The Partner Track: A Novel (24 page)

Dr. Rossi shook hands with Tim. Then he turned to me, nodded, and actually gave me a quick wink. It caught me by surprise. It was such an oddly intimate, oddly conspiratorial gesture that I was taken aback.
Let’s not get carried away,
I thought.
I said I’d help, and I have. But let’s not pretend for a moment that any of this is
my
show. I’ll be thrilled when tonight is over with.

“Plenty of seats,” Tim said. “Join us.”

Dr. Rossi shook his head. “Thanks, but Marty and Harold have asked that I join them up there.” He tilted his head toward a long VIP table on a raised platform at the head of the room. I was relieved.

“Okay, then,” I said brightly. “See you later.”

“See you. Enjoy the evening,” Dr. Rossi said, then turned and made his way over to the raised platform.

Adler and Harold Rubinstein were taking their seats on the stage. I saw Adler shuffle through a small sheaf of notes, adjust his bow tie, check his watch. Then he looked off to the side of the stage and nodded toward someone in the wings.

A frosted-blond woman, wearing a fastidious black dinner suit and bright red lipstick, picked up a microphone and tapped on it twice, producing a loud squawk of feedback. “Good evening, everyone.” Her voice bounced above the noisy din of the crowd. “If I could invite all of you to kindly find your seats as quickly as possible, we’d like to get the evening’s festivities under way.”

There arose in the ballroom a convivial last wave of chatter and air-kisses, invitations to lunch and cocktails, a flurry of business cards changing hands, the clink of highball glasses being set down or sent away, and chairs being pulled out from tables, as this carefully handpicked assembly of the luminaries of New York—politicians and professors, prosecutors and judges, CEOs, CFOs, COOs—took their assigned places and then looked casually around for their first pours of wine.

I placed my tiny evening bag onto the seat next to me, saving it for Tyler, when he ever bothered to show up.

Two others puffed up to our table and sat down on either side of Tim Hollister. Pamela Karnow and Sid Cantrell. I hadn’t seen Pam Karnow since the outing, and I’d never spoken to Sid Cantrell before. Sid was a powerful Litigation partner, a brilliant closer at trial, an infamous workaholic and screamer. He’d once created a small stir by making some poor associate spend a late night of billable time writing a memorandum comparing the relative merits and flaws of the eight pizza delivery joints near the office, complete with footnotes. The infamous “Pizza Memo” had, predictably, been forwarded to associates, partners, and paralegals at every major law firm in the country.

Pamela Karnow looked over at me and smiled. “Hi there. Ingrid, right? We met at the summer outing.” As she shook my hand I felt a swell of pride. It was definitely a booster shot to my ego that Pam Karnow knew who I was. The firm was so big that most partners never bothered learning the names of the associates outside their own departments. No point. Most of us were gone by our third year.

Oh yes, there was definitely scuttlebutt about me, that was for sure. I smiled and took another sip of water.

Sid Cantrell leaned over and shook my hand, too. “Good to meet you. Mildred, is it?”

“Ingrid,” I corrected.

Here was the thing about ego—easy come, easy go.

“And you practice in our … ah … Intellectual Property group?”

“Actually, no. I’m in M&A,” I said.
Ellen Chu Sanderson had been the one in IP,
I wanted to tell him.

“Ah,” said Sid Cantrell. “Very good. And you’re”—he waved a hand at me questioningly—“what? A third-year? Fourth-year?”

This time my voice came out louder than I’d expected. “This is my eighth year with the firm, actually.”

He nodded, not the least bit embarrassed by his mistake.

A tuxedoed waiter approached our table with an open bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, a crisp white napkin collared around its neck, and deftly filled all of our red wine goblets.

After another authoritative screech from the microphone, we all directed our attention to the stage. Adler was at the podium, his hand on the mike.

I angled my chair to get a better view of the podium and accidentally bumped into the empty chair next to me. My evening bag slid onto the floor—beaded satin will do that—and as I leaned over to pick it up, someone tapped me gently on the shoulder.

“Is this seat taken, dear?” Jack Hanover asked in a stage whisper, pointing to the chair I’d been saving for Tyler.

