“Sadie wants to see you,” he tells me. “She sounds…unhappy.”
“Gasp oh gasp,” I say.
I take the elevator back down to Sadie’s law office, where I’m greeted by the receptionist-cum-paralegal, a recent college graduate named Taft Buckington III. Taft’s father—he is known to all as Taffy—is a fellow member of Merion Golf Club. We play a lot of golf, Taffy and I. Young Taft meets my eye when I enter and shakes his head in warning. There are four attorneys in total at Fisher and Friedman, all female. I told Sadie once that perhaps she should hire one man to make it look good. Her response, which I loved, was simple:
“Shit no.”
Instead the sole male is the receptionist-cum-paralegal. Make of that what you will.
When Sadie spots me standing next to Taft’s desk, she beckons me to her office and closes the door once we are both inside. I sit. She stands. This was Myron’s old office. Sadie kept Myron’s desk. It was still here when she took over the lease and so she asked whether she could purchase it. I called Myron to see what he’d charge, but as I expected, he said to give it to her. Still, it’s disconcerting to be in here because nothing else is the same. The small refrigerator where Myron kept his stash of Yoo-hoos has been replaced by a printer stand. The posters from Broadway shows—there is no straight male in North America, with the possible exception of Lin-Manuel Miranda, who loves musicals more than Myron—are gone now. Myron’s office was eclectic and nostalgic and colorful. Sadie’s is minimalist and white and generic. She wants no distractions. It’s all about the client, she once told me, not the attorney.
“I have permission to tell you this,” Sadie begins. “Just so we are clear. It’s no longer attorney-client privilege because, well, you’ll see.”
I say nothing.
“You know about my hospitalized client?”
“Just that.”
“Just what?”
“That you have a client who was hospitalized.”
This isn’t true, by the way. I know more.
“How did you find out?” Sadie asks.
“I overheard someone in the office talking about it,” I say.
This is also a lie.
“Her name is Sharyn,” Sadie continues. “No last name for now. It doesn’t matter. Names don’t matter. Anyway, her case is textbook. Or it starts out textbook. Sharyn is doing a graduate degree at a large university. She meets a man who works at the same university in a somewhat prestigious job. It starts off great. So many of these do. The man is charming. He flatters her. He’s super attentive. He talks about their grand future.”
“They always do that, don’t they?” I say.
“Pretty much, yeah. It’s not fair to label every guy who starts sending you flowers and showering you with tons of attention as a psycho—but, I mean, there is something to it.”
I nod. “Not all overly attentive boyfriends are psychos—but all psychos are overly attentive boyfriends.”
“Well put, Win.”
I try to look modest.
“So anyway, the romance starts off great. Like so many of these do. But then it starts to grow weird. Sharyn is in a study group that includes both men and women. The boyfriend—I’m going to call him Teddy, because that’s the asshole’s name—doesn’t like that.”
“He gets jealous?”
“To the nth degree. Teddy starts asking Sharyn a lot of questions about her guy friends. Interrogating her, really. One day, she checks the search history on her laptop. Someone—well, Teddy—has been looking up her guy friends. Teddy shows up at the library unannounced. To surprise her, he says. One time he brings a bottle of wine and two glasses.”
“As cover,” I say. “A faux romantic gesture.”
“Exactly. The behavior escalates, as again it always does. Teddy gets upset if her study sessions run too late. She’s a student. She wants to go to a campus party or two with her friends. Teddy, who works as an assistant coach, insists on going. Sharyn starts to feel the walls closing in. Teddy is everywhere. If she doesn’t respond to his texts fast enough, Teddy throws a fit. He starts accusing her of cheating. One night, Teddy grabs Sharyn’s arm so hard he bruises her. That’s when she breaks up with him. And that’s when his psycho stalking starts.”
I am not a good sympathetic ear, but I try very hard to appear like one. I try to nod in all the right places. I try to look concerned and mortified. My resting face, if you will allow me to use that annoying colloquialism again, is either disinterested or haughty. I struggle thus to engage and look caring. It takes some effort, but I believe that I’m pulling it off.
“Teddy shows up unannounced begging her to take him back. On three separate occasions, Sharyn has to call 911 because Teddy’s pounding on her door after midnight. He’s pleading with her to talk to him, says she’s being unfair and cruel not to hear him out. Teddy actually cries, he misses her so bad, and eventually he convinces her that she”—here Sadie makes quote marks with her fingers—“‘owes’ him the chance to explain.”
“And she agrees to meet?” I ask, mostly because I worry I’ve been silent too long.
“Yes.”
“This,” I say. “This is the part I never get.”
Sadie leans forward and tilts her head to the side. “That’s because while you’re trying, Win, you’re still too male to get it. Women have been conditioned to please. We are responsible not just for ourselves but everyone in our orbit. We think it is our job to comfort the man. We think we can make things better by sacrificing a bit of ourselves. But you’re also right to ask. It’s the first thing I tell my clients: If you’re ready to end it, end it. Make a clean break and don’t look back. You don’t owe him anything.”
“Did Sharyn go back to him?” I ask.
“For a little while. Don’t shake your head like that, Win. Just listen, okay? That’s what these psychos do. They manipulate and gaslight. They make you feel guilty, like it’s your fault. They sucker you back in.”
I still don’t get it, but that’s not important, is it?
“Anyway, it didn’t last. Sharyn saw the light fast. She ended it again. She stopped replying to his calls and texts. And that’s when Teddy upped his assholery to the fully psychotic. Unbeknownst to her, he bugged her apartment. He put keyloggers on her computers. Teddy has a tracker on her phone. Then he starts texting her anonymous threats. He stole all her contacts, so he floods mailboxes with malicious lies about her—to her friends, her family. He writes emails and pretends he’s Sharyn and he trashes her professors and friends. On one occasion, he contacts Sharyn’s best friend’s fiancé—as Sharyn—and says she cheated on him. Makes up a whole story about some incident in a bar that never happened.”
“Imaginative,” I say.
“You don’t know the half of it. He starts sending Sharyn messages, pretending to be her friends saying what a fool she is to let a sweet guy like Teddy go.”
I frown. “Imaginative albeit pathetic.”
“Beyond pathetic. These men—sorry, I don’t want to sound sexist, but they are almost always men—are insecure losers of biblical proportions.”