The Honest Answer to a Different Question #2
“The second thing is that I have had you twelve feet from me for five months,” Alexander said, “and I have never heard you say you wanted anything for yourself. Not once. I want you to notice that five months was long enough for me to be sure of it. You ask for terms. You set conditions. You tell me what you won’t accept, and you’re extremely good at it, and I have built about half of who I currently am around how good at it you are.
” He stopped. “That’s not the same as wanting something.
I didn’t know you did. That’s. I’m aware how that sounds. I’m saying it anyway.”
Jo stood in his kitchen with her hands on the counter and could not immediately speak.
Because it was accurate. She ran it back and it held: the terms in Boston, the terms after the reassignment, the terms she had rebuilt on her own authority in a kitchen in Astoria.
Every one of them a fence. Not one of them a want.
She had walked into the best assistant job in Manhattan and negotiated ninety-four thousand dollars and a guaranteed exit, and had never once, in five months, said the sentence I would like more than this.
“I don’t know how,” she said.
“I’m aware.”
“No, I mean it as information, not as a confession. I genuinely don’t know how.
” She turned her glass and this time let herself do it.
“Setting a condition is safe. If you say no to a condition, I’ve lost an argument.
If you say no to a want, I’ve lost something I admitted to wanting, and there’s no version of that where I get to be dignified about it afterward. ”
“That’s the most complete answer you’ve ever given me.”
“It’s the most complete answer I’ve ever given anyone.” She heard it land in the room and did not soften it. “Congratulations. It took you asking a question with no edges on it, which took you five months, so I’d say we’re about even on the slow-learning front.”
He laughed. It was not a big laugh and it went through him properly, which she had seen maybe a dozen times.
He crossed the kitchen.
He did not touch her. He stopped a foot away and looked at her with an attention she had been on the receiving end of maybe four times, and none of them in a kitchen.
“Say the sequencing thing.”
“What?”
“The argument. About the capital plan.” He had not raised his voice and did not now. “You said there’s no room where it lands. I’m a room.”
“Alexander —”
“I’m not doing you a favor. I want to hear it.” And then, because he was who he was and had never in his life been able to leave a thing at the generous version: “Also I’d like to know if you’re right, because if you are I’ve been wrong about Hartford for eight months.”
So she told him.
She stood in his kitchen at seven-forty on a Wednesday and laid out an argument about capital sequencing that she had built for somebody else’s business, using somebody else’s numbers, and she took the serial numbers off it as she went.
She said say you had eleven of something instead of naming them.
She moved Chicago to the Gulf and Hartford into a generic Northeast and kept every ratio intact, and did it fluently, in real time, while making the actual argument, which was a thing she had not known she could do until she was four sentences into doing it.
The argument itself she did not have to disguise, because the argument was hers.
You do the worst two first. Not the closest two.
The worst two are the only ones that test whether the thesis is real, and you want that answer in month four with two buildings rather than in month twenty with nine.
The good assets teach you nothing. That is the problem with them.
They will still be good in eighteen months and they will still have taught you nothing, and meanwhile you will have spent your cheapest year proving something you already knew.
He listened to all of it. He asked four questions. Two were good. One was excellent and she did not have an answer to it and said so, and he said no, that’s the right answer, nobody has an answer to that one, and the top of her head came off.
“You’re right about Hartford,” she said, at the end.
“I know. I worked that out about ninety seconds in and let you finish.” He was still a foot away. “Do you know what you look like when you’re doing that?”
“Don’t.”
“I’m going to say it anyway.”
“I know you are.”
“You look like a person who isn’t managing anything,” Alexander said.
And that was when he touched her — one hand, along her jaw, thumb at the corner of her mouth — and the whole evening turned over.
It was nothing like Friday.
Friday had been fast and it had been hers, taken off him in a kitchen with her own hands. This was slower from the first second and it was not hers at all, and the difference was that he would not stop looking at her.
He undressed her in his bedroom with the lamp on. She reached for the switch and he caught her wrist, not hard, and put it back down, and said, “No,” and that was the whole conversation about the lamp.
“You’re making a point of something.”
“I’m making a point of all of it.” He got the last of her shirt off. “You just told me a true thing that took you three years to be able to say. I’m not doing this in the dark tonight.”
He put her down on the bed and took his time in a way that was almost unbearable, and the unbearable part was not the pace.
It was that every time she closed her eyes he waited.
Every time she opened them he was already looking.
By the fourth or fifth time she understood that he was going to keep doing that until she stopped closing them.
“This is a tactic,” she said.
“It’s a preference.” He moved down the bed and got a hand under her knee.
“It’s a tactic and you know it’s a tactic.”
“Then stop me,” Alexander said, and put his mouth on the inside of her thigh, and did not stop.