The Book of Jonah (19 page)

But rather than the reassurance Jonah had expected to take from these reflections, he instead felt an uneasy correspondence between these thoughts and his conversation with Danny; between himself and the man in the picture. But it was a darting, nebulous feeling, he couldn't pin it down and finally didn't want to. He closed the report. He was seeing secrets everywhere today, he thought.

There was a brief knock on his door and Doug Chen walked in, as usual polished to immaculate tidiness. Evidently, Dolores was not at her desk; evidently, he had not been grated absolution after all. The good news was that Doug Chen had come upon him in a suit, clearly at work on BBEC. The bad news was he had a cigarette in his hand.

Doug Chen crinkled his nose in cartoonish repulsion. “Smoking is a workplace health liability,” he stated, with the authority of one quoting gospel.

Jonah looked at the cigarette in his hand, considering all manner of excuses, justifications—decided if he was going to lie, he might as well go for a Hail Mary. “It's unusual circumstances,” he said. “My girlfriend walked out on me. Apparently I work too much. There goes three years and ten thousand dollars of jewelry, but at least I can celebrate my new freedom.” And he held up the cigarette.

As lies go, it was not terribly sophisticated, but his instinct had been that someone who liked strip clubs so much might be a misogynist, and apparently he was right, because Doug Chen nodded in dispassionate acknowledgment—as close to sympathy as he probably got. “Those who don't work rarely understand what is required of those who do.”

“I know what you mean,” Jonah lied again. “Still, I apologize.” He put out his cigarette.

“I am flying to Washington this afternoon to prepare a client for congressional testimony. This was unexpected, and unfortunately it is necessary to cancel our meeting scheduled later today.” He made a small but precise gesture of his hand toward the BBEC files. “Do you understand the tack we are taking?”

“I wouldn't want to be a Dyomax attorney.”

Doug Chen observed Jonah for a moment and then said, “On Tuesday, the twenty-fourth, there will be a meeting of BBEC in-house counsel in Los Angeles. I will be going to California ahead of that meeting with Kevin Phillips and Frank Chapman. I believe it would be helpful for you to join us on the flight, as we will be discussing general strategy.”

Jonah had learned from the files that Kevin Phillips and Frank Chapman were the Chief Legal Officer and the CEO, respectively, of BBEC. “I'll ask Dolores to get the specifics from your assistant and have her book my ticket,” said Jonah.

“That will not be necessary,” Doug Chen told him. “We will leave from the office Monday and fly on the BBEC corporate jet.” He said this as though flying on a private jet were as routine as taking the express train from 14th Street.

Jonah managed to nod with parallel equanimity. “Sounds good,” he said.

“I will be back from Washington on Thursday. We will start preparations then and through the weekend. Give some thought to any additional associate support you might need.”

“Absolutely.”

Then, with no visible alteration in mood or mind, Doug Chen added, “Gifts of jewelry rarely bring a satisfactory return on investment.” He left and shut the door silently.

Jonah stared at the closed door for a moment—and then began to laugh: at the absurdity of this last statement, and more—at how well his career was suddenly going. Something in his work must have impressed someone in the upper echelons of the Cunningham Wolf hierarchy—Doug Chen or Aja Puvvada or someone even higher up than that. And the greatest irony of all was how poor his work performance had been for the last several days. It was a joke, really: He'd been scrambling all afternoon after sleeping through the morning and the whole previous day, and now he would be taking the BBEC private jet with the BBEC CEO, picking the associates who would report to him.

He realized: He was going to make partner. He'd known—he'd assumed—but it now attained some greater form of certainty in his mind. He really would ride on private jets, become a millionaire, accomplish what he'd spent so many years trying to accomplish—after all. “Those who don't work rarely understand what's asked of those who do, Doug?” he said, laughing. “You don't know the half of it.” He felt so triumphant, so relieved and obliquely grateful, that he laughed almost to the edge of tears.

When this laughter finally abated, it was with a kind of generosity of spirit that he reopened the Dyomax annual report—looked again at the picture of Dale Compstock. Sure, he could acknowledge that he was sorry for him, in some abstract way. It was his turn to lose. But sooner or later everyone took that turn, and losing might only inspire him to start another biotech and maybe this time to do the stealing instead of being stolen from—and to hire better lawyers.

