Diary of a Yuppie (9 page)

"I deny it absolutely!"

"Do you think I haven't checked it out with your client? I'm not crazy, Mr. Deane."

"Are you all going to sit here and put up with this?" Glenn almost screamed. "Take down your pants, Service, and let them kiss your ass!"

A burst of questions now hit me.

"What the hell's going on here?"

"What were the checks for?"

"Why were you spying on Glenn?"

"Gentlemen, gentlemen!" I called. "The matter is a simple one. Glenn Deane made the unilateral decision that the compensation of three of his associates was inadequate. He requested special bonuses for them, which were refused by the executive committee on the ground that they would throw our compensation system out of balance and create firm-wide jealousy and dissatisfaction. Mr. Deane thereupon proceeded to take our management into his own hands. He reduced a firm bill to a client on the understanding that the client would issue checks totaling the sum reduced directly to the three lawyers involved. Do you still deny it, Mr. Deane?"

"I won't answer, you shithead."

"Mr. Deane," I continued, addressing the table in cold triumph, "has diverted firm funds for his private purposes. It is embezzlement, pure and simple. I don't know about the rest of you, but I do not propose to continue practicing law in the same firm with a man who has behaved in this fashion."

There was a great deal of shouting and screaming after this, and it was ultimately agreed that the partners should be given more time to think it over. The next week was a hectic one in which I was constantly visited by groups with different offers of compromise. Deane, I was assured, would never do such a thing again. Deane would gladly return the fifteen thousand dollars to the firm. Deane would agree to resign from the executive committee and interfere no more with my control of the firm.

But I was adamant. I knew that he could never be trusted. I assured each partner that I would never practice law with him again. And they knew that I meant it; that was the great thing. They knew that I would walk out of the firm alone, if necessary, and take a vital part of its business with me. Furthermore, even to those who regarded me as harsh and autocratic there was no disgrace in siding with me. Glenn Deane had defrauded them; I never had. They might deplore my lack of mercy, my absence of charity, but they had to concede that I was only living up to my often enunciated principles.

In the end Glenn resigned and went to work for Ace Investors. Only one partner, Lew Pessen, left with him. And we kept Ace as a client! I was perfectly aware that my rule would be resented for some time to come. But it had been established; that was the real point. I could afford to be lenient now, at least until I had patched together our broken unity. I had done the only thing I could have done. I realized it, and I slept well of nights.

And now I come to the shattering aftermath. Lynne Deane went to see Alice in her office and called me every name in the book. When Alice and I next met, I was informed by my now marble-faced, alienated wife that the question of our reconciliation was closed.

"I
SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT
Lynne's abuse might have recommended me to you," I protested to Alice. "She was never a favorite of yours."

"But you don't deny that you threw Glenn out of the firm?"

Patiently, if a bit wearily, I recounted the facts.

"And you wouldn't give him a second chance?"

"Of course not. The whole point was to be rid of him. It was a golden opportunity. He might have been too smart ever to give me another."

"Oh, my God, you plotted it! Oh, Robert, Robert, can't you see what's happening to you?"

"How can a man not become whatever it is you think I'm becoming when his wife leaves him for doing his job?"

"Then you
do
see it?"

"I see what you think you see." I turned away from her with despair in my heart. "But I'm tired of your illusions, Alice! You think you're like Scrooge's girl friend in
A Christmas Carol
, who gives him up because she feels his heart is turning to gold. So noble, so sad, so firm. But what horse manure it all is! My work supports a hundred people. Before I'm through it may be five times that number. And all you can see is that I've taken off my gloves to handle an s.o.b. the only way he can be handled! All right, let's give up on reconciliation. What more can I say?"

What I had to despair of ever making Alice see was that I was not immoral. I simply accepted the basic greed and selfishness of human beings. I recognized that they are always going to act in their own interests and that they should be allowed to do so except where an actual crime to person or property was threatened. To avoid crime in law was the sole moral imperative, and it was imposed on man not by God but by man. Yet on that sole imperative hung all "the law and the prophets." A man could go right up to the threshold of crime, but not a step farther. Not even a half step! Alice, for the life of her, couldn't see this as a moral code. But to me it is the only valid one. The rest is cant.

My dissent from Alice's code may spring from a dichotomy between myself and the culture in which we were both raised, a dichotomy that was probably the determining cause for the form my personality has taken. For I could never see that there was any real substance to the idols that my elders respected or purported to respect. They were not only hollow, but you could
see
they were hollow, or if you had any doubt about it, you had only to give one of them a tap.

It was not only my father's false pride in his lowly position in his law firm that had disgusted me. That had simply provided a start to my speculations. I could also see that the congregation in the church where he passed the plate was either daydreaming or wrestling with dark doubts. None of them, I was convinced, believed in the efficacy of their orisons or in an afterlife. Indeed, the church had fallen to such low esteem that some of my family's friends half apologized for attending services, explaining that they enjoyed the "poetry" of the old ritual. To avoid the bald terror of the idea of extinction I suppose they clutched at a wild hope of some kind of survival, however nebulous, and then firmly turned their thoughts from it. And Protestants not only don't believe in the virgin birth, they tend to regard their ministers as namby-pambies. A "real" man would go in for success, wouldn't he, and success is power, and what is power, as the Bible puts it, but being able to say to this man, Go, and he goeth, and to that man, Come, and he cometh? And what of the multitudinous majority that can never come to power? Oh, they have "dignity" or "honor," like my old man.

Even in their personal lives the grinning idols rang false. The "love" of which they prated, as the be-all and end-all of life, was either a mild sentimentality or a mere sexual impulse. Parental duty was the artificial continuation of an instinct; a child's duty to a parent was a myth. What made me bitter was not so much the real world, which was understandable and could be coped with, but the thing that people made of it, a bedizened and tinseled Christmas tree as opposed to a noble fir standing proud in the forest. When I hid my thoughts from the world, I found that my blond and blue-eyed boyish looks made a perfect mask. I have always at least looked the fool that so many people try conscientiously to be.

