Three Openings
Saturday morning he made coffee badly and she let him.
That was the first one, and it was the widest. They had the whole day.
Nothing was scheduled. He was standing at the machine in yesterday’s shirt working a problem he refused to concede was a problem, and Jo sat on the counter where he’d had her fourteen hours earlier, and there was no obstacle of any kind between her and the sentence.
“Ask me about my week again,” she said.
He looked over.
“You said long. The contractor can’t read a calendar.”
“I did say that.” Jo hooked a heel against the cabinet under her.
“Was it not true?”
“It was entirely true.” She watched him tamp the grounds with more force than the machine wanted. “It just wasn’t the whole week.”
And there it was, open, held open by her own hand. He set the portafilter down and turned around and gave her his whole attention, which she had wanted from him since her first week and had spent five months learning how to survive.
“Tell me the rest of the week,” Alexander said.
Jo opened her mouth.
What came out was: “The variance note. What I said on Friday.” She heard herself take the safer one and go through it anyway.
“Which sounds like nothing. It’s the first time anybody on that committee has treated me like a party to it instead of the person who booked the room, and I’ve been sitting on it all week not knowing where to put it, because I can’t exactly tell Doyle I’m pleased about a signature. ”
All of that was true. She had, in fact, been sitting on it all week.
And she watched it land on him — watched him take it seriously, and set his own morning aside for it, and ask her two good questions about what it would mean for the December session.
By the end of the second question the opening had closed behind her so smoothly that she could not have said which sentence did it.
“You should be pleased about the signature,” he said. “You’re allowed to be pleased about work that took you five months and nobody else could have done.”
“Mm.”
“I mean it. You do this thing where you get handed something and immediately start looking for what it costs.”
Jo laughed, because it was funny, and because if she had not laughed she would have had to do something else.
“That’s a coping mechanism wearing a personality trait’s clothes,” she said.
“Is that yours?”
“Mara’s.”
“It’s very good.” He handed her a coffee that was, objectively, not good. “She should charge for that.”
She drank it. He turned back to the machine and she watched his forearm work the handle and wanted him, plainly, at nine in the morning, and had stopped apologizing for that years ago.
That had been available too. She could have crossed the kitchen instead of talking.
That it arrived one second after she let the opening close was information she filed and did not examine.
They spent the day doing nothing, which neither of them had any talent for, and which they had gotten better at over about a year of practice.
He read a survey report on a building in Charlotte he had no intention of buying, which was what he did instead of having a hobby.
She did the crossword, first for fun and then for blood.
At two he took a call from Grant that lasted nine minutes, and she listened to half of it from the other room and heard him say no, ask Jo, she has the actual dates to his own outside counsel on a Saturday.
She stood in his hallway with a pen in her hand and nothing to write on.
Grant would have that sentence in his notes by Monday.
It would not appear anywhere with her name on it.
At four he said, without looking up, “There’s a thing in October. Not work. My mother does a lunch. It’s four hours and it’s excruciating and I have gone alone to sixteen of them.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“It’s a warning, followed by an invitation, in that order, because I want you to have the warning first.” He turned a page. “It’s in October. You don’t have to answer now.”
October.
Jo looked at the back of his neck and did an arithmetic she had not asked for and could not stop: October was eleven weeks out. The offer had two, maybe four. He had just put a date on a calendar that sat on the far side of a decision he did not know existed.
“I’ll come,” she said.
“You say that now.”
“I’ll come.”
She fell asleep on the sofa in the middle of the afternoon with her feet in his lap and woke an hour later with a blanket on her that had not been there.
The apartment was quiet. Her bag was still on the bench by the door where she had put it on the way in.
She looked at it for a while from the sofa.
Nine feet of floor and a canvas strap and a buckle she had done up herself on Friday evening, in an office in this same building.
He was still reading. He would do this again next Saturday, and the one after, and in October he would stand in a room full of his mother’s friends for four hours with Jo beside him for the first time in seventeen of them.
Reason one, she thought, and it did not help at all: it would have ruined the day.
That was even true. It was the last one that would be.
Sunday she went home to Astoria and told Dani.
Not all of it. That came to her afterward, and it was irritating in the way it is irritating to catch yourself doing the thing you were warned about on Friday: she told Dani there was a job, and that it was a real job, and that it was in hospitality operations and would pay more than double.
Dani shrieked. She made her say the number twice and got the good glasses down.
She did not say whose money it was.
“So what’s the catch,” Dani said, forty minutes in, when the shrieking had subsided into the serious part.
“There isn’t one.”
“There’s always one.”
“There’s an eighteen-month stretch of genuinely bad hours and a woman who told me about them up front instead of hiding them.” Jo turned her glass. “That’s not a catch. That’s the job.”
Dani looked at her over the rim.
They had lived together for six years. Dani had watched her come home from three jobs that went nowhere.
Dani had been on the floor of that apartment the night the second one folded, and had been the one to bring the takeout when Jo negotiated ninety-four thousand dollars and thought it was a victory.
And she had never once said anything about Jo having stopped bringing work stories home somewhere around the time the work stories started involving Alexander.
Dani got the bread out of the oven and put it on the board and did not cut it, which meant she was building up to something.
“Can I say a thing about the apartment?”
“That is an alarming opener.”
“You’ve been home nine nights this month.
I counted. I do twelve-hour nights, and I know exactly how many times I’ve come in at eight in the morning and had the place to myself.
” Dani said it the way she read out a lab value, which was worse.
“I’m not doing a bit about it. I like him.
I’ve liked him since the thing with the radiator.
I’m telling you because you’re about to make a decision about a job, and I don’t think you’ve noticed that you’ve already made about a hundred smaller ones. ”
Jo sat with that.
“That’s not a catch either.” Jo turned her glass a half circle and put it down.
“No. It’s a cost. Different column.” Dani finally cut the bread. “You’re the one who taught me the difference, so don’t look at me like that.”
“Have you told him?” Dani said, twenty minutes later, when they were most of the way down the bottle.
Opening two.
Smaller than Saturday’s. Not because Dani was harder to talk to, but because the answer was three days old now, and every day it aged made the telling a slightly bigger event than it had been the day before.
“Not yet.”
“Okay.” Dani let that sit a second longer than was comfortable, which was her version of an alarm. “Why not yet?”
“Because I haven’t decided anything, and if I tell him before I’ve decided anything, then it stops being my decision and starts being ours.
” Jo heard the sentence. It was well constructed.
She had built it at some point during the week without noticing she was building it.
“I’d rather bring him a decision than a crisis. ”
“Huh,” said Dani.
“What.”
“Nothing.” Dani got up to deal with the pasta. “I’ve just never heard you sound so much like him.”
Reason two: I’d rather bring him a decision than a crisis.
She wrote that one down, later, on the back of the folded page, under the two columns, in the shorthand nobody else could read.
It looked worse on paper. Everything did; that was what paper was for, and it was the entire reason she had used paper since she was nineteen years old and had needed to see the rent in her own handwriting before she could believe it.
She read it twice. I’d rather bring him a decision than a crisis was a sentence built to be said out loud to somebody else, which meant she had already drafted the conversation, which meant she had already decided she was going to have it late.
She did not shred it.
Monday the opening was four seconds wide and she watched it go past like a train.
Priya put a coffee on her desk at eight-forty and said, “You’ve had that face since Friday,” and did not ask the question attached to it.
She did do one thing. On her way past at ten she put a sheet of paper in Jo’s tray, blank side up, and said nothing about it, and when Jo turned it over it was the org chart for the Warrick Street joint committee with Jo’s name on it in the row marked Kade Group — Operations, which was not her title and had never been her title.
“Farrah’s team sent that over,” Priya said from four desks away, without turning around. “I thought you’d want to see how they’ve got you filed.”
Jo put it in her drawer. The locked one. On top of nothing, because the folder had gone home on Friday and had not come back. That was not an opening either. That was Priya being better at this than everyone.
Mara caught her at the printer at noon and used her one sentence, as promised.
“Day four.”
“Of what?”
“You tell me,” Mara said, and took her pages, and left.
The actual opening came at four-fifteen, in the corridor outside the boardroom, when Alexander stopped beside her with a folder in his hand and said, “You’ve been somewhere else since Saturday. Do you want to tell me, or do you want me to leave it?”
He gave her both doors. He stood there holding them open, having noticed on Saturday and waited until Monday, which was him being careful with her in the way she had asked him not to be, and also him being kind.
“Leave it,” Jo said. “For now.”
“All right.”
“It’s not about you. I want to say that, because I know what it looks like.”
“I believe you.” And he did leave it, entirely: no second pass, and no one-more-question at five o’clock on his way out. He went into the boardroom and ran a ninety-minute session and did not look at her once in a way that meant anything.
Reason three: and here she had to work for it, standing in a corridor with a folder of her own, because he offered to leave it.
Which was not a reason. It was a thing he had done, converted into a reason after the fact.
Jo went back to her desk and sat down and understood, with the administrative clarity she brought to everything that frightened her, that the reasons were getting thinner and the openings were getting narrower, and that these two facts were the same fact.
Saturday she had needed a whole day to talk herself out of it. Sunday it had taken a sentence. Monday it had taken four seconds in a corridor and a door he held open himself.
At this rate she would not need a reason by Thursday.
Four days.
Corinne Lasker had given her fourteen.