Brian Sul ivan was made a junior partner at thirty-three. He was the one al of the first years wanted to be, the one they al talked about. He was handsome in a prep school way and looked like every cute boy that Mary had a crush on in high school. He was the first person to ask Mary to write a memo, and she was flattered. “Real y,” she asked. “A memo?” She sounded like a parrot.
He laughed and leaned on her desk. “Look,” he said. “I know it feels impossible now, but it’l get better. I promise.” He put his hand on her shoulder, and Mary almost turned her head and leaned down to kiss it. It was the first time in a week anyone had touched her, not counting the toothless woman who’d pul ed on her leg as she was going down to the subway. Her face got hot, as though she had actual y leaned over and placed her lips there. Brian removed his hand before she could think much more, and she was left in her office with her embarrassing thoughts.
Mary had always been scared of her imagination. When she was younger, she used to think, “What if I stood up in the middle of class and told Mrs. Sugar to go to hel ?” Then her cheeks would flush at the thought and her heart would start pounding, as if she was real y going to stand up and scream. “I’m not going to do it,” she would tel herself. She would try to calm down, but then she would think of it again, how she could have just screamed, how no one would have stopped her, and she would get nervous again. It was the potential of what could happen, the possibility that she could do something so reckless. That’s what scared her.
Brian Sul ivan brought al of that back. Every time he came into her office and stood next to her desk, Mary imagined what would happen if she put her hands on his belt buckle and started to take off his pants. Her blood pounded in her ears, and she tried to reassure herself that she wasn’t going to do any such thing. But then she’d pass him in the hal , and she’d think, “What would happen if I just went up to him and said, ‘Let’s have sex right now’?” She tried to tel herself that she was in charge of her actions, that her brain couldn’t take over. And then she thought, “This is what happens to people right before they go insane.”
Brian found Mary on the roof one night, sitting on one of the stone benches, her head leaning back as she smoked her Marlboro Light very slowly, letting the smoke trickle out of her mouth and escape into the air. “Hey,” he said. “So, you’re a smoker.”
Mary snapped her head up quickly, causing her to cough and choke for a few seconds before she could speak. “No,” she final y said. “I’m not a smoker. I’m quitting.”
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.” He pul ed out an unopened pack of cigarettes and hit them against the heel of his hand, then unwrapped the plastic and crumpled it into a bal , never looking away from her. “I’ve been quitting for years.” He raised his eyebrows and took a cigarette out of his pack, held it in his teeth, and smiled.
Mary gave a weak laugh and held her cigarette low. “I real y thought I would’ve quit by now,” she said. “But it’s been a harder adjustment than I planned on.”
“Because I make you nervous?” Brian asked.
“What? No!” Mary said. She sounded too forceful. She’d meant to sound calm, but it came out in a little yel .
Brian laughed. “It’s okay,” he said. “I mean, when I first started, even the secretaries made me nervous. Everyone knew more than I did.”
“Oh,” Mary said. She realized that he had meant something very different, and she made herself laugh again. “Yeah, wel . I guess it goes away eventual y, right?”
“That it does,” Brian said. He blew circles in the air.
Brian and Mary started smoking together at night. She always hoped she’d see him and she always felt sick when she did. She should not be doing this, she told herself. He was a partner. He was her boss. But she looked forward to their conversations al day. When two days in a row passed without them running into each other on the roof, she felt desperate. When he returned on the third day, she almost jumped off the bench.
Every piece of information she got about him felt like a gift. She gathered al that she knew and went over it in her head. He had two brothers, he was the youngest, he liked gherkins and sour Altoids but hated any kind of soda. He was a Yankees fan, cal ed his grandfather “Oompa,” and looked best in light pink shirts.
They talked about col ege, and she found out that he’d played lacrosse. “Wel ,” she said, “that’s no surprise.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked her.
“Just that, you know, you kind of look like a lacrosse player,” Mary said.
“Real y?” Brian asked. “How do you mean?”
“I mean, you just look like you went to prep school and played lacrosse. I don’t know.” Mary took a drag of her cigarette and tried to sound not stupid. “Al the boarding school boys at my col ege, they al played lacrosse and just had a look.”
“Wel , I did go to prep school,” Brian said. “But I didn’t go to boarding school. My roommate did, though, and he was weird.” Brian stopped talking and Mary wasn’t sure if he was done. Then he flicked his cigarette and continued. “I’d never send my kids to boarding school,” he final y said. “It fucks them up.”
Everything she learned in these five-minute conversations just made Mary like Brian more. And once when she was assigned to his case in a big meeting, he winked at her, and she thought that maybe she didn’t have control of her brain anymore. With each day, there was a greater chance that she was actual y going to act on one of her total y absurd thoughts. There was no going back.
Mary told her friends that there was a cute lawyer at the firm, but that’s as far as she let herself go. They were out for drinks one night and she just wanted to say his name, so she said, “There’s this guy at my firm, Brian, who’s pretty cute. He’s a partner, though.” Then, because she regretted saying his name, she said, “I’m not interested in him or anything. Maybe he’s not even that cute. I can’t tel anymore.”
Lauren nodded and said, “It’s probably the cutest-boy-in-the-class syndrome.”
“The what?” Mary asked.
“Cutest-boy-in-the-class syndrome,” Lauren repeated. “You know, when you spend al your time in a class and it’s boring and you get a crush on a guy, who looks super cute in the class but then when you go out in the real world, he’s not. It’s just that you were only comparing him to that smal group, so there was a curve.”
“Huh,” Isabel a said. “I never thought about it like that.”
“I mean, that’s just the name, but it applies to al sorts of things. Like why camp boyfriends always turned out to be nerds. Or how a work crush can happen on a guy that’s real y not al that great.” She shrugged and tried to look modest, as though she were the one to discover this phenomenon.
“It’s good to remind yourself of it, though,” she said. “So you don’t end up sleeping with a bartender who’s a total life loser, or something like that.”
“Or something like that,” Isabel a said. Mary nodded, as though they had figured it out, but she knew Brian didn’t fal into that category. She didn’t know where he fel , but it wasn’t there.
They kissed one night in her office, late, after everyone else had gone home. The two of them had ordered Thai food, and Mary had eaten very little, afraid that her skirts were going to stop fitting soon, and sure that when Brian looked at her, al he saw was a big ass.