One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  “Of course they were,” Rosten said. “You were so much smarter than them.”

  She thought about getting a teaching certificate, but dragging tenth graders through Julius Caesar did not hold much appeal, so when Jim announced that he was going to apply to Harvard Business School, she decided that she would, too. She was accepted and he wasn’t, so they ended up at Wharton. “Good investment,” his father said, “like long-term care insurance.”

  Both of them got jobs easily. They received promotions, had a child. They moved to a better apartment, had another child. By all appearances, the investment had panned out. Then the marriage faltered. His parents saw that something was wrong. At Thanksgiving dinner with the kids at the table, Jim’s father turned to him and told him to think carefully about what he was doing. “Run the numbers,” he said.

  It was funny, really, she said, because Jim had ended up in marketing, so if anyone were going to run numbers, it would have been her.

  Her eyes went to her lap and she plucked the napkin.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  As she moved away from the table, he caught the waiter’s attention. When she returned, she was fresh and he had paid. He walked her toward her hotel but stopped about two blocks out.

  “What a pleasure,” he said. “Catching up.”

  “Except it was all about me,” she said. “You could come up, you know. There’s a minibar. Do they still call it a nightcap?”

  “That’ll have to be a road not taken, I’m afraid,” he said. She deserved better than that worn old line. “I have nobody to blame but myself,” he said. “It’s my fault you’re spoken for.”

  “Hardly spoken to,” she said. “Jim’s out of the picture. I suppose it was when he found another woman to add to the other woman. He ran the numbers and four’s a crowd.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he said.

  She did not answer.

  “It can’t be at your hotel,” he said.

  “Nobody would be shocked,” she said. “They’re road warriors. It happens all the time.”

  “To you?” he said.

  “No. That’s Jim, not me.”

  He stepped to the curb and lifted his arm. A taxi pulled over on the opposite side of the street. He took her elbow and crossed over. He may only have imagined it, but when she slid in, she seemed to place herself a little farther from him than before.

  “Your husband is a fool,” he said as the taxi pulled away.

  The driver lurched onto Michigan Avenue, throwing Grace awkwardly into him. She recovered quickly. This, she thought, must be what it felt like to go home with someone you just met in a bar.

  They passed the Dome and eventually pulled up at a townhouse—three stories, with a fence, a little lawn, and a flower box. Lights were on inside.

  “Should we have called ahead?” she said.

  “I have the cleaning lady leave them on.”

  It was foolish to assume anything about him, as it had always been.

  “The lived-in look,” she said. “Two kids and a dog.”

  “One man rattling around in too much space,” he said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. A good investment, I guess.”

  “It’s lovely,” she said.

  A pair of topsiders sat just inside the door, lined up in the center of a small throw rug. The stairway bore no trace of him. The off-white walls were bare. The carpet smelled as if it had just been shampooed. It was clear that two people did not live here. In fact, it was hard to believe that one did.

  When they stepped through the door at the top of the second flight of stairs, she found herself outside on a deck, looking across some railroad tracks and Lake Shore Drive into the empty darkness of the lake.

  “I wish there were a moon,” he said.

  The east wind smelled of water. She dared to lean into him for a moment, just barely, then pulled back before he could. Mistake on mistake on mistake. She did not know him, and yet she felt that he knew everything about her, what she wanted—him beside her, the smell of water, a moon.

  His idea of a house tour was to open doors and let her peek in. She tried to find something in the few pieces that hung on the walls, but there was no person behind them. Even the master bedroom, which he barely let her glimpse, looked like a room your secretary would book for you in a first-rate business hotel. When they got to the living room, he asked if he could get her a drink. The wine from dinner had grown heavy on her. She said Scotch.

  “Really,” he said.

  “A little splash in a big glass, with soda and ice.”

  He disappeared into the kitchen, leaving her to look for photos of smiling women standing with him on the ski slope or with the Mediterranean at their backs. She found only a group portrait, the logo behind them, at the bell-ringing on the opening day of trading in Day and Domes shares. The sole woman was the one from Investor Relations who had flirted with him this morning. But the most remarkable thing about the room was that it had no bookshelves, not a single volume anywhere, not even something oversized with pictures lying on the coffee-table glass.

  “Can I see your office?” she said when he returned.

  It was off to the left. He let her walk in ahead of him, and in the darkness she saw the car lights running white and red on Lake Shore Drive. Then the overhead fixture came on, and she realized that he had placed his desk so that his back was to the lake. She turned. No shelves here either.

  “OK,” she said. “Where’s the library?”

  He stepped aside to cue her exit. She stayed put.

  “I have some books at the Dome,” he said. “My little act of corporate rebellion. I don’t really have time anymore. I think we’ll be more comfortable in the living room.”

  She hesitated, but he was already switching off the light.

  “I have to admit that I don’t go in for anything very heavy myself these days,” she said, sitting down on the couch. “I even pick up a thriller once in a while when I run out of reading matter at an airport. They usually disappoint, starting at the level of sentences.” She did not say spy novels, which disappointed differently because she went to them for explanations they never provided.

