The firm had a gym, and one day Alice, who they’d made a partner because there was no way not to, came in and took her clothes off. The men were frightened. They wanted to kill her.
Alice knew this. Her mother was a politician in a small way, and she liked to quote Lyndon Johnson to the effect that if you couldn’t walk into a room and know by instinct who your enemies were, you had no business in Washington. Alice lived in New York, but she was good at walking into rooms. “Very self-possessed” was a phrase that was sometimes used.
The gym had been constructed on the (perhaps unconscious) principle that, as they shared liability, partners of a law firm should have no secrets from each other, might share offices or even desks. So it was just one big room, with exercise equipment in the middle, doorless wooden lockers and benches around the sides, and a large door into a big open shower room. When they made Alice a partner they just assumed she’d “understand” and never even stick her head in.
And the other women partners? Well, the short answer is they didn’t go to the gym. Neither did a majority of their male counterparts, in fact. There wasn’t any explicit rule that said who could use the gym. But working in a high-caste New York law firm is a form of self-mutilation. At some level most of the partners assumed they weren’t supposed to be healthy, or have time for exercise. The three dozen or so who did use the gym on a regular basis were the powerful ones—the alpha males. There weren’t any alpha females.
As word began to get around about Alice, some of the men who’d never spent much time in the gym developed a sudden interest in personal fitness, but most evidently decided it would have been a bit obvious to do so. Or maybe they were too modest. In any case, the firm’s existing pecking order was largely preserved—except for the presence of Alice.
The first way the alpha males tried to get rid of Alice was to recommend her for a job in Washington. “Assistant Secretary of Something,” said Oscar. “Or ambassador to a small country.”
“Far away,” said Henry, who was senior partner.
“What’s your problem?” said Charles. “Good-looking woman on the next stairmaster. I personally find it quite motivating.”
“Charles, it’s awkward and you know it,” said Henry.
There was a new President in residence in the White House. Several of the firm’s partners had been important donors and, therefore, had “access.” And being political junkies they knew that the appointment and confirmation process now underway often uncovered secrets. They sensed that Alice had some. Probably a lesbian, they said. Serve her right, behaving the way she had. And if she did get confirmed, she’d have to move to Washington, which would get her out of the gym.
When Alice heard about the plan to have her nominated she put a stop to it. “I couldn’t stand the scrutiny,” she said a trifle loudly as she dried off after her shower, facing the middle of the room to give everyone a good look. “And I know what you’re up to” was the subtext, though she didn’t have to say it. The plotters gave each other meaningful looks.
Alice was hiding something, but it wouldn’t have caused a problem with a Democratic Senate. Her family was working class. She hadn’t exactly specifically kept it a secret that her father had been an ironworker, up in the sky with the Iroquois who don’t mind heights, or that her brothers were both firemen, or that her mother had been one too until she temporarily became a local celebrity for saving a little kid on television and someone powerful persuaded her to let her name go on the ballot—but a fair-minded person might have described her reticence that way.
Some improbable strand of DNA had given Alice a skinny upper-class body, with breasts that when she was naked were quietly perfect, rich black hair, pale skin and an aristocratic capacity for self-deception—whereas the rest of the O’Malleys were red-haired and freckled and as forthright as fire plugs—and she’d accepted the role destiny seemed to have designed her for. When she was fourteen, Alice’s voice began of its own accord to acquire the neutral accent of a television newsreader, and she decided to become a lawyer. She’d seen lady lawyers in television shows and they seemed to live their lives in Armani.
No one at the firm knew Alice’s “come-from,” as Charles put it—or about her younger brother’s decoration for bravery, or her mother’s victory over the bureaucrats in keeping open an effective if old-fashioned high school in an unfashionable part of town. All her partners knew was that clients liked her, and asked for her, that she billed two thousand hours a year (which was a lot) and didn’t make mistakes. Alice was proud of her family, but silently proud. And if her last name excited curiosity, she would respond that “all O’Malleys are related.” That probably wasn’t a mortal sin.
