A Room With No Work In It

The whole next day Maren did not answer his text.

She let it sit on her phone the way a person lets a bill sit unopened on a counter, present and pretending not to be, and she did the day around it, three client calls and a lunch and a two-hour session with an art dealer whose girlfriend had gotten hold of a memory card and needed to be moved from a girlfriend to a former one without appearing anywhere in a newspaper. She did the sessions well. She did them, in fact, better than usual, because the alternative to doing them well was thinking about the two lines of text sitting under Theo's name, so she poured herself into the small murderous mercies of her actual job with a concentration that Priya remarked on twice.

At six she went to her office and shut the door and answered him.

Yes. Where.

He replied in under a minute.

A place in the East Village. It's called Ricci's. Eight o'clock. Wear anything. I'm not testing you.

She wore the same charcoal she'd worn all day. She did not want him to think she'd dressed for him. She also did not want to think about the fact that she had considered, for the length of one whole subway ride she did not take, dressing for him, and had chosen instead to be, in some small perverse way, more herself, which meant the charcoal, and the same lipstick, and hair pulled back exactly the way she'd pulled it back that morning.

Ricci's was on Twelfth Street between B and C, past the point where the avenue letters stopped pretending to be a neighborhood and started being a favor to whoever still lived there. The place had no sign. It had a red awning and a hand-lettered menu in the window with the specials scratched out in Sharpie and a small brass bell on the door that rang when she pushed it open. Six tables. Candlelight, because the fluorescent had gone out and no one had replaced it, and after a while people had started to call it atmosphere. He was already there, of course. He was always already there.

He stood when she came in. He did not smile.

"You came."

"You asked."

"That's not always the same thing."

She sat. He sat. The woman who ran the place brought a carafe of red wine without asking and two glasses and a small dish of oil-cured olives and left again, and Maren looked around the room, and she said, "This is not the East Village of the man who runs a clean-energy company on Park Avenue."

"No."

"How'd you find it."

"I got acquitted here." He poured for her, then for himself. "Not literally. My lawyer's office was around the corner. I ate dinner in this room the night the jury came back. The woman who runs the kitchen didn't know who I was. She still doesn't. I like that about her."

The candle guttered between them. He watched her.

"I don't want to talk about Meridian tonight," he said. "I don't want to talk about the firm. I don't want to talk about the eighteen months. If we can't do that, I understand, and I'll pay the check and we can go, but I wanted to ask."

"Why."

He considered the question.

"Because you asked me a real thing yesterday morning," he said. "And I don't want the entirety of our knowing each other to be a series of transactions in a grey room. I don't have any illusions about what this is. I signed the paper. I know what you can do to me and what you probably will. But there was a moment yesterday when you asked me the question, and you didn't move afterward, and I have been thinking about that moment for thirty hours, and I would like to know what would happen if we sat in a room for an hour and I didn't have to be the client and you didn't have to be the fixer, and we just found out."

She had been on the receiving end of many propositions. She had received them from senators and from second sons of European royal families and from a defense attorney once, in a hotel bar in Geneva, who had spent forty minutes explaining to her exactly why she would be very good for his career. She had never in her life been on the receiving end of an offer as terrifying as this one.

She picked up the wine. She drank a full swallow, longer than she meant to.

"All right," she said.

"All right."

"But you talk first. If we're doing this."

"Why."

"Because I don't have small talk anymore. I used to. I lost it somewhere. So you go and I'll learn how it's done again by watching you."

He almost smiled.

He told her about his mother. She had died two years ago, of a slow, unglamorous cancer, in a hospice on Long Island that smelled like lemon disinfectant, and she had made him promise before she went that he would eat properly and not let the years he'd lost make him bitter, and he had, so far, only kept the second promise, because he was a bad cook and hated to eat alone. He told her about his sister, who lived in Portland and taught eighth-grade math and had two children he only saw at Christmas because she thought he was too quiet these days for the children, which he was. He told her that he had learned Italian in his late twenties for reasons he could no longer reconstruct and it was one of the four things in his life he had never regretted. He did not tell her the other three.

She listened. She did not, for the first time in six months, run three private strategies in the back of her head while a man was talking to her. She just listened, and after a while she said, quietly, "My father used to read to me in the bath."

He waited.

"He was a professor. Comparative literature at Fordham. He would sit on the toilet lid and read me The Odyssey while I got prune-fingered, and my mother would come to the door and yell that it was inappropriate to read Homer to a nine-year-old and he would tell her Homer wrote it for nine-year-olds and everyone since had misunderstood." She turned the wineglass by its stem. "He died when I was fifteen. It wasn't the cancer kind. It was the kind where a newspaper decides you did a thing you didn't do, and then a second newspaper decides they were right, and then the department decides it's easier not to have you, and then you spend the last year of your life in a rental in Queens with your books in cardboard boxes, and one morning you don't get out of the chair."

The candle went sideways in the draft from the door.

"That's why you do what you do," he said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"That's the whole answer."

"That's the whole answer."

He looked at her a long time. The woman came and brought them plates of pasta with a small brown butter sauce and a chip in the rim of one of the plates that Maren stared at as if it were the answer to a question no one had asked.

"Maren," he said.

"Don't."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"Yes you were."

"All right." A small, tired half-smile. "I was going to say I'm sorry about your dad."

"Everyone is."

"That's true. But I meant it in a specific way. I meant that I think whatever happened in that room yesterday was you meeting a piece of him you haven't looked at in a long time, and I don't know what it was and I'm not going to ask, but I want you to know that I saw it and I'm not going to use it. I don't have a lot to offer you, at the moment. But I have that."

She put her hand around her water glass because her hand needed something to hold that wasn't him.

"Eat your pasta," she said.

He did.

The bell over the door rang and rang and the candle burned itself down another inch and by the time she left him on the corner at a quarter past ten she had not agreed to anything and had not said anything she would not have said sober, and she stood on the curb after his cab pulled away with the small terrible knowledge that in the entire conversation she had told him one true thing about herself, and she had wanted to tell him another.