Chapter 16 #2
There was no applause. That was the thing Nicole thought about for a long time afterward — that in a room of three hundred people who had applauded him in a lobby in April, not one person put their hands together, because there was nowhere for applause to go.
He had not left them anywhere to put it.
He walked down the two steps at the side and stood at the bottom, in front of the whole room, not going back to his table.
And the silence stretched into something unbearable.
Nicole stood up.
She had not planned it. She had planned about nine things and this was not one of them, and afterward she could not have told anybody what moved her out of the chair.
She only knew that she was crossing a ballroom floor in front of three hundred people with her hands shaking, and that Kara Bowers said "oh my God" very quietly behind her, and that the room turned to watch her the way a field of wheat moves.
She went up the two steps and picked the microphone up off the podium.
She had no notes. Her hands were shaking and she let them.
"Some of you," Nicole said, "have been coming to this for twenty years."
Her voice went out into the room and it was steady, which surprised her more than anything.
"Twenty years ago I signed a lease on a room over a print shop on Dorchester Avenue, because his credit was worse than mine.
I did the books in pencil for six years because we were guessing.
I hired the first four people and I got their salaries wrong and I fixed them the next year.
" She looked out. "I priced a school in Dorchester nine thousand dollars short and we ate it and neither of us took anything for seven weeks.
That's the part I'd want you to have, if you're only going to keep one thing. Not the good bit. The seven weeks."
Nobody moved.
"I'm not going to talk about my marriage tonight," she said. "That's mine, and some of it's his, and none of it is this room's."
She let that land, and watched a couple of hundred people receive it.
"But I'll tell you what I want from you, since I've got the microphone and I've never had it before.
" Her hand was steadier now. "There is a woman at my company called Kara Bowers, and she is twenty-nine, and in February her name came off a page that she wrote.
Not maliciously. Nobody in that chain did anything wrong.
There was a template with one credit line on it, and a form, and everybody was busy, and it happened the way it always happens — which is slowly, and politely, and with everybody being extremely nice about it. "
She found Kara at table nine and did not point.
"That is how you do it," Nicole said. "That's the entire method. Nobody in this ballroom in December decided I was decorative. It just became true, over about ten years, because it was convenient and nobody had to sign anything."
She stopped.
"So that's what I'd ask. Not for me — I'm all right, I've got a job, I wrote it myself and they gave me every line of it.
" A ripple of something that was almost laughter, and she let it go past. "Go back to your buildings and find the person whose name is coming off the page.
It'll be a woman about twenty-nine and everybody will tell you she's a real asset. "
She put the microphone down on the podium, exactly where he had left it.
Then she walked down the two steps and past her husband, close enough to touch, and did not touch him, and went back to table nine and sat down.
Sal Corbett, seventy-nine years old and in a forty-year-old tuxedo, stood up.
Then Ilene. Then Wendell. Then Dolores, and Ross, and Ross's wife, and Kara.
Then table four, which was field staff. Then most of table six.
Then the room.
It went on for a long time, and it was not the noise the room had made in April, which had been the sound of three hundred people enjoying a good moment.
This was a slower, uglier, more useful sound, and about a third of the room stayed sitting down, and Nicole was extremely glad about that, because a room that had all agreed would have meant nothing at all.
She did not look for her husband. She found out later, from Bridget, that he had stayed exactly where he was at the bottom of the steps for the whole of it, and had not once clapped, and had not once looked at anything but the floor.
Vera Sutton left at half past ten without saying goodbye to anybody.
She stopped at table nine on her way out, which nobody expected.
"Nicole."
"Vera."
The old woman stood there with her bag over her arm, small and immaculate and seventy-nine, and Nicole could not read one single thing in her face.
"I did not know about the script," Vera said.
"I know you didn't."
"No." A pause, precisely as long as it needed to be. "But I've thought about it since April, and I find that I would not have been surprised. Which is a different thing, and worse."
She adjusted her bag.
"I shan't apologize," she said. "I'm too old and you'd know it was manners.
But I have been sitting at table two for two hours listening to my son say that he stopped being good at something in 2017, and I have been trying to work out why he thought that mattered, and I have concluded that he learned it from me. "
Nicole did not say anything.
"That's all," said Vera Sutton, and went.
Nicole got out at eleven.
She stood on the steps of the Trumbull in the September air with her coat over her arm and Boylston going by wet and gold below, and she was so tired that her hands had stopped shaking and gone somewhere past it.
Bridget came out behind her.
"Right," she said. "I'm going to say one thing and then I'm going to get my car."
"Go on."
"I've been telling you he doesn't deserve you since the sixth of December.
" Bridget pulled her coat around her. "And I stand by every word, and I'd say it again tomorrow, and Nic — " she stopped, and for once she wasn't performing at all — "I have never in my life seen a man do what he just did in there. Not once. Not one man, ever."
"Bridge."
"That's it. That's all I'm saying." She dug for her keys. "Do you want a lift?"
"No," Nicole said. "I'm going to walk for a bit."
And she stood on the steps of a hotel in Back Bay in September, in the same coat she had worn in December, and understood with complete clarity that the thing she had been holding in both hands since the first Saturday of the winter had finally, actually, been set down.