One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  “You will look to them the way you look to me,” she said. “You will look like who you are.”

  “I’m sunk,” he said.

  When the letter welcoming him to membership came, he made her read it out loud slowly, just to make sure. His acceptance became his arrival, but whether he had ever felt that he really belonged, Simons was not sure.

  “It’s a curse to be a pioneer,” he said as she stood before him in her mortarboard and robe outside the football stadium in Evanston the day she got her MBA. “Nobody shows the way.”

  “You were there for me,” she said. “And now I have an advanced degree in peddling.”

  Not long after graduation she dropped the h from her first name for the same reason the immigration officer had added the s. For her father’s sake she fasted and ate as expected, when he was there to see. She married holy, though that did not last. Her father would have liked her to have been with him more often, of course. She pleaded distance; he was by then in Highland Park, and she lived downtown near the Dome. At the point in her career when Day and Domes granted her the perk of a club membership, he all but ordered her to follow him into the Standard. She joined the Union League instead.

  “It’s for the WASPs,” he said, with a face that made her fear for his heart. “They would not have us, even for lunch.”

  “It wasn’t long ago that they wouldn’t have women either,” she said. “You and I are pioneers, remember? It’s who I am.”

  “And being who you are means forgetting who you were?” he said.

  Not forgetting so much as coming into her own. At Day and Domes she thrived: better offices, promotions, bonuses, the club membership, the vice presidency. She believed it was because she had an instinct for what her customers needed. That you gave me, Daddy. That I kept.

  After passing the Standard Club, she looked into the lobby of the high-modernist, glass-and-steel Federal Building and wondered what she would have become had she grown in that greenhouse. The places where we spend our working lives shape us the way our traditions once did. It would have felt like being filed alphabetically in a drawer.

  The old wood and brass of the Union League Club could not have been more different. She could imagine Mark Twain holding forth in the lobby, the most redolent cigar in the box. The foyer murmured with judges and lawyers, echoing conversations that had been going for a hundred and thirty years. She checked her coat at the long counter, where tips were not allowed, then took her newspaper to the sitting room, where she had a view of the lobby so she could see Dick Chase when he made it in from his meeting out beyond O’Hare. She could have given him directions to the library upstairs with its leather-stuffed chairs and polished tables, which was a better place for reading a newspaper, but she preferred reading people, imagining how she would approach them.

  Those two men near the stairway had obviously known each other for a very long time and would be delighted to tell stories to anyone who hadn’t heard them before. That young man greeting the woman in spike heels might like to have a wingman. Those three men by the cigar stand seemed not to trust one another, or perhaps anyone else. They might accept her as a sucker at their poker table.

  She eased back into a chair that was too big for her and folded the paper the way her father had taught her when they rode together on the El. This allowed her to hide her attention whenever the object of it looked her way. A young woman coming through the revolving door slowed down so much that Simons thought she might stop inside and flutter there, a butterfly in a jar. Ever since becoming Day and Domes’s vice president for Sales and Marketing, Simons had not hesitated at any entrance. The young woman took one step into the lobby and saw someone Simons couldn’t see. Her expression was recognition, but not relief. The man stepped into the frame. He certainly knew that he belonged, probably born to it. The woman’s date? Her potential boss? The man took her by the elbow. More than an interview, less than a date. Or worse, a little of both.

  At least she was beyond all that. Her lunch engagement was at the same level of intimacy as all her dates these days—Dick Chase, of whom someone had once said, “He’s like a first husband who never got the word.” This was not quite right. He behaved just as badly to men.

  Chase had a big, pudgy face on which he cultivated a mustache and pointy goatee, which made him look like a hypnotist you would never allow to put you in a trance. But, then again, she could not imagine allowing herself to be entranced by any man. She’d had relationships after divorcing Noah, and early on, some of them had been quite intense. The trouble was that the thing always turned out to be like business, the get and the give. Now all she wanted of her men was that they be presentable. She took them to the charity balls. Occasionally she would go with one to a play. A few she even took home. They did not stay. Tom Rosten seemed to live the same kind of life. She would see him with some lovely woman a couple of times. Then nobody. Then another.

  “You’re early,” said Chase, who suddenly loomed. She stood, rising in her shoes to almost his height.

  “You’re looking particularly dapper today,” she said. No harm in trying, even though what he really looked like was a plumber dressed for church.

  “Traffic on the Kennedy,” he said.

  She looked at her watch, a Movado, nice enough but never better than what her customers had on their wrists.

  “Actually I’ve been enjoying myself,” she said. “Don’t you like being invisible so you can watch people without them knowing?”

  “I thought Rosten was the spy,” he said.

  “Let’s take the elevator,” she said, moving him toward the lobby. “The stairs are grand, but they weren’t made for heels.”

  Thank goodness he wasn’t quicker or he would have heard both meanings.

  “What union is it that this club was named for?” he said.

  “Abe Lincoln’s,” she said. “But that was before my people’s time.”

