The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan
Chapter Twenty-Four
Fia hasn’t been up here since that breakfast buffet on the morning all the summer associates arrived. It’s a lot quieter now, on the roof terrace of the sixtieth floor. Fia and Benjamin are the only ones around; even the traffic noise is dampened at this height. All the way down at street level, cars and pedestrians look like little Lego pieces.
Fia walks a few paces, her eyes darting around as though some sort of surprise new addition to the space is going to jump out at her – but none appears. The rooftop looks precisely the same as it always does.
‘Please tell me this isn’t where you chuck me off,’ she says.
Benjamin doesn’t miss a beat. ‘And ruin my career before it’s even really started?’ he replies. ‘I’d never get away with it.’
She just looks over him, her question asked in the silence.
He smirks. ‘Always the husband, right?’
Fia has to admit, she somewhat set herself up for that one, and she rolls her eyes, unable to help the smile that comes with it.
‘So, then, what are we doing up here?’ she asks, following him as he turns the corner towards the other side of the building.
A few seconds later, he stops dead, nodding out to the horizon. ‘That’s what we’re doing.’
Before them, the moon is larger than Fia has ever seen it: a perfect circle, nestled low in the sky as though held there by the tallest towers of 49th and 50th Street. It looks slightly pink in colour – almost cartoonish in its dimension and definition.
‘Pretty cool, huh?’ Benjamin says.
Fia just nods, taking it in for a moment. ‘Pretty cool,’ she agrees softly. ‘Is it a supermoon?’
‘Yeah. That’s literally about the extent of my knowledge, though. I just read in the paper – by which I obviously mean the internet – that it was happening tonight.’
He moves to pull up a slatted wooden chair – one of many dotted around – before her warning comes.
‘Oh, I think that’s the banjaxed one,’ she tells him. ‘I don’t know why it hasn’t been removed.’
About six weeks ago, at a client reception, Fia watched a man – quite an important man – literally fall through that chair. By way of a deep and sincere apology, someone from ZOLA was now going to be taking him to the New York City Ballet more or less in perpetuity.
Fia hoists herself up onto the concrete surround of an enormous planter, trying not to disturb the actual plants in the process. ‘View’s better up here anyway,’ she says, and he hops up to join her.
They each look out, in comfortable quiet, and for some reason Fia is struck by the thing – or one of the things – she’s just said to him: banjaxed.
These days, she’s more and more American in the way she speaks (even if not always in the way she thinks). It’s not just vocabulary – elevator, eggplant, eraser. She can also hear the way her own cadence, her own turn of phrase, has changed: she’s all about ‘taking’ a shower now, ‘grabbing’ a coffee, ‘calling’ a client. She has adapted in order to assimilate. With Benjamin, though, it is the oddest thing: she has caught herself, more than once, talking to him in her old language – the same way she did just now. And if, on any occasion, he hasn’t understood her … well, he’s done a good job of hiding it.
She really has no explanation for that. Maybe, she realizes, it is just a history thing. For obvious reasons, she’s never been inclined to think of her history with Benjamin Lowry as having any sort of positive connotation. But, sitting beside him now, it occurs to her that of the eight million people in this city, he is in fact the one who has known her the longest – or at least, who knew her first. That’s a strange one to think about.
Fia gives herself a shake, as if to snap herself out of such ruminations.
It’s just the view, she thinks. It’s very hard to look out at that cityscape – that incredible moon – without having some thought approaching the philosophical, some musing beyond the minutiae of one’s own little to-do list.
‘So, you’re here late tonight,’ she says, because that feels like a safe topic: work.
‘Yeah. You know, they told us all this stuff at Columbia about work-life balance and how you gotta set boundaries and whatever,’ he replies. ‘And I thought, great. I’ll do that. Right off the bat, you know? Get into good habits. But it turns out – and I’m 100 per cent sure you don’t need me to tell you this – you actually cannotdo this job between the hours of nine and five. Like … that very literally just isn’t enough time to do the whole job.’
