The Partner Track: A Novel (21 page)

Hunter, for his part, looked completely unsurprised. I wanted to reach over and wipe the complacency right off his face.

“Don’t mind my friends here,” Hanover said jovially, waving a hand in the direction of his
friends.
“We’re just having a little visit. Hunter’s father-in-law and I go back a long time. Justin’s dad, too, of course.”

Of course.

I nodded, unsure what to say. Not even sure an answer was expected. Jack Hanover was not being unkind. To him, it must seem perfectly normal that we should all be gathered here in this room in this precise configuration.

Upon seeing the older man’s nonchalance, Justin settled himself back into his chair. He may even have sipped his Scotch a little more deliberately, but maybe not. Turning away from me, he pretended to study the crowded collage of framed awards and photographs on Jack Hanover’s walls and bookshelves, but I saw a telltale flush spread across the back of his neck.

Good. I
hoped
I was making him uncomfortable.

I bent down in an awkward sort of crouch next to Hanover’s desk chair, showing him the SunCorp acquisition document and pointing out the clause in question.

Jack Hanover sat back, crossed his arms behind his head, and began to lecture me on the profundities of the
Gilder
decision and their potential impact on the Delaware Chancery Court. I was mortified. Humiliated. I couldn’t absorb a word he was saying.

I felt like a child stumbling onto a grown-up dinner party.

So I just stood there, a reluctant maid-in-waiting before Jack Hanover and his royal court. And I grew angrier and angrier. Until I was roiling.

Now Justin was staring directly at me. His expression was neither mocking nor pitying, just watchful. He appeared to be waiting for my reaction. Justin Keating—the paralegal who was supposed to be assisting
me
on this all-important deal—had been up here shooting the shit and sharing a fine tumbler of Scotch with the firm patriarch while I’d been running around the office like a chicken with its head cut off.

I felt humiliated and sweaty, unkempt and unwashed. I was a mess. And what a perfect little triumvirate to be a mess in front of! As I stood doubled over in my little awkward crouch by Jack’s chair, hoping my underarms didn’t stink and that my hair didn’t stick up too much, that my mascara wasn’t running
all
the way down my face, I could feel Justin Keating’s prying eyes sticking to me, and I hated him.

When Jack Hanover finally finished holding forth on the precedential value of
Gilder,
I gathered up the pages of my term sheet without looking at him, without looking at any of them. My face was burning, and I could feel the sting of little pinpricks behind my eyes.

“Thanks for your time, Jack,” I bleated—hating myself, hating my weak little voice—before hurtling out of the room.

Back in the safety of my office, with the door closed, I sank into my desk chair, closed my eyes, and began to cry quietly. I could hear more lawyers and secretaries leaving for the night.
Have a good weekend. See you Monday.
Then silence. After a time, I heard the cleaning ladies make their way down the hallway, vacuums roaring.

Why don’t we start our conversation another way, Ingrid. What made you want to become a lawyer in the first place?

I swiveled over to the window and looked out at the wide expanse of evening sky. Lights were coming on all up and down Madison Avenue. I stared for a long time at my beloved Manhattan skyline, its jagged silhouette so familiar to me now that I could sketch it by memory. I thought about the long-ago dinner party my parents had taken me to in Dr. Giles’s Fifth Avenue apartment, with its view of the world that I wanted.

It was the very reason I had willed myself to stay at Parsons Valentine all these years, the reason it had now become absolutely crucial—completely nonnegotiable—that I make partner. It was what would make all of these little humiliations and exclusions
amount
to something. It had to. More than anything, I wanted, once and for all, to shake that haunting suspicion that, while my record impressed and my work made the grade, I was ultimately
not valued
.

Oh yes, at a place like Parsons Valentine, I felt liked, but I did not feel
well
liked.

And yet, to become the first woman of color ever voted into the partnership at the prestigious law firm of Parsons Valentine & Hunt LLP would make things better for everyone in the long run. Wouldn’t it?
Sometimes, in the grander scheme, it behooves us to do certain things not because we want to, but because we are among the very few who
can.

