8. Chapter 8
Christina
I'm outside Vivian's office at seven fifty one with my coat still on, because the text said before I take it off, and I'm taking instructions literally today.
Through the half open blinds I can see her at her desk with two phones in front of her and a single printed page face down on the blotter. She sees me through the glass and points at the chair across from her without looking up from what she's writing.
I go in. I sit. The office smells like her coffee and the eucalyptus thing she keeps by the window, and the city is still gray out the glass behind her, a delivery truck idling at the coffee shop across the street, the driver unloading boxes one at a time onto a dolly.
Vivian finishes her sentence. She caps the pen. She takes her glasses off.
"How was the lake?"
"Vivian."
"That's the whole question. I'm not being clever. Was it good?"
I open my mouth to give her the version I rehearsed in the elevator and what comes out instead is just the truth.
"Yes."
"Good. You paid enough for it." She turns the printed page over and slides it across the desk toward me.
The column. The market photo. My own face caught mid laugh at something off camera, Julian's hand reaching into the cart with the candy bars, both of us looking like two people who forgot anyone could see them.
"Now we deal with this part. Tell me what you think this is. "
"A problem."
"Be specific. The bid isn't the problem.
The bid set a record at my client's event, the donors are still talking about it, and Dianna at the hospital sent me a fruit basket the size of a golden retriever.
A planner spending her own money at a public charity auction is unusual.
It isn't misconduct." She taps the paragraph at the bottom with one finger.
"This is the problem. A source close to the firm.
Somebody in my building handed a gossip column a knife with my company's name on the handle.
That one sentence cost me a pitch meeting yesterday.
A foundation board read it and asked my sales lead if we had internal issues. "
I keep my hands still in my lap.
"You think you know who it was?" Vivian asks.
"I'd be guessing."
"Then don't guess out loud. I asked you not to speak to Rachel and I meant it, and here's why, and I'm only saying this once.
" She folds her hands on the desk. "Twenty six years I've run this company.
I've seen employees take clients on the way out the door.
I've seen an intern sell a guest list. I once had a planner steal an entire truck of chiavari chairs.
I know how this goes. People who do this do it twice.
The first time tells me it happened. The second time, if I'm patient and quiet, tells me who.
If you go to her desk and light her up, she gets careful, and I never get my answer.
" She holds my eyes. "So you're going to be polite.
You're going to be boring. And you're going to let me work. Can you do that?"
"Yes," I say.
"I know it's hard but I'm asking anyway.
" She leans back, and something in her voice shifts, down out of owner and into something that sounds more like a person.
"For whatever it's worth, Christina. Watching you bid against her in front of four hundred people was the most alive that room got all night, and the quote in this column made my firm look small in a week when you made it look generous.
You're not the problem I'm solving. Hold onto that, because the next few weeks might feel otherwise. "
She picks up a folder from the corner of the desk and hands it across to me. The tab reads ALDRIDGE.
"The Aldridge Foundation luncheon. Three weeks out.
A hundred and twenty guests at the Marbury Club, awards program, two speeches, no auction, no press list. Small, quiet, and the board chair is the most detail oriented woman I've ever billed.
You're running it alone. Start to finish, your name on every email.
" She puts her glasses back on, which is how I know we're almost done.
"Boring excellence. That's the assignment.
Make this firm so reliable the column has nothing to write about. "
"Understood."
"Coat off. Go to work." I'm at the door when she adds, without looking up, "And Christina. The nine thousand dollars. Was it for the kids?"
I stop with my hand on the frame.
"It was a great cause," I say.
"Mm," Vivian says, in the tone of a woman who has heard every version of that answer, and waves me out.
Kate is at my office door four minutes after I hang up my coat, carrying two coffees and wearing the elaborate casual expression of a woman who has been watching Vivian's blinds since seven forty five.
"Well?"
"I'm running Aldridge. Alone."
"The luncheon?" She steps in and hands me one of the cups. "That's very good. That's the Hartwell account's quiet little sister." She drops her voice. "And the other thing?"
