Becka sat in the chair hugging her legs and shaking her head.
“Can you believe that?”
She continued to shake her head. The story was over. What, he wondered, would they do now?
“Are you tired?” he asked. “Do you want to go to bed?”
She suddenly yawned as if in answer. He had to think of something.
“Do you know Mike Kronish?” he asked.
“The name’s familiar,” she said.
“You’ve met him,” he said. “He’s the managing partner for litigation.”
“What animal does he have to have in the room with him?”
“Listen to this,” he said. “Will you listen to just one more?”
She let her head fall back, but her eyes stayed open.
“So Kronish makes it a policy as managing partner to personally interview every candidate for hire, which is a pretty arduous task when you consider how many people we look at in any given year. But this is a legendary control freak, even worse than me if you can believe it. And he tells every candidate a little autobiographical story, which I can confirm is true because I was on the plane with him right after it happened. He tells it so that the incoming class of associates understands his personal idea of an exemplary Troyer, Barr attorney, and the story goes something like this. Kronish worked on a case, a very famous case involving the government’s attempt to break up a big tech company for what it considered antitrust violations, a case that went on for several years. Part of that case took place in California, where one of the tech company’s competitors had brought suit against it. And Kronish, who had just made partner, worked the case, so he had to be in California for trial prep. Now, he said he intended — although I sort of doubt this — he intended to fly back to New York a few weekends every month, you know, to spend time with his wife and kids. He had two boys, they were, like, six and eight at the time, maybe eight and ten. And for about two years, except for holidays, Kronish never made it back home. So the boys would come out to visit, and their mom would take them to Disneyland and the beach, and more frequently than not, they’d return to New York after an entire week’s visit having seen their father literally for a dinner or two at the hotel restaurant. So when the case is over — we won, by the way — to make things up to the boys he says to them, okay, you and I are going to spend an entire week at the house in the Hamptons, just you and your mom and me, and we’re going to catch up on lost time. So one Friday they drive out to the Hamptons, and that very night, that Friday night, Kronish gets a call from an important client. And this client says to him that while Kronish has been in California saving the tech client’s ass, another partner at Troyer has been fucking up his own impending trial, and with only two months to prepare, the client’s considering defecting to another firm unless Kronish, and yours truly, step in personally. So Kronish, in the Hamptons with his boys less than twelve hours, calls his driver to turn around and pick him up. He tells the boys that he has to fly to Houston that night and won’t be able to spend the week with them after all. And the boys’ hearts — now this according to Mike himself — the boys’ hearts break. Tears, tantrums, everything Kronish detests about children. So he hands them off to his wife and goes upstairs to pack his things and then comes back down and waits for the car outside the house. The driver comes. Kronish gets inside. And then one of the boys breaks free of the house and runs toward the car. Not a tear on this boy’s face. He promises never to cry ever again if Kronish will just stay. He promises no more crying, and Kronish can see his little face quiver, but he doesn’t say a word to the boy, he just rolls up the window and tells the driver to drive. And the kid just bursts into tears behind the tinted glass while Kronish heads off to Houston. And he tells me on the plane later that night that if the kid hadn’t cried as the driver started off, he would have considered staying. It was like a test, he tells me. Personally I doubt that. But that’s the story he tells me on the plane, and it’s the same story he tells every member of the firm’s incoming class, and he tells it to crowds of people at firm events and to clients so that everyone knows what he considers to be his idea of client commitment. And what is the first thing you see when you walk into the man’s office? You see an eight-by-ten glossy of him and his family on the wall next to his law degree. They’re grown now, those boys. They call Mike ‘Uncle Daddy.’ Now, I dropped the ball with you sometimes,” he said to her, “but I was never as bad as that.”
“You never dropped the ball with me, Dad,” she said.
“In high school,” he said. “I let you down.”
“I was an asshole in high school.”
“I was an asshole from nineteen seventy-nine onward,” he said.
“I’ve been an asshole my whole life.”
They laughed. Then the unsettling silence set in again, and he had to try to think of another story.
9
His return to the firm, his steadiness behind the desk, his palpable sense of day following uninterrupted day gave him faith that it would hold. His time in the room was over. Twenty-seven months and six days of profitless labor had passed. He had endured as a half-wit, the scale of life diminished to a light fixture. Elation followed by delicate readjustment. He remembered the first time stepping out onto the lawn, etiolated, held upright on trembling legs, blinking in the awesome sun.
He walked the halls more often after his return. There was always someone to say hello to in the halls, and he liked to stop with a cup of coffee to look out at the views he had seldom noticed before. He watched taxis taking their slow, toylike turns around corners, and tugboats drifting down the great river.
From time to time he’d want out of the office as out of a catacomb, just so he could breathe fresh air and feel the sunlight on his face. How long would this reprieve last? He lived in constant fear of a recurrence, as if he were an immigrant living in the country of his dreams whose fickle authorities could nevertheless decide without warning to take him into custody, nullify his freedom and dispatch him to sorrow and dust.
On one such outing, he encountered an eclectic group of people stretching around the corner of a gray concrete building, as ornate and generic as a reconstituted bank. They were assembled single file and waiting to enter for a mysterious purpose that made passersby look twice, wondering what they might be missing. He’d seen such lines before but had never cared. Now he slid between two car bumpers, crossed the street and approached the last man in line, and, like a tourist new to the phenomenon of anonymous city gatherings, asked him what was what.
“Casting call.”
“For what?”
“Movie.”
Move on if you don’t know, the man’s curt reply seemed to say. We don’t need the extra competition.
But he stayed put just for the thrill of it, doubtful he’d last so long as to actually enter the building and find himself in front of a casting agent, but feeling nothing else pressing. Or trying his best not to, anyway. There was some busywork waiting for him back at the office, but nothing exciting. Soon a small gathering had accumulated behind him. He felt the interloper. Never took an acting class in his life. Never sat for a headshot or waited tables for crap pay or suffered the heartbreak of losing a part on the final audition. So this was the subculture, so often talked about but so often scattered, invisible as bedbugs, of the struggling actor. With the rest of the artists, together with the immigrants, they carried the city on their backs. Eating like hell and suffering miserable colds, serving your ahi tuna, reciting Shakespeare in the shower. Directly behind him stood two girls: one Latina with hoop earrings and curls stiff and frozen and black as tar, and the other dressed, improbably — although nothing was improbable here, if you just looked around — as a princess, a jean jacket thrown over a strapless white gown of silk and organdy that flared widely at the skirt, a silver spangled tiara in her hair. Must be auditioning for princesses, he thought.