Blind Man's Alley by Justin Peacock Page A

awesome misoglazed cod we had at Nobu?”
    Lily clearly was not accepting Duncan’s attempt at distraction. “Then he asked if I wanted sticks to eat with.”
    Duncan frowned. “Okay, well, that’s not good, but—”
    “Sticks,” Lily hissed.
    “The guy’s like sixty-five years old; he’d probably never met an attorney who was a woman of color for the first twenty-five years of his career—”
    “Why are you defending him?” Lily said angrily.
    “I’m not,” Duncan said quickly. “It was a total prick move for him to say stupid things like that. But in five years he’ll be retired and you’ll be a partner. Just wait the bastard out.”
    “So I just shut up and take it in the meantime? I bite my tongue about this crap my whole life, and I’m not going to make a scene now, but it’s ridiculous and I shouldn’t have to deal with it. However long it took for him to meet a female lawyer with nonwhite skin, he’s had plenty of time to get used to the idea by now.”
    “You’re right, and it sucks, but he’s just an asshole, and you can’t take the existence of assholes personally.”
    Lily fixed him with a sour look. “We don’t all have your luxury, Duncan.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” Duncan said, giving her a look of his own.
    “You know exactly what it means,” Lily said. “I know you think you understand, that it’s the same for you and me, but you don’t get it, not really. Somebody like Wolcott looks at you and he sees a white guy. He looks at me and he thinks the mongrel hordes are pillaging.”
    Duncan glanced around, checking whether their increasingly heated conversation was attracting notice. Instead of being about Wolcott, this had somehow become part of an ongoing argument between them. Duncan was angry himself now, but this wasn’t the time or the place. “I can’t change any of it,” he said. “So what the fuck do you want from me?”
    “Sometimes, Duncan, it’s about choosing sides,” Lily said. “You can’t always be both, or neither, or whatever it is you think you are.”
    DUNCAN’S APARTMENT was easy walking distance from Rockefeller Center, so he set out west on Fiftieth Street, still stewing over his fight with Lily. It wasn’t a new fight, but rather the renewal of an ongoing battle from which their relationship had never recovered. A fight that had started over the firm’s attorneys-of-color group.
    Like most of the big firms, Blake and Wolcott had created several affinity groups as part of its attempt to attract and retain a more diverse workforce. There was a women’s group, one for gays and lesbians, and another for attorneys of color. Duncan found such things a rather dreary reminder of collegiate political correctness. Lily, on the other hand, was active in the attorneys-of-color group, and once they’d started dating she’d encouraged him to join. When Duncan had declined, Lily had accused him of passing. He’d angrily denied it, retorting that on the contrary the reason he didn’t join such a group was that he didn’t want to worry about having to justify to the group itself whether he belonged. Things had escalated from there, and it had opened up a chasm between them that had never fully closed. Their both being biracial had not actually led to common ground, and what had started out as a rather abstract argument about the value of affinity groups in a corporate context had ended up going to the heart of their respective identities.
    And somehow it was a fight they were still having. Duncan hadn’t intended to defend Wolcott, had just been trying to calm Lily down, but clearly he’d gone about it the wrong way, become the target of her anger himself. He understood it in part: understood that she was right that he didn’t have to put up with the kind of nonsense that she’d had to with Wolcott. Maybe she was right: maybe he was passing simply by not being louder about who he was.
    It was nearly ten by the time Duncan made it back