The voice replies, To live? To live how?
Ivan finds that when he listens to the voice the pain goes away.
Ivan wonders to himself if he has not lived as he should have. But how could that be, if he has done everything one ought to?
And when it occurred to him, as it often did, that it was all happening because he had not lived right, he at once recalled all the correctness of his life and drove this strange thought away.
—
LAW SCHOOL MARKED the first time in my life I had access to moneyed events: recruiting parties, thrown by corporate law firms. By the beginning of my second year, I spent lots of time in a black dress and my mother’s pearls, assuring recruiters that I was very interested in mergers and acquisitions. Each event in this boozy season of restaurant-hopping—whether it was wine and salmon cakes at Chez Henri or a giant chocolate fountain at the Charles Hotel—was designed to seduce you. You were meant to apply to the firm, then to work there over the summer, and finally—assuming you weren’t too obvious about your hangovers—to receive the Offer. The seduction worked in conjunction with other forces: necessity (law school debt was enormous), social pressure (everybody else was doing it), and rationalization (much of the world is run by corporations, and you should know how they work). You tried your best to blot out the advice of a law professor who called the corporate route “the path of least resistance” and suggested that “when you die, you don’t want your gravestone to say, He kept his options open.”
Between my second and third year in school, I spent a month at a law firm in Manhattan, becoming a “summer.” The work was asphyxiating, although my paycheck astonished me. Besides the free five-course lunches, every few evenings the summers were treated to an event involving open bars and fancy food. The firm held, for instance, a “diversity” event to celebrate Asian Americans; its keynote speaker was advertised as “the Asian guy on Survivor.” Another evening, we attended a gourmet cheese–making tutorial. One firm sent its summers to a night at trapeze school.
Each summer was assigned a lawyer-mentor. Mine dutifully treated me to lunch at an excellent Japanese restaurant in Manhattan. I liked him because, unlike the other mentors I heard about, he didn’t appear to care much about recruiting me. My mentor was actually a year younger than I was, but he had the manner of an old man. He was haggard and spoke of body aches. He talked about alcohol a lot. He was Korean American, I gathered, and had gone straight from college to law school to the firm. With cryptic nostalgia, he recalled his test-taking days. I wondered if the tests reminded him of a time when he knew exactly what hoops to jump through, no questions asked.
For these four weeks, my New York was much like Tolstoy’s Moscow: We had dull work that we interrupted by eating and drinking, and the next day we returned to our work that was dull, which we again interrupted with eating and drinking. I loved my eating and drinking; I hated it, too.
When my mother and father visited me that summer, we met for lunch outside the law firm’s building in Times Square. How very immigrant they suddenly looked, peering up at the skyscrapers. How very long their journey to the United States now appeared. More than thirty years ago they’d come to Michigan from their obscure island nation of Taiwan, learned English, gotten jobs, raised two children in a Midwestern suburb, and now, towering over them, was proof that they had made it: Here, in this tall building, their daughter worked. My father—the sort of person who ponders, at lunch, what he wants for dinner—asked me to describe the five-course meals I was treated to, and I obliged. It was hard for my parents to understand my observation that none of the associates seemed happy, so I didn’t belabor the point.
My job at the firm ended after four weeks. As part of its recruitment strategy, the firm had agreed to pay for my internship at any nonprofit for the remaining summer. After cleaning out my office at the law firm quickly—there was nothing I wanted to save—I stayed in New York to work at an organization for kids, called The Door. It was a boisterous Hull House for young people: dance and rap classes, onsite counselors. I helped get a visa for a Chinese kid who’d been trafficked. I felt happy. During these four weeks, I lost the BlackBerry my firm had loaned me, which I was expected to return at the end of the summer—it was somewhere on my desk at The Door or, possibly, not on my desk. On a Friday morning, buoyed by a workers’ rights training that I’d organized, I received a phone call on my private cellphone. “Where are you?” It was the law-firm coordinator for summers.
“What do you mean?” I replied. Apparently I’d missed the ceremony for summers who got offers, the details of which had been conveyed via the missing BlackBerry.
“Well, you got an offer,” she said. “Thanks,” I responded, nervously wondering if she could now revoke it.
Other summers called their parents when they got offers; I didn’t.
I tried to date, or to learn how to date. Inevitably during these dates I would talk about teaching in Helena. As with any intense experience, it was hard to put into words, and it was still recent enough that I did not yet think of it, or want to think of it, as my past—as, merely, a “good experience.” Perhaps this explains why I would revert to talking about the Delta in the future. “If I had a partner who was willing,” I would say on a first date, “I might go back and live there.”
And I wondered why these dates went no further.
Mostly I entered my last year of school preoccupied, like everybody else, by the hunt for a job after graduation. I had the offer from the firm but was on the fence about taking it. I considered working for the government or for nonprofits. Students at Harvard were lucky in this way; jobs at nonprofits were scarce and when they did hire, they tended to choose unfairly from the top-ranked schools. My friends at other law schools who desperately wanted to work in the public sector were bound for the private sector instead. I had the luxury of options. But where should I work?