Chapter 9 #2
His counsel had a page about it: a coordinated statement, jointly agreed, a firm engaged, a strategy for taking the archive down and a second one for what to say if it stayed up. It was competent and it was expensive and it had clearly taken somebody a week.
“No,” Lawrence said.
“It’s a joint statement. It’s been drafted so that neither party—”
“No.”
Roslyn put her pen down, which Celia had learned meant she was interested.
“I’d like to hear the reasoning,” Roslyn said, “since it’s unusual.”
Lawrence turned the page around on the table so nobody had to lean.
“Because any statement that makes her look better has to make me look worse, and the second I hand a firm the job of making me look worse than I already do, they’ll do it by explaining me.
” He tapped the paper once. “They’ll put out that I was under pressure.
That there was a deal. That my father is difficult, that my mother died the way she died, that I’ve been in a gatehouse since Christmas.
All of it’s true and every word of it is a defense, and the day that goes out is the day my wife stops being a woman who was wronged and starts being a woman who is understandably angry at a man with a reason. ”
The room was very quiet.
“There’s no version of me getting into this publicly that doesn’t cost her something,” he said. “So I’m not getting into it. The archive can stay up. Let it be the last thing anybody knows about me.”
His counsel said, “That is professionally the worst advice I have ever heard a client give himself.”
“Yes,” Lawrence agreed.
Celia looked at the table.
Six months ago that man had spent four days trying to buy his way out of this with a boat.
“For the record,” Roslyn said, writing, “my client also declines a statement, and has done since March,” and Celia did not look up, but she heard Lawrence do something with his breath that was not quite a laugh, and she was very careful to keep her own face doing nothing at all.
* * *
The mill visit was Roslyn’s idea and Celia agreed to it in a moment of stupidity she would revisit many times.
The valuation people needed a site with an architect on it. The building was the only asset in the file that was actually Celia’s work and actually in progress, and Lawrence’s counsel wanted an inspection, and it was a Tuesday, and it took forty minutes.
He came with two people in coats who asked sensible questions about the roof.
And then, somehow, the two people in coats were on the ground floor with Chuck, and Celia was on the stair tower with Lawrence, because he had asked what was up there and she had said “the whole point of the building” before she had thought about it at all.
The stair was still bad. There was a temporary handrail on it now.
She went up ahead of him, slowly, one hand on the rail, and she could feel him behind her holding himself back from doing something about it, and she could feel him deciding not to, and she thought: good.
On the third floor she stood aside and let him come out into it.
The roof was still gone over the western third. It was late April now and the light came down through the open rafters onto the boards and the rest of the room went back into that deep layered dark, and Lawrence Hollister walked four steps into it and stopped.
He didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Oh,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t fix it.”
“No.”
“That’s —” He turned around slowly, all the way around. “Celia, that’s the garden. That’s the yew and the eleven feet.”
She had not expected him to get it. That was the honest truth of the moment and she would not have admitted it to Frankie: she had brought him up here half-daring him not to understand, and he had understood it in nine seconds, standing in a cold room in a bad suit.
“It’s the same idea,” she said.
“It’s a better one.”
“It’s a bigger one. The garden was a hedge.”
“The garden,” Lawrence said, “made three hundred people make a noise at the same time,” and he said it looking at the light, not at her, and she had to turn away and pretend to check a rafter.
They stood there.
And then, because he could not help himself, or because he had been holding it for two hours, or for eight days, he said:
“I used to be able to tell you things.”
Celia did not turn around.
“You could have told me anything,” she said. “That’s the part I can’t get past. There was never a door. You just stopped walking through it and then you told a stranger the door was shut.”
“I know.”
“You told a stranger the door was shut, Lawrence. And she taped it.”
“I know.”
“And I have to live in a world where four hundred thousand people have heard a man explain, very reasonably, at two in the morning, that I left him.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ve listened to all of it. Every file. Twice.”
She turned around at that.
“Why?”
“Because I couldn’t remember saying half of it,” he said, “and I needed to find out whether that was true or whether it was just the most convenient thing I could believe about myself.” He was very pale.
“It wasn’t true. I said all of it. I meant most of it when I said it.
I want you to hear me say that in a room with nobody else in it, because I’m not going to say it where it helps me. ”
The light moved about an inch. Outside somebody dropped a length of pipe and swore.
He was five feet away and she could smell the cold coming off his coat and she was, appallingly, aware of her own hands.
Neither of them moved.
“Celia,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were about to.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I was.”
She heard the two people in coats coming up the stair, talking about slate, and she stepped back into the dark part of the room where the light stopped, and by the time they came through the door she was pointing up at the rafters and saying something entirely competent about ventilation, and Lawrence was standing where she had left him with his hands in his pockets, looking at the floor.