Kind of an inside joke, pretending to be talking in code, when anyone who read through all our text messages would obviously see through the ruse. She replies promptly:
Anxious for it
Right, good. She replies again quickly:
Anxious to talk to you
That could mean a lot of things. It’s deliberately vague.
Everything ok?
She responds:
Thinking a lot about us. Better to talk inperson
I respond quickly:
Good or bad?
Should I be worried?
30
Tuesday, September 13, 2022
So what the hell was that text message tonight? You’ve been thinking a lot about us, and better we talk in person? Are you going to break up with me, Lauren? Are we done?
I don’t know what I’ll do. The times we see each other each week, the twice a day we text, are the only things that matter in my life now.
Was it because of what I said last night about my father cheating on my mother? How I’d grown up hating infidelity more than just about anything in the world, and now I was doing it, too?
Oh, why did I have to open my mouth? This isn’t the same thing, Lauren. Vicky doesn’t love me anymore. I’m not proud of cheating, but this is different than what my father did to my mother! And your marriage isn’t real, either.
We aren’t cheating, not in that way. We aren’t!
This, this,THISis what I hate, this weakness, this feeling of vulnerability. I swore I’d never let this happen again, but I did. I kept my guard up for nearly two decades after you laid waste to me, but the moment I saw you on Michigan Avenue, I tore down that wall and exposed myself all over again.
Maybe I’m making too much of this. Maybe all the other crap going on—my job prospects suddenly in the dumpster and my marriage just a friendship—is clouding my brain. Maybe I’m not thinking clearly and everything is fine.
Don’t you realize getting texts like those—we have to talk, better in person—is pure torture? Now I have to wait until tomorrow morning before you even turn on your damn cell phone again. And it’s not like I can just run over there, is it? Thanks, Lauren. Thanks so much for turning me inside out yet again.
I knew this would happen. I knew it.
31
Simon
I met Lauren Lemoyne on my first day working at my father’s law firm.
I’d graduated high school and was getting ready for college. High school had been easy for me academically but difficult socially. I’d had a late growth spurt, shooting up to five feet eleven my senior year, which I realize is not much more than average male height, but when you start as a freshman at five feet two, and people call you “Mini-Me” and things like that, five feet eleven feels like Paul Bunyan.
I spent most of high school a bookish, small, not very confident boy. I ended a bookish, taller, but only slightly confident boy.
I needed some money before college, so Dad said I could be a gofer at his law firm. Times were good financially because Dad had just rung the bell (as he liked to say) with that enormous verdict in the electrical-injury case. The Law Offices of Theodore Dobias had three partners, five associates, ten assistants, and four paralegals.
One of those paralegals was Lauren Lemoyne. I was introduced to everyone by one of the partners (my father didn’t want to do it himself, wanted me to learn my own way), and I first saw Lauren bent over a banker’s box of files, wearing a tight miniskirt and showing a lot of leg. It felt like my own personal porn movie, though she quickly righted herself and pulled down her skirt and greeted me in a friendly but perfunctory fashion.
It wasn’t perfunctory to me, though. I was immediately taken but intimidated. She would be my pinup girl, gorgeous and exotic, whom I could admire from afar, but well beyond my reach, way out of my league. Istammered a return hello, trying to sound easy and cool and pretty sure I had failed miserably.