One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  “Shall we?” she said.

  It had taken a lot to get him to agree to dinner. He had obsessed about being spotted by the Admin News Network. Maybe they should leave the Dome separately. The only way she was leaving the Dome, she had told him, was on his arm. Now, in the lobby together under the mosaics—he in his sharp new jacket, she having made the very best of what God gave her—she slid her hand into the crook of his elbow, and he did not pull away. Nor did he stammer an explanation to the guard. And after they did a quadrille through the brass revolving door, he actually opened a space for her hand between his elbow and his side and took a long, deep breath of the cool June air.

  She led him with gentle pressure and the shifting of her center of balance. He seemed comfortable enough following as she turned him at the corner and then again at a light. They did not walk fast. It was a lovely evening, he said. Yes, she said, the kind she had hoped for.

  She had not been at her new club often since it had granted her membership. She had been taking clients to restaurants. The club was still her father, not her. When they entered the lobby, she balked. Sam wasn’t expecting it and continued forward a step. She did not know the entry protocol. Fortunately, the man at the desk looked up, smiled, and nodded. She turned Sam toward the stairs.

  “Do you mind walking up?” she said.

  “How many floors?”

  “Just three.”

  “Just,” he said.

  The walls were clad in travertine. “It’s only a kind of limestone,” her father had told her the first time he brought her here to dinner.

  “Fine marble is limestone, too, Daddy,” she said. “It’s just been under more pressure.”

  “Then it won’t be long before they can chisel a statue out of me,” her father said.

  Sam lagged on the stairs. She could hear him breathing. When he reached the top, she took his arm again and led him into the dining room. A large abstract painting dominated the far wall.

  “I don’t belong here,” he said. “Even with the jacket.”

  “You sound just like my father,” she said, letting go of his elbow and taking him by the hand as the maître d’ showed them to their table.

  When the man left, she said, “Some people are skittish about being in a Jewish club.”

  “My mother’s father was Jewish,” he said.

  “That doesn’t count.”

  He opened the menu carefully.

  “It’s OK,” she said. “It’s kosher.”

  They started with a cocktail, which loosened him. His parents were Protestant, he said, but not churchy. They kept a Bible somewhere, but it was old and stuffed with obituaries, birth announcements, and programs from weddings and graduations. He had never seen anyone actually reading it. His father was a quiet man, a bookkeeper. At home he read National Geographic and Russian novels. He loved Scientific American, always saving the “Mathematical Games” for last.

  “Sometimes he would take me through a solution,” Sam said. “Of course, I couldn’t really follow it.”

  “Smart father,” she said. “He made you want to. That’s how you got so bright.”

  When the waiter returned, he delivered a dramatic reading of the specials. She ordered the salmon. Sam did, too. The salad came with merciful speed.

  “Good dressing,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she heard herself say.

  The entrées offered a wide range of conversation topics: the freshness of the fish, the interesting texture of the lentils, the fineness of the china.

  “Have some dessert,” she said as the plates were removed from the table.

  “Not for me, thanks,” he said.

  “You don’t have to worry about calories,” she said. “Look at how fit you are.”

  The busser swept the cloth. Sam took his napkin from his lap and spread it before him, covering up spots of salmon juice.

  “Why are you doing all this?” he said.

  “Dinner is not so much of a thing to do,” she said.

  “Dressing me up, telling me I look trim, how bright I am,” he said.

  “You have no idea how uncommon you are,” she said.

  “Out of step,” he said.

  “Uncommonly unassuming, considering your brain,” she said. “Uncommonly considerate. Courageous. Pretty good-looking, too, when you don’t hide in dumpy old things. You are a catch, Mr. Gunderman.”

  He looked past her.

  “Your wife made you feel worthless,” she said. “That’s what people do to the one they’re betraying.”

  “Can you excuse me?” he said.

  He got up from the table and turned, as if to hide his face. She had not wanted this. She had thought she needed to sell him on himself before she could hope to sell him on her. She was selling, and it was driving him away.

  “Are you all right?” she said when he returned. “I’m so sorry I brought her up. I had no business.”

  “I should get home,” he said.

  “To Megan,” she said.

  “I just should.”

  “Well then.”

  She did not take his arm as they left the dining room. They passed through the lobby in silence until the man at the desk said, “Have a good evening, Ms. Simons.” Maybe he had looked her up, but no matter. He recognized her existence. You can do this, girl.

  Outside, the slight chill gave her an excuse to take his arm again and hold it tightly.

  “I should have brought a wrap,” she said.

  “Take the jacket.”

  “Not a chance.”

  They reached the corner of Jackson but did not step out from the wall of the building because of the wind.

  “Do you need a cab or something?” he said.

  “Usually the man offers to take the lady to her door,” she said. “Then the woman, if she is so inclined, asks the man up for a nightcap or a cup of coffee.”

  “This late?”

  “It’s not about caffeine,” she said. “The man usually accepts.”

  “Is that what we are?” he said. “A man and a woman?”

  “I would very much like to find out,” she said.

