THIRTEEN #3
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.
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!!!!