The Partner Track: A Novel (23 page)

“I spoke to Ted Lassiter two days ago,” Adler said, “and he tells me he’s very impressed with your work, and the way you’ve kept this deal on track and on time.
Very
impressed,” he repeated, beaming.

I darted a glance at Harold Rubinstein. He was beaming, too. “Keep up the great work, Ingrid,” he said. “Don’t think it’s going unnoticed.”

Eat your heart out, Murph.

We stopped in front of the Forty-ninth Street entrance. “After you.” Adler waved me through the revolving doors, and we proceeded across the gleaming marble lobby. A line had already formed at the elevator bank. Distinguished-looking gray-haired men in tuxedos escorted well-preserved women in tasteful evening dresses, a few of them holding silver-and-blue invitations embossed with the firm’s logo.

“Arthur! Glad you could make it,” Adler said to a dashing man with graying temples and a pronounced chin. “Where’s Elizabeth? Don’t tell me she couldn’t be here tonight.”

The elevator doors opened, and Adler and the man he called Arthur entered the car. I followed along with the rest of the crowd, but Harold Rubinstein placed a hand on my elbow and gently steered me away to wait for the next elevator. When one opened, we wedged ourselves in.

The doors opened on sixty-five, and the crowd spilled out into the reception suite.

Harold Rubinstein hurried forward and tapped a debonair-looking older gentleman on the shoulder. “George. I thought that was you.” He smiled and held out his hand for the older man to shake. “Harold Rubinstein. Rick Fallon introduced us?”

“Oh, of course,” said George.

“It’s funny, I was just thinking I should give Rick a call,” Rubinstein said. “How’re things over at Time Warner these days? Didn’t I read last week about your plans to…”

The two of them went on ahead, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I hated the brownnosing aspect of these things.

Rubinstein seemed to have forgotten I was there, and that was just fine with me. Taking my time, making sure to widen the distance between myself and Rubinstein, I walked into the Rainbow and Stars room, where an elaborate cocktail and hors d’oeuvre reception had been set up. The firm’s staff was seated at a long table, greeting guests, checking names off on a printout listing the important friends and clients of the firm. Because of our tuxedos and evening gowns, we had been spared the usual plastic name tags worn on cords around our necks. Tonight we were supposed to be glamorous grown-ups at a ball, here of our own accord, enjoying ourselves.

“Hi there,” I said to Ann Trask, who was sitting at the end of the reception table.

“Hey, Ingrid.” She motioned me over. “C’mere a second.”

I edged closer to her. “What’s up?”

She jerked her head down the long conference table toward an arrangement of glittery midnight blue gift bags imprinted with the firm name and logo, and stuffed with silvery tissue paper peeking out the tops. “Make sure you pick up a swag bag on the way out. This one’s to die for.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “A Parsons Valentine fleece and a ceramic ‘We Love Diversity!’ mug?”

She laughed. “Try a pair of Knicks tickets, an Apple Store giftcard, a free week at Equinox, a massage at Bliss, and a Bobbi Brown lipstick.”

“Wow. Nice work.”

“Thanks.”

I looked around at the quickly filling room. “Well, guess I better go mingle, huh?”

She shooed me away. “Go. Schmooze, schmooze. That’s what you’re here for.”

A waiter stopped in front of me with a heavily loaded tray. “Hors d’oeuvre, miss?” He was already perspiring through his shirt, and the cocktail hour had just started. I felt bad for him.

“Thank you.” I smiled. I selected a skewer of grilled zucchini and shrimp and accepted the cocktail napkin he offered me, then wandered off to the far side of the room to look out over midtown and Central Park. I wanted to put off meeting and greeting people as long as possible. If I could just waste enough time until the seated dinner, I was home free.

These networking cocktail hours were pure torture for two reasons: I was a young single woman, and I was short. It was miserable to attempt to sidle into a conversation already under way between some CEO thirty years my senior, his wife who was about my age, and some hungry midlevel asshole trying to chat up the CEO. Add to this the fact that, even in three-and-a-half-inch heels, I still stood at eye level with most of the men’s armpits, so they all had to twist down awkwardly in order to hear what I had to say. Either they didn’t bother or, when they did, it was to look down my dress or check my hand for a wedding ring.

