“Mine,” said another woman, “was actually my grandfather. An amazing person. He was a tail gunner in the Korean War.”
After the event was over, Greer said to Lupe, “You were so wonderful. They really loved you.” The young woman looked shyly away; was she pleased or just self-conscious? It was hard to tell. Greer remembered something that Faith had said during her speech in the Ryland Chapel. She had told them that if they said what they believed, then not everyone would like them, or love them. “If it’s any consolation at all,” Faith had said, “I love you.”
Could that have been true? Yes, Greer thought, it probably had been, because right now she felt a kind of love for Lupe Izurieta. And Greer knew Lupe as little as Faith had known everyone in that chapel.
After the building had cleared, Greer and Lupe went back to their rooms in the hotel, which were connected by a door that they didn’t open at first. Greer lay down on the king-sized bed and Skyped with Ben back in New York. He had slept over twice in the last week; their relationship had no propulsion, but it felt physically relieving, his body pleasurably heavy on her like a weighted blanket, his hands and mouth resourceful and in motion. “I think they liked it,” she said to him now. He came close to the screen, the camera giving him a fisheye-lens convexity that made her think about Skyping with Cory over the years: at Princeton, with his messy room behind him, and in the Philippines in the middle of the night, while afternoon blazed in America. Ben’s face on-screen was still not entirely familiar, though they had slept together a number of times.
“Great job,” Ben said. “I watched the live feed with Faith and a couple of people from upstairs,” he said. “We all thought you were great. And it was very emotional, that moment with the girl.”
A text appeared from Faith a little later.
NAILED IT! THANK YOU AGAIN.
YOU ARE THE BEST.
XX
FF
A little while later Greer quietly knocked on the door that separated her room from Lupe’s. She used her high school Spanish to ask whether Lupe wanted to get an Uber with her and go into LA for dinner. There was a long pause, and maybe Lupe’s response was one of dread; maybe she would’ve preferred to be alone tonight. “Or we could stay in,” Greer quickly added. Then the bolt was slid, the door opened, and the two of them stood looking at each other. “But I mean we should celebrate,” she said. “You were amazing out there.” Lupe had done something today that she had never done in her life: gone onstage and spoken before an audience.
Lupe nodded, unsmiling.
“Is it okay if I come in?”
“Okay.” Greer entered the room, which looked barely occupied. A little orange suitcase was splayed open on a table, revealing the small collection of clothes and belongings that had made the trip here from so far away. Greer wanted to tell her to occupy more space, to drape her modest things around the room, to ask for more, and in so doing to become more. But you couldn’t make someone be that way, especially after a lifetime of poverty and then a year of trauma. The world had failed her. Now it was turning. Don’t be dispirited, Greer wanted to say, but that would have been demanding, not listening.
They ordered dinner from the menu; that was an ordeal. Who knew what Lupe thought she was getting? Then, when it arrived, they ate it while watching a pay-TV movie about the hostile colonization of the Andromeda Galaxy—a plot so removed from both of their real lives that it was an equalizer, neither more nor less comprehensible to either of them.
Greer sensed, at some point, that maybe she was staying too long. Lupe looked sleepy. Would she actually be able to sleep tonight in this strange bed? What did she think of all this? If Greer had been asked, she would have sat in the desk chair and waited for Lupe to fall asleep. She was suddenly so protective of her. They’d been onstage together, and now, somehow, she was hers.
The next morning the two of them flew back to New York together. On the plane, as she had done during the flight to LA, Lupe sat very still and obviously afraid. During a period of turbulence, Greer saw that she was crossing herself repeatedly. On the floor at Lupe’s feet was her purse, and protruding from the top was a froth of white wool and two copper needles, the spontaneous gift from that woman in the crowd. Knitting was supposed to calm you down. Greer gestured toward the wool, but Lupe shook her head and just stared miserably at the seat in front of her for most of the trip. She went home to Ecuador a day later.
Greer spent the weekend at Ben’s place, where she lay with him on his opened futon, idly playing around on her laptop while he idly played around on his. Sometimes one of them would slam his or her laptop shut, and the other one would follow, the laptops making a decisive sound like two car doors closing, a big part of foreplay these days. On Sunday morning, Ben slept while Greer went through the emails that had collected overnight. As she sifted through them she saw one from Kim Russo, who used to work for the COO at ShraderCapital until she’d left a few months earlier to work for a solar energy company.
Hi Greer,
I really wanted to talk to you, in confidence. Any chance we can meet? Kind of important. Thanks—
Kim Russo
Greer wanted to ask Ben what he thought this was about, but then her instinct was that she shouldn’t. She didn’t say anything to anyone. The two women met before work the next day in a coffee shop in downtown Brooklyn. At ShraderCapital Kim had dressed in the conservative uniform of the corporate woman, but since she had been at her new job, her clothes were relaxed. But Kim herself was tense; she shook her head at the giant laminated menu as it landed on the table and ordered only black coffee, which she drank in a hard draft.
“Look,” Kim said. “We don’t know each other well. But you always seemed like you really cared about what you did. It made me wish I worked on twenty-six instead of twenty-seven.”
“It’s a good place,” Greer said mildly, waiting.
“But ShraderCapital was a natural path for me after Wharton. They were very flattering when they hired me.” Kim looked down and swirled her cup. “I saw your speech. Someone sent it to me. You were good.”
“Thank you.”
“I need to say something.”
“Okay.”
Kim centered the coffee cup between her hands and made sure that Greer was paying attention. “The mentor program in Ecuador is bullshit,” Kim said.
Greer waited a second out of politeness, then she said, “I appreciate your opinion. I know there’s legitimate criticism of doing things like this overseas. I know it can seem like privileged meddling. But it isn’t bullshit. It gives these women a chance.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant it’s bullshit, as in it doesn’t exist.”
Greer just looked at her. “Okay, that’s just not true,” she finally said. The coffee shop hummed and rang with its weekday morning noises. Menus were slapped down, and the glass door kept swinging open. All around them, other, more ordinary conversations over coffee were taking place. There were men with wet, slicked-back shower hair and jackets and ties; women fragrant and blown-out and optimistic and all business; moms with strollers blocking the fire exit.
“It is true,” Kim said.
“I highly doubt it.”
Kim said, “We can go around and around, but I have to get to work, and I really think you want to know what I have to say. They sent you out onstage in LA with that girl. They sent you there, and they knew it wasn’t true. In my world, that’s unacceptable.”
Greer couldn’t take in what Kim was saying, because it didn’t make any sense and she didn’t know what to do with it. It was as if a dog had brought her a present from the wild: a dead bird, bloodied and grotesque and still warm, which was then deposited at her feet.
“How do you know this?” Greer finally asked.
“I was in on the meetings upstairs, months ago, when they were planning everything.”