6. Nolan
NOLAN
The acquisition closes on a Thursday in early October, in a glass conference room on the forty-eighth floor of a building I now own most of, and I do not feel the way I usually feel when I close on something this size.
Usually I feel the small, clean satisfaction of a clock that has finished ticking. Tonight I feel the way I felt at the gala — like there is a clock somewhere I cannot see, and it is running in a direction I have not yet figured out.
Phillip pushes the executed copy across the table with two fingers, exactly as he always does, and tips his coffee cup toward the room.
“To the Overtown corridor. To Ashford keeping the whole operation by the scruff. To Nolan, who apparently woke up one Sunday in July and decided a hundred and twelve million dollars of historic frontage would make a nice toy.”
"To not waiting for September," I say, lifting my cup.
The lawyers laugh because the lawyers are paid to.
Phillip doesn't laugh because Phillip has known me since I was twenty-six and a much worse version of myself, and he can tell I am not in the room with him.
He waits until the lawyers have collected their copies and filed out before he sets his cup down.
"Claire wants ten minutes when you're done here," he says.
"She's been collecting questions about the southern parcel for two weeks, and you've answered approximately one of them, which I'd describe as out of character.
The rest of us are starting to wonder if you've had a small stroke and are hiding it well. "
"Tell her she can have fifteen. I'll come down."
Claire Ashford runs my acquisitions group, and she has run it since the year I bought the Wabash hotel in Chicago for cash on a dare.She is thirty-three, prematurely gray at the temples in a way she refuses to dye, and the only person at this company allowed to put her feet on her own desk without anyone making a face about it.
She is also, as of three weeks ago, the head of internal coordination on the Overtown corridor, and as of about ten days ago she has been looking at me sideways.
I find her in her corner office on forty-four with her shoes off, a half-eaten apple on a napkin, and three different printouts of the same schedule spread across the conference table.
"You wanted me," I say, dropping into the chair across from her.
"I want a lot of things, Nolan. A vacation.
A new sales head. A boss who answers his email about the southern parcel before I have to walk to him.
" She flips the topmost printout around so it faces me.
"Halloran-Reyes' lead architect on the south side has missed three of the last five coordination calls.
We have a quarterly leadership meeting on the eighteenth and her name has been on the attendee list every version of the agenda I've sent you, and you have, each time, asked me to confirm she'll be there.
I have confirmed she will be there. The third time you asked I started keeping count, because that is the kind of thing my therapist tells me I'm allowed to do now. "
"Noted."
"Three times, Nolan."
"I heard you the first time."
"Then tell me what I'm coordinating. Because it isn't an acquisition anymore. We've closed. It's an integration. And it is also, increasingly, beginning to look like a personal interest project, and I would like to know which it is before I budget the next quarter."
I sit back. Claire watches me sit back. The apple on her napkin is starting to brown at the bite. Outside her window the lake is doing the gray, restless thing it does in October when it can't decide whether it's still summer.
"It's an integration," I say. "She's the right architect for the south parcel.
I read her Pullman Row write-up before I bought the corridor and I want her name on the building when it goes up.
I would like that name to come with a person who is actually attending the meetings I have asked her to attend, which she is, by your count, no longer doing. "
"And the personal piece?"
"Doesn't exist."
"Nolan."
"Claire."
She picks up the apple. She doesn't bite it.
She points it at me. "I've worked for you for eleven years.
You have, in that time, asked me about exactly two architects by name without prompting.
Both of them were men, both of them won the Pritzker, and you forgot their names inside a quarter.
You have asked me about Arielle Sutton on a count I have personally lost track of since the Miami gala.
If you tell me again that it doesn't exist, I will believe you, because you are my boss and that is what we agreed I would do.
But I am going to remember you said it."
"Remember whatever you want," I tell her. "Get her on the eighteenth. In the room. Not on a screen."
"I have been trying."
"Try harder."
Claire bites the apple. She does not break eye contact. I leave before she has finished chewing.
Back upstairs my assistant has left the south parcel binder open on my desk to a tab I did not ask her to flag.
Halloran-Reyes' integration paperwork sits on top, neat as a folded shirt.
I drop into my chair and flip past the legal exhibits to the section I have been circling around for three weeks like a man pretending he doesn't know where the kitchen is in his own house.
Lead Architects — Southern Parcel. Arielle M.
Sutton, AIA. Updated employee photo, October.
The photo is new. The one I’ve been carrying in my head since the gala is the corporate version — pulled-back hair, no smile, that headshot energy built from years of being underestimated.
This one isn’t that. Her hair is down, soft around her shoulders.
She’s not smiling at the camera so much as past it, toward whoever took the picture, as if she likes them, as if the camera is just tagging along for a moment meant for someone else.
Her cheeks look softer than they did in Miami.
Her jaw less sharp. And the tiredness around her eyes has nothing to do with a long day on marble in heels.
I sit with the binder open on my lap and I look at her face and I am, without permission, deeply unsettled.
I close the binder. I open my laptop and draft an email to her firm-issued address — the same one I’ve written twice this month and deleted twice.
Ms. Sutton. Following up on last Tuesday’s coordination call. I’d like to discuss the facade language for the corner site in person. Available windows attached.
I attach the windows. I wait forty seconds. Then I send it.
The reply comes back inside ten minutes, from her project manager.
Hi Mr. Ashford — Arielle asked me to pass along that she'll be out of office for a personal medical appointment on Thursday and Friday but is happy to coordinate via written comments on the marked-up elevations attached. Best, Terry L.
I read it twice.
Personal medical appointment is the kind of phrase a project manager uses when he has been told to use it.
It is also a phrase I have never seen attached to Arielle Sutton's calendar.
I scroll up through her firm's coordination notes from the last three weeks, which I have, embarrassingly, been keeping a tab open on.
Out — appt. Out — appt. Late, appt. Working from home, follow-up appt.
She is, by my count, at the doctor every five business days.
I think about the woman in the emerald dress on my balcony in July, who held her water glass with both hands by the bar at the gala because she was tired and would not let anyone see it.
I think about the new photo, the softer cheeks, the eyes.
I think about the night she told me to close the drawer.
I close the drawer in my own head and leave it locked, because I won’t start calculating a woman off three blurry data points scraped from a project manager’s email. That’s the kind of math men in my bracket botch in public and answer for in court.
And I’m not spending the eighteenth behind a screen.
I pick up the phone.
"Claire. Reschedule everything I have on the eighteenth. I'm flying to Chicago. I want to be in the room for the leadership meeting in person. Tell Halloran-Reyes I'll be there as a courtesy and not a surprise. I am not in the business of ambushing my own architects."
"Nolan." Claire's voice on the other end is too careful. "Just so I understand. You are flying to Chicago to attend a quarterly coordination meeting you have, in eleven years, never once attended in person. Do I have that right."
"You have that right."
"Anything else?"
"Book me at the Peninsula. Two nights. I'll need a car."
I hang up before she can find a polite way to ask me the question she has already asked me twice today.
I sit in my chair on the forty-eighth floor and watch the lake decide what it wants to be, and I make a list, inside my own head, of all the reasonable, professional, due-diligence-shaped reasons I am getting on a plane.
I make it a long list. I make it a good list. It is the kind of list I could read out loud to a boardroom and not lose the room.
I am not fooling myself with it for a second.