It was a perpetual challenge for young, non-wedding-banded female professionals to telegraph our intentions at these networking cocktail receptions. I remembered a conference for M&A practitioners that I’d attended in Tampa, where I’d spent forty minutes in a stuffy hotel ballroom nursing a single lime seltzer and talking up the firm’s white-collar defense practice to the general counsel of some securities brokerage. He’d been on his third gin and tonic, but he was asking all the right questions and hanging on my every word. I’d already begun to imagine the glorious coup it was going to be back at the office, when I told the partners about this new client I’d just reeled in. Everything had gone swimmingly until the end of our chat, when he’d slipped me a business card with his hotel room number scrawled on the back.

As I stood now at the window with my back to the cocktail reception, gazing down at the view—the little yellow cabs tiny as LEGOs, the web of treetops in Central Park—I heard a low male voice behind me. “Ingrid? Ingrid Yung?”

I sighed softly, just once, before spinning around, preparing to paste a fake smile onto my face and make stilted conversation with some half-remembered client. I almost laughed in relief when I recognized who it was.

“Marcus!” I said.

“Hey, how’ve you been?” Marcus Reese, a classmate from law school, leaned down toward me. I reached up toward him with my half-eaten shrimp on a stick and we embraced awkwardly, laughing.

“Good, good. So, what are you up to these days?” I asked. “You went to White and Case, right?”

“Yeah, but I quit the law firm thing two years ago. I’m in-house at MTV now,” he said.

“Oh yeah? That must be pretty exciting.”

He smiled ruefully. “It’s not any better or worse than a firm, just different. Politics as usual.
You
know what I mean,” he said.

I nodded.

Popular and funny, Marcus Reese had been something of a star in our Columbia Law School class. He’d played football at Michigan before deciding on law school, then became notes editor of the
Law Review
and served as president of the African American Law Student Association for two years. Universally liked and affable as he was, a perfect diplomat with a winning smile and ready laugh, Marcus was another Minority Darling—a favorite of the law school administration. He was thoroughly and utterly
presentable.
Marcus Reese and I had this much in common.

I had always discerned a certain humbleness about Marcus Reese. Despite his popularity, he wasn’t a showboating asshole. Many of our classmates from law school would have printed out flyers announcing their in-house counsel job at MTV. Often, when I bumped into law school classmates on the street or subway, they fell over themselves gushing about how fabulously everything was going for them, how wonderful their lives had been since our graduation. They’d go on for so long it was like they were trying to convince themselves, rather than trying to impress me. So I appreciated Marcus’s honesty about “politics as usual.” It was refreshing.

“Anyway, what about you? You’re doing well at Parsons, I take it,” he said, nodding toward the huge flat-screen monitor set up along one wall that read
PARSONS VALENTINE & HUNT LLP WELCOMES YOU.
“I mean, I’m sure they didn’t invite
every
associate at the firm to come carry the flag here tonight, huh?”

I fixed him with a sober, penetrating gaze. “Oh, yes. Didn’t you hear? They’ve determined that I possess the keenest legal mind of our generation, Marcus. That’s the only reason I was asked to come out tonight and represent.”

At this we both burst out laughing. Marcus gestured at his tuxedo. “Look, I’m just glad our CEO didn’t make me put on a dashiki.”

Right then we heard three cloying notes. “Attention, ladies and gentlemen,” an announcer said, between chimes. “If you would please start making your way to your tables, the dinner program is about to begin. Thank you.”

I watched as, slowly, about half of the crowd drifted into the ballroom while the other half chased down final hors d’oeuvres, lingered over half-finished conversations, and got in line at the open bars for last cocktails before dinner.

“Well,” said Marcus, as he set his empty champagne flute down on a passing service tray, “I better go find the Viacom table. Great seeing you again, Ingrid. You got a business card on you?”

“Don’t we get disbarred for coming to one of these things without them?” I unsnapped my evening clutch and handed him a card. I kept a stash in each of my handbags.

Marcus glanced at it. “Great. Hey, I’ll e-mail or call you at the office sometime, we’ll set up a lunch?”

“Definitely.”

