We're writing this in tandem, so each entry is going to have Elaine and Karen speaking separately about a particular aspect of Elaine's divorce. We're going to lead you pretty much chronologically through the whole exhausting thing. Sometimes Elaine will weigh in first, sometimes it will be Karen, depending on the topic du jour.
ELAINE:
I'm standing outside our house and it all looks perfect. The white impatiens are abundant despite their being planted in flower boxes and the boxwood is that perfect English green. Amazingly, nothing has died in our small townhouse garden despite the scorching heat in New York City. My family and I have just returned from our summer holiday in Bermuda and I'm feeling a little bit spoiled, very grateful, and, truth be told, really cranky that we have to get back to our routines. The front door opens and our housekeeper lets Jack, our yellow lab, out to greet us. He sheds all over us and I guess it's good to be home after all. I know, we looked like a cliche: two fair-haired girls, mother, father, and the dog, but really, we were a nice family.
You might be thinking: "here it comes, it's all going down the drain any second." But really, I didn't know. I didn't know that everything would start to move sideways in my life, not in a cataclysmic earth-shifting sort of way, but slowly and sometimes imperceptibly. Over the next year, everything -- and I mean everything -- changed.
That fall my children were starting a new school, my mother-in-law would be undergoing surgery to save her life, and the investment banking firm for which my husband worked was a pressure cooker. Between kids, hospital visits, and the pressure of work, my husband became an out-of-sort, short-tempered, and increasingly belligerent man who I didn't quite recognize. His behavior was so out of character, and yet sometimes he seemed so completely himself. His routine hadn't changed, he dressed the same, weighed the same, worked the same long hours, traveled constantly and when he came home he gave me a kiss, foraged in the refrigerator for something to eat, and then went upstairs quietly to kiss our sleeping girls goodnight. This was our life and I thought it was perfect. It was. Right?
But maybe I should mention the hang-up calls that I started to receive that fall and winter late at night before he came home or how my husband always seemed to be in a bad mood and very abrupt with me if I called his office (and really I hardly ever called). It must be this new deal he's working on, I kept thinking. It did seem strange that during our annual ski trip out west he no longer made his business calls from the condo we were renting. Instead he went to the business center at the nearby hotel so that he wouldn't disturb us. He had never done that before. It used to drive me crazy that we would always take a business call when we were all underfoot. He would then raise his hand to silence us as if that were the international signal understood by all that "Daddy is busy." It might be actually, but he was rarely doing that now. Now he went to the business center, alone.
KAREN:
I, of course, wasn't on the scene yet while Elaine began to have her suspicions that fall and winter, so I don't have much to say directly about her situation at this point. For now, I'm going to talk for a bit about how I came to find myself practicing divorce law, of all things.
No one goes to law school planning to become a divorce lawyer. The very thought conjures up visions of, at worst, a cheaply-suited sleazebag with a bad toupee, or, at best, a slickster Arnie Becker-like character with a perma-tan and a roster of celebrity clients. Reviled, the butt of innumerable bad jokes, divorce lawyers are not, in any event, generally considered to be the cream of the legal profession. So how did I, a nice girl from upstate New York with an undergraduate degree from a preppy women's college, end up joining the ranks of the despised?
When I graduated from law school in 1986, I became an associate with the law firm for which I had worked as a law student, a "boutique" firm specializing in commercial litigation. I spent a couple of years there learning how to take depositions and write motions and make my first quavering court appearances, and then I moved on to another boutique firm with an elite clientele. I ended up working almost exclusively for one of the partners there, a brilliant but unassuming guy then in his late 50s, who, after a career as a commercial litigator had started to handle "high net worth matrimonials," which had become a much more serious and lucrative practice a few years before when New York's divorce laws underwent a sea change.
A bit of a historical note here: before 1980, divorce law in New York was something of a cesspool. Women didn't receive any assets accumulated during the marriage unless those assets were in jtheir names or held jointly with their husbands. On the other hand, they received alimony for life or until they remarried, unless they had committed adultery, in which case they weren't even entitled to support. The practice of divorce law before 1980 was dominated by a few old pros who, I've concluded from innumerable hoary anecdotes passed down over the years, spent most of their time instructing their favorite private detectives to collect and/or invent adultery evidence. However, once the new equitable distribution law came into effect in 1980, women were now entitled to a fair share of the assets acquired during the marriage (although they were no longer entitled to lifetime alimony), and adultery, while it remained on the books as a ground for divorce, faded into insignificance as a factor in the parties' financial entitlements.
