Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  At eight, I turn onto Fifty-seventh. Marco’s in front of the restaurant—Sky—gesturing for me to simultaneously pull over and roll the window down. I do.

  “Valet it.”

  Before I can get out, a kid in a crimson blazer and black bow tie opens the door for me.

  “Hello, sir. Valet?”

  “Sure.”

  I pull myself out of the cockpit. The black street glows with moisture, and the tires of the cars going by hiss and drip as they roll. There’s a faint hint of sunlight left and for a moment the city seems clean, almost welcoming. I look west down the street and then up in the sky. A mottled pigeon flies by, then passing in the opposite direction but at the same angle of ascent, an airplane. A taxi honks. The valet hands me a ticket. He’s been waiting.

  “Hey, man, happy birthday.” We shake. I step onto the curb. “So, have you joined us all on the downward slope?”

  “One more year.”

  “Well, enjoy it.” He starts inside, then turns. “Did your wife ever get ahold of you?”

  “No.”

  “She called around eight this morning.” He produces his phone. “You want to try her?”

  “No, thanks. Later.”

  He opens the door for me and I go in. I’m surprised at how simple the room is. The ceiling is at least twenty feet high, but the space is broken up so as not to dwarf a person with its scale. There are four different levels: The main level contains the bar, poured concrete dyed dark gray. To the right, six steps up, is a raised area that extends to the back, where there are more stairs that lead to another level, about ten feet above the main floor, that spans the width of the room. Under it is more seating. Above the bar in what are like opera boxes are more tables and switchback stairs, which lead up to them. The railing is all brushed stainless steel with cable running through it. The room would look like a cross between a spy weapons lab and a high-tech boutique if not for the sidewalls, which are deep slate blue Venetian plaster.

  “Good evening,” says the host, looking only at Marco.

  “Four for Andolini.” Marco leans back into me. “I had to ask a couple of associates along. Sorry. Do you mind?”

  “No. No, not at all.”

  “Right this way.” He extends his arm toward a young woman in a tiny black dress who leads us up over the bar to one of the opera boxes, in which is a large, bright red banquette. In it are two women. One is blonde with shoulder-length hair—a layered hairdo—feathered, I suppose, very sophisticated. The other woman is light brown. Her hair is long, black, and in one braid, which disappears behind her back. I stand behind Marco as he tries to introduce us, as though he can hide me. Maggie and Diana—with a long first a.

  We all sit silently. They seem to be waiting for a cue from Marco to begin speaking. I have nothing to say. I try not to drift, but I keep going from the blonde’s hair to the dark girl’s forehead and their juxtaposition to the wall—both hair and skin contrast. I’ve never seen such a good plaster job. Someone troweled a 20×100-foot wall so well that I can’t find a blemish on it.

  They start talking, about office things, I suppose. And I suppose that some would consider what Marco has done for me kind—the car, the dinner, the cigars—and I shouldn’t be offended that he’s doing business. I certainly can have a lovely meal in silence. It must be like this for him all the time, blending the private and public, business and pleasure. They, in fact, may not even be as separate as I imagine. They may never have been, but as I hear their conversation wind down, hear their focus begin to shift, I can’t help but think that Marco is trying to teach me a lesson. It’s bad enough for him to try and rub my face in his shit. He doesn’t need to rub it in my own.

  “How was your run last night?”

  “You run?” asks the blonde.

  I nod. Silence again. The ladies start to fidget. Marco has tried and doesn’t seem to want to try again. It seems strange that this is all they can muster, but when they talk in conference rooms, they probably have something to talk about. This silence must be difficult for them. My stomach shoots out another gas blade. I turn directly to the blonde.

  “Do you run?”

  Everyone’s relieved, but only for a moment. I keep looking her in the eye, paying attention to her—engaged. She starts to answer and then looks away. I should cut her some slack, but then I ask myself why. Her martini is almost finished and I can’t imagine her carrying this moment, which is at worst awkward, too far into the future with her. Marco is grinning stupidly. The dark one squeezes her glass stem. I look away and rephrase my question.

  “Do you like to run?”

  She’s suspicious. She looks into her glass, then starts to answer slowly.

  “Yes. Well, no.” She seems comfortable again. At least I tell myself that.

  “Yes and no?” asks Marco. They laugh as though the last three minutes haven’t happened. The waiter comes. He’s tall, dressed in an immaculate black and white uniform—immaculate face and hands.

  “Hello, may I get you drinks?” He looks at the women’s glasses, “More martinis?” They shake their heads. Marco waves them off.

  “Yes,” he says, pointing to the glasses. “Yes.” He points at me but keeps looking at the waiter. “Sparkling water for the table.” It’s not a question, but the inflection makes it seem as though he’s asking one. “Talisker, neat.”

  We all study our menus for a while. I hone in on the simplest things there: green salad. Steak. I leave the menu open to deter questions coming my way. They talk—an occasional “Everything looks so good,” or some approximation thereof. Finally, my ploy backfires.

  “See anything?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  I close it and go back to the hair, the brow, the plaster, and then to Marco, who is trying to mouth something to me from behind his menu. The waiter returns with the drinks.

