15. Arielle
ARIELLE
Ihave a drawer at Nolan's penthouse by the third week of December, and I refuse, on principle, to acknowledge it as a drawer.
It started as a single sweatshirt I left on the back of a chair after a Thursday night that ran into a Friday morning.
By the second week it was a toothbrush in a porcelain cup that already had a toothbrush in it, and a pair of leggings I needed because the city was doing its second ice storm of the season.
By yesterday it was an entire stack of soft prenatal clothes, the kind with the panel cut for the belly, folded neatly inside the second drawer of the dresser in his bedroom because Nolan moved his own undershirts to make room without asking.
"That isn't moving in," I told Bianca on the phone Tuesday morning. "That is logistics. There's a difference."
"There's a difference," she repeated back to me, slowly, the way she repeats things back when she is trying to give me a chance to hear myself.
"Sure, cousin. Logistics. You and your logistics drawer.
You and your logistics toothbrush. You and the logistics shampoo I saw in his shower when I came over to drop off the prenatal vitamins because he asked me which ones you actually use. "
"He asked you what?"
"He asked me which ones you actually use. Then he ordered them. From three different places. Because two of them were the wrong dose and he didn't trust himself to pick. He texted me four times, Ari. He sent screenshots. The man sent screenshots."
I am at his kitchen counter now on a Tuesday night, working on a structural memo, and the kitchen lights are doing the warm overhead thing they do at this hour, and Nolan is across the room in his study with his sleeves rolled up and his back to me, on the third phone call I have heard him take since seven o'clock. It is almost ten.
He has not, by my count, eaten the plate I left on the warmer at eight.
"Nolan."
He holds up one finger, the universal sign for give me sixty seconds, and he keeps talking to someone in Dubai about a permitting issue I do not fully understand.
I close my laptop. I get up. I refill the glass of water on his desk.
I set the plate of pasta down on top of the contract he is reading.
I sit on the arm of his chair until he looks up at me.
"I have to go," he says into the phone. "Yes. Tomorrow. Yes. I'm aware. Goodbye, Khalid."
He hangs up.
"That was rude," he says, with no real heat in it. "I was negotiating."
“You were dodging a plate of pasta that’s been congealing on a warmer since eight. That’s not the same thing, and I refuse to apologize for saying so.”
"You're using my line on me."
"I am using your line on you because it is a good line and you keep wasting it on lawyers."
He pulls me into his lap with the same motion he uses to push the contract aside, careful as he always is now, his hand sliding under my elbow and his other arm settling around my waist. His tie is undone.
There are dark circles under his eyes. I am not sure he can see in his own bathroom mirror anymore.
He smells like the cedar and citrus of whatever's on his collar, and underneath that, very faintly, like coffee from at least four hours ago.
"When was the last time you slept seven hours, Nolan?"
"Define slept."
"Don't be funny. I'm asking. Real number."
"In a row, uninterrupted, no checking the phone?
Probably September." He says it without flinching, the way he says most things, the way a man says things when he has decided in advance that being honest about them is cheaper than being asked twice.
"The Khalid problem has been the Khalid problem since October.
The China thing has been live since March.
I sleep when the bridge financing has a quiet week, and the bridge financing has not had a quiet week in a calendar year.
Eat the pasta with me, Arielle. I'll sleep tomorrow. "
"You'll say that tomorrow about the next day."
"Probably. But I'll say it while I am eating pasta with you, which is an improvement on the version where I say it while I am not."
He picks up the fork. He eats. He keeps one hand at the small of my back the entire time, like he is afraid I will get up and put on my coat if he stops touching me, which is, embarrassingly, not entirely an unfounded fear.
I do not move. I sit on the arm of his chair and rest my hand in his hair and I watch him eat a plate of pasta at twenty-two minutes after ten on a Tuesday night, and I think about my mother at twenty-six, working three jobs, eating a sandwich standing up over her own kitchen sink so she didn't have to wash a plate, and I think about what it is going to mean for me to have raised a daughter in a kitchen this expensive with a man this tired and how many things about that picture would have horrified my mother and how many of them would have made her laugh.
