The Partner Track: A Novel (6 page)

I took a swallow of wine, settled back against the cushions, and closed my eyes, finally letting myself think about the thing that had been bothering me all afternoon—had nagged at me, even as I sailed through a productive lunch meeting with Ted Lassiter, followed by a successful strategy conference with Marty Adler back at the office.

By all objective measures, it should have been a great day.

But it was an extremely unwelcome realization, to a grown woman of thirty-three who was about to make partner at one of the most powerful law firms in the world, that a single stupid, careless word tossed underhand on the street could still slice right through me as if I were nothing and no one at all.

I felt like I was six years old all over again, and the other kids at Ravenwood Elementary were pushing up the corners of their eyes at me on the blacktop at recess, chanting,

Chinese,

Japanese,

Dirty knees,

Look at these!

This was not still supposed to be happening, was it?

Get a grip, Ingrid,
I admonished myself.
What is wrong with you? Why do you even care what some random jerk on the street says? Everything’s going just the way you always wanted.
I took another big swallow of wine, put the glass down on the end table, and curled up on my impractically expensive couch, trying to sleep.

I could remember with perfect clarity the first time I saw the gorgeous spirals and peaks of my beloved Manhattan skyline.

It was summer, and I was nine years old. That June weekend, my parents and I drove from our suburban house in Maryland to visit New York City for the first time. I had chattered for weeks about nothing else.

We were going to visit an old colleague of my father’s, a well-respected Princeton economist named Roger Giles. Dr. Giles had been a visiting American scholar at my father’s university many years ago in Taipei, Taiwan, and he and my father had managed to remain in touch all this time. Every Christmas, my mother would carefully copy a single English sentence that I had written down for her—
Season’s greetings to you and yours, and best wishes for the coming new year!
—into a set of boxed Hallmark cards purchased for half-price the previous December 26 and stored for eleven months in our basement. Each year, my parents dutifully sent these cards to the handful of non-Chinese acquaintances they had acquired in the two decades since immigrating to America: a few co-workers; my piano teacher, Mrs. Johnston; two or three neighbors who had invited us to the occasional barbecue or block party (not all our neighbors did); and Dr. Giles.

After retiring from Princeton, Dr. Giles and his wife lived full-time in New York and for years invited my family to come visit them in Manhattan.
After all,
they scrawled in cheerful script across the bottom of their annual holiday letter,
New York is only three hours from Washington by train! We’d love to see how little Ingrid has grown. It sounds like she’s turning into quite a good student!

My father finally accepted their invitation after I came home from school one day and announced that I was one of the few kids in my class who had never seen the top of the Empire State Building.

I loved going on long car trips with my parents. I had no siblings to squabble with in the backseat, so it was always peaceful, sitting with the two people I loved and admired most in our own enclosed, private vessel. I felt safe and comfortable and cocooned from the outside world. Sailing by the factories and old houses and storefronts, my father told funny made-up stories about every point of interest that we passed. My mother hummed along to tapes of old Connie Francis and Elvis songs she and my father liked—the very songs, she said, that my father had used to
woo
her back when they were both college students in Taiwan. There had always been certain oddball English words my mother could surprise me with by actually using in their proper context, and “woo” was one of them.

I loved having their complete and unhurried company for hours. From the front passenger seat, my mother twisted all the way around to explain to me how my father had been Dr. Giles’s star economics grad student at Tai Da, the best university in Taiwan, especially because he spoke English far better than most of his peers. My heart swelled with pride and affection. His eyes on the road, my father murmured that she was exaggerating, but I could tell from his voice that he was smiling. As we hurtled along the interstate at seventy miles an hour, I remember feeling as perfect a happiness as I’d ever felt, either before or since. Our little family was completely content and at ease in that car, on our way to see someplace new.

We got to New York around noon. As my father drove around and around midtown, swearing under his breath as he looked for street parking, my mother pointed out the Chrysler Building and Grand Central Terminal and Carnegie Hall and Rockefeller Center.

