"Fidelity is a personality trait"

She lost her mule outside Jack's office. I'm not sure how it happened, but somehow she kicked it off, and then tripped over it. I was walking too close behind her and when she stumbled I nearly came down on top of her. I righted myself by grabbing onto the pedestal of a carved wooden sculpture of a naked woman that was displayed in the hallway. The sculpture rocked back and forth, and for a moment I was worried that we would both, the wooden woman and I, come crashing down on top of the recruiting coordinator. We didn't. The sculpture held fast to its plinth, and I found my balance and stayed on my feet. I was immediately sorry that I had. A handsome man was crouched beside the recruiting coordinator, her foot in his hands.

"Does it hurt when I squeeze?" he said. The muscles of his back strained against the soft white fabric of his shirt. I could see them flex as he lifted her foot gently in the palm of his hand. I felt a nearly insurmountable urge to kneel down behind him and press my body against his, cleave my breasts and belly to his back, slide my fingers around his waist.

"Ooh," the recruiting coordinator murmured, wincing. The faker.

"I think it's probably sprained," he said.

He laid her foot tenderly on the floor, blew his forelock out of his eyes -- he was going through a floppy-hair phase back then -- and reached around her waist. He hoisted her to her feet and half led, half carried her into his office. "Marilyn," he called out. "Will you see what you can do about finding some ice?"

His secretary, whose desk was in the hallway outside his office, got to her feet.

She turned to me. "Was Frances taking you somewhere before the tragic loss of her shoe?" She didn't seem in a particular hurry to get the ice.

"Yes. She was showing me to my new office."

"I think you'll be on your own for a while. What's your name?"

"Emilia Greenleaf. I'm a new associate."

"What number office are you in?"

I looked down at the folder in my hand. On the page with my code number and my telephone extension and e-mail address was an office number. "Eighteen eighteen," I said.

"Double life," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"The numbers. That's what they mean." She looked at me appraisingly. "You are Jewish, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I'm Marilyn Nudelman."

"I'm not religious or anything."

She shrugged her shoulders. "Come, I'll show you to your office."

Marilyn is still Jack's secretary, and while she danced the hora at my wedding, while she is satisfied that at least I am more Jewish than Carolyn Soule, twelfth-generation descendant of the Mayflower, still she does not consider me Jewish enough. This is clear from the presents she sends me -- a Hebrew calendar every year before Rosh Hashanah, a box of fruit jells at Passover, a little mesh bag of gold coins at Hanukkah. Each gift is accompanied by a little explanatory note, as if she really believes I do not understand the significance of gelt or wheat-free candy. There is something passive-aggressive about all this gift giving, but I am certainly up to the challenge. I buy lavish presents for Jack to give to Marilyn -- cashmere sweaters from Saks, a Coach briefcase and matching purse, gift certificates for a day of beauty treatments at Elizabeth Arden. Then I insist that he give them to her on Christmas Eve.

This gentle battle will likely continue forever, or certainly until Marilyn retires. It began on the evening Jack first succumbed to the signals I had been sending him for three years, ever since he failed to notice that I was standing behind shoeless Frances Defarge in the hallway in front of his office.

It was late in the afternoon, around six o'clock. I had prepared a brief for Jack in support of a motion to recuse a Texas judge who had not once but twice referred to Jack as his client's "Jew York lawyer." This was not the first assignment Jack had given me in the three years I had worked at Friedman Taft. There had been a few minor research projects over the past year, memos a first-year associate might well have been assigned, but I had leaped at the chance to work with Jack. This brief was finally an opportunity for me to show off a little. I was good at briefs. I had learned while still in law school that style, though it could not entirely substitute for adequate research and a sophisticated grasp of the law, could make the difference between a winning argument and one that put the judges to sleep. This brief was not meant to persuade the Texas judge. The man probably had a hard time every morning deciding which robe to wear, his black or his white, and to him I, too, would be just another shyster from Jew York. I wrote the brief for the appellate court, and I wrote it for Jack. It was lucid, it was incisive, it sliced and diced the bigoted judge and left him bleeding and burning on a cross of relevant precedent. And it was funny.

Next page: "I wore a garter belt and stockings because I had fantasized about seducing Jack"