A Reasonable Person Would Take It #3
“The third is that I would rather you took it for the correct reasons than the interesting ones,” she said.
“The correct reason is that you’re good and it’s beneath you where you are.
The interesting reason is anything to do with me.
If you find yourself deciding this on the basis of what it would mean, or what I might want it to mean, then you’ll have let me into a decision I have no business being in, and you’ll resent it for years, and honestly so would I. ”
She got back in the car.
Lasker shook Jo’s hand, said, “Two weeks is fine, three is fine, tell me if you need four,” and went east.
Jo stood on Fifty-Third Street holding a folder, at ten past three on a Thursday afternoon, four blocks and one avenue from her own desk.
The worst part was that the three sentences had been correct.
She stood there and took them apart one at a time, because that was what she did, and they held.
If Vivienne had wanted leverage she would have made the offer conditional and let Jo feel the condition.
If she had wanted to wound Alexander she would have made sure he heard about it first, and he had not; Jo would have known within the hour.
If she had wanted Jo gone she had not needed to spend eleven properties and a founder-equity grant to do it.
And the third sentence had been the one that actually landed, which meant Vivienne had known it would, which was itself a fourth thing she hadn’t said.
If you find yourself deciding this on the basis of what it would mean.
Because that was the move available to her, standing on a sidewalk: to make this about Vivienne.
To hand the whole thing over to the story where a rival dangles a job, and be righteous about it, and go back to her desk having never once had to ask whether ninety-four thousand dollars was what she was worth.
It would have been such a relief.
Jo put the folder under her arm and started walking, and did not take that exit, and understood somewhere around Fifty-Second Street that not taking it was going to cost her considerably more than taking it would have.
She did not open it on the train.
She did not open it at the kitchen table, either, where Dani had left a note about the boiler man coming Tuesday, and half a bag of the good coffee she had stopped pretending she wasn’t buying for both of them.
She put the folder on the counter and made dinner she didn’t eat much of and sat with it in her eyeline for an hour and forty minutes, and at no point did the top page get turned over.
She knew why. Opening it made it a thing she was considering. Left shut, it was a folder a woman had handed her on a sidewalk.
Which was a distinction with no weight in it at all.
She had spent forty minutes in a bakery redesigning somebody’s capital plan.
The folder had stopped being hypothetical somewhere around the second Chicago property, and the only thing the closed cover was protecting was her ability to describe the afternoon, later, to a man who would ask about it, in words that were technically accurate.
She was already choosing the words. She caught herself at it and did not stop.
Her bag was on the chair by the door with the page from the week before still folded in the inside pocket. A person accumulates documents about her own life and does not read any of them. Jo sat with that for a while. Then she got up and put the folder in the bag, with the page, and closed it.
Alexander called at nine.
“How was Thursday?”
She had, in the week since the atrium, told this man that she had built a version of her life without him in it and maintained it like a spare key. She had told him about her mother. She had told him she didn’t want to be good at losing him. All of that had been harder than this.
“Long,” Jo said. “The Chicago thing ran over.”
It was not quite a lie. There had been a Chicago thing, and it had run over, and she had spent the afternoon reconciling the Warrick Street inspection window with a contractor who could not read a calendar.
“Come over.”
Somewhere behind him a door closed.
“Tomorrow. I’m going to sleep for eleven hours and be unbearable about it.”
“Be unbearable here.”
“Tomorrow,” she said, and heard herself smiling, and meant it, and hung up.
The bag sat by the door with both documents in it.
Jo went to bed at ten and lay in the dark doing what she had done since she was nineteen: taking a thing apart into the part she controlled and the part she didn’t, laying the pieces out, checking them.
Two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. Nine reports. Four markets. Eleven buildings with something wrong buried in the paperwork of every one.
Somebody has been getting it at assistant rates for five months.
She turned over. Outside, a truck went through the intersection and the window frame buzzed for four seconds and stopped.
She was still awake at one. Three hours in the dark and Alexander had not been in any of it, and she had noticed that around midnight and gone back to the arithmetic anyway.
She left that one where it was.