24. Nolan
NOLAN
Imove into the office on Tuesday because the penthouse is too quiet, and because the housekeeper, who is sixty-two and Honduran and has been with me since the Wabash hotel, has stopped meeting my eyes in the mornings, which is the kind of small domestic catastrophe I do not have the room to fix.
The office is not better. The office is the same forty-eighth-floor view of the lake doing the gray, restless thing it does in March, and a leather couch I had reupholstered three years ago and have not, until this week, slept on.
I keep a clean shirt in the closet behind the door.
I have three. I have rotated through them since Sunday.
Malcolm brings me the daily report at six-fifteen every morning. He stands at the corner of my desk with his hands clasped at his belt and reads from a small black notebook with a pen looped through the wire.
"Miss Sutton left her apartment at seven-fifty yesterday.
Driver was the firm's, not ours. South parcel until eleven, lunch at the Greek place on Randolph alone, doctor at one-thirty.
Dr. Ellis ran fifteen minutes long. She got back to the firm at three-ten.
She left at six-forty. She picked up dinner from the bread place on Damen.
She was in bed at nine-twenty, as far as the doorman could tell.
The kitchen light went off at eleven-oh-six.
No visitors except Bianca at seven-fifty p.m., who stayed nineteen minutes. That's everything, sir."
"Thank you, Malcolm."
"Mr. Ashford."
"Malcolm."
“Sir, I’m about to ask you something, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t fire me for asking.”
"Go ahead."
"You have me on a quarterly retainer through the corridor closeout.
The retainer covers protective surveillance.
It does not require a daily verbal at six-fifteen.
Miss Sutton has been clean of media for three days.
There is no active threat. I am happy to provide the report in writing, the way I did before October.
I am asking, with respect, whether you would like me to do that, because I am beginning to feel like a man delivering grief by the cup. "
"Keep delivering it, Malcolm. I'll tell you when to stop."
"Sir."
He goes. He closes the door behind him very gently, the way he closes every door, which is the part that hurts most this morning because it reminds me of the way Arielle said I do, and it is on a list of small daily things that have begun to land like small daily punches.
Claire arrives at seven without knocking. She has not knocked on my door since 2014. She is in a black turtleneck and the long camel coat she wore to lunch with Arielle the week before everything ended, which I am sure is not an accident, because Claire does not do anything by accident.
"Get up off the couch, Nash."
"Good morning to you too."
“Get up off the couch. Wash your face. I’m going to talk to you, and I’m not doing it with a man who slept in his shirt. There’s dignity involved. Move.”
I move. I wash my face. I come back out in a clean shirt I have not buttoned at the collar.
She is sitting in the chair across from my desk with her ankle crossed over her knee and her coat still on, and she has put a paper cup of coffee on my desk that I am almost certainly not going to be allowed to drink before she has finished with me.
"You watched the press conference."
"Yes."
"How many times."
"Twice on Saturday. Once on Sunday. I have not watched it since Sunday."
"Liar. Devon told me Malcolm pulled it off your screen Monday night when you left the office to get a sandwich.
You have watched it five times, Nash, and Devon told me because I asked him to, because if I have to be your sister and your second chair at this company I am at least going to do both jobs with the same information. "
"Claire."
“Don’t. Don’t speak yet. I’m saying one thing, once, and then I leave.
I want you to sit with it for fifteen minutes without responding, because when you’re this tired, you argue with the last sentence of a paragraph instead of reading the whole paragraph.
Sit. Drink the coffee. Keep your hands still. ”
I sit. I drink the coffee.
“You are not your father, Nash. I want that stated plainly, because Arielle said it in her kitchen last week and you’ve been carrying it like a verdict, and I’ve watched you do it.
You are not him. You do not share his contempt or his cruelty.
You did not marry under false pretenses, you did not shut your wife out in a hallway, and you did not raise a son only to abandon him for seven years.
Those are crimes. You did not commit them.
