[Wine bar, Tribeca — April 5, 2012, 7:48 PM]
The wine bar was the kind of place that called itself intimate because it was small enough that you could hear what people two booths over were lying about. I had picked it because I knew the layout — corner booth, window to the street, the bartender who did not look at faces twice. Scottie had agreed to it by text. The text said yes and nothing else.
She was twenty minutes late.
I had been there for thirty. The first ten I had spent ordering a Sancerre I did not particularly want. The next twenty I spent watching the door without looking like I was watching the door, which is harder than it sounds when you are trying to read a wine list you have already read.
When she came in she came in the way she always came into rooms — like she had been there before and was returning to a chair she had left her coat on. Black work coat. The Darby International lanyard still around her neck, the laminated badge tucked into her breast pocket so only the cord showed.
She stopped at the edge of the booth.
She did not sit.
Her hand went to the lanyard. She lifted it over her head, slowly. Coiled it around her fingers. Set it on the table between us, deliberately, the way someone places a piece of evidence into a record. The badge made a small sound against the wood.
Then she sat.
"Hi."
"Hi."
She picked up the menu and put it down without reading it. Detection brought up her resonance and held it steady. The signal was clean on the surface and there was something running underneath it, low and quiet, like a refrigerator humming in a kitchen you have stopped noticing the kitchen of.
She had wanted to come. That was true.
She had wanted to come and she had not told me everything she had brought with her. That was also true.
I did not voice the read. I had a rule about that.
"You're late."
"I am late."
"Anything broken?"
"Conference call ran. London office. They like calls that start at four PM Eastern. I think they think it is a kindness."
"Is it?"
"It is many things. Kindness is not the first three of them."
The waitress came. Scottie ordered a Pinot, no preamble, the way you order in a place you have not been to but have been to fifteen versions of. The waitress left.
The lanyard sat between us.
"You took it off before you sat down."
"I did."
"That was deliberate."
She looked at it. Looked back at me.
"That was deliberate."
We both let that sit for a second. The wine came. The wine went down a little for both of us. The booth had a candle in a small jar. The flame did its small movement.
"How was your morning."
"My morning was a merger announcement."
"I saw."
"I assumed."
"They moved on you fast."
"They moved on Palmer first. They will move on the rest of my client list this week."
She tilted the glass. Watched the wine turn. She had a habit of doing that when she was thinking and did not want her face to be doing the thinking for her. I had clocked the habit in our second month. She did not know I had clocked it.
"What I need to tell you," she said, "is that I have not seen your client file. Not because they have not given it to me. Because I have not asked. And if they push it across my desk I will not read it. I will hand it back."
"That is going to be hard to maintain."
"I know what it is going to be."
"They will eventually wonder why you keep handing it back."
"They will eventually decide I am not worth the salary they are paying me. Yes."
I let that hold. Detection ran the line again, looking for the deception that has to be there because no one says a thing that could cost them their job and means it. The deception was not there. The omission was still there — the same low hum — but the line about the file was clean.
"Scottie."
"Don."
"You do not have to take that hit for me."
"I am taking that hit for me. Not for you."
The distinction was important to her. The distinction was also true. She was not protecting my interests. She was protecting her ability to look at her own face in a mirror while having a job at a firm that was eating my firm for breakfast.
I drank some wine I still did not want.
"I am going to need to be careful about what I tell you about my cases."
"I assumed."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be."
"I am, though."
She nodded. Did not say it back. Did not need to. Both of us were carrying it. Both of us knew the other one was carrying it. That was its own kind of arithmetic.
The candle flame moved. Outside the window a man walked past with a takeout bag. The bartender wiped a glass.
"How do we do this," she said.
She had said it the way she said important things — like she was already standing on the other side of them, looking back.
"We do what we did before, except we do not do it in our offices and we do not do it on email."
"Underground."
"That is the word."
"I do not love that word."
"I do not love it either."
"How long does it stay underground?"
I had an answer to that and I did not say it. The answer was until one of us makes the other one choose. I did not say it because Scottie was still on her first glass and we had not yet eaten anything and I had a rule about saying the hard things on an empty stomach.
"As long as it has to."
She picked up the lanyard from the table. Put it back over her head. Tucked it back under her collar. The badge disappeared. The cord stayed visible by an inch.
She kept her hand on the lanyard for a second longer than the motion required.
Then she let it go.
"I missed you this week," she said.
Detection ran the line. The line was clean. Whatever she was omitting, the missing-me was not part of it.
"I missed you too."
That was also clean.
We finished the wine. We did not order food. She paid for hers; I paid for mine; we left the bar in the order we had come in, ten minutes apart, by a tacit arrangement neither of us had spoken aloud.
---
[Hudson Street, ten minutes later]
I went left. She went right.
At the corner I looked back, because I am the kind of person who looks back, and she had stopped a half-block down, under a streetlight that was not flattering. She was on her phone. The screen lit her face. She was reading something with her work-face on. Then she put the phone away.
She did not look back.
That was deliberate too.
I turned the corner and walked west toward the apartment. The April air had a kind of damp edge that suggested it was thinking about rain and might or might not commit. Halfway home my phone buzzed once. The screen showed Scottie's initial and three characters: S — ok.
The coded text the underground would run on. Two letters and the all-clear, the way she had once signed off on dinner reservations when we still texted in normal words.
I held the phone in my hand for a second.
I typed back one character — .
I sent it. I put the phone in my coat pocket. I kept walking.
Above the rooftops the sky was the same color as the inside of the candle jar from the booth, and I had to remind myself, with no small effort, that the candle had not been the most important object on that table.
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