Fia smiles drolly. ‘I don’t know. Have you tried a meditation app?’
They both snigger, and for a moment, there’s quiet before she continues.
‘Seriously, though, I get it. I mean, I definitely don’t think it’s just this firm or just the law. I think it might just be modern working. Both my roommates are the same, and my brother and sister. It’s like we don’t even get to just be crazy-busy and stressed about it anymore. Now we have to be stressed about our stress, too – as if it’s completely our own problem that we’ve dropped the ball on self-care.’
Benjamin squints over at her. ‘Can I ask you something? About the job?’
‘Go for it.’
‘I guess, it just doesn’t always seem like you … exactly love it,’ he says then, his tone delicate, as though he is doing his best to be sensitive, to tiptoe into a very difficult topic
Meanwhile, Fia barely bats an eyelid. ‘Oh, I don’t love it,’ she agrees readily. She’s long past any angst about this subject. ‘I like being good at it, and I like the clients – most of them. And, obviously, showing up here every day is what pays for, like … my entire life. But am I giddy over trusts and estates? Wills? The occasional divorce?’ She cocks an eyebrow, like the very notion is ridiculous. ‘No, I’m not.’
Benjamin looks sincerely a little thrown by this turn of events. Fia would wager she might be the first person since he stepped through the doors at ZOLA – and maybe the first among all those he’s met through law school, too – not to have waxed lyrical at him about an alleged passion for the profession.
‘But, so, you’re up for promotion, right?’ he says, and maybe she’s the one who looks surprised now, because then he shrugs, all innocence. ‘… I hear things.’
He probably, Fia realizes right then, hears all sorts of things.He’s been at the firm so much less time than her, and yet there are doubtless already ways in which he could well and truly school her. Dashing from one team to another as he does, in and out of partner’s offices, chatting away with the secretaries … he must now have a whole array of information, both reliable and less reliable, in his back pocket.
‘So, if you’re not necessarily super into any of this, why do you stay at all? Never mind actually seeking out … more of it?’ he continues. ‘I mean, that’d be the basic consequence, right? More work, more responsibility.’
‘More money,’ she points out. ‘That’s definitely part of it. New York is expensive.’
Manhattan, specifically, is sickeningly – perhaps unsustainably – expensive, even for someone like her who already gets paid comparatively well. A hike in salary would go some way towards offsetting what has started to feel like an incurable financial deficit – namely the absence of a partner who also gets paid well. And, at least as much as the practical aspect, there is also the principle of the thing. Fia has come to understand that cold hard cash is really the number one way in which an employer demonstrates the extent to which they value an employee. It isn’t unladylike to say so. Praise and promises can be nice to hear from time to time, but they are ultimately not it.
Of course, in Fia’s particular case, there is an added wrinkle: if she wants to stay in New York, she really has no option to walk away from ZOLA, get a better-paid role in some comparable firm that would end up being the same but would briefly pretend to be different. She can’t ever tell Celia and the other partners that if they liked it, they should have put a ring on it. Her right to be in the United States at all is tied to the firm.
That Benjamin doesn’t readily grasp all this is not something she holds against him. It isn’t his fault. There are just certain things you can never know about a job before you are some way down the path of actually doing said job. For that matter, there are certain things about the practice of law as a woman and – yes – as an immigrant that Benjamin might never really understand. That doesn’t make him a bad guy. It just … is what it is. They are where they are.
And then, there is another, simpler truth to all of this, too.
‘You know what?’ she says, looking over at him. ‘Mostly, I want to get promoted because I just fucking deserve to get promoted.’
He laughs out loud at that, the frankness of it, and it makes her grin as well.
‘That seems like an excellent reason,’ he says. ‘I think you should tell Celia Hannity exactly that when it comes up.’
Fia just chuckles, twisting around a little to take in the panorama. That huge moon – this particular vantage point from which to experience it – might be one of the coolest things she’s ever seen in this city. It somehow makes the familiar view seem magical again, as if she’s seeing it with brand-new eyes.
