by Wan, Helen
“And? What’s she like?” I asked.
He shrugged. “We’ll see. I think she was a gorgeous girl, but there was something that kept her from being a complete ten. You know, like when a pretty girl can’t walk in heels or something.”
“What a shame.” I shook my head mournfully.
“Plus,” Murph continued, “it was pretty dark in the bar where I met her. She may be kind of a bakkushan.”
A moment passed as I chewed my bagel. “Okay,” I said. “I give up. What’s a bakkushan?”
Murph grinned. “It’s the Japanese word for a chick who looks hot from behind, but from the front, not so much.”
I shook my head. Poor Anna Jergensen, whoever she was.
As the only senior female M&A associate left at the firm, I was used to this. While Murph could come to work and recount all the gory details of his dating exploits—and did, ad nauseam, to the great amusement of Hunter, me, and all of our colleagues—I never talked to any of the guys in the office about my romantic life. Granted, there’d been nothing to tell for the last two and a half years, but that was beside the point. Gloria Steinem notwithstanding, there was still a clear double standard for men and women when it came to talking about our sex lives in the office.
In Murph’s case, it was almost expected, the bawdier, the better. In my case, it would seem unprofessional at best—and at worst, slutty.
“You gonna make it to the outing this year?” asked Murph.
Parsons Valentine was about to hold its annual firm outing at a Westchester country club. It always took place on a Friday, and the firm gave secretaries and paralegals the day off—which sounds like a magnanimous gesture until you stop to consider that they were not invited to the outing itself. It was strictly for the lawyers and summer associates. As with all firm events, attendance was surreptitiously taken.
“Do I have a choice?” I said.
Murph shrugged. “Not really.”
“Then I guess I’ll be at the outing, won’t I?”
He waggled his eyebrows at me. “Bringing your bikini this year, Yung?”
“Keep dreaming, Murph.”
He laughed. “Oh, I will, Yung. I will.”
My phone rang, and we both glanced at the display:
MARTIN J. ADLER x3736
Murph gave me a crisp military salute. “Guess you need to get that,” he said, unfolding his limbs from my chair and rising. At the door he turned back around. “Not to say I told you so, but I knew you should have looked busy that day Adler came calling. Now you’ve ruined your whole summer!” He shook his head in mock pity.
“Bite me, Murph,” I called after him. But I was smiling.
Murph was jealous, and we both knew it.
THREE
I was running late for lunch with Ted Lassiter. Even if I sprinted from my office to the restaurant, I’d still be late. Five minutes at least. Maybe ten. Fuck. Ted Lassiter was not the sort of client you kept waiting. I cursed the stiletto pumps I’d selected that morning, even as a little voice in my head assured me they had been the right choice. Ted Lassiter was clearly the kind of man who felt that if he absolutely had to work with a woman lawyer, at least she should show him the courtesy of wearing a skirt and high heels.
I stepped out of the elevator and hurried across the marble lobby.
“Where’s the fire?” yelled Ricardo, who worked Building Security. He and I had been friends ever since he’d rescued me from a stalled elevator eight years ago. It was my second month at the firm, and I’d just worked my first all-nighter when, in my sheer exhaustion, I’d stumbled into an elevator car that was disabled for the night, then stupidly pressed DOORS CLOSE. It had been Ricardo who found me at 5:00 A.M., crumpled in a corner, panicked and crying. He had never mentioned the incident to another soul, and I was eternally grateful.
“Late for a meeting, RC,” I threw back over my shoulder as I headed toward the doors. “See you on the way back.”
I careened down Madison, hung a left at Fifty-first, and waited at the corner to cross Park Avenue. I took in a long breath. This particular section of the city always had a calming effect on me, especially on a day like this, with the sky a vivid blue against the endless crawl of bright yellow cabs as they made their way up and down the canyon of hotels and investment banks. A handful of tourists were stranded on the little concrete island that divides Park Avenue and I felt a little pang of sympathy. I remembered how much it used to bother me, as a young graduate who’d just arrived in New York, to misjudge the timing of those Park Avenue traffic lights and get stranded on that little slab of concrete, as the taxicabs and town cars whizzed past. I’d felt exposed, an amateur. Now I felt completely at home. I loved this feeling. Why not? I’d earned it.
