Cast Of Shadows

– 62 -

Female secretaries, paralegals, and summer interns at Ginsburg and Addams shared a regular appointment. Law firm politics stratified employees into sections and subsections – those with a law degree and those without, those with testes and those without – and so the workers who fell into both of the without groups, thrown together by sexism and caste, met informally once a week for happy hour at a bar called Martin’s (frequently called Martini’s, in an ongoing, unfunny joke). Once together and half full of gin and vermouth, they explored other things they had in common – the weather, fear of the Wicker Man, vacations, men, and horror stories about a senior associate named Sam Coyne.

Coyne had parallel reputations in a number of categories, all of them bad. He was a cruel boss, an overly competitive softball player, an arrogant negotiator, and a strange, selfish, and violent lover. Stories regarding the last of these were usually told in the gossipy fashion of urban legends, and these stories were repeated often as the staff turned over, month by month. In fact, if the gathering at Martin’s included, on average, a dozen young women, three of them had probably slept with Sam Coyne (or performed an act other than intercourse most people would count as sex, or had started such an act and not completed it because of something he said or did, or had tried to stop but felt compelled to see it through because of alleged physical or psychological coercion on Coyne’s part). In most cases, these women never told their coworkers of their own involvement, but instead passed along embellished accounts of the events with the names of long-gone Ginsburg and Addams employees substituted for their own. Occasionally, one of the women would get drunk enough and fess up to a tryst with Coyne. Such a person would earn head-of-the-table honors at Martin’s and would be pressed for explicit details. At the very least, she’d be expected to comment on the most notorious Sam Coyne rumor of all, that the handsome young attorney who specialized in mergers and acquisitions had a cock like the grip on a tennis racket, and a woman in the know would always confirm this by contorting her mouth into a wide oval and holding her hands apart at an exaggerated length, and a soprano-pitched roar would go up from that corner of the bar and martinis would be ordered by the tray.

Some Sam Coyne stories had sober endings (and even more dubious attribution) and they drew a different reaction. There was Nancy, who had to cover her bruised arms and legs for an entire month; Jenny, who discovered the handcuffs and the crazy leather masks in his closet and also discovered that she was kind of into it; Carrie, who felt degraded kneeling in front of Coyne in a downtown parking garage while he pulled her hair and growled commands down at her like she was in some sort of perverse puppy school; and there were multiple stories of former Ginsburg and Addams employees, usually girls right out of schools in Missouri or Indiana, who’d been briefly imprisoned by Coyne in his car or his apartment and forced to perform on him while being verbally and physically abused. The women with tenure traded legends of raped paralegals paid to shut up and sexually harassed secretaries bullied into silence – “sexual harassment harassment,” they called it. Sam Coyne was handsome like a movie star, smart like a politician, mean like a jungle cat, and hung like a bell tower, and men with that combination, the Friday night cynics at Martin’s agreed, can get away with just about anything.

Sam knew the women talked about him. He heard them whispering sometimes in the break room, or caught the new ones searching his slacks surreptitiously for some topographical evidence of his infamous attribute. It didn’t bother him. He even worked it into his come-on when he found him-self drawn to a new girl, when he saw some darkness in her eyes, some clue in the way she dressed, some unexpected piercing, or the faint arc of a buried tattoo. “What do they say about me?” he’d ask in the late hours of overtime when one of the newbies volunteered to stay late and help him with copying or filing or whatever she could do. “Nothing,” the new girl would say, looking at him with her big eyelids at their apex and her mouth turned down in a determined attempt to appear naive. He’d say, “Half of it isn’t true, you know,” which would make her blush, betraying the fact that, yes, they did talk about him, and much of it was juicy and even shocking, and then he’d say, “Does that disappoint you?” and the girl would say, if she were mature beyond her years, “It depends on which half, ” and that’s when he knew he’d have her in his bed or on his desk or in the copy room or in his car (or on his car), depending on the mood and circumstances and whether or not this one would lose her nerve at the last minute, like too many of them did.