I couldn’t take my eyes away from the window. I had never seen any city like it, and I had never felt so small, but small in such a wonderful way. Small in a way that didn’t feel bad, or lonely. Everything felt vital and important here. Bigger, better, faster, more. As if everyone were essential and functioning in a great big machine with lots of moving parts, and it really mattered that they were all here and going about their business exactly as they were doing. That was the moment I vowed that I’d move here one day, the moment New York wooed me.

First, because it was what I wanted, we went to the very top of the Empire State Building, where a lady greeted all the kids coming out of the elevator with big red lollipops wrapped to look like candy apples, tied with ribbons that said
I
♥
NY
. My parents hoisted me up to the railing so that I could see all the way down, each of them maintaining a firm grip on my elbows. There was so much to look at from up there. I could even see the line where the blue sky ended and the gray matter that made up the city began.

There was another kid right next to me, about my age, whose dad lifted him up and pointed intently at something. “See that building over there, Max? The big one with the greenish pointy top next to the one with the gold round top?”

“Yeah,” the boy replied, bored. I strained to see the one the man was talking about.

“That’s where your dad goes to work every day,” said the man proudly. “What do you think of that?”

“I know. Can we go now?” said the boy.

As his father let him down from the railing and they walked away, I remember being fiercely jealous of both of them, although I couldn’t really have said why.

My ears popped in the elevator down. When we were back on the street, my dad stepped off the curb, raised his arm with a flourish, and gave a merry little wave at the end, showing me how to hail a cab. But the light was red, so no cars were moving. Then my dad looked over at me, winked, and asked, “Want a try?” I nodded. He scooped me up and took a step closer to the street. I raised my arm and waved at the traffic. The light changed, the cars surged forward, and like magic, a yellow taxicab pulled up right next to us. I was enchanted.

The cab dropped us off in front of an enormous, fancy toy store near the entrance to Central Park. We stayed there for hours, but I wasn’t allowed to buy anything. I was, however, allowed to get an ice cream cone from one of the vendors in the park, even though my mother said it was getting close to dinner. As I sat there on a green park bench between my parents, with chocolate ice cream dripping onto my knees, watching the horses and carriages going by, I decided that New York City was absolutely the best place in the world.

When long tentacles of afternoon shadow stretched across the park, my father glanced at his watch and said we should make our way to the neighborhood where Dr. and Mrs. Giles lived. We didn’t want to be late for dinner. We walked out of the park and paused on the flagstones. My mother suggested stopping for a nice bottle of wine to bring as a gift, and a kind elderly lady out walking the smallest dog I had ever seen pointed us in the direction of a wine store.

After purchasing a bottle of red wine, we hopped into another cab. My father quickly murmured directions to the driver, and he took off. I was proud that my father knew his way around the city and didn’t need a map. I was still young enough to believe that my parents knew everything.

We shot up Madison Avenue, turned left onto a block of tall, stately buildings, then took a left again down another wide avenue, where we stopped at a red light. Across the street to my right, the sidewalk had opened onto a large flat plaza, with fountains and benches. “Look.” My mother pointed out the window. I peered up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the impossibly grand reach of it, the endless tiers of neat white steps, its thick round columns flanking two gigantic, colorful banners.
THE OLMEC ART OF ANCIENT MEXICO,
I read.
REALISM REVISITED: THE AMERICAN MASTERWORKS.

“Can we go in?” I asked.

My father shook his head. “Not today, Ingrid. We don’t want to keep Dr. Giles and his wife waiting.” He saw the crestfallen look on my face and added, “Next time, okay? New York will always be here. I promise.”

The cab stopped in front of an enormous white building with a polished gold plaque at its entrance. My father looked up at the numbers on the green and white awning and said, “This is the one. Right here’s fine, thanks.”

