Marcia’s eyes narrowed. “If I succeeded, people would think I batted my eyes at a judge. If I was promoted, people would think I slept my way to the next level, or just that my boss hoped I would be grateful for the favor. No matter what I did or didn’t do, I could never get credit for earning it with my work. Is that fair?”
“That’s a false question,” Parish said. “It’s probably possible to figure out which lawyer won a case, even if her side consisted of a team of three or four. But it’s not possible, even for her, to determine exactly how she won: what proportion of her victory was caused by the cold logic of her presentation, what proportion by how appealing she looked while she was giving it. In every instance, it was both.” He paused. “The only place where fairness comes in is whether she-a person-gets rewarded for using what she had to win.”
“But part of the reward should be the respect. You shouldn’t win and then have people feel contempt for you.”
“People don’t feel contempt in that situation. The only negative feeling is jealousy,” he assured her. “The women feel you don’t deserve to have what you’ve been given. The men see that you have powerful magic that’s not available to them.”
“I earned what I have.”
He looked at her, his expression intrigued, but said nothing to contradict her. His eyes refocused, and she knew he was studying Mary O’Connor again. At first Marcia was relieved. But after a time, she realized her irritation would not let her leave the subject. She needed to deliver a rebuttal.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you why it was unfair. I was interviewed by the senior partners, and they asked difficult questions. I was hired, and was given no special privileges that I know of. I worked for three years, as hard as anyone. By then I thought I had become an important part of the team, a member of a group that valued me because I knew some things that the others didn’t, had experience that was different from theirs, was willing to devote as much effort as anyone did to succeed on a case. It was a shock to learn otherwise. It was a sudden dose of reality that I’d never had before. And do you know what? When the time came, my reaction wasn’t ‘They have it wrong.’ It was ‘Of course.’ It had never happened before, but it felt familiar, as though it had happened a hundred times. I’m bitter, but what I’m bitter about isn’t the world we live in. It’s the loss of the brighter, better, fairer world I imagined and lived in before.”
“What did you learn about the real world?”
“It’s a hard, harsh place.”
“Why?”
“You have to study as hard as I did and work the same hours, but you also have to work to be attractive. And you can’t decline to use it: all you can be is pretty or ugly, not somebody who refuses to be either. And you have to be very calculating about everything you do, including sex. You have to make self-serving decisions about who you will sleep with, but also who you won’t sleep with. And you have to be very careful never to let them know that ‘no’ is permanent, that you won’t ever sleep with them, because then they’ll stop pleasing you and begin to punish you. And…” She let her voice trail off.
When she stopped talking, Parish looked at her sharply. She began again. “I wasn’t prepared. On an impulse, I had an affair with a partner. David. He was cruel to me. I broke it off. He made it clear that I didn’t have that option. I was afraid, but more afraid of giving in to him than of being fired. So he had me fired. When I told them I’d fight, they produced a file full of fake negative performance evaluations. In the meeting, in front of all the senior partners, one of them said, ‘You’re a disruptive influence. Who you fuck or won’t fuck is taking up billable hours. You’re not good enough as a litigator to make up the lost money. Nobody is.’ ”
Parish was looking past her again. “It’s time.” He stood up and she glanced over her shoulder to see Mary O’Connor put a cell phone into her purse and walk out of the restaurant into the hotel lobby. Marcia turned toward Parish, but he was heading for the door that led through the garden to the street.
She followed. He had done it. He had gotten her to talk through all of the waiting, and had gotten her to talk about her injustice, to make her pick at the sore until she felt the hatred like a stab. She saw Parish come close to Mary on the street, and saw her tell him something. He waved his hand at a cab, and when it stopped, Mary got into it. Parish walked back to join Marcia. “The place is a bar in Georgetown. It’s called Handel’s. Have you been there?”
She shook her head. “Uh-uh. Never heard of it.”
“Good.” He took her arm and looked at his watch, then conducted her toward the Metro stop. “We’ll take the subway.”
In the Bethesda station, Marcia watched Parish step up to one of the big automatic ticket machines along the wall at the bottom of the long escalator, push the plus and minus buttons until he got the right fare, then slip a bill into the machine, take the tickets, and scoop up his change. She had thought she would be the one to do that, because she was the one who had lived in Washington. But Parish seemed to have been everywhere and to know how all systems worked. He repeated the process. Four tickets? Return, of course. She would not have bothered.
They took up places near the tracks and watched the lights that were set into the pavement blink on and off to signal that a train was coming. The train slid into place at their feet and they stepped through the doorway and sat together in one of the orange plastic benches near the front of the car, but they did not speak. She realized that she missed being one of the people who came down into a station and stepped onto one of these trains that used to take her to work.
Everybody in the Washington subway seemed to wear a plastic pass on a long lanyard around his neck. It was a status symbol that had started with government workers and spread. Like all status symbols, it had a reverse effect. Marcia had always worn a smooth, tailored suit and kept it fresh by never sitting down on the train. An attorney for Spailer, Creeden and West didn’t have anything as common as a security pass around her neck, any more than a cabinet officer did. She could feel a tight, angry knot in her stomach.
She looked at Parish, who was staring straight ahead, his expression vacant and his body at perfect rest. It was his fault that she felt the bitterness so strongly tonight. He had reminded her, and now each step was one more familiar sensation that she had not felt in over a year, and had missed.
The vibration of the Metro train that she felt under her feet reminded her that she would never ride it again, not all dressed up on her way to that beautiful office in Georgetown. Even the hotel restaurant near the Bethesda station had set off feelings of loss. She wondered if Parish had known before he had asked.
The ride took only twenty minutes, and as the train pulled in briefly at each of the familiar stops, she felt the intensity of her anger growing. Her life had been destroyed. She was willing to concede that what she was most angry about was that a whole system of false beliefs had been wrecked, shown to be untenable. But anyone could have seen that she had needed those illusions. She was also aware that billions of people in the past had lived and died without ever being disabused of similar beliefs. Why could hers not have been preserved?
When she had been at school, she and some friends had spent hours discussing what the unforgivable sin was, the one that could never be erased by absolution. The majority had said it was witchcraft. Marcia had thought it was destroying another person’s faith. What had set that off? Oh, yes. A Hawthorne story they had read in class. Things were so much more complicated in girls’ schools than mere philosophical inquiry. The witchcraft answer had gained adherents because one girl had been having a feud with two others, and burning candles in her room with ominous incantations. The faith answer was not free from outside influences either. Tanya Holbrooke had recently scandalized a few classmates by referring to born-again Christians as “fooled again,” and they spent most of the time during the discussion giving her sidelong glances.