New York - The Novel

is working a ninety-hour week. That certainly hadn’t been in the original plan.
    Sometimes Gorham Master wondered, did the big law firms and investment banks overdo it a bit with the hours? It showed the young associates were serious and committed, of course, but was there an element of sadistic pride in it, like pledging for a fraternity? But unlike the frat pledges, this went on for years, until one made partner.
    Maggie did corporate work. Often, when she had big deals going through, he’d gone down to her offices at maybe nine or ten at night, taken her out for a quick dinner, then let her get back to work until two or three in the morning. Both their courtship and the first years of their marriage had been like that. Romance snatched at odd moments, leisure organized in little compartments of time. In a way it was exciting.Wartime affairs and marriages, Gorham realized, must have been like this. But peace was a long time coming.
    They had been having an affair for a year before he proposed to her. By that time he was completely crazy about her. If she wasn’t a corporate wife, he didn’t care. And she, for her part, not only loved him, but would sometimes say in wonderment: “I just can’t believe that you put up with the terrible hours I have to keep.” His fascination and her gratitude, Gorham reckoned, made a good cement in the building of their marriage.
    “If you want to have it all, Maggie,” he’d cheerfully remind her, “just remember that having it all includes me.”
    The marriage was at her parents’ Catholic church in Norwalk, Connecticut. Her parents thought Gorham was perfect. They didn’t even mind that he wasn’t Catholic. As for Maggie, she didn’t tell the priest, but she’d already assured Gorham that their children could attend any church he liked, or none.
    Juan was best man—he’d married Janet by then—and Maggie’s brother Martin was one of the ushers. Martin was a pleasant, rather intellectual fellow, and he and Gorham got along fine. At the end of the wedding, Maggie’s father had quietly suggested to Martin that if he had no plans for ever marrying, perhaps he’d like to tell him about it some time.
    The pattern of their lives changed only a little as they entered the 1980s. If Gorham needed Maggie to attend a business dinner with him in the city, she’d make great efforts to do so. Once, when Branch & Cabell hosted a weekend at a resort for all the partners, associates and their spouses, Gorham was amused, during the lawyers’ business sessions, to be taken around and entertained with all the spouses. “I like being a spouse,” he told Maggie with a grin. “I had twenty wives all to myself.”
    The only other necessary defining of their positions in the early eighties had been the newly popular social acronyms.
    “I have always been a WASP,” Gorham rightly declared. “And I guess I may be called a preppy. But Maggie is definitely a yuppie.”
    Even this changed in 1986, however, when Maggie was made a partner. “And a partner of Branch & Cabell,” she insisted, “can no longer be called a yuppie.”
    “Not even a pretty young red-headed partner?”
    “Nope. But I’ll tell you something else about a partner in Branch & Cabell.”
    “What’s that?”
    “A partner in Branch & Cabell,” she informed him with a smile, “might get pregnant.”
    Her pregnancy the next year had raised another issue.
    They were happy in the apartment on Park. When they married, Maggie had done a little redecoration, and they’d had fun buying some new furniture together. The third year of their marriage, after he’d been awarded a handsome bonus, his Christmas present to her had been the money to install a new kitchen. That had been a big deal.
    Maggie had made one other small improvement to the apartment. She’d opened a closet one day and found in there a carefully wrapped parcel that looked like a picture of some kind. Asked what it was, Gorham had confessed to his shame that it was the only gift he’d failed to deliver for Charlie, after his father’s death. “And so much time has passed now that I’m embarrassed to give it to the rightful owner,” he said.
    “Can I see what it is?” she’d asked.
    “I suppose so.”
    “My God, Gorham,” Maggie exclaimed when she’d unwrapped the parcel, “it’s a Robert Motherwell drawing. This thing is really valuable.”
    “I hardly know what to do about it,” he admitted.
    “Well, I’m putting it on the