"What other thing?"
"Christina."
"There's no other thing I'm allowed to discuss, which is itself information, so stop reading my face."
"Your face is a newspaper." She settles into my side chair, both hands wrapped around her coffee, and her eyes go past my shoulder and do the thing where they go still and careful a half second before I turn.
Rachel is in my doorway.
She's in cream today, something silk and tailored, the kind of thing you wear when you already know the morning went your way. She looks rested. She looks like a woman whose week landed exactly where she put it.
"There she is." Her smile doesn't reach anything above her mouth. "How was the lake? You got sun. Or something."
"It was great, thanks." I keep my voice even. I pick up the Aldridge folder and open it, not all the way, just enough to look occupied.
"Mm. I saw." Two seconds. She lets that sit there between us, watching me over the rim of her cup, and Vivian's voice is playing in my ear, polite, boring, patient. "Some of us have client work to catch up on. Aldridge, I heard? Cute little luncheon. Hundred and twenty people?"
"Hundred and twenty."
"Cute," she says, and her heels go back down the hall.
Kate exhales through her nose like a radiator releasing pressure.
"I need you to teach me whatever that was," she says. "Your face did absolutely nothing. I've never been so proud."
The Aldridge folder takes my whole day and I let it.
I pull up the Marbury Club site plan and spread the printed copies across my desk before nine thirty, and the morning disappears into it.
I drive out to Wells Street for the site visit at eleven, my Audi stuck behind a delivery van the last two blocks, and I park in the garage and walk the half block to the club in the November cold with the folder under my arm.
The events manager walks me through a paneled room with brass sconces and a fireplace that hasn't been used in a decade, ninety year old parquet under my heels, and I do what I do.
I count what's there. I measure the aisle with my steps.
I stand where the lectern goes and clap once to hear how the ceiling takes sound.
Back at the office by two. I build the timeline backward from the board chair's speech. I order tastings. I flag the kosher and gluten free meals in the seating chart and cross reference them against the RSVP list twice, because this board chair is the kind of woman who will know if I do it once.
Somewhere around six the floor empties out around me and I'm still at my desk with the lamp on, drawing table maps, and for whole stretches of it I don't think about him at all.
Then I do.
His hand on the armrest. His fingers closing around mine without either of us deciding to do it. I hadn't even noticed I'd reached for him until I was already holding on.
I pick up my red pen and go back to the table maps.
By eight the parking garage is mostly empty, my footsteps louder than they should be in that kind of quiet. I toss my bag into the passenger seat of the Audi and dig for my keys and the phone lights up in my hand before I've even got the door closed.
JULIAN.
I go still.
It rings. My thumb is right there, right over the screen, not moving. I watch his name sit there and pulse and go dark.
One new voicemail. Forty one seconds.
I sit in the car with the engine off and the key in my lap and the fluorescent tube buzzing somewhere two floors up.
Forty one seconds. He talks fast when he's nervous, I noticed that at the lake, the way his sentences compress when he's trying to sound like he's not trying.
Forty one seconds is a paragraph if he meant it.
I don't play it.
I drive home with the radio off. I eat soup standing at the stove because sitting down with it would make it a meal, and I don't want to make anything a meal tonight, I just want to get through the evening.
I rinse the bowl. I get into bed with my hair still damp and the phone face down on the nightstand.
The last thing I do before I sleep is the worst thing.
I pick it up. I look at his name. Forty one seconds.
I press delete.
The phone asks if I'm sure.
The phone, apparently, has opinions.
I press delete again and set it face down and close my eyes, and somewhere out there he left a forty one second message for a woman who just erased it, and I don't know if that makes me smart or just afraid, and I'm not going to figure it out tonight.
The week moves the way work weeks do when you need them to, in that forward grinding way where Thursday shows up and you're almost surprised it isn't still Tuesday.
I'm at my desk Friday morning when Kate walks past my open door and then walks back and stops in the frame.
"There's someone downstairs for you."