Jonah leaned back in his chair, and decided to celebrate his latest success by smoking another cigarette. It was too bad he'd gotten addicted all over again, but that only meant he'd have to do the work of quitting all over again. He'd done it once, he could do it again. This cigarette, he decided, would be his last.

Now that he had days instead of hours to finish reading over the BBEC files, he found it harder to sustain the motivation to continue plowing through the thousands of pages of documents. He looked at the clock on his phone: It was almost four. He decided to have another cup of coffee. He took the Vassar mug on his desk and walked out of his office. Dolores was still not at her desk—was either at a late lunch or simply not doing her job. He smiled at this, though—identified something amusingly ironic in the fact that even as he ascended the Cunningham Wolf ladder, Dolores's performance only declined. In any case, as a partner he would have an assistant who would never turn apostate on him.

To reach the kitchen and the coffeemaker, he had to walk down a corridor bordered on one side by ten-foot-high filing cabinets and on the other by a hive of cubicles. As he turned down this corridor, he saw a naked man pull open a drawer and lean scowlingly forward to examine its contents. The man stood in perfect silhouette to Jonah—such that Jonah could follow the line of bare skin from the man's neck down his shoulder and curved back and rib cage to his waist—ass and dick—thighs, calves, feet. Jonah's first thought was that the i-bankers had taken their bonus ritual to the Cunningham Wolf floors, but when he turned his head he saw that all the cubicles, the passages between them, the corridors beyond and the office doorways were all filled with naked people: naked lawyers, assistants, paralegals, associates, and yes, partners—all working with no attention to their nudity. A fifty-ish bald securities lawyer scrunched his paunch into folds as he slouched at his desk, holding a phone against his ear with his hairy hand; the long, narrow breasts of an M&A attorney dangled from her chest, flapped gently against one another as she took a phone from her tan-armed and pale-chested colleague. Two lawyers from Jonah's summer associate class, Steve Weisman and Rich Cameron, despite the exposure and nearness of naked genitals—circumcised and uncircumcised, respectively—sipped steaming hot coffee as they nodded seriously to each other. Everywhere Jonah looked: Folders were tucked into the hairy bend of armpits, belly buttons pressed into the edges of desks, arm flesh shook as fingers typed, legs were folded across pubic hair—asses spread doughlike against nylon seats and skin was squeezed wafflelike into the mesh of chair backs.

“Can you do a five o'clock TC with Scott and the LJP team?” asked Veronica Snyder, a petite redheaded lawyer with an arc of moles and freckles across her chest and small dark areolae capping her breasts like tiny yarmulkes.

Without answering Jonah headed to the elevator, which had provided escape from the last vision. But as the doors opened he saw that the janitor inside was naked, too—short, Indian, with little tufts of white hair above his ears and a kind face and his chest had an almost perpendicular slope starting at the nipples and everything else was luckily hidden by the four-foot trash bin he had before him. Jonah got on and pushed L and stared at the floor. But the elevator floor was tile polished to reflection, and as the janitor walked off Jonah saw the mirrored image of the V-shaped sagging of the flesh of his back, a vitiligo-white splash across his right calf—he caught a glimpse—brief but long enough—of the underneath of the man's ball sack and his perineum.

Once, Zoey had mentioned to Jonah that when she walked down the street in New York, she always felt she was the only person heading in whatever direction she was going—that every other person on the sidewalk was coming toward her. This was in the early, halcyon days of their relationship; the comment had struck Jonah as both very revealing (about Zoey's psychology) and very insightful (about New York's)—and it had the effect of pushing him even deeper into love with her—love for Zoey in those days being the only thing he seemed interested in feeling. Those days were long since over, of course—but whenever he observed this sidewalk phenomenon himself, he always thought of her, fondly. It was not, he didn't believe, that New York necessarily made you feel isolated—though it often did—but rather that New Yorkers always walked with decided purpose: with a great belief in the importance of getting wherever they were going. When you stood in the way of such people, you inevitably noticed them more than the people walking beside you, behind you. Very often, too—they were the people between you and the very important place that you had to go.