‘What neighbourhood do you live in?’ she finds herself asking Benjamin then – the stuff of a very first meeting.
‘East Village. Like, Little Ukraine, Alphabet City kind of area?’ he replies, and he waits for her nod of recognition before he continues. ‘I have this new roommate, he just moved in two months ago. He’s a dancer, like, Cirque du Soleil kind of stuff, you know? Anyhow, he’s broken up with his boyfriend, and he’s been crying – and I mean wailing – for weeks. He’s in the flex bedroom, so that’s been … interesting.’
Fia laughs along with Benjamin, but even as she does, other thoughts are coming to her, running like ticker tape in her brain. Is it surprising to her, that he is living in that neck of the woods? With a roommate? With a roommate whose bedroom in fact comprises a partitioned section of the living room? Yes, as it happens, all of that is very surprising to Fia. It doesn’t quite tally with what she envisaged of his life here: the apartment in a doorman-building, somewhere Uptown, decorated to his parents’ taste.
In fact, of the two of them, she’s the one closer to that scenario. She’s struck by an unsettling, itchy sort of sensation – as though her insides are shifting, and she can’t stop them. Feeling the sudden need for some variation, some movement, she hops down from her spot on the planter, heading to the perimeter of the roof terrace.
She walks all the way over to the very edge, until she can – if she tilts forward a little – see the street below. It’s all very well-secured, of course, not exactly a Spiderman situation, but nonetheless, her brother and sister would be nearly vomiting already. Neither Eoin nor Maeve have ever, even in all their visits here, quite acclimatized to high-rise living.
Fia, by contrast, has a head for heights. She looks down for a moment, before switching instead to look up. And, all the while, she can sense Benjamin’s eyes on her. She can sense it, too, when he sidles up to stand alongside her, lets his gaze follow hers. You can never see the stars in Manhattan, the way you can in Ireland. This is something Fia appreciates about her home country when she’s back there, more so than something she necessarily misses all that much when she’s away. There’s a lot of stuff like that.
‘Y’know,’ she says then. ‘The thing about New York is that it’s dirty and crowded and probably vulnerable to terror attacks …’
‘Not to mention your run of the mill mass shootings,’ he interjects dryly, and she smirks a little, because she was born into, raised on, just that sort of black humour.
‘Right. And some people are not that nice, and it can definitely be lonely, and everything’s crazy expensive. The work culture is – as discussed – completely terrible. But I love it.’
Benjamin smiles over at her. His smile, in its full force, is … something. Fia tells herself that it is fine to have noticed this, that any person would have done, that there really was no way not to have noticed it.
‘Yeah. Me too,’ he replies, and for another moment, there’s quiet between them.
‘I could live here the rest of my life, I think,’ Fia declares.
‘Yeah?’
In fact, in the few months before turning 30 and the few months that have followed it, this very subject has been occupying more and more of Fia’s thoughts. And, depending on the day – sometimes the hour – she comes down on different sides of the whole thing. But at least right now, what she’s told him feels solid, true.
‘Yeah. It’s weird, isn’t it? Have you ever seen those Hallmark films where the girl’s, like, I don’t know, a big city lawyer, let’s say.’
‘Let’s say,’ he agrees, a smile pulling at his lips.
‘And she has to go to the sticks for whatever reason, and she’s super bitchy about it at first. Maybe it’s Christmas. Maybe there’s, like, a local festival of some sort that needs saving.’
‘She meets a hot single dad,’ he chimes in.
Fia laughs. ‘Exactly. What’s the message there? Small towns are great, and big cities are terrible, right? Knowing all your neighbours by name is meaningful, and working in a skyscraper is vapid. But I don’t know.’ She sighs, lets her gaze span the horizon once more. ‘I still look out at that view and feel …’
‘Alive,’ he says softly.
She turns to look at him, and her own voice seems to come out sounding just the same. ‘Yeah. Alive.’