THEY TELL YOU TO PLAN FOR CHANGE, BUT WHAT THEY REALLY mean is to plan for time, whether it changes things or not. As a result of family business, I was recently called back to the town where I grew up, a flat and sunbaked stretch of suburban south Florida. In the years since I left town, much of it has been torn down or overbuilt. For most of the two days I spent there, I felt more dislocation than location: the squat white shack where I traded in the faulty rental car had once been a veterinary practice, the firm handling my uncle’s probate was housed in a glass-and-steel tower that rose up from what was once a strip mall anchored by an optometrist and a sandwich shop. The third day in town, already bored by what was new, I undertook a tour of deliberate nostalgia. I drove past my high school, past the park where I had played Little League, past creeks I fished and trees I climbed and even the house of the first girl I had ever loved, whose last name I didn’t remember and whom I had been too afraid to approach until junior high school, when it was too late. I parked across the street from the house and wondered who lived there now. I backed out, drove away, made one left turn and then another. I was looking for the real estate office where my mother had worked one summer, only to quit in tears after a fight with the office manager; instead I came upon a small tan building that I recognized for what it no longer was: the law firm where I had worked one summer during college. It had occupied only a small corner of my life, that job, but it was dense with implication. The building looked exactly as it had then, but because time had passed and, by passing, shifted nearly everything within me, the sameness of the place was more shocking than any change I could have imagined. I got out of the car and scrutinized the nameplates to the left of the main glass doors; the names were unfamiliar enough to comfort me, but I was still not entirely comforted. As I pulled away, I glanced in my rearview mirror and imagined that I saw myself there, standing by the glass doors. It was a highly theatrical arrangement, and it drew me in, by degrees, until the present was far behind me and the past was present.
Schiff and Mortenson, the two principals at the firm, had trained together, and each was convinced of the other’s skill. In fact, the name of the practice was itself a testament both to that conviction and those skills. Schiff, the younger of the two, had suggested that Mortenson’s name should come first, in keeping with alphabetical order and the superior experience of the older man. Mortenson parried Schiff’s proposal by arguing on behalf of euphony and meter, the way the name would be spoken by men when they spoke it. He was giving up his dominance, but he was justifying his decision with reasons of wisdom, and in this he further demonstrated his preeminence. For the most part, this was the way the talents were assigned: protocol to one man, strategy to the other. They knew that they were held in balance by one another, and that this balance was what kept them from tipping toward either collision or drift.
Schiff’s parents were German immigrants, and he had kept on in that same spirit. He had skin that was pink like a baby’s and arms that at first seemed short but were in fact only thick. The features of his face were mostly absent, pushed down into the pudding of his flesh. He had the appearance of something not just fat but fattened. His girth made dressing an ordeal for him, which was probably why he insisted on automating the process: each day, he wore a light-blue shirt beneath a dark-blue coat, and brown pants above black shoes. The only bit of improvisation he permitted himself was his tie: one day a solid yellow, one day green, one day red, all rendered in the fullest and most deeply satisfying shades. He was older than his years, older than all of ours. “We have tagged a specimen of Tristissimus hominum,” Mortenson liked to say of his partner, with comically formal pronunciation.
Mortenson was another kind of species: easier to tag, harder to be made to understand that he had been tagged. He was not as fat as Schiff; he was not fat at all, except if you watched him for a while and began to understand that he thought that he deserved everything around him. All his features were on the sharp side of strong, from nose to ears to chin. There was only one part of his anatomy that had no point: his head was a perfect bald dome, as round as if it had been scooped out from something. He was a decade Schiff’s senior but quicker, healthier in body and mind alike, the kind of eternally young middle-aged man who would sometimes leave the office in the afternoon to swim laps for an hour in his health club’s pool. He had held on to youth with the same effortful ease that characterized nearly everything he did. His enthusiasms—for cars, for women, for the law, though not all of it—were too present in him, and Schiff was always bringing him back to the moment by placing a heavy finger upon some line or other of testimony or statute. “I can’t be bored for you,” Mortenson would say to Schiff, his eyes twinkling, but he could be, and was, excitedly. He had given himself fully to the law as practice, to the artifice of it that men like Schiff insisted was merely a protective cover for a dense moral core, and he held an ever deeper belief that the core, far from pure, might itself be broken open and inspected for even more precious traces of artifice.
At home, as at work, Mortenson was Schiff’s counter. He was married, to a second wife only slightly more than half his age, but he was not very serious about the matter. He liked to take the secretaries out for lunch and to treat them to drinks after work. The secretaries never lasted very long in his employ, though I noticed that they didn’t seem to leave angry. It was another one of his many talents. When secretaries left, I would sometimes get a call in the evening and orders to open the office in the morning. That’s the door I was looking at in my rearview mirror as I drove away from the office. The door was closed, but it had opened a memory. When I got to the edge of the parking lot, I thought I was far enough away that it was safe to relax, because I was safe from that memory. I was wrong on only one point, which is enough.
I ARRIVED AT WORK one rainy June morning, fresh from my first year of college, bearing a note of introduction from my father, who had attended college with Mortenson and was now a professor of political history at the local university. He was a principled man, my father, though his first principle was to seek validation.
“Gregory Tipton, junior,” Mortenson said, though I went by Jim and always had. He read my father’s note, which I had not been permitted to see, with a hard light in his eyes that softened to something more hospitable by the time he reached its end. Then he came to his feet, motioned for me to follow, and took me to the file room. “Get acquainted with the place,” he said, and left me there.
