Counsel of Choice
My husband hired me on a Tuesday, in blue ink, on a form I have personally drafted nine hundred times.
I didn’t know it yet. At twenty to eleven I knew only that Dov Ansel was standing in the doorway of my office holding a file against his chest the way people hold things they hope to be rid of, and that he had not knocked.
“You always knock,” I said.
“I know.” Dov was twenty-six, with a clerk’s stoop and a clerk’s habit of apologising to furniture. “I think you should put the pen down.”
“I’m not holding a pen.”
“Then I think you should sit.”
“I am sitting, Dov.”
“Yes. Good.” He crossed the carpet in four steps, laid the file on my blotter, squared its edge to the edge of the desk, and retreated to the door as though it might go off.
It was the ordinary buff of the Registry of Terms. It had the ordinary red tab that meant Non-Renewal, and the ordinary label, typed in the ordinary careful capitals of the third-floor pool.
RHEE, T. v. CALLOWAY, I.
I read the label twice. It is a thing lawyers do with bad news: we assume the fault is in the reading.
Calloway, I. is me. I kept my name when we signed. It was the one thing Tobias and I had never argued about, because he had never once pretended to mind.
“It’s a clerical error,” I said. “A transposition. Somebody’s put the wrong spouse on the tab.”
“I checked that.” Dov’s voice was very gentle. “I checked it twice. I’m sorry, Iris.”
I opened the file.
Form T-9, Notice of Non-Renewal. I know it the way a pianist knows a scale. One page of boxes, a signature line, a stamp. Section One: Filing Party. Tobias Anselm Rhee. Section Two: Spouse of Record. Iris Margit Calloway. Section Three: Term Commenced. The fourteenth of November, seven years ago. I remembered the day. It had rained, and we had been twenty minutes late to our own ceremony because Tobias had stopped to buy a stranger an umbrella.
Section Four: Term Expires. The fourteenth of November of this year.
Thirty days, then. Exactly thirty. Under Section Nine of the Conjugal Term Act, a marriage in Verrane runs for seven years and then renews automatically for seven more, unless one spouse files written notice with the Registry no later than thirty days before expiry. We call it the quiet clause, in the trade. Silence renews. In my nine years as an advocate I have told something like four hundred clients that the most powerful sentence in the Act is the one that says nothing at all. Most people don’t leave. Most people simply don’t file.
My husband had filed.
“He’s done it correctly,” I heard myself say. “Look at that. Every box.” It was a stupid thing to say, but I couldn’t stop. I had spent nine years watching people fill in this form wrong, in crayon, in tears, in the wrong order, and here was one in a beautiful, even, upright hand, with every date in the correct format. Tobias had always had lovely handwriting. He wrote me notes in it, once.
“Keep going,” said Dov, from the doorway. “To Section Six.”
I turned the page.
Section Six: Counsel of Choice.
Under the Act, a filing party is entitled to representation by a Dissolution Advocate. Normally the Registry assigns one by rotation, and the other spouse receives one too, so that nobody walks into the quietest end of a marriage alone. But a filing party may name an advocate of his own choosing, provided the Registry is satisfied there is no conflict.
In the box, in the same blue ink, in the same beautiful hand, it said:
CALLOWAY, I.
I put my hand flat on the desk. It seemed important that the desk should stay where it was.
“That’s not possible,” I said. “Section Thirty-One. A conflicted advocate can’t act unless the opposing spouse consents in writing.”
“I know.” Dov came back into the room one step at a time. “That’s the thing. It’s attached.”
He turned to the back of the file and lifted out a single sheet, stapled at the corner. Waiver of Conflict and Consent to Representation. A paragraph of dense, neutral language that I could have recited. And at the bottom, on the line marked Consenting Spouse, a signature.
It was mine. The loop on the I, the flat roof on the C. I’d have sworn to it in front of a judge.
“I didn’t sign this.”
“I’m not suggesting you—”
“I didn’t, Dov, I’ve never seen—” I stopped.
Sunday. Three weeks ago. A Sunday night with the rain on the windows and a client’s affidavit open on the screen, a woman whose husband had hidden half his estate in a boat. Tobias had come into the study in his shirtsleeves, with the particular quiet of a man who has learned not to interrupt me, and set a short stack of pages at my elbow. I remembered how he’d flagged them. Little yellow tabs, where you need to sign. I remembered saying, what is it, without turning round. I remembered his answer. Household things. The insurance renewal. Nothing, Iris. Just sign.
Eleven yellow flags. I had signed them one after another, with my left hand, while my right scrolled through an affidavit about a boat.
I had read nine hundred forms in my career. I had caught a forged codicil in a drawer of someone else’s grandmother’s papers. I had never once, in seven years, read a single page my husband gave me.
“Iris?”
“I did sign it,” I said. “I just didn’t know.”
Dov was quiet for a moment, in the pained way of a decent young man who has been asked to watch a good person fall.
“Reassignment’s possible,” he said carefully. “Section Thirty-One lets the Registry reassign if the advocate declines. Any advocate in the Office can take it. I can have it moved by lunchtime, and Mr. Rhee will simply be given the next name on the rota.”
“A man I don’t know,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Who will file my husband’s notice, take his instructions, and sit across from me at the hearing.”
“Yes.”
“And who I’ll never be allowed to talk to about it.”
He didn’t answer, which was an answer.
I looked down. In the corner of the form, past the boxes and the stamp, there was one more line I had not reached. It was small and optional, the sort of space the Registry leaves for people who wish to explain themselves and almost never do. Section Seven: Grounds (optional). Most clients leave it blank. A few write irreconcilable, which is the word we put in the brochures. Once I had a man write four pages in pencil about a dog.
My husband had written six words.
Ask me properly. I’ll answer.
I read them with the whole of my attention, the way I read contracts, hunting for the trick. There wasn’t one. There was only the upright blue handwriting, and the plain fact that in seven years I had never once asked him anything he couldn’t answer in a sentence.
I turned my hand over on the blotter, to stop it shaking, and my ring caught the light from the window.
All of us have them: the Term bands, thin and plain, issued by the Registry at the ceremony. Inside, where only the wearer can see, the Registry engraves the day the Term begins, and the day it ends. I have drawn it off a thousand clients’ fingers and watched them read it for the first time in years. I hadn’t read my own since the morning we were wed.
I slid the band halfway off my finger, and tilted it to the light.
14.11 — 14.11.
Thirty days. Seven years. And a husband who had learned my handwriting so well that he could ask me, in writing, for the one thing I’d never have given him if I were looking.
“Dov,” I said. “Don’t reassign it.”
“Iris, you can’t possibly—”
“Not yet.” I closed the file. My voice, I noticed, was perfectly steady. It was my courtroom voice, my best one, and I had never wanted so much to be rid of it. “Give me the afternoon. I’d like to go home and ask him properly.”
