First time here? Start at the beginning.
The next time I got the perfect lawyer alone was a few Sundays later. We’d planned to see some play on Bleecker Street because it starred our favorite actress from the L Word. When we went inside, though, we found out it wasn’t showing. There’d been a typo in an advertisement. She argued with the ticket guy for a few minutes and then we went next door for a drink.
We were at Von, the same place we went for Griffothy’s birthday. We sat at the bar. The place felt especially dark because sun rays still brightened Bleecker Street. Von was like one of those fish tanks set in a wall, only one of its faces exposed, so we got to be goldfish.
I asked the perfect lawyer how her religion was going. Griffothy had told me that she went to church on Easter and subsequently decided to be a Christian again, with some idiosyncrasies. For example, gay sex was okay and so was shoplifting from large stores.
She told me it was going well. “I need to believe there’s a trap door, you know what I mean? Every day is the same obstacle course. I can’t keep living to make my boss happy, or Griffothy. And I already ran a marathon.”
I thought about church. Colorful windows, domes, a certain type of discussion of moral philosophy…
“I wonder if finding God is supposed to be harder than running a marathon.”
“Stop making fun of me!”
“I’m not! I totally know what you mean. I need something besides like going to class… eating pizza… procrastinating. What’s the church like, is there singing?”
“Yes!”
“Oh. And holding hands during the Our Father?”
“Yes!” On second thought, I could probably just find some essays about Christian philosophy online.
“I wonder what else you can do with your life,” I said, “besides read and go for walks.”
“You can get into sado-masochistic relationships,” she said. There was a pause. “With a judge.”
“So tell me what’s wrong with living to make Griffothy happy,” I asked, breaking my personal rule not to solicit gossip about Griffothy from the perfect lawyer. I feared that if she vented just a little, I’d tell her what a jackass he sounded like in con law and ask her to marry me.
“Because I can’t hate myself for his problems. I learned that from hundreds of hours of psychotherapy.” She sneered again, the same way. “I used to blame myself every time his cell phone broke.”
“Oh…” I was confused.
“You know, his cell phone breaks if he holds it up to his head for too long.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s so ridiculous when you think about it.” Of course; all the robot signals tangled with the phone’s. Griffothy thought too hard.
“That sucks,” I said. “But you’re right, it’s not your fault.”
“And if I ask him to do the simplest chore, I mean sometimes it’s fine, but sometimes he just starts yelling at me-’You’re using up all my memory!’” She mimicked him by speaking in a lisp and bending her wrist in front of herself. “And it’s like I’m just supposed to know automatically that he has something on his mind.”
“Right…” Did the perfect lawyer not know that her own husband was a robot? Even Patrick knew, and he didn’t strike me as a social genius.
“And he’s never gotten a single cavity in his whole life! I’ve had two.” The perfect lawyer sighed out her nose and squinted ahead, not at me. She really didn’t know. I ordered another drink.
“Do you ever confront Griffothy with, you know, just facts and stuff?
“No! That’s just it, I can’t stand up to him,” she said, her pitch rising. “I can’t not be nice or I feel like, like a… bitch. I’m always the bitchy one!” She exhaled because she had sworn and I glowered because this conversation was becoming a parody of itself. If she wanted to make some post-structuralist point about how gender-specific language forms our identities, why didn’t she just come out and say it? She continued in an even tone, “I can’t divorce him. If I did I’d have to pay him tons of alimony, since he helped put me through law school.”
The perfect lawyer’s phone vibrated on the bar. She cocked the screen toward her.
“Oh good, it’s Griffothy. I texted him when you were in the bathroom earlier. He’s on his way here from the library.”
