”

She did. His old apartment near UCLA contained a mishmash of furniture he collected from his parents and various other relatives and friends. Joe was never poor the way Sarah was—he had grown up in Palo Alto with parents who both worked for tech companies—but Joe liked to spend money on things that were important to him. A stylish apartment was not one of them.

“Want something to drink?” Joe asked as she followed him inside.

Good question, Sarah thought. Would it be better to stay completely sober and alert, or to ease her nerves with a little lubrication?

“Wine,” she said. “Or beer—whatever you have.”

“Beer I always have.”

He opened the shiny black door of his refrigerator, pulled out two bottles, and set them on the spotless counter.

“Cleaning woman?” Sarah guessed.

“What, you don’t think this is all me?”

Considering what a slob he’d been in law school, Sarah doubted it, but maybe he had matured and changed.

“I’m hardly here anymore,” he told her, “but she still comes in twice a month, whether I need it or not.”

Her mother would love having a client like that, Sarah thought. But she doubted whether any of her mother’s customers had Joe’s kind of money.

He popped the tops on both beers and handed her one. Then he motioned her toward the living room.

She chose the dark gray couch and let him have the dark leather chair. She kicked off her shoes and pulled her feet up under her.

“Comfortable?” Joe asked.

“Not particularly.”

He left the room for a moment and returned with a folded blanket. Sarah took off her suit jacket and wrapped the blanket over her. Then she took a sip of beer.

“Well, I think we know why we’re all here,” Joe began, and even though he tried to make a joke of it, Sarah could hear the tension in his voice. Was he afraid, despite what he’d said? “Do you want to ask the questions, or do you just want me to tell you?”

“Tell me,” she said. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be too involved in the conversation. It might be easier just to listen.

“How much do you know?” Joe asked.

“Not much,” she said. “Thanksgiving, finals, then that was it.” She tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice, but she could hear it just the same.

“First your birthday,” Joe said. “You remember that.”

Sarah nodded. She looked away and took another drink.

“I meant all of it,” Joe said.

She shrugged.

“Sarah . . . ”

“Doesn’t matter now,” she told him. “Keep going.”

He hesitated, but obviously decided not to press it.

But of course she remembered. Everything. She had replayed that night a million times.

Thanksgiving fell during the last week of November that year. Sarah’s birthday was the day before. They celebrated before they both went home for the holiday.

That was the night Joe gathered her into his arms after they’d made love, and told her he loved her like crazy. That he could barely stand to be away from her for the four-day weekend. That he loved her so much he wished he hadn’t waited so long to come after her. That she was everything he’d ever wanted.

It was how Sarah felt, too. It was how she felt from the very beginning. She had fallen for him so hard, it sometimes hurt just to look at him. She loved him like she never thought possible. He felt like an extension of her mind, her body, her soul.

“I want to marry you,” Joe had told her then. “Not now, but after we graduate. I can’t imagine spending my life with anyone but you.”

She kissed him so hard she was surprised his teeth didn’t fall out. She told him yes, and then laughed at the tears spilling down her face. He smudged them away and kissed her, and they went right back to making love as if they had never stopped.

Sarah drank another sip of beer and could feel how much tighter her throat had become. This was why she had never wanted to ask, she thought. Because asking meant remembering, and she had been fighting against that for years.

“So you went home for Thanksgiving,” she prompted. “And you found out your mom was sick.”

Joe nodded. “She’d been cancer-free for ten years. Maybe I told you that. We thought it was over. But when I went home, nobody even needed to tell me—I could see it. She’d lost so much weight, she looked like a teenager. And she just looked . . . bad. My brother walked in about an hour later, and the first thing out of his mouth was, Shit, not again. That was when they decided they’d better tell us.”

He hadn’t given her as many details back then, but she remembered the look of shock and grief on his face when she saw him again that Sunday night after Thanksgiving. He wrapped his arms around her waist and buried his face against her neck. Then he sobbed—so hard, Sarah sobbed right along with him before he could even tell her what was wrong.

Even now, she could see the remnants of grief on his face. She understood that he didn’t like reliving this story any more than she did.

“Then we had finals,” Joe said.

Sarah remembered vividly the two of them trying to study in between phone conferences with his father and brother. Joe’s mother was fading quickly, and every phone call marked the further decline. It finally got to the point where Joe couldn’t bear to answer the phone. He let it go to voicemail so he could just listen, and process the information on his own without having to say anything to his dad.

“Advanced Federal Tax Law,” Joe said. My last final. December twentieth.”

Sarah remembered how nervous he was about it, even though he’d always done well in the class. He planned to take the test, then immediately head home for the winter break. The two of them had kissed goodbye that morning, and Sarah wished him good luck with everything. He promised to call her later.

He never did. And it was the last kiss they shared for six years, until Sarah passed out and woke up in the medical clinic at Snowbird.

“What was so important about that class?” Joe asked her, a new look of pain settling onto his face. “Can you tell me? You were there. Why did I think it was so important to stay? What was wrong with me?”

Sarah shook her head. She was afraid to answer. Because suddenly she remembered something on her own.

When she didn’t hear from Joe for days, and then a whole week, she finally did some investigation. She had her suspicions about what had happened, so she searched the public record.

“It wasn’t that day was it?” she asked, her voice choking on the question.

He nodded.

“Oh, Joe . . . ”

“I was four hours too late,” he said. “She died before I got home.”

The look of anguish on his face was too much. Sarah got up and went to him. She bent down and wrapped her arms around him and held him hard.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

“Because of this,” he said. “Because of exactly what you’re doing right now. You would have tried to comfort me.”

“Of course I would!”

“No. You would have said it was okay,” Joe told her. “And it wasn’t. I screwed up, Sarah. I wasn’t there. I never saw her again.”

Sarah couldn’t stand it another minute. Couldn’t stand hearing him talk like that, knowing he’d carried it with him all alone for all these years. She crawled onto his lap and wrapped her arms around him and held him the way she wished she could have back then, the way she knew he must have wanted, but he hadn’t let her, and that hurt her more than she could bear.

“Joe, you should have told me,” she said, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I loved you. I would have helped you. You know I would.”

“I couldn’t think,” he said, his voice thick. “It was so . . . . And then it went on from there: the funeral, her ashes, Nate and dad and I spreading them in her garden—”

A sound escaped his lips, but he covered it with a cough. Sarah could feel his body tighten. He gently pulled away from her, reached for his beer, and drank it to the bottom. Then he patted her on the rear and told her she could go sit down again.

Sarah returned to the couch, but it wasn’t where she wanted to be. Joe might not need the comfort right now, but she did. A pain was spreading from the center of her chest outward, and she needed to hold on to him more than he seemed to need her.

But she wrapped herself in the blanket and waited to hear whatever else he wanted to say.

“So then there was you,” he said.

Sarah swallowed hard.

“I really did love you,” Joe said, looking at her with a different kind of anguish in his eyes. “But it was too much. I couldn’t be happy right then—it would have been wrong. I felt so . . . ” He looked upward as if searching for the word. “ . . . ‘guilty’ doesn’t even cover it. I was a total, unmitigated a*shole for not being at my mother’s side. Why didn’t I go home once I knew how close she was? Why did I think any of my finals or my grades were so damn important?”

“Joe, you didn’t know . . . ”

“See?” he said, laughing in a way she supposed was meant to disguise his pain. “That’s how you would have been. You would have tried to make me feel better. You would have been so loving and supportive—”

“Of course I would,” Sarah said. “I loved you. I wanted to marry you.” She hadn’t meant to say that last part, but the two truths were tied together. She thought she was part of his life back then—soon to be part of his family. But instead he had kept all of this from her.

“So I did what I had to,” he went on, his voice losing its steam. “I came back and I made sure you’d never try to console me. Made sure you’d back away and never try to love me again.”

Sarah bowed her head with a grief all her own. It was like reliving her own death, and hearing now how he’d orchestrated it, how he set out to hurt her so much she would never come near him, felt like a blow upon a blow. So cold, so deliberate, while meanwhile her heart had been disintegrating into a thousand miniscule pieces.

Joe’s voice sounded dull now, empty. “It’s amazing how good it feels to self-destruct. I thought it would be harder, but it was easy once I started. It helped that I stayed drunk most of the time—”

“You did?” She hadn’t noticed that. Then again, she avoided him as much as possible that last semester.

“First thing in the morning,” Joe said, “some Jack in my coffee. Couple of beers at lunch, then the really serious drinking started in the afternoons.”

It explained so much, Sarah thought. The stony, expressionless look on his face whenever she passed him. The reckless way he’d grab some girl and grope her if he knew Sarah was watching. The complete and deliberate destruction of their relationship.

“Joe, all this time, I’ve . . . ”

“You’ve hated me,” he said. “I know. You should have. It’s why I never tried to contact you, even after I sobered up. I know I hurt you, Sarah, and I’m so sorry for that. It’s eaten away at me for years. Then for whatever reason, I got the gift of you walking into that deposition in San Diego. It was like you just dropped from the sky. And ever since then . . . ”

“Your strategy is to be nice to me,” Sarah said.

Joe nodded.

The two of them sat apart for a long time, while Sarah took it all in.

“Can I tell you now?” she finally asked, getting up from the couch and going over to him again. She climbed onto his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I’m so sorry, Joe. You’re a good man. I’m sorry all of that happened to you. It must have been so awful . . . ”

She held his face between her hands and began kissing his cheeks, his jaw, his temple. Treating him tenderly the way she would have back then. Then she brought her lips back to his mouth where they belonged.

Joe deepened the kiss. He shifted her so that she faced him, and she sat astride him on the chair. He threaded his hands through her hair and kissed her with a kind of need different from any he’d shown her so far.

He left her mouth and began kissing a trail down her throat. She undid the top two buttons of her blouse so he could continue following the line down.

There was nothing frantic or playful about how quickly their clothes fell away this time, it was more of a necessity, Sarah thought, one steady, continuous movement from where they had been to where they needed to be. He lifted her and carried her into his bedroom. Then laid her down gently on his bed and continued the slow, steady course toward reminding her why she fell for him in the first place, and how she might find her way back there again.

“Sarah—”

But she silenced him with a kiss. She couldn’t hear any more—not tonight. She needed to be in her body now, to feel his, not to think or hear, but just shut out the world and be with him.

She kissed him the way she used to, with a kind of sweetness she had been careful not to show him since they began again on her birthday.

Joe seemed to know the difference, too. He pulled back and looked into her eyes.

“That’s it, Red,” he said. “That’s what I’ve missed.”