The Honest Answer to a Different Question
Wednesday the Chicago contractor finally read a calendar, and Jo took the win the way she took all of them, which was to log it and move on to the next thing before anyone could congratulate her for it.
Day six.
She had begun counting in the mornings now, as she had counted the twelve days, and she disliked that she was doing it and did it anyway.
Six days since a bakery. Eight left of what Lasker had given her.
The paper in her bag had been in her bag so long that she had stopped registering the weight of it and started registering its absence when she set the bag down, which was worse.
The spreadsheet was the part she would have had trouble explaining.
She had built it on Sunday night after Astoria, sitting up in bed with the laptop on her knees, and it had taken four hours, and it was good.
It sequenced eleven properties across thirty-six months against a capital plan that could only carry four buildings in year one, and it had a tab for the Hartford assumption she thought was wrong, and she had color-coded it out of habit.
Nobody had asked her for it. Nobody was going to read it.
She had made a working document for a company she did not work at, had given it a filename designed to survive somebody glancing over her shoulder, and had then not opened it again for three days, which was its own answer to a question she had not put to herself.
Doyle caught her at four with a folder he did need to hand over, for once.
“Hartford,” he said. “You had a view on it in March. I ignored it.”
“You did.”
“I’m revisiting.” He put the folder down and did not sit. “Not because you were right. Because I’ve been through the numbers twice, I can’t make my own version work, and yours is the only other version anyone has offered.”
“That’s the warmest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Don’t tell anyone.” Doyle picked the folder back up and tapped it once against his palm. “Write it up properly. Two pages. I’ll take it in.”
Jo said she would, and meant it, and understood as she said it that she had already written it, at midnight, for somebody else.
At six she was still at her desk with the floor emptied out around her.
“Go home,” Priya said, coat on, bag over her shoulder.
“I’m finishing the Hartford file.”
“The Hartford file was finished at four. I watched you finish it.” Priya stood there a second. “He’s still up there, if that’s the question.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Mm,” said Priya, and left.
Jo sat for another minute in the quiet, and then she went up, because she wanted to, and because six days of not saying a thing had put a pressure behind her sternum that only went away when she was in a room with him, and she had noticed that too.
He was at the window with his jacket off and his phone face-down on the sill, which meant he had been standing there long enough to have put it down.
“You didn’t text,” he said.
“I’m aware of the location of the elevator.”
“You are.” He turned around. “There’s food. It came from a restaurant, so it’s edible.”
They ate at the counter and he told her about a lender in Frankfurt with an opinion about interest-rate risk, and she told him about the contractor, and it was easy as it had been on Friday and on Saturday, and Jo was starting to understand that the ease was not going to stop being available.
That was the shape of the thing. Nobody was going to make this hard for her.
She was going to have to do all of it herself.
Afterward he put the plates in the sink and did not turn around from it.
“Can I ask you something and have you not manage the answer?”
Jo set her glass down.
“Yes.”
“What do you want that you’re not getting?”
Somewhere behind her the dishwasher filled, and that was the loudest thing in the room.
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
“No,” Alexander said. “I don’t think I will. I think that’s the whole question, and I think if I narrow it I’ll get the answer to the narrower one, which is what’s happened every other time I’ve asked you anything.”
He turned around then, and leaned back against the sink, and folded his arms, and waited.
He did not fill it. He was the only person she had ever met who could ask a question and then wait out the whole of the answer, and she had spent five months being grateful for that and about four seconds resenting it.
He meant the two of them. She knew that with total clarity. He had asked the widest possible version of are you happy with me and had stripped every escape hatch off it, and had done it standing at his own sink with a dish towel in his hand, which was the most exposed he knew how to be.
Jo opened her mouth to answer the question he had asked.
“I want to run something,” she said.
He didn’t move.
“That’s not what you meant. I know that’s not what you meant.
” She heard herself keep going and did not stop, because the thing had come loose and there was no version of this where she got to put it back.
“You meant us. And we’re — I’m going to answer yours in a minute, and the answer is good.
But you asked what I want that I’m not getting, and the honest answer, the one that’s actually sitting in my chest at six o’clock on a Wednesday, isn’t about you. ”
“Then tell me that one.”
“I want to run something.” Jo put both hands flat on the counter.
“Not a floor, not a department. A thing that’s mine, where the decisions have my name on them and when they’re wrong they’re wrong in my handwriting.
I’ve been doing the work since March, Alexander.
I built the remediation model. I found the covenant error.
I renegotiated an inspection window with a contractor who still doesn’t know it happened to him.
I reconciled two sets of numbers eleven percent apart and Farrah’s team put me in a row on an org chart marked Operations, which is not my title, and I looked at that piece of paper for about a minute longer than I should have. ”
She stopped, briefly, because she had not planned any of this and it was arriving faster than she could sort it.
“And the thing I want that I’m not getting is.
” She stopped and found it. “It’s not credit.
I don’t need anybody to say well done. It’s that there’s nowhere to put it.
I have opinions about buildings I’ve never seen.
I have a whole argument about how you’d sequence a capital plan across eleven properties and there is not one room in this company where that sentence has anywhere to land, because I’m the person who books the room.
And here’s the part that actually frightens me.
I did three years of it before this. Three years of jobs that went nowhere, and I was fine, and I was fine about being fine.
This job was supposed to be the thing that fixed it.
It took three years to get here and it has taken five months to arrive at exactly the same place, and the only thing that’s changed is that the work is better and I’m still the person who books the room.
I’ve been fine about it the way my mother was fine, and I watched her be fine, and I have started to be afraid that being fine is the only thing I’m actually world-class at. ”
The dishwasher clicked over into whatever cycle came next.
Alexander had not moved from the sink.
“How long have you been carrying that?” he said.
“I don’t know. Longer than I’ve known I was carrying it.”
She turned the glass a half circle and stopped doing it when she noticed.
“There’s a version of me that’s forty-one,” Jo said, “and she’s extremely good at this job, and she has been extremely good at it for fourteen more years, and everybody on that floor would be genuinely upset if she left.
And she has never once been in the room when the thing got decided.
I can see her. I know what her desk looks like. ”
“Jo.”
“I’m not being dramatic, I’m being accurate.
That isn’t a nightmare. That’s a good life, and it’s better than what my mother got and considerably better than what I had three years ago.
” She made herself say the rest of it. “I just don’t want it.
And I’ve been walking around for about a year knowing I don’t want it and having nowhere to put that either, because what am I going to do? Resign in protest at being competent?”
“Why haven’t you said it?”
“Because until about eight weeks ago, saying it out loud to you would have been the same as asking you for a promotion, and I would rather have —” She cut it off. “I’d have chewed glass first.”
“And this year?”
Jo looked at him.
“This year I’ve had other things on my mind,” she said.
It was true. She said it and it was true, and she watched him receive it as the answer to a different question, and she did not correct him.
He put the dish towel down.
“I want to say two things and I’d like to get them in the right order.
” He said it the way he opened a board session, which she understood by now was what he did when something mattered enough to need scaffolding.
“The first is that I’m not going to fix this.
I could. I could go downstairs tomorrow and make a title for you and it would be real and you would be good at it and every single person on that floor would know how you got it, including you.
So I’m not going to, and I want you to hear me decide that out loud rather than wonder later whether it crossed my mind. ”
Jo had not expected that.
“It crossed your mind.”
“It crossed my mind at about the third sentence and I’ve been holding it in my mouth ever since.” He almost smiled and did not commit to it. “You’d have hated me inside a month.”
“I’d have taken it.”
“I know. That’s the part that stopped me.”
The dishwasher ran on. Somewhere below them the city did what it did at eight o’clock on a Wednesday.
“What’s the second thing?”