But the great thing about Alice was that from the beginning of our friendship at the age of sixteen I never associated her with any of the falseness of our suburban community. She was at all times, as she still is, totally and sublimely honest. She may have believed in the idols, but they never made
her
hollow. Wherever I put my hammer on her soul it rang loud and true. And as I write this it breaks my heart to face the fact that I have lost her.

We were in love through all of our four years at Columbia, and it was not until we were seniors that she began to be troubled about me. I think that one of the reasons that she was so late in conceiving her doubts was her intense gratitude to me for accepting her scruples about sexual intercourse. Many, perhaps most of our classmates, children of the sexual revolution, immediately converted their casual attractions to affairs, but Alice belonged to the minority of women who believed in preserving their virginity until marriage. She did not criticize those of more liberal views; she simply insisted that she had to be true to what she believed was right for herself.

"I do not want to belong to you until I know I shall belong to you for life," she would solemnly tell me.

I was so much in love that I was grateful to settle for her not going out with other men. So long as I could be sure of being the exclusive object of her affections I was able to put up with almost anything. There were times, I confess, when even the knowledge that I was wholly loved by the glowing creature at my side did not guarantee my fidelity, but Alice never knew of any falling off, or if she did, she was big enough to look the other way, allowing me the latitude of our era. But nothing of any real emotional importance occurred to me in all that time aside from Alice.

Her doubts arose over some of my opinions rather than over anything that I actually did. It distressed her that I was reluctant to go "all out" on issues over which she, like most college students of the time, felt passionately, as for example, when I defended American opposition to communism in Vietnam or suggested that Richard Nixon's brand of patriotism was not wholly contemptible. But what was worse than any particular difference of opinion between us was Alice's growing suspicion that there was apt to be a reservation on my part behind our apparent accord: that I tended to believe that most proposed social cures were as bad as or worse than the disease they purported to treat, that idealists were usually talking through their hats and that two opinions always existed as to the degree of any villain's iniquity.

"I never seem to be able to tie you down," she would complain.

"Why should you want to?" I would retort. "Can't you live and let live?"

But she couldn't. She was disturbed by my tolerance of opinions that she found obnoxious. She didn't, for example, think it was at all funny when I quipped: "Some of my best friends are anti-Semites," and she wouldn't go out with me for a week when I refused to sign a petition calling for an investigation of police brutality. Alice could be very stern indeed.

But our greatest difficulty came over her father. Alice adored Jock Norton with a hero worship that made the faintest implied criticism of him seem a besmirching mud attack, and her suspicions of my habit of mental reservation made it hard for me to be convincingly enthusiastic. Besides, I didn't like Norton. It is always difficult to like someone who dislikes oneself, and Alice's father was always sniffing out the philistine that he obviously believed to be lurking under my exterior of good will.

Norton was a man of studied amiability and sly sarcasms who would keep you under relentless oral examination until you began to sense how much hostility might underlie that probing curiosity. For years he had been in the habit of offering me exaggerated compliments with only the faintest note of mockery: compliments on my looks, my athletic aptitude, my popularity, my good marks, my interest in literature. But when, as undergraduates at Columbia, Alice and I began to go steady, a more acerb note crept into his treatment of me. He would keep his glinting eyes fixed on me as if I were some interesting freak, running his long fingers through his long greasy hair, chewing the ends of his glasses, twisting his thin restless body as if to defy me to define his undeniable charm, as he said such things as:

"I never cease to marvel, dear boy, at your spirited enthusiasm for such florid decadents as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds. That a young man who might play Stover in a film version of 'Stover at Yale' should interest himself in the lacquered prose of those two old queens bespeaks wonders for the tolerance of your generation."

"But if I could write, Mr. Norton, I should like to write like Pater."

"Ah, the bleak wind that blows from the pure hills of youth! Avast, ye spirits of the glorious dead who made fetishes of the pungent phrase, the club that was called a club, the Anglo-Saxon term, the four-letter word! Shades of Hemingway and O'Hara, begone! Henry James is god, and Pater is his prophet!"

"Is it necessary to choose between writers? Can't we keep them all?"

At this moment Norton became almost serious. "No! Nobody ever loved literature who loved it all! Of course we must choose!"

I had the distinct feeling that Norton disliked the idea of anything sexual between me and his daughter, not so much because he wanted to keep her, in a Freudian sense, for himself, as because he did not want her to give pleasure to any man. He was jealous, really, not so much of me as of her. I am quite sure that I am not making up this homosexual side of Norton's nature. It was the only thing that really explained his hostility. So long as he could not have me for himself—and I believe he was not a practicing but an inhibited pederast—he did not want anyone—certainly not a woman, most of all his beloved daughter—to have me. Norton was drawn to good-looking young men, but he hated them for the very attraction that they exercised, and he did all he could to make them seem boobs in contrast to his brilliant self. Oh, they might have beautiful bodies, yes—much good it would do them!—but who had a mind as beautiful and a wit as sharp as Jock Norton?

Of course, he always pretended friendship for me. He would even, on occasion, ask me to join him for dinner, just the two of us, at the Yale Club, where he always drank a good deal too much. Like the Baron de Charlus in Proust's novel he could not resist the subject of homosexuality, but being of a later generation he did not have to pretend to scorn it. On the contrary, he maintained an attitude of lofty, detached tolerance.

On one of these occasions he drank so much that I believe he was actually on the verge of betraying himself, not only to me but to himself. An evening headline about a march to promote gay rights gave him the start that he needed on a favorite subject.