Scot on the Rocks Read online

  “Thank goodness,” I said.

  “Will Brooke…”

  “Get to the part about the wedding, Nostradamus,” I interrupted.

  “Magic 8-Ball, will Brooke have fun at Trip’s wedding?” he asked and gave the ball a vigorous shake. I pulled my hair out of its bun and twirled a strand of hair with my finger. He looked at the answer, and after a dramatic pause, triumphantly told me: “Signs point to yes.”

  “You didn’t ask it the important question,” I said, grabbing the Magic 8-Ball from his hands. “Will I break up with Douglas?” I gave the ball a little shake and slowly, carefully turned it over. I remembered how I would actually get nervous when we would ask the Magic 8-Ball if we would be working over the weekend, somehow thinking that whatever the ball told us would be gospel. I felt my stomach tighten.

  “What does it say?” Jack asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t say yes,” Jack told me. “The Magic 8-Ball doesn’t talk like that. Let me see.” I slowly showed it to him, careful not to let the insides move. “Yes,” he repeated.

  “Oh, my God, I’m going to break up with Douglas?” I asked him.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Brooke,” Jack said. “These things are stupid.” Whenever the Magic 8-Ball told us we’d be working over the weekend, Jack would always say that the Magic 8-Ball was stupid. Nine times out of ten, the Magic 8-Ball called it.

  “Do it again,” he told me. “Best two out of three.”

  “Magic 8-Ball,” I said quickly, “will I break up with Douglas?” I shook it twice and turned it over.

  “What’s it say?” he asked, leaning out of his seat to try to steal a look.

  “Yes — definitely,” I told him, and quickly put the Magic 8-Ball back onto the edge of his desk as if the mere act of holding it would make its fortune come true.

  “Well, it doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “How will I have fun at Trip’s wedding if I break up with Douglas?”

  “Let me try,” he said, picking the ball back up.

  “Magic 8-Ball, now I am being very serious. This is an important matter we are discussing here, so don’t screw with us.” He looked up to me and I shook my head to show my support of his chastising the Magic 8-Ball. “So, Magic 8-Ball, tell us now — are Brooke and Douglas going to break up?” He shook the ball over his head and closed his eyes. He drew the ball down and looked inside.

  “What?” I asked him, barely able to wait, like a defendant getting her sentence. He didn’t respond at first, just kept staring at the answer.

  “Jack,” I said. “What does it say?”

  “You may rely on it.”

  “You may rely on it?” I parroted back. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know, Brooke,” he said. “I only read the fortunes.”

  I didn’t necessarily blame the Magic 8-Ball for the breakup with Douglas. Not entirely, anyway. But I did blame it on Trip’s wedding.

  Six weeks before the wedding, Douglas and I had been in total domestic bliss, living together in Douglas’s apartment — a space that I had single-handedly transformed from a spare-looking, modern bachelor pad into a warm, inviting home. Okay, fine, so he wouldn’t really let me change anything, from the mammoth sixty-inch TV down to the leather-and-chrome couches, but I did bring in fresh flowers every week. Well, maybe not every week, but whenever I could think of it. Or could find flowers that Douglas wouldn’t accuse of being too “girlie” (which is not easy, I assure you). Okay, okay, so I didn’t even really ever do the flower thing, but I thought about it. And furthermore, I already told you that I am a big-time lawyer at Gilson Hecht, so get off my back. It’s not exactly as if I have that kind of time on my hands. And anyway, that sort of thing isn’t billable.

  We were getting ready for work one morning. I was in the bedroom getting dressed while Douglas was in the bathroom shaving. Like I said, total domestic bliss.

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “What’s very funny?” he asked, calling from the bathroom.

  “It’s very cute. It’s funny,” I said, walking into the bathroom.

  “For fuck’s sake, would you please tell me what you find so goddamn amusing?” he asked, still shaving. Douglas used to shave with a straight blade, like at a barber’s shop. How sexy is that?

