The Third Thing
Jo did not sleep, and at six she got up and cleaned the apartment.
She did the kitchen to the grout. She was about forty minutes into it, on her knees with a cloth, before she heard what she was doing and sat back on her heels on the floor of a kitchen in Astoria and laughed out loud, once, at nobody.
Then she got up and made coffee and sat down at the table with the legal pad.
Two columns. She drew the line down the middle out of eight years of muscle memory, and looked at it, and understood that the instrument had finally run out of road, because the thing she had to decide today did not have a controllable side and an uncontrollable side.
It had three options and all of them were hers.
So she turned the page over and wrote three headings instead.
Take Lasker’s job. Stay at Kade. Something else.
The third one had nothing under it. She looked at the empty space beneath it for a long time.
Mara came to Astoria at nine, on a Friday, having told the floor she had a dentist.
“You’ve cleaned,” she said, in the doorway.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not saying anything. I’m noting it. Noting is free.” She put a paper bag on the table. “Bagels. You won’t eat one. I’m going to put one in front of you anyway and we’re both going to pretend.”
Jo told her all of it. Every part, in order, for the first time to anyone: the bakery, the three weeks, the openings she had not taken, Priya on Twenty-Sixth Street, Warrick Street on Wednesday night, and a dinner at the Carlyle at eleven-forty.
Mara listened to the whole thing without interrupting once, which from her was extraordinary.
“Okay,” she said at the end. “Can I do the thing I’ve been not doing since July?”
“Yes.”
“Right.” She put her coffee down. “In March, you told me you had a plan for if it went wrong. I said it was a coping mechanism wearing a personality trait’s clothes and you said noted and we went back to work, and I’ve thought about that about once a week ever since, and I got it wrong.”
“You didn’t get it wrong. You were completely —”
“I got the diagnosis right and the prescription wrong, which is worse, because you took the prescription.” Mara leaned forward.
“I told you to notice you were doing it. That’s what I said.
Just notice you’re doing it. And you did.
You’ve noticed brilliantly. You’ve noticed for five months, in high definition, with commentary. You could give a lecture.”
Jo said nothing.
“Noticing was never going to do anything,” Mara said. “You can watch yourself do a thing forever. Having a plan for losing him was never the same as being ready to keep him, and I should have said the second half in March instead of the first half, and I’m sorry.”
“That’s not your job.”
“No, but I’m the one who had the sentence.
” She sat back. “So here’s the whole of it, four months late.
You don’t have a problem where you can’t tell whether to take a job.
You have a problem where you have never once, in your entire adult life, made a decision on the basis of a thing you want rather than a thing you can survive.
And today you have to, because all three of these are survivable and that’s why you can’t pick. ”
Jo looked at the legal pad, at the third heading with nothing under it.
“There’s a third option,” she said.
“Of course there is. There always is, and you always find it, and you always find it about four days after it stops being useful.” Mara stood and got her coat. “Find it today, Marlowe. I’m going back in, because if we’re both out on a Friday, Priya will come here personally.”
At the door she stopped.
“For what it’s worth, and then I’m gone. He said take the job.”
“He did.”
“Men say that.” Mara pulled her coat on.
“Almost none of them say it at one in the morning, twice, unprompted, after the worst hour of their year, and then say it a third time as you’re going out the door specifically so you can’t talk yourself out of believing it later.
” She shrugged. “That’s all. That’s not advice.
That’s an observation and you can do what you want with it. ”
She sat with the three headings for two more hours after Mara left.
What she noticed, eventually, was that she had written them in the wrong order. Take Lasker’s job first, because it was the biggest number. Stay at Kade second, because it was the safest. Something else last, in the position she always put the thing she was not going to do.
She had been building lists like this since she was nineteen and she had never once put the frightening option at the top.
So she turned to a clean page and wrote it first, and looked at it there, and it did not look any more possible. But it stopped looking like an afterthought, which turned out to be a different thing and enough of one.
At eleven Jo called Corinne Lasker and asked whether she could come in rather than do it by phone.
“That’s usually bad news.”
“It is bad news. I’d rather deliver it in a room.”
“Then come in,” Lasker said. “And Jo — thank you for not doing it by email. You would not believe how many people do it by email.”
The printworks at one o’clock had four people in it and a freight elevator operated by Emil, who asked her about the Mets, and she said something about the bullpen that she did not hold and could not defend.
Lasker took her into the room with six chairs and no window. Jo had noticed, weeks ago, that every building has one.
“I’m not taking it,” Jo said. “I want to say why properly, because the why matters and I don’t want you to have the wrong version of it.”
“Go on.”
“It isn’t Alexander.” She said it first because it was the thing Lasker would assume. “He told me to take it. Three times, at one in the morning, after finding out in the worst possible way. If this were about him I’d be signing.”
“Then what.”
“On Wednesday night, at a dinner at the Carlyle, Vivienne Castellane told my company’s outside counsel that I’d accepted this job. In front of witnesses. Sixteen hours before your deadline, and about forty seconds before I was going to tell Alexander myself.”
Lasker’s expression did not change, but she went entirely still, which Jo had learned to read.