Because I was one of the very few who
could,
I had long ago decided that I must.

TWELVE

With the next draft of the acquisition term sheet safely pitched to the other side, Murph and I spent Saturday night in the city together—a Hitchcock revival at the Film Forum, a three-hour, two-bottle-of-wine dinner at my favorite little bistro on Cornelia Street, and then, finally, my apartment.

It felt like a real date.

Murph felt like a real boyfriend.

When I opened my eyes the next morning, the first thing I did was to look over at Murph’s sleeping form. I half expected him not to be there. But sure enough, there he was, snoring lightly beside me, one of my eggshell, eight-hundred-thread-count sheets twisted half underneath his body. I rolled onto my side as quietly as I could, propped myself up on an elbow, and studied his face. I’d never noticed before the tiny rivulets forming in the crepe-paper skin around his eyes.

Few things are more disarming than a man asleep. No matter who he is or what he does in his waking hours, a man sleeping just looks so winningly vulnerable—so innocent and blameless. They all do. This is my favorite way to pass the time on long business flights. After the evening meal is cleared away, after everyone clicks off their overhead lights and tries to get comfortable with the airline-issue pillow and blanket, I entertain myself by studying the men around me in the Business Class cabin as they sleep. And make no mistake: The majority of these passengers are still men. I draw an odd and comforting sort of pleasure in seeing such men—these potent, chest-beating captains of industry, these Masters of the Universe—felled by something as natural as sleep.

I lay there happily for a moment longer, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of Murph’s smooth chest, when it suddenly occurred to me that I had nothing at all in the apartment to offer him for breakfast—no eggs, no bread, no cereal. I couldn’t even remember if I had any coffee. I crept out of bed and shivered, goosebumps rising on my bare skin.

The hardwood floors were cold beneath my feet. I’d always meant to get a rug for my bedroom but had never gotten around to it. Quietly, I opened my top dresser drawer, slipped on some underwear and a ribbed cotton tank top, and wandered out into the hall.

I looked critically around my apartment. My living room was a total mess. Starbucks cups and a half-empty pizza box littered the floor around my sofa, next to my laptop and three legal pads containing my SunCorp notes. I closed my laptop, gathered up all the papers, and stacked them neatly on my coffee table.

In the kitchen, I quickly confirmed what I already knew: nothing to eat. I wondered what that said about me and my priorities. Who bought an apartment with a Viking range and a Sub-Zero refrigerator and never used them? I thought about Anna Jergensen and all the other twentysomething girls whose cramped, homey Williamsburg shares Murph regularly went back to. What did a girl like that serve guys like Murph for breakfast? She’d probably breeze into the kitchen and whip up a batch of pancakes while he was in the shower. Whereas I was someone who actually had to Google how many minutes it took to boil an egg. I remembered Rachel telling me once that she’d made blueberry pancakes for Josh the first time he’d slept over at her place and that later he’d told her it was one of the first things that had made him fall in love with her. I’d never made pancakes in my life. What was even the name of that stuff you were supposed to use for them? Bisquick? I had no idea.

I slipped back into my bedroom and checked on Murph. Still asleep. I threw on some yoga pants and running shoes. As I pulled my hair through an elastic band, I tripped on one of my high-heeled sandals that had been kicked onto the floor late last night.

Murph stirred, sitting halfway up.

“Sorry,” I said softly. “Go back to sleep. I’m running out to pick us up some bagels or something. Be right back.”

“Mmn-kay.” He flipped over onto his stomach. In a second his snoring resumed.

I lingered a moment. This was nice
,
I thought, leaving my bedroom with someone still in it.

By the time I’d returned from the bagel shop with coffee and half a dozen plain and everything, Murph was wide awake and reading my Sunday
Times.
He’d parted the curtains so that sunlight flooded in through the picture window. The duvet was bunched up near his crossed ankles at the foot of my bed.

He looked up at me over the top of the business section and flashed me that big, winning Jeff Murphy grin that I loved. “Hey.”

