Chapter 17
Miles Ashby called on the Tuesday.
"I read the piece."
"So has everybody."
"Yes, but I read it twice, which puts me in a smaller group." She could hear a job site behind him, somebody shouting about a delivery. "I'm calling for two reasons and I'm going to do the professional one first so you don't have to be uncomfortable about the other one."
"Go on."
"We're bidding the Somerville schools. Nine buildings, phased, three-year program. I want you to run it and I've got the authority to say that." He said it plainly. "It's a bigger job than the archdiocese and you'd own it end to end. Bring Bowers. Bring whoever you want."
Nicole sat down on the edge of her desk on the fourth floor.
"Miles."
"I'm not finished. Second reason." A pause, and the sound of him moving somewhere quieter.
"I said I'd ask you again if you beat us again, and you've beaten us twice more since February, so I'm asking.
Dinner. And I'd like to say that the two things are entirely separate, and they are, and I know perfectly well that they can't be, which is why I've put them in the same phone call so you can see both at once. "
She laughed, once.
"That's very fair of you."
"It's very inconvenient of me," Miles said. "If I had any sense I'd have made the job offer and shut up."
Nicole looked out at Farnsworth Street.
Here it was, then. The other life, arriving in a single phone call, with a nine-building program and a decent, funny man on the end of it who had never once in eight months said the words your husband.
She let herself have it for a moment. She was honest with herself about that; she stood in the middle of her own working day and let herself see the whole of it — a different building, a different city, a name on a different door, dinner on a Friday with a man who thought she was interesting.
It was a good life. It was a completely available, entirely real, good life.
"No to both," she said.
"Right." He took it well. "Can I ask which no it is? Professionally, I mean. Because if it's a money question I've got room."
"It's not money. I built a division here in August and I've got a woman called Kara Bowers who turned down a job in July because she said she'd go where I went, and I'm not going to be the second person to write her out of something.
" Nicole turned her pen over. "And the archive clause I fought for doesn't travel.
It's in this company's articles now and I'm the reason it's there, and if I leave, in ten years it's a sentiment again. "
"And the other no?"
Nicole was quiet for a second.
"The other no is that I'd be having dinner with you for the wrong reason," she said, "and you'd deserve better than that, and I'd know it the whole time."
"That's a kinder answer than I'd have given," Miles said. "All right. The Somerville offer stands for two weeks, in case you want to be sensible. And Nicole — for what it's worth, and it's worth nothing — I'd have been good to you."
"I know you would," she said. "That's why it took me four seconds instead of one."
She stood in her own kitchen that night with her coat still on and understood, finally and completely, what she had done.
She had not turned him down because she was married. She had turned him down because she had somewhere she wanted to be, and it was not a man's house — it was a fourth floor, and a division she had written herself, and a hard clause in a set of articles, and a twenty-nine-year-old in site boots.
She had a life. Not a settlement, not a consolation, not a brave woman's second act. An actual life, built out of a rented kitchen in eight months, with her own name on the front of it.
Which meant that anything she did about her husband now, she did from here.
He was in the stairwell of her building at half past nine on the Thursday.
Not the lobby, not her door — the stairwell of the Charlestown walk-up, sitting on the fourth step with his coat over his knees like a man who had been there a while and had made his peace with looking ridiculous.
"How did you get in?"
"Your neighbor let me in about forty minutes ago. She asked if I was your husband and I said yes, and then she asked if I was that husband." He rubbed his face. "I said yes to that too."
"What did she do?"
"Let me in anyway. She said, and I'm quoting, she's not been home yet, and I'm watching."
Nicole stood at the bottom of the stairs with her keys in her hand.
"I'm not here to ask you anything," Gordon said.
"I want to be clear about that before I say another word, because I've had five weeks to think about how not to do this wrong.
I'm not asking you to come home and I'm not asking you what you thought about Saturday.
I came because Regina Halsey's office wrote to my lawyer on Tuesday about the file, and I wanted to say one thing to your face before anything gets signed, and then I'll go. "
"Say it, then."
"I'd like you to have the Chestnut Street house."
Nicole did not move.