The next thing that happened to Mrs. O’Malley’s daughter was that a partner she didn’t know very well, named William, sat down beside her in the gym and said very quietly, “I know what you mean about scrutiny.” Alice didn’t know where he was headed, so she just kept on tying her gym shoes. The man had finished his shower and had nothing on but a towel, which added to the confessional quality of the situation. “I have a problem,” he said finally, in a carefully non-alpha tone.
If a partner of a high-caste law firm has a problem that relates to his professional expertise, the firm has a problem. William was a tax partner and he’d cheated on his taxes. Well, not cheated exactly—taken an aggressive position. So as to improve his cash flow at the time of his divorce. And maybe simultaneously had been ultra-conservative about the value of his illiquid assets, which the State of New York would have expected him to share with his former wife. These two (in retrospect) errors of judgment interacted in subtle ways that reminded Alice why she had not become a tax lawyer, but the net result was that if he was unable to deliver some cash to his former wife within two weeks, she would make a fuss that would probably provoke scrutiny of his returns. And he continued to be short of cash. All this while gripping the towel and looking down at Alice’s shoes. Most of all, he was mortified to be putting the firm’s good name at risk.
Alice knew—and William knew she would know—what he was saying. If William’s partners didn’t help him, they would regret it. It wasn’t a threat—just a reminder of the realities. The firm could beat up on him if they wanted to, and he was prepared to act embarrassed and grateful, but his former wife was a ticking time bomb and they better get on with it. He needed about seven million dollars.
Alice felt within her a flicker of alpha anger. She didn’t look forward to telling her partners that each of them needed to kick in fifty thousand dollars to bail out someone who billed a lot but wasn’t very popular. She didn’t want to part with that kind of money herself. But most of all she resented William’s assumption that she would be “good about it”—would be sympathetic and efficient and discreet, the way girls who joined high-caste firms were supposed to be, the way even former wives were supposed to be.
“Stand up, William,” she said quietly. “Drop the towel and show us your dick.”
William obeyed.
“And stay out of the gym for a while.”
Alice got right to work, starting with known curmudgeons, which made it harder for the rest to waste time being outraged. She made William sign a loan agreement that obliged him to live on an associate’s pay until the seven million dollars was repaid. She negotiated a settlement with William’s former wife, staying professional and distant despite her curiosity about the woman. She got another tax partner to review William’s back-year returns, the conclusion being that, well, he hadn’t broken the law. And when William, whose sense of entitlement was nothing if not resilient, happened to return to the gym at the precise moment Alice emerged dripping from the shower, she just looked at him, and he backed out of the door. “Part goddess, part border collie,” said Charles—just loud enough for Alice to hear him.
But along with this brutal triumph, something soft and spooky was going on. As she went around from office to office, soliciting checks from her partners, Alice realized that being clothed made her gym companions shy. And not being gym-goers made the rest uncertain. It was as if they all now knew that the selves they presented in suits and ties (or in her case a skirt and blouse and very expensive cardigan) were fraudulent. I know that you have clumps of hair on your back, she found herself thinking as she settled into the chair Frank offered her. I know that you have a pretty impressive body, Oscar, even if having been bullied as a little boy or guilt about something has forced bad posture on you. And you both have proof that I am a woman. It has become impossible any longer to see me as a sexless striver, which was such a safe and comfortable arrangement.
As the weeks passed, more and more of Alice’s partners made cautious visits to the gym, but not to spy on Alice. As far as she could figure out, they wanted her to have seen them. They liked it. Their shoulders relaxed. The stress of self-presentation dissolved. It was like having been to confession at the age of nine.
Alice liked it too. Examining and being examined constituted acceptance. You have a sunburn, Paul. I have a bruise, Peter. Count my moles, George, if you like. There are six on my front and two on my back. I would gladly let you touch them, but lightning would strike you dead. And yes, Henry-pretending-not-to-look, when I stand up straight, you can see that my quietly perfect breasts are very slightly asymmetrical. Same as your wobbly bits.
Alice knew that there was endless speculation about what she was up to, what had given her the idea of walking into the gym and stripping. “She thinks she’s being modern,” said Frank. “She thinks she’s being clever,” said Andrew. Charles composed a haiku: “Alice be a frog. Work here twelve years, and never blink. One day she jump.”
Alice adopted a strategy of not thinking about it, which was presumably how her father had coped with working fifty stories above the sidewalk. She pushed her own questions aside with words like “thrill” or “mischief.”
