A Thousand Pardons

4



“THERE’S A HEALTH CLUB on the third floor,” Yvette said; “your key card opens it. If you need a locker, send me an email and I’ll get you set up. It’s twenty-four hours, with the exception of the pool and the Jacuzzi, for obvious reasons.” Nothing was obvious to Helen about any of this. She just kept trailing behind Yvette, who was the office manager and who looked like a catalogue model, nodding and making noises of assent and wishing that the needlessly comprehensive tour of Malloy Worldwide’s facilities would terminate at Helen’s own desk, which she was eager to get behind and gather herself a little. She carried over her shoulder a new soft briefcase that had in it only a New York Times, a pen, a yogurt, and a plastic spoon.

“On the fourth floor is the staff cafeteria,” Yvette continued. She walked like most people ran. “You’ll get another card—a lot of cards, right?—that’s good for the employee discount there. You can pay cash if you want, though most people just have it deducted from their paycheck. The food”—she turned around to confide in Helen—“is really good, I have to say. I mean you know it’s just to encourage you to stay in the building and take shorter lunches, but still. The whole place is nut-free, though, for obvious reasons, so you’d have to go outside the building if you’re, you know, desperate for nuts.”

A glance into the cafeteria, occupied at this hour mostly by people waiting in line at the cappuccino bar, was enough to tell Helen that she probably wouldn’t be eating there all that often. She was now immersed in the world she had taken notice of when she first started job hunting in Manhattan, the world where people her age were nowhere in evidence, where she was, or felt, old enough to be everybody’s mother; she did not see herself sitting at one of those long tables in one of those clusters of skinny women in their twenties, complaining about whatever it was such creatures thought they had to complain about. Only some of them were from Malloy—they shared the building with, among other enterprises, a casting agency and a website devoted to shopping. The notion of cheap food did still have a strong pull; Helen had to keep reminding herself that she had not just a new job but a new salary, and so saving a few bucks on lunch was no longer the imperative it had been just a few weeks ago. Still, she thought she would bring her lunch most days.

“And here we are at your office,” Yvette said suddenly. It was indeed an office—not a cubicle, as she’d feared—and she felt a surge of pride at the sight of her nameplate on the wall outside the door, even though the plate was attached with what looked like Velcro. She just wished she’d been paying better attention to how they’d gotten there. She laid her briefcase carefully atop the empty desk. Pictures, she thought—that’s what people put on their desks. Tomorrow she would bring in a few framed pictures of Sara, if she could figure out which still-sealed box she’d packed them in when they left Rensselaer Valley. “I’ll leave you to it,” Yvette said, still on the threshold. “You have my email if you need anything. Good to have you with us.” Helen smiled her thanks. The tour had lasted nearly an hour, and most of it had been about the aspects of office life that did not involve actual work; not once had Yvette referred to how Helen was expected to use her time when she was not exercising or smoking or eating or taking a Jacuzzi.

Though Mr. Malloy had been clear that this was a full-time position, still Helen had imagined herself, in the weeks before she started there, as something like a consultant, on call for new or longstanding clients in case of some extraordinary public-image emergency; she couldn’t imagine that there would be some crisis to deal with, some nominal fire to put out, forty hours a week. About that she turned out to be mistaken. Back at Harvey Aaron they had sometimes waited around for days with only scutwork to do, until some sort of scandalous event would trigger the process by which she worked and got paid; here, though, as it turned out, the demand for their time was almost more than they could keep up with. Part of it was that the term “crisis” was defined at Malloy in a way that was sometimes so petty it would have seemed comic under less exigent circumstances: her first week on the job, Helen was called in on a Saturday because a Broadway play in which one of their clients had invested had gotten panned in The New York Times the day before. But part of it too was that Malloy was an operation whose true range Helen simply hadn’t understood when she signed on with them. They had thousands of powerful clients all over the world, and at every moment of the day there was at least one of them, paranoid and imperious, who was being perceived, fairly or otherwise, as having done something wrong, someone who saw where the story of his life was headed and wanted to redirect it.

She had a boss, or more strictly speaking a supervisor, a very good-looking young man named Arturo—gay, she was quickly and preemptively informed, as if the notion of a straight Arturo would keep her from being able to concentrate—who cultivated an air of knowing what you were going to say before you had quite finished saying it. Every morning at ten-thirty the Crisis Management group met in the conference room on the fifth floor, a room known among the staff as the Fishtank because of its glass interior walls. There was one of those single-cup coffee machines, and an array of pastries and fruit, though that had usually been thoroughly picked over by the nine-thirty meeting of the Promotions group.