I got acquainted with it at once, and then spent the rest of that long summer wishing I had not done so with such swiftness. The room had no windows. It was lit by massive fluorescents. Three of its walls were lined from ceiling to floor with beige filing drawers, while the fourth contained, in addition to the door, a map that showed the countries of those continental cabinets: which of them were inhabited by past judgments, which by pending arguments, which civil litigation and which criminal. There was exactly one piece of art in the room, a picture of two fish jumping from a stream side by side, tails fully fanned.
After my first morning there, I emerged to find Mortenson smiling and chatting with a secretary. “Go get yourself some lunch and then alphabetize and file the pile by the door,” he told me. That took care of the afternoon and the next day. The hours piled up and I filed them away, too. On the morning of the third day, a knock sounded at the door and Schiff appeared. He stood in the doorway until I invited him in, then took a seat dolorously and asked me how I was enjoying the file room. When I murmured something about getting an education, he cleared his throat to take me off it. “The files are history, but what’s history? Merely markers of time that can’t be recovered.” This was, I would come to learn, his dominant mode, a grave melancholy that he intended as philosophy but was in fact autobiography. “Well, this is what Mortenson wants you to do, so you should work,” he said, “and I should go.”
But he did not go; he stayed with one hand hovering just above the folders and began to instruct me, slowly but with unmistakable purpose, in the law. That first day’s lesson was the Jeffers case, which concerned a client who had sued his employer for unlawful dismissal. Schiff was not capable of fine movements, but his broad strokes had all the necessary detail in them: he explained the man’s position, the employer’s stance, the statute at that time, the dominant interpretation of that statute, the precedent that allowed him to locate an opening. Through it all, it was clear that the law had once meant everything to him, and now meant nothing. He was bereft but not poor; only a rich man could have lost so much. Finally, after we had toured the whole of the case, he stirred heavily. “After lunch, come by my office. I have some work for you that makes more sense than this. I’ll leave it on the table by the window.”
His office was in the corner. As in the matter of the firm’s name, Mortenson had asserted his stature by concession, giving up the largest space on the floor to his partner. Schiff kept the place sparse. He had no pictures with which to clutter the desk or credenza, and no newspapers or magazines. The place was not empty but filled with what was missing. The assignment for me—a list of appointments I was supposed to schedule—was on the table, squared between two staplers.
When I finished, it was late. Nearly everyone had left for the day. From Schiff’s window I could see the spire of the university lecture hall where my father held forth on Lewis Douglas and the Bonus Bill. There was, just beneath the window, a small triangular park, trees springing up from each corner, a small pond in the dead center—no more than a pool, really, for bicycles and baby carriages to circle—and spans of grass in which children tossed a ball. The afternoon light played out, and by degrees my reflection appeared on the window glass. It was unfamiliar to me, and in the midst of so much newness that unfamiliarity was a haven. I had a clear sense of becoming something I had not been before.
Schiff visited me in the file room only once that week, and once the week after that. Each time he lectured in that understated, overdetermined manner of his, and each time he departed with some word or another about work he had for me in his office. As we went, I came to forget the specifics of the cases he presented and to remember only the aphorisms with which he summed up each case. At the conclusion of a long case concerning workplace injury, he represented the judgment to me with this moral: life is a bell with a crack in it, and yet its tone when struck is the nearest to perfection any man will ever know.
It is hard for me to explain exactly what I did in the file room the first part of that summer. The firm had started as a civil-rights concern but under pressure from Mortenson had shifted its business toward anticorporate litigation: a pharmaceutical company that had not adequately advertised the health harms of its products, a shipbuilder that had exposed its workers to irresponsible levels of asbestos. I summarized existing documents, copied new blanks, arranged and assembled. I did not work with any great speed, because I enjoyed staying late, past Schiff and Mortenson, past the secretaries. I liked the office when it went quiet and cool with evening light. It was as if I were the last man on Earth, and I insisted on that belief even when I heard the cleaning lady’s cart clattering its way down the hall. I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value.
ON FRIDAYS, Schiff and Mortenson rounded up the secretaries and the paralegals and the office manager, ordered food, and sat in the conference room. The two of them did not agree on many things, but there was no argument here: Chinese. The restaurant was run by a man who had not a drop of Chinese blood in him, but that’s how it was done in those days. We put it out, the moo goo gai pan and chicken chow mein and barbecued spare ribs, and we flipped our ties back over our shoulders and tucked napkins into our collars and got to it.
“Pass that carton, please,” Mortenson said.
“Here you go,” Schiff said. He was eating. He was a man who ate. But while the rest of us sat around the table and talked about our week, he held himself back from the discussion. His gaze went to the window, though he had a way of giving you to understand that he was looking at the pane of glass rather than through it.
“It’s a nice day out there,” said one of the paralegals, a young woman with a brunette bun.
“That it is,” Mortenson said. “Don’t you think?” he asked Schiff. Schiff didn’t answer, and this spurred Mortenson on. “I saw a movie the other day,” he said, pointing his chopsticks—and the shrimp pinched between them—at his partner. “Exciting. About a man who tries to kill the president of an African nation. It’s based on fact.” He knew which part of the sentence shone most brightly to his partner, because he repeated it. “Can you imagine?” he said. “An assassin.”
“I don’t like it when they make a movie about something like that,” Schiff said, bringing his large head around. “The very point of an assassin is that he is trying to be as famous as the man he assassinates. The film shouldn’t conspire with a murderer to that end.”
“What do they call the man they’re trying to assassinate? The assassinee?”
“He is the assassination. That’s the noun for the victim as well as the process.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Mortenson.