  Berry wasn’t sure that even he could have broken Rosten. Under questioning, the man had not had to eat a single piece of bad paper. Not an e-mail. Not a memo to file. Not a handwritten note that turned up in somebody else’s drawer. Though Berry knew that Rosten had pushed Joyce to disclose, the man avoided saying so under intense interrogation, even as Joyce was preparing him a shroud.

  Being unafraid protects a man better than any lawyer can. There were times when Berry wished he could have had Rosten as his client rather than Joyce, but Berry had his partners to consider, and if anyone was going to survive to do more business with the firm, it was obviously not going to be Rosten.

  Of course, at the outset there had been a fair chance that the board would call Joyce to account. The directors had probably balked because they had reasoned, badly, that firing him would be an admission that the security problem had been material. If things had been different and the directors had hired Berry as their separate counsel, he would have advised them that changing out a CEO after a company soiled itself was a fiduciary’s safest move. He would have warned them that if they let Joyce stay, he would not necessarily be chastened. When a bullet brushes past a big man’s temple, it often makes him feel both invincible and fixated on vindication, as if do-overs eradicated mistakes. In Berry’s firm they referred to this as the corporate mulligan, and it kept many attorneys’ families in luxury cars.

  As the investigation played out, there had been no doubt that the prosecutor felt she needed to break Rosten. She had him back for questioning four times. The last two sessions, Berry himself represented him. She was relentless. It was for just this quality that Berry had hired her when he had been U.S. Attorney. He wasn’t surprised that she stepped over the line and asked whether Rosten had been trained by the CIA to lie.

  “I did not have that kind of assignment,” Rosten
had said.

  “What exactly was your assignment?” she said.

  “If you are cleared to know,” he said, “you will be able to find that out for yourself.”

  He was simply masterful. He never told a single plain lie, as far as Berry knew. Evasions, yes. Deflections. Incompletions. But never a contradiction of provable fact that she could use to pry him open. This reduced her to insult.

  “You were terrified that you would be fired if people found out about the hacking, weren’t you,” she said.

  “I’m afraid I’m not the frightened person you want me to be,” he said.

  Berry regretted having to sacrifice such a man, but the directors made it clear to Joyce that somebody had to go down if he didn’t. Berry assured them that there was very little chance of Rosten flipping, even if they severed him. The man seemed to want nothing for himself.

  “A man to be envied,” said the Sikh, who was the only director who spoke up for Rosten’s retention.

  “It must have been hard for you,” Donna said.

  “He let me down,” Brian said, picking up the pile of mail she had put at his place at the table.

  The troubles at the Dome had closed him up. When she said so, he told her it was her imagination.

  “Is it the boys’, too, then?” she said.

  “I’ll come to the school play or whatever it is, if that’s what they want,” he said.

  “I don’t think it’s that,” she said.

  She had thought that when the board finally embraced him again, it would bring him some peace. Instead, it launched him on a mad search for a major deal that he could complete and that would complete him. It was as if he had not lost a business opportunity when he lost Gnomon, but rather one of his limbs.

  “We’ll blow Gnomon out of the water,” he said.

  “It isn’t a North Korean warship,” she said.

  “Data is going to be huge,” he said. “Cash-register receipts tagged by loyalty programs, official records opened up by the Freedom of Information Act, click-throughs on web sites. One day those BlackBerries everyone is carrying will reveal in real time what their owners are doing—GPS location, imagery from built-in cameras, actual voices. Algorithms will sift through the vast stream of e-mails. We will know every person in the market, really know him.”

  He did not seem to care about the fleshy versions. They were simply emitters of information, like antennae, like stars, like violas, like Donna.

  He did not notice, but she doubled the hours she practiced—scales, exercises, études. It was not that she had designs on moving up a chair. She practiced in search of her own voice, what was left of it after all the years of trying to meld with his. The viola spoke things she could not say. Dissonant double stops. Cries at the top of the instrument. Anyone who had heard it might have feared for her. But he did not hear. When he was there, she was silent. And he was not much there.

  One day, after she got the boys off to school, she repaired to the music room and found, atop the piano on a cloth of wine-dark velvet, a precious baroque viola. Next to it lay an ivory card impressed with a description of the instrument’s provenance. She ran her finger over the indentation of the letters but did not read the words. Instead, she slid her two hands under the cloth and instrument and carried them to his office at the opposite corner of the house. There she laid them on his desk and wrote on the back of the card, “Thank you, Brian. But this is not me.”

  The courtroom ceiling was so low that it seemed to bear down on the raised bench. For some reason Grace had expected a cavernous space, a theater of justice, but this one had just two short rows of pews behind the railing and but a few steps between the lawyers’ tables and the judge. There was only one person in the room when she poked her head in, an elderly fellow in a worn plaid jacket, striped vest, and denim shirt. A colorless tie dribbled down his front. He was asleep.

  She had managed to get to the courthouse more than an hour early, prodded by the fear that something awful would happen and she would not get there at all. She had checked and rechecked her alarm before going to bed and risen an hour before it rang. In the taxi, she had compulsively pulled at the sleeve of her dress to get to her watch until the jersey knit sagged.

