The Version Where She Tells Him #2
He could end this in four minutes. He could call Vivienne Castellane at half past one in the morning and she would answer, because she always answered, and he could make her understand what it would cost her to have done that at a dinner in front of witnesses.
He could call Corinne Lasker at eight and be extremely reasonable and Corinne would have no idea she was being handled either.
He could make the whole thing go away and Jo would keep the job and keep him and never know precisely which parts had been arranged.
He stood there with the phone in his hand for four seconds. Five.
Then he put it down, screen-first, and pushed it away from himself across the counter with two fingers, and stood there with his hands flat on the marble and his head down.
“There,” he said.
And Jo, watching him do it, felt the last thing she expected, which was not gratitude.
“You want me to see you not do it,” she said.
He looked up.
“That’s not fair.”
“No. It isn’t.” Her eyes were streaming and her voice was steady, which was its own kind of horrible.
“And I’m still saying it, because it’s true, and because you’d say it to me.
You put it down where I could see. You’ve been putting things down where I could see for five months, and you have been magnificent, and I have taken every single one of those and filed it, and none of it touched the actual problem. ”
“Which is what.”
“That I spent three weeks proving I could survive losing you,” Jo said, “instead of three weeks finding out whether I had to.”
He did not say anything for a while.
The clock on the oven turned over twice while he didn’t. Jo made herself stand in it rather than fill it, which was new, and which cost her more than anything else she had done that night.
“Do you want to know what I’d have said,” he said. “On day one. If you’d come up here on the Thursday and told me in the doorway with your coat on.”
“Don’t.”
“I’d have said take it.” He said it to the counter. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I’d have said take it, and then I’d have asked you eleven questions about the capital plan, and then I’d have got a bottle out, because a woman I love had been offered the thing she wanted.”
“Stop.”
“Three weeks,” Alexander said, “for that.”
“Can I ask you something,” Jo said. “And I want the true answer, not the generous one.”
“Go on.”
“Do you trust me.”
Alexander did not answer right away, which was the answer, and she made herself stand in it.
“I trust every fact you will ever tell me,” he said at last. “That hasn’t moved and I don’t expect it to. You have never once told me a thing that wasn’t so.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“No.” He looked at his own hands. “Do I trust that you’ll bring me the hard thing while it’s still hard, rather than after you’ve solved it alone. No. Not today. I did on Tuesday.”
Jo nodded, once. It was the correct answer and she had asked for the correct answer and it went through her anyway.
“How long,” she said.
“I don’t know. I’m not going to invent a number to make tonight easier for either of us.” He said it plainly.
The refrigerator came on again.
He still had his coat on. It was two in the morning and he had been standing in it for the better part of an hour, and Jo found she could not look at it any more. “It won’t be forever. That’s the most I’ve got at two in the morning.”
Nothing resolved.
That was the thing she would come back to. There was no moment where either of them broke and reached, no sentence that turned it. They stood in his kitchen at two in the morning and had said the true things, and the true things did not fix it, because the true things were the problem.
“I need to go home,” she said.
“I know.”
“I’m not doing a thing. I’m not leaving in a way that means something. I need to be in a room where you aren’t so I can think without arranging it for you.”
“Jo.” He said it as she got to the door. “Take the job.”
“Stop telling me to take the job.”
“I’m going to keep telling you to take the job,” Alexander said, “because it’s the only thing I’m sure about tonight, and because in about four days you’re going to start wondering whether I meant it, and I want you to have said it out loud to me too many times for that to be available.”
Jo stood in his doorway with her bag over her shoulder.
The folder and the folded page were still on the counter. She had put them there so that he would see them, and he had seen them, and neither of them had picked them up all night.
She left them.
She got the elevator down thirty-eight floors on her own at ten past two in the morning, and got a cab on an empty street, and did not cry in it, and was in her own bed in Astoria by three, and Dani was on nights.
She lay there in an empty apartment and did not sleep, and at some point around four she got up and drank a glass of water standing at the sink in the dark, and went back to bed, and was, as she had always been, entirely all right.
That was the worst part. She had built it herself, over eight years, out of the best materials available, and it worked exactly as designed, and it held.