“It’s a fact,” said Schiff, “though not a pretty one. What we believe but cannot praise.”
Mortenson was unwilling to be drawn into the other man’s current. “Well,” he said, “this movie has a great sequence where the assassin is assembling his weapon to practice for the fateful moment,” said Mortenson. “He is in a bedroom at the home of his girlfriend, and there is a baby sleeping in the corner. It’s a melodramatic contrast, but somehow it’s very affecting.”
“Well, I don’t like the whole business of it,” Schiff said. “It’s distasteful.”
“Also, in the film, many of the Africans are wearing American T-shirts. And not just any shirts. Did you know that after sports championships are played, the shirts announcing the victory of the losing team, which have of course already been printed, are shipped to Africa? It’s like there’s an alternative reality there.”
“Or here,” Schiff said. And that is how it went: Mortenson moved from subject to subject, like a child discovering the very process of discovery, and Schiff functioned punctuationally, always with a heavy sense of judgment. It was like watching two painters work side by side; Mortenson with more colors in his palette, Sciff furnishing the sense of form.
Toward the end of the meal, they turned to practical matters, specifically to personnel, and to the sense that they would have to settle a few questions before they went away again. They were traveling often that summer, as they were handling a pair of cases involving police shootings of unarmed young men in central Florida and southern Georgia. After they had returned from the previous trip, one of the secretaries had left—the rumor, as usual, was that it had to do with Mortenson—and Amy, one of the other secretaries, was out on maternity leave. “We’re down two,” Schiff said, “and we need someone new.” They discussed the issue in front of everyone, which was their way.
“What’s your feeling about Lisa Foster?” Mortenson said.
“Who?”
“The Foster girl. I told you the other week. We got a letter of application. She wants a summer position. Or we could promote Jim here to a real job.” He swiveled the chopstick toward me.
“Promotions take time,” Schiff said, sighing with a heaviness that would have, in another man, been comic. “Lisa is her name? Her father’s the doctor?”
“A hell of a doctor.”
“Let’s have her in for an interview.”
“I jumped the gun on this one,” Mortenson said. “I had Stacy schedule her for tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll be here,” Schiff said.
No one asked me, though I would, as it turns out, be most affected by the whole business.
WHEN LISA FOSTER FIRST CAME into the office, it was out of the rain. She shook off a coat and then lifted the damp hair away from her face. It was light to the point of white, even when wet. I knew her from around town: her father was a doctor who had treated my mother for something mysterious years before, and who had come by the house with a dignified look on his face while she was dying. He was an unhealthy man himself who somehow managed to look like a matinee idol. His wife was a compact blonde whose features were harder than she would have wished. And yet they combined perfectly in their daughter, who was short and buxom, a bit flat in the nose and deep in the eyes, and so powerfully attractive that when she entered the office I stepped out from behind the filing cabinet and took her coat without thinking.
“Thank you,” she said, and the way she neglected to say my name told me that she knew it. Mortenson appeared and took her into the conference room, where Schiff was waiting. I sat and covered the front desk for Stacy, who was late. Or rather: I pretended to cover for Stacy and I watched Lisa Foster. Her face did not look like the face of a stranger. Everything about her reminded me of another woman, but when I thought of those other women I was reminded of her. Inside the room, Mortenson asked questions with false seriousness, and Schiff occasionally gave an equally false laugh.
She got the job, of course. I don’t think it was ever in question. Her father, it seemed, had also treated Mortenson’s wife on a matter some years before. “Just in time,” Mortenson said, though he did not elaborate. They put her behind a boxy desk up front that was fenced in by a putty-colored partition. She said hello every day to everyone as they came through the door. To me, she gave a little wave that at first seemed like no more than professional obligation. When I decided, quite independent of any evidence, that she was not the kind of woman to act out of obligation, I started waving back.
LISA WAS A TALENTED GIRL—she was a fine painter who was also taking classes in architecture—but perhaps her most important trait was her lack of belief in herself, which in turn produced a fine brand of aggression. When I made a comment, she would contest it, no matter what it was. If a joke failed to find its mark, as it often did, she would tell me flatly why it was unfunny. “I’m assertive, not aggressive,” she told me. “One is about protecting your own space; the other is about moving into someone else’s.” I accepted the definitions but not the diagnosis. That first week, she stopped me as I went downstairs for lunch. “I’ll join you,” she said. “Let’s eat in the little park.”
We went across the street to a bench, which was in a shady, quiet spot that seemed all the more so after the hot, crowded stretch of road we had to cross to get there. We put our sandwiches out on the table and weighed down napkins with bottles of juice. Afterward, she smoked a cigarette. That first day, we didn’t have what I would call a full conversation. She made observations about the people in the office and I agreed, usually readily. She knew Mortenson was a wolf even before Stacy confessed to her in the women’s bathroom. “He takes her to motels,” she said, “not because he can’t go to her place, but because he kind of gets off on the sleaziness of it. He’s a good judge of character, though. She said she does, too.” Schiff, she held, was a great man. “But the kind of great man no one will ever know. He’s so shy. He turns away from me when I’m talking to him. And to have a man that large turn away? It’s a blow to the ego.” She told me that her life as an artist was, while not temporary, not necessarily permanent. “Not that I’ll ever stop painting, but I have a feeling that later on I might want money, or things that I can get with money. I don’t know how I’ll handle being poor down the line.” She said she enjoyed working in the office, that she imagined that she was ordering the world, or at least giving order to a part of it in a way that might spread outward, like a healthy disease.