The answer was ambition, of course. But what settled over her was calm. She had control. She liked that.
She began talking to Sandra, who’d made partner four years ahead of her, and whom she’d made a point of not getting to know, on the theory that it would be politically unwise. A woman had to make it on her own, really. Somehow that didn’t matter any more.
“Come to the gym some time,” said Alice when they ran into each other in an empty corridor. And I don’t care if you’re a lesbian, she added silently. I want to know where you buy those fabulous suits you wear.
“So the boys can look at me?” said Sandra.
“It isn’t what you expect. It’s . . . freeing. It’s like being baptized.”
“The sin of being a woman washed away?”
“Up to you how you think about it,” said Alice.
Sandra did come, briefly, though on a day Alice happened to be seeing a client in Chicago. “Sandra peak in and Sandra run away,” Charles told her with perfect political incorrectness. He spoke “fluent black person” (his phrase) as well as “oriental” when he thought he could get away with it. Sandra wasn’t exactly African-American in appearance, but there was general agreement that it was hard to say what she was. Other than a scarily good litigator, that is.
Charles was a problem, Alice knew. She probably had a crush on him, though she’d kept that admission at bay for many years. He came from Nebraska, which he told you immediately. “I should have been a Southerner,” he’d tell clients, “but I didn’t have the poetry.” What he did have was the body of a man who had worked on a farm as a boy. He liked to roll his sleeves up, and the muscles on his forearms were poetry. When he was in a drafting session, intensely concentrating on the task at hand, he made Alice imagine young Abe Lincoln straightening up from his rail-splitting and letting his eyes rest on the horizon—an Abe Lincoln who looked like Gary Cooper, that is.
Charles never hit on the female associates. He dated women in more glamorous professions like fashion and the theater. Armani wasn’t the half of it. Alice had seen pictures of him in magazines she flipped through at the hairdresser. He had never even sniffed at Alice, though they’d worked on some long, complicated deals together. But he engaged her right away when she started coming to the gym. She’d be mostly undressed and he’d sit down beside her, straddling the bench with his (so to speak) manhood between them and start chatting away about nothing, studying every square inch of Alice that was available for study. The other men, Alice learned later, dubbed this “the battle of not being embarrassed.”
Long, complicated deals could also be a problem. Alice knew this instinctively, but some of the firm’s children evidently did not. So an associate named Mary had stepped out of the hotel elevator on the wrong floor, and a partner named Fred had mistaken her intent. They were coming back from dinner after an unexpectedly successful day of negotiations. He’d kissed her right there in the corridor, and Mary had thought—or so she claimed—this is cool. And now, she was pregnant.
Fred asked Alice to talk to Mary. He suspected she was pregnant but she wouldn’t talk to him. “I don’t know what to do,” said Fred. “It was an accident. I didn’t have a condom. I never take them on business trips.”
“Too much information,” said Alice.
Alice wasn’t ready to admit she’d intended to acquire power but she seemed to be doing so. She had supplicants. As her mother would have said—maybe it was another of Lyndon Johnson’s principles—she kept putting favors in the favor bank. She said she’d talk to Mary.
“Thirty-five days,” said Mary.
“Everyone misses a period from time to time,” said Alice.
“I’ve been to the doctor,” said Mary.
Mary didn’t want an abortion, and she didn’t want to make any trouble for Fred, who thank God wasn’t married. She just wanted to keep her job and maybe get a raise so she could employ a live-in baby-carer. She had a friend whose Ecuadorian had a cousin who was looking for work . . .
Alice didn’t know what the answer was. She needed someone to talk it over with, so she made an appointment to see Charles in his office. She figured he could talk about sex without getting flustered.
“Just look at them,” said Charles. “Individually and when they happen to pass each other in the hall.”
“And?” Alice was lost.
“They’re in love,” said Charles, “and if they didn’t have the misfortune to work in this cathedral of virtue and over-achievement, they would have started dating three years ago. They’ve avoided working on anything together until this last deal, even though they both have public utilities experience. You got eyes, girl?”
Alice didn’t answer. “Evidently not,” said Charles, eventually. He’d turned in his chair to watch the stream of well-dressed lawyers flowing past the glass wall of his office.