I need that established before I say the rest, because the rest will be harder. ”
"Go ahead."
"You loved her like she was a parcel, Nash.
You did. You did not mean to. You did it because that is the language you speak.
You see a thing you want, you buy the building around it, you buy the block, you buy the corridor.
You did it with the suite at the Marquesa.
You did it with the Wacker office next to her firm.
You did it with the variance. You did it with Holcomb.
You did it with the Crain's reassignment.
You did it with the photographer. You did it with the alderman at four in the morning.
Every one of those was you converting a person into a parcel because parcels are the only thing your father ever taught you how to love.
And Arielle is not a parcel, Nash, and she let you know on a balcony in Miami that she was not a parcel, and she let you know in a glass office in October that she was not a parcel, and she let you know in a trailer in January that she was not a parcel, and you kept buying the block around her anyway because the part of you that listens has not been trained, and the part of you that buys has been trained since you were nine years old by a man we are both still afraid of. "
"Claire."
“I’m not finished. You asked what to do — or you were about to — so I’m answering now.
Leave her alone. Not forever. For now. Let her have the press conference she just gave, the project she just defended, and the daughter she’s about to deliver without you in the room, because she asked you to step out, and the first thing — the only thing — is honoring that request. No soup.
No Malcolm. No convenient detours past her building on West Erie.
No having Devon call Bianca for updates.
Stop. Sit in this office. Sit in the penthouse.
Sit with the consequence. And in three months, or six, or twelve, when she’s ready to send a sentence, you take it as it comes.
You don’t script it. You receive it. Are we clear. ”
"We're clear."
“Good. Now I ask you something else, because apparently I can’t exit a room without escalating it. What’s the plan for Harrison.”
"There is no plan with Harrison."
“There is. He called me yesterday. He wants you out of the foundation chair. He thinks the corridor optics have made the Ashford name uninvestable through the second quarter. He’s planning to raise it at the executive meeting on Thursday and ask the table for a vote.
He told me so you’d have time to prepare.
I’m telling you so you have time to decide whether you’re going to fight him. ”
"He told you to tell me as a courtesy."
"He told me to tell you as a maneuver. He thinks you are weak this month, Nash. He thinks you will fold."
"He's right that I'm weak this month."
"He's wrong that you will fold."
She stands. She does not button the coat.
At the threshold she pauses, fingers brushing the wood as if testing its grain, in the same place I stood outside Arielle’s room on Friday night, and she looks at me with that soft, dry expression she only lets slip when she’s my sister first and my second chair second.
“You can be a different man, Nash. Start with that, because I led with the hard truth. You can. You won’t stay the man Arielle Sutton walked away from on Friday. You’ll become someone else. I’d like to meet him.”
She leaves.
I sit at my desk through three meetings without speaking. At eleven, the executive call starts in the conference room down the hall. Harrison joins remotely from a chair he has been sitting in since 1989. Phillip is there. Two of the lawyers are there. Claire is there, in her coat.
Harrison does not waste the first ten minutes. He puts the motion on the table at minute eleven. He frames it as governance hygiene. He says my name twice without looking at the camera.
I let him finish.
“Phillip,” I say when he finishes. “Take Harrison off the foundation chair distribution list. He’s no longer copied on foundation business. Remove him from the corridor list as well — he’s no longer copied on Overtown.
Move Thursday’s executive meeting to a smaller table. Six chairs. I’ll send the names this afternoon.
Harrison, you’ll receive a written summary at the end of each fiscal quarter. That is the access you have to my company for the foreseeable future.
We are clear.”
The room is very quiet. Harrison's face on the screen does not move.
"Nolan."
"Goodbye, Harrison."
I end the call myself.
Claire doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. She closes her notebook, very gently, and leaves the room ahead of me, and I sit at the head of an emptied table on the forty-eighth floor of a building I built, and the room finally stops feeling like it belongs to my father.
It also does not feel like it belongs to me. Not yet. But it is, I notice, mine to learn.