The next day at lunch, I was a little bolder, sometimes frowning at things she said, sometimes laughing. The third day, I spoke up. “I remember coming to this park as a kid,” I said. “Fourth of July.”
“Really?” she said. “Me too. I was afraid the fireworks would fall on me, and I hid under that tree over there.”
“Oh, I remember you now,” I said. “The coward.” Insulting her, even in jest, was not an easy thing, but it yielded the desired result. She laughed and moved closer to me on the bench; between us there was a thin band of heat. She had also fallen silent, which was rare, and I had time to study her: the way her clothes, which were always tight, seemed insensible to her dimensions. That night, when I thought back on the day, I felt a thickness in the pit of my stomach. I had a girlfriend back at college, almost, and another girl who was waiting if that didn’t happen. Lisa could have been a summer fling, but she was not a summer fling. Her center of gravity was too low. It was wrong of me to hope for her, because my life was loaded up, and she was not the thing that would, if added, make it lighter.
Still, if I was content not to have her, I also did not want to watch her go elsewhere, and I made a point of keeping our lunch plans at least twice a week. For her part, she clearly felt some displeasure at her own excitement as well, and so she leveled the frame by reminding me of her power at every opportunity. She started to mention a recent ex-boyfriend named Alan and a number of unnamed suitors. There were also accompanying gestures, like reaching up to arrange her hair and, in the process, showing me the undersides of her bare arms before bringing down those arms and folding them across her chest. The whole effect was masterful; she aroused excitement while at the same time foreclosing any possibility of acting on that excitement. Because it was what I wanted, too, it drew us closer together.
“So,” Lisa said at the beginning of the third week, at the end of lunch, as she lit her cigarette. “Good weekend?”
“Not much to speak of,” I said.
“Well, then don’t,” she said, laughing. “I’ll tell you about mine instead. I had a friend in town from college, and we went to a party on Saturday night.”
“A good party?”
“A long party. A leave-at-four-in-the-morning-not-quite-remembering-your-own-name party. We smoked a ton of who knows what. But I wouldn’t say it was good. At the moment, I’m more into peace and quiet. Trying to focus on work.”
“Office work or painting work?”
She tapped out the cigarette. “That’s an interesting question, although you might not know it.”
I scowled at her. “Thanks, I guess.”
“I mean it. People think that because I paint, painting has to come first. But painting is observing, so it always comes second. What comes first is observing: a party, or my family, or this office. Yesterday I was watching how Schiff stands when he’s waiting for the elevator. He bows his head and turns one leg inward, like he’s trying to disappear. How can a big man disappear, really? He’s disrespecting physics. But it’s like he thinks that the elevator ride might be his last, and he’s not sure that he minds the idea.”
“You got all that from watching him for a few minutes?”
“It’s been a few weeks,” she said. “But I’m getting sick of sitting in the beige cage. I want to be able to move around. More to see. Do you think they’ll let me switch to the file room?”
“Hey,” I said. “That’s my job.” I was trying to joke, but my tone was wrong, and it dragged across the smooth surface of the indifference I had spent weeks polishing.
“I’m not trying to take your job,” she said. “I mean to take a few half days a week to help out in there. But I shouldn’t ask you.”
“You shouldn’t,” I said. “Ask Schiff.”
“Not Mortenson?”
“I thought you were observing everything,” I said. “Schiff will just say yes or no. With Mortenson, there’s always a kind of dance.” Telling her who had power was the only power I had.
Soon enough she had joined me in the file room two mornings a week. Schiff visited more than once each morning, and for a little while I was worried that I had miscalculated his interest in her. After all, behind his dolorous façade was a man, and a man would not have been immune to a girl like Lisa. But then his visits stopped, and it occurred to me that maybe his concern had been for me. I could see why. I knew things about the file room that she did not know, but she was a quick study, and by the third or fourth day she was correcting my errors or suggesting ways that work might be organized more efficiently. “A smart person wouldn’t do this,” she said, which made me dislike her a little and, predictably, want her even more. Lisa knew this and did her best to magnify matters. When we were having lunch, she directed her attention—both toward me and away from me, it is true, but she directed it. And I did what you do with direction: I followed it. “What are you doing?” she liked to say to me, no matter whether she had caught me looking or caught me not looking, and the tone was not coy or supportive but rather belligerent. I should have told her I was thinking of other girls, or even that I was thinking of her, or that her system for improving the file room was foolish, but instead I said too much by saying nothing at all. Days before, I had been certain that I wanted her but wouldn’t act on it. Now I was less sure that I wanted her and less sure that I was capable of resisting. I had a clear line to my uncertainty and she was tangling it.
I HAD BEGUN TOYING with the idea that my future might involve, if not exactly writing, the management of written language toward some previously envisioned end, and in that spirit I started to ply Lisa with notes I left on her desk on the mornings when she did not join me in the file room. Most were officious in the extreme, which I intended as a form of modesty: “Ms. Foster,” I’d write, “I hope you do not believe it has escaped my notice that you are filing your nails when you should be filing affidavits.” Or, “I cannot express my disappointment strongly enough, so I will leave it to your evidently prodigious imagination, which you seem to be exercising rather than focusing on work.” In the letters, I was authoritative, presumptuous, even rude.
One evening in the file room, I kissed her. I suppose it was predictable, but that did not make it any less miraculous for me. I credit, at least in part, her car. She drove a Toyota, brown with black vinyl, that baked hot in the afternoon sun, and she refused to leave the office until it had cooled off a bit. Since temperatures were routinely reaching ninety degrees, she was always there past seven, and just as I had gotten used to being the only one in the office late, I grew accustomed to being there late with her. We didn’t always talk—it seemed too intimate—but sometimes I would drop by her desk to ask if she had received “Mr. Tipton’s letter.” One night, she came by the file room, even though she was supposed to be at the desk. She brought a transistor radio and a can of soda. “Care package,” she said.
I did not answer. Or rather, as an answer, I slid my hand along the underside of her arm, closed my grip around her shoulder, and kissed her. She didn’t return the kiss, not exactly, but she didn’t pull away either. It was impossible to tell how she was feeling about the moment, and that was intoxicating to me. We kissed for a long time, and when I reached for the top button of her blouse, she pushed my hand away and unbuttoned it herself. Then she turned off the three long fluorescents that lit the room and backed herself against a wall in such a way that it seemed as though I were pushing her there. I waited for her to hike her skirt until I became aware that she was waiting for me.
Afterward, she excused herself and vanished downstairs to smoke a cigarette. I watched from the window as she puffed small clouds into the parking lot, looked back up to the eleventh floor, gave a wave of her fingers, got in her car, and drove off for home. No time had passed. I went back to filing.
The next morning, she was scheduled to join me in the file room, but she stayed at the beige cage to order office supplies. Once or twice I came out to ask her some minor question, and she answered with a nonchalance that was drenched in significance. She was mine, but not if I wanted her. And she was not mine in the way she had been a day earlier, when I had been secure in her friendship, desirous of more, and well aware of the importance of suppressing those desires. Now what was wanted clouded the air between us. I stayed in the file room, out of everyone’s way, playing the radio a little bit louder than I knew was proper. In late morning, Schiff came into the file room, where he praised my efficiency and spoke to me for a few minutes about some new billing conventions that would affect the way we were accounting time on the Younce case but not the Jarney case. He did not dispense his usual aphoristic wisdom, and its absence was conspicuous. That, I gathered, was the day’s lesson, that sometimes wisdom could abandon a man. I wondered how he knew about me and Lisa.
I wanted her to stay late that night with me. I thought I had wanted things before, but I had been wrong; they were nothing in comparison to this. Instead, she asked me downstairs to sit with her in her car while she smoked. She fidgeted nervously with the lighter and left the cigarette unlit until I said what I thought she wanted me to say, which is that the previous evening had been a mistake, and that we needed to be friends above all, because she was my only real ally at the firm, and that I wished we could go back a day and undo what we had done. She agreed too readily for my tastes, and patted me on the shoulder in a way that precisely erased the kiss. With the situation now defused and her power restored, she offered me a ride home, and though I could have refused out of spite, or what I now can see would have been power, I accepted with a shrug that could not conceal any portion of my excitement.
The car was cooled off by now, and the whole way back we carried on a polite conversation in washed-out colors. The next morning, there were no longer even traces of that forced politeness, just a humiliating normalcy. The subject had been dropped, on account of its weight.
THE KISS HAD AN EFFECT on the rest of our friendship, as I knew it would, but I could not have anticipated exactly what effect. It was as if we had met for a meal and did not have much to say about the food until a second spice was added, at which point we realized that it had covered the flavor that we did not previously know had been there. That first flavor was on my tongue constantly, and I was honor-bound to pretend it was not. She was equally unwilling to admit that anything had occurred, and we stood arm in arm on this dishonest foundation. Mortenson was the first to notice, and he started to call us Ma and Pa. One after-noon, he and Schiff called a meeting to settle up some business before they left the city on a trip. The agenda was brief—order supplies, schedule more interviews—but then Schiff said that he had an announcement. “We’re going to give the two of you just one paycheck,” he said. “We won’t pay you less, but since you’re always together, it’s just easier that way.” Lisa and I could have been offended, but we took it in stride. We were happily inseparable, bound as much by what wasn’t happening as by what was. We were determined not to be dismissed as fools, and that determination was perhaps the most foolish thing of all.
Mortenson had said Ma and Pa, but there in the office, after hours, we were like the king and queen of the place. Sometimes I would stand at Schiff’s window, and she would come up beside me and say, “Get to work.” While I took calls from Schiff and Mortenson and ran into the file room to tell them which judge had presided over a certain case or what date a judgment was rendered, she spent an hour ordering lunch or performing what she called her “Goldilocks test,” in which she sat in a series of chairs until she found the most comfortable. She called the local radio station and asked for her favorite songs to be played. The top drawer of the desk by the beige cage was filled with the Mr. Tipton letters, which carped about her lack of focus and drive; they were heaped in a pile to prove the point. Once, she went missing in the middle of the day; I patrolled the office until I found her in the stairwell, smoking a cigarette. She looked as though she had been crying. And more than once, when we were at work late, she took a glass out of Schiff’s cabinet and filled it with whiskey. “To pleasure,” she said, and then corrected herself. “To a few minutes of freedom.” Her refusal to focus on work didn’t bother me so long as she stayed late with me in our kingdom, but after that first week, she abdicated. She left earlier and earlier, sometimes even when the sun was still out. On those evenings, the office was dull: gray, flat, and silent.
But wonderful things happen in the dullest places. Sitting there in the conference room one night, knocking my foot against one of the legs of the table, I saw a comet streak across the sky. The janitor was the only other one there. He had just finished emptying the wastebaskets in the room. The air conditioner had started to power down for the night, and it was getting warm. I was trying to power down, as well, seeking what I would have described as peace, though I have realized as I have grown older that it is closer to humility. Just then, in the corner of the window, I saw what looked like a star moving.