“Uh, no,” I blurted. “It’s not taken.” I had to swallow the word “sir.”

I wondered if Jack Hanover even remembered me from that evening in his office, if he ever could have imagined how much humiliation and grief that single brief encounter had caused me, how much it had cost.

“Thank you, dear,” he said, and sank into his chair just as Adler began to speak.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Adler boomed. The lingering din died down, and all eyes focused toward the front of the room. At the same time, almost imperceptibly, by slow, expert degrees, the ambient lighting in the room dimmed, and Marty Adler was bathed in a subtle spotlight up at the podium. It gave him an old and wizened look, and I thought again of the Wizard of Oz—this time, of the man behind the curtain.

“On behalf of everyone at Parsons Valentine and Hunt, I’d like to welcome you all to what promises to be a wonderful evening,” Adler said proudly. He gazed out at the assembled crowd, beaming a confident smile, and I marveled at how he managed to look both arrogant and kind at once.

“We are very honored tonight to have all of you with us for our inaugural Diversity Dinner,” Adler continued, “which we hope will become an annual tradition. I want you all to know that my colleagues on the firm’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee and I thought long and hard about what to title tonight’s event.” Here he furrowed his brow and scrunched up his mouth a bit, as if to dramatize for us just how long and hard they had had to think about it. “Finally, we decided it was most appropriate to call it ‘A Celebration of Diversity in the Profession.’” He paused to let this sink in.

I scanned the room. It was a pretty white crowd for a celebration of diversity.

“Now, some of you may ask, why call it a
celebration
? Don’t we still have a long way to go to achieve true equality in the workplace? Isn’t there much more hard work that lies ahead?”

Across the table, Pam Karnow tilted her head at a thoughtful angle, as if considering answers to Adler’s rhetorical questions. Sid Cantrell was shredding a cocktail napkin into a thousand tiny pieces. Jack Hanover had crossed his arms lightly across his chest. His eyes were closed.

“The answer to each of these important questions is a resounding
yes,
” Adler informed us. “However”—he slapped his palm onto the podium for emphasis—“we at Parsons Valentine feel strongly that it’s important to celebrate all the gains we have made thus far, and all of the legal and cultural barriers that have already been broken, in
this,
our shared struggle toward achieving professional equality for
all
men and women, regardless of race, color, or sexual orientation.”

The crowd burst into applause. I even heard a couple of catcalls and whistles thrown into the mix. For this crowd, on this night, Marty Adler was a rock star.

I fought the urge to laugh. Wasn’t Adler being just a
wee
bit heavy-handed and self-congratulatory? I mean, we weren’t exactly marching on Washington or refusing to give up our bus seats here. We were at the freaking Rainbow Room, eating tomato and goat cheese tarts drizzled with Parmesan vinaigrette, for God’s sake. We were, quite literally, sitting on top of the world.

I glanced at my BlackBerry and noticed a new message in my inbox from “Reese, Marcus A.” I looked over my shoulder and across the room at the Viacom table. Marcus was smirking at me. I looked back down and read his message:

I have a dream!!!!

I laughed out loud—softly, and just once, but out loud. Sid Cantrell shot me a fast disapproving glance.

I extinguished my smile and slid my BlackBerry into my lap.

Are we free at last?
I wrote back.

Across the room, I saw Marcus laugh. Then, just as quickly, I watched him delete my message, put away his BlackBerry, and stare back up at the podium, calm and straightfaced. Oh, Marcus was good. He was very good.

Following Marcus’s example, I turned primly back toward the stage, pasting a contemplative look onto my face.

There was nothing like one of these lavish corporate-style celebrations of ourselves to make me feel like I was just sitting on my hands, marking time. A willing pawn. Tyler had been smart not to come. I knew that now.

“So tonight,” Adler boomed, “we pay tribute to those leading the charge. This evening, we are
thrilled
to have with us our keynote speaker, Professor Charlton James Randall from the Harvard Law School, who will be introduced by Dr. Marilyn DuBois, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. I look forward to hearing from them both later this evening. And now, please, eat, drink, and enjoy.”

As if on cue, a squadron of waiters appeared from nowhere bearing salmon filet and wine.

