She pushed fears about the Partnership Committee from her mind and decided to think, instead, about her upcoming vacation. Far more pleasant to think about that. Two weeks of being pampered in the sunshine. Two weeks to either celebrate her triumph or salve her pride. Massages. Facials. Mud baths. Hanging out on the beach by herself with a bunch of trashy paperbacks. Well, to be honest, not all by herself. She’d find someone to play with. Someone with no connection to Maine or to Palmer Milliken. Someone European might be fun. Maybe she’d have a chance to practice her French. Patti LaBelle’s rendition of ‘Lady Marmalade’ riffed through her brain.

Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?

Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?

If the news was good, she supposed, Hank would want a ‘performance review.’ He’d probably want one anyway. He found the term amusing. Ms Goff, could you stop by, oh, at five thirty or so? We need to do a performance review. Thank you very much. We’ll see you then. Not an elaborate review either. Just forty minutes of snatch-and-grope on the red leather couch in his office. That was really all there was to this so-called affair. That and the occasional ‘nooner’ back at her apartment or a rare business trip to some out-of-the-way hotel. Lainie wanted more. She wanted a real relationship. If it was with Hank, fine. If not, that was fine, too. There were others she found interesting. One in particular she occasionally spent time with. Either way, she wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep this bullshit going.

It started a year ago as a one-night stand after a few drinks on an overnight trip to East Millinocket to do due diligence on the sale of a paper mill, but it had long since become a regular thing. For him, she knew, it was totally casual. For her, things were more complicated. Sleeping with Hank as a means to an end was fine. She’d always been attracted to older men, powerful men, and, when they had enough time, Hank could be a skilled and attentive lover. Intelligent. Charming. Attractive. She knew he liked her. She toyed with the idea that she could somehow close the deal. Wouldn’t that be a hoot? Lainie Goff as the second Mrs Henry Ogden. Elaine Elizabeth Goff Ogden. The trophy wife. It was a role she could play to a fare-thee-well and one she would thoroughly enjoy.

Deep down Lainie knew it would never happen. Divorce for Hank wasn’t an option. He was married for good or ill, till death do them part, to the plain, plump, immensely wealthy Barbara Milliken Ogden, the only granddaughter of Edward A. Milliken, one of the firm’s founders. Once the partnership was safely tucked away, it would be time to think of a good way to end the relationship without damaging her career. The idea of being free to pursue new adventures pleased her.

Lainie watched the activity below her window. Banks of dirty snow were pushed to the side, and the center of Monument Square was filled with people. Small groups, mostly twos and fours, scurried in and out of the shops and restaurants that lined the pedestrian plaza on the south side of the square. On this last Friday before Christmas, they were open late and busy. In the middle, near the monument, a brilliantly lit, sixty-foot blue spruce commemorated the season. A big, beautiful decorated tree. Not a Christmas tree, though. Lainie remembered reading that in the Press Herald. These days calling a Christmas tree a Christmas tree wasn’t done. A city spokeswoman told the reporter that Portland was calling it a holiday tree. ‘We want it to sound denominationally neutral,’ she said. ‘We don’t want to offend anybody.’ Lainie snorted. She hated such PC stupidity.

At the base of the tree, a troupe of carolers in faux Victorian garb sang. A few dozen people gathered around to listen and sing along. Most were bundled up against the cold and looked, from where Lainie stood, like little round Michelin men and women. Some held the mittened hands of even smaller Michelin children. Down near the entrance to Longfellow Books, she spotted Kyle, the hot-dog man, tending his pushcart, his trademark white apron wrapped tightly around a heavy woolen jacket. On his head he wore a leather aviator’s cap with the earflaps pulled down over his gray hair. He seemed to be doing a brisk business selling the gyros, hot dogs, and Italian sausages he grilled over an open charcoal fire.

Lainie smiled. Kyle was her buddy. He always asked how she was doing, when they were going to make her a partner, and, with a wink and a smile, when she was going to go out on his boat with him. He talked about his boat a lot. A twenty-eight-foot Chris-Craft. He’d have to sell a hell of a lot of hot dogs to be able to afford a thing like that. Then again, Lainie knew, because she was a customer, Kyle sold merchandise more profitable than snacks. Need a little happiness? Need a little joy? Go see the hot-dog man. Either way, she enjoyed his flirting, enjoyed his easy Irish charm. Sometimes, when she was making a buy, she caught him looking at her a little too directly. Sometimes he looked away. Sometimes he didn’t. Once or twice he said with that wry little smile of his that he might let her have a bag or two for free. God, what a thought. Lainie and the hot-dog man. There was no way in hell she would ever let that happen. Not now. Not ever. Still, he wasn’t bad-looking.

She wasn’t sure how old Kyle was but guessed somewhere in his early fifties. It was an age she found attractive. The same age as Hank. The same age as her Contracts professor at Cornell, the one who gave her the A she needed to make Law Review. About the same age, she calculated, her stepfather would be today.

Lainie had been thinking a lot about Albright lately, though she hadn’t seen him in years. Her mind went back, once again, to that time in their old house in Rockport. A year or so before his career started taking off. Two years before he divorced her mother and moved out. Without his income her mother couldn’t afford the old place. She sold it, used part of the money to buy the smaller, crummier place in Rockland, and invested the rest.

She could see that bastard’s face now. The handsome, brilliant Wallace Stevens Albright. A lawyer whose parents named him for a poet, though she’d never known a man with less poetry in his soul. He never let anyone call him Walt or Wally or any other nickname. It was always Wallace. Or Mr Albright. Lainie was seven when he married her mother and they went to live with him. He wanted her to call him Daddy. She never would, though she knew it made him angry. He wasn’t her father. He even wanted her to change her name from Goff to Albright. She didn’t want to do that either. Thank God, her mother said no and made it stick. Otherwise Lainie might be carrying that bastard’s name even now.

A strict disciplinarian and a stubborn perfectionist, Wallace Stevens Albright held himself, he said, to a higher standard. Lainie smiled bitterly at the memory. Yeah, right. A higher standard. Like pulling down her pants and spanking her when she was little for the slightest infraction. Bastard was getting off on it. But, oh, did he ever put on a righteous show. She was never able to please him or earn his praise, no matter how hard she tried – and, though she hated him, she did try. It seemed important to win him over, to impress him. Important but impossible. She remembered how once in ninth grade, she got a ninety-five on an algebra exam. It was an exam half the class flunked, even a lot of the smart kids. When she told him about it, proudly, he mocked her. Oh, really? A ninety-five? What happened to the other five points? She went to bed that night feeling like she had failed. Again. Fuck him.

She was fifteen when the really bad shit started. The day of the Belfast soccer game. Lainie closed her eyes and it all came flooding back, immediate and real. Her sophomore year in high school. Camden Regional, not Rockland, where she had to go after the divorce. It was an afternoon in late October. One of those cold, rainy fall days that in Maine presage the coming of winter. It was an away game, and it had rained on and off all day long. The field was a sea of mud. All the girls were slipping and sliding, and by the end of the game their skin and hair were covered in drying brown gunk. Lainie scored two goals and just missed a third when the ball hit the left upright and bounced back onto the field. She knew, if she told him, Wallace would focus on the one she missed. Maybe if you’d worked a little harder you would have made it, Lainie. You can always improve. You can always strive to be better. Yeah. Just like you, Daddy Dearest.