We All Sleep in the Same Room Read Free Page B

people crossing in every direction at different rhythms. Up ahead, underneath the Lichtenstein mural, a flautist and a bongo player are heads down, playing some kind of jazz. I take a dollar from my wallet and watch the bill’s jerky descent into the wicker basket below.
    On the street, I stop to watch a small crew lugging half-kegs through the front door of the Times Square Brewery. Two guys smoke cigarettes, dressed in all white—kitchen staff, most likely.
    At my desk. The spring-loaded arm of my draftsman lamp has crept, once again, imperceptibly down during the night. I angle it back and watch the circle of yellow light spread like a rising sun across the landscape. Mountains of print, transcripts, communications, depositions, and decisions—old and new, finished and unfinished, both loose and bound in a plethora of styles befitting the time and taste of the clerks, lawyers, and secretaries involved—offer a rough representation of my day, my week, my month, my career.
    My latest litigation involves Elena Gomez, a public school teacher who was abruptly fired last month when her social security number came back “no match.” This, after six years of employment plus another ten in the private sector.
    â€œIt’s the number I’ve always used,” she’d said. “The one my father told me was mine. It’s never been a problem. Why now?”
    Elena, who was born in the DR and raised in the Bronx, is the ninth separate “no match” case our office has handled in the last year. Sudden pressure from the brute and clumsy hand of our post–9/11 government.
    At noon, the office gathers around the long table in the conference room for lunch. On the walls hang framed posters of C é sar Chávez, Samuel Gompers, John Steinbeck, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosie the Riveter. We can do it. I sit at one end with the senior partners and the secretaries, and Jessie and the younger lawyers congregate at the other.
    My firm is blessed with some of the sharpest minds and the most idealistic hearts of a generation. Sure, a few years back we lost two Harvard grads to corporate law, the dark side, as we referred to it, but that’s always gone on. The atmosphere that remains here is one of empathy, hard work, and a keen and worldly intellect. Today there’s a lot of talk of Bush’s recent nomination of Judge John Roberts for the Supreme Court. It’s disheartening news to an office full of dyed-in-the-wool progressives, but I actually think it makes us dig our heels in and fight harder.
    With ample experience behind me and with relative youth by lawyer standards, I have, in all likelihood, entered my professional prime. If this firm were a sports team, I think my partners would agree—assuming they were alright with that metaphor—I’d be captain. According to the firm’s revenue earned minus expenses incurred, I’d also be the leading scorer. Forty-six for lawyers may be what twenty-six is to a ball player.
    There are three senior partners who’ve been on the payroll since I joined the firm. They’re like elders at a holiday feast. Each aging lefty still retains a nicely furnished office, but since they make an appearance only a few days a week, as breadwinners they’ve been on the decline for years. It was common knowledge that Bernie Levan, who commuted from the Hamptons, wasn’t even breaking even. In a week he was headed south for a little Florida R&R. But for better or worse, they’re still buddies with some of our largest clients, having garnered national reputations, and comprise the firm’s namesake: Cunningham, Klein, and Levan. No one is in a position to move them out the door, and their presence at holiday parties and client-sponsored conferences involving golf and free dinners, which incidentally, they never seem to miss, is strangely comforting. At least to me it is. My father died my first year away from home so I