I motioned to the janitor, asked him to verify what I was seeing. The comet moved more slowly, and it was larger to my eye than I would have expected. It passed behind a tree and reappeared. Now it was in the dead middle of the window, perfectly positioned to make a statement, and it flared brilliantly, like a piece of music, and vanished. “That was something,” he said.
I went immediately to Schiff’s office and dialed Lisa’s number. This violated one of our unspoken rules, that when one of us was at home, the other did not intrude. “There was a shooting star, and it was huge,” I said, throwing something extra into my tone to excuse myself. “It almost went all the way across the window.”
“You’re still at the office?”
I went for broke. “Yeah. I could come over.”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“Well, then, you could stay late tomorrow.”
“Good night, Jim,” she said, but not unkindly, and she lowered the phone and then raised it again. “Ask me again one of these days,” she said. Her tone gave enough away that I did not need to take the chance the next day, or the day after that. We kissed once in the stairwell, and once out by her car, and once when she was driving me home she stopped the car, got out, and let me press her up against the driver’s side door. She said only my name, which almost made me forget myself.
SCHIFF AND MORTENSON HAD enjoyed some success with their trips and so they made more of them. That meant time for me and Lisa, but also an awareness that there was never enough time. They were always back too soon for my tastes, Mortenson in particular. He liked to look at Lisa, and though I could not blame him for that, I started to worry that he was looking not out of interest but with a professional eye. She was not, as I have said, working very hard, and a good manager could have put her right out of the office. That would have been worse for me than if I was fired directly.
Cases shifted and settled through June, and by the end of the month one in particular had moved to the front of the pack: the shooting in a motel complex in Georgia of a college football star. The young man, Lorenzo Francis, was staying at the motel with his girlfriend. When an off-duty policeman who was also a motel guest saw what he thought was a drug transaction, he confronted the football player, who denied the accusation. After a scuffle, shots were fired, and Francis was hit by two bullets, one of which severed his spine and left him paralyzed. The officer remembered an attempted flight across a courtyard, but Schiff and Mortenson meant to show that the angle at which the bullet entered the body disproved this story, particularly with regard to location—in short, that he could not have been where he said he was when the shot was fired. To demonstrate this, they planned to use a model of the apartment complex.
This seemed like an opportunity for me to help myself. I went in to see Mortenson. “You need a model built?” I said.
“That’s the word on the street,” he said.
“You should ask Lisa,” I said.
“Lisa?” He said the name as if he had not thought of her for days.
“Not to make it,” I said, rushing forward. “I mean, maybe. But you should ask her because she takes architecture classes and I’m sure she knows people.”
“That’s a good idea,” he said. When he turned, I saw a phone number on the paper. It was hers. He was already planning on calling. I did not even know if he was going to give me credit for the idea. I had parleyed and gained nothing.
Lisa went directly in to speak to Mortenson. I sat outside at her desk. I tried to see the office from her perspective, but it was difficult, since I could see her in the scene. Mortenson laughed and rubbed his bald head. She sat down and made her case: an architecture student would benefit the firm in this regard. A model was precisely what a student was trained to produce. She knew good people. Whatever they paid for the model, could they pay her as well for organizing it? There was something in her expression that was so strong it was almost a scent. Mortenson laughed again, and I had the sudden sense that it was all beyond me.
Mortenson buzzed the desk and asked me in. I entered the conference room and stood there wrapped in the sense that I had intruded. “There’s one guy I think would be especially good,” Lisa said. “His name is Jeff. I don’t know him all that well, but he’s the best model-builder in the class. He could do cutaway views, maybe even put some little lightbulbs in to show where the different people were. He has little kids and he’s always talking about how he needs more money. I think he’d do it for cheap.”
“Hi, there,” Mortenson said to me. And to Lisa: “Lightbulbs. That’s a great idea.” And back to me: “Do you need her for something?”
“Something’s wrong with the printer,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be right there.” She was quick to the door.
JEFF LELAND WORE HIGH-TOP SNEAKERS and a sweatshirt and his hair was held back in a ponytail. He sat so nervously that he should have stood: he jiggled his knee, fretted his wedding ring. I went to get him. “Hello,” I said.
“Hi,” he said. “Jeff. You must be Jim.” I didn’t like the way he said my name, or even his own. He was too easy by half, and that intimidated me. Now it seems comical, to have been intimidated by a man who was at most twenty-four or twenty-five.
“Follow me,” I said. “Mr. Schiff and Mr. Mortenson are waiting.”
I dropped Leland off. As I was leaving, Schiff called to me. “Stay,” he said. I listened with professional interest, possibly for the first time in my life, as Schiff and Mortenson explained the case. The next day, when I told Lisa about the conversation, I found that I could replay a few notes but not reproduce the whole tune. Mortenson had drawn Jeff in by talking about his outfit. “Say that the cops see a guy dressed like you,” he said, “and they assume he’s up to no good. Is that just cause? And assume that this guy, the guy dressed like you, takes off at a clip, because he’s afraid of what’s going to happen to him, to his girlfriend. Do the cops call out to him? Do they order him to stop? Or do they just draw their weapons and fire at this guy who’s like you?”
Schiff seemed disappointed that Mortenson would not bring himself to the facts. “But not just like him. Black. Let’s not forget that. White officers.”
“Right,” Mortenson said. “Young guy. Black guy. Prime of his youth. Suddenly, his life as he knows it is over.”
“He’s not the jury,” Schiff said.
“He might be,” Mortenson said. “Or someone just like him.”
