ELEVEN #3
By the time I got off the elevator, buzzed myself in through the glass doors, and found Jack Hanover’s corner office, his secretary had already left for the evening. But there was a sliver of light coming through beneath his office door, which was slightly ajar. He was expecting me.
I smoothed my hands over my hair and skirt in a final attempt to pull myself together. Then I gave a tentative knock.
“Come in,” boomed a voice.
I pushed open the door.
The office was shadowy and dim, the only light coming from a green-shaded banker’s lamp on the credenza.
I took a few tentative steps into the room.
Jack Hanover was seated behind an antique walnut desk with ornately carved legs and claw feet.
Directly across from Jack Hanover, each seated in a wide leather club chair, were none other than Hunter and Justin Keating.
They looked as startled to see me as I was to see them.
All three of the men were cradling highball glasses, with an inch and a half of amber liquid sloshing around in the bottoms.
Jack Hanover’s famous Scotch. So that part was true.
“Hello, hello,” Hanover boomed at me, beckoning me forward. His voice was not unkind. “You called with the quick question, yes?” I knew he didn’t know my name, but at least he seemed aware that I was an associate.
I was at a complete loss. Bleary-eyed, looking every bit as disheveled as I felt, I opened my mouth but no words came out. I stood there, stupefied. I looked from Jack Hanover to Justin Keating to Hunter, one by one by one.
Justin had straightened abruptly when I entered the room. Even he seemed aware that there was something slightly indecorous—something unseemly—about the whole situation.
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.