This change in the law heralded a shift in the way divorce matters were perceived by the Bar and the courts, and the field began, at least in theory, to attract a better "class" of lawyers. Many of the newer practitioners brought financial sophistication and top-notch trial experience from years in the commercial and criminal litigation arenas. In addition, a cottage industry of forensic accoutants, appraisers, and other financial professionals began to grow up around the divorce field, which now revolved less around the prurient details of marital infidelity, and more around complex valuations of closely-held family businesses, and so-called "enhanced earning capacity." The law even held that a spouse's "celebrity status" could be valued.
By the time I landed my new job, nearly a decade after a passage of the new statute, matrimonial law had become a burgeoning new specialty, and my new boss was one of a growing handful of New York City attorneys handling "high net worth" divorces. My very first assignment was to research the bigamy laws in New York, New Jersey, and two foreign jurisdictions to determine if one of our clients had committed any crime when he participated in a quasi-religious ceremony with his girlfriend that looked and smelled like a wedding, but they insisted wasn't really a wedding. His estranged wife, with whom he was involved in a protracted litigation, thought otherwise, and was eager to have him prosecuted for bigamy. As I sat in the libarry of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (this was the late 1980s, and most lawyers still perfomed their research in law libraries, by reference to actual books rather than Lexis or Westlaw), it occurred to me that this practice area had the possibility to be -- dare I say it -- interesting, even fun. (And no, in that situation it wasn't bigamy.)
ELAINE:
It finally unraveled. Late one spring night, three days before my fifteenth wedding anniversary, while my husband was on a plane to Europe for business, I received a phone call asking me if I was Mrs. So-and-So. I said I was, and I started to cry a little because I knew my husband must have had a heart attack or that the plane had gone down or that he had been in an accident and had never actually made it to the airport. All of that, as it turns out, would have been good. Instead, I find out from an anonymous caller that my husband had been having an affair for the past four years, even bringing the woman to our home while I was spending summers in Bermuda with the children. (He joined us for long weekends of golf at the club, and for a couple of weeks at the end of the summer.) The caller (someone I later learned "SHE" had bribed to make the call) wouldn't tell me with whom my husband was supposed to be having the affair. I certainly didn't have a clue. I didn't quite know what to do or to think. I mean, he was always working, poor guy, he didn't have time for an affair. Which is precisely what he said when he got home a few days later. Ridiculous. But then something really funny happened. He started to come home early from the office. Really early. Three hours early. He wanted to spend time with his family, with us, and with me. After all, he told me, don't I have a right to be with my family? I almost bought it. Well, that's a lie. It didn't smell right to me, either.
Predictably, a few weeks later, the inevitable unraveling came one night during a horrible fight with lots of shouting. Then he quietly admitted everything. Everything. I am not going to identify the "other woman" other than to say that she was someone I knew fairly well (or so I thought) and had no reason to distrust. I could not believe my husband had ruined our family over her. I married an idiot. I'm an idiot.
I knew what I had to do. I left the house that night after the emotional bloodletting with my husband, and walked down Park Avenue to see the two friends I knew who wouldn't mind me showing up at 11:30 p.m. My mother once told me that there were two kinds of friends. There were the kind who sit in your kitchen and then there was everyone else. (When a lifelong friend of my mother's died suddenly in her late 30s, my mother was beside herself. A few years later when that friend's widower had remarried, my mother knew things had really changed. Now she sat in the living room while the new wife's friends were in the kitchen.)
My friends Maureen and Jim are two of the very best friends anyone can ever have. I sat in their kitchen until 2:00 in the morning drinking scotch and I did the mature thing. I bawled my eyes out. It wasn't pretty. Later, when I walked back home I thought about the last several years of my life and the time that I spent waiting and worrying about my husband every time he was working late or traveling. Which if I'm being honest, was nearly every night. I loved him that much. I worried about the weight I had put on during four pregnancies. I worried if I were still reasonably attractive and if that had anything to do with al of this. Truthfully, I wondered what was wrong with me and the life we had built and the values I thought we shared. Then I thought about how he had had this other woman in our home every time that I was away with our daughters. Then, as I stood in front of our townhouse looking up at the dark windows, it came to me. Oh my God, I needed a lawyer.
