Diary of a Yuppie Read Online Free

an attack will be launched against Shaughnessy Products that will in all probability result in the ouster of his golf companion from a position it has taken him a lifetime's labor to achieve. What will Lamb think of him, knowing that on that lovely morning in the country, smacking the golf balls and talking of heroic stands in Asia, his supposed friend was actively plotting the raid that has destroyed him? And indeed Albert Lamb
was
furious and has since retired from the foursome. But Blakelock does not so much care what Lamb thinks of him; he is too big a man for that. What he really minds is what he must think of himself. That he, Branders Blakelock, a god of the Irving, a man of good will, a holder-up of the beacon light of good fellowship and humanitarianism, should find himself in a position that in the good old rosy past might have been described as more suitable to a legless, slithering reptile!
    Yes, I feel sorry for him. I really do. But what I cannot get away from is that he is basically doing it to himself. He wants to be a leader of today's bar and at the same time reconcile his actions with a code of ethics for a
désœuvré
society of nineteenth-century aristocrats. And obviously it's not going to work.

3
    A LICE'S REACTION was very different from Mr. Blakelock's. Whereas he was concerned with my ethics, she was concerned with my relationship with him.
    "Why do you have to be more Catholic than the pope?" she demanded. "If he doesn't like it, why not drop it?"
    "Because I want this takeover to take."
    "Isn't that his affair? You're not a partner yet."
    "No, but do I even want to be a partner of a firm that hasn't the guts to do the job?"
    "Guts? It's the first time I've heard you accuse Mr. Blakelock of not having guts."
    "Call it fastidiousness then. His nostrils are too tender. One nasty smell, and he gags."
    "One nasty smell! Ransacking garbage pails?"
    "Of course, you would jump on that aspect of it. If you concede that information has to be gathered, you must go where it is."
    "I guess I don't concede it has to be gathered."
    "Why should you? You're not a lawyer. But leave the practice to those that are."
    "I do! To Mr. Blakelock! I'm perfectly happy so long as you follow his lead. But now it seems you no longer do."
    What man who calls himself that would not have been angered? To have it spat in my eye that my boss was not only my boss but my preceptor, and a badly needed one at that! As I looked at Alice, so tall and fine and proud and dark, it struck me that she and Blakelock were acting as if they had formed a secret alliance to keep an unruly boy under control.
    "Maybe we'd better have supper," I equivocated. "Is it ready?"
    "It can be ready in ten minutes. I want to go on with this first. You've changed, Bob."
    "I haven't changed in wanting my supper."
    "I tell you it's coming."
    Alice was the perfect wife. She took pride in being ready for me whenever I came home. Our two girls had had their supper and were doing homework in their room. Audrey, who was eleven, sometimes supped with us, but not tonight. Alice would have left her office at five and come home to take over from Norma, our black cook-cleaning woman, who left at six, having prepared the meal, which only had to be warmed up. At seven, when I arrived, on nights that I wasn't working late, she was clad in a long dressing gown tightly belted, which admirably set off her tall, full figure. Alice was a dark beauty with pale skin and eyes that looked as if they would have betrayed laughter had she not been so determined to be serious.
    Our living room owed more to her gravity than to her taste. I think Alice thought that interior decoration was trivial. There was too much blue on the sofas and chairs, and she had a cabinet of ornaments given her by a mother of middle-class tastes that contained statuettes of animals and birds. The walls had two Piranesi prints that had belonged to her grandparents. It was surprising that a woman of so much