  “So how was your run? You were out for a long time. How far did you go?”

  “About eight.”

  He takes a sip of his drink. The girls sip theirs. I wonder if that junkie got another beer. I try to imagine what it tastes like. It doesn’t take much to do so—like the mineral water I’m drinking only with a dash of sugar, hay, and cosmic certainty. I don’t remember, but I think people liked me better when I drank a bit. The waiter comes back and takes our order.

  Marco leans back in the booth and exhales.

  “Today was ridiculous, huh?”

  The girls concur, but they keep their good posture. I look out over the dining room. It’s full now, but the clamor is somehow softened—I don’t know how with all the hard surfaces. Marco taps my elbow.

  “Ten years ago our client paid this guy twenty million to develop product for them.”

  “What product?”

  “Software.”

  “Who’s your client?”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  I look at him closely. I wonder who he thinks I might tell—how I could possibly compromise the deal.

  “Anyway, he finishes. So now he’s claiming that he owns the product and that they have to buy it from him, even though the original contract, which he signed, says that he doesn’t.”

  “So this is an intellectual property issue?”

  “Exactly.” He leans forward and takes his glasses off, puts his elbows on the table. I realize that I hardly know Marco. Yes, I know his story, at least some of the highs and lows, the ones, at least, he’s told me, but nothing more than his narrative and what I’ve assumed from it in combination with what I see. In my head I’ve seen him in his office in a tall building downtown. I’ve seen the suits he wears when we’ve walked together to drop our boys off at school and I’ve seen him disappear down the stairs of the 4-train. My mother wanted me to be a lawyer. She gave me a book on Charles Houston, and I remember being awed by him and wanting to be like him. I wonder where that feeling went—why wasn’t I like him? As I got older, the idea of being a lawyer was displaced by the dizzying exactitude of actually becoming one. I suppos
e I began seeing lawyers, as well—the fathers of my schoolmates. They weren’t grave men in hats and overcoats with leather bags walking up the steps of the Supreme Court armed with purpose.

  “So what do you think?”

  “What do I think of what?”

  “Do you think our client owes him anything?”

  “A deal’s a deal, I guess.”

  He nods. “So how was your run?”

  “Not so great.”

  Maggie joins in. “Sometimes I go out and I feel tired. I just slog through it.”

  Marco smiles. They check him to see if what she said is acceptable. He’s said that they’re associates, and I don’t know what that means. How had he presented the idea of spending an evening out with us to them? In a hallway, at lunch? “We can close the Johnson and Johnson merger, but it’ll have to be in front of a stiff I’m letting crash at my house.”

  Diana looks potentially angry. She’s not frowning, but she seems to be waiting for me to say something she can disagree with. I’m not sure what she finds so troublesome about me. Perhaps I’m over-dressed. Perhaps she’s wary because I’m strange and a stranger. She doesn’t know what I do, where I’m from, what I think of her. I’m a suspicious character, and I appreciate that—that she hasn’t come to any preconceived notions about me. But I can’t sit with her uncertainty. I want to tell her something, anything, to set her at ease.

  “Yeah, my run was weird.” I hear myself say “weird,” and I’m sure it wasn’t my voice that said it.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, I got caught in that cloudburst.”

  “I didn’t even know it rained last night.” She looks at Marco. Her last comment didn’t seem to pass muster with the boss.

  “I was chased.” I say it plainly so it takes a moment to register with everyone, including me. I’ve said it without realizing that I’ll have to follow with something more.

  “Oh, my god,” says Maggie. She checks Marco. I guess she gets the signal to continue. “By who, what?”

  Now I feel like an ass because I have to answer. They’re waiting, curious. Even Diana seems interested.

  “By the golden calf riding Leviathan bareback.”

  They laugh. Marco spits out his drink and slaps the table. “Sorry.” He wipes his mouth with his hand, offers me his napkin, which I refuse. I suppose that it is funny, especially if you think it’s a joke. I let them laugh. Diana is the first one to regain her composure. She looks at me and I smile and it feels good. She smiles back. She’s lovely, just a shade darker than honey with black hair that looks like braided silk. Then it fades—the joy—quickly back to the suspicion, which, after I’ve seen her smile, is all wrong. Her face shouldn’t be so closed. Maggie still has her head down and Marco snorts again, a dry one this time.

  “No, really,” I say. And they break up again. I try to talk over their laughter. “I was on the bridge . . .” They won’t have it. Marco waves for me to stop.

  I show them mercy. I keep quiet, but just looking at me is enough to keep Marco giggling. He slowly returns to form. I wave back to him—recognize our wordless truce. He inhales deeply, wipes his eyes, and checks the girls to see if they think his breakdown was undignified. They do not. They look to me to continue. I don’t know what to say, but I feel strangely touched by their attention—their acceptance—but I still haven’t anything to say. I look around the table for a launch. I stop at Marco’s glass and point.

  “Talishire.”

  “Talisker.”

  “No, it’s from Talishire—islet scotch—from the Isle of Skye.”