I gave Marcus a final wave before he disappeared into the crowd. As I watched his handsome figure retreating, I wondered exactly when Marcus Reese and I had turned into people who no longer simply met for lunch. Instead, we met for
a
lunch.

In this city, especially in my line of work, the casual business lunch invitation was issued so often, to so many people, and rarely did any of these proposed lunches actually take place. I knew with as much certainty as I knew my own name that Marcus would not be calling my office to schedule a lunch anytime soon. Not because we didn’t genuinely like each other, and not because he hadn’t truly meant the invitation. He simply wouldn’t have the time, and neither would I.

Sighing, I moved away from the window and followed the crowd into the main ballroom.
Here we go,
I thought, looking around. I checked my watch once again. Where the hell was Tyler?

I paused at the threshold of the ballroom.

The Rainbow Room always took my breath away. New Yorkers were supposed to have perfected the art of looking perpetually unimpressed by places and things, but here, people’s carefully disguised awe did not fool me. I noticed more than a few surreptitious glances at the exquisite candles and stunning floral centerpieces, the elaborate china and crystal settings, the spectacular glass chandelier lowered from the ceiling, and of course that billion-dollar view.

The round dining tables were set up on what was usually the sunken dance floor in the center of the room. A podium and a long VIP table had been set up on a raised dais in the front, underneath an enormous screen that, for now, displayed a simple blue background with the firm name and logo projected onto it.

Numbered black and white placards, printed with the names of corporate clients and friends of the firm, had been placed at the center of every table.
Citigroup. MetLife. Time Warner. American Express. General Electric. JPMorgan Chase. Google.
And so on. I was very aware of Marcus Reese standing across the ballroom with a bunch of older white men, laughing and talking loudly and finally pulling their chairs out from around the Viacom table. Marcus stood a head taller than most of his colleagues.
Well,
that
had to help,
I thought, with unmitigated envy.

Parsons Valentine had designated a separate table on the floor for those of us attending from the firm. But Marty Adler and Harold Rubinstein, as partners on the Diversity Committee and co-chairs of the planning committee for this event, were to be seated in special places of honor at the long table at the head of the room. Again, fine with me.

I finally located the firm’s table, in a clearly visible and yet modestly off-center spot three rows in from the front. I was the first to arrive. I sat down, then immediately wished I hadn’t; most people were still standing and chatting. Well, it was too late for me to get up now and stand—that would look foolish and indecisive, to anyone who might have been watching. No, better to remain seated. I whipped out my BlackBerry and pretended to be engrossed in important e-mail correspondence.

When I had taken as much time as a reasonable person could reasonably take reading through her messages, still no one had shown up at my table. I looked down and peered at the elegant appetizer plate already arranged in front of me—some sort of round, delicate, quichelike thing. I pretended to examine the ivory menu card propped artfully beside my plate.

Parsons Valentine & Hunt LLP
proudly presents

“A Celebration of Diversity in the Profession:

Breaking Barriers, Bridging Gaps”

The Rainbow Room

Red & Yellow Tomato and Goat Cheese Tart Drizzled with Parmesan Vinaigrette

Atlantic Salmon Stuffed with Spinach, White Beans, and Pinenuts Roasted Fingerling Potatoes

Dark Chocolate Truffle Cake

Well, the
meal
was certainly diverse. I glanced again at my watch, and looked again around the Rainbow Room. Still no Tyler, I observed, annoyed. And I continued to bristle over the fact that Murph begrudged me
this
—this dubious
honor
of being paraded around as the Diversity Poster Girl.

“Hey, Ingrid,” said a voice, finally. I looked up. Tim Hollister was pulling out the chair next to mine. I was relieved to no longer be sitting alone. I was more than relieved to be sitting next to Tim.

“So how’s our secret weapon on the softball team?”

I laughed. “Doing just fine, Tim. Thanks.”

“Everything’s still going well with SunCorp, I hear.”

“So far, so good,” I confirmed.

“I’m happy to hear it.” He smiled at me. And I decided that intelligent women would not have to debate the matter, after all. Tim Hollister was handsome.

“Good evening, everyone,” said another warm, familiar voice from behind us. Tim and I turned to see Dr. Rossi. He looked different tonight, handsome in his well-cut suit and freshly trimmed beard.