Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

She’s suspicious. She looks into her glass, then starts to answer slowly.

“Yes. Well, no.” She seems comfortable again. At least I tell myself that.

“Yes and no?” asks Marco. They laugh as though the last three minutes haven’t happened. The waiter comes. He’s tall, dressed in an immaculate black and white uniform — immaculate face and hands.

“Hello, may I get you drinks?” He looks at the women’s glasses, “More martinis?” They shake their heads. Marco waves them off.

“Yes,” he says, pointing to the glasses. “Yes.” He points at me but keeps looking at the waiter. “Sparkling water for the table.” It’s not a question, but the inflection makes it seem as though he’s asking one. “Talisker, neat.”

We all study our menus for a while. I hone in on the simplest things there: green salad. Steak. I leave the menu open to deter questions coming my way. They talk — an occasional “Everything looks so good,” or some approximation thereof. Finally, my ploy backfires.

“See anything?”

“Oh, yes.”

I close it and go back to the hair, the brow, the plaster, and then to Marco, who is trying to mouth something to me from behind his menu. The waiter returns with the drinks.

“So how was your run? You were out for a long time. How far did you go?”

“About eight.”

He takes a sip of his drink. The girls sip theirs. I wonder if that junkie got another beer. I try to imagine what it tastes like. It doesn’t take much to do so — like the mineral water I’m drinking only with a dash of sugar, hay, and cosmic certainty. I don’t remember, but I think people liked me better when I drank a bit. The waiter comes back and takes our order.

Marco leans back in the booth and exhales.

“Today was ridiculous, huh?”

The girls concur, but they keep their good posture. I look out over the dining room. It’s full now, but the clamor is somehow softened — I don’t know how with all the hard surfaces. Marco taps my elbow.

“Ten years ago our client paid this guy twenty million to develop product for them.”

“What product?”

“Software.”

“Who’s your client?”

“Can’t tell you.”

I look at him closely. I wonder who he thinks I might tell — how I could possibly compromise the deal.

“Anyway, he finishes. So now he’s claiming that he owns the product and that they have to buy it from him, even though the original contract, which he signed, says that he doesn’t.”

“So this is an intellectual property issue?”

“Exactly.” He leans forward and takes his glasses off, puts his elbows on the table. I realize that I hardly know Marco. Yes, I know his story, at least some of the highs and lows, the ones, at least, he’s told me, but nothing more than his narrative and what I’ve assumed from it in combination with what I see. In my head I’ve seen him in his office in a tall building downtown. I’ve seen the suits he wears when we’ve walked together to drop our boys off at school and I’ve seen him disappear down the stairs of the 4-train. My mother wanted me to be a lawyer. She gave me a book on Charles Houston, and I remember being awed by him and wanting to be like him. I wonder where that feeling went— why wasn’t I like him? As I got older, the idea of being a lawyer was displaced by the dizzying exactitude of actually becoming one. I suppose I began seeing lawyers, as well — the fathers of my schoolmates. They weren’t grave men in hats and overcoats with leather bags walking up the steps of the Supreme Court armed with purpose.

“So what do you think?”

“What do I think of what?”

“Do you think our client owes him anything?”

“A deal’s a deal, I guess.”

He nods. “So how was your run?”

“Not so great.”

Maggie joins in. “Sometimes I go out and I feel tired. I just slog through it.”

Marco smiles. They check him to see if what she said is acceptable. He’s said that they’re associates, and I don’t know what that means. How had he presented the idea of spending an evening out with us to them? In a hallway, at lunch? “We can close the Johnson and Johnson merger, but it’ll have to be in front of a stiff I’m letting crash at my house.”

Diana looks potentially angry. She’s not frowning, but she seems to be waiting for me to say something she can disagree with. I’m not sure what she finds so troublesome about me. Perhaps I’m over-dressed. Perhaps she’s wary because I’m strange and a stranger. She doesn’t know what I do, where I’m from, what I think of her. I’m a suspicious character, and I appreciate that — that she hasn’t come to any preconceived notions about me. But I can’t sit with her uncertainty. I want to tell her something, anything, to set her at ease.

“Yeah, my run was weird.” I hear myself say “weird,” and I’m sure it wasn’t my voice that said it.

“What happened?”

“Well, I got caught in that cloudburst.”

“I didn’t even know it rained last night.” She looks at Marco. Her last comment didn’t seem to pass muster with the boss.

“I was chased.” I say it plainly so it takes a moment to register with everyone, including me. I’ve said it without realizing that I’ll have to follow with something more.

“Oh, my god,” says Maggie. She checks Marco. I guess she gets the signal to continue. “By who, what?”

Now I feel like an ass because I have to answer. They’re waiting, curious. Even Diana seems interested.

“By the golden calf riding Leviathan bareback.”

They laugh. Marco spits out his drink and slaps the table. “Sorry.” He wipes his mouth with his hand, offers me his napkin, which I refuse. I suppose that it is funny, especially if you think it’s a joke. I let them laugh. Diana is the first one to regain her composure. She looks at me and I smile and it feels good. She smiles back. She’s lovely, just a shade darker than honey with black hair that looks like braided silk. Then it fades — the joy — quickly back to the suspicion, which, after I’ve seen her smile, is all wrong. Her face shouldn’t be so closed. Maggie still has her head down and Marco snorts again, a dry one this time.

“No, really,” I say. And they break up again. I try to talk over their laughter. “I was on the bridge. .” They won’t have it. Marco waves for me to stop.

I show them mercy. I keep quiet, but just looking at me is enough to keep Marco giggling. He slowly returns to form. I wave back to him — recognize our wordless truce. He inhales deeply, wipes his eyes, and checks the girls to see if they think his breakdown was undignified. They do not. They look to me to continue. I don’t know what to say, but I feel strangely touched by their attention — their acceptance — but I still haven’t anything to say. I look around the table for a launch. I stop at Marco’s glass and point.

“Talishire.”

“Talisker.”

“No, it’s from Talishire — islet scotch — from the Isle of Skye.”

He shrugs his shoulders and leans back. The heat of interest has left his face. I should explain, tell the story of how Gruntcakes as a young man used to go with his older brother to be fitted for wool suits and sample the local whiskeys. But first I should tell them why I call Claire’s paternal grandfather Gruntcakes. He was a stoic and unreachable English bastard until later in his life, but he always made Claire pancakes — griddlecakes — taking great care to cut small chips of butter into the batter before cooking.

The last time he went to Skye, before he and his brother fell out, they walked the foothills with flasks of Talisker. They got drunk. They got muddy, so much so that the innkeeper wouldn’t take them. They spent the night in a barn. He told me that story more than once, always in some moment when he could get me alone. “I had a boat once, a sloop. Named it after the scotch. I wanted to sail it with my brother.” He’d sit in some corner of some large, spare room, a party going on around him, with his whittled, driftwood cane, staring into the void, searching for his lost boat, his dead brother. Taking stock of what remained: him, me, and the dinghy. We’d made it seaworthy that last summer but never got to launch it. There’s an old picture of him on the boat, three-quarter profile, sailing in Buzzards Bay. I’ve always liked to think that he’s going to find his wife, somewhere in the middle of the ocean.