  “What you just said,” I explained, looking over his shoulder as he shaved. “That you’re taking your kilt to the dry cleaners to be ready for Trip’s wedding.”

  “Ah,” he said, understanding me. “Well, you need to give them a couple of weeks. It’s a very special cleaning they have to do. That’s a two-thousand-dollar kilt that I’ve got.”

  Suddenly, I was not laughing anymore.

  “Oh, my God, you were serious.”

  “Well, of course I was serious, girl. What did you think I was going to wear to a black-tie wedding?” he asked. This conversation was not going anywhere good.

  “Here’s a crazy idea — a tuxedo?”

  “Well, fuck me! Why the hell would I want to do that?” he asked, laughing as if I’d just asked him to go to the wedding naked or something. Actually, maybe that wouldn’t have been such a bad idea. Douglas had an amazing body…but, I digress.

  “Because it’s a black-tie affair…” I explained.

  “Right,” he said, sounding very Scottish.

  “Right,” I said, sounding very confused.

  “Right.”

  “Wait, are we being serious or are we joking?” I asked.

  And with that, Douglas stormed into the bedroom, leaving the towel and razor he had been using in his wake, with me following closely behind on his heels. I hated when his face got that menacing look to it. In fact, I lived most of the two years we’d spent together doing anything I could just so that his face would not get that menacing look to it.

  He tore the stepladder from its hiding place and brought it over to the closet. Slamming the stepladder down, he then stepped up and pulled down a large box. He gently placed it on the bed and took off the cover, revealing a jacket. I smiled. He was joking all along. Those crazy Scots! As I put my arms around his neck, my hands inching up to his wavy black locks, he picked up the jacket, only to reveal a kilt.

  “Oh, my God,” I cried, my arms falling from his neck. This was no time to mince words.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked, oblivious to the look of horror now crossing my face. “This tartan’s been in the family for over two hundred years.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Go on, take a proper look, would you?” But I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to do anything that might suggest that I approved of my boyfriend wearing a skirt to my ex-boyfriend’s wedding. Don’t panic, I thought. Be cool. Use your super litigator skills to make this man realize that he does not, in fact, want to wear this skirt. He wants to wear pants. But, be so smart as to make him think that he came to this conclusion himself. The sort of Jedi mind trick young single women everywhere are forced to use on their boyfriends every day.

  “You can’t wear that,” I instead blurted out. Yoda would not have approved.

  “What do you mean, I can’t wear it?”

  “I told you, ex-boyfriend’s wedding, trying to be low profile…”

  “But I’m Scottish,” he told me. Did he think that I didn’t notice that or something? Did he think that American men excessively used the expression Fuck me, or that American men obsessively watched World Cup soccer or that American men had such thick accents that I could barely understand what they were saying half of the time? Were people on the street accusing this man of being American and this was why he was explaining that he was, in fact, Scottish to me? Anyway, that’s not really the point. The point is that no matter what nationality you are, in America, we encourage men to wear pants. Especially at our ex-boyfriend’s weddings.

  “I know, honey, but we’re trying to go low profile. Remember, the whole low-profile thing….”

  “Well, we can still be
low profile,” he said.

  “Don’t want to stand out….”

  “Are you ashamed of me?”

  “Honey, no! God, no! It’s just that I was going for the whole ‘quiet-complacent-ex-girlfriend’ thing, not the whole ‘loud-flashy - ex - girlfriend - with - the - hottie - in - a - skirt’ thing.” At this point, I felt it prudent not to even mention the fact that his wearing of said skirt would totally, completely screw up my outfit selection for the night. How does one even try to find a dress that will not clash with her boyfriend’s skirt? I thought that I would have to consult the Scottish embassy on that one.

  “It’s a kilt,” he said, interrupting my thoughts.

  “I know that, I’m looking right at it.”

  “You called it a skirt.”

  “Whatever it is, you can’t wear it.”

  Putting his shirt on quickly and grabbing his jacket, he asked, “Oh, and you are going to decide that, are you?”