Arturo’s oversight of the individual members of the group was intimidating but loose. The ten-thirty meeting was often the only time all day he spoke to them. Most crucially, though, he was in charge of assigning them to new clients, or to old clients with new crises, and in this area his disregard of Helen’s particular skill set, not to mention the limits of her previous experience, was so perverse she wondered if it was intentional. She had a hard time imagining that he wouldn’t have known she was his own boss’s personal hire. But Mr. Malloy was more of a specter than a presence there—his office, though only three floors above theirs, had its own elevator, so sightings of him were rare—and with a rigorous impartiality Arturo felt free to assign her to the aggrieved Broadway investor, and to an online-gaming company whose IPO valuation was threatened because its CEO had just died, and to other clients who often seemed as puzzled by her anxiety as she was by theirs.

One Friday morning in the Fishtank, Arturo laid out for them the news that feuding board members at a cellphone-chip manufacturer they represented—one of those companies you’ve never heard of that turns out to dominate a whole vital corner of your world—had been secretly taping one another’s conversations, both on the phone and in person, and that the transcripts had been leaked to The Wall Street Journal, which was going through some high-level legal review, even as they spoke, to see what they could safely publish and what they could not. “Ashok will take you through our response,” he said, nodding curtly to another member of the group, a diffident young man (they were all young to her) whom Helen had pegged as decent, despite his nervous adherence to a handful of business school aphorisms.

“It goes without saying that we have to get out in front of this,” Ashok said, and everyone, including Helen, nodded; but it turned out that what he meant by getting out in front of it was that they should mount an all-out attack against The Wall Street Journal, focusing on the morality of profiting by someone else’s criminal act.

“Does that mean we can question whether the tapes themselves are even genuine?” said Shelley, who sat next to Helen at the conference table. Not by accident: Helen always tried, at these meetings, to sit beside either Ashok or Shelley, a rock-bodied young woman who also managed to exude a kind of good-heartedness despite the rapidity of her speech and the fact that she had a rather uncorporate and scary tattoo of someone’s initials on the back of her neck. You couldn’t always see it; it depended on what Shelley was wearing that day.

“Probably not,” Ashok said. “There are dozens of hours of these tapes, from what I’m told. I don’t think we want to engage them on the level of authenticity. Anyway, the first course of action, in this type of situation, is to dirty up the messenger, if that’s possible. And here it seems most definitely possible. Everybody hates Murdoch. Everybody values privacy, and this whole dispute has its root in illegally bugged convos, which are basically stolen goods.”

“What’s on the tapes?” Shelley asked.

Ashok frowned. “See, even just asking that moves the conversation—”

“I know,” Arturo said. “Still, it’s information they should probably have.”

Ashok sighed. “Price-fixing,” he said impatiently. “Buried in these hundreds of pages are some arcane discussions about price-fixing. But that is information that stays within these walls, because it is not relevant to the problem at hand.”

The hell it isn’t, Helen thought, but she stayed quiet as the requisite tasks were assigned, none of them to her. This was her first real experience with a corporate job and its attendant hierarchies, and her chief aspiration for now was to avoid giving offense. Older or not, she wasn’t so proud as to assume that her instincts were better than other people’s. Ashok enlisted Shelley’s help in writing an anonymous blog that would attack the Journal and Murdoch for their greed in rushing to cash in on someone else’s crime and thus interfering with the workings of the justice system. The fictional blogger, claiming to have a mole inside the Journal, would release piecemeal everything the Crisis Management group knew about conflicts inside the paper, as well as some other allusive nuggets Ashok would simply make up, for instance the suggestion that the Journal might have paid for the tapes not after the fact but before. Two other members of the team were directed to set up a nonprofit entity called Americans for a Responsible Press, which would begin placing print ads exploiting the average citizen’s push-polled contempt for the immoral tactics of the media. They talked about staging an actual rally outside the Journal editorial offices; but that would mean hiring actors, with obvious attendant risks, and so Arturo wistfully declared that proposal tabled for now.

They carried these plans out over the course of ten days, never knowing how close the Journal was to publishing its story. Helen spent the better part of those days on a different case, arranging photo ops for a hedge fund manager who had started a charitable foundation to overhaul public schools, first in the city and then, after what he viewed as his inevitable success at home, across the country. The photo ops had to be the sort at which no reporter could ask this client a question, for his chronic problem was that he couldn’t keep himself from publicly insulting the teachers, administrators, families, and even children he had supposedly devoted his time and expertise to helping. “Charity” seemed to Helen an odd word to use in connection with what seemed more like a campaign of aggression, but she tried to see the best in people, and surely the goal was a worthy one. She went to every ten-thirty meeting and offered her update when asked, even though what she was doing didn’t seem to her strictly like crisis management work.

She ate in the cafeteria with Shelley and Ashok once or twice a week. The food was remarkably good, and their youth gave her cover. Shelley was maybe twenty-eight, but what made her really imposing was her level of physical fitness. Her arms alone, at which Helen had to remind herself to stop staring, must have amounted to a part-time job. Ashok, whenever the subject came up, looked embarrassed and mumbled something about a gym membership that he never had time to use. Though Shelley in particular loved to pump Helen for her backstory, neither she nor Ashok ever made much reference to their own lives outside the office. Once, when Shelley got up for another Vitaminwater, Helen—curious how well these two work friends even knew each other—asked Ashok with a conspiratorial smile what was up with that tattoo on the back of Shelley’s neck. Not to sound like an old lady, but weren’t they generally supposed to be somewhere less visible? Did everything these days have to be so out there? He did his best to smile back at her before answering.

“She lost a child,” he said. “Those are his initials.”

And as chastened as she was by that, Helen never forgot Ashok’s weak but carefully complicit smile, which was obviously meant to help her feel less guilty in retrospect for having accidentally made light of something tragic. She was right about him, she decided.

Her salary was now almost ninety thousand a year, plus insurance and access to a car service and other assorted little freebies such as coffee that her colleagues didn’t even take into consideration but that Helen, not long ago, was penciling into her budget every week. Suddenly there was money in her and Sara’s lives that was not only sufficient but dependable. Certainly they could now afford to live somewhere nicer than the cramped two-room rental they’d been in since January. Looking for a place to live in Manhattan, though, was absurdly complicated and labor-intensive. Helen wasn’t really working longer hours now than she had been at Harvey’s office, but she did have much less freedom to take off for an hour or two in the middle of the day in response to yet another excited phone call from some broker.

“There’s Brooklyn,” Sara said when they were discussing it at breakfast one Sunday.

“Sweetheart,” Helen said, cutting in half a warm everything bagel, “I am going to let you in on a little secret. I am too old to figure out where everything is in Brooklyn.”

In the end, she decided that another rental, even if it were bigger than this one, would only put them through the trauma of packing and moving again; they would wait until it seemed reasonable to start looking for a place to buy. That day might already have been upon them had the sale of their old house in Rensselaer Valley, upon which their original plans had naïvely depended, not fallen through. The buyers had started postponing the closing with demands that escalated in ridiculousness—a second well test, a certificate from a tree surgeon, replacement of the foam insulation in the garage—and when Bonifacio began skeptically looking into them, he discovered that the husband had recently lost his job, and their financing had been pulled. He wanted to tell them to take a hike, but Helen had suggested waiting to see if they could bounce back and get approved for another mortgage. They couldn’t, though, and eventually they withdrew entirely, and Helen had earned her lawyer’s scorn by returning this time-wasting couple’s deposit even though they weren’t entitled to it. They had a one-year-old son.

In the end, the Journal mined the bugged phone conversations not for one story but for almost a dozen—one every day for a brutal two weeks, as if to manufacture the fiction that the tapes themselves were still being feverishly transcribed, with the most damning moments reprinted as eye-catching sidebars. It was a war of attrition, which Ashok and his team were ill-equipped to win. His grassroots offensive, however loving the craftsmanship with which it was faked, was roundly ignored. Finally the day came when the CEO of the chip company tendered his resignation, along with most of the board of directors. Apart from a hopeful uptick on the day the resignations themselves were announced, the company’s stock fell steadily through the floor.

Helen took no pleasure in the air of panic and failure that seemed to suffuse the Fishtank during these weeks. She lay low and took meaningless notes. Then one Monday morning Arturo began the ten-thirty meeting by announcing that the chip manufacturer’s reconstituted board of directors had just fired them, and the recriminations began.

“Did anybody besides me even look at that blog?” one group member said disdainfully. “It read like a child wrote it. Even the comments sections were full of people calling bullshit on it.”

“It didn’t matter who wrote it,” said another voice, “or how well. It’s an old-school tactic. It’s a Neanderthal, first-year-business-school-textbook idea. Ivy Lee would have thought it was stale.”

Ashok, clearly panicked, hit the table with the heel of his hand. “How nice to hear from you,” he said, “finally, after all these weeks. I certainly didn’t hear a word from you back when we were looking for ideas. Of course it’s much easier to wait like a vulture and then say how you would have done things differently. And Ivy Lee was Ivy Lee for a reason, by the way—”

“Enough,” said Arturo. He stood up from his chair, buttoned his jacket, and turned upon them a stare so ostