Chapter 10 #2
I asked about the Roth Group’s current infrastructure position, partly because I was genuinely curious and partly because I wanted to see how he handled a direct question about something he presumably considered proprietary.
He handled it by giving me a more complete answer than I had expected, precise and unguarded, in the manner of someone who has calculated that transparency is the more strategically interesting choice.
“Why the formal request?” I asked, when the entrees arrived. I had been holding the question since the kitchen that morning and it had not become less relevant with the passing of several hours. “You don’t seem like a man who asks permission for things he intends to do regardless.”
Sebastian set down his glass and looked at me with the expression of a man encountering a question he had expected and had, nonetheless, not entirely prepared for.
“I asked because your brother would have found out I’d sought an introduction either way, and I prefer that people know where I am and why I’m there.
Particularly people whose families have recently had the experience of discovering that significant things were happening without their knowledge. ”
The room was quiet between us for a moment.
“That’s a considered answer,” I said.
“It’s the true one.” He looked at me steadily. “I also wanted to meet you without the intermediary telling you how to think about me first. Your brother has opinions.”
“He kept them to himself,” I said. “Specifically. He said he didn’t want to contaminate my impressions.”
Something crossed Sebastian’s face that was swift and warm and gone almost before I caught it. “That sounds like Atticus,” he said. “He’s more careful about you than he lets on.”
“All of them are,” I said, and felt the truth of it in my chest in the particular way of things you have only recently been allowed to believe.
Sebastian looked at me for a moment that I did not try to fill, and in the quality of his looking there was something I had not encountered in many people — the genuine, undivided attention of a mind that was fully present, not planning its next sentence, not managing how it was being perceived, simply there, in the room, with me.
It was, I found, somewhat more difficult to be the object of than I had anticipated.
* * *
We stayed for two hours, which was an hour longer than I had planned and, I suspected, an hour longer than he had planned, though I could not be certain of this because Sebastian Roth did not show his plans the way other people showed theirs.
We talked about things that were not the Castellan legal review or the Roth Group’s infrastructure position.
He asked what I had studied. He listened to the answer with the quality of attention that made you want to give a better one than you had prepared.
I asked why he had chosen financial services when the family background was in manufacturing.
He told me the story with the ease of someone who has told it before and the precision of someone who has never let the ease make it careless.
His grandfather had built things. His father had protected what was built.
He had decided that the work he was most suited to was understanding how value moved rather than how it was made.
“And are you?” I asked. “Suited to it?”
He looked at me with the expression I was beginning to recognize as his version of amusement, which was not a smile exactly but a particular quality of attention that warmed by a precise degree.
“Generally,” he said. “Tonight I find I’m suited to the conversation I’m in rather than the one I came here to have. ”
I picked up my water glass and did not say anything immediately, because the sentence deserved the space to sit without me filling it. When I did answer I said: “What conversation did you come here to have?”
“A preliminary one,” he said. “Introductions. Pleasant formality. Laying groundwork.” He turned his wine glass once, a thinking gesture that was not unlike Atticus’s coffee mug and was, I suspected, equally unconscious. “This has been more than that.”
“Is that a problem?” I asked.
He looked at me directly. “No,” he said. “It’s a complication.”
I understood the distinction. A problem was something to be solved.
A complication was something that changed the shape of what you were doing without your permission, that required you to revise the map mid-route.
He was telling me, in the careful, precise language of a man who chose his words with the same deliberateness with which he chose his moves, that something had not gone as expected tonight and that the something was me.
I found I did not know what to do with this.
Not because it was unwelcome — that would have been simpler — but because it was specific in a way that unsettled me, and I had spent two weeks becoming someone who did not let unsettled show when it wasn’t useful, and I was not sure, at this particular moment, that this counted as useful.
We left the restaurant at nine and stood briefly on the pavement in the October dark while his driver came around.
He did not ask for my number. He did not suggest a next meeting.
He looked at me with the direct, unhurried gaze he had been looking at me with all evening and said simply: “Goodnight, Wren Castellan.”
The use of the full name was deliberate. Everything about Sebastian Roth was deliberate.
“Goodnight,” I said.
His car pulled away and I stood on the pavement until the tail lights were gone, and then I stood there a moment longer in the particular cold of an autumn evening that has become, between one breath and the next, more interesting than it was before.