The conversation at our table was restrained by the presence of Jack Hanover. That much was clear. Whole minutes would slink by with only the sounds of forks and knives scraping delicately against our plates, our water glasses clinking against our wine goblets as we raised them gently to our lips. Tim Hollister and Pam Karnow, both young, recent partners, seemed especially anxious not to say anything wrong in front of Hanover. So the politics of sucking up didn’t end with partnership. Both Tim and Pam called him Jack but seemed to swallow the syllable a bit, as if still unsure of their right to use it.

Jack Hanover, for his part, seemed perfectly comfortable chewing in silence, with just his salmon for company. The only time he initiated any conversation was when he waved his empty wineglass, looked around for our waiter, and murmured, “Now where’s one of those little guys when you want him?”

At the front of the ballroom, Professor Randall stood and made his way to the podium. I’d never seen the revered Charlton James Randall in person before, but I knew who he was, of course. We all did. In law school, I’d been assigned his Constitutional Law casebook and had done a preemption check on an article of his published in the
Columbia Law Review.
A tall, bespectacled, African American man in his sixties, with a very dignified mien, he withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket and smoothed it out in front of him.

“Thank you, Marty, for inviting me to speak tonight at this wonderful gathering. First off, I must commend Parsons Valentine and Hunt for taking such a strong leadership role in the cause of diversity and inclusion in the corporate workplace. Let’s have a round of applause for our gracious hosts.”

The crowd complied with cheers and applause. Professor Randall took a sip of water and began.

“On an occasion such as this, and in such esteemed company, it may be hard to believe that it was only fifty-odd years ago that Chief Justice Earl Warren handed down the famous unanimous decision proclaiming that separate is
inherently
unequal, and that it was only some forty years ago that Thurgood Marshall became the first African American justice to serve on the United States Supreme Court…”

Jack Hanover was shoveling chocolate truffle cake into his mouth. Surely a black-and-white cookie would have been more appropriate, I thought, and smiled at my own joke. Twenty minutes later, Professor Randall wrapped up his keynote address to thunderous applause. My hands hurt from clapping. My face ached from holding a fake smile. I stifled a yawn and glanced at my BlackBerry. It was past ten. The waiters had cut off the wine supply ages ago. Now they’d stopped making rounds with the coffee and tea.

Adler, beaming and still applauding, walked to the podium, heartily clapping Professor Randall on the back. “Thank you so much for those inspiring words. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to say a few things in closing.”

You could hear a collective sigh go up from the audience as people shifted impatiently in their seats, poised to flee, evening bags clutched in laps, programs dog-eared and discarded onto dessert plates. The attention span for celebrating diversity was apparently three hours, tops.

Adler cleared his throat. “On behalf of all my partners at Parsons Valentine and Hunt, let me just say how pleased we are that you have all joined us for tonight’s celebration. By choosing to be here this evening, we are sending a message—loud and clear—that we cannot … indeed, we
will not
tolerate exclusion of any kind in the courtrooms, the chambers, the legal boardrooms, and the hallowed halls of corporate America. Tonight we recognize this truth: that
all
of our institutions are only
enriched
by the inclusion of women and people of color. Racial and gender diversity is not just a trend, is not an albatross
thrust
upon us by political correctness. No, diversity is not merely an aspirational goal. It is one of our
strongest assets.
And I’ll let you in on a little secret: It is the
only
way any of us can hope to stay competitive in the dynamic, global marketplace of the twenty-first century.”

My mouth was dry, and my head was positively pounding. I noticed a single glittery black bead coming loose from my clutch purse and pulled at it.

“We at Parsons Valentine and Hunt have recognized this truth for years, and it is borne out in everything we do—from reaching out to deserving communities in need through our pro bono practice to our efforts in recruiting and hiring, and then developing, promoting, and mentoring our nontraditional attorneys at every single stage of their careers.”

I picked absently at the loose bead. I glanced at my BlackBerry and scrolled through three new messages.

Adler continued, “And I am extremely proud that we have with us tonight one of the best examples of these efforts—truly a successful product of all of our recruiting, mentoring, and retention programs—Ingrid Yung, one of our most promising young attorneys in the Mergers and Acquisitions group. Ingrid, would you please stand?”