Chapter 19
ELIAS
Elias walked north on Clark.
He didn't know where he was walking to. His car was parked on Wells; the direction he was walking in wasn't the direction of his car.
Walking was the thing his body was doing in the absence of any clear instruction from the rest of him, and continuing to walk was going to be more useful than stopping, because stopping would require him to determine where to stop.
Several blocks passed without registering.
At Webster he turned east and walked to the lake.
The wind off the water was harder than the wind on the interior streets had been.
It came at him across the width of the drive and took the warmth out of his face.
He stood at the railing of the footbridge over the drive and looked down at the cars passing beneath him and didn't think anything in particular.
The railing held him for some number of minutes. Then he turned and walked back.
At his office, he asked his assistant to hold his calls.
She looked up when he came in and didn't comment on the coat he was still wearing, or on the color his face probably was, or on the hour — past eleven, out since nine — and she did what she always did, which was to register the instruction and produce no evidence she'd seen a thing she hadn't been asked to see.
The door closed behind him. The coat stayed on.
The desk received him the way the desk had received him every day of his adult life, and he sat with his hands on the blotter and didn't mistake their steadiness for anything.
He'd already learned, in the weeks since the living-room kiss, that the steadiness of his hands was no longer information he could use.
You don't get to touch me anymore.
The sentence sat in him. His wife had given it to him directly, without inflection, with her palm up between them: the gesture of a woman drawing a line she didn't intend to renegotiate.
The line had held. It was holding now. Two hours after the line had been drawn, it was still between him and his wife, and in the course of the afternoon he was going to have to decide what to do about it.
The decision, when it came, came from the part of him that had always activated first. The part that had been activating since he was very young, since the year of Michael Warren, since before Michael Warren, since the years in which he'd learned that the thing to do when the world delivered a result you hadn't predicted was to move.
He picked up the phone.
"James."
"Elias."
"I want to delay the divorce. I want to file whatever needs to be filed to put the timeline out — the maximum window the court will give us."
A pause. "Elias, I'm not sure — "
"James."
Another pause. "I heard you."
"Then do it."
James didn't answer immediately. James had been his senior counsel for a long time and had, in the course of that time, pushed back on Elias perhaps four times. This was the fifth.
"I can file for an extension on discovery," James said at last. "I can ask the court for time. Her counsel will oppose it. Feldman will oppose it."
"Oppose it anyway."
"It won't buy you much. A month, perhaps. Six weeks if we're lucky."
"That's fine."
"What are you trying to do, Elias?"
The question was the question, and the question didn't have, at the desk on a Tuesday afternoon, an answer he was prepared to produce out loud.
What he was trying to do was slow a thing down, to produce, through a procedural instrument, the one resource a man in his position could still produce when every other resource had been taken away from him, which was time.
Time was the resource. Time had always been the resource.
A man who had time had, eventually, options. A man who didn't have time had nothing.
"Give me time, James."
"All right. I'll file by the end of the week."
"Thank you."
"Elias."
"Yes."
"Be careful with this."
"Thank you, James."
The phone went down.
James had said be careful with this, in the tone James used when he was declining to say the thing he actually meant, which was this is not going to do what you want it to do.
The tone had been heard. It hadn't been engaged with.
James was his senior counsel; James's job was to file what Elias told him to file. The filing was in motion.
A month. The month was going to give him time to construct whatever instrument was going to bring his wife back.
The instrument itself … he didn't yet know what it was.
That part didn't worry him. Instruments weren't, in his experience, difficult to find; what was difficult was knowing what instrument a situation required.
A different instrument, then. He didn't know what it was.
But he was a man who'd made a career out of finding instruments for situations he hadn't previously been in, and he'd found them by moving first, by producing motion, by producing the conditions in which a solution could present itself.
A man who stood still didn't find instruments.
A man who'd engaged his counsel and filed for delay was a man who'd produced motion.
Motion had been produced. He sat at his desk and let himself, briefly, be satisfied with it.
The next several hours produced the surface of working.
The folders on his desk got moved through.
The pages that required initialing got initialed.
Two of the calls his assistant had held for him got returned, and the men on the other ends of the calls received the same version of him they received every afternoon.
None of them noticed anything. The afternoon moved the way afternoons moved.
Underneath the surface, something else was happening.
A construction was underway: the version of the story in which his wife came back.
It was a thing he could construct; he'd constructed, over the course of a career, many versions of many stories, and this one wasn't, as a piece of work, different in kind from what he did every day.
The end state was his wife in his apartment.
Working backward: the end state required certain preceding conditions, the preceding conditions required certain events, the events required certain instruments.
The first instrument was time. Time had been secured.
The second instrument — he thought about this for a while, sitting at his desk with a pen in his hand — was a private conversation.
The sidewalk in Lincoln Park had been public, the conference room on Madison had been semi-public, and he hadn't yet had a conversation with her in a room in which the walls belonged only to the two of them.
A private conversation would be the instrument that repaired the thing her public sentence on the sidewalk had broken.
The conditions for a private conversation would have to be produced by means other than tracking her to Clark Street again, because tracking her had been the error. The conditions would come by creating, somewhere in the course of the weeks ahead, a moment she'd agree to be in a room with him for.
The thinking about what that moment would be lasted the rest of the afternoon.
By five, no adequate version of the moment had presented itself.
Every option he'd produced kept running into the same obstacle, which was that his wife didn't, at present, wish to be in a room with him.
Her position on the matter had been communicated with a clarity that didn't, reasonably, admit of near-term adjustment.
The pen went down. The desk got turned away from. The window got walked to.
The city in the failing light lay below him, and he permitted himself — briefly, as an exercise — to consider the possibility that what his wife had said on the sidewalk was what his wife had meant.
The thought was permitted for several seconds.
Then it got put away. The thought wasn't operative.
If permitted to develop, it produced outcomes he wasn't going to accept.
A man who accepted that his wife meant what she'd said when she'd said she wasn't going to let him touch her was a man who'd, in the act of accepting, completed the transition from married to unmarried, and that transition wasn't one he was making.
The filings his wife had initiated were filings; the sentence she'd said on Clark Street was a sentence.
Filings could be delayed. Sentences could be, given the right conditions, revised.
He didn’t go back to the apartment. The club on Michigan did — the club where he'd eaten dinner on the odd evenings of his unmarried years and on the few evenings in the months of the marriage when a dinner in the apartment with his wife hadn't been, for one reason or another, a thing he'd been prepared to perform.
The club had a library and a quiet dining room and, above all, a staff who'd been trained not to register the presence or the state of their members in a way that might, later, become information.
Dinner was eaten alone. Less got drunk than could have.
After dinner, the library: the chair his father had sat in, a book he'd read several times before, he didn't want to encounter anything new.
The brass light. The silence of a room built by people who understood that a man occasionally needed a room to be silent in.
For the duration of the reading, the corner of Armitage and Clark didn't get thought about.
He thought about it when the book closed.
He thought about it all the way back to the apartment in the car.
The apartment had been dark since the morning of the divorce papers: Maura hadn't been told to turn on lights in the evenings before he came home.
Keys went into the crystal dish without looking at the dish.
The study door opened. The lamp turned on.
At the desk, he got no work done.
Instead, a he took out a sheet of paper.
At the top of it went the sentences he was going to say to his wife when the conditions were produced.
Good sentences: he'd been writing versions of them since the afternoon, rejecting several rounds.
The sentences he'd arrived at by the time the evening had gotten late were clean, specific, and accurate.
They named what he'd done without attempting to diminish it.
They acknowledged that the thing he'd done couldn't be undone, and they proposed, in the language of a man asking for something he didn't, strictly, deserve, that the two of them might nonetheless attempt, together, to live in a version of their life in which the thing had been done and was being lived with rather than refused.
The sentences got read through. They were, as sentences, correct.
He spent a long time staring at them.
The curb on Clark Street came back. His wife's palm up between them, flat, the gesture of a line. Her voice, firm.
Elias told himself that the sentences were going to work because the sentences were what he had, and the alternative to believing the sentences were going to work was an alternative he wasn't, alone in his study at night, going to take.
The phone rang as he was heading to bed. James.
"I spoke with Feldman."
"And?"
"He's going to oppose the extension. Which you knew."
"Yes."
"He said something when we were wrapping up.
" A pause. "He said — he said to convey to you that his client had no interest in a negotiation, that his client wasn't available for any form of conversation outside the formal proceedings, and that any attempt to contact her through channels outside the formal proceedings would be construed by his client as harassment. He asked me to convey it."
Silence on the line.
"Feldman doesn't say that kind of thing for effect," James said.
"No."
"She's instructed him to say it."
"I understand that, James."
"She's saying it to you through him because she doesn't want to say it to you directly."
"I understand, James."
"All right."
Neither of them asked whether the extension should be withdrawn. Neither volunteered. The line held for several seconds, and then James said good night, Elias, and Elias said good night, James, and the line went down.
The phone went on the desk. The sheet of paper with the sentences lay beside it.
Any attempt to contact her through channels outside the formal proceedings would be construed by his client as harassment.
His wife had just told him, through her counsel, that any room he produced would be met as a violation.
There was no room. There was the formal proceeding, the filings, and in the weeks ahead a courtroom in which the two of them would appear across a bench from each other in the presence of a judge and their respective counsel, and there were no other rooms.
The sitting with this went on for longer than he would, at any other point in his adult life, have permitted himself to sit with a piece of information that contradicted a plan he'd just produced.
Then the thing he always did got done. He told himself that his wife was acting from the position of a woman who'd, very recently, been very badly injured by him.
The position of a woman who'd been very badly injured wasn't a position that held permanently.
The sentence through counsel was a sentence of the moment.
Time would dilute the position. The position his wife held today wasn't the position his wife would hold at the end of the month he'd hopefully bought.
He told himself these things in the voice he'd been using his whole adult life. The voice had always, in the end, been right before.
It had to be correct now.