You Think It, I'll Say It(57)
He sighs. “Hopefully, the worst is behind us. It was fairly amicable, as these things go.”
“Have you been in Chicago all this time?”
“I did a stint in New York before HBS. But I’ve been here for fifteen years, so, hey, only fifteen more until I’m a real midwesterner.”
“You grew up in Connecticut, didn’t you?” she says. “There’s so much I can’t remember in my daily life, like where I left my keys and what night my kids’ Cub Scouts meetings are, but I’m afraid my memories of Bishop are weirdly intact.”
“That’s impressive,” he says. “I’m from Darien.” He doesn’t know where she grew up, which she seems to recognize, because she taps her chest and says, “Burlington, Vermont.”
“And how long have you guys been in Denver?”
“Eight years. My in-laws are there, so that’s a double-edged sword.” As the waitress delivers his beer, Sylvia holds up her glass, which is still a third full and contains two green olives on a toothpick, and says to the waitress, “Another gin martini?” Then she tilts her glass toward him and says, “Cheers.” As they clink, she asks, “Which of our classmates are you in touch with?”
“Warrington Russell’s been trying to persuade a bunch of us to meet at his lodge up in Alaska some summer, have a week of fly-fishing, but we’ll see. Coordinating the calendars of five men in their forties is like herding cats. What about you?”
“Laurie Dixon was in Denver a couple years ago, and we had lunch, but I’ve been pretty lame overall. That’s why it was good to catch up with everyone at the reunion.” She takes a sip and says, “A lot of your family went to Bishop, right? So you must naturally run into people.”
Is there some subtext to this comment? He isn’t sure. He says, “Yeah, both my older brothers. And my dad, too, and my uncle.” There’s a pause, and he says, “How’d you end up at Bishop? Were you from a family where boarding school was the default?”
“My parents were both professors, and neither of them had gone away to school, but some of their students had. I was attending a not great public middle school, and when the teachers floated the idea of my skipping a grade, I applied to Bishop instead. Did you hear that Dean Boede died?”
It’s still early, and it might be a little easier if Clay himself had consumed more alcohol, but this feels like the right moment. He clears his throat. “I want to say—I’m not sure if this is why you got in touch—obviously, if it is, I respect it—but after Trump was elected, in the past few months, I’ve been thinking about our time at Bishop, and I want to apologize.” The expression on her face is a little weird, as if maybe she’s amused, but he perseveres. “I guess we’ll never know the results of that runoff, but I’d be willing to bet I lost and you won. And even if it was a different time, even if I wasn’t the one who came up with the plan, what happened was completely sexist. I just want to say I recognize that now and I’m sorry.”
She’s watching him intently, still with that amused-seeming expression, and she says, “Is that why you think I suggested having dinner? To extract an apology?”
He hesitates, then says, “I’m not faulting you if you did. I get it.”
“Hmm.” She looks to the side for a few seconds, at other diners, and she seems to consider his comments, then she makes eye contact again. “I’ll tell you something about that stuff at Bishop,” she says. “In the first round, before the runoff, I voted for you. Frankly, I probably thought I’d make a better senior prefect, but I also thought back then that it was conceited or indecorous or something to vote for myself. Did you vote for yourself?”
“Yes.” He adds, “It was a competition.”
“No, I know. You should have voted for yourself. I should have, too. But it’s just funny because if I had, we wouldn’t have tied and I bet Dean Boede wouldn’t have come up with his boneheaded plan. He was your football coach, right? And he clearly favored you. At the same time, I learned an important lesson from all that, which was to be my own advocate and if I came off as immodest, so be it. And you have to figure that out at some point. Or at least if you’re a woman, you do, or not a white man. Architecture is totally an old boys’ field—the vast majority of partners at firms are men, and a lot of times if a woman is a partner, it’s a woman without kids.”
“Well, if that’s the case,” Clay says, “you’re welcome.” He can tell immediately that she didn’t like the joke—she raises her eyebrows and purses her lips in a sort of fake-pleased way—and he strongly wishes he hadn’t made it.
“Just to be clear,” she says, “I’m not brushing off what happened like it was no big deal and I’m so easygoing. It was appalling. It’s just that I worked through my issues about it a long time ago. For me, it’s appalling, but it’s also old news.”
“Fair enough,” he says.
There’s a silence, then, slowly, she says, “Out of curiosity, before our country decided to elect an unhinged narcissist over an intelligent, experienced, qualified woman—before that, had it really never occurred to you that the senior prefect thing was sexist?”
The narrowness of the margin of error here, combined with the high likelihood of his screwing up—it reminds him of marriage counseling. He, too, speaks slowly. “If you’re asking if I was introspective about it at the time, no. I wish I had been, but it’d be a lie.”