  “Well, it’s my ex-boyfriend’s wedding that we’re talking about, so, yes, I’m going to decide it!” I yelled at him.

  “Why don’t you want me to be proud of where I came from?”

  “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be proud of where you came from, I’m just asking you to wear some goddamn pants!”

  Already down the corridor, he yelled, “Why are you so ashamed of my culture?”

  Still in the bedroom, I screamed, “Why do you hate America?”

  Yes, I asked him why he hated America. I couldn’t help myself. I’m really very patriotic.

  3

  Now, you may be asking yourself how a brilliant big-time lawyer like myself managed to get herself into such a predicament. Funny you should ask that. I’ve been asking myself that very same thing, too. So has my mother. So has my best friend. So has my therapist. But I digress.

  It all started with an innocent little phone call. From my ex-boyfriend. Now, some people would think that that’s an oxy-moron. I mean, how many women can honestly say that they’ve stayed friends with their ex? But it was a no-fault breakup: we were graduating from law school, he asked me to move with him to California, and I said no. I stayed in New York to begin the glamorous job at the large big-time law firm that he wanted but didn’t have the grades to get, and he went off to California to settle for the not-so-glamorous job that he didn’t want but my father’s connections helped him to get.

  When the phone rang, I was sitting in my big-time lawyer office. I was feeling kind of good about myself, what with being practically engaged and on the verge of making partner at my firm. I mean, after all, I’d been living with Douglas for almost a year, so it was just a matter of time until he popped the big question. Mere minutes, really. And I hadn’t cried because of a partner yelling at me in well over a week. That alone qualified me to make partner myself.

  “Hi, is Mrs. Palsgraf there?” a voice queried. I smiled. Trip and I were always making really stupid law jokes with each other. It was sort of the foundation of our entire relationship. You see, there was this huge case in first-year torts class involving a woman named Mrs. Palsgraf. We spent about three weeks on the case, that’s how important it was. For the entire first semester of the first year of law school, just mentioning the name Palsgraf was enough to throw our study group into fits of laughter. If you went to law school, you would have appreciated that one. Or thought that Trip and I were major dorks. One of the two. Either way, I told you so. Stupid law jokes. It remained the dynamic of our relationship up until the very end of it.

  “Your father’s connection panned out,” he said with a boyish smile as we lined up at our law-school graduation. “I’m going to L.A. I should be representing famous movie stars in no time.” We still had our graduation caps on our heads. Mine was standing at full attention, tilting upward, while Trip’s was sliding down off his dirty-blond head, as if the mere act of staying on his head for the whole of the ceremony had simply been too much for it to bear.

  “I don’t doubt that you will,” I said back, looking straight at him. And I didn’t doubt it, actually. Trip could be really hardworking when he wanted to be. And also kind of sleazy. He may or may not have been still dating his girlfriend from college when we first started up in law school.

  “Is this a change of residence or domicile?” I asked. Stupid law joke. You see, residence is where you are living right now, whereas domicile is your permanent residence.

  “Domicile,” he said, looking down.

  I didn’t even cry about it. (Which for me, as you may have picked up by now, is a major feat.)

  I suppose it was because I somehow knew we weren’t going to end up together. Throughout the entire three years of law school that we dated, I just knew. There were little hints everywhere. Like the fact that when I was with his family, I felt as if I were on an audition. (Them: “So, Brooke, where does your family summer?” Me: “Summer? You mean like in the summer? Where do they summer in the summer? Uh, in their backyards?” Them: “Backyard…Ah, yes, is that off the coast of Maine?” Me: “Yes.”) Or the fact that it was like hanging out with the Kennedys. Seriously. They actually played flag football in their backyard and stuff. And his father was the president of their country club. And his uncle was always looking at me in a kind of inappropriate Tedesque way. Okay, wait, if they had actually been the Kennedys, that would have been kind of cool. Or even the Shrivers. Or, say, the Rockefellers. Now that I think about it, I heard a rumor a year or so back that there were still some Rockefellers running around Manhattan. Single ones, too. Now, why didn’t I ever date a Rockefeller? Life can be so unfair sometimes.

