The Satyr’s Pipe (Bathhouse Beasts #13)

Chapter 1

The Satyr’s Pipe: Cal

Iwas on my fourth call of the morning when I realized I didn't remember any of the first three. And that I hadn’t eaten all day.

This was happening more often. I'd be sitting at my desk, headset on, looking at a screen full of figures and a face in a Zoom window, and partway through the meeting my body would just…

disconnect. Not in a dramatic way. I wasn't dissociating, or whatever they called it on those stupid wellness podcasts my assistant kept emailing me links to.

It was more like the back half of my brain would quietly close up shop while the front half kept the lights on.

I'd answer questions. I'd nod at the right moments.

I'd say things like I'd want to circle back on the upside scenario before we commit and the variance there feels manageable but let's stress-test it, and the words would come out in the right order, and the men on the other end of the call would nod back, and twenty minutes later I'd hang up and not be able to tell anyone what we'd just decided.

I caught my reflection in the dark band at the top of my monitor.

Forty-one years old. Gray at the temples in a way my mother had warned me would happen and that I'd refused to believe until it did.

The expensive haircut that the firm essentially required of senior partners.

A face that, in the right light, looked composed and reassuring.

But if you looked close, it looked like it was about to crack.

And honestly, I think the cracking had started a long time ago.

"Cal." My name in my ear, a little sharper than the rest of the conversation. "What do you think?"

I had no idea what I thought. I had no idea what the question was. I looked at the screen. Seven faces in seven little boxes, all of them turned attentively toward me, the senior tax partner whose opinion was about to make or unmake a hundred-million-dollar piece of the deal.

"Send me the latest model," I said, which was always the right answer, "and I'll have notes back to you by the end of day."

There was a pause, a tiny one, the kind of pause that means you should have had notes for me already.

Then the youngest associate in the meeting, a kid named Devon who'd been at the firm eighteen months and was already showing the early symptoms of becoming me, said brightly, "Already in your inbox, Cal. "

"Perfect," I replied. "End of day."

The meeting ended. The little boxes blinked out one by one until it was just my own face staring back at me, hollow-eyed in the webcam, and I closed the laptop before I had to look at it any longer.

The thing about being good at your job is that it eats you.

I don't mean it makes you tired, though it does. I don't mean it makes you cancel plans, though it does. I mean it literally eats you, the way a fire eats a log. Slowly, from the inside, until one day someone touches what's left of you and the whole thing collapses into ash.

I’d spent twelve years at the firm. Six years as a partner.

I had a corner office on the forty-third floor with a view of the river, an assistant who knew my coffee order and the names of my recent string of exes.

I had a parking spot in the garage with my name stenciled on the wall, and a billing rate that made my college roommates whistle through their teeth when I'd accidentally mentioned it at a reunion two years ago.

By every external metric a person could measure, I had won.

I had also, somewhere along the way, stopped being able to feel things in any reliable way.

I noticed it during small, embarrassing moments.

The summer my mother had her hip replaced, my sister had called me crying from the hospital, and I'd realized, sitting in my car in the firm's parking garage, that I was already running through the schedule of how to bill the time I'd lose flying out to see her.

The moment my last relationship had ended had been a red flag too.

I'd been seeing a man named Adrián, a graphic designer.

He was kind and patient and a hundred times more interesting than me.

And he'd said, in the gentle final way of a man who had made his decision a long time ago, Cal, I can't keep dating someone who isn't here.

And I'd looked at him across the kitchen table of his beautiful apartment and felt, somewhere underneath the suit and the gray temples and the senior-partner face, a small bright pulse of realization that he was right.

And then the pulse had passed, and I'd nodded, and I'd gone home.

And I'd been back at my desk by seven the next morning. Not a single tear was shed.

That had been almost two years ago. I had not been on a date since.

I worked. That's what I did. I worked until my eyes burned and my back ached and the city outside the windows went from gold to dim to dark to gold again.

