Chapter Eighty-Two: Marcus, After

Foster's office had a leather chair that sighed when you sat in it, and Marcus Cross had always disliked it for precisely that reason. A chair should not have opinions.

He sat in it now, on a gray Thursday morning, with a pen in his hand and four copies of the same document spread in front of him, and listened to it sigh.

"Twelve monthly installments," Foster said, from behind his desk. "Beginning on the first. Paid into the account you have designated. Market price on the day of each transfer, as agreed." He turned a page over, squared it, and slid it across. "Initial here, here, and here."

Marcus initialed. He took his time about it. He had a very good initial, a bold looping M with a flourish on the tail, and he had learned long ago that a person who signs slowly is taken to have read the document.

"I don't suppose," he said, without looking up, "there is any appetite for a floor."

Foster regarded him over his glasses for a long moment.

"Market," he said.

"I felt I had to ask."

"I know you did." And the corner of Foster's mouth moved, very slightly, in what was either contempt or something that, in a kinder light, might have passed for affection. "It would have been out of character not to."

---

He had been told, by the judge, that the report would name him. It named him four times. He had read each passage in the quiet of his flat, with a glass of the good Scotch, and found that the prose was beautifully clear. Judge Whitaker did not use adjectives. She described what he had done in plain declarative sentences, one after the other, like a bricklayer, and when he reached the end of the third mention, he had put the pages down and sat for some time looking at the window.

It was the lunches that had told him, in the end. He had always had lunches. Twelve a month, sometimes sixteen, at tables with white cloths and men who leaned in when he spoke. In the month after the report, he had lunched four times, and two of those had been with his dentist and his accountant.

He was not a stupid man. He did the arithmetic. In this city, among these people, he would be a pleasant cautionary story for perhaps two years, and after that he would simply be a man one did not invite. The prospect did not frighten him, exactly. It bored him, in a particular, bone deep way, as the idea of a long grey Sunday bores a person who has always preferred to be busy.

So he had made a call. He had always been very good at calls.

---

The firm was called Ridgeline Partners, and it was in Phoenix, and its principals did not read the Ledger.

They were two brisk, sun browned men in their fifties who built strip developments along the interstate, and they had listened to him over a long, excellent lunch with the courteous interest of men who had been told a good deal about him and had decided to find out the rest for themselves. He had been charming. He had been rueful. He had described, with a faint, becoming sadness, his role in the Meridian affair.

"I was the one who brought it to the board," he said. "In the end. I felt a director's duty. It cost me a great deal."

It was not false. That was what made it an art. It was only arranged. He had, in fact, brought the file to the board, by way of his sister, by way of a bargain, by way of a reporter and a records clerk and a good deal of money. But the sentence, taken alone, stood perfectly well, and the two sun browned men nodded gravely and looked at each other.

They had offered him a consulting role. A modest one. Strategy and relationships, two years, a salary that was not what it had been and a title that did not mean much. He had accepted before dessert.

---

He went to the house on the last day, because he had told himself he would not, and he had never in his life been able to resist doing a thing he had decided against.

It was a Saturday. The moving van was gone. The front door stood open, and the hall behind it was bare to the floorboards, and Eleanor stood on the top step in a plain gray coat with a single cardboard box held against her chest.

He stopped at the foot of the walk. He had a small flat object wrapped in newspaper under one arm, and he felt, absurdly, like a boy outside the principal's office.

"I'll take that," said Marcus.

"You have never carried anything for me," said Eleanor.

"No. I thought I might begin." He came up the steps and held out his hands, and after a second, she gave him the box. It was lighter than he had expected. Books, he thought. A few folded things. It rattled faintly, like a box of small stones.

They stood on the porch. Neither spoke. Down the street a child was riding a bicycle in slow loops, and somewhere a dog barked once and stopped.

"Where will you go?" he said.

"A flat. On Dearborn. Two rooms." She looked at the street. "I am told it has a very good light in the mornings."

"I'm going to Phoenix."

"I had heard."

He set down the box on the top step. He unwrapped the newspaper with great care, and held out the clouded little frame, the boy and the girl on the porch, squinting into the sun with their single melting ice cream.

"I thought you ought to have it back," said Marcus.

---

Eleanor looked at it. She did not take it.

"I put that on your desk for you," she said. "Not for me. I do not think I understood why at the time. I believed it was a manoeuvre."

"It was a rather bad photograph."

"We were eating ice cream."

"We were sharing it," Marcus said. "I remember. You gave me the larger half, and then took it back, and told me it was for my own good."

"That sounds like me."

"It did seem consistent."

She almost smiled. It was brief and dry and nearly invisible. She put out one hand, and gently, with two fingers, pushed the frame back toward him.

"Keep it," said Eleanor. "I find I do not need a photograph. I remember it perfectly well."

He wrapped it up again. His hands were not quite steady, which annoyed him.

"I won't forgive you," he said. "For the girl. For the way you sat in that study and let me draft the thing. I don't want you to think that's been settled."

"Nor shall I forgive you," said Eleanor. "For the reporter, and the woman in records, and the folder. Or for the vote in that boardroom, which was very well done, and which I deserved." She tilted her head. "Isn't it restful?"

He laughed. He could not help it. It came out of him short and startled and entirely genuine, and he stood on his sister's porch in the cold with a photograph under his arm and laughed until he had to put one hand against the railing.

"Goodbye, Marcus," said Eleanor.

"Goodbye, Ellie."

She had not been called that in thirty years. She went very still, and he carried her box down the walk to the waiting taxi, set it carefully on the back seat, and did not look at her face again.

---

The plane was half empty. He had a window seat and a gin and tonic and a man in the middle seat who wished to talk.

"Business or pleasure?"

"A bit of both," said Marcus, and smiled his old smile. It came easily. It always had. "I'm joining a firm in Phoenix. Consulting. I used to run a good-sized company, back East. Family business."

"That so. And do you miss it?"

"Every day." It slipped out, with an unexpected ring of truth that surprised them both, and he looked out of the window at the ragged, sparkling city falling away beneath the wing.

He had already built the story. He would tell it at dinners, on terraces, over drinks at conferences in cities where nobody read the Ledger. A courageous director. A family scandal. A price paid. The sentences were polished and the order was good, and he would tell it so well, and for so long, that in ten years he might very nearly believe it.

He took out his wallet. It was habit, not intention. Behind the cards, flat against the leather, was a small square he had slipped out of its clouded frame in the back of the taxi and trimmed to fit, a boy and a girl on a porch, blurred and sunburned and impossibly young.

He looked at it for a long while, under the rumbling light of the plane.

He had always been good at the version of events that left him standing. It was a singular thing, he thought, with the clouds sliding gold below the wing, that the photograph did not come with one.