The light changed, and the crowd surged across Park.
I looked at my watch again. If Lassiter was on time, he’d have been waiting for seven minutes now. Shit. I quickened my pace. I half-walked, half-jogged past the soup kitchen line at St. Bart’s, past office workers eating their lunches outside, past carts and trucks dishing out kebabs, gyros, arepas, empanadas, dumplings, buns, jerk chicken, lobster rolls, Indian curries, and Southern barbecue. Everything smelled delicious to me. I would have much preferred something out of one of those shiny metal carts to the Cobb salad I always ordered at these client lunches.
The restaurant was up ahead, just on the other side of Lex. As I approached the corner, I noticed a jowly middle-aged man seated beside an array of framed watercolors and charcoal sketches. The man’s head was turned about ninety degrees to follow the backside of a young female office worker as she crossed the street. Ugh. There are few things more galling than having to walk directly toward a man you know for sure will be watching your ass as you walk by. Especially when it’s so clearly not a man (a) who you particularly want checking out your ass, or (b) whose ass you would want to check out in return. From time to time, depending on my mood, I found it amusing to surprise these guys—to turn around abruptly and actually catch them in the act. Four times out of five, they blushed. Sometimes we’d even laugh, the man and me.
I took a breath, squared my shoulders, and clicked past the sidewalk artist. But the light had just changed, and as the wave of traffic nosed forward, I was forced to step back and wait by his corner.
“Ni how!” he called out to me.
I sighed.
“Konnichiwa!” he tried again, louder. “Hey, you! Konnichiwaaaaa!”
I rolled my eyes. This was going to be a long light.
I did not understand why more men could not grasp the subtle yet important distinction between overtures toward women that carried a snowball’s chance versus those that didn’t. For example: Nice hair, okay. Nice pair, no. Was it really so difficult to master?
As the light finally changed and I stepped off the curb, the man hissed at me in a loud stage whisper, “Fucking chink.”
I froze. There it was. That familiar churning, centered deep in the pit of my stomach. An acute flash of anger. Then rage.
The voice inside my head screamed, Hey, you really don’t have time for this! even as I felt myself pivoting, hard, on my right stiletto heel. I walked up to the man. I planted myself directly in front of him, forcing him to look at me. I was standing close enough to one of his crappy little watercolors to drive my Jimmy Choo pump right through it. It would be so easy. I’d played women’s soccer for three seasons at Yale.
The sidewalk artist blinked up in surprise, then pretended to be fascinated by a fixed point ten yards behind me.
“Excuse me,” I said, very loudly and very clearly. “What did you just say?”
I could see him clench and unclench his jaw muscles, could see the deep flush of red spreading out from beneath his collar.
I cocked my head to one side and waited. I fought back the urge to check my watch. Let him think I could stand here all day.
This asshole wasn’t going to win just because I was running late.
I was very well aware
that I was wasting the time of a very important man, a Fortune 500 CEO who was not accustomed to being stood up. Especially not by some girl lawyer whom he hadn’t even wanted running his deal in the first place. I could already hear him sputtering this, red-faced and furious, to Adler. Oh yes, I knew there would be hell to pay once I got to the restaurant, and certainly once I got back to the office. But at the moment, I really didn’t care.
Because this jerk could have called me anything else. He could have followed me across the street hollering you bitch into my ear, and I wouldn’t have flinched. Wouldn’t even have remembered him by the time I was handing my wrap to the coat-check girl in the cool interior of the restaurant, smoothing my hands down over my skirt, and following the maître d’ to Lassiter’s table, a sweet smile and some rehearsed apology on my lips.
But that word—the one the sidewalk artist had so carelessly hurled in my direction—that word, I could not let go. It didn’t matter who I kept waiting.
I edged closer to his dirty canvas chair and asked him again. “Something you wanted to say to me?” I crossed my arms over my chest and waited. “Well?”
He let out an ugly, dismissive snort. He glared at me, threw his hands up in the air, and shrugged. “Look, lady, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. So just get out of my face.”
“I’m talking about when you called me a chink back there, you fuck. That’s what I’m fucking talking about.”