"Not as a settlement — it's already yours in the paperwork, that's not what I mean.
" He stood up, awkwardly, on the fourth step.
"I mean I'd like you to have it. I'm not in it.
I've been sleeping in the room above the print shop since June, which is a stupid thing for a man of fifty-one to do and I'm aware of it, and I've had two men in to look at the plumbing and it can be made decent.
So the house is empty and it's a good house and you should have it if you want it, and if you don't want it you should sell it, and either way I'd rather you knew it was standing there empty than found out in a year. "
Nicole stood in a stairwell.
"You've been living in the print shop."
"Above the print shop."
"Gordon, there's no bathroom."
"There's a bathroom on the landing."
"There's a bathroom on the landing—"
"It's fine," he said. "I'm fine. That's not why I told you."
And she looked up at her husband, standing on the fourth step of a walk-up in Charlestown at half past nine at night with his coat over his arm, having given away a club, a board, a nine-million-dollar site, a partner, and a house, and having asked for absolutely nothing.
"Come up," she said.
He didn't move.
"Nicole—"
"Gordon. Come up. I'm not going to have this conversation on a staircase in front of a woman who's watching."
The apartment was very small with him in it.
She had not thought about that. He had been here twice, in April, and both times had been so awful that she had not registered the room — but now he stood in the middle of it in a good coat and the place was twelve feet across and there was one chair.
"Sit down."
"I'll stand."
"Sit down, Gordon."
He sat.
Nicole put her bag on the counter and her keys in the dish and took her coat off, and did all of it slowly, because she needed the time.
Then she turned around and leaned back against the counter with her hands on the edge of it.
"Three things," she said.
He looked up sharply — and she saw him hear it, the December morning, the kitchen on Chestnut Street, three things and then I'm going to go upstairs. Something crossed his face and he did not say anything about it, which she noted.
"One," Nicole said. "I turned down a job on Tuesday. Nine buildings in Somerville, three-year program, my own program end to end, more money than the one I've got. And a dinner, from the same man, who was honest enough to put both in one phone call."
Gordon's hands went still on his knees.
"I said no to both," she said. "And I want to be exact about the order, because it matters. I said no to the job because of Kara Bowers and an archive clause. And then I said no to the dinner, separately, for a different reason."
"You don't have to tell me—"
"I'm not telling you for your benefit." She kept her voice level.
"I'm telling you because in about six months you'll wonder, and you won't ask, and you'll turn it over on a Sunday in a room over a print shop.
So: it was there. It was completely real and it was available and I looked straight at it. "
"Okay," Gordon said, quite quietly.
"Two." Nicole took a breath. "I'm not signing the agreement."
The apartment was silent.
"I'm going to tell Regina to close the file on Monday," she said. "Not paused. Closed."
He did not move at all. He had gone completely still, the deer in the field, the negotiating room, twenty years of a stillness she had learned to read as composure and now knew perfectly well was a man not daring to want something.
"Nicole—"
"Three." She held up her hand. "Three is the terms, and this is the part you need to actually hear, because it isn't a mood and it isn't tonight. This is what the marriage is now, or there isn't one."
"Tell me."
"I don't come back to being your wife." She said it clearly.
"I'm not applying for the old job. What I do at that company is mine — the division, the clause, the reporting line, all of it — and it doesn't come to you for approval, ever, including approval you think is generosity.
You are not my sponsor. If I have a bad year at work you don't fix it.
If I'm passed over you don't call anybody. "
"Yes."
"Second. You don't speak about me in public. That was Saturday's condition and it doesn't expire when the room empties — it's permanent, and it's not a punishment, it's the shape of it. If somebody says something at a dinner, you look at me."
"Yes."
"Third." Her throat tightened and she made herself go on.
"You tell me things. That's the actual one.
That's the one that ended us and it isn't the roast and it isn't Whitney.
" She pressed the heel of her hand under her eye.
"The two a.m. in the hospital hallway. The Brighton number.
The good day in October in the parking lot with the clams that you gave away to somebody else — Gordon, that's what killed it.
Not the joke. You had a lovely day with your wife and at nine forty that night you wanted to tell somebody about it and it wasn't me. "
"I know."