“We just need you to make a model,” Schiff said. “To show us how the apartment complex is laid out, to help us help a jury decide whether or not a man could have jumped from the landing to the middle of a stairwell without injuring himself.”
“So what’s the procedure?”
“Procedure’s a grand way of saying it. We send you up there to that same motel. You stay there. You spend your time taking photographs and measuring, and then you make us a scale model of the place.”
“How long will it take?”
Schiff paused judgmentally. “As long as you need for it to take.” He turned to me. “Do you think he’s up to the job?”
“He asked you that?” Lisa said as I told her the story.
“He did,” I said.
“And what did you say?”
I was silent, just as I had been in the meeting. Lisa fell silent, too, and her face grew very serious, as a joke, and soon we were both too deep in the silence, and neither of us felt like smiling.
JEFF TOOK THE TRIP to make the model. Lisa called in sick while he was away. “I’m nervous,” she said. “Maybe I gave them a bum steer.” I told her she had nothing to worry about, secretly hoping I might be wrong. A week after Jeff returned, he brought in his model. He dropped it off, shaking hands with Schiff and Mortenson, and left without saying hello to either me or Lisa.
When I went into the conference room, Schiff and Mortenson were standing next to the model. “Do you notice anything about this?” Mortenson said.
I did: it was beautiful, but it was not big enough to be seen clearly in court. “No,” I said.
“Artists,” Schiff said, “always prefer injustice to justice, whether they know it or not.”
“He even put little handrails next to the stairwells,” I said, trying to praise everything that was wrong about it.
Mortenson stood and came around the table. “The thing is, it proves our point.” One of his fingers stabbed down into the courtyard. “There were echoes when the cop yelled. The sound bounced from place to place, repeating itself, but also erasing the first noise. There was no way for Francis to know where to look. He never had a chance.” He shook his head with effort. “I’m sorry this kid screwed up the model. It may cost us a victory.”
That night, Lisa agreed to drive me home. “I just don’t understand,” she said.
“What don’t you understand? He botched it.”
“There’s no way to salvage it?” Her tone was pained. “I feel like I’m on the line.” That night, trying hard not to help Jeff, I helped Lisa. I knew how to rescue the model, and came in early the next morning to explain the solution to Mortenson. He was instantly alive with the idea. “We put a camera right up against the model and give the jury a projection? This could work. This could work. Beautiful.”
We took it to Schiff, who was in the conference room with the model. “I don’t think it works,” he said. “I think it’s wrong to take to a jury.”
“What do you mean?”
He wasn’t the sort of man who was accustomed to explaining himself, but it was not for lack of skill. “It’s just wrong. Putting a little camera in there and projecting the image on a screen would turn it into a show. The jury will feel it was made with a kind of pleasure, and that’s the wrong message to send.”
“I disagree,” Mortenson said. “I think it’s great.”
“Do you talk so much so that you don’t have to listen to me,” Schiff said, “or to yourself?”
Ordinarily, Mortenson would have returned fire, and the volley would have gone on. But he just picked up the model and walked past Schiff silently. To ignore him outright was one of the most final things he could have done.
I WAS GLAD I HAD NO GRASP of the practical details of my plan, because it gave me a justification for involving Lisa again. She was good with those kinds of things, and she helped rig the camera and test the projection. The effect, the white model on the white screen, was both alienating and intimate. Mortenson was immensely pleased.
But Schiff was right. Schiff was always right. Whatever magic there had been in the idea—and in the office there had been a considerable amount—came off as legerdemain in the courtroom. I did not know this firsthand. I did not go to court. I could tell from the stormy look on Mortenson’s face as he entered the office the day of the verdict. Schiff followed, triumphantly defeated. They had Stacy cut a check to Jeff and send it off and that was the last of him. Lisa began to work hard again in all things, convinced that she needed to prove her worth again. She also began to allow me more latitude in romantic matters, but it was the concession of a defeated woman. I accepted it nonetheless.
Over the next few weeks, Schiff and Mortenson grew apart. Lisa noticed first, and reported the breach in an aggrieved tone. I nodded sadly. But perpetrators always think of victims: though Lisa had suggested Jeff, I had suggested Lisa, and when Jeff had failed the first time, I had rescued him so that he could fail a second time, more profoundly, and by doing so bring down the entire house. I knew that Lisa would figure this out soon enough, and that when she did, she would be gone.
It took a week. One Thursday night we were in her car, doing what we always did, when she announced that she felt something missing. “Is it your blouse?” I said. She laughed and drew close to me, but in drawing close she pulled away for good. She was giving me a farewell gift. The next evening, she left early. “I’m going out with friends,” she said. “See you Monday.” It put me in a black mood that permitted me to see everything else all the clearer, as a man in a darkened room at night has full vantage of the sky outside.
My situation, at any rate, was trivial compared to what happened to that little world I had inhabited. It had been teetering, I now saw, and before I could truly understand what that meant, it fell. Schiff and Mortenson were through with each other. It happened very quickly: one shouting match in the conference room in which the model was mentioned as proof of incompetence, withdrawn, and then thrust forward again with a stabbing motion. Mortenson stormed out and did not return, not the next day or the day after that. When he did, it was with a stack of papers that he said were for the purpose of dissolving the partnership. None of us could believe it, and we believed it less when they began to sign the documents. Schiff’s signature on top, Mortenson’s on the bottom: It was difficult to understand this togetherness in the service of separation.
