Chuckling Is For Partners
Ch. 1 of An Evening With God
Dong-Hyun was hard at work for the third day in a row on the Global brief when Marty LeVine, Bruford, Weimar, Flushing, Cho, and Baxter’s highest-ranking non-partner, invited himself into Dong-Hyun’s office, and made himself comfortable.
Dong-Hyun actually worked for Darren Cho, the firm’s Korean partner, but saw a lot more of Marty, as Darren was the sort of Asian who pulled the rope up once he himself had climbed it. He made no mystery of believing that he was all the Asians the firm needed, and presumably resented Dong-Hyun having a much easier time starting his career then he himself had. Marty LeVine, on the other hand, made no secret of his strong attraction to the youngest attorney in the office, though Dong-Hyun deduced from the many photos of the wife and three children atop Marty’s desk that he wasn’t supposed to have sensed that Marty was gay.
“Finish up what you’re doing, Doug,” Marty said, even though Dong-Hyun had tried to make clear that he wished to be known by the name his parents had given him. “Client Number Uno will be here in 25 minutes.” Much as he disliked “Doug”, Dong-Hyun preferred it to not being addressed at all, as he was by the other named partners.
Dong-Hyun and Marty weren’t the first to the conference room, with its remarkable 18th-floor view of the Waverley Country Club golf course. That honor went to Rupert Flushing and his favorite associate, Lynnda, with two N’s, after whom all the partners except Marty lusted shamelessly. Dong-Hyun hadn’t failed to notice her gorgeousness, or that she treated everyone in the office not a partner — fellow associates as well as support staff — with palpable indifference.
She was showing more leg and cleavage today than usual, and had been more fastidious with her makeup. The remaining partners except the scrupulously dignified Cho all either winked or leered at her as they entered with their own lieutenants.
“Big day for us, as you know,” Dale Bruford said sunnily as, flanked by a pair of secretaries, he took his place at the head of the table. Dong-Hyun’s impression was that Broof’s IQ was by no means the highest in the firm, and might have been among the lowest.
“I don’t think I need to encourage everybody to be playing their A game when he gets here.” He leered at Lynnda. “It isn’t just that we have the sexiest associates, paralegals, and secretaries that makes us the most envied firm on the coast, after all.” Neither Lynnda, nor Bruford’s nearly as gorgeous second secretary, just behind him, hurried off to file a sexual discrimination lawsuit.
There was a knock on the conference room door. It was the firm’s receptionist. She stepped back and allowed a rumpled-looking white guy of around 60 to enter. He reminded Dong-Hyun of a particular political operative who’d been seen on television a lot lately, speaking, sometimes noticeably slurredly, on behalf of a right-wing populist whose growing popularity made Dong-Hyun shudder in dismay.
His longish, perfectly straight hair, combed straight backward, cried out for shampooing. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. There were bags under his eyes and, Dong-Hyun would have guessed, crud under his ragged fingernails, if he had fingernails. On the few occasions when he’d taken a lunch break and hurried over to a place on Montgomery Street that offered a styrofoam clamshell full of pasta for $5, Dong-Hyun had passed tidier-looking beggars. But there was something about the rumpled-looking client that precluded revulsion. His arch, faintly bemused expression, maybe, or the mischief in his slightly bloodshot eyes.
“For those who haven’t met him,” Bruford turned to tell the conference room as he and Numero Uno conferred three quick pats on each other’s backs and then ceased to embrace, “This is Bruford, Weimar, Flushing, Cho, and Baxter’s most prized client, known to me for over 27 years now as Jeff, but known to others by lots of other names.”
The man himself spoke, the twinkle in his eye growing a little brighter. “The only one I hope I won’t hear too much of is Yah. I’m not the biggest Kanye West fan.”
Yah? Dong-Hyun had no idea what he was talking about, though he was of course aware of West being a singer or rapper or something who’d received a lot of bad press for endorsing far-right political candidates. Yah?
“We’re all eager to hear how we can help you, Ol,” Andrew Weimar, who was expected to be the firm’s kingpin when Bruford retired in a year or two, said, not sunnily at all, all business all the time, the pooper to Broof’s party.
Ol? Short for Oliver?
“There’s a chance I just came in here to bitch and moan,” Numero Uno said. “If that’s the case, welcome to my pity party.” All the partners except Weimar chuckled. The unwritten rule Dong-Hyun had deduced was that, as coffee was for closers, chuckling was for partners.
“The Internet has made it possible,” Numero Uno said, “for the likes of Christopher Hitchens — I rest his soul — Richard Dawkins, and that whole crowd to attract more followers than ever before. It hurts my feelings. A lot of these people are really very bright, and better than ever at intimidating those who believe in me. And then, with the Internet, within 10 minutes of somebody coming up with a cute new argument for non-belief, a couple of billion people have heard it, and laughed. And their laughter is implicitly at me. And I’m not going to pretend, among friends — or at least the law firm that I pay a pretty significant retainer to every month — that it doesn’t rankle.”
“‘I’ rest his soul,” Dong-Hyun thought to himself. Now that’s a little weird. And wasn’t Christopher Hitchens the famous polemicist and atheist? He googled Hitchens on his phone under the conference table, out of everyone’s view. He’d been right.
“Not now, for Christ’s sake,” Marty whispered to him. “Put it away, Doug!”
“I’m well aware I ask some variation on this question every time you honor us with a visit, Ol,” Weimar said to Numero Uno, “but if the criticism bothers you, why don’t you just give the critics a fatal disease or something — not, of course, that I’d get pleasure from another man’s death, or woman’s.”
Numero Uno rolled his eyes, but they hadn’t ceased to twinkle. “Of course I could,” he said, “just like I could have made humanity incapable of getting on my nerves. But I’ll ask what I always ask at this point: What would be the fun of that?
