Diary of a Yuppie Read Online Free PDF Page A

Alice is a very big thing. She thinks that people who do not have it have missed the best in life. She does not realize that everyone has it. That might make it seem too cheap. And it has to be based on a solid pedestal of honor; true love, in Alice's book, exists only between two morally upright and mutually trusting persons, who should also have a generous political and humanitarian viewpoint. I should not go so far as to say that she believes true love exists only between Democrats or liberal Republicans in tune with the
New York Times
editorial policy, but there might be a kernel of truth in it. True love may be found between Romeo and Juliet, but never between Macbeth and his lady. And indeed if Alice is today beginning to see me as morally unworthy of a great passion, it is because she is building an excuse for its failure between us. It cannot be she who has failed in the challenge of love. That would be unbearable to her.
    Alice and I were both only children. Only children are apt to be extreme realists or extreme idealists; it is obvious how that turned out in each case. And the reasons are also obvious. Alice's father was a man who considered that he was a failure when he was actually rather a success. My father considered that he was a success when he was actually rather a failure. The offspring of each reacted in such a way as best to protect themselves from a repetition of parental illusions.
    The Jock Nortons, Alice's parents, lived down the road from us in the village of Keswick in Westchester County. Alice and I were classmates in high school and later at Columbia, where we became engaged in our senior year. We were "childhood sweethearts," which Jock Norton always maintained was the American nightmare, only half laughing when he said it. He was a free-lance writer who always believed—according to Alice, for he was too much of a gentleman to say it—that, had he not saddled himself with a wife and child and an expensive house in the suburbs, he might have been a first-class novelist. What he never realized was that his genius was precisely for the kinds of pieces that he did write: brilliant short stories, witty satirical poetry, devastating movie reviews, which brought him a modest but regular income. He was better off, I am sure, lamenting a career as a major writer of fiction than facing its failure. Isabel, his wife, was saved from the boredom of suburbia by her constant anxiety as to whether her husband's regular drinking and irregular adulteries would get out of control. They never did. Jock Norton always knew what he was doing. He was a bit of a ham who was ashamed but not ashamed enough of being one. He even had the decency to be a bit ashamed of his success in playing the role of adored father to a too genuinely adoring daughter.
    Fatuity, on the other hand, was the keynote of my father's life. Jason Service was and still is, at seventy, an associate in the great Wall Street firm of Burr & Doyle. When he started practicing law in the late 1930s that firm had perhaps fifty lawyers; now it has three hundred. Dad's tall, ambling figure, his high, shiny dome, big nose and bleary gray eyes are almost a trademark of the organization. Everyone knows him; everyone respects him; everyone pities him. Why did he not move on when he failed to make partner thirty or more years ago? Because he had a specialty in patents and a safe little niche, and he always claimed that he was not interested in the "rat race for partnership," that there was adequate dignity and satisfaction in a job well done. He loves, or purports to love, his little nook in the law and insists that it is a relief not to be bothered with administrative problems or what he likes jocularly to call "ambulance chasing," by which term he simply means acquisition of the roster of clients necessary to support any law practice. He has always made a decent salary, and our small Queen Anne house and acre of land in Keswick are situated on a