  He shrugs his shoulders and leans back. The heat of interest has left his face. I should explain, tell the story of how Gruntcakes as a young man used to go with his older brother to be fitted for wool suits and sample the local whiskeys. But first I should tell them why I call Claire’s paternal grandfather Gruntcakes. He was a stoic and unreachable English bastard until later in his life, but he always made Claire pancakes—griddlecakes—taking great care to cut small chips of butter into the batter before cooking.

  The last time he went to Skye, before he and his brother fell out, they walked the foothills with flasks of Talisker. They got drunk. They got muddy, so much so that the innkeeper wouldn’t take them. They spent the night in a barn. He told me that story more than once, always in some moment when he could get me alone. “I had a boat once, a sloop. Named it after the scotch. I wanted to sail it with my brother.” He’d sit in some corner of some large, spare room, a party going on around him, with his whittled, driftwood cane, staring into the void, searching for his lost boat, his dead brother. Taking stock of what remained: him, me, and the dinghy. We’d made it seaworthy that last summer but never got to launch it. There’s an old picture of him on the boat, three-quarter profile, sailing in Buzzards Bay. I’ve always liked to think that he’s going to find his wife, somewhere in the middle of the ocean.

  “I worked at a bar once, when they first exported it.”

  We’re back to feeling good again.

  “When did you do that?” asks Maggie.

  “When I first moved here. When I was a kid.”

  Maggie smiles, not at all bothered that I know how young she is, almost relieved that I’ve recognized the age gap. Perhaps it makes me seem less predatory, more fraternal. She isn’t elegant and beautiful like Diana. She doesn’t seem at home in the little cocktail dress with her hair down. She should be in shorts, at a burger joint, after playing soft-ball in Central Park. She, in fact, doesn’t look as though she should be in this city at all. Her straight hair should be in a ponytail or under the hat of a team she actually roots for. She leans in, eager for more speech. Her dress falls away from her and above her left breast is a tiny, black cross. I suppose if I needed to, I could make her look like Sally—just without the freckles. She smoothes her dress against her flat chest and waits for me to speak.

  “What do you do, Maggie?”

  She snaps up straight, gestures at Diana. “We’re law students.”

  “They have internships at the firm,” adds Marco. I smile. They all smile back. It buys me some time. I try to picture myself, twelve years ago, preparing for life: plucking guitars in the East Village, reciting poems in Chelsea lofts. Even though I know it’s wrong for her to be here, there’s something reassuring about Maggie—her unjaded enthusiasm. I like the wiry girl in the black dress. Diana is another case, though. After the laugh she has gone quiet, but not from shyness. She seems aloof and calculating. And her martini seems to be shutting her up rather than relaxing her—reinforcing her superiority. Booze does that sometimes, make you high and mighty, saucy and silent, while you avoid what is really happening—you’re scared, black, and young and you believe you can’t afford to make a mistake.

  Sometimes dinners come down to being merely exercises—accumulating experiences and killing time, until the food arrives, until it’s time to go: filling the time unerringly, without spoiling appetites or hurting feelings. Without playing the fool. To be able to say “I did this” or “I saw them.” Diana stares out over the dining room. I direct the next question at her.

  “Do you know each other from school?”

  “No, we don’t. We met this summer.” She finally speaks. Her voice is deep and soft and clear. Her mouth, like Claire’s, hardly moves.

  “I’m at NYU,” peeps Maggie. I turn to her, nod, and then go back to Diana.

  “And you?”

  “Harvard.”

  “Really. What brings you to New York?”

  “I’m from New York,” she answers with a hint of condescension. She turns slightly to Marco, “And the opportunity to work at Jancy.”

  “I’m from Boston,” I pat the table. I don’t like my tone—too syrupy, but I’m not sure how to speak. I don’t want to match hers. I don’t want to turn this into another competition, but I don’t know what she wants to hear. I stick with the syrup.

  “Do you like being there?”

  “No, not
particularly.”

  I nod.

  “No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  Marco jumps in. “Didn’t you go to Harvard?” The girls turn to me with involuntary curiosity. Diana’s face relaxes for a moment. She feels this and tightens it again. I want to kick Marco, but then I wonder what he knows. There’s very little he does know about me—so I think. I don’t know what Claire, in a weak, confessional moment has put out there in the channels—the gossip that came to him as fact. Whatever the case, he has always been gracious to me and remembered, as much as I’d like to forget it, my birthday. I suppose over the last few years of analyzing starting pitchers and raising discreet eyebrows at cocktail parties Marco has seen the both of us as outsiders. He knows he is. He doesn’t apologize, nor does he deny it. Marco’s an outsider and everybody knows it—even he. What they don’t know is how and why. He’s not one of the men in the storefront social clubs, which, though dwindling, still exist. He’s not a grumpy landlord’s son, nor the corner merchant. He’s not a gangster or a steamy lover. What I know is that he appeared one day in a second-grade classroom in a dead mill town north of Boston and he didn’t speak a word of English. His father roamed the north shore for day work. His mother stitched shoes. He became a millionaire by thirty.

  “Yes, I did,” I respond, nodding too earnestly as if to warn them of what’s to follow.