The Book of Jonah (27 page)

For the third time in as many minutes, Sylvia called. It was reasonable to think she might be worried about him. It was reasonable for him not to do any more harm than he'd already done. And when all else failed—and all else did seem to have failed at this point—he could at least try not to make things worse.

“Hey,” he said into the phone.

“Jonah, Jesus,” she said, distressed. “Where have you been?”

“Working. Out. I don't know.”

“But you'll be at Corcoran in twenty minutes, right? I'm in a cab from LaGuardia now.”

“Look, Syl…” But he didn't know how to finish this sentence.

“Do not tell me you won't be there, Jonah, do not say that to me.” There was an unfamiliar commingling of worry and anger in her voice—strained in a desperate way. “I canceled a meeting with the president of the Bank of China and the finance minister of Angola for this.” The fact that she had divulged the players in the deal she was working on was more striking to him than their titles: It meant that much to her. And why shouldn't he live for other people? It seemed he was no longer permitted to live for himself.

“I'm heading downstairs to get in a cab,” he told her.

He allowed himself time to change his clothes—knew as he walked out his apartment door he ought to have said something about being late so he could have showered and shaved, too. But what difference did it make anymore? At least he could get there on time, for her.

He actually ended up arriving before she did. He was led by a receptionist into a conference room decorated with framed maps of New York at various stages of its history, with a long table where Brett sat waiting. He was stapling the lease with an electric stapler as Jonah walked in. “Jonah!” he said, predictably upbeat. “Great to see you.” Something in Brett's sunniness exhausted Jonah all the more. He let himself drop into a swivel chair on the other side of the table. “Jonah, how are you?” Brett now asked, his voice taking on tones of tremendously sincere concern. He probably should have showered, Jonah concluded. “Did you get any sleep last night? Did you call Guru Phil? I promise you, he will put you in touch with the universal.”

Jonah rubbed his forehead with the heels of his hands, effecting minor, momentary relief of his headache. “I don't need a guru for that, Brett,” he said. “When the universal has something to say to me, it comes down and kicks me in the balls.”

“Exactly,” Brett said. “Exactly! It sounds like you've had an epiphany.”

“That's the least of what I had…”

“You know how I felt when Lehman closed?”

“Like you'd been kicked in the balls?”

“Like I'd been kicked in the balls.”

Jonah lifted his face and looked at Brett—smiling encouragingly and as if he knew exactly what Jonah was going through and that it was all no big deal. It was the sanctimony, he decided, that he couldn't stand. “Y'know, Brett, you did help trigger a global economic collapse, so maybe you deserved to get kicked in the balls.”

Brett nodded assentingly. “Maybe so, Jonah, maybe so. But what matters is what we do with that kick. Where does that kick take you? I know where it took me.”

Clearly, Brett's sunniness was not to be defeated, no more than Jonah's blackness. “Can we talk about something else?” he muttered, rubbing his forehead again.

“Sure,” Brett agreed. “Take a look at that map,” he said, indicating one on the wall near where Jonah sat. It was hand drawn, black and white, titled “New Amsterdam, 1660,” and portrayed the tip of Manhattan as a modest collection of docks and farmland, with little penciled ships sailing off the coast. “Most New Yorkers don't appreciate the maritime history of the city, but you have to remember that this was a port city, first and foremost, for almost all of its existence. Now, what is really interesting to me is that you're starting to see that nautical flavor in the architecture in a lot of the newest developments in—”

“Sorry, sorry,” Sylvia said, hurrying into the room. “I had one of those cab drivers who can't drive.” She had her impressively sufficient day bag with her, looked well put together, as always—in a tan jacket and skirt and a pale-blue shirt, ironed and collar straight, heels on her feet, her hair organized in its bob with military precision. Then Jonah did have an epiphany: He was going to live with this woman. She must have caught something in his look, because she returned it with a puzzled frown, which deepened as she took in his appearance. She sat down next to him.

“So let's get started,” Brett said. He slid the lease across the table. Sylvia seemed to wait for Jonah to take it—which surprised him until he remembered that, oh, right, he was a lawyer. After another moment when he didn't pick it up, Sylvia started to read it herself. “There's nothing exotic in there,” Brett said as she read. “It's a boilerplate Manhattan lease. Termination fees, pet restrictions, liability limits. Once you sign, the owner will countersign, and I'll FedEx you both a copy, hopefully by tomorrow afternoon. Your move-in date is September first, but your payment today of first month, last month, and security deposit will cover you until October first. You remembered to bring your checkbooks?”