He paused for a second, then put his hairy hands on his knees and laughed. “You’re crazy.” And then he stood up. He was much bigger than he’d looked sitting down. I felt a hot rush of panic, but I stared him down until he turned his back on me and pretended to busy himself with a row of postcard-size prints.
For the first time I got a real look at what he was selling. They were amateurish, cartoonishly bad pictures—portraits, I suppose—of dogs and women. Sometimes alone, sometimes together in the same scene. The dogs were all cast with human characteristics: dogs driving taxis, dogs selling newspapers, dogs drinking beer, dogs playing football. Ironically, none playing poker. I almost laughed.
The women in his paintings were all nude and large-breasted. What a surprise. I glanced down at the biggest watercolor, the one closest to me. It showed a voluptuous blond woman, naked and spread-eagled on a motel bed. A dog was lying next to her, smoking a cigarette.
He saw me eyeing it. “Oh, you like that one, eh? Yeah, it’s one of my personal favorites. Five hundred dollars,” he said, his lips twisted into a mocking smile. He was enjoying himself. He looked me languidly up and down, his eyes lingering on my breasts. “But for you—eh, I’ll let you have it for an even twenty,” he said with an exaggerated wink. “I got a special discount today for the pretty Chinese girls.” He jerked his chin roughly at me. “You’re Chinese, right?”
I didn’t answer.
“Or is it Japanese? Or Korean?” He smirked and waved dismissively. “Ah, well, it doesn’t matter. You people all look the same.”
BAM!!!!
I’d plunged the pointy tip of my alligator pump all the way through the painting. Reflexively, I’d bent my knee and drawn my foot all the way back, then snapped my leg sharply out and forward, making contact at the precise angle I’d perfected so many soccer practices ago. I still had damn good aim. Pretty decent form, too. Coach would have been proud. I’d landed my kick in the dead center of the canvas, leaving a large, ragged hole. I’d taken out the cigarette-smoking dog completely, and half of the naked woman, too.
The man dropped to his knees in front of his painting, waving his arms and yelling. “What the fuck? What the fuck!”
I was dazedly inspecting my right shoe, which, impressively, wasn’t damaged—see, that’s why you pay for top quality—when the guy threw his ruined canvas onto the ground and came toward me. His face was red and shiny.
I tried to back away, but my legs refused to obey me, and I remained rooted to the spot.
The sidewalk artist took two lurching steps toward me.
“Easy, buddy,” I heard a gruff male voice say.
I whirled around to see Ted Lassiter standing directly behind me. He pulled a money clip from the pocket of his perfectly draped gray suit. The sidewalk artist suddenly looked unsure of what to do, and Lassiter took advantage of his momentary arrest to peel a single twenty from a thick wad of bills. He crumpled it into the other man’s palm. “I believe this was your going rate.”
The sidewalk artist looked too bewildered to respond.
Lassiter turned to me with a broad grin. I grinned right back at him.
As we crossed Lexington Avenue, Lassiter clapped me on the shoulder, in exactly the same way he’d greeted Marty Adler at our first meeting.
“Come on, Slugger. We’re late.”
FOUR
I padded into my kitchen and opened the stainless-steel fridge. The immaculate shelves stared back at me, empty save for a carton of orange juice, a takeout container of chicken tikka masala, an ancient Chobani yogurt, and—bingo!—a bottle of Pinot Grigio. The kitchen spoils of a woman who had eaten dinner at home exactly three times in the last month.
Although I’d bought the place two years ago, my apartment still wasn’t lived in—no pictures on the stark white walls, no rugs on the bare hardwood floors. “But it doesn’t look like anyone lives here!” my mother had exclaimed on her last visit to New York. My father just murmured approvingly about the state-of-the-art security system.
I poured myself a glass of Pinot Grigio and returned to the living room to contemplate the events of my day in peace and quiet. I sank down onto the couch—the one splurge I’d allowed myself, a little gift to celebrate my closing on this place. Plush, low-backed, celery-colored, and horribly, impractically, expensive, it was the sort of couch meant to be looked at, more than sat on. Having grown up in a house where every piece of furniture was purchased on sale and remained neatly covered until the precise moment company walked in the door, I was not accustomed to making impulse buys. Still, I’d allowed myself this one luxury.
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 c
arefully 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.