  She wished they could have concluded the divorce without appearing in open court, but her lawyer wanted to get Jim under oath that his financial disclosures were accurate. This had infuriated him. She had assured her lawyer that the numbers were right; she was the one who had kept the books. Money wasn’t what Jim lied about, she said. “When they lie,” her lawyer said, “they lie.”

  Rather than fretting in the courtroom, she decided to take advantage of the weather. She wandered up Centre Street to Broome. When she and Jim were new to the city, they had come here often and pretended it was the other side of the globe. The smell of ginger in hot oil. Ideograms stacked up on the signs like mah-jongg tiles. The gold on vermilion that you never saw anywhere else. She and Jim would make their way through the crowds, past old people in faded black, until they found an authentic-looking place to eat. The menus were always stained with sauce, the translations delightfully approximate.

  The other side of the globe and together had both been illusions. Apart forever was what she wanted now. In the courtroom on Centre she and Jim would stand on either side of the aisle, his lawyer his best man, her lawyer her father taking her back. Then it would be over. Grace felt a fullness in her eyes.

  Tom had wanted to be with her, which was sweet of him, but she had said no. She was glad of it now. If he had come and they had wandered in Chinatown and the tears had gathered, he might have thought they were regret rather than fear that it would all happen again, that one day he would look at her as if he saw a stranger looking back.

  “Are you satisfied that you are being fairly treated in this settlement?” the judge asked. “I’m speaking to you, ma’am.”

  Grace forced her eyes upward.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice so fragile that she sounded even to herself like a woman who needed protection.

  The judge then pronounced the words.

  Jim was quick out the door. She waited to let him clear. Outside, she hailed a taxi, which sped up the West Side Highway. Tom would probably be deep in a book when she got home. These days he spent hours and hours reading. There were times when she looked at the volumes piled on each side of the chair and wondered how long he would be satisfied moving them from one side to the other.

  Maybe a job, though neither of them needed the money, what with his net worth and her settlement. It frightened her to see him idle. He was drawn to intensity, and she was its opposite.

  “Perhaps going back for a Ph.D.,” she said.

  “Do I look like a professor to you?” he said.

  In his chinos and open-collar dress shirt, sitting between his Doric columns of words, in fact he did.

  “Maybe an MFA,” she said.

  “I’ve become a citizen of a nation of actuaries,” he said. “I have nothing to say.”

  Secrets of state, dead men, and wicked women. Corporate scandal. There was a reason danger marked his past. Nothing to say? He did not see the pattern. Maybe only others could. She was afraid that someone like Harms would walk into his boredom. Or that woman in Washington. An intensity so raw that it would capture him again.

  Stop. He was not at all like Jim. He was the anti-Jim. He had never lied to her. The worst he had ever done was to be brutally honest. Now he told her that he was feeling a contentment he had never known. “Believe me,” he said. But when they made love, he seemed to hold back. She wanted to scream for him to crack her open and let everything she held in pour out. But she never did. Afterward he touched her back lightly with his fingertips as she lay atop him, a generous energy passing between them over a completed circuit, alternating current, back and forth. If only this could be enough.

  She had asked him once if it was. He had said she could not begin to know how much it was. But he knew how to speak shadows
the way poets did. What he said was that she could not begin to know. Those were his words. She could not know.

  The taxi dropped her at the corner. The doorman said her name. She opened the door of the flat, and there he was, still showing the glow of a run. He put down his book. It was Browning. He rose, and she folded into him.

  Even with the labor of breath and the acid gathering in the muscles of his legs, the river enchanted Rosten. It was a moving sheet of coated glass reflecting the sky, or the sky the water, both pure surface and infinitely deep. It did not seem right to feel so peaceful while Grace was in a courtroom living out the end of a great sorrow.

  Not long after moving to Manhattan with her, Tom had taken up jogging—if you could dignify his shuffle with such a word. He had been too long sedentary. Too much had pooled inside. He needed to sweat it out. And never more than today, when things were beginning and coming to an end.

  Grace had bought him athlete’s clothes, praised him every day that he ran. She was so patient with him. No, she had been patient the first time, when he had shown up out of nowhere, lost, and rung her apartment buzzer. This was much more than patience. This time she had come to him.

  By the time she did, he had become an urban hermit. Plastic forks and knives lay in the sink by the dozen. Greasy cartons of fried rice moldered in the trash. He had not breathed open air since leaving the Dome. Before Berry’s rent-a-cops escorted him out of his office, he had centered his company BlackBerry on his desk, gotten his suit jacket from the closet, and asked Gail to box up his personal things. If anybody questioned any of the items, let them have them, he said. All except one book of poems that he pulled down and handed her. Gail suggested that he take it along, but he said he wasn’t ready.

  Weeks later he still wasn’t. His things sat unopened on his living room floor. From time to time, lines of verse came back to him as if spoken from inside one of the boxes. One from Browning haunted him with hope, as it must have haunted Pound: “Why is it that, disgraced, they seem to relish life the more?”

  Then came a knock on his door. He wasn’t going to respond, for the same reason that he had unplugged his telephones and stayed off e-mail, but it was so tentative that it had to be just some child soliciting for a cause. He pulled a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet to make the problem go away.