  During the summer after we’d completed our first year of law school, the week before Trip and I were to start our jobs — mine for a very prestigious Second Circuit judge, Trip for a family friend of my uncle’s — we went to stay with his parents out at their summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. It was a wonderful weekend. You would have loved it. Well, unless you are the type who would let the little things get to you, like the fact that Trip’s mother couldn’t deign to remember my name and instead referred to me only as “that Jewish girl.” Which, luckily for me, I do not.

  After I met his family, things really fell into place. I’d always assumed that the little competitive thing that Trip and I had going on was just his cute little precursor to sex (“Oh, I’ll habeas your corpus”), but it turned out that he was actually serious all along. Trip and his siblings were constantly trying to best one another, from how many eggs each one could eat in the morning to where their undergraduate schools ranked on the U.S. News & World Report list. (Trip’s ranked last.) In the pool, they tried to see who could hold his breath for the longest, and at the end of the day, they held up their arms to see who had the fiercest tan. To be fair, I really put Trip at a disadvantage in this regard, what with my slathering SPF 30 all over his body every chance that I could get.

  What? You really need to be careful in the sun!

  Meeting his family also really explained that look on his face when, at the end of the summer, I made Law Review and he did not.

  And it definitely explains this little exchange we had one day after pulling one too many all-nighters with our study group:

  “Okay, Brooke, you’re up. What is a writ of habeas corpus?”

  “Oh, I’ll habeas your corpus!” What, you thought that I didn’t really say that?

  “Actually, babe, habeas corpus is an unlawful detention, so you really mean to say, ‘I’ll habeas corpus you.’ Did you even bother to do the reading for Con Law?”

  “Just take off my goddamn bra!”

  See what I mean?

  But when I got that innocent little phone call, it all faded away. At the sound of his voice, all of the fun times came rushing back to me. I smiled the smile of a cat that has just swallowed a goldfish.

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said, “she’s out with Pennoyer and Neff.” Another stupid law joke. You see, there is this civil procedure case that you read the first week you are in law sc
hool. No one really understands it and…You know what, forget it. Even I think that it’s dorky at this point.

  “How are you, B?” I had forgotten how much I loved it when he called me that.

  “Great. How are you?”

  “Great. I’ve got news,” he said. My God, I thought, the guy’s still in love with me. After all these years, still in love. How sweet! He’s probably on a plane to New York as we speak, ready to whisk me away to California to be his. When he sees Douglas, no doubt a fight will break out. A fight for my honor. With Douglas being Scottish and all, it will probably be more like a duel. Yes, Trip will challenge Douglas to a duel. I wonder if Douglas knows how to fence? Fencing is hot.

  I’ll have to let him down gently, I thought. I’m really very sensitive, you know.

  “News?” I asked. Gently.

  “I’m getting married.”

  “Great!” I said back, a little too quickly. He kept on speaking, but I don’t think that I heard a word. I was still registering the fact that my ex-boyfriend was getting married before I was. Shouldn’t there be some law against that?

  “So, who’s the lucky girl?” I asked, grabbing for the little stress ball that was on my desk.

  “Ava Huang,” he replied. Ava Huang? The movie star? No way in hell did he just say Ava Huang. No way in hell is my ex-boyfriend is marrying a movie star. Even if he did say Ava Huang, he must mean some other Ava Huang. Why, there must be about a million other Ava Huangs running around L.A. right at this very minute! Now, be cool, be subtle, act like you don’t even care.

  “The movie star?” I asked. Way to be subtle, Brooke.

  “The very one. I represent her. It’s so refreshing to talk to someone on the East Coast about it, though. Everyone here has been freaking out about it. It’s not like you guys even care about movie stars out there.” Trip is so right. We so do not care about movie stars here on the East Coast. For example, when I told Jack that my ex-boyfriend was engaged to Ava Huang, he managed to rattle off her entire filmography, complete with analysis as to which films she “looked her best” in (read: took her clothes off in).