The Partner Track: A Novel
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Authors: Helen Wan
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For my family
and in loving memory of my grandmother
An Ching-Chun
CONTENTS
I would not like to be the only woman on the court.
—
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
ONE
The Parsons Valentine dining room—affectionately known as the Jury Box—resembled nothing so much as a high school cafeteria, writ large. We were all older, sure, with expensive haircuts and finely tailored suits. The food was a lot better, and it was served on fine china, classic white with a platinum border. And then there was the view. Instead of a track or a football field, our windows overlooked the grand expanse of Fifth Avenue and Central Park. No trophy cases or spirit banners, either, just a vast Ellsworth Kelly painting and a few signed Chuck Close prints adorning the otherwise stark white walls. But these were just trophies of a different sort.
At Parsons Valentine & Hunt LLP, every step you took was a carefully calibrated decision, right down to where you sat at lunch—especially the year you were up for partner. The powers-that-be took meticulous note of who was allied with whom. If you regularly sat at a table to gossip and gab with other associates, it telegraphed
lazy
and
unambitious.
If you sat only with partners, it screamed
brownnoser.
Sitting off by yourself, not surprisingly, was the worst kind of professional suicide—you might as well walk around wearing a big
SOCIAL LIABILITY
sign around your neck. And the worst thing you could be at Parsons Valentine was
unpresentable
.
At lunch in the Jury Box, we were spoiled for choice. I navigated my way around the freshly stocked salad bar, past the sushi chef, deli counter, brick-oven pizza and teppanyaki lines, and stopped at the hot entrée station. Mason, the firm’s executive director of Dining Services—he’d apprenticed at Le Bernardin—was standing behind the sneeze guard, wearing his chef’s hat and a crisp white apron. Mason was one of my favorite people at the firm. He’d once sent a steak sandwich to my office when I was stuck on a late-night conference call. I’d never forgotten it.
“Hey, Mason, what are you pushing today?” I asked.
“Well, well. Ingrid Yung. My favorite customer.” He gestured with a flourish at the row of silver chafing dishes. “Today we’ve got some beautiful seared ahi tuna steaks with avocado tartare.”
“Hm. Sounds healthy.”
“And over here I’ve got my famous spicy three-cheese lasagna.”
“Sold.”
I walked my lasagna and a Perrier over to the cashier line. The guy in front of me, some fourth-year Litigation associate I’d never spoken to, was busily scratching a client matter number onto a checkout form with a stubby yellow golf pencil.
Parsons Valentine attorneys had the option of paying for our Jury Box meals in one of two ways: cash from our own pockets, or charging it to the client whose matter we were working on. We were supposed to do this only when working late and bringing dinner to our desks, but a lot of lawyers just charged their meals whenever they felt like it. This meant that Microsoft might be springing for your breakfast bagel, while Time Warner picked up your turkey club at lunch. I always just paid cash. It was faster, not to mention more honest.
I picked up my tray, entered the dining room, and surveyed my options.
Jeff Murphy half-stood from his table, waving me over to where he sat with Hunter Russell, another associate in our class. Good old Murph. He was one of my best friends at the firm. We’d shared an office as summer associates, exactly nine years ago this month. Frankly, I hadn’t expected to like him much at first. I’d taken one look and assumed he’d be too entitled for my taste, the worst kind of irritating, backslapping, how-the-hell-are-you frat boy. But he’d grown on me. Murph was a smart guy, despite the rich jock pedigree.
I set my tray down next to his on the starched white tablecloth and pulled out a chair. I nodded at Hunter, who barely glanced my way, thumbs frantically working the keys of his BlackBerry. Hunter loved his BlackBerry. It gave him the appearance of responding to urgent client messages while he checked his Fantasy League Baseball stats.
“What’s up, Yung?” said Murph, jostling my elbow. He grinned at me, and I looked sidelong back at him.
Murph was a good-looking guy, and he knew it. I was reminded of this once again, seeing him in his crisp white dress shirt, open at the throat, sleeves rolled up, his tanned, muscular forearms lying easily on the table. His wavy, dark blond hair just brushed the top of his collar, and his new tan set off his eyes to brilliant effect, making them look even greener than usual. Murph’s family had a house on the Cape, and he spent a week there every Memorial Day. He’d just gotten back, and he practically glowed with privilege and well-being.
Murph and I had once had something of a moment, you might say, years ago. When you hire ninety-five young, smart, attractive, ambitious people every fall, who’ve all just graduated from the same five law schools and landed in Manhattan, and then make them work twenty hours a day together in close quarters, there’s obviously going to be sexual tension. Back when we were first-years, Murph had thrown a huge Halloween party at the loft he shared in Tribeca with one of his college buddies. I hadn’t really wanted to go, and I didn’t have a costume, but all the other associates in our class were going, and there was nothing I hated more than feeling left out.
