Diary of a Yuppie (3 page)

"What do you suggest, Branders?" This perhaps would be from Lamb, gray-haired, square of chin and shoulder, an executive from a cover of
Fortune.
"Would you send in troops through Pakistan and call them volunteers?"

"Damn it, Al, I think I might!"

"But the Reds would send in ten men for every one of ours. It would be Vietnam all over again against a foe many times as strong. You have nothing to fight with, Branders!"

"It is recorded in the Scriptures that Samson smote the enemy with the jawbone of an ass." I can just hear Blakelock's high, snooty laugh. "So if you, my dear Albert, will oblige us by shipping your lower maxillary to the Department of Defense...!"

But now Blakelock would be going too far. He would not be so acerbic if something were not eating at his heart. He knows that in a day or so an attack will be launched against Shaughnessy Products that will in all probability result in the ouster of his golf companion from a position it has taken him a lifetime's labor to achieve. What will Lamb think of him, knowing that on that lovely morning in the country, smacking the golf balls and talking of heroic stands in Asia, his supposed friend was actively plotting the raid that has destroyed him? And indeed Albert Lamb
was
furious and has since retired from the foursome. But Blakelock does not so much care what Lamb thinks of him; he is too big a man for that. What he really minds is what he must think of himself. That he, Branders Blakelock, a god of the Irving, a man of good will, a holder-up of the beacon light of good fellowship and humanitarianism, should find himself in a position that in the good old rosy past might have been described as more suitable to a legless, slithering reptile!

Yes, I feel sorry for him. I really do. But what I cannot get away from is that he is basically doing it to himself. He wants to be a leader of today's bar and at the same time reconcile his actions with a code of ethics for a
désœuvré
society of nineteenth-century aristocrats. And obviously it's not going to work.

A
LICE'S REACTION
was very different from Mr. Blakelock's. Whereas he was concerned with my ethics, she was concerned with my relationship with him.

"Why do you have to be more Catholic than the pope?" she demanded. "If he doesn't like it, why not drop it?"

"Because I want this takeover to take."

"Isn't that his affair? You're not a partner yet."

"No, but do I even want to be a partner of a firm that hasn't the guts to do the job?"

"Guts? It's the first time I've heard you accuse Mr. Blakelock of not having guts."

"Call it fastidiousness then. His nostrils are too tender. One nasty smell, and he gags."

"One nasty smell! Ransacking garbage pails?"

"Of course, you would jump on that aspect of it. If you concede that information has to be gathered, you must go where it is."

"I guess I don't concede it has to be gathered."

"Why should you? You're not a lawyer. But leave the practice to those that are."

"I do! To Mr. Blakelock! I'm perfectly happy so long as you follow his lead. But now it seems you no longer do."

What man who calls himself that would not have been angered? To have it spat in my eye that my boss was not only my boss but my preceptor, and a badly needed one at that! As I looked at Alice, so tall and fine and proud and dark, it struck me that she and Blakelock were acting as if they had formed a secret alliance to keep an unruly boy under control.

"Maybe we'd better have supper," I equivocated. "Is it ready?"

"It can be ready in ten minutes. I want to go on with this first. You've changed, Bob."

"I haven't changed in wanting my supper."

"I tell you it's coming."

Alice was the perfect wife. She took pride in being ready for me whenever I came home. Our two girls had had their supper and were doing homework in their room. Audrey, who was eleven, sometimes supped with us, but not tonight. Alice would have left her office at five and come home to take over from Norma, our black cook-cleaning woman, who left at six, having prepared the meal, which only had to be warmed up. At seven, when I arrived, on nights that I wasn't working late, she was clad in a long dressing gown tightly belted, which admirably set off her tall, full figure. Alice was a dark beauty with pale skin and eyes that looked as if they would have betrayed laughter had she not been so determined to be serious.