  “Mine were on the other side.”

  “That explains a lot,” she said. This he seemed to take as flattery. “But I don’t hear an accent.”

  “I grew up in Beverly,” he said. “It was my grandfather who had the twang. He wouldn’t have been welcomed in this club.”

  “Mine either,” she said, “and yet here we are.”

  The dining room always made her think of the stateliness of the Walnut Room at Marshall Field’s. She had once begged her parents to take her there before the tree came down after Christmas. “It’s a Hanukkah bush,” she said, following her Reformed friends. “There is no such botany,” her father said, and made quick work of his lunch.

  Simons and Chase had to wait a few minutes before the maître d’ seated them at a table along the inside wall.

  “You don’t rate a window?” said the Chase she knew.

  “A woman wants to be a little private when out with a gentleman,” she said.

  They sat, and he fell to straightening the alignment of the silver and china before him.

  “I know what I want,” she said.

  He picked up his menu and went over it line by line. When he finally looked up, she took his order and filled out the card for the waiter. Chase put his forearms on the table and leaned toward her, the way she sometimes saw lawyers leaning toward judges.

  “What is it you want?” he said.

  “I was hoping you could help me understand what’s going on with our CEO,” she said. It wasn’t her real purpose, but it was the kind of thing that would loosen Chase up.

  He sat back.

  “He trusts me to be discreet,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “The thing is, sometimes it’s like he isn’t there,” she said. “I go to his office to brief him on an important contract negotiation, and he interrupts to ask whether I think he should redo the boardroom again.”

  “The woman’s touch,” said Chase.

  “I haven’t heard of any problem with the acquisition,” she said. “Have you?”

  He turned and lo
oked behind him.

  Chase’s representative on the working group was Rob Greener, the one Lawton had traded to him when they were shuffling people around to place Gunderman. Everybody was surprised that Chase had given him the working group assignment, because Greener had been all over D&D and never done much.

  Sara leaned forward and put her hands down halfway across the table.

  “You’ve been noticing something about Joyce, too,” she said.

  “I didn’t say that,” he said.

  “But you’ve poked around.”

  “Who said I have?”

  She took a sip of breath, then of her iced tea.

  “Mind reading is in my job description,” she said. He stared at his perfectly centered plate as if it were a mirror. “Look,” she said. “Everyone has the same question. I figured that if anyone had an answer . . .”

  “And here I thought I was going to work you for information,” he said. “Why do you think I’ve been so pleasant?”

  “I imagined it was me,” she said.

  The waiter brought their meals, in which they took refuge for a time.

  “So you don’t know any more than I do,” she said.

  “I don’t know how much you know.”

  “I hear Dell Lawton has been holed up in his office with the door closed,” she said. “You don’t think it’s the COO job.”

  He put down his fork. His eyes moved back and forth over her face as if he were trying to read something printed on the skin.

  “You mean he’s been told it isn’t him,” said Chase.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “He’s lucky still to have a job at all after losing his manhood,” he said.

  “That’s vivid.”

  It was funny what people saw and what fell into a blind spot. Everyone but Chase knew that he had even less of a shot at the COO job than Lawton did.

  He took a bite of Cobb salad and a sip of cranberry juice.

  “You don’t imagine that you’ll get it,” he said.

  “I’m not quite ready,” she said. “But look, this lunch really isn’t about the COO job.”

  He took another bite of greens.

  “Maybe he’s heard a death sentence,” he said. “That would make a man close his office door.”

  Sara had let the conversation wander a long way from what she wanted from it, which was to smooth the way for a visit by a potential customer to the largest data-storage facility. It was important that he not feel like he was entering Guantanamo. She was about to bring things around to this when suddenly it came to her.

  “Joyce is in trouble,” she said.

  There was a slight hardening at the corners of Chase’s mouth. This was the only tell.

  “A fight with his wife?” he said. “A brother with a nose for drugs?”

  What she could not decide was whether he was trying not to show what he knew or what he didn’t.

  “Something involving Lawton,” she said.

  Chase met her eyes as if he were checking her for glaucoma.

  “What kind of trouble?” he finally said.

  “I was hoping you would be able to help me with that.”

  His eyes were not examining hers anymore. They were warning.

  “This conversation never happened,” he said.

  7

  When the war room door scraped an arc in the carpet, all conversation ceased. Rosten was the only one who could see that it was only Sandra Harms.

  “Did I penetrate a secret?” she said.

  “You know we would keep nothing from you,” he said. “I was just summing up.”

  “So sum away,” she said.

  One of the bankers stood and offered her his chair. She waved him off.

  “I’d like to have the financial modeling wrapped up by close of business Friday,” Rosten said.

  “That’s aggressive,” said Grace Bondurant.

  “That’s Tom,” said one of Rosten’s young analysts.

  “Next week will be for kicking the tires,” Rosten said.

  “To see if they need inflating,” said Harms.

