The bell rang again and Doug rose to answer it.
“You’re here,” Nate said.
“Yep,” he replied, remaining in the doorway, letting the boy wonder if he’d be let in this evening. From that first day that he’d crept into the house, something in Nate’s demeanor had goaded Doug on—his lack of defense, a vulnerability the shyest women lacked. It was a provocation of a sort, such weakness.
“Martinez is pitching,” he said, hopefully. “Are you watching?”
“I’m busy,” he said. “But go ahead. Turn it on, if you want.”
He spent the next hour reading up on Evelyn Jones. Her performance reviews were stellar. If you believed her supervisor, she was the patron saint of settlements, but given that man’s doddering liberalism Doug had no idea if he meant it or simply felt a historical obligation to praise his imagined inferiors. Doug trusted more the traders’
comments, who to a man reported that she was cleaner and faster than most anyone else who had handled their work. Around midnight, he called Sabrina and told her to do a public records search. As the game was ending, he finally closed his laptop.
Nate was sitting cross-legged beside him, the sleeves of his oxford shirt rolled up past the elbows of his slender arms.
“You’re not a baseball fan, are you?” Doug said.
“What do you mean?”
“Before you started coming over here, you didn’t follow it.”
“Sometimes I did.”
“What is your deal, anyway? Don’t you have somewhere to be? Out with your friends or something?”
Nate looked into the mouth of the bottle he’d been drinking from. “I like being here.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I just do.”
“Well, I got to get some sleep. Time for you to go.”
“Would you mind … I mean, it’s okay if you would, but would you mind if maybe … I stayed over?”
“Where? On the couch?”
“Okay,” he said, his eyes brimming with fear and longing. “If that’s what you want.”
“Jesus. Come on, then,” Doug said, leading him up the stairs to the bedroom.
What Nate wanted, and what Doug let him do once he had turned out the light, was to lay his head down on Doug’s stomach and take his dick in his mouth. He had never really touched Nate before but he palmed the top of his head now, guiding his motion. It had been a long time since he’d been given a blow job and though the boy was no professional his eagerness helped.
Afterward, he couldn’t sleep, not with Nate in the bed beside him. He tried for a while before fetching his computer from downstairs and starting in on more work. A box in the corner of his screen showed the Nikkei continuing to drop. Eventually, after nodding off for an hour or so, he got up and showered.
When he came back into the room to dress, Nate had woken and rolled over onto his back, his face blurry with sleep, his cheek marked by the creases of the pillowcase.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Quarter to six. I’m going to work. You should get up.”
He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and sat upright in his frayed T-shirt and boxers, his fuzzy, unshaven jaw giving him even more of a grunge look than usual. He smelled of pot most nights and had that laconic, hangdog look that stoners wore.
“Don’t you have school?”
“It’s senior week,” he said, yawning.
A lifetime of doing only girls and now Doug had got himself into this. A hand job or two was one thing—a convenience—but now the kid was blowing him. The way he looked at Doug in the closet mirror was almost worshipful, his need clinging in a way that a girl wanting Doug to call her never had. He felt implicated somehow, and it galled him.
“Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“What?” Doug said.
“Have you ever done this before?”
“Done what?”
“Been with a guy.”
“I got an idea,” Doug said, pulling a tie off the rack and quickly knotting it. “Let’s skip the conversation part. Okay? Let’s keep it simple.”
___________
D
OWNSTAIRS,
he was about to open the front door when something caught his eye through the window.
“Unbelievable. Just look at that.”
Charlotte Graves and her two hounds were standing beside the garage, the woman leaning down to gather twigs which she deposited in a plastic shopping bag dangling from her wrist, while the dogs sniffed impatiently at the grass. In the gray dawn, the three of them looked like figures in a dream, a nightmare in fact, as if the world had been emptied by plague, leaving only these ragged scavengers.
“Feel like saying hello to your tutor?”
“No. She’s just walking them. She’ll keep moving.”
“You bet she will.”
Doug crossed the circle of the driveway before she noticed his approach. Startled, she stood sharply upright, yanking the dogs to attention. The Doberman bared his teeth and snarled.
“What do you think you’re doing here?”
“You’re up earlier than usual,” she said.
“You realize you’re trespassing. Your property is a hundred yards that way,” he said, pointing her back up the hill.
She grinned. “The interesting thing is, Mr. Fanning, not only am I
not
trespassing, but you
are
. It’s a strange bit of law, but there it is—I didn’t write it. You’ll understand soon enough. Soon enough,” she said.
“You’re mad. You’re totally mad.”
“So I’m often told. These days, even my dogs might agree with you. But they’re like you. They don’t know who they are. Or rather, they’re pretending to be people they aren’t, which I suppose amounts to the same thing.”
“Listen to me,” he said, moving a step closer, causing the mastiff to start barking, saliva dripping from his black gums.
“Samuel! Quiet!” she scolded. Amazingly enough, the animal obeyed. “They’re usually not so boisterous at this hour. That’s why I walk them early: my mind’s clearer than theirs.” A light rain had slickened the grass and was slowly dampening Doug’s jacket. “I can see things more lucidly at this time of day,” she said. “For instance, why did you build this house? To support a belief about yourself, about the life you’re living? To give that belief a concrete form in the hope the building would make it true? Isn’t that the idea? And isn’t it false? Wouldn’t you say that honesty—not of the rule-following kind but of the clear-eyed-apprehension-of-the-world sort—wouldn’t you say it requires us to give up those childish equivalencies: the doll for the person, the object for the dream? If a person couldn’t do that, it might suggest a lack of inner resources, don’t you suppose?”
“You have no idea who I am,” he said. “You think I’m like every other person in this town living in a new house, but you’re wrong. I have as little time for them as I do for you. And I’ll tell you something for free—you’re as obvious as they are. You just happened to get here first so you think that gives you some divine right to have it all to yourself.”
As he spoke, the Doberman squatted and proceeded to dump a pile of steaming shit onto the lawn.
“Oh, I do apologize. Honestly. That’s very rude of him. Bad, Wilkie! Never on the grass! I got him from the pound, you see, and he’s never taken well to instruction. It’s hopeless now, of course,” she added. “You simply can’t imagine.”
“Listen,” he said, telling himself to just let the dog shit go, just let it go, “this lawsuit of yours, you’re going to lose, so why not do us
both a favor and just drop it. I didn’t come after you. But if you keep this up, I will.”
Suddenly, both dogs lunged leftward, catching Charlotte off guard and forcing her into a run as they chased after a tabby cat Doug had never seen before. Their speed was too much for her and she stumbled at the edge of the driveway, her feet slipping on the wet grass, her hand and shoulder and then thigh coming down hard onto the pavement. Freed from her grasp, the dogs dashed forward, disappearing around the corner of the house.
“Great!” he shouted. “Another fucking lawsuit!”
Miserably, he walked toward her prone figure, though by the time he reached her, she’d sat up and was brushing grass from the arm of her jacket. Rain ran off her forehead, down her nose, and into her eyes. She looked utterly lost at that moment, as helpless as a child. He was about to reach a hand down to help her up when he saw Nate jogging across the circle.
“Ms. Graves, are you okay? Are you all right?”
He knelt beside her and put his arm around her back.
“Who’s that?”
“Can you move? Can you move your legs?”
She nodded and as Doug looked on, Nate dipped his shoulder under her arm, put a hand around her waist, and raised her off the wet ground.
“She needs a doctor. We have to call an ambulance.”
“No, no,” she said. “Don’t be silly. I’m fine.” She pushed the hair out of her eyes and straightened her skirt. “Those beasts will get no dinner.”
“You need to be x-rayed.”
“Heavens, no. Once you get into one of those hospitals you
never get out.” She looked shaken but appeared steady enough on her feet.
“So,” Doug said, “just to be clear, you’ve been offered medical attention and you’re declining it, correct?”
Nate glared at him but said nothing.
“All right, then. I guess Nate here will get you home.” And with that he strode off, leaving the two of them huddled together in the early-morning drizzle.