I don't look up from the Aldridge seating chart. "If it's the Marbury Club florals coordinator, tell her I'll call back before noon."
"It's not the florals coordinator."
Something in her voice makes me look up.
Kate's face is doing a thing it almost never does, which is absolutely nothing. Total stillness. The face she uses when she's very carefully not telling me what she thinks.
"Who is it?" I ask.
"I'm not sure... He said he was in the building for a meeting on seven and he thought he'd stop up." She pauses. "He is very tall."
The seating chart is still in my hand. I'm aware of this because I'm gripping it slightly harder than a piece of paper requires.
"Tell him I'll be right down." I set the chart flat on the desk. I check my reflection in my dark monitor screen, which tells me nothing useful, and I stand up.
Kate steps aside to let me through and then follows me to the elevator at a distance that she clearly thinks is not obvious.
"Kate."
"I'm going to the kitchen."
"The kitchen is the other direction."
"I'm taking the long way."
I press the button and don't respond, and the elevator takes exactly long enough for me to decide that my face is going to do nothing, the same way it did nothing with Rachel on Monday morning, the same parking lot expression that Kate said she was proud of, and that's exactly what I'm going to walk in with.
The lobby is marble floors and a security desk and a revolving door that throws November light in sideways at this hour. He's standing near the window with his coat on, one hand in his pocket, looking at his phone, and my chest does something I don't have a word for.
He looks up before I reach him.
That's the thing about him that I noticed at the lake and forgot to keep being careful about. He always sees me coming. Not the way people look up because someone's walking toward them. The way you look up because something shifted and your body knew it before you did.
"Hey." He slides the phone into his pocket.
"Hey." I stop a reasonable distance away. Professional. Lobby appropriate. "You had a meeting on the seventh floor?"
"I had a meeting on seven."
"That's a coincidence."
He looks at me. He doesn't confirm or deny the coincidence.
He looks good, which I notice against my will, the way you notice weather. He's got the good coat on, the charcoal one, and he hasn't shaved since I last saw him.
"You didn't call me back," he says.
"I was busy."
He nods once, slow, like that answer told him something more specific than I meant it to. He glances past me toward the elevator bank for a half second and then back. "I'm not here to complicate your week."
"You're standing in my lobby."
"I know." A small thing moves across his face and is gone. "I just wanted to see that you were okay. With the column. With whatever Vivian said."
I look at him, this man who drove me home in a Land Cruiser and stood on a curb with his hands in his pockets and didn't reach for me, who left a forty one second voicemail I deleted in a parking garage, who is currently standing in my office building pretending his meeting on seven was a coincidence.
"I'm okay," I say. "Vivian handled it. I'm running a big account. It's fine."
"Good." He doesn't move toward the door. "And you. Not the account. You."
The lobby is doing what lobbies do at eleven on a Friday, people moving through it in both directions, and I'm aware of every single one of them in a way that I shouldn't be.
"I'm fine, Julian."
He watches my face for a second the way he did at the lake when I said something he didn't quite believe. Then he nods, and it's not agreement, it's just the end of that particular question.
"Okay." He pulls his keys out of his coat pocket, which is him getting ready to leave, which is the right thing. "If the voicemail ever gets boring enough to play," he says, "there's no deadline on it."
"I told you I deleted it."
"You deleted it? You said you were busy." The corner of his mouth moves, barely. "Those aren't the same thing."
He's right, and we both know he's right.
He lifts two fingers off his keys, something between a wave and just a gesture that doesn't have a name, and he goes through the revolving door and out onto the street. I watch the door spin after him until it stops.
Then I turn around and Rachel is standing twenty feet away by the elevator with her phone in her hand and her eyes coming off the door like she just watched the whole thing.
Her expression does not change.
Mine doesn't either.
She looks at her phone and steps onto the elevator and the doors close. I stand in the lobby for three more seconds and just breathe.
I'm back at my desk by eleven fifteen. I open the Aldridge folder and I pick up the red pen and I stare at a table map that I have already corrected twice and get back to work.