I might have spent my career as a public defender had it not been for the fact that in some years my wife took home more than I did in her hodgepodge of jobs—waitress, babysitter, vocal tutor, actress. When I first mentioned that I was thinking of leaving the FD to go out on my own, she asked, “Can we afford it?” My answer—“Can we afford it if I stay?”—was only partly meant to be clever.
Unspoken between us was that when Anne turned thirty, I started becoming aware of her biological clock, even if she preferred to ignore it. Part of me thought that if I led by example, taking a job I didn’t necessarily love because that’s what grown-ups thinking about the future did, Anne would follow suit.
It had not worked out that way, at least not so far. To the contrary, whenever I mentioned that she might want to transition into a more stable lifestyle, she always used Nicky as a shield. “Are you also telling your best friend that he should have a regular job and give up his dream of becoming a novelist?”
The opening of my eponymous law firm taught me that being your own boss means you can actually lose money working. If it were not for court-appointed work, I would have gone under, but the thirty-five dollars an hour I was paid for those cases was scarcely enough for me to be able to pay my office rent.
My hours at the FD had been long, but at least when I left for the day, I was on my own time. Private practice worked the opposite way. If I had no billable work from nine to five—which was often the case—I had to work twice as hard after hours to drum up business. That meant attending bar association meetings that began at eight o’clock or taking out prospective clients or those I hoped would someday be business-referrers for drinks or dinner. Whatever the cause, I rarely arrived home before ten. By that time, Anne was usually out, participating in various open mic sessions. Our schedules made it akin to a harmonic convergence when we were together and awake at the same time.
Which was why I had hoped that Anne would join me to meet Carolyn. At the last minute, though, she had canceled. One of the Upper East Side families that paid her roughly my hourly rate to tutor their off-key daughter on vocal techniques had asked for an “emergency appointment” to prepare for an upcoming middle school audition.
“I’ll catch Nick’s next conquest,” she told me. “Probably be next week, anyway.”
I chuckled at the dig. In the movie version of Nicky’s life, his past girlfriends would appear as a montage of beautiful women differentiated by hairstyles and clothing but always well endowed. Here’s the kicker, though—they were always smart. Not a bimbo in the bunch. Not even the rebounds or the one-night stands. Each new girlfriend was, as Nicky put it, a woman of substance.
From her résumé, I already knew that Carolyn fit that last criterion, but upon catching sight of her, I realized she also would have been heartily welcomed into the club of prior Nicky paramours based on her physical attributes alone. She was six years younger than Nicky, which was about as young as he could have gone at the time and not been a thirtysomething dating a grad student. Her figure strained against the buttons of her blouse, and the McDermott surname fit his penchant for Irish women, although Carolyn was black Irish, with dark, almost black hair and an alabaster complexion. Combined with sapphire-blue eyes, she had a certain Snow White vibe.
“Carolyn, this is Clinton,” Nicky said.
“Clint,” I corrected. “Unless you call him Nicky, in which case you can also call me what Nicky calls me.”
She laughed. “Nicky?” Apparently, she had not been briefed on that point.
“Call him Clint,” Nicky said with an eye-roll for my benefit. “It’s the third iteration of his name since we’ve met. His given name is Francis. Then he was Clinton through high school, and somewhere along the line he became Clint. I think it makes him feel like Dirty Harry.”
“To be fair, no one ever called me Francis. Not even my mother.”
“Clint it is,” Carolyn said with a smile. “Now, Nicky, can you get me a beer?”
Nicky laughed. To me he said, “I told you, right?”
Nicky got up and made his way to the bar. As soon as he left, Carolyn slid down the bench until she was against the wall, sitting directly opposite of me. The bartender was busy, which meant that I’d be alone with her for the next few minutes.
“So you’re the one and only Clinton—I mean Clint—Broden?”
“Guilty as charged.”
“I’ve been excited to meet you because . . . well, the way Nick talks about you, I didn’t think you could actually exist. He seemed to be describing . . . I don’t know, a superhero, maybe.”
“You sure he was talking about me?”
She made a face like she might have been mistaken, but I knew it was a put-on. Living with Anne had alerted me to the difference between good and bad acting.
“Let me see,” she said, in mock thought. “Are you the smartest guy he’s ever met? And have the most beautiful wife?”
It’s hard not to like someone after an introduction like that. But even if she had been less kind, I couldn’t have helped but like Carolyn. She was exactly as Nicky had described, and I thought that, despite my best friend’s seemingly impossibly high standards for women, he might have finally found the woman of his dreams.
The next day, Nicky wanted to see me again at the same bar. I assumed that he wanted to get my views about Carolyn, or to brag about how his evening had ended with her. But when we sat, he handed me a shopping bag that contained his completed manuscript.
“Hot off the presses,” he said. “I want you to be the first to read it.”
This was only the second time I’d been given the honor of reading his work, and to my knowledge, it was only the second time he’d completed a manuscript. His first effort had been an outgrowth of his senior-year college project. That book was about two childhood friends from a middle-class, outer-borough neighborhood. Although he took pains at the time to emphasize that it was a work of fiction, it wasn’t too difficult to decipher that I was Clay, best friend to the story’s protagonist, Nate. The plot revolved around a can’t-miss business deal. At first, Nate tried to entice Clay into joining the venture, but Clay saw the danger and cautioned Nate to back out. Four hundred pages later, all Clay’s concerns were proven true, but Nate prevailed on the last page, outwitting his business partners and escaping to a Caribbean island with a suitcase full of cash.
The book was good enough to capture the attention of a well-respected New York City literary agent, but they couldn’t sell it to one of the big publishing houses, although at least two publishers said that they wanted to read Nicky’s next novel. The agent told Nicky not to lower his standards and accept a deal with a smaller press; instead, he should write something new.
I thought it a tremendous success that Nicky’s first effort had piqued an agent’s interest and resulted in favorable reactions from the major publishers, but Nicky was devastated. The rejection might have been the first he’d ever suffered, at least of any consequence.
I’m not sure he wrote another word for the rest of our twenties. At least he didn’t mention anything that got further than the “idea stage,” and he never asked me to read anything. Then, around the time that Anne and I got engaged, he mentioned that he was back at it, working on something he was very excited about.