“You know, we could keep the first part of the mission but forget about the second. The follow-up,” said Greg.
“And what about the donations we’ve been receiving for the mentor program?” Monica asked. “We sent out a ton of brochures, and Faith’s people handed them out at the last summit. We’re getting a surprising number of donations, and the money is just sitting there. It’s too late to return any of it. We’d look incompetent.”
“Well, we can’t do anything else with it, can we?” asked her assistant. “It’s a restricted gift.”
“We could put it to very good, similar use,” said Doug, “the next time Faith wants to do one of her special projects. We’ll channel these funds over there. It’s not like they’d be used for personal gain. I mean, my God, no one is making a penny out of any of this. The whole thing, our whole support of Loci, is only charitable.”
“Yes, we’re saints,” said Monica.
“What is your point?”
“That it’s also rehabilitative,” she said. “You know very well. It cleans up our act. It hoses us down.”
Greg folded his arms and said, “I must ask that everything that’s being discussed in here today behaves the way a housefly does.”
“What do you mean?” Monica said, annoyed.
“That it never leaves the room.”
There was mild, self-conscious laughter, and then they had a brief vote and decided they would go ahead with the plans, even in the absence of mentors. Carry out the rescue. Later on, invite one of the Ecuadorian girls to LA, as they were going to do. Continue to accept donations that arrived, earmarking them for next time, and later quietly close the fund and say the program had been a success, but now it was over because they had reached their goal.
“What about Faith and all of them downstairs?” asked Kim. “What will you tell them?”
Shrader sat fiddling with the wire sculptures, and then he realized that the whole room was looking at him, waiting. Very reluctantly he let the wire/silver/magnet things drop from his hands in a little waterfall of clicking parts. “I’m going to leave that up to all of you,” he said.
So the rescue mission had taken place under cover of darkness, and had been a success. The rest of it, the mentor part, was “still not on track,” but anyway the girls were free, and that was what mattered most. No one at ShraderCapital knew what had happened to them since then, though. Emmett Shrader, with his pealike, flealike attention, never followed up on any of this after that meeting, or apprised Faith of the situation—and really, she was out of the loop, since apparently no one had told her in the first place that her contact had been replaced with Paulson’s wife’s contact.
By now the mission was months in the past, and mostly it had been forgotten. Donations were still coming in, but luckily not too many. After a while everyone had gotten very relaxed about it, and in the run-up to the LA event someone was tasked with inviting one of the rescued girls. The travel agent arranged everything, and Greer Kadetsky introduced the girl at the summit and wrote her speech, and gave an excellent speech herself, and everything was perfectly fine and unremarkable until a couple of days later, according to Faith, when Greer apparently heard from some unnamed person who told her that there had been no mentor program after all.
“Tell me who it was,” Emmett said, but Faith refused.
He thought about the early days of the foundation—how exuberant he had been. It was like being young again. It was like having sex with Faith all over again, though without the sex. It was like some kind of full-mind, full-body fuck. That was what it was like when your entire self was engaged. That was what it was like to pay attention.
When Faith had first signed on with him, he had sent Connie Peshel down to the skeletal space that was then the twenty-sixth floor, to find something suitable for her. “Windows for Ms. Frank everywhere,” he had instructed Connie.
“I can’t punch through walls, Mr. Shrader,” she had complained. What a sourpuss. She had been with him since he had founded the firm back in the seventies. His wife, Madeline, had liked her, and everyone said it was because Connie Peshel was so frankly ugly: a thick neck that could have had bolts in it, and a face dappled with what once, a million years earlier, had been teenage acne, onto which for some reason she spread a layer of foundation the color of candy circus peanuts.
But Madeline hadn’t been particularly relieved that Connie was homely. She didn’t even care if Emmett wanted to screw his secretary or not. She had known that he had slept with various different women while they were married. It was the way he was built, and it was part of their unspoken deal. But the deal also tacitly stated that he could screw them only if he didn’t respect and admire them, and that he could not screw them if he did. The equation was simple. This way, there was never any real threat to the marriage, because while Emmett Shrader liked sex with all kinds of women, he wasn’t one of those men who would throw over his whole life for someone intellectually uninteresting.
Madeline had called all the shots from early on, because she was rich and he was poor. The money that had started ShraderCapital all came from her family. Marrying into the New York Tratt fortune when you were the son of a milkman from Chicago had had its severe stresses. At all Tratt family functions, he was iced out. No one wanted to talk to him or look at him then. Together in the earliest days of their marriage, attempting to show his supposed indifference to her wealth, Emmett worked at a dull job at Nabisco, and Madeline volunteered with charities. They were a bored young couple who occasionally toured Europe, and went out to Vegas to gamble. Only later, when Abby was born, was there a flicker of life in the household. Madeline was a good mother, natural and lively, but because she had been raised with nannies she reflexively hired one for Abby, so her days were still unfilled.
And Emmett was often unfaithful. This was nothing special; many of the men he knew had frequent dalliances; it recharged their batteries, that was all. But when Emmett returned home on a warm night in 1973 after that single, stupendous sexual encounter with Faith Frank, a young so-called feminist at that new women’s magazine that was trying to get Nabisco to buy ad space, he knew this was different. He was so excited and disturbed by what had transpired that he had sat in the darkness in the living room of the Bronxville house, talking quietly to himself, trying to figure out his next move. The sex with Faith had been snappingly dynamic, revelatory. He had ached for it throughout their dinner at the Cookery and during the cab ride to her little apartment; and then in her bed the ache was furiously resolved, the tip of his long penis touching the depths of her, as momentous to him as if it were fingertip meeting fingertip in The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It wasn’t just sex, it was connection. To be attached by all nerve endings to this person of substance and sympathy. She was independent, which somehow made him want to be dependent on her.
But then she had said that thing to him, “You’re married,” summarily killing the possibility of his ever seeing her again. So after he left that night he went home and sat in his chair in the dark living room, thinking of Faith’s glorious body, the look and feel and taste and smell of her—Cherchez, she’d said her perfume was called—but it was more than that. Her perfume was mixed with saline, which was mixed with something ineffably specific to Faith. He pictured her brain packing her beautiful head, rendering her inquisitive and sharp and exquisitely attractive.