“Thanks,” said Alice. “I know what to do.”
Fred and Mary were married in City Hall as soon as the results of their blood tests came in. She kept her last name, and announced she would work until she had to leave for the hospital. Fred was so pleased he blushed any time someone looked at him. Since he was a partner, and hadn’t fiddled his taxes, money was not a problem. It was agreed that Mary should probably move to another firm, but that could wait. Alice’s one condition was that Fred and Mary both take some maternity/paternity leave. “This being in love is fine, but you ought to get to know each other,” she said.
Alice was not a virgin. Climbing the skyscraper of her ambition included dating presentable men—required it, sometimes, when you needed to take an escort to a black-tie dinner raising money for a client CEO’s wife’s pet charity—and in order to do that you had to be responsive to their needs. But nothing had ever clicked. So the ballad of Mary and Fred, as Charles called it, made her a bit unsteady, some evenings, when she got back to her apartment. It was a small but attractive apartment, with a view of sorts. She’d used a decorator, and she kept the place immaculate—almost as if she expected a visitor.
Charles came to see her. In her office. “Nice painting,” he said. He hadn’t come to her office before.
“You want a diet Coke?” Alice kept a dwarf refrigerator under her desk.
“No thanks,” said Charles, settling himself into a chair across the desk from Alice. Then, “You solve any more problems they’ll make you senior partner.” He picked up a pencil from Alice’s desk and began playing with it. He could twirl it round and round his hand as if it had a life of its own. She’d watched him do it in drafting sessions.
“Henry’s senior partner,” said Alice. “The President of the United States returns his phone calls.”
“Well, managing partner, then. Lawyers generally aren’t too good at managing their own affairs, as you are progressively discovering.” A smile passed over Charles’s face for a moment. “And the President would get back to you too if he’d been in our gym.”
Alice shrugged. That had sounded like a compliment.
“Comfort zone,” said Charles. “I admire the way you’ve gone outside yours. Managing partner’s just the next step. We don’t even have one, if you think about it. The departments run themselves. Henry decides what we all get paid and every year he fires someone so we won’t think he can’t. Some of his decisions are . . . peculiar, though. He’s in his own world sometimes. Having his friend get elected will make that worse, of course.”
“Do we need a managing partner? What would one do?” Alice laughed. “That is, aside from managing Henry?”
“No idea,” said Charles. “Probably do need one. Management’s not my field, but I’m confident that once we’d elected you, you’d find useful work. But that’s not why I’m here.”
“You want to ask me out,” said Alice, suddenly laughing.
“Comfort zone,” said Charles, ignoring her outburst.
He manages rejection well, said Alice to herself. And then less clinically, Jesus, why did I say that?
“Like you,” said Charles, “I have always pushed myself. I joined the Marines the day I turned eighteen. When I was thirty, I ran a marathon. I have called up glamorous women I didn’t know and talked them into going out with me. One of them had won an Oscar the previous month. ‘What do you want from me?’ she said. ‘I’ll probably want to sleep with you,’ I told her, ‘but that’s hardly original. How about I try to make you laugh?’ Which she did, right then on the phone, and we had a drink, and it was clear as a trout stream that we would never be more than good friends. But I did pump a bit of adrenalin giving it a try.”
“I’ve pumped a little adrenalin in the gym,” said Alice.
“You have that shower with Sandra yet?”
“You are a very bad boy, Charles.”
“Well, that’s what I wanted to tell you about.”
“As opposed to the supermodels you’ve had?”
“Some years back—I won’t say where or when—I decided I was getting complacent. I’m physically fit. I can do what people who work here are supposed to be able to do. I can generally get a date. I wanted to go outside my comfort zone. I wanted to do something irrevocable. So I went to bed with another man.”
Alice didn’t breathe.
“As I’m sure you realize, that’s kind of the third rail. Touch it and you’re electrocuted. No do-overs. Or if you know about Native American culture, it’s like the ordeal young men go through, being hurt and hungry until they have a vision. Afterward, they are not the same person. And I’m not either.”
“So you’re bisexual?”