Our living room owed more to her gravity than to her taste. I think Alice thought that interior decoration was trivial. There was too much blue on the sofas and chairs, and she had a cabinet of ornaments given her by a mother of middle-class tastes that contained statuettes of animals and birds. The walls had two Piranesi prints that had belonged to her grandparents. It was surprising that a woman of so much character could have produced a chamber with so little. But Alice was literary; her domain was words.

"You think you're always the same, Bob. But you're changing, little by little, all the time."

"In what way?"

"Shall I put it bluntly?"

"When do you not?"

"Well, then you're getting hard-boiled. Or perhaps I should put it that you're trying to get hard-boiled. As if you thought there was something desirable about being cool and clear and above it all and looking down on poor scrapping mortals."

"And there isn't?" But for all my jaunty tone, I was cruelly hurt. Who wants to be thought hard-boiled?

"No! Sometimes I wonder what happened to the blue-eyed, laughing boy who sat next to me at Columbia and collected the famous lines of English poetry that had clumsy mates."

"'My heart is like a singing bird,'" I promptly quoted.

"'Whose nest is in a watered shoot,'" she came right back at me.

"'Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime.'"

"'A rose-red city half as old as time!'"

"I could go on."

"Could you, Bob? When I see you day after day, night after night, so wrapped up in one of these ghastly corporate raids, I can't help but wonder."

"That's my job. The only difference between now and eight years ago is that now I'm making some of the decisions. When I was a junior clerk I had no responsibility. I might as well have been running the elevator. But I always knew the time was coming when I'd have my share. What else was I slaving for?"

"Was that really it? You mean you always imagined that one day you'd be doing this kind of work? And loving it?"

"Well, of course, I couldn't know I'd become a specialist in takeovers. But it was always going to be some aspect of corporate law. That's what being an attorney is all about."

"Even the dirty tricks?"

"Even what you call the dirty tricks. The trouble with you and Blakelock is that neither of you has the remotest understanding of the moral climate in which we live today. It's all a game, but a game with very strict rules. You have to stay meticulously within the law; the least misstep, if caught, involves an instant penalty. But there is no particular moral opprobrium in incurring a penalty, any more than there is being offside in football. A man who is found to have bought or sold stock on inside information, or misrepresented his assets in a loan application, or put his girl friend on the company payroll, is not 'looked down on,' except by sentimentalists. He's simply been caught, that's all. Even the public understands that. Watergate showed it. You break the rules, pay the penalty and go back to the game. Albert Lamb would do to any officer in Atlantic exactly what I propose doing to him. If not, he should be benched."

"So you think Mr. Blakelock should be benched."

"I'm certainly beginning to wonder about it."

Alice was fair enough to give to what I had said some moments of thought. But then she came, in her woman's fashion, back to the personal aspect. "I guess what I really mind is your enthusiasm about it. If you thought of it just as a job, that would be one thing. After all, it's not your fault that American businessmen are such sharks. But the glee with which you ferret around in ash cans! Why do you have to want to do so much more than Mr. Blakelock wants?"

"I've told you. He's old-fashioned. And I have to get ahead."

"Have to?"

"Well, do you think my family don't cost me a mint? It's all very well for you to spend your days with your poets and think high and lofty thoughts, but I notice that you expect private schools for the girls and that you like to travel and—"

"Yes, of course I do. You don't have to be a financial giant to have those things."

"But if I'm going to be anything, I'm going to be a giant. There's no halfway for me."

She sighed. "That's it, then. You want to be what you're making yourself. It's a free choice."

"And always has been. I haven't changed. That's where you're wrong. I could prove it to you in the papers I've kept."

She visibly shuddered. "You mean you might let me read them? After all these years? I wonder if I want to. Now."

"Because they might show you had married the wrong man?"

Our eyes met. "Maybe. Maybe that
is
what I'm afraid of."

