Chapter 13 #2
"Two weeks ago," Joanna said. "He wrote to me directly, not through his people. He's given me the entire founding archive. Everything Records had under review since December, the incorporation file, the original partnership agreement, the lot — with a release, signed, no conditions on use."
"No conditions."
"One condition," Joanna said. "Which is why I'm calling. He asked not to be quoted."
Nicole did not say anything.
"I want you to understand how unusual that is," Joanna said, "because I've been doing this for eighteen years.
Everyone wants to be quoted. Everyone. Especially the ones who say they don't — they say don't quote me and then they say something quotable and wait.
He didn't do that. He gave me nine boxes and one line: I'd rather not be in it. It isn't about me."
"Did you push him?"
"Of course I pushed him. I offered him a full interview, unedited, on the record, at length.
I told him it was the best offer he'd get all year and that if he didn't take it, other people would characterize him and he'd have no say.
" Paper. "And he said — I wrote it down — he said, I've had a say for twenty years. That's the problem."
Nicole put her hand flat on the counter.
"Is that what you wanted?" Joanna said. "Because I'll be honest with you, I've been sitting on this for a fortnight and I couldn't work out whether telling you was doing his job for him."
"It probably is," Nicole said.
"Yes. I thought so too. I've told you anyway, because I said in a café I'd never surprise you, and that outranks him."
Bridget, when Nicole laid the whole of it out on a Sunday, was quiet for a long time. That in itself was alarming; Bridget had not been quiet about Gordon Sutton since December.
"Right," she said at last. "I'm going to say something and I want you to know it's costing me."
"Go on."
"That's not paperwork." Bridget put her mug down.
"The trust, back in December — I said it was money and he's got a spare of money, and I stand by that, and I'd say it again.
This isn't that." She rubbed her face. "He's not spending money, Nic.
He's spending the thing he bought with the money.
He's spending the actual thing. And I've been waiting eight months for him to do one thing that costs him something he can't get back, and now he's done four in a fortnight and I feel like an idiot. "
"You're not an idiot."
"I've been so sure." Bridget looked genuinely troubled. "I have been so sure since December, and I've said it to you every single week, and I've enjoyed saying it. And now the man's blown up his entire life in silence and hasn't told you, and I don't have anywhere to put it."
Nicole said, "Neither do I."
"Do you want to know what worries me?"
"Always."
"That he's doing it to be worthy of you," Bridget said. "Because that's still about him. Do you see? A man who makes himself into somebody worthy is still a man doing a project, and you're still the — the grading standard."
Nicole thought about that for a while.
"No," she said finally. "I don't think that's it, and I'll tell you why.
If it were that, he'd have found a way to let me know.
Not crudely. He'd have made sure a person told me, or that I read it somewhere.
There'd have been a route." She turned her glass on the table.
"He's built a version of this where there's no route at all.
He asked Joanna to leave him out of the one document that will still exist in fifty years.
Bridge, that's not a man making himself worthy.
That's a man taking himself out of the story. "
"And what if he's just very good at this?"
"Then he's spent nine million dollars on a performance with no audience," Nicole said, "and if a man is that committed, at some point you have to call it a life."
She saw him once in all of it, at the end of June, in the Farnsworth Street lobby at half past seven in the evening.
He was standing in front of the wall.
Not doing anything. Just standing there in a coat with his bag over his shoulder, in an empty lobby, looking up at THE SUTTON GROUP in brushed steel, in a building he owned, and Nicole came out of the stairwell and stopped, and he did not hear her.
She watched him for maybe fifteen seconds.
He looked, standing there, completely ordinary.
Fifty-one years old and tired and slightly too big for his coat, a man alone in a lobby at half past seven with nowhere in particular to be, and she thought about the Prescott and Meridian and a nine-million-dollar site in Hollow Brook and a man named Foss, and about how not one of those things had been announced, and how not one of them had been done for a camera.
He had spent twenty years buying his way into four rooms.
And in nine days, in his fifty-first year, at a cost he had not itemized to anybody, he had walked out of every one of them — and had gone on coming to work, and had not told his wife, and had asked a journalist to leave his name out of the only document that would outlast all of it.
Nicole stood in the stairwell doorway with her hand on the frame.
You cannot fix this for me, she had told him in April, in a rented kitchen. The answer's nothing until I ask.
He had listened. That was the thing standing in the lobby. He had gone away and done the most enormous and expensive things a man could do and had made absolutely certain that not one of them arrived anywhere near her.
Gordon shifted his bag on his shoulder and walked out into Farnsworth Street, and the door swung shut, and Nicole stood in an empty lobby underneath a name that was going to change by the end of the year.
She did not go after him.
But she stood there for a long time.