“She did what.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I did not know.” Lasker said it flatly. “I want that on the record between us before you say anything else, because you have had a month of people managing you and I am not going to be the seventh.”
“I believe you.” Jo meant it. “That’s why I’m here in a room.”
She made herself say the rest of it in order.
“If I take this now, then what she did worked. Not the offer — the offer is clean, I’ve checked it four ways and it’s the best-structured thing I’ve ever read.
The timing worked. She spent a month building something I could verify, and then she spent forty seconds spending it, and if I sign today then the last three years of my life end on a move I didn’t make.
” Jo kept her voice level. “I’ve spent five months at a company where every number attached to me was set by a man who loves me.
I’m not walking out of that into a company where the anchor investor gets to decide when my relationship ends.
That’s the same problem. It’s a better-paid version of the same problem, and I’d be somebody’s instrument twice in one week. ”
The room was quiet.
Lasker was quiet for a moment.
“Can I push once? Not to change your mind. To make sure you’ve built it properly.”
“Push.”
“You’re treating her timing as though it decides something.
” Lasker leaned back. “It was ugly and it was calculated and I’m going to have a conversation with her about it that she will not enjoy.
But she doesn’t get a vote on your career, and turning this down because of what she did is still letting her set the terms. It’s the same surrender with better optics. ”
Jo sat with that, because it was the strongest version of the argument against her and Lasker had produced it unprompted, against her own interest.
“I thought about that at about four this morning,” she said.
“Here’s where I got to. If I take it, she picked the day my relationship ended.
If I turn it down because of her, she picked my career.
Both of those are her hand on it.” She turned her palms up.
“The only move that isn’t hers is the one where I go and do something neither of you has anything to do with.
That’s not principle. It’s the only square on the board she isn’t standing on. ”
“That’s a good answer,” Lasker said. “I don’t like it and it’s a good answer.”
“There’s a second half.”
“Go on.”
“I’m resigning from Kade Group on Monday.”
Lasker’s eyebrows went up about a millimeter, which Jo had also learned to read.
“You’re doing what.”
“They gave me Warrick Street on Wednesday. A real seat, real reporting line, my name on the board papers in October, and two people went on record to make sure nobody could say I was handed it.” Jo turned her hands over.
“It’s the best thing anyone at that company has ever done for me and it doesn’t fix anything, because in two years, when I’m good at it, somebody will still be able to say it.
Not because it’s true. Because it’s sayable, and it will always be sayable, and there is no memo that makes it not sayable. ”
“So you’re leaving both.”
“I’m leaving both.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know yet,” Jo said. “That’s the actual answer and I’m not going to dress it up.
I’ve got about four months of savings and a piece of work I did on eleven properties that I can show people, and a headhunter’s number, and I’m going to go and find out what I’m worth in a room where nobody has ever met either of them. ”
Corinne Lasker looked at her for a long moment.
“You understand I have to restart the search.”
“Yes. And I’m sorry about the date, and I’m not sorry about the answer.”
“No. Don’t be.” Lasker stood and put her hand out. “For what it’s worth, and this is the last thing I’ll say about it — I’ve hired eleven people in my career and I’ve watched maybe three of them turn something down for a reason that wasn’t fear. You’re the third.”
At the door Jo stopped.
“Can I ask you something that isn’t my business?”
“You can ask.”
“Did she pick me because I’m good, or because I’m his?”
“Both,” Lasker said. “I’ve known that since April and it didn’t change my arithmetic, because you’re good. It should probably change yours.” She almost smiled. “Come and see me in a year. Not for a job. I’d just like to know how it went.”
“I will.”
“People say that.” Lasker held the door. “Do it anyway.”
Jo walked from the west twenties.
She did not do the arithmetic and there was, for the first time in three weeks, nothing to do it about.
There was no folder. There was no plan. She had turned down two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars and a seat on a board paper in the same afternoon and she had four months of savings and no title and no idea, and she was walking up Sixth Avenue at three o’clock on a Friday in July with the whole thing gone.
She stopped at Thirty-Fourth and got her phone out and did the last piece.
Can we talk tomorrow? Not tonight. I’ve done a thing and I want to tell you after it’s done, not before.
He wrote back inside a minute.
Yes. Whenever you want. — A
Jo looked at that for a while: at the fact that he had not asked what, and had not asked whether he should be worried, and had signed it, which he had never once done in five months of messages.
Then she put the phone away and kept walking, and it took her another eleven blocks to work out what the feeling was, because she had not had it before and had nothing to compare it against.
She was frightened. Properly, ordinarily frightened, with no plan under it.
She checked it the way she checked everything, walking north on Sixth with the crowd going round her: not dread, which she knew well and had lived inside for three weeks.
Not the low industrial hum of a woman pricing a loss.
This was thinner and higher and entirely present-tense, and it had no arithmetic attached because there was nothing left to calculate.
She had turned down two things in one afternoon.
Her hands were not steady and she let them not be steady.
It was the first entirely honest thing she had felt since a bakery on Fifty-Third Street, and she walked the rest of the way home inside it, and did not manage it, and did not put it in a column.