“No. Don’t answer. Let me try to explain. There’s this guy in Fujairah, one of the Arab emirates. Really rich, this guy, and a gigantic football fan. Dreamed of playing for Real Madrid or Man United when he was a kid, but wasn’t nearly good enough. He’s built himself a little stadium, and hired a couple of dozen local young men to play football with him every Saturday afternoon. When a particular whistle’s blown, the other team knows to let him score a goal, though they pretend to be trying to stop him. He scores, and he’s the happiest guy in the Gulf, and maybe on earth. But he knows deep down he hasn’t really scored.
“That’s what it would be like for me if I made everything perfect. I might feel better for a few minutes, or even an eon or two. But I’d always know I’d rigged everything, and would feel a jerkoff for it.”
“First World problem,” Barry Hairston, the firm’s lone black associate mumbled, less under his breath than he imagined, and everyone chuckled, including Numero Uno, or gasped.
“Don’t I know it,” Numero Uno agreed, making Barry the most relieved man on earth. “A lot of this clever new breed of atheist ask how I can be omnipotent as long as there’s such a thing as juvenile leukemia. Nobody hates to see innocent kids dying in agony more than I do, I promise you. The atheists say, ‘A God that allows innocent kids to die in agony either isn’t omnipotent, or is a sadist.’ I actually think that’s a compelling argument. But, again, as I know I say every time I come in, I can’t just wave my hands and make everything peachy, much as I may want to. It wouldn’t be fun for me, and it also wouldn’t be good for humanity. Who’d really want to live a life devoid of pain? How would you know what pleasure was?”
“Makes sense to me,” Rupert Flushing piped up. It didn’t make much sense to Dong-Hyun, albeit more sense than the firm’s seemingly encouraging its client to imagine himself divine.
Wait a minute. Not Ol, but Al, the first syllable of Allah? And Yah, the first syllable of Yahweh? Had Dong-Hyun unwittingly been cast as the lone sane employee of a law firm that believed one of its clients to be God?
And what was this! Numero Uno was no longer a rumpled middle-aged man who seemed to enjoy a drink or three, but the gray-bearded God of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, though his voice was unchanged. He said, “I need a project, something to occupy me, something to keep my mind off the atheists and the suffering kids.” And then, in a wink, he was that famous actress turned television star, on the cusp between middle and old age, black, gap-toothed, rotund, dreadlocked, opinionated.
At exactly the moment Dong-Hyun realized his mouth had fallen open, Numero Uno winked at him — there could be no question at whom the wink was aimed — and turned back into the rumpled male version of himself.
“You know what I’m thinking, Ol,” Weimar said. “Well, of course you do, knowing everything.”
“Say it anyway, Andy.” Numero Uno said.
“I’m thinking you might do better to narrow your focus a little bit. If I understand what you’re saying, you’re looking at all of humanity.”
“Oh, more than that, Andy. All of the universe. And you heard it here first: humans aren’t the only self-aware beings in it, not by a long shot.”
“What an awful lot of responsibility you’ve got,” Weimar said. “Who wouldn’t find that level of pressure oppressive? It seems to me — and of course I’m a litigator and not a psychotherapist — that you’d do well to focus on a tiny fraction of humanity, maybe even the people of a single city. There’s a place up in northeast County that we think might fit the bill. San Rodrigo. Lots of wealth, but also a lot of poverty. Multi-racial.”
The atmosphere in the conference room had grown tense, as everyone awaited Numero Uno’s reaction. The only sound was the hiss of Lynnda’s pretty legs as she nervously recrossed them.
“I like it,” Numero Uno finally said. “I mean, I’m well aware that there are those who’ll slam me for not painting with a broader brushstroke, but I get slammed pretty hard regardless of what I do. By golly, I’m going to give it a try. Naturally, I’ll ask you good people to consider the idea from a legal point of view.
“Well, that’s what we’re here for,” Dale Bruford said sunnily, seemingly pleased, because of his very short attention span, that the conference seemed to be winding down. Around the table, many pens were laid with relieved sighs to relax atop yellow legal pads.
“If possible,” Numero Uno told Bruford, “I’d very much enjoy a one-to-one consultation with one of the new associates I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet.” Smiling at Lynnda, he was suddenly a men’’s underwear model — maybe 25, with high cheekbones and a six-pack, wavy dark hair, and an expression that said, “You know you want me,” or maybe, “You know you want to be just like me.” Could it be that Dong-Hyun was alone in seeing this?
“How about Doug Park,” Bruford, card that he was, said, giving Numero Uno a little old-bros punch in the arm. “Our second Korean hire? Further proof of our commitment to diversity in the workplace?”
“I’m not seeing that much diversity,” Numero Uno teased back. “You’ve already got Cho. Real diversity would be your hiring a Burmese or Nepalese or Paraguayan or something.”
“I’ll get Maggie Thurston right on that,” Broof said, thoroughly in his element now, riffing as though with a fraternity bro, albeit 45 years after the fact. Thurston was the firm’s head of Human Resources.
It occurred to Dong-Hyun that the way Numero Uno and Lynnda looked at each other as everyone filed dutifully out of the conference room constituted a fire hazard. When he went to the gentlemen’s room around 20 minutes later, he noticed that, in contravention of the unwritten rule that associates keep themselves readily accessible to their partner supervisors, Lynnda’s door was closed.
When she and Numero Uno finally reappeared, making the rounds for Numero Uno to shake everyone’s hand, Lynnda’s blissful expression seemed to marvel, “Oh. My. God.” Judging from his rumpled appearance, Dong-Hyun would have thought that Numero Uno, whom he hadn’t been near to in the conference room, might have smelled of gin or cigarettes, but he smelled divine.
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