I worked through weekends in a quiet way that didn't look like working.

I checked my email at brunch, took calls from the treadmill at the gym, drafted notes for clients in my head while pretending to watch movies.

I had a gym membership I used three times a week with the joyless precision of a man maintaining a machine.

I had a therapist I saw on Wednesdays and lied to with great consistency.

I even had a small clean apartment in a building with a doorman, and a refrigerator that held mostly seltzer, and a king-size bed I slept diagonally across like a starfish because there was no one to be considerate of.

I had everything.

I felt nothing.

It was, I'd been thinking lately, kind of becoming a problem.

The rest of the day went the way all my days went.

I read the latest model. I sent Devon notes.

I took two more calls. I ate a salad at my desk that I didn't taste.

At four-thirty my assistant put her head in to remind me I had a five-thirty drinks reservation with Hollis, and I stared at her for a full three seconds before remembering who Hollis was and why I'd put it on the calendar.

Hollis Marwick, a law school friend. Now he was a managing director at a boutique firm across town. One of maybe four people left in my life who would still, occasionally, drag me out of the office and into a bar before I could come up with a reason not to go.

"Right," I said. "Thanks, Mira."

She gave me one of her looks. Mira was sixty-two, had been an assistant at the firm for thirty-one years, and had outlasted three of my predecessors. There were very few things she didn't know about me. Including, I sometimes suspected, things I didn't know about myself.

"You should go home and change," she said.

"I am going home and changing."

"You are saying you are going home and changing. I am telling you to actually do it." She nodded at my reflection in the office window. "You look like a man who died last Tuesday and just kept coming to work."

The woman had zero filter. But then again, at sixty-two, I supposed she didn’t really need one anymore.

"Mira."

"I'm just telling you what I see."

She closed the door before I could come up with a comeback.

So I went home. I changed.

The bar was a place called Verity, one of those low-lit downtown spots that pretended to be a speakeasy without committing to the bit.

It had leather banquettes and a cocktail list that ran to four pages with prices that would have horrified me if I'd still been the kind of person who registered prices.

Hollis was already there when I walked in, leaning against the bar with a Manhattan in his hand and his tie loosened, looking, as he always did, like a man who'd just gotten away with something.

That was the thing about Hollis. He looked like me.

He had the same gray creeping in at the temples, the same expensive suit, and the same forty-something face that was holding up about as well as it had a right to.

And he did, on paper, the same job I did too.

But you could tell, just by watching him stand at a bar, that he had not given the same things to it that I had.

There was a slack ease in his shoulders.

A readiness to laugh. A way he had of looking around a room like he was genuinely curious what was in it.

I didn't have any of those things anymore.

And, on a good day, I could almost remember that I used to.

He saw me across the room and grinned. "Calvin Reeve. Look at you. You're like a ghost."

"Hollis."

"How long has it been?"

"Six weeks."

"Six weeks. Christ. We used to do this every Thursday."

"Yeah."

"And now we do it every leap year."

"Yeah."

He shook his head, signaled the bartender, and pointed at me. "Old fashioned, for the ghost. And another of these for me."

We took our drinks to a corner table. I sat down and felt, as I always did when I sat down somewhere that wasn't my office or my apartment, a kind of vague structural confusion in my body.

It was like a piece of equipment that had been asked to perform a function it wasn't designed for.

Sit. Relax. Have a drink with a friend. My nervous system reading the instructions and not quite finding the right way to go through the motions.

"So." Hollis stretched his legs out under the table and considered me over the rim of his glass. "How are you, Cal."

"I'm good."

"No you’re not."

"I'm good, Hollis."

"You are not good. Look at yourself. You look like a man who's about to be subpoenaed by his own body."

I laughed, which surprised me. It came out a little rusty. "That's very specific."

"It's specific because it's true. When's the last time you slept seven hours in a row?"

I thought about it. "I don't track that."

"That means you haven’t in a long time."

"How would you know that?"