“Hey, yourself.” I set our bagels and coffee on the dresser, stripped back down to my tank top and underwear, and flopped dramatically onto the mattress next to him, entwining my legs with his.

“Hold your arm out,” he said.

“What?”

“Just close your eyes and hold out your arm.”

I did as I was told.

Murph gently placed something on my wrist. I opened my eyes. It was the construction-paper bracelet that Isabel had made for me.

“Oh, this.” I smiled. “This is my favorite piece in my jewelry collection. My friend’s four-year-old daughter made it for me last time I babysat.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You?
Babysit?
”

“Thanks for sounding so surprised. I’ll have you know I’m actually really good with kids.”

He smiled. “I’m not so surprised,” he said softly, into my ear. Goose pimples rose on my arms, and I shivered in happy anticipation.

But when I looked back at Murph, he had gone back to reading the
Times.

“Really?” I said. “This is what you do when you wake up in a beautiful woman’s bed on a lazy Sunday morning? You read the business section?”

“I’m one paragraph from the end of this article. Did you see this? About that pipeline project in Nigeria that went under at the last second? Good cautionary tale for Rubinstein’s São Paulo clients, eh?”

I disentangled my legs from his, landing them on my side of the bed with a thud of protest.

Murph looked over at me. “You know, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to read this stuff, either. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, Yung—you should always be thinking about business development.”

“Wow. Could you try to sound a little less like a
lawyer
?” I asked.

He ignored this.

I was getting nowhere. I reached down and pulled the duvet up to our waists. I sidled over toward Murph until my body was aligned against his. I looked up at him. He was frowning at the
Times
business page. Slowly I brought one leg upward to his groin, then moved my thigh very gently back and forth against the partially open fly of his boxers—one stroke, two strokes, three—until I felt him make an appearance.

The business section landed on the floor.

I smiled up at Murph with my eyelids at half-mast, a look I’d learned from a babysitter when I was twelve and later perfected in college.

Murph leaned over me. Just as I was about to close my eyes, I saw him glance at the clock on my dresser.

I laughed.

“What?” he said.

“Um, did you just look over at the
clock?
”

“No,” he lied.

“I saw you.”

He grinned. “So? I like to know what time it is.”

“Jesus, Murph. You make love like it’s billable.”

“Ouch.” He clutched at his heart. “That really hurts, Yung.”

He leaned in to kiss me. I shut up after that.

Later, I lay happily on my side, with my head resting on Murph’s outstretched arm.

“Murph?”

“Hmm.” He’d drifted half to sleep.

“Do you think anyone at work knows about us?”

“No.” He opened his eyes and rolled over on his side to look at me. “At least, I haven’t said anything to anyone. Why?”

“Just curious.”

“Would you care if they knew?”

I hesitated. “No.”

But I did care. I cared deeply. I knew that I had more,
much
more, to lose than Murph did in this particular respect. It was one thing for him—loud, boisterous, ladies’ man, frat boy Murph—to have slept with one of his fellow senior associates in the group. It was quite another for me—the only senior woman attorney left standing—to have slept with him. I didn’t want this getting around, especially not now, when we were both less than a month away from partnership. Oh God. If only Murph and I had just gotten all of this out of our systems back when we were first-years, things would be so much simpler now.

Timing was everything.

I knew very well, from having been around them for eight years, the way my male colleagues bragged about their conquests—professional and sexual. They’d stopped censoring their conversations around me many years ago. I was just one of the guys by now. And while I liked to imagine that out of professional respect for me, their only female colleague, they might stop themselves from talking about me like they did their other female conquests … well, in reality there were probably more than a handful of male colleagues who would be slapping Murph on the back if they knew. Boys will be boys and all that.

I pressed the heels of my palms hard against my eyes, thinking.

The conventional wisdom around the firm was that Murph and I were both shoo-ins for partner in M&A this year. Murph knew it, and so did I. There was a certain romantic symmetry in that idea that I liked. Mr. and Ms. Partner & Partner. It had a nice ring.