If she had only burst into tears! There is nothing I would not have done for a weeping Alice. I have a recurring dream of Alice suffering some cruel and undeserved punishment, writhing, bewildered, clutching a rag about her exposed limbs as a savage tormentor strikes blow after blow upon her bare back. Alice hurt, terrified, pleading, desperate...; I wake up and cry out aloud at this picture, as vivid as some nineteenth-century academic painting of a tortured Christian slave girl. At such moments I love Alice so passionately that I can imagine myself, like the Roman officer in
The Sign of the Cross
, tearing off my insignia and leaping into the arena to meet the lion's gory mane at the side of my love. A happy death!

But no. Alice always has to be above me. She has to be the angel of light. She seems almost able to divine the rush of my inner sympathy and anxious to head it off. I suppose she spurns it as sentimentality. But love is love, in all its forms. It is not to be lightly rebuffed.

A
LICE THINKS
we have been drawing apart. We haven't. She has been drawing apart from me. And she thinks that we are becoming disillusioned with each other. We aren't. She is becoming disillusioned with me. I have the same opinion of her that I had when I married her, and I believe that my opinion is still a correct one. This is not because I am more perceptive than Alice. It is simply that I am not burdened with the astigmatism of her need to idealize people. She is not unlike Mr. Blakelock in this. As a matter of fact, she is not unlike many of our middle class in this. Her parents had the same failing and taught it to her. My parents also tried, but they were inept teachers. Any child could have seen through them.

When Alice and I enter a cocktail party, we tend to give the impression of a fine young American couple who will probably go to the top of their ladders, or fairly high up anyway, and who will grace those ladders in doing so. "What a fine pair!" people exclaim. We are both of a good size, well made, with little fat; Alice has rich dark hair, a squarish face, perfect skin, and her eyes, wide apart, bear an expression that combines, charmingly, a warm sincerity with a faint, pleased surprise that she is so continually being confronted with such wonderful things. And I, of course, as I have so often confided to these pages, am the all-American kid (the kid in his early thirties, however), who looks as if he would like nothing better than to bound out of the house and pass a football with his host's sons and who was probably freckled when he was their age. The great difference between us is that Alice supposes that the impression we give bears some relation to the actuality. I know that it's just an act, like other people's acts. That does not necessarily make it sinister. Are other people sinister?

If I were to tell Alice that I love her as much as I did on the day we were married she would probably retort that in that case I have never really loved her. But would it be true? What is love? She has never ceased to be physically attractive to me, and I delight in her sense of humor and respect her intellect when it is not clouded by illusions about love and duty. If she were a little more honest with herself, she would be almost perfect. It is a fact, as she complains, that I do not miss her when I go off on business trips, but then I never miss anybody when I know I shall see them again in due course. This is true of all but the neurotically dependent, but it does not make one popular to say it. Alice likes to make a great deal of missing me, but then she wants to miss me. She does not think she would be a deep person if she did not miss the man she loved. Or ought to love.

For love to Alice is a very big thing. She thinks that people who do not have it have missed the best in life. She does not realize that everyone has it. That might make it seem too cheap. And it has to be based on a solid pedestal of honor; true love, in Alice's book, exists only between two morally upright and mutually trusting persons, who should also have a generous political and humanitarian viewpoint. I should not go so far as to say that she believes true love exists only between Democrats or liberal Republicans in tune with the
New York Times
editorial policy, but there might be a kernel of truth in it. True love may be found between Romeo and Juliet, but never between Macbeth and his lady. And indeed if Alice is today beginning to see me as morally unworthy of a great passion, it is because she is building an excuse for its failure between us. It cannot be she who has failed in the challenge of love. That would be unbearable to her.

Alice and I were both only children. Only children are apt to be extreme realists or extreme idealists; it is obvious how that turned out in each case. And the reasons are also obvious. Alice's father was a man who considered that he was a failure when he was actually rather a success. My father considered that he was a success when he was actually rather a failure. The offspring of each reacted in such a way as best to protect themselves from a repetition of parental illusions.