So at the last minute, I rushed from work to my apartment and threw on my high school prom dress—the one I’d worn the night I’d been crowned Potomac Valley High’s first-ever Asian American prom queen. (Oh my! Mrs. Saltzstein, the guidance counselor, had gushed. She’d heard of Oriental valedictorians before, but never a Chinese prom queen!) The dress was a strapless pink taffeta number. The zipper took some coaxing, and I was mushrooming a little out the top, but damn if I didn’t still look pretty good in that thing.
By the time I cabbed downtown to Murph’s loft, the party was in full swing.
“Yung!” said a very drunk Murph upon greeting me at the door. He was dressed as Pope John Paul II. We air-kissed—funny how being at a party makes it okay to air-kiss your co-workers—and he led me to the drinks in the kitchen. Many hours and margaritas later, Murph, Hunter, Hunter’s wife, and I were huddled around his CD collection (this being before the iPod age) and someone put on “Son of a Preacher Man.” Murph looked at me, bleary-eyed, and said, “Yung. What
are
you wearing?” I batted my lashes and purred, “My prom dress.” Hunter’s wife threw back her head and laughed. “What about some fake hickeys? You can’t be a prom queen without the hickeys!”
Without missing a beat, Murph volunteered to provide the real thing, and before I could think better of it, Murph bent over my bare neck and shoulder and did the honors while I leaned back against his Sharper Image CD tower. I remember being surprised at the warmth of him, and how good the burr of his late-night stubble felt against my skin. It tickled, and I was laughing, and Dusty Springfield was singing that being good isn’t always easy, but when Murph stood back up and gazed at me with a deadly serious, intensely hopeful look on his face, I realized I’d made a grave mistake. Sure enough, later that night, as Murph helped me look for my coat among the huge pile on his bed, he fixed me with a solemn if drunken gaze and leaned in toward me at a deliberate angle. I gently disentangled myself and pretended to laugh it off. “If only you weren’t dressed as the pope,” I’d said, the easiest way I could think of to let him down lightly. This was
Murph,
after all; he was like my brother. Furthermore, everyone at work knew he was an incorrigible flirt. Monday morning we both acted like it had just been the tequila talking. That had been eight years ago. We’d never spoken of it since.
“Health food?” Murph asked now, nodding toward my plate.
“Shut up, it’s delicious,” I told him, and took a huge bite of lasagna.
I did not appreciate Murph or anyone else scrutinizing what I was eating. It always felt, just a tiny bit, like I was back in my fourth-grade cafeteria, shyly unwrapping the scallion pancake or shrimp toast my mother would pack in aluminum foil in my lunchbox. “What’s
that
?” Becky Noble would wrinkle up her nose, her own tidy baloney-and-cheese sandwich raised halfway to her mouth, causing all of the other girls to giggle. Years later, on a blind date at the Campbell Apartment, my twenty-dollar martini had arrived alongside an appetizer of those same scallion pancakes, cut into dainty bite-size triangles and served with a ginger-soy dipping sauce. My blind date—an anesthesiologist named Ethan—pushed them toward me. “Try one. These things are amazing,” he enthused, popping one into his mouth. “They
are
good, aren’t they,” I replied, smiling vaguely and wondering what had ever happened to Becky Noble.
Murph shook his head at me. “I swear I’ve never seen a woman eat so much and still be a size two, Yung.”
I shrugged.
Here was another thing about all the male attorneys I worked with. They all called me by my last name, Yung, instead of by my first name, Ingrid. I wondered if some of them even knew what my first name was. But I didn’t mind this. I’d been in the corporate world long enough to know that it was a good sign. When they felt comfortable enough to swear like sailors around me, I knew I was finally in.
I looked over at Hunter. He was hunched over a piece of paper, scribbling on some sort of cryptic sketch that looked like a tree.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Huh?” Hunter looked up. “Oh. I’m doing our softball brackets. See?” He slid the paper toward me. “This is how the season’s shaping up. Wachtell’s out. All we have to do now is beat Simpson Thacher in two weeks. And trust me, we will. They suck this year. So if Davis Polk takes down Skadden next week, and then they knock out the DA’s office after that, we’ll face them in the finals.” He beamed.
Murph looked at me. “Glad you asked?”
Hunter was captain of our firm’s softball team, the Parsons Valentine Prosecutors, and he was obsessed with winning the Central Park Lawyers League championship trophy. He spent twice as much time on softball captain duties as he did on legal work, but Hunter could afford to. He was pretty much unfireable. Nine years ago, during his final year of law school, he’d had the good fortune to knock up the daughter of a longtime Parsons Valentine client. This bank CFO had promptly forwarded Hunter’s résumé to the head partner in our Corporate Department with a lunch invitation and a handwritten note, gently suggesting that his new son-in-law was sure to be an asset to any firm. Hunter was hired the following week. He’d been here ever since, billing about two-thirds of the hours the rest of us did. We grudgingly accepted him in our midst. We knew they’d never actually make him a partner—the firm was too worried about malpractice for that—but he was assured a cushy job as a senior associate or Of Counsel for as long as his father-in-law’s bank kept paying its bills.