Mortenson was the one who left, which was predictable. He was mobile. In fact, he could not stop moving, and the minute he was gone it seemed like a small miracle that he had ever been there at all. Schiff never regained his balance, morally speaking. After he parted ways with Mortenson, he became sullen and capricious. He would not come out of his house except to go to his office, and vice versa. Two weeks after Mortenson’s departure, Lisa left to return to school. That was how my summer ended, and how the things in it ended, too. I went back to school. I graduated, aged, did my best not to let time do its worst to me. I wrote Lisa one long letter that I never mailed and eventually threw away, keeping only the envelope, which was addressed to her but not stamped. Years later, I drove by the building, checked the nameplate, relived that summer. Then I returned the car to the airport and flew back home.
ABOUT FOUR MONTHS AFTER my visit to Florida, I was traveling by train to my sister’s home in Delaware, and as we pulled out of the Philadelphia station, I looked up and saw Lisa standing in the aisle. I had already experienced a sense of displacement, thanks to a young man I had seen when I was boarding the train. His hair was uneven to the left, as if put to the side by an idea, but other than that he was exactly what I was at that age. I put up my bag. I sat down, read a little bit of history, looked up, and Lisa was there.
We were in our fifties by then. Or rather, I should say that I saw with a start that she was, and I realized that I must be, too. I debated whether to reach out and tap her on the hip, and when I realized that the only thing deterring me was the idea that the gesture might be perceived as flirtatious, that was enough to push me forward. She turned and smiled even before she saw who it was. Then her smile vanished and returned, somewhat dimmed and thus more powerful. She sat down next to me. I tried to see her as she was, hopeful that it would help her see me as I was. Can a man be happy in memory or only lonely?
We had a grand old time, looking out the windows until night fell and making light of what we saw. After that we traded stories about the lives we had lived, and those we had failed to live. She had married a man who owned a small lumber company. The two of them had been through good years and bad years. They had two children who gave them equal parts joy and trouble. “I’m happy, but like everyone, I didn’t do nearly what I wanted to do,” she said. She did not, despite her story, look like a woman who had made sacrifices.
For my part, I told her that my first wife had been a poet, by which I meant an heiress, and that the union had ended badly, and that I had spent quite a bit of time living the bachelor’s life before eventually finding a second wife. “No children,” I said. “That’s maybe the one abiding regret.” We got, after a time, on to the matter of the office. I told her about my recent visit. “Same little building,” I said. She asked me if I had heard that both Schiff and Mortenson had died. I said no but that I had assumed so. We sat in silence for a little while. She hummed, and I tried to recall her as a younger woman, when her papery skin was a pliant pink and the clothes she wore suggested their own absence.
“I remember that summer so well,” she said. “Do you?”
“A little,” I said, lying.
“Remember Jeff?” she said. I nodded. Now she was back in the past with me, or more accurately without me. “We had such a wonderful trip that week. I’m afraid I didn’t let him work on the model even for a minute.” She smiled at me. “You and I had quite a discussion about it, if I remember correctly.”
We had not, of course, at least as far as I remembered. And I would have remembered. Still, it didn’t surprise me; I may have suspected as much at the time, and by now I was far past being harmed even by confirmation. Still, and despite all the wisdom I believed I had acquired, I was overcome by a sense that all the time since had been miserably misspent, and that fear propelled me up from my seat.
“I could use something to wet my whistle,” I said.
“Wet mine while you’re there,” she said, laughing. Her eyes went up coyly, as if she were a much younger woman.
I went off to the dining car. At the far end I noticed the young man I had seen boarding the train, the junior version of me. He was pushed up close to a young woman, speaking animatedly. “I don’t know how you feel about me, exactly,” he said. “You don’t say.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t say.”
His head bowed in sadness. He was better than me at being me, right down to the failures.
I walked farther down the train, bought two small bottles of gin, and walked back up the train, and Lisa and I poured ourselves drinks and came back to the past. She had given me a story and so I gave her one in return. At forty I had thought I would remarry, but I lost the woman I loved—not to another man but to illness. At forty-five, I thought I would never remarry. At fifty, I met a woman in a downtown bar. I was with a man who fancied himself a poet. She was a dancer twenty years my junior, so beautiful she made me feel both too old and too young. I drank too much, as I always did in those days—“how else to ascend / the twin peaks of Truth and That Which Could Not Be Said?” as the poet had it—and I treated Mary, for that was her name, to a recitation that, I am ashamed to report, contained a rather lavish description of her physical charms. “It was as if my entire personality had its shirttails out,” I said.
“And how did she respond?”
“She married me,” I said. I put a twinkle in my eye.
“Wonderful,” she said. “Just wonderful.” She settled back into her seat. The train clacked along. I felt guilty for having lied. Or rather, for having told the truth without telling the whole truth. Mary was the kind of woman who was easily mortified. She had a distaste for confessionals, outsized announcements, and any other type of behavior in which decorum fell under the wheel. That day she had looked at me with dread and left the bar. She married me, but only after nine months of silence, and nine more months of begrudgingly cordial conversation. I was not restored to anything approaching amity until we had spent a chaste summer in the company of some friends on the Cape. Then came the romance, and the rigors, and the loss, and the retrenchment, and the courtship, and the comedy, and the declarations (mine) and the withdrawal (hers) and the reiteration of the declarations and the marriage.
I did not explain any of those things to Lisa. The past cannot learn from the present, no matter how much it aspires to. As we neared Delaware, I let the string of the conversation out to her. She was funny on the matter of her children, one of whom was adopted. She told me about vacationing out west when they were young and how the boys invented a game called “square-ball.” I helped her stand when the train came into the station. Her arm was frail beneath my fingers. Time had taken its toll on the young bodies we remembered using for disreputable ends.