KAREN:
I continued to find the work "interesting and fun" for the first few years I practiced matrimonial law. I learned an immense amount, and added several gems to a growing trove of priceless anecdotes. One of my favorite stories derives from one of the first divorce complaints I ever drafted. The cruelty grounds included the husband's uncontrollable obsessive compulsive behavior which had wreaked havoc on the marriage and the wife's own mental health. The husband insisted, for example, that all of the toilet paper in the parties' five bathrooms had to be torn exactly on the perforations. He also routinely roused the household in the middle of the night to make sure that everyone's mattress was perfectly aligned on the box springs. He also monitored the broom closet next to the maid's room, and if he discovered, late one Sunday night, that the family's supply of TopJob or Pinesol had fallen below ten bottles (which he deemed to be "crisis level"), he would send my client out into the night to find an open store and purchase an additional reserve of the cleaning product in question.
I confess I also enjoyed titillating glimpses into a lifestyle that I could not have imagined when I was growing up in a small town in upstate New York (pop. 7,000). One of our clients had a Renoir hanging over the toilet in the powder room off the foyer of her palatial apartment. Another had a full-time silver polisher on his household staff. Yet another, an Imelda-wannabe, had an entire room filled with her shoes and someone who came in twice a week to clean and polish them.
There were also darker moments, including the time I had to go to court to obtain an order of protection for a client whose husband had pushed her down a flight of stairs. There was a relocation case we lost, where a heartbroken father attempted and failed to prevent his wife from moving to Florida with their young son, effectively depriving him of any meaningful relationship with the boy. There was the former professor of ancient history, a Ph.D. rendered childlike by a massive brain tumor, whose clever M.B.A. wife finessed his signature on a separation agreement in which he gave up his rights to any property or support. There was the mother of newborn twins whose husband walked out on the marriage before she was even discharged from the hospital after her C-section.
I eventually made a career move and joined a large corporate firm that had a prominent "family law" department. I became a partner mid-way through my nine-year tenure there, and was by that time firmly entrenched in the matrimonial world. I worked on a number of exciting cases, some of which even "made law." I also was involved in many high-stress, even gut-wrenching, matters that caused me to experience insomnia for the first time in my life, and contributed to my ever-darkening view of human nature. I remained, however, one of the more popular attorneys at the firm's monthly cocktail party, where colleagues in the bankruptcy and pension departments would sidle up to me and ask me if I had any "good ones" that month. (It's not like their clients were fessing up to them about running off with the au pair, or engaging in battles to the death over their wedding china.)
Divorce litigation is in many ways just like any other litigation (a "lawsuit is a lawsuit is a lawsuit"), with a plaintiff and a defendant, a sometimes protracted pretrial discovery process, motion practice, depositions, oceans of paper, trips to the courthouse, settlement negotiations, and, if those negotiations fail, a trial. However, divorce litigation is unique in that, in addition to all of the usual stresses of the legal process, there is an overlay of the emotion, anger, betrayal, hurt, and sheer vindictiveness that can only be felt in relation to someone you used to love. This human drama can, and sometimes does, undermine the effectiveness of the legal process, and can cause someone with an otherwise sympathetic case to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
I left the big corporate firm in 2001 and am now a partner at a prominent matrimonial "boutique" in New York City. Now, twenty-plus years on from that first "interesting and fun" bigamy research assignment, I often wonder, "Why do I continue to do this for a living?" The hours are rotten; the income isn't that good in proportion to the mental and emotional energy expended; the clients can be irrational and demanding, sometimes bordering on abusive; the adversaries do not always conduct themselves as though they are on the playing fields of Eton; the work itself can be sheer drudgery. On bad days, my answer is "I'm stuck and this is the only thing I know how to do." On good days, I tell myself, "You're helping people at one of the worst times of their lives. You're doing good work, and it's worthy."
Elaine, my co-blogger, is a former client who was never irrational or demanding or abusive (other than that time she kicked the wall in the elevator lobby of my office in frustration after a particularly fraught meeting with her estranged husband). We thought that telling the story of her divorce, juxtaposed against my explanations of the process, might provide some guidance, maybe even some wisdom, on how to survive your own divorce -- whether you live on "Park Avenue" or "Main Street" -- with some shred of dignity, on how to minimize the financial and emotional cost of the process, and last but not least, on how to spare your divorce lawyer a sleepless night.
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