by Wan, Helen
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.
“It’s quite something, isn’t it?” Dr. Giles remarked cheerfully, as he poured four drinks into ornate crystal glasses. “That view’s what finally sold Nancy and me on this place.”
I could not stop looking and looking out that window, at the deep violet hue spreading across the sky. It felt as if the day’s humiliations were draining from my body, and I was waking up fresh. I had never wanted to belong to anything more than to that shimmering landscape of office towers lit up against the dark New York sky. Each individual glittering box of light—like gems strung along a necklace—seemed to me to be a tiny oblong window onto success, acceptance, respect, that is to say, a place in the world. Everything that must be good and great and worth striving for. I thought about how each glimmering box of light came with a telephone, a computer, a keyboard, a desk, diplomas on a wall, shelves full of books. I thought to myself that these must be the kinds of things anyone would want. I resolved at that moment to come back here and look at this city skyline someday after I was grown, and know that one of those millions of tiny, far-off, glittering boxes of light in the sky was mine.
I wasn’t big. I wasn’t strong. I wasn’t tall. I wasn’t even a boy. But people said I was smart. So I simply willed myself to succeed—over and over and over again—because I had to. It was the only way I could think of to protect my parents and myself. It was how I would justify what my family was doing here. I didn’t see any other way.
FIVE
The morning of the firm outing dawned bright and beautiful. Of course it did. It was as if Parsons Valentine had ordered up the weather. I wouldn’t have been surprised. If anyone could do it, they could.
At nine o’clock on the dot, while the rest of the midtown commuters scrambled to clock in and get to their desks, I boarded one of the luxury charter coaches lined up on Fifty-first Street.
Tyler Robinson, another Corporate associate who worked in the Securities group, waved his arms above his head. “Seats back here, Ingrid.”
People were laughing and talking excitedly; golf bags were strewn across seats. The air was charged with the buzzy anticipation of a busload of kids going to summer camp. I made my way down the aisle toward Tyler, nodding to various partners and associates along the way.
Tyler Robinson was six foot four and gorgeous. The only African American associate in Corporate who’d stuck around past his third or fourth year, he was also one of a handful of openly gay attorneys at Parsons Valentine. In private, Tyler and I joked that together we made up the firm’s Diversity Dream Team. Between the two of us, the firm got to tick off four boxes on its National Association of Law Placement diversity questionnaire: black, gay, Asian, female. Four exotic birds with just two stones.
And we were, by far, the two most-photographed attorneys in the firm’s glossy recruiting brochure. Look, here’s Tyler in a boardroom! There’s Ingrid in the law library! Here they both are interacting meaningfully with senior partners! It was as hilarious as it was sad.
Tyler half-stood. “Window or aisle?” he asked.
“I’ll take the window.”
He stood up obligingly so I could slide in.
I sank into the seat and, glancing out the tinted window, spotted Murph looking for a bus to board. He was wearing a white golf shirt and khaki shorts, with a tennis racquet bag slung over his shoulder. I rapped once on the glass, and Murph looked up.
I waved.
Murph gave me a thumbs-up. In another second he was striding down the aisle.
Tyler shot me a look. “Really?”
“Come on, it’s just for an hour,” I said.
Murph and Tyler Robinson were not buddies. I wouldn’t say that they disliked each other, exactly; just that they were two extremely different kinds of men. Tyler wasn’t a “joiner” in firm activities, but if Murph ever left the firm, well, you got the feeling that social life at Parsons Valentine would simply grind to a halt. Not surprisingly, Tyler avoided Murph, Hunter, and the rest of the firm jocks whenever possible. For their part, Murph and Hunter thought that Tyler was “aloof” and “standoffish.”
But I had always been a pleaser. I wanted people to get along—with me and with each other. It was exhausting having friends who weren’t friends themselves.
“Hey,” Murph said breathlessly, flopping into the seat in front of me. “Did you have to find seats all the way in back?”
“The cool kids sit in the back of the bus,” I told him.
“Yeah, yeah.” He stowed his tennis racquet under the seat and then settled himself comfortably against the window, one tanned arm resting along the back of the seat in front of me. He glanced over at Tyler and nodded.
Tyler nodded back without a word.
“So,” I said, a little too loudly. “I see you’re signed up for tennis today, Murph?”
“Definitely. Hunter and I put in for some doubles. Who knows who we’ll get paired up with, though. Hopefully no losers.”
“Hopefully not,” said Tyler mildly.
Now I gave him a look. Try harder.
Tyler rolled his eyes and turned away.
Murph looked at me and mouthed, What’s with him?
I decided to change the subject. “Why doubles?”
Murph shrugged. “Easier to get court time. Ever since Trask took over.”
The Management Committee had discreetly asked Ann Trask, the firm’s director of special events, to take over the assigning of teams for golf and tennis. In recent years, the most jocklike male partners had excluded the less athletic lawyers from their golf carts, a practice the firm had deemed unsporting.
For the rest of the ride, Murph and I placed bets on which partners would get the most shit-faced while Tyler pretended to nap.
An hour later, the coach turned onto Country Club Drive. We rolled past tall green hedges and a set of massive stone gates at the entrance, bearing a sign that read:
OAK HOLLOW COUNTRY CLUB
EST. 1883
MEMBER AND GUEST ENTRANCE ONLY
The coach pulled up to the clubhouse, a once gracious manor that was now home to corporate events and political fund-raisers. Everybody stood up at once, gathering their stuff and crowding into the aisle. A boisterous clique of summer associates huddled at the front of the bus, joking and talking. “Let me at those pancakes,” said one, rubbing his hands together. “Forget the pancakes—let me at that open bar!” said another. “Not til noon, Steinberg,” said a third. “Remember, we’ve got to pace ourselves.”
“Oh my God, you guys aren’t going to start drinking before noon, are you?” shrieked one of the young women, zipping up a Louis Vuitton squash bag.
The oth
er girls in the group laughed and tossed their long, straight hair as we filed off the bus and into the clubhouse.
Once inside, we walked down a long hallway, our footsteps echoing on the impeccably polished floors, passing a library and a large empty sitting room, until we reached a set of French doors that led out onto the vast stone terrace. Along one edge of the terrace stood a white-tablecloth buffet breakfast, complete with an outdoor grilling station staffed by men in white chef’s hats, flipping made-to-order omelets. The air smelled of sizzling bacon and freshly mown grass.
We stood for a moment and surveyed the Parsons Valentine crowd: men decked out in tennis whites or golf shirts and khakis; women wearing crisp sleeveless shirts and tailored shorts, or light-colored tennis skirts. And you’ve never seen so many people wearing visors.
“Let’s go sit over there,” suggested Murph, tilting his head toward a table where Marty Adler and Harold Rubinstein sat chatting with a group of summer associates.
“Sure,” I said. Tyler just shrugged. We threaded our way through the crowd, only to find Justin Keating sitting at the table, looking bored and complacent. I felt a flash of annoyance. No other paralegals had been invited to the outing. Then again, no other paralegals had Justin’s connections.
Adler looked up and half-stood, holding on to the napkin in his lap. “Well, well! The party can begin. Make yourselves at home.”
Murph, Tyler, and I pulled out chairs and sat down.
Adler introduced us to the summer associates at the table. Then he asked, “And you all of course know Justin?”