  He put down his glass, whisky neat from the look of it, and lowered himself into an armchair on the other side of the coffee table. He did not seem comfortable in it. It did not seem possible he had ever been comfortable in it.

  “I’m not doing very well by you, am I,” he said.

  “We were just going to talk,” she said.

  “What is the use of talking,” he said, “and there’s no end of talking, there is no end of things in the heart.”

  She put down the drink, then picked it up quickly and wiped the tabletop with her hand.

  “I’m sorry. I should have thought this through,” she said.

  “It’s Pound,” he said. “No end of things of the heart. I read it to you once. When I came back.”

  “The timing was horrible,” she said. “We were both lost.”

  She was on maternity leave from the bank when he appeared. She welcomed his presence. They tended to baby Jonathan together and talked when he slept. When he woke up, they read aloud the Brothers Grimm, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shel Silverstein, which to the infant could not have been anything but sound. They would take different speaking parts, making up odd voices and laughing. One day she turned the conversation to Lord Jim, which was a favorite of his. He started to give an interpretation of what had gone wrong inside the man with ability in the abstract, but then he stopped. There was a boundary, his Iron Curtain, keeping her out and holding him in.

  Not long afterward he told her he was leaving New York.

  “To Boston,” he said. “For an MBA.”

  She wanted to warn him that business school was not a place to find yourself. It was a place to put yourself on ice. It did not dawn on her until seeing his apartment that this was exactly what he had wanted.

  He leaned across the empty coffee table. She was af
raid that he could see her feelings welling.

  “It must be hard, losing him,” he said.

  She wiped her eyes.

  “It’s better now than it was when we were putting up a front,” she said. “I thought it could not get worse than that. Then we told the kids.”

  She had never seen Luisa cry the way she had that evening. Before Jim had gotten out all the words, their daughter began breathing in spasms, as if she had pulled something hard and sharp down into her lungs. Jonathan said that he was sorry for everyone but not to worry about him because he was grown, having reached his sophomore year in college. With that he began to leave. Jim said that it wasn’t either his or his sister’s fault. Jonathan turned and said, “Obviously.” Jim went on like an actor delivering his lines as a scene fell apart. Grace could only whisper, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  “You were strong not to put them in the middle,” he said, “but I’m sure they knew what had happened.”

  “I don’t know what anybody knows or doesn’t know anymore,” she said. “When Jim said he wanted a divorce, our past was like a jewel box lying open on the carpet, everything precious in it gone.”

  “Do you have the kids’ pictures?” he said.

  She was determined not to cry.

  “Always,” she said, touching her purse. Sometimes their photos were the only things that kept her from disappearing.

  Tom came around the coffee table and sat down close to her on the couch.

  “Can I see them?” he said.

  She fumbled with her purse, which suddenly seemed large and hollow. She managed the latch. Her hand mercifully encountered the wallet, which she withdrew. The pictures came out from behind her driver’s license, clinging together.

  “Jonathan has become a man,” he said. “Corn-fed and healthy, like you.”

  “It’s wheat, Tom,” she said. “You always wanted it to be corn. But in North Dakota it’s wheat.”

  He put Jonathan’s picture behind Luisa’s in his hand and smiled.

  “I thought you and Jim had it all figured out,” he said.

  She took the photos back, which brought his eyes to her.

  “I’ve heard that a lot,” she said. “But obviously I hadn’t figured out a single thing.”

  She was not sure she could stop the tears now. She turned her head and drew air against them.

  “It’s OK,” he said. She felt his arm around her shoulders, holding her up. She pulled against it. “I’ve cried with you.”

  This was a password that unlocked an image of New York on a rainy afternoon together. It wasn’t the past that had been stolen. It was the present, what was real and who.

  8

  On his way in, Rosten stopped at his secretary’s desk for messages.

  “Why the short face?” Gail said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Mona Lisa,” she said.

  “My little mystery.”

  Gail had come with the treasurer’s office. From his first day, she had not taken him entirely seriously. This, she later explained, was because the men she had worked for before Rosten were like bran: “They just kept moving through.” He surprised her by moving upward and bringing her along.

  “If it’s meds you’re on,” she said, “I’d like to ask my doctor for some.”

  “Don’t even try to guess,” he said and tapped his knuckles on her countertop.

  “You know you’re on in five minutes in the war room,” said Gail. “And don’t for a minute think you’ve stumped me.”

  “Save your energy.”

  “You’re smitten, aren’t you.”

  “The folders,” he said.

  “On the table”

  “You’re coming with me.”

  “I’m right, aren’t I,” she said.

  “Two minutes,” he said.

  He retreated to his table and checked the top file. Gail did not make mistakes. At his desk he booted up then opened his personal AOL account, which Gail could not access. At the top of the queue was a message from Grace:

  —Who would think I could get so excited about a meeting?

  He hit reply:

  —The Joy of Decks.