Sylvia nodded—glanced at Jonah. Under the circumstances, he could hardly be blamed for forgetting this detail. Sylvia said to Brett, “I'll write our check for the full amount.”

“That works for us,” said Brett.

“Jonah, do you want to take a look at this?” Sylvia asked him. She held out the lease. He glanced at it and looked into her face. He'd been avoiding this—her perplexed, frustrated, anxious eyes. He looked away.

Brett patted at the pockets of his pants and said, “You know what, guys? I forgot a pen. I'll go get one.” He stood up and left. Jonah had to give him credit: Sanctimonious or not, Brett was incredibly tactful.

Jonah was expecting an immediate, no-holds-barred tongue lashing, but instead Sylvia turned toward him in her chair and said in a concerned way, “Talk to me, Jonah.”

“I've had—I don't know, Syl.”

“I know it's been hard with me gone. You think I don't miss you, too?”

He looked at her again: Her face was more worried now—supportive. Yes, he thought, he could live with this woman. “I think I've been working too much,” he said quickly. “I've been stressed and I've been, drinking and shit.”

“I can smell it on you, Jonah.”

“But you know that is not who I am.”

“Yes, I know,” she answered.

“And I can—I can be what you want me to be, I think, if we work together.”

She took his hand, squeezed it in hers. “Look, don't get mad,” she said. “I was talking to Emily about, well, our problems. She and her husband had some marital problems, too, and they saw a counselor, in Chappaqua, and from what she said … I think he could really help us, Jonah.”

Sylvia's father was an alcoholic—a mean-spirited, misogynistic piece of shit Jonah had met once and had no interest in ever meeting again. He'd made Sylvia and her mother and her two younger sisters as miserable as he could, short of doing anything strictly illegal. Sylvia had fled to boarding schools, to Harvard, to New York and Wells Fargo and then Ellis–Michaels. How hard it must have been for her to come into this room on this day and find him in this state. Was that the message of all he had been put through? That he was a piece of shit, too, just like Sylvia's father? Fine, he thought, he got it. He would change. “We'll see that counselor in Chappaqua,” he said—and as he pronounced the words, he felt an incredible upsurge of hope and optimism. Yes, he thought, the counselor in Chappaqua! “We'll go five times a week if we have to.”

“We will get through this, and we will start making our life together,” she told him. She kissed him, put her hand on his heart. At that moment Brett returned. Jonah concluded that either there were cameras in the room or Brett's sense of timing was impeccable. Either way, this man really had to be the greatest broker in the city. He seated himself again, straight-backed and formal, giving the occasion the ceremony he must have believed it deserved—handed Sylvia a black uni-ball Vision pen (Micro).

Sylvia opened the lease and, still holding Jonah's hand, signed her name. Then she slid the papers and the pen to Jonah. “Sylvia J. Quinn,” she had written. Jonah lifted the pen. There was a thin black line where he was meant to sign—and above it a blank space.

He glanced to the neat loops of Sylvia's name. He found himself staring at her middle initial. Her first and last names she'd written in cursive, but the
J.
was done in simple print. And he'd never seen her include it in her signature before: not on any check, or letter, or anything else he'd seen her sign. There was something so touching in its presence now—something so honest and forthright—as if in this tiny upward-reaching hatted letter were encapsulated all her hopes for them, her allegiance to him—her wish for a home together on Bond Street. Only when he saw that letter did he understand how badly she wanted a home.

“I cheated,” he said. He wasn't looking at her, at anyone, was still looking at her signature in black ink, the vast empty space beside it, above the line where his was meant to be. There was silence in the room. Apparently, not even Brett was tactful enough for this.

“Who?” she finally asked.

“Zoey.”

“How long?”

“Months.”

“You are so stupid,” she said simply. “You are so, so stupid.” She sighed audibly. Then she picked up the electric stapler on the table and slammed it against Jonah's face. “You are so fucking stupid!” she screamed as he nearly tumbled over in his chair. She threw the stapler on the table and it exploded apart in a cloud of staples, Brett shielding his eyes. She took her bag and left the room.