So as Jonah stepped onto the sidewalk and was confronted with a crowd of naked pedestrians moving toward him, he thought bleakly of Zoey—with a pang of nostalgia for better, simpler, more prosaic times. He was then swept up in a wave of masses and stretches and gatherings of flesh—juxtaposed against one another in size and shape and tint—a great farraginous jumble of white arms and darker arms, a leg here, naked arms there pushing a stroller and a naked toddler—a stomach across which black hair crept like a weed over unearthly soil. He started forward in what was his best guess as to the direction of home. Wasn't this a fantasy? he asked himself—being able to see any person he wanted naked? But that fantasy proved a very different proposition from having to see every person naked: the nude street vendor whose shoulders contorted as he fished with tongs for a hot dog in steaming water—the protruding bumps of spine of a nude delivery man, tracing an arc toward a dropped quarter. When he did see young women, attractive women, something in the profusion, in the lack of awareness of their nakedness altered it—made the tautness of stomachs, the fullness of breasts, the firmness of thighs and coils of pubic hair more a simple fact of their bodies than features to be admired by him. Whatever might be attractive, erotic in a particular body was lost in the general wash of bodies—the commonality of all the bodies around him: all things soft, all things pendulous. He saw in it something terribly sad—because this was how these people were. Only the thinnest stretches of fabric hid them, protected them from this. Beneath the clothes of every New Yorker, beneath their job and title and urgent reason for being on the sidewalk—was a naked human being: and him, too—

And Jonah found it heartbreaking.

6.
TREMENDOUS PROMISE

One late August Sunday before Judith's senior year of high school, she and her parents went to see a movie at the independent theater that had recently opened in the center of town. It was already dark out by the time the movie was over—the evening air “more fall than summer,” Hannah, Judith's mother, commented. They walked across the town common to a Chinese restaurant they often ate at, shared vegetable lo mein, chicken with broccoli, steamed dumplings—their usual order. Then they drove home—David, Judith's father, letting her drive the new Saab he had just bought. Back at the house, Judith's parents settled in the living room: Hannah sitting on the couch with the galleys of an anthology of twentieth-century women's poetry she had edited; David answering emails on his laptop, typing with two fingers, every now and then asking his wife a question of phrasing or tact. Judith put a James Taylor CD on the stereo, took her copy of the Sunday
New York Times
crossword puzzle (all three of them liked to do the Sunday crossword, so they got three copies of the paper delivered to the house on weekends), and lay down on the living room floor, knees bent and ankles crossed in the air, occasionally tapping her pen lightly against her nose in absent contentment as she made her way through the puzzle. At one point she looked up to see her father watching her.

“What is it?” she asked him.

“Just taking mental pictures,” he told her, smiled a little wanly, glanced at his wife, and went back to typing. College—the great trauma of American family life—was fast approaching.

Judith had already taken her SATs and SAT subject tests, half a dozen AP courses and exams. She had exhausted Gustav's course offerings in French, and so had arranged an independent study with a professor at the college where her parents taught. That summer, she had spent six weeks at a program for high school students at Yale.

This last experience had cinched her decision to apply there early. She had been leaning in that direction, anyway—it was where Hannah had gone as an undergraduate—but mounting the steps of templelike Sterling Library, feeling, not unrealistically, that as she crossed its threshold she was entering the presence of the most accomplished, the most distinguished, the most promising minds in the country, stirred her zealotry pleasantly. And as she walked beneath the vaulted ceiling of the reading room, light pouring through great traceried windows onto rows of tables filled with students bent over notepads and laptops, flanked by stacks of books—she concluded that this was where she belonged.

The application was a team effort. In a detail that would seem to her in later years touchingly anachronistic, they had to use a typewriter to fill it out: set up on the dining room table the old Olympia SM9 on which Hannah had written her dissertation, spread out around it all the forms and essays and recommendations and transcripts. Slowly, they assembled Judith's entire academic life—which represented more or less her entire life—in a single envelope. Then they “sealed it with a kiss,” as David said—and sent it off to New Haven.