Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Chadley spoke over the report, which showed B-roll of office buildings and cartons of documents in a federal courthouse. “We’re disappearing a division at a time. Every time I’m back in DC, more cubicles get dismantled. The receptionist left on maternity leave, and they replaced her with one of those automated systems: If you’d like a company directory, press two now. ”

Cadence thought of the carnage as a disaster movie, red circles on a map, spreading and overlapping, tracking the growing reach of the epidemic. The broadcast report moved on to an unfortunate videotape of one of the firm’s senior partners telling a room full of stockholders in some client company how his stock options were more profitable than cocaine, for chrissakes. The news networks loved to show the tape over and over, an emblem of runaway corporate greed, a visual that translated to television better than a five-thousand-dollar shower curtain or a wine cellar paid for by stockholders. The conversation that morning was punctuated by a repeat of the video Cadence had already seen, the same partner doing the perp walk into a federal courthouse.

Cadence kept expecting Chadley to change the channel, but he didn’t. Finally, he said, “I’m in trouble at work.”

“The firm’s going under. No one will blame you if you’re one of the rats that jump ship. Maybe you should get your résumé together, talk to a headhunter.”

“Not that kind of trouble.”

“What, then?”

“Someone,” he announced gravely, “has been auditing the auditors. Which means I’m fucked.”

She knew that if she waited him out, she would get the rest of the story.

“When I started, right out of school, everyone was on the same gravy train, you know? We got performance bonuses, holiday bonuses. On one project, the lead auditors got to take their whole team to the Cayman Islands for a month to finish up a one-week job. Last year, people on the Chicago project got a Christmas bonus in an envelope, cash. No one said where it came from. Just an envelope, understand?”

Cadence thought of her long-dead grandmother in northeastern Pennsylvania, her uncertain English, the immigrant way she punctuated every sentence by asking, Do you understand?

Chadley reached under the bed for his briefcase, extracted an expandable folder, pulled out a spreadsheet. “By my own calculations, I’m into the firm for something like eleven thousand dollars. The attorneys told us on Friday that the key to avoiding prosecution is restitution.”

“That’s quite a chunk of change. What for?”

Chadley ruffled some receipts, looked at the list. “All things that used to be copacetic. Steakhouses. Bar tabs. Upgrades to business class. Tickets to this and that. Laundry. You know how we used to choose the wine for dinner? We’d order the third-most expensive bottle on the list. Room service, and”—he averted his eyes—“in-room movies.”

Cadence gave him a wide smile. “Don’t you know? Movie titles do not appear on your room bill, ” she said, in the kind of voice announcers save for the fine print of car advertisements.

“I just don’t have it,” he said, and it took Cadence a minute to realize he was talking about the money.

Chadley exhaled, somewhere between a sigh and a deflation, and Cadence interpreted his silence as an admission: He was going to be fired. Everyone on the Chicago project was going to be fired. The guys at the top were likely headed to a country-club prison; the guys just beneath them were plotting their bloodless coups, and the guys beneath them were the scapegoats, the endpoint of the avalanche that was going to smother Chadley and his burgeoning career.

Cadence could see Chadley struggling with whether or not he could ask her for help. And she debated whether the easiest path out, out of this Chicago hotel room and out of this relationship with this boy, was simply to write him a check. Would he even have the balls to ask?

Chadley said, “I can’t watch,” and ran through the channels, past college football, country-music videos, and a pair of cooking shows, before settling on a different news talk show.

The anchorman said, “This afternoon, we’ll tackle the issue of free speech in America’s public schools. Does the right to speak your mind end at the schoolhouse door? Our guests, Congressman Sammy Bickley, Republican of California, and Richard MacMurray, attorney for the Students’ Committee Against Censorship.”

After the theme music faded out, the anchorman described the kids as eighteen-year-olds James Terrance Scott and Riley Wayne Kiddings, using the three-name construction news writers reserved for serial killers and presidential assassins.

Cadence immediately grabbed for the remote, but Chadley played keep-away.

Whenever she saw Richard on television, she expected him to rise to his usual theatrics. But today he seemed calm, measured. She watched him say, “Parody, satire, sarcasm, and biting humor might be unpleasant. But they enjoy total constitutional protection. The real issue here is political, that a superintendent with thin skin doesn’t like either the manner or the substance of what these young men have to say.”

The anchorman recited the teenagers’ names off the prompter again before holding up a copy of the offending student publication and pretending to read from it, asking, “Isn’t it counterproductive for these young men to compare that same superintendent to Joseph Goebbels?”

“I don’t think that was their message at all. We have very few absolute freedoms in this country, but one of those is an absolute freedom of the press. These young men used their own time, their own initiative, to put out a newspaper that was parody, a bit caustic, perhaps, but entirely factually correct. And that meets, to the letter of the law, our definition of protected speech.”

Cadence held her hand out for the remote. “Why are we listening to this guy? He sounds a little off.”

Chadley held it away, and Cadence receded to her side of the bed. “It smells like sex in here,” Chadley said through a smile. “Sex, cigarettes, and cheesecake.”

He pulled a cigarette from a crumpled soft pack on the bedside table. “That guy doesn’t sound off.” He pointed at the TV with a twitch of his head. “It’s those kids he’s talking about. Probably walking around the halls showing off their new piercings.”

“It’s the inalienable right of every teenager to feel alienated.” Cadence pinched the cigarette from Chadley’s hand, took a drag, handed it back. “Trouble in the land of Presbyterians. Shocking. But can we change the channel now, please?”

“Nothing much else to watch. Unless you’ve developed a sudden passion for college football.”

“Let’s watch the Weather Channel. The hotel information. Pull up your bill on the TV and see how much damage we’ve done. Anything but Richard.”

“Richard? You know this guy?”

Cadence moved to the chair in the room’s corner, cleared off her clothes. She grabbed a dirty T-shirt to cover herself. Every difference between them suggested fundamental ways they were incompatible, even the clothes they’d worn yesterday working out together in the hotel fitness center. Her T-shirts advertised charity events, race walks to cure breast cancer, or 5K runs to fight AIDS. Chadley’s were freebies promoting light beer, bar crawls, and a brown liqueur that tasted like cough syrup, which Chadley referred to as a “gateway drug.”

Cadence felt she was sitting in a hotel room with the very definition of extended adolescence. She used to think that she was envious that Richard came to her with a past that she would never be able to truly inhabit. He had a certain worldly authority. But there, looking across the bed at Chadley, with his hairless back and the upper arms that he shaved, she knew she’d been wrong. She’d run her hands over the stubble on his triceps and think, What a fool —not just Richard, but herself too. Chadley was a boy who had made only a boy’s mistakes.