We pushed through the revolving doors and walked into a gleaming marble lobby with a separate area off to the right that actually looked like someone’s living room. Someone rich. I remember thinking suddenly that my mother’s shoes made a lot of noise. For the first time that day, I wondered whether we were properly dressed. My mother had wanted to bring a fresh change of clothes for dinner after tromping around the city all day, but Dr. Giles had said to just come as we were, we weren’t going anywhere fancy.

A rotund, rosy-cheeked man in a forest green uniform with gold piping at the cuffs and hem stood behind a tall wooden desk a few yards from us. He was busy signing a clipboard held by a skinny man in a brown uniform, who was balancing a large parcel against his hip.

“Forgot the wine!” my father exclaimed under his breath, and dashed back out through the glass doors toward our cab, which was just pulling away from the curb. He took off after it.

My mother approached the doorman and said politely, “We’re the Yungs. We’re here to see Dr. and Mrs. Giles?”

He looked my mother and me up and down. “How do you spell that?”

“Y-U-N-G,” she said, enunciating each letter clearly.

“One moment.” He picked up a green phone and dialed a number he seemed to know by heart. He announced us, listened for a moment, then hung up and said, “Yes, they’re expecting you. The elevators are around the corner, down the hall, and to your right. Twenty-E.” Then he turned back to the newspaper half-hidden in front of him.

“Let’s wait over here for your dad,” my mother said in Mandarin, herding me away from the doorman. A moment later, my father burst through the doors and came puffing up, holding the black plastic bag that contained the bottle of wine.

The doorman glanced up, jerked his head to the left, and said, “Delivery entrance is around the corner.”

My father paused a second, then started past the doorman. “No, I’m here to—”

The doorman stepped out from behind his desk and planted himself in front of my father, blocking his path. “I said, deliveries are around the corner. Can’t you understand English?”

My mother made a small noise I hadn’t heard her make before, a kind of startled choke.

My father didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said evenly, “We are here to have dinner with Dr. Roger Giles. You can tell him it’s Dr. Le-Wen Yung and his family.”

The doorman looked over at my mother and me now, more carefully this time. My mother raised her chin a little as she returned his stare. I thought for a moment that he might apologize—he
had
to, didn’t he? But he just stepped back behind his desk and picked up his paper again. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Twenty-E.”

My father had turned a dark shade of red. He and my mother were both silent as the three of us made our way down a long carpeted hall to the elevators. I knew from the set of their faces not to say a word.

I remember wanting to cry, but not a sad kind of crying. An angry kind. I was angry at the man in the dark green uniform, and angry at myself, for feeling embarrassed for my father.

Finally we reached a dark-wood-paneled elevator with a shiny brass handrail. I was surprised to see that another man in green sat inside. He smiled at us and asked, “Which floor?” My parents looked startled by the appearance of another uniformed man, but I piped up, “Twenty, please.”

“Right away, young lady.”

The doors closed and whisked us the twenty floors up. The elevator traveled so fast that my ears popped, and I thought what a strange and wonderful thing that must be—to live so high above the ground that your ears popped every time you got home!

I snuck a glance at my father. He still had a dark look on his face and stared resolutely at the lit numbers as they counted up to twenty. My mother straightened her skirt and inspected her reflection in a compact from her purse. She reached over and smoothed down my hair, and I squirmed away from her, embarrassed and annoyed, before the elevator stopped at the twentieth floor.

After we sat stiffly through a delicious dinner of roast beef and whipped potatoes, during which neither my mother nor my father had said much, for which I’d compensated by keeping up a constant chatter with the Gileses about what I was learning in the third grade, Dr. Giles suggested retiring to the living room for something he called a cordial. It had been light out when we sat down to dinner, so when we stepped back into the living room, with its wide picture window open to the city, I was not prepared for the view that greeted us.

My mother, father, and I stood together in front of that picture window, gazing out over the dark tops of the trees in Central Park and the majestic spires and towers of Manhattan, glinting silver and pink in the deepening dusk. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.