“No. Not in the least. That’s the point. I’m completely heterosexual. I didn’t like kissing someone who needed to shave. I didn’t like . . . doing the things we did. But I did them. I lived in the horror that homosexuality represents to a normal kid from a farm community in the Midwest. I did it for a whole weekend, in a very expensive hotel suite in a city where no one knew me.”
“Two problems,” said Charles. “It was incredibly sexy. I hated it, but part of me liked the horror. I suppose it’s like the first time you eat an oyster, only your whole body is involved.”
“You’re sure this doesn’t make you bisexual?”
“I don’t want to do it again.”
“That’s good news. So what’s problem number two?”
“He fell in love with me.”
“In another country.”
“Oh, I was anonymous. All he knew was that I could afford an expensive hotel and famous wine with room service. But it wasn’t fair of me to have let him fall in love.”
“You didn’t fall in love with him?”
“No. But I pretended. That was, in fact, the essence of the ordeal. And I pretended too well.”
They were both quiet for a while. Someone looking in the glass wall of Alice’s office would have concluded they were wrestling with a difficult legal issue, and might even have had the thought, how nice that partners of this firm can consult each other.
“Is that why,” Alice said finally, “you never chase the female associates? You’re afraid they’d fall in love.”
“Basic self-preservation,” said Charles, shifting his tone. “I don’t want to be Fred. But listen, Alice, the moral of the story is this: you can do whatever you decide to do. And you can survive it.” He stood up, put the pencil back where he’d found it on Alice’s desk, looked at her framed law school diploma as if he’d never seen such an object before. “High Honors,” he observed. “Very impressive.” The energy had gone out of the room. Whatever had just happened, they were on the other side of it.
“It got me this job,” said Alice.
“Same as me.” Charles put his hand on the doorknob but lingered for a moment.
“You did make all that up, didn’t you?” said Alice.
“That would be a safe assumption,” said Charles. “That is, if you want to be safe.” He closed the door behind him.
If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter how you get there. Thus said the White Rabbit to another Alice. This Alice decided she needed her own ordeal, with or without visions. She needed to toughen up. I’m afraid of being hurt, she told herself. She didn’t know whether Charles was flirting with her because he found her attractive or simply because he could. She’d seen a documentary on one of those nature channels, sitting up in bed at 2 a.m. eating popcorn, trying to become sleepy after a difficult day, in which it was explained that lions kill leopards “because they can,” and maybe that was all Charles was up to: keeping sharp his ability to make women melt.
Whether his tale was true or not, the message was clear. With me there would be no limits. You can have anything you want.
So that night instead of popcorn Alice got in bed with an alligator clamp she’d brought home from the office and thought about letting it close on one of her nipples. It was about an inch wide—not one of the biggest but she assumed its grip would be sufficient. She approached the matter slowly because it was her reactions rather than the pain that she cared about. She’d never tried this sort of thing before. She wanted to study her fear. How did it differ from what she assumed ironworkers felt on their way to work each morning? She looked down at her perfect breasts, which were being particularly quiet. We’re in this together, she told them.
“Ouch.” It was, yes, exactly. She’d read that what you were supposed to do with pain was focus on it. Panic made it worse, let the pain achieve dominance. You had to stare right at the pain, decide what color it was. Pale yellow?
Alice removed the alligator clamp. It wasn’t actually a decision. She just suddenly seemed to have the little nasty in the palm of her hand again, having endured at most thirty seconds.
She went for the other nipple right away, and then stopped herself. How does it feel? Is there excitement, and if so, in respect of what, as a lawyer would say? Invisible fingers did seem to be tracing patterns on her shoulders and thighs. It was cold in her bedroom and she was warm. Was it the prospect of pain or the fact of misbehaving that was doing that?
She let the alligator clamp squeeze her other nipple. We’ll go for ten minutes she said to herself. She’d been thinking five and changed her mind at the last second, which shoved a little shot of adrenalin into her blood stream. The surprise of her decision made her gasp.
So if focusing on the pain was the recommended approach, what would happen if she thought about something else. Would the pain be worse? She called up images of saints being tortured for their faith. The alligator clamp was nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. Three minutes. Seven to go. Or maybe she wouldn’t stop at ten. Could a person learn to fall asleep with one of these things on?
