My old girl friend entered the room. For many years, I had dreamed about this day and had imagined that our encounter would be bittersweet and poignant. We would reminisce about the good old days in quiet voices, all passion clarified into resignation and tranquility. But it was nothing like that. My old girlfriend had not aged and since nothing about her had changed, it seemed as if my feelings were also unchanged and this took me by surprise.
When she unexpectedly entered, I was speaking with a large and very handsome man seated on a throne-like chair. I had attended law school with this man and always marveled at his handsome, immobile face and his powerful chest and body and his great hands that rested on the arms of his chair like the paws of a mighty lion. When my former girlfriend approached, I nodded at her, but she pretended not to see me. She made herself busy not seeing me and I felt a pang of bitterness.
I leaned close to the large man and whispered in his left ear: "Do you see her?" He nodded. "Pretty, isn't she?" I asked. The big man nodded again. My ex-girlfriend approached him on the right side of his throne. I felt boastful and said: "I lived with her for six months." That was untrue: we had been intimate for three years but I never lived with her and, during that time, she had a succession of affairs with other men. I looked across the big man's impassive face and saw that my ex-girlfriend was whispering in his right ear, all the while carefully avoiding the slightest glance in my direction.
The big man turned to me. His eyes flashed wrathfully: "I don't know how you can expect me to understand a word you are saying when you whisper to me at the same time she is talking in my other ear."
And I recognized that what he was said was indisputably true.
----
Some people do whatever they do with zest. They seize the day. I suppose that I should have studied law with enthusiasm and made the best of each day, enlivening each class with my optimism and high spirits.
Many people are vibrant and enjoy life. This is not the case with me. I am sullen and pessimistic by nature, unfriendly and solitary. I suppose it was amazing that I even had a girlfriend when I was in law school, let alone an attractive, if unfaithful, one.
My girlfriend had contempt for my sour attitude. She told me that I should enjoy life and be grateful for the pleasures that came my way. Often, she tried to persuade me to be more positive and sociable. She told me that lawyers were mostly positive and sociable people, personable with firm handshakes and a ready smile. "You will not succeed," she said, "unless you adopt a better attitude."
But she made success in my studies difficult. Invariably, at the end of each quarter, when I was studying for my exams, she would have an affair with one of my friends and, then, confess those events to me triggering hours of weeping and wailing. Every time I opened a book and began to seriously study, she would come to my side and begin explaining my failings and why those deficiencies had compelled her to betray me and, when I became angry with her, she would say that I was blaming her for what she had done, when, in fact, I was the one to blame.
The week before I took the bar exam, she arranged for me to find her in bed with a man that I had met a few times before, a mechanic with whom she traded oral sex for tune-ups on her car. My girlfriend told me that this man was very handy and that he could fix anything that was broken and that he had a cheerful heart. We clung to one another weeping because of my defects and my girlfriend said that she loved me but could never be faithful to me. My bitterness and constant recriminations were murdering her spirit.
I took the bar exam with tears in my eyes and thought that I had failed. Several of the questions made no sense to me at all. Those questions seemed to be about problems existing in the world that had nothing to do with the law at all, questions of etiquette and morality that I couldn't parse as involving any legal issues. One of the questions didn't even seem to me to be a question: rather, I read the little paragraph of prose on which I was supposed to spend the next hour writing an answer, as a parable, a depiction of a state of affairs that was inescapable.
Somehow, I passed the bar exam, although I didn't know this for many months. My girlfriend attended my graduation from law school and said that she was proud of me and, then, she went away and I never saw her again. Or, at least, never saw her until we met in the room with the big man.
ANALYZE THE LEGAL ISSUES PRESENTED BY THIS SITUATION AND SET FORTH THE ADVICE THAT YOU WOULD GIVE TO THIS CLIENT.
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