A
S SOON AS
Doug entered Evelyn Jones’s office an hour later, he realized he’d need a plan B. Whatever the origin of her immunity—intelligence, race, lesbianism perhaps, fact-based suspicion, some combination of these—his default MO would get him nowhere here. And yet she had to be won over. A bit of bad accounting was one thing. It could be papered over once he’d got an explanation from McTeague. But throwing the compliance department into investigative mode before he knew the facts—that wasn’t an option.
“You mind if I close the door?” he asked.
“Be my guest.”
Memos were tacked squarely to the bulletin board, binders arranged neatly beneath a row of five clocks, each labeled for the city whose time it kept. Along the front of her desk sat two small picture frames, their backings to Doug. Sabrina’s sleuthing had turned up the fact that she’d been absent for her brother’s funeral just a day or two ago.
“So,” he said, leaning back in his chair, his eyes wandering the lunar white boards of the dropped ceiling. “It looks as if Jim Lowry is moving over to community relations. Which will leave his position vacant. Is that a job that interests you?”
He allowed the silence that followed to stretch on a few moments.
“Vice president. For operations? Are you serious?”
“Yeah. I’ve been in this office two minutes, and I can tell for a fact you’d be better at the job than he is. Besides, your evaluations have it written all over them. And I know from the look on your face you know that’s true. Most of those assholes out there—they’re cattle, pension seekers, cowards.
Leadership
, though. That’s the question, right? The one the hiring committee would ponder judiciously before taking dead aim at mediocrity and finding the mark as sure as the men who hired them.
Leadership
. How fucking debased that word has become, don’t you think? Excuse my language. Seminars in swanky hotels where the lemmings take dictation from some retired guru hack. We pay for this shit too, we pay for them to fly off and learn the seven principles of how to manipulate your underlings and keep them cheerful as you do it. Millions a year.”
Evelyn Jones neither nodded nor looked away, her attention even and unremitting.
“There’s another thing we both know,” he said. “You get a big promotion and people—not to your face, of course—say, That figures. Right? African American woman, big corporation, diversity initiative. They do the cultural math and that’s what they think. Now, that would piss me off if I were you because you’re good at your job. And frankly, while I know a lot of the staff around here think of me as the friendly type, when it comes to management, I don’t give a shit who anyone is. I want the machine to work. Because the best parts of it, I built them. That’s why I want you to have Lowry’s job. And I’d make sure people understood that.”
“We’re being honest here, Mr. Fanning? Is that the idea?”
“Absolutely. But if you give me a second, I think I know what you’re thinking: ‘Last night I discover a gaping hole in one of Fanning’s
trader’s scrub accounts and this morning he’s in my office offering me a vice presidency. How easy does he think I am?’ Am I in the ballpark?”
“Yes,” she said, resting back in her chair. “You are.”
“McTeague fucked up. Thanks to you, I spent last night on the phone figuring out what happened. It was a favor for a client. I’ve spoken to him about it, and it’ll be worked out. Now, just to be clear,” he said, “do I want compliance getting their nose in this? No. Do I read employee e-mail, including yours? Obviously. If you don’t already, you will once you move into operations. You’d be negligent not to.”
“So you’re asking me to keep quiet about a possible loss of three hundred million, not to mention a reporting violation?”
“You’re not keeping quiet. I’m his supervisor and I’ve been notified. What I’m saying is this is how the chairman’s office wants to handle the matter. It’s how I want to handle the matter. But part of you is still thinking, ‘He’s only here because he’s got a problem and there wouldn’t be any of this talk about a vice presidency otherwise.’ That’s not wrong, of course. It’s just not the whole picture. The situation brought you to my attention, that’s true, but the fact is I think the bank would make more money if we promoted you. And that’s what we’re here for, right? You’re not a romantic about that, I hope—our purpose?”
“I’m not an innocent,” she said. “If that’s what you mean.”
Doug leaned far enough forward to get a sidelong glance at the framed photographs. In one, a vacation shot, Evelyn and two other women smiled for the camera at an outdoor table under a parasol, a beach in the background. The one beside it appeared to be a family portrait: an older black woman in a blue dress seated in the middle, a much younger Evelyn standing over one of her shoulders, a boy of about fifteen resting his hand on the other.