Chapter Thirty-Six
Cait
They ate at the desk because the flat did not have a dining table, which she had not noticed before and which struck her now as very him: a good desk, west-facing windows, a kitchen equipped for the one thing done well, no dining table because dining tables implied a kind of settled domestic permanence he had not, until recently, been planning for.
She ate the lamb, which was excellent, and drank the wine, which was also excellent, and sat across from him at the desk with the city going dark outside the windows and thought about a Midwest portfolio role based in Chicago and what it would mean.
She had trained herself, over six years of this work, to take significant information and hold it for twenty-four hours before deciding what it meant.
Information received in a state of high feeling was information you could not accurately assess, because the feeling was part of the data and you could not separate the weight of the feeling from the weight of the fact until the feeling had settled.
She was going to apply that discipline to this. She was going to eat the lamb and drink the wine and be in the evening without deciding what the evening meant, and she was going to think about it clearly in the morning.
She lasted until dessert, which he had not made but which turned out to be very good chocolate from a shop two blocks away, the kind of shop that required knowing the neighbourhood to find.
"The Kelleher renewal," she said.
"Yes."
"If I negotiate it in the next three weeks, the terms will be on record before the end of the liaison term. That protects the arrangement regardless of what happens with ownership or management structure."
He looked at her. "You're thinking ahead."
"I'm always thinking ahead. It's the job." She ate a square of chocolate. "But also yes. I'm thinking about what the plant looks like in six months and in twelve and in two years, and I'm thinking about what's in place by May regardless of other variables."
"Other variables," he said. Not ironic. Acknowledging.
"Victor hasn't answered yet."
"No."
"And even if he does." She looked at him. "Even if the answer is yes and the portfolio role exists and you're here, that's not a plan. That's a fact about geography. The plan is something different."
"I know," he said. "I'm not asking you to plan tonight."
"I know you're not." She looked at the window.
The city at night in March, the grid of lights, the lake invisible but present.
She had lived within five miles of that lake her whole life.
She knew its moods the way she knew the legal pad and the wobbling desk and the intervals of warmth from the radiator.
"I'm telling you that I'm thinking about it.
Clearly, without the feeling getting in the way.
That's what I do with things that matter. "
He looked at her. "And."
"And I'll tell you when I've finished thinking."
"All right."
"Garrett."
"Yes."
"It matters." She held his eyes. "That's what I can tell you tonight. It matters in the way the things I don't walk away from matter."
He reached across the desk and put his hand over hers.
She turned her hand and held it and they sat at the desk without a dining table with the city outside and the lamp on and the chocolate between them, two people who had come at each other from opposite directions and ended up at the same desk, which was, she thought, not a bad place to be.
She stayed until morning.
She walked home in the early March light with the cold still in the air but the quality of it changed, the winter's edge gone from it, and she thought: the want and the fact are still the same thing. She had thought she would need to sleep on it. She had not needed to sleep on it.
She had needed Sunday dinner and a desk and a man who cooked one thing well and had called his boss on Thursday without telling her first because he had wanted to know the answer before he raised the question.
She thought about that: that he had not asked her first. Some people would have.
Some people would have made the gesture visible before making the move, to be certain of the reception.
He had done it the other way. He had found out what was possible before he said what he wanted, because what he wanted was not hypothetical and he had not wanted to present it to her as though it were.
She knew this about him now. She knew a great deal about him now, in the accumulated way of four months in the same building: the notepad and the pen held still and the coffee taken black and the Friday mornings on the press floor and the way he said her name when he was being deliberate about something.
She knew the flat and the desk and the west-facing windows and the photograph of the Cambridge library and the one thing cooked well.
She knew enough. That was what she had decided on the walk home: she knew enough to stop treating this as a problem to be solved and start treating it as a fact to be built on.
She went home and made coffee and opened the legal pad to a fresh page and wrote Kelleher renewal at the top, and below it, after a moment: Victor's answer.
She put a star next to the second one. Then she got to work.