Chapter 25 #2
I look at my notebook. At the pages of observations I've taken. The quality of the room, the sequence of events, the words in my shorthand, the corner of his mouth moving at worth it.
"The personal piece," I say. "It's almost done."
"I know."
"I'm going to send it to you tonight. Before anyone else sees the final version."
He looks at me. "You don't have to?—"
"Item four works both ways." I hold his gaze. "I'm not going to make decisions that affect you without telling you first. That's the deal we made." A pause. "I'm keeping it."
His expression shifts. Not surprise exactly. Something more specific. The quality of a man who has just had his own principle reflected back at him by someone who means it, and who recognizes that what he's looking at is a choice she made rather than a concession she offered.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay."
The room is nearly empty. Diana is at the door with her tablet, giving us the variety of privacy that consists of examining something in the opposite direction with great professional focus.
"Lily wants to know if you're coming to breakfast Saturday," Ezra says.
"She asked you to ask me?"
"She texted me." He takes out his phone and reads.
"Is Summer coming Saturday? I'm making eggs now.
The technique is significantly improved.
You should probably tell her about the technique improvement because it's relevant to her decision-making.
" He pockets the phone. "She considers the technique improvement a significant variable. "
I laugh. Genuine and surprised. "She's making a case for the eggs."
"She researched scrambled-egg technique for three weeks. She has opinions about heat and time that she would like to share with a receptive audience." He looks at me. "You're the most receptive audience she's encountered."
"That's because I actually listen."
"I know." His mouth moves. "I've noticed."
I look at the empty room. At the podium where he stood twenty minutes ago and said worth it in front of cameras that will carry it everywhere.
At the door where Diana is pointedly not watching us.
At this man beside me, who is ten years into learning something about himself and is, by any honest assessment, actually learning it.
"Saturday," I say. "But I'm bringing the coffee."
"The coffee from?—"
"The place on Lexington. Yes."
"That's a forty-minute round trip from Brooklyn."
"I'm aware." I stand. Pick up my bag, my recorder, my notebook. Everything I carry into every room, the assembled equipment of a journalist who arrived at a gala at the Plaza eight months ago with a press badge and a thrifted Valentino knockoff and a story she needed to find. "It's worth it."
I say it the way he said it. Directly. Without decoration. Looking him in the eye.
He looks at me for a long moment.
The room is empty now except for the two of us and the cameras that have been switched off and the podium that held the prepared remarks he set down.
Then he smiles. The real one. The crooked tooth, the warmth behind it, the smile I've been cataloguing since a ballroom at the Plaza when he laughed at something I said and I thought: oh, that's the real one.
"Saturday," he says.
"Saturday."
I walk out of the Kittredge Foundation conference room into a building doing what buildings do. Elevators arriving, phones ringing, the ordinary machinery of an organization running its systems.
Into the lobby and through the door and out onto Lexington Avenue, where Manhattan is doing what Manhattan does.
I have my recorder in my bag and my notebook full of observations and the personal piece almost finished on my laptop at home.
The one about being inside a story that was also happening to me.
About what it costs to be a journalist when the journalist is part of the story.
About the specific difficulty and specific reward of staying in a room when leaving would be easier.
Robert wants it in three weeks. I think I can do it in two.
I'm halfway down the block when my phone buzzes one more time. Ezra.
The coffee on Saturday. I'll order from the place on Lexington so you don't have to make the trip.
I stop walking. People split around me on the sidewalk, the city moving past with its usual indifference.
I look at the text.
You always do that, I type back.
Do what.
Order things before being asked.
Three dots. Then: Yes. I'm working on it. But in this case I thought the forty-minute round trip was unnecessary when I could remove the obstacle.
That's not the point of the gesture.
A pause. Then: What's the point of the gesture?
I look at the phone for a moment. The quality of a man who has spent months learning to ask before he acts, asking, right now, in real time, on a sidewalk text, why the gesture matters.
The point, I type, is that I want to make the trip. I want to bring you the coffee. That's different from you ordering it.
A long pause.
Then: I understand.
Then: Thank you for explaining.
Then, after another moment: I'll see you Saturday.
I put my phone in my pocket.
I stand on the sidewalk for another moment, in the October afternoon, in the city that is relentless and indifferent and full of stories happening right now to people who don't know yet how they end.
I know how this chapter ends. The next one is still being written, the way all the best ones are. Unfinished in the good way. The way that means there's more to come, more to write, more to understand about what it means to be the kind of person who stays in the room and keeps asking questions.
I'm already looking forward to it.
I put my phone in my pocket and walk toward the subway and let the city do what it always does around me. The sirens and the delivery trucks and the bodega cat and the couple arguing cheerfully about something and the eight million stories running their systems.
Mine isn't finished yet. But the woman telling it is someone I recognize. Someone who stays in the room. Someone who chooses to.