There was something exquisite, something tremendously sheer or total in the pain in Jonah's face. She had hit him squarely in the nose—he reached up tentatively to it, and as his fingers brushed its tip, his entire field of vision was swallowed in searing white pain. When he looked at his fingers, there were droplets of blood on them.

“Okay,” Brett said. “Let's all stay calm.” He was on his feet, very pale, arms raising and lowering at the elbow, like a drama student gesticulating through a high school play.

Jonah knew his nose was broken.

*   *   *

Brett wasn't much use after that. He kept insisting on the need for calm, then finally had to sit down with his head between his knees. From this position, he revealed that he always got light-headed at the sight of blood. The most helpful person was the receptionist who had led Jonah into the room. She had a couple of semesters of nursing school, she told him, and she examined his nose in a professional manner and confirmed that yes, it was broken, and yes, he would need to go to the hospital. Soon after that, a manager appeared with some sort of waiver for Jonah to sign. But Jonah remained sufficiently conscious of being a lawyer to refuse to sign anything while bleeding from the face—though in a different mood he might have assured the manager that it would be difficult to build a tort case around the presence of a stapler. The manager took his refusal to sign angrily and then said something rude to Brett—whom Jonah had acquired a strange fondness for—and when Jonah told the manager that he should stop being a dick to his employees, he was asked to leave the Corcoran premises. Before Jonah went out, the receptionist handed him a frozen veggie burger from the kitchen freezer, and Jonah held this gently against his nose for a while, sitting on the curb.

It was now mid-morning, on a fine summer day: hot but not humid, the sky a deep and cloudless blue. Jonah was reminded of sitting on the porch of the house he'd grown up in, in Roxwood—and perhaps because of the iciness of the veggie burger, he was reminded of eating Popsicles. He could not deny a sense of peace, sitting there on the narrow street. He regretted the hurt he'd caused Sylvia. But by now it seemed clear that hurt was all he had to offer her—and vice versa. At least that hurt had reached its end point—or perhaps its inevitable climax. Either way, it was over.

He recognized that if he'd felt compelled to make a confession, he ought to have waited to make it: found a more appropriate time, a gentler manner in which to tell her the truth. When the moment had come, though—he really hadn't felt he'd had a choice. It was as if the visions and all that had followed had been steadily gathering into a tide, and in that conference room he found he could no longer resist it. Maybe he had never been able to resist it.

And this, he sensed, now switching the veggie burger from one hand to the other, was the true source of his unexpected contentment. The relief was more than satisfaction at the end of a punishing relationship. It was the relief of giving in, of surrender—of being buoyed by a current he had been struggling against, vainly, for so long.

He looked around: The street was too small to be anything but a tributary of the city's din and traffic; cars passed him so infrequently that he could hear each one as it drove up, and then rolled away. The late-summer sun seemed to touch every surface with the subtlest tinge of gold. And taking all this in, he asked himself: Why resist at all?

Why not, he thought with gathering fervor, admit to the enlarged sense of humanity he'd acquired? Why not accommodate his chronically distressed conscience? Why not yield to these spastic urges to be better than he wanted to be? Wasn't this the meaning—the message—to which all his recent experiences amounted? Why not just give up, and do good?

The simplicity, the clarity, with which this idea struck him was such that for several moments he forgot about his nose, sat staring across the street with the veggie burger resting on his knee. Then his phone—foghorn or siren of the world not circumscribed by a quiet street on a sunny day—chimed from his pocket. He took it out: He had an invitation to a meeting with Doug Chen that afternoon. He recalled the circumstances of the BBEC case: 5F-LUM6, and Dyomax, and Dale Compstock. He recalled the theft that BBEC had committed—and the role he was to play in helping them get away with that theft. He understood this was an overly simplistic accounting of things. The moral complexities he'd gratefully observed in his previous analysis of the case were still there, even if he now wished they weren't. But that didn't matter. He would hold himself to a higher standard—obviously, he had to. He had to think of the scientist whose labor had been wasted, of the dozen or more people who would lose their jobs, of the angel investors and the … These were the only examples, however, he could come up with of individuals who might really suffer if BBEC prevailed. But they were enough, and besides, the point was that he would no longer reason as he had before—would no longer content himself that the ambiguities inherent in a dispute between a multinational drug maker and a biotech venture absolved him of any personal, ethical, moral responsibility. He would embrace that responsibility. He would run to it.