  Before he could sign off, another message popped up:

  —Soon!!!! :)

  He returned to the table and counted the folders. Each jacket carried a large label with a number in red, and each page inside bore the same number. When his team saw this, there would be jokes about CIA Rules.

  “It’s only a question of who,” said Gail, leaning against the door frame.

  “You might as well just give up,” he said.

  The crowd in the war room was restless and Grace an eye of calm at the heart of it. He opened the meeting, briskly explaining the security procedures. Gail began calling names.

  “Taking attendance,” said one of the analysts.

  “It’ll be the time clock next,” said Chase’s man, Rob Greener. Rosten would have understood an even sharper edge. Everyone knew it had hurt him when Lawton had traded him away.

  When they had finished the preliminaries, Rosten launched into his presentation. This would be the only time he would run through the deck before going to Joyce. Some practiced so much that you would think they were performing Lear, but fundamentally it was just numbers, and they made a robust case for acquiring Gnomon at a substantial premium to the public market price.

  “We believe we can make a preemptive bid that Gnomon’s management will find attractive,” he said as he reached the final slide.

  The room was silent. Grace was nodding.

  “Comments?” he said.

  Greener raised his hand. He always wore a suit and kept the jacket on, its sleeves riding a bit above the cuffs of his white shirt, which was always in need of a little bleach. His tie was thin, no matter what the fashion. It was not so much that he seemed uncomfortable in his clothes, rather that his clothes did not seem quite his own. Before working for Lawton, Greener had been in the Finance Department, starting at the same time that Rosten did. He was one of those people who seem to know how to do everyone’s else’s job but could never figure out how to put things together himself.

  “Rob,” said Rosten.

  “Page 14 of the supporting document,” Greener said, and the room fluttered, a flock of pigeons rising and settling back to the sidewalk. “You include a figure for system security upgrades for the combined company. I question that. We should be doing those whether we do the deal or not. The incremental cost for the merged enterprise will be minimal. I mean, is the number really material?”

  Rosten nodded, but of course no number was material. Numbers were Platonic. In an acquisition exercise, numbers weren’t even resolute. Rosten had seen them jump to meet expectation and retreat from criticism. Yell at them loudly enough and you could stampede them right off a cliff.

  “Thank you, Rob,” he said. “I’ll rethink that.”

  “For the record,” said Greener, “the Operations Department is willing to commit to keeping all costs low.”

  A snicker went through the room. Where exactly was this record that Chase’s people were always saying things for?

  Now other hands were up.

  “This may be a little granular,” said another one of Rosten’s financial analysts, “but on page 11,” more pigeons fluttering, “shouldn’t we footnote our assumption about the weighted average cost of capital going forward?”

  “Maybe in the leave-behind,” said Rosten.

  The questions went on, none of them the big ones like what if the wind changes and there’s a recession? Or another terrorist attack? What if interest rates spike? What if all the data-mining business goes to some kid in a dorm room who stumbles on a piece of code?

  From the back of the room, Margery Strand raised her hand. Rosten barely knew her, but in the annual leadership review Sara Simons always listed Strand as the leading candidate to succeed her as vice president for Sales and Marketing. Some people said it was only beca
use Strand was African American, though they were careful about being overheard.

  “Why don’t we just get on with it?” Strand said. “It’s way too late to abort this puppy. I mean, everybody knows the boss wants this. We’re here to show him that he’s right. But what I see is top-line growth that is, shall we say, aspirational. And it will be my ass if I can’t make the numbers you all have been putting up on the whiteboard.”

  “I wouldn’t assume anything about Joyce’s preconceptions,” Rosten said. “He will look with a fresh eye at what we’ve done here and feel free, I assure you, to disagree. By the way, do you?”

  “Pardon?” she said.

  “Disagree,” he said.

  “I just know sales will be on the hook,” she said.

  “There’ll be plenty of hook to go around,” he said.

  A few others said they didn’t want to get down into the weeds, then took out their gardening implements. While they were rooting around, the door opened and Gail appeared. She came straight to the front of the room and handed Rosten a folded pink message slip.

  The words were printed on the blank side.

  “The Man needs to see you in the boardroom,” it said.

  Rosten read this and picked up his explanation where he had left off. Another pink slip appeared.

  “now!” it said.

  “I’m so sorry,” Rosten said to the room. “I’ve been summoned.”

  Rosten looked at Grace and then away. As he started toward the door, Gail whispered, “He was in a state.”

  “Angry?” he said.

  “Something else,” she said.

  “What?” he said.

  “After you see him, you can tell me,” she said.

  Rosten was called to see the CEO so often that he did not usually tense up the way some did. But why the boardroom? Was there a directors’ meeting? Rosten would have had to handle the preparations. Some awful impropriety then. Fraud. Sexual harassment. Was it about Grace? A chill went into his belly. Wait, breathe. He’d had nothing to do with deciding which bankers to use. That had been Joyce’s call. Technically, she wasn’t even on the D&D payroll. He took hold of the brass knob, pushed open the door, and entered.

  Joyce sat alone in his chair at the end of the table, the light from the windows behind him making him dark.