  Rosten felt himself tighten. His role had been to let excess air out of the numbers, not to pump it in.

  “Stop that metaphor,” he said. “Let’s put it this way: Next week we’ll look for weaknesses and fix any we find. Now, go straight home, everybody. We meet again at dawn.”

  This met with the standard stage groans as folks began to stand and gather up their papers. Rosten turned to erase the whiteboard. He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “You’ve put all this together remarkably well, Tom,” Harms said, leaving her hand there for a beat past business. “So often I’ve seen the bankers take control.”

  Grace stood off from them, but close enough to hear.

  “They’ve been great contributors to the process,” he said.

  “Bankers are always for the bank,” she said.

  He put down the eraser.

  “I’m the one pushing, not the bankers,” he said.

  “And I concur,” she said. “The sooner we green- or red-light this thing, the better.”

  She touched his hand and left. The door scraped slowly closed.

  “You were making yourself quite a challenge for her,” said Grace.

  “I wasn’t impolite, was I?” he said. He put his papers into the file jacket he carried around now in place of the Bible. People had started calling it the Book of Common Prayer. “She was just trying to get a rise out of me.”

  “I’ve been there,” she said.

  “That was different.”

  “I remember.”

  He was sorry for the memories he had left her with.

  “When Harms looks at me,” he said, “she sees an H-P financial calculator and a sheaf of spreadsheets.”

  “I’m pretty sure she sees more,” said Grace.

  He put the folder under his arm and pushed in his chair.

  “Maybe you’d better warn her,” he said. He regretted saying that. The memories weren’t her responsibility.

  “Do you have plans for dinner?” she said.

  “People may get the wrong idea,” he said. “It’s one thing to be seen at an obligatory charity event. Half the people there are partners of convenience.”

  “Then choose an out-of-the-way place.”

  An hour later, they met outside a bar a few blocks from the Dome. It was drizzling.

  “Better not,” he said, looking down at her hand as she placed it in the crook of his arm.

  “Slick pavement,” she said.

  “Here’s a cab,” he said, freeing himself to open the door for her. When she got inside, she slid over to give him room, but not enough. They touched at the shoulders and hips.

  In New Haven he had been the bold one. Now he hugged the taxi’s door. He did not know her anymore, and he had not let her know him. She could not possibly want him to fail her again.

  They had been a couple for almost three years, he a class ahead of her. They were both outsiders in the East, he a Chicago Pole and she part Sioux and straight off the North Dakota plains. They went everywhere together. Even if they did not belong to the place, the two of them made it belong to them. Then, as his graduation approached, he was recruited by the CIA.

  During the long, black time that followed, Rosten had no contact with her. But then, when it got so black that he finally realized he had to walk away, he went straight to her. While he was gone, she had married a man from her class named Jim Bernsten and had a new baby. He had no right to intrude on them. At that point Rosten wasn’t sure what, if anything, he had the right to do. But despite everything, she helped him. He did not know why. When she looked at him, he no longer knew what man she saw.

  The taxi pulled up at the place he had chosen for dinner. He paid the fare and did not flinch when she took his hand to make the long step across the puddled gutter to the curb.

  “We’ve eluded surveillance?” she said.

  “Let’s not go there,�
� he said.

  There were eyes on them in the hotel lobby and restaurant, smiles and nods.

  “Do we look happy?” she said.

  “Are we?”

  “Yes, actually.”

  They had a good table, lush with flowers, the sepia light sparkling off the crystal like sunset.

  After they ordered drinks, she took out her BlackBerry. He took out his, too, but then he felt her looking at him, head aslant, and realized she had turned her device off.

  “How did you manage to get this assignment?” he said.

  “When I heard about the D&D project, I offered and let nature take its course,” she said. “I’m not much of a schemer.”

  “Which is why you chose investment banking for a career.”

  “The analytic side.”

  “Funny that we both ended up hiding under spreadsheets,” he said.

  The wine came.

  “Is Jim all right with your working with me?” he said.

  “I didn’t ask.”

  Her eyes were examining her fingertips, which were tasting the condensation on the water glass.

  “I was never anyone for him to worry about,” he said. “I was just a cloud passing.”

  She ordered fish. He had a cut of pork trimmed with things on the menu whose names he did not recognize as food. As they ate, he got her talking about herself. Some of it he already knew, some he didn’t. She told of following Jim to New York, where his math major had gotten him an entry-level position at McKinsey. Her education up to that point had been almost perfectly nonquantitative, so she had to settle for proofreading at a midtown law firm whose senior partner wrote essays on Wallace Stevens and Dickens on the side. He liked to lend her books from his office. She had a lot of time to read at home, with Jim gone so much. Usually novels, at first new ones that got attention in the New York Review of Books and TLS, but eventually the self-absorption of formal invention became tiresome, and she turned to novels of life. She loved her boss and did not mind the work, which was as orderly as justified lines, but some of the firm’s lawyers were a trial.