A person could not. And going beyond ten minutes hadn’t in the end seemed necessary. Nor did whipping herself with a leather belt, which reminded her of a baroque painting when she caught sight of herself in the mirror on her closet door. It wasn’t as satisfactory as the alligator clamp, despite the dramatic welts flagellation left on her backside. The thing about an alligator clamp was that you made the decision but then the tension in the metal did the work. The clamp didn’t back off the way she found she did with a belt if the tip end caught her with particular viciousness.
I hope I don’t develop a taste for this, Alice said to herself as she undressed the next evening. She’d kept the alligator clamp in a little velvet box that some earrings had once come in. She dropped in a second clamp. I’ve brought you a friend, she said.
Alice had always been a diligent girl. She practiced for two weeks. Not because there was anything to practice really—the alligator clamps were good at their job—so much as to not quit too easily. Living with the knowledge of what would happen when she got to her tidy apartment each evening was, well, part of it. Some days the ache in her nipples made her proud; some days it made her sad. She persevered, as she’d promised herself she would.
Alice told herself there wasn’t anything mystical about what she was doing. Just hard work, with an occasional erotic tingle. On good nights, though, potential insights did present themselves for inspection.
Charles’s disclosure wasn’t an offer of sex but an offer of friendship. Or maybe of both. Alice didn’t claim to be an authority on men, but most of them got pretty skittish about homosexuality, so perhaps the message was that Charles was prepared to trust her.
Or perhaps it was simply a confession, and he wanted to be forgiven. He was another supplicant. As for so many of her partners, Alice fulfilled a role that had little to do with Alice the person. It occurred to her that if absolution was what Charles wanted, she hadn’t provided it. Again the thought occurred to her that he handled rejection well.
Sex, she decided, and devotional practice and, for that matter, growing up, all amounted to the same thing: finding a blend of mastery and submission that matched a person’s resonant frequency. Charles had been willing to go down into the subway of his self and contemplate the third rail. Would it kill Alice to stop pretending she didn’t have a family?
The thing that was embarrassing, actually, was not that her family lived in Brooklyn but that, at thirty-seven and wildly successful, she needed to keep that a secret. It was childish, like still sleeping with a teddy bear—which Alice definitely didn’t do. It was evidence of the fierce ambition she had learned to hide, not least from herself.
On the final Saturday she let the alligators feast on her for half an hour, and afterward began to cry. I am not an admirable person, she said to herself. I am alone and I don’t like it.
So at noon on Monday, Alice went into the gym as usual, undressed, spotted Charles under the towel he always put over his head when he was recovering from the rowing machine, and sat down next to him, astride the bench. Then, looking around to be sure no one could see, she fastened one of her alligator friends to her right nipple. It hurt as much as ever.
After a bit, Charles pulled the towel off his head and sat up. He saw the alligator clamp. “Don’t do that, sweetheart,” he said. He gently removed the device and attached it to one of his own nipples.
“I think you should marry me,” said Alice.
“Good idea,” said Charles.
“Why don’t you ask me?” said Alice.
“I think I just did. Do I need to ask your father?”
“He’s dead. Heart attack at fifty. Stress of the job, I assume.”
“Same as my father. What did yours do?”
“Ironworker. Up in the sky.” It wasn’t that hard to say it.
“Farmer,” said Charles.
“What’s stressful about farming?”
“When there isn’t any rain.”
“You have relatives back in Nebraska?”
“Dozens.”
“They don’t mind about the rain?”
“They don’t have a choice.”
“Why did you?”
“Ran away. Joined the Marines. Saved money for college.”
“You feel guilty about that?”
“Of course,” said Charles. And then, “It’s going to be quite a wedding.”
“So the answer is ‘yes’?” said Alice.
“Yes.” And then, “Where does your family live?”
“Brooklyn. Fire Department.”
“Figures,” said Charles. “Courage gene.”
Alice began to cry, and was very glad to have a towel to hide her face in.
“You know,” said Charles, “if we’re going to do the whole backstory, perhaps you could take this do-dad off me.”
Alice started. “Of course, darling.” She removed the alligator. “It’s alright if I call you ‘darling,’ isn’t it?”
“Very distressed if you didn’t,” said Charles.