Robert Parker - The Widening Gyre

One of them did pay attention to my subject however. She came in wearing tight jeans and a green vest over a white cable-knit sweater. She sat down opposite my subject and said, "How'd ya do in the poli-sci final, Gerry?"

"I think I aced it," Gerry said. "How about you?"

"I think I knew the stuff, but that bastard Ekkberg hates me."

Gerry shrugged. "Ekky hates everybody, especially girls."

She nodded. They did some more small talk and then the girl got up and left. Unless the fates were snickering up their sleeve, the kid was Gerry Broz. He even looked like his father, or like his father had. There was a kind of theatricality to him. He sat as if he were being viewed from all sides. But he was softer-looking than his father, not so much overweight as undersinewed, as if he'd walked slowly everywhere he went. He had taken off the tan parka with the dark blue lining he had worn to the library. He was wearing a blue oxford cloth shirt with a buttondown collar and chino pants over Frye boots. His belt was blue with a red stripe running through it and his hair was short and carefully cut. The more I looked at him, the more I was sure it was he in the videotape, and that he was Gerry Broz.

At 6:30 Gerry got up and put on his parka and stowed his notebook in a green book bag and left the library. He allowed them to check the book bag on the way out, and with me discreetly distant he went out into the darkness and walked back to his apartment and went in. I left him there. It was time to get ready for Susan.

I was dressed to the teeth, dark blue suit and vest with a faint white pinstripe, white silk show hankie, dark red tie with tiny white dots. White broadcloth shirt with a pin collar and French cuffs. My cordovan loafers were shined, I was close shaven, my teeth sparkled. Had the weather been better I'd have worn white flannel trousers and walked upon the beach. Instead I sat beside Susan on a banquette in Rive Gauche and ordered beer.

Susan said "Dewar's and water" to the waiter. Off to our right there was a family group, obviously mother and father with son and daughter-in-law. The old man was explaining to the son and daughter-in-law what a really world class big deal he was. Occasionally the mother chimed in that yes, he really was a big deal. The son and his wife listened in glum silence, the daughter-in-law forcing a bright smile through it all. Obviously the parents were paying.

There were few other people in the room. The howling storm had paralyzed Washington as drifts of nearly an inch and a half had piled up along some major arteries.

The waiter brought our drinks. Dewar's and water," I said.

"Yes. I don't care really, but everyone at work says if you don't order by name they give you bar whiskey."

I drank a little beer. Molson. Rive Gauche didn't have Rolling Rock Extra Pale either. The All World Big Deal at the next table was telling his kid about how tough you had to be to prevail in business and giving a number of examples of how tough he'd recently been.

"Lonely at the top," I said to Susan.

"But not quiet," Susan said.

"How about I threaten to kill him if he doesn't shut up."

"It would probably work, but the rest of the evening might be a bit strained."

"I know. The world is never simple, is it?"

Susan shrugged. "He's excited by his success. He wants to pass along to his son some of what he knows. He's showing off a little. I'm not sure it's a capital offense."

"He's showing off for the daughter-in-law," I said.

Susan shrugged again, and smiled. "He's male."

The waiter appeared to take our order. I ordered pigeon stuffed with cabbage. Susan ordered sole Veronique. I asked for a wine list. The Big Deal listed some people he'd recently fired. I studied the wine list. Control. If I concentrated on Susan and dinner and wine, I could block the guy out. It was simply a matter of control. The wine steward came by. I ordered Gewurtztramminer. He smiled approvingly, as they always do, took the wine list, and departed.

The Big Deal explained to his son some of the ways the son could improve professionally. I could feel the muscles bunch a bit behind my shoulders. Susan noticed my shrug to loosen them.

"Getting to you, is he?" she said.

"Takes his work seriously," I said.

"Don't you?"

"Not as seriously as I take you," I said.

The food arrived, and the wine. We were quiet while it was served.

When the servants had departed, Susan said, "Is there an implied criticism there?"

I didn't answer.

"Do you think I take my work more seriously than I take you?"

"At the risk of oversimplification," I said, "yes."

"Because my work has taken me away?"

"In part."

"Your work takes you away. How is that different?"

"When I leave, I leave because I must," I said. "You could have stayed in Boston." Susan started to speak. I made a stop sign with my hand. "It's more than that. You went willingly, you aren't…" The more I talked the more churlish it sounded. It wasn't churlish inside. "You aren't sorry. You're having a good time."

"And you'd like it better if I weren't?"

When I had been a small boy someone told me that the blood in your veins was blue, the way it looked through the skin, and that it only turned red when you exposed it to air. What I felt was one thing when I kept it in. It changed color entirely when I exposed it.

"I would like it better if you seemed to be missing me more."

Susan drank some of her wine and put the glass down very carefully, as if the table were shaky. She looked at the glass for a time, as if it were something she'd suddenly discovered. Then she raised her eyes and looked at me.

"Until I was twenty I was my father's princess, his little JAP. And then I was my husband's wife, the ornament of his career, and after the divorce, not very long after, I met you and became your"-she made a wiffling gesture with her hand-"friend. Always me was perceived through you- you my father,you my husband, you my friend."

"By whom?" I said. When I was serious my English was good.

"By all of us. By me and by you, all of you. Down here there's no intermediary lens, no you through which me is seen. Here I am what I am and a great many people are very much taken with me because of what I am and they never even heard of you. Yes, I love that. And yes, I miss you. But missing you is a price I have to pay in order to become completely me. At least for a while. And goddamn it, it's a price I am glad to pay. I sort of expected you'd understand better."

"I kind of hoped I would too," I said. "I'm doing the best I can."

"So," Susan said with emphasis, "am I."

I drank some wine. The truth kept turning to confusion as I tried to speak it. "I think what you're saying I can handle," I said. "But I think you've overcommitted. You are becoming your work. You don't talk the same. You use the jargon of the profession, you drink the drink of the profession, you know who the important people are and get next to them. You've begun to believe in potluck suppers to boost morale. I'm not sure how much you're becoming yourself."

"I'm not becoming myself," Susan said. "I'm trying out selves, I'm working up a self. That's part of the problem. I never had a center, a core full of self-certainty and conviction. I've merely picked up the colorations of the yous: my father, my husband, my…"-she smiled a little- "… friend. Of course I'm becoming more shrink-y than the shrinks. I'm like a kid in her first year at college. And if it helps you any, you might think of me that way, leaving the nest. Even explaining myself limits me, it's intrusive, it compromises me. I want to do what I want to do."

"Unless your supervisor tells you not to," I said.

"That's not fair. It's not… it's not even insightful. You still can't get outside your own view. You can't understand someone without a goddamned code. You don't see that for millions of people, male and female, the workplace is the code."