The Ashford Urban Development board meeting in the first week of the new year is at ten on a Friday morning on the fortieth floor of his Chicago office, the building he closed on the day after he saw the ultrasound.
I am there because Nolan asked me, and because Claire asked me, and because Harrison Ashford has asked, through a third party, that he be allowed to meet "the young woman who has so captured my son's attention.
" I am wearing a charcoal wrap dress that I can still close, low boots, and the gold cuff.
I am twenty-three weeks pregnant. I look, I have decided, like a woman who has come to a board meeting on purpose.
Harrison is at the head of the table when we walk in.
He is sixty-eight, silver-haired, with the cold-eyed handsomeness of a man who has been in rooms like this one since before I was born and has yet to lose one.
He stands when I enter, which is the kind of manners that costs nothing and means less.
Claire is two seats down from him, in a black turtleneck, her face deliberately neutral.
"Miss Sutton. A pleasure. Nolan has been quiet about you, which I take to mean serious. Please, sit."
"Thank you, Mr. Ashford. It's nice to meet you."
"Harrison, please. We're going to be family, after all, in a sense."
Claire's jaw does a thing I would describe in a deposition as flexing.
Officially, the meeting concerns the southern parcel and the integration timeline.
Unofficially, it’s a referendum on whether the southern parcel stays with Arielle Sutton or gets handed to a senior architect with what Harrison twice refers to as “the appropriate institutional weight”.
The first time he says it, he avoids my eyes. The second time, he doesn’t.
"I'd like to understand the trajectory of the lead architect's experience, given the scale of the corridor," he says, the way a man says it when he has rehearsed the sentence in his car.
"Miss Sutton, I'm told you were raised in Chicago.
Public schools, scholarships, that sort of thing.
A remarkable story. I admire it. I do wonder, however — and I ask this with respect — whether the social and political demands of a project of this scope are an environment one can prepare for through scholarships alone. "
The room does not actually go quiet, but it stops fidgeting.
I have a sentence ready. I have a sentence ready for men like Harrison the way I have a sentence ready for women like Celeste, the way I have had sentences ready for rooms like this one since I was seventeen years old. I do not get to use it.
"Harrison." Nolan's voice is flat. He has not raised it.
He does not need to. "I'd like to be clear about something, since we're saving meetings later in the quarter.
Miss Sutton was raised by a woman who put herself through night school while running a public school in Bronzeville, which is two zip codes away from where this building is standing, and Miss Sutton drew a building two blocks east of here that has been on the cover of an architecture quarterly you subscribe to.
She is the lead architect on the southern parcel because she earned the southern parcel.
If you have a concern about her preparation for the political demands of this project, I would direct your concern to the eight commissioners and three city council members who have asked, in writing, for her to remain on the project specifically because they trust her judgment over yours.
I will not be having this conversation again on this point. Are we clear?"
Harrison's smile does not move. His eyes do.
"Of course, Nolan. I meant no offense to Miss Sutton."
"Good. Then there isn't any. Let's move to the next item."
In the car after the meeting Nolan does not speak.
He sits in the back seat with his hand resting on my thigh and his eyes on the gray winter river going past the window, and his jaw is doing the thing his sister's was doing earlier, and I realize, watching him, that he has not been performing the controlled version of himself for me in any of this.
He has been performing it for them. For Harrison. For thirty-seven years.
"Nolan."
"Don't, Arielle."
"You defended me."
"Don't make a thing of it. He has been doing that since I was nine. He has gotten more polite about it. He has not gotten kinder."
"Nolan, you defended me in front of your own board."
"I would have defended you in front of God, Arielle. Don't ask me to be impressed with myself for the lowest version of it."
I take his hand off my thigh and weave my fingers through his, keeping them there, saying nothing for the drive, because I’m only now seeing the cost of the man he’s been all through my pregnancy — and how young he must have been when someone first taught him what that cost demanded.