Read Extraordinary Rendition for Free Online Page B
Authors: Paul Batista
Tags: Extraordinary Rendition
“I’m on a stationary bike at the gym. Almost naked. The old faculty letches are staring at my ass.”
“I have a hard-on.”
“That’s standard issue weaponry, right?”
“Fuck you, lady.”
“In your dreams, fella.”
“When are you coming out here?”
“Check the CNN listings.”
6
B YRON JOHNSON WAITED MORE than a week after Christina Rosario left the firm in mid-August to send her a tentative email. He had a right as a partner to ask the personnel office for information about her—partners, after all, owned the intangible entity known as SpencerBlake. Byron learned that Christina was in fact older than the fifty other young eager summer associates; she was thirty-four. Her appearance, her qualities—gestures, glances, reactions, her aura—were too developed for a woman in her twenties. According to the firm’s records, she’d worked in advertising at one of the very large, now lost-through-merger firms that was, when Byron was early in his own career, the archetype of the Madison Avenue advertising firm. She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Bowdoin, that college in Maine not far from where he spent parts of his summer on Monhegan Island, where no cars or trucks were allowed and people pulled their groceries and luggage on red children’s wagons from the ferry boats to their big, wood-shingled and weather-beaten homes. When he was young, Bowdoin was an all-male school. He’d considered attending it because he was attracted by the idea that it was the college from which both Hawthorne and Longfellow graduated in 1825; but his father was a Princeton graduate and the social forces that made Byron follow him there were as profound as the tides.
Christina’s email address was in the firm directory. So was her apartment address—405 West 116th Street, an immense, curved building that faced Riverside Park just two blocks from the Columbia campus. Byron found himself thinking that the building was a quick uptown drive from his apartment in Tribeca—there was no need to make the difficult passage across the island from the east side to the west. The thought was, he realized, a fantasy, a projection, a desire.
His first email message, which he sent at eleven-forty-five on a Wednesday night, wasn’t answered for a week. During that week he was often embarrassed by the note, and he tried to “unsend” it. He was mystified by that word on the computer screen: it was like reclaiming and eliminating an event, canceling a moment in the past. But he learned that since she was on a different Internet service it wasn’t possible to unsend the note. In that way, the sending of the note was like the sending of a letter in the time before the Internet—once dropped in an iron mailbox, the letter couldn’t be retrieved.
Byron’s note was simple enough: “This is Byron Johnson. I’m sorry we weren’t able to work together this summer. I guess the gods on the summer associate committee decided otherwise. Hope you enjoyed your summer with us. And that you have a good last year of law school.”
That was it, he thought, a valedictory, just a polite note from a senior partner that could easily have been sent to all of the summer associates as part of the firm’s vigorous policy of generating good relations with all these summer associates and the famous schools to which they returned for their third year of law school—Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Penn, Berkeley, Cornell (all of the schools from which all of the olderpartners had graduated) and NYU, Northwestern, Michigan, even Hofstra (the more diverse law schools from which, in the less elitist years of the last two decades, more and more of the associates and partners came).
During the week in which his email to Christina was out there, unanswered and irretrievable, Byron wondered whether his sending it violated the firm’s policy on contact between male partners and women associates. He had never given any attention to any of those proliferating
“I have a hard-on.”
“That’s standard issue weaponry, right?”
“Fuck you, lady.”
“In your dreams, fella.”
“When are you coming out here?”
“Check the CNN listings.”
6
B YRON JOHNSON WAITED MORE than a week after Christina Rosario left the firm in mid-August to send her a tentative email. He had a right as a partner to ask the personnel office for information about her—partners, after all, owned the intangible entity known as SpencerBlake. Byron learned that Christina was in fact older than the fifty other young eager summer associates; she was thirty-four. Her appearance, her qualities—gestures, glances, reactions, her aura—were too developed for a woman in her twenties. According to the firm’s records, she’d worked in advertising at one of the very large, now lost-through-merger firms that was, when Byron was early in his own career, the archetype of the Madison Avenue advertising firm. She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Bowdoin, that college in Maine not far from where he spent parts of his summer on Monhegan Island, where no cars or trucks were allowed and people pulled their groceries and luggage on red children’s wagons from the ferry boats to their big, wood-shingled and weather-beaten homes. When he was young, Bowdoin was an all-male school. He’d considered attending it because he was attracted by the idea that it was the college from which both Hawthorne and Longfellow graduated in 1825; but his father was a Princeton graduate and the social forces that made Byron follow him there were as profound as the tides.
Christina’s email address was in the firm directory. So was her apartment address—405 West 116th Street, an immense, curved building that faced Riverside Park just two blocks from the Columbia campus. Byron found himself thinking that the building was a quick uptown drive from his apartment in Tribeca—there was no need to make the difficult passage across the island from the east side to the west. The thought was, he realized, a fantasy, a projection, a desire.
His first email message, which he sent at eleven-forty-five on a Wednesday night, wasn’t answered for a week. During that week he was often embarrassed by the note, and he tried to “unsend” it. He was mystified by that word on the computer screen: it was like reclaiming and eliminating an event, canceling a moment in the past. But he learned that since she was on a different Internet service it wasn’t possible to unsend the note. In that way, the sending of the note was like the sending of a letter in the time before the Internet—once dropped in an iron mailbox, the letter couldn’t be retrieved.
Byron’s note was simple enough: “This is Byron Johnson. I’m sorry we weren’t able to work together this summer. I guess the gods on the summer associate committee decided otherwise. Hope you enjoyed your summer with us. And that you have a good last year of law school.”
That was it, he thought, a valedictory, just a polite note from a senior partner that could easily have been sent to all of the summer associates as part of the firm’s vigorous policy of generating good relations with all these summer associates and the famous schools to which they returned for their third year of law school—Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Penn, Berkeley, Cornell (all of the schools from which all of the olderpartners had graduated) and NYU, Northwestern, Michigan, even Hofstra (the more diverse law schools from which, in the less elitist years of the last two decades, more and more of the associates and partners came).
During the week in which his email to Christina was out there, unanswered and irretrievable, Byron wondered whether his sending it violated the firm’s policy on contact between male partners and women associates. He had never given any attention to any of those proliferating