Hope Idiotic | Part 13
Hope Idiotic is a serialized novel. Catch each new part every week on Monday and Thursday.
MICHELLE’S WORKDAY WAS ROUTINE. Up at six-thirty and into the shower. A bowl of cereal and a small glass of Diet Coke while she read the daily news online. Dressed and out the door to catch her bus by seven-thirty. She flipped the lights on in her office by eight-oh-five. It was a decent size with room for a large desk, two chairs and a couch, but it felt small because every surface was covered with stacks of documents. She navigated her office as if it were an obstacle course. Anyone who ever came to see her never bothered to come in. They stood in the doorway. On one wall was a large painting she bought at an art fair shortly after moving in. Another proudly displayed her diplomas. She graduated summa cum laude from both undergrad and law school. Her large wooden desk was partnered with a wall unit where she had more desk surface for her laptop and papers, shelves, drawers and cabinets. The fourth wall was a window looking into the hallway.
She spent the majority of her day sitting at that wall unit writing summary judgments and answering the flurry of emails that poured in. Many of them were only one or two sentences — conversations that could have been easily had over the phone in less time and with less interruption to her train of thought. There’s nothing more distracting for a working writer than to have an email notification going off in the corner of the computer screen every other minute. When she needed a moment to think, she would lean back in her chair and look at the shelf just above her computer at the two framed photographs of her and Lou. One was a picture from the New Year’s Eve party when they first slept together. The other was of them at some fancy Chicago restaurant. She thought they made a cute couple. A good-looking couple. Seeing them smiling like that, happy like that, having fun like that always relaxed her.
The work she did was stressful. She worked with one of the country’s most prominent labor attorneys. Their clients were some of the country’s biggest companies. The senior partner, James Rosenfield, demanded the best, which is why Michelle was the only junior associate he trusted to work with him. He worked her hard, and she always had to be at the ready to take his phone call or answer his email — those one-sentence emails — or hear him out when he’d poke his head through her door and dump out details of a case in a stream of consciousness that every other associate and partner couldn’t follow and outwardly complained about. Michelle was known as the Rosenfield Whisperer around the office. Divorced with two kids he couldn’t relate to, he often asked Michelle for help on how to handle an issue with his teenaged daughter and preteen son. The man was undoubtedly a genius when it came to the law, but it was a wonder that he was able to garner and maintain any clients because of what a struggle it was for most everyone else to talk with about anything not law related. Socially speaking, his genius was his undoing.
If the workflow wasn’t too heavy, Michelle would escape from the large Chicago Loop office building and grab a quick lunch at any one of the dozen restaurants located on the block. Sometimes Lou would come downtown and meet her. Sometimes he would bring flowers from the florist located in her building. She loved it when he did this. Among the stacks of files in her office was a small collection of vases that had come with Lou’s floral deliveries. She couldn’t help but smile almost foolishly as she rode the elevator up to her fifty-third-floor office. “What beautiful flowers,” people would say. “Someone must love you,” others would say. “Lou is a helluva guy,” James would say. “That, or he screwed up. I should have sent my wife more flowers when we were married.”
All of her past relationships ended because the guy she was dating wasn’t smart enough, motivated enough, challenging enough.
Long and stressful days that bled into nights were the price Michelle paid for the large paycheck she had directly deposited into her bank account every two weeks. But she worried that she’d end up like James — divorced, unable to relate to her kids or her friends and living only for billable hours, traveling only for client meetings. She wanted to become at least an associate partner. It would be just enough success to feel as if she’d accomplished something truly magnificent but without all of the responsibility that a full-blown partner like James had. She didn’t need to make anything more than a healthy six figures in the five hundreds. She was on track to reach that point in a few years. Maybe sooner since she had the confidence of the firm’s lead partner.
She wanted to work hard for a few more years, bank a few million bucks then step away from the workforce, domesticate herself and raise a family with Lou. By then, she figured, he’d be earning enough to support their accustomed lifestyle and they wouldn’t have to depend on the nest egg she’d built. Maybe she’d do some consulting work for extra dough once the kids were a little older and in school full time. She wanted to travel to every corner of the world and drink strong drinks and eat exotic foods and send the kids to the best private schools in the country. She wanted to live somewhere warm and be close to her parents. These desires were not unreasonable. And she felt that Lou was preventing them from becoming a reality. His inability to stand on his own two feet and be the rational, confident man she knew he could be had thrown her life’s schedule off course.
She knew things were hard for him. But Michelle was never the person to stop and reflect on her condition or the condition around her. In her opinion, too much thinking led to too little action. No matter what she saw standing in the way of her goals, she would plow right through it. She was unapologetic for being harsh, terse or outright mean if it got her what she wanted. This is what made her a great lawyer. But it made her a hard person to be with sometimes. And she knew that.
All of her past relationships ended because the guy she was dating wasn’t smart enough, motivated enough, challenging enough. After she became an attorney, many guys were intimidated by how much money she made. Lou was not. And she knew he was smart, and how motivated he could be, and since moving to Chicago he was certainly challenging. Michelle had pushed away many men because of her high standards and strict demands. She didn’t want to do that with Lou. But she couldn’t let him go on the way he had been. The challenge, more and more, was becoming a struggle. She felt she was not only swimming upstream but doing so while pulling Lou who had a cinderblock tied to his ankles.
Michelle wanted Lou to be as hardworking as she was. But she also wanted him to have the time to take care of her. His unemployment allowed for this and he knew that although he couldn’t yet provide for her financially, he could do so domestically. At the end of the long days, Michelle would come home to her apartment with Lou waiting for her. He would kiss her on the forehead, ask about her day and listen as she dumped her brain out on the living room floor. He’d pour her a glass of wine. He’d pour himself a scotch, and they’d drink and talk. Then he’d make dinner and they would watch mind-numbing TV until she’d fall asleep on the couch. Lou would gently wake her up with kisses and bring her to bed, where they’d crawl under the covers and sleep with their feet intertwined all night. Then she’d wake up at six-thirty and it would start all over again.
But sometimes they’d get into fights on the phone during the day if she felt like he wasn’t trying hard enough to find work. And quit often, she was completely warranted to feel that way. Like when she would come home to find Lou asleep on the couch with the TV blaring and a near-empty bottle of scotch on the kitchen counter next to an empty cardboard circle from the frozen pizza he had had for lunch.
Most of the time she wanted to help him even if she wasn’t quite sure how. The best she could come up with was to help through example. She had never needed anyone else’s help to get what she wanted. She was self-propelled, hyper-determined and immune to self-sentiment. If he would do what she did the way she did it, if he’d only see it her way, they’d be as happy as they were the nights the photos in her office were taken. She wanted, more than anything, for them to be that happy. Always. If only he would be more like her, she felt with all of her heart that they would be.