“Why am I here, Emmett?” she asked him the afternoon she came to his office. “Is this our second date?”
He roared in pleasure. “Yes,” he said. “If you would like.”
“Well, usually the man takes less than four decades to call the woman again, or vice versa. I think it’s a little late for us.”
“Are you sure? I could bring you a corsage and a Whitman’s Sampler. Remember those? Each chocolate was labeled. ‘Molasses chew.’ ‘Cherry cordial.’ ‘Cashew cluster.’ You look great, Faith. I like your style. You’re rocking a sort of elegant European stateswoman thing here.”
“I’m not sure that’s a compliment, coming from you.”
“It is.”
“Well, then, thank you, Emmett; you look excellent too.” She crossed and recrossed her long, booted legs, and said, “So let’s move past the fact that once upon a time, you and I had a moment.”
“A moment of great feeling. Which ended in true sadness. Star-crossed, wouldn’t you say?”
Faith smiled. “I would. And maybe now you can tell me why I’m here.”
He laid it all out for her, and he brought in two young associates to show her the prospectus he’d had drawn up for the women’s foundation that he wanted her to run. “Primarily it will function as a platform for the most vibrant speakers on women’s issues,” he said.
She had immediate misgivings. “I don’t know that I should be in business with a high-flying company like yours, no offense. How would it look?” she asked.
“It would look shrewd,” he said. “Everyone will be jealous of how you don’t have to beg for scraps all the time, the way you did back at your little magazine. Cormer Publishing were cheapskates. I looked into their numbers and none of their magazines do well. I mean, Figurine Collector. Empty Nester. Who needs these magazines? Give me a break.”
She had said no, but then she’d come back with a counterbid involving funding some special projects, and they’d agreed. For a while, Loci had mostly done what it was meant to do, but in recent years, others at ShraderCapital had pressured Faith to change the feel of the foundation, to make it sexy, as someone said. They could charge more that way, and get a lot more press. That singer Opus—who had now become a movie star too—was coming to their big bash soon. He knew that Faith hated the reliance on celebrities, and the manicures, and the psychic they hired, but what could she do?
At a recent summit, that psychic, Ms. Andromeda, had announced that she saw a woman president in the future. The crowd erupted. But then the psychic, studying her cards or chart or crystal ball or whatever it was she used, apparently said, “I see . . . Indiana.”
“Oh shit,” said someone else. They were all glumly quiet, imagining a moment in the future in which Senator Anne McCauley, who gave the appearance of a kind, well-spoken grandmother, had won the presidential election and women were forced to undergo back-alley abortions again, and doctors were thrown in jail, and scores of teenage girls delivered babies against their will into this heartless new world.
The operating budget had appalled his CFO when Emmett first announced his elaborate plan to underwrite a women’s foundation. But damn if it hadn’t worked. It was good for disenfranchised women, on whose lives a spotlight was shined, and look at the donations that now poured in. It was good for ShraderCapital and its image, which was constantly in need of repair, and it was personally good for Emmett, who got to see Faith every single workday, after not seeing her for so very long and missing her with a strange and persistent melancholy.
There were days, over these four years, when she came up to his office at around five p.m.—or he came to her office—and he luxuriated in having her there across from him. She’d take off her boots and rub her feet, and she would sit there quietly talking, radiating intelligence. She told him about her day, and he told her about his. They drank a good Malbec and were enveloped by long, happy silences. Once in a while they talked about their respective children, Lincoln and Abby, one serious and consistent, and exceptional to his mother because he was hers; the other one stormy and highly successful. Still he thought of Abby as his little girl, and he remembered the exact feeling of her undiluted, Electral love for him: a girl on a father’s lap, all crinoline and hot bottom.
Sometimes, as he and Faith sat together, he said a few words about some woman or other who he’d slept with recently, and how she’d provided a physical outlet, which was worth a lot these days as he entered the terrifying arena of old age, and Viagra was as important as sunscreen. Faith listened well, not judging, and she sometimes told him a few shreds of detail from her own life, but mostly she was private. They talked about the people they’d known in common in the old days. He unloaded all his rage and frustration.
And they always laughed a lot. Faith had the greatest laugh. And the greatest throat. She was the whole package, he thought. But now, sitting in her living room, having lost her respect and incited her anger and contempt because of the stupid botched Ecuador mentor project—that was a torment.
“I find it hard to believe that you allowed us to step deep into lies just because you didn’t pay attention during a meeting,” she said. “You know it’s more than that. Attention is a smokescreen. You have the ability to be attentive; I’ve seen it. You’re attentive toward me.”
“I should have listened better in that meeting, and I shouldn’t have let them switch out that woman you liked, and I should have shut down the fund and announced the whole thing publicly. Punish me, Faith. Just don’t ice me out.”
Faith tightened her mouth, and for the briefest moment she looked like every woman in the world who was angry at a man.
“I’m going to tell you what I’ve decided to do,” Faith said, “and I don’t want you to say anything. I just want you to listen.”
He nodded, folding his hands in his lap in an exaggeration of listening. This was super-listening, the kind done by higher beings, and he tried to imitate it now.
“I’m not going to make a stink,” Faith said. “That would imperil the foundation and stop us from doing anything ever again. And while I detest the moral vacuum that apparently exists upstairs at ShraderCapital, I can’t just quietly quit my job, because where else would I go? I’ll continue to take your money, Emmett, but I won’t approve of it. I’ll take it and I’ll use it, and I will watch it closely, because I don’t really have much choice.
“We were all put on this earth to row the boats we were meant to row,” she said. “I work for women. That’s what I do. And I am going to keep doing it. I have no idea if this Ecuador story will ever leak out of the building. If it does, it will be an embarrassment, and perhaps it will shut us down. But the bottom line is that I’m not going anywhere.”
“Good.” His relief almost sprang from his forehead. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if you’d said you were quitting.”
“Oh, you’d be fine. You’re the one percent of the one percent.”
“I was very bored until you came here, Faith,” Emmett said. “Someone once called me a ‘privileged narcissist’ in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. I guess it’s true sometimes.” He thought, but didn’t say, that people like him needed someone to remind them not to be privileged narcissists. They needed someone like Faith to do that.
Emmett impulsively took Faith’s hand, and for a few seconds she didn’t pull away. Then she shifted, and their hands unlinked. “All right then,” she said. “It’s getting late.” She stood up, so he stood up too.
“No one else knows about this but Greer Kadetsky?” he asked. “And whoever told her this?”
“I’m not certain.” They sat silently for a moment.
“Well, Greer won’t say anything, right?” he asked.
Faith shook her head. “I very much doubt it. But she’s already quit. It was an unpleasant moment. She’s someone I like, and someone I brought along.”