The Partner Track: A Novel (11 page)

I thought about that for a moment. Then I looked up and said, “I don’t understand. Why would anyone need to do something like that for
you
?”

His eyes fluttered open. He looked at me. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s just that—well, you’re Murph.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know. You just fit in so perfectly.”

Murph laughed. “You think you know everything, don’t you?” he said softly. His eyes were closed again.

“No.” I shook my head and sat up. It suddenly seemed extremely important that I set the record straight. “That’s just it, Murph. I
don’t
think I know everything. When I first got here I didn’t think I knew
any
thing! I just mean that you know how to play the game so well, that’s all. It doesn’t come naturally to me the way it does for you.”

I couldn’t believe I was actually saying all of these things to Murph. I’d never said anything like this to anyone before except Tyler. And I knew Tyler would not approve of my telling all this to someone like Murph. One of them.

“And what makes you think it comes naturally to me?” Murph asked.

“Are you kidding? It’s obvious. It’s all about what you’re used to.”

“What I’m used to?”

“Yeah. I just mean that when you come from a place of privilege, this place is a lot easier to navigate.”

Now he turned his head and looked at me sideways. “A place of privilege?” he asked. I could hear his quotes around the phrase. “And what would
I
know about coming from a place of privilege?”

Murph was confusing me. I knew that rich white people didn’t like to talk about their money, but as long as I was being this honest with him, I felt he should be so with me. It seemed only fair.

“Huh?” he nudged. His voice was gentle. I could tell he wasn’t mad, just curious.

“Well, your family’s house on the Cape, for one,” I blurted. It was the first thing I could think of.

He laughed again.

“What?” I said.

“You’ve got a vivid imagination, Yung. It’s not
my
family’s summer house—it’s my college roommate’s. I’ve just been invited up to Chatham every summer since sophomore year. They let me tag along.”

“So that’s when you learned to sail?”

“Well, there wasn’t exactly a sailing club at West Tilden Regional High School,” Murph said.

“You went to a public high school?”

Murph leaned in close, like he was letting me in on something. “I just finished paying off all my student loans last year, Yung. I had tons to pay off, college
and
law school.”

I felt like an idiot. All these years I had somehow managed to make up a whole life, an elite prepster history for Jeff Murphy that simply didn’t exist. As much as it bothered me when people assumed things about me, well, seems I was just as guilty.

“Wow,” I said finally. “I’m sorry I—”

“Look,” Murph cut in. “We all make assumptions about each other. It’s what people do.”

“I guess.” I still felt sheepish.

Murph leaned his head back and closed his eyes again. “And for the record, I think about that stuff sometimes, too.”

I think I said, “Then you and I have more in common than I thought.” But maybe I just thought this.

*   *   *

We sat there, peacefully, in the stillness of the darkened clubhouse, with my head resting on Murph’s shoulder, for what seemed like a long time. At some point I dozed off. I don’t know how long we sat there in the darkness—maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour—before a large, clamorous group of summer associates made their way down the corridor toward the buses, talking loudly.

“I couldn’t fucking
believe
those guys!” shrieked one.

“Yeah, this’ll be up on YouTube in about two seconds,” giggled another.

“Good luck explaining
this
at on-campus recruiting this fall,” someone else said, laughing.

Murph gently jostled my shoulder. “Okay, Yung, we should go.” He stood up, grabbed both my wrists, and pulled me to my feet. He had to work at this, because I was resisting. I never wanted to leave the comfort and safety of that room, and I wanted Murph to stay there, too.

When we were both on our feet, he gave me a brief, awkward little hug. “Come on, we still need to get our stuff from the locker rooms. The sooner we get back to the city, the sooner we can get you home.”

I dozed nearly the entire bus ride back to Manhattan—my head against the window, Murph feeling solid and warm beside me, eyes closed. Having him there made me feel so protected, so safe. Even more than that, I was beginning to feel
understood.

Murph was right. I did feel better by the time we stepped off the bus in front of the Parsons Valentine building, although I was still a little woozy and the silhouette of midtown looked a hazy blur. I stood obediently on the sidewalk while Murph flagged down a cab to take me the ten blocks uptown to my apartment. He waited until I’d folded myself into the backseat before leaning into the cab and telling the driver, “Make sure you see her get safely into the building, right?” and handing him a twenty.

Get in,
I wanted to say to Murph.
Don’t leave me yet.
It had felt so nice to be so close to him, in the safety of the clubhouse and on the bus, and to be talking, really
talking,
but now it felt like some precious window was abruptly closing, and I wasn’t going to get a chance to say what I really wanted.
Get in, Murph. Come home with me.

“Get in,” I actually mumbled, but if Murph heard this, he chose to ignore it.

He gently shut the door of the cab, leaned his head in the window, and said, “You’ll be all right, Yung. Sleep it off. I’ll see you Monday.”

As my taxi pulled away from the curb, I watched Murph’s figure get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror.

The driver let me out in the horseshoe drive of my building. True to his promise, he waited until I reached the lobby doors before speeding off. Safely ensconced inside the soothing, tomblike privacy of the elevator, I closed my eyes and slumped against the brass handrail as it hurtled the nineteen floors up.

Once inside my apartment, I kicked off my shoes, tossed my bag toward the couch, and noticed the message light blinking on the phone on my hall table.

“Ingrid-ah,” my mother’s voice came through in Mandarin. “It’s Friday, after ten o’clock, you’re still not home? I heard it’s a little cool in New York today—make sure you bring a sweater when you go out. Daddy and I worry about you, up there all by yourself, always working so hard. Call home when you can. Love, Mom.”

Hearing her voice made me inexplicably sad. I didn’t want my parents to worry about me all the time. Wasn’t I doing just fine as it was? Wasn’t I getting everything they came here for in the first place?

I went into my bedroom and stepped out of my white cocktail dress, leaving it in a little pool on the floor. As I climbed into bed, exhausted, tipsy, a little sad, wrapping myself tightly in my duvet, my final thought before my head hit the pillow was that I should have kissed Jeff Murphy as we sat there alone in the darkness of that clubhouse, and now the moment was irretrievable.

SIX

“Parsons Valentine Summer Outing Marred by Racist Parody.”

That was the headline of Monday’s
New York Law Journal.
The
New York Post
was more creative—“Ghetto, Fabulous? White-Shoe Law Firm Gets Black Eye.” All the legal blogs and chat rooms were abuzz over the “racist scandal over at Parsons Valentine.” Ninety-three seconds of grainy cell phone footage had been posted over the weekend to both YouTube and Above the Law before the firm had finally gotten them to take it down. In the video, you couldn’t really make out what was happening onstage, but you could hear the song’s refrain clear as you please. A scathing post on Gawker was titled simply “Parsons: Paradise?” It had already gotten 477 comments, and still counting.

It was nine fifteen when Rachel called. “So were you there for the skit?” she asked breathlessly. “Did you actually
see
it?”

“Oh, I saw it, Rach,” I sighed.

“And? Was it as bad as all the blogs are saying?”

“It was worse.”

“Wow,” she breathed. “So what do you think they’re going to do about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, they’ve got to be in full damage control mode by now.”

“I’m not sure there’s much they
can
do,” I said. They sure as hell weren’t going to fire Hunter Russell, that much I knew.

“But they’ve got to do some kind of CYA,” Rachel shot back. “Don’t you remember what happened at Foster Cowan?”

Of course I did. Foster Cowan & Mays LLP had been one of the dozen or so firms in the city that considered itself Top Five—until a few years ago, when six female associates reported being groped by two inebriated male partners during the firm’s annual summer booze cruise around Manhattan. After weeks of stubborn silence, Foster Cowan had finally issued a single tepid statement:
We are regretful if anyone in attendance felt in any way aggrieved by any of our attorneys’ actions.

Basically, we’re sorry you’re so sensitive.

In an even more stunningly boneheaded move, each female lawyer at the firm had received a ceramic mug and a hoodie.

The nation’s top law schools had responded swiftly, some even going so far as to ban Foster Cowan from recruiting on campus. All of the SAs—WLSA (Women Law Student Association), AFALSA (African American Law Student Association), APALSA (Asian Pacific American Law Student Association); LALSA (Latino American Law Student Association); and LGBTLSA (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered Law Student Association)—mobilized their troops, firing off thousands of e-mails urging recipients to
PLS FORWARD!!!!!!
Sure enough, fewer
Harvard Law Review
résumés came in to Foster Cowan that year than at any previous time in the firm’s hundred-year history. A small but conspicuous cluster of Fortune 100 clients began publicly taking their business to other law firms—news that rated a brief item in the business section of the
Times.
The firm’s Top Ten ranking plummeted.

Foster Cowan had been, as it were,
blacklisted.

Two years later, however, Foster Cowan had recruited a high-profile African American female senior partner and inaugurated the Foster Cowan Women in Law Fellowship at Columbia Law School. Many of its top clients returned, and Foster Cowan was allowed back to recruit at Harvard and Yale.

It was back to business as usual.

By midweek, Pamela Karnow, along with a dozen or so other Parsons Valentine partners and associates outraged by the skit, had formed a group called FLARE—Firm Lawyers Against Racism Everywhere. I’d heard that even a few summer associates had joined up, including none other than Cameron Alexander (along with, I was sure, a couple of members of her fan club). FLARE was demanding an emergency meeting with the firm’s Management Committee to discuss an appropriate response and possible disciplinary action.

To my knowledge, no one on the Management Committee had said a single word to Matt, Kyle, or Hunter about any disciplinary action. In fact, the three of them were looking quite chipper when I spotted them together at lunch in the Jury Box. There’d even been a flattering note in the firm newsletter—the
Daily Brief
—on our recent Lawyers League softball victory over Simpson Thacher, in a squeaker, thanks to a double late in the final inning, hit by Hunter himself.

In the days since the outing, I’d been trying hard to avoid running into Hunter. Personally, I didn’t think he was an actual racist, just an idiot. Anyway, I resolved not to get in the middle of it. Let FLARE do its thing, if it wanted to. I had enough on my plate to worry about.

*   *   *

“Knock, knock.”

I looked up from the SunCorp purchase agreement I was reviewing to see Marty Adler leaning into my office, a big Cheshire Cat grin on his face. “Hi, Ingrid. You coming up to the meeting?”

“Of course.”

“The meeting” was the Corporate Department lunch scheduled for twelve thirty. We held these department luncheons the second Friday of every month, ostensibly to “bond” as a department. The real purpose, however, was for the rainmakers to beat their chests and let the associates know what new deals we should expect to be slaving over in the weeks ahead.

“Care for an escort?” Adler held out an arm as if asking me to dance.

I laughed. “Thanks, but I have to respond to an e-mail from Ted Lassiter first. See you in a minute?”

“Okay. But don’t be late, now.”

Something was up. Marty Adler did not come to associates’ offices merely to round us up for a routine department meeting. “What’s going on, Marty?” I asked, smiling a little, looking at him sideways. “Why are you so worried about me being there?”

“Well, let’s just say we have something a little special on the agenda today. I think you’ll be very pleased, Ingrid.” He winked. “See you up there.” Then he was gone.

I stared at the empty doorway for a full minute, trying to suppress my jubilance. The e-mail could wait. Adler was clearly planning to mention to the entire department what an amazing job I’d been doing on SunCorp. How I’d won Ted Lassiter over after our rocky first meeting, and how he would now only phone Adler with a question when he couldn’t reach me first.

I arched my back, took a deep breath, and sauntered over to my wardrobe mirror. I freshened up my lip gloss and mascara before heading up to the conference room.

People were still trickling in, even though it was already ten minutes past our start time. This was common practice. Parsons Valentine lawyers did not show up for internal meetings on the dot; it would suggest you didn’t have enough to do at your desk.

A lectern had been set up at the front of the room. The tables were arranged in a wide U. Water pitchers were set up at four-seat intervals along the length of the starched white tablecloths, and a buffet lunch was laid out in silver chafing dishes along one wall. The aromas of roasted potatoes and some kind of fish wafted toward me. As I got in the buffet line, Hunter came up behind me and said, a little too close to my ear, “God, I hope this doesn’t take all day. I’ve got so much shit to do.”