Denise had met Mark on her first day at Kimmel, Johnson, and Murphy, LLC, spring of 1985. She wore her pencil skirt and her kitten heels, and she was so nervous. She had been the receptionist at her stepdad’s tiny real estate office in Downtown Brooklyn for the previous five years, since she had graduated from high school, but then her mom had divorced her stepdad, and the job went too. This was her first time working in Manhattan. She’d answered an ad in the classifieds, and amazingly, they’d hired her. She had a lot of experience, and her new supervisor said she had “spunk.”
The law firm was on the thirty-fourth floor of a skyscraper on East Thirty-Ninth Street; the Chrysler Building was so close that Denise couldn’t see to the top of it from the office. She was working for a short and fat attorney who sweated profusely, and she had been told in the interview that part of the job was constantly running to and from the dry cleaners to switch out his dirty shirts for clean ones. He went through at least two of them each day. Her desk was situated outside his office, and his phone did not stop ringing all morning. In fact, the whole office was men walking briskly between offices in their suits, and phones continually ringing on the desks outside the offices, and secretaries at the desks picking up the phones and speaking in their cheerful yet professional, capable voices: “So-and-so’s office; and who may I ask is calling?” Denise, on the other hand, felt as if she bumbled every time she picked up the phone and had already disconnected the line twice when trying to transfer a call to her attorney. At one P.M. on her first day, she had not yet eaten or gone to the bathroom, and she wouldn’t have minded taking a fifteen-minute break to do so.
She noticed the man walking toward her attorney’s office, swaggering, really, with his head held erect and a calm, satisfied expression on his face. He seemed so comfortable, so at ease, so very capable. He was tall and he had wide shoulders, and though Denise knew nothing about expensive suits, she recognized that he was wearing one. He noticed her—she knew he did—and bashfully she looked down to scribble nonsense onto the pad of paper in front of her.
“Hi there,” she heard the man say, and she looked up at him. His face was so clean-shaven that there wasn’t a hint of stubble, and she had the urge to reach out and feel how smooth it might be. He had long eyelashes, like a girl’s, which made his eyes seem deep and important.
He put a hand out when she didn’t say anything back. “I’m Mark,” he said.
“I’m Denise.”
His hand gripped hers hard. “Is it your first day?” he asked, so kindly, so sweetly, that she wanted him to wrap her up in his arms just then. It was odd; this man must have been in his forties. He had some gray hairs on his head and lots of wrinkles around his eyes. She had a boyfriend in Brooklyn, a mechanic she met getting her car fixed, who was twenty-three like her.
She nodded. “Yes,” she said.
“And how is it going?”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I really need to go to the bathroom.”
He broke into a wide grin, showing his rich white teeth. “Do you want me to sit at your desk?” he asked.
“That would be so nice,” she said with a grateful sigh.
When she came back, he was sitting in her chair, legs up on the desk, talking to someone on the phone with his fingers twirling around the cord.
“Oh yes, we’ve begun hiring male receptionists,” he was saying into the phone. “Equal opportunity.” He looked up at Denise and winked at her, as if he was crafting this private joke for just the two of them.
—
Mark appeared breathless at the front door to the police station an hour later. He was dressed in jeans, boat shoes, and a polo. Denise was used to seeing him in his suit jackets and loosened ties on weeknights. She wished that she wasn’t still attracted to him—it would have made things so much easier—that his extra weight and increasingly high forehead repelled her, made her pity his age and his mortality, for she was twenty years younger than him and still wore the same dress size as she had when they met. But his aging made her feel a tenderness toward him. It was dignified, even, the way he was growing older; it made her feel, as she always felt about him, as if he knew more than she did, as if she was being taken care of. It was just a few months since they had last slept together.
“You made good time,” Denise said to him. At camp, after seeing the other mothers in their conservative Bermuda shorts, she had wondered if her outfit was too provocative. But now she was glad for what she was wearing: denim shorts that showed off her legs, platform wedges, and a tight graphic T-shirt that she shared with Rachel.
Mark took one wordless look at Denise and then walked over to Bud.
“Mark Weinberg,” he said, shaking the older cop’s hand. “Is this going to cost me anything?”
Bud seemed alarmed by Mark’s brusqueness. He glanced at Denise sitting with her hands in her lap. “Technically, no bail posted. But your, um—”
“My ex,” Mark said.
“Yes.” Bud cleared his throat. “She has overdue speeding tickets. That’s why her license was suspended. Altogether she owes four hundred and eighty-five dollars.”
Mark turned to Denise. “How do you have so many speeding tickets? You only drive once a year.”
“Three times,” she corrected. “To drop Rachel off, Visitors’ Day, and to pick her up.”
“And you get pulled over every time?”
“How would I know?”
Mark paid to get a tow truck to pick up the rental. Then, in his own car, he took Denise into the city.
They were mostly silent on the drive. Ray-Bans shaded his eyes, even though the sun was beginning to set. He was speeding.
Soon the parkway widened, and traffic slowed at a light when the road turned local in Westchester. It was eight o’clock; the sky had become an expanse of dark purples and blues. As they merged onto the Saw Mill and got closer to the city, traffic slowed more dramatically. Mark wasn’t giving in to the new pace. Each time the car in front of him decelerated, he waited until the last possible moment to slam the brakes, which would cause Denise’s body to jerk forward, then jolt back into the seat.
“Could you stop doing that?” she finally asked.
Just then his cellphone rang. He looked at it and cursed. “Don’t say anything,” he told Denise, and then he turned the radio all the way down.
He told his wife that no, he didn’t hear the office phone ring; it must be disconnected on weekends (a particularly bad lie, Denise thought; he was getting lazy with the lies). This case was such a shit show, he said. He would just be another hour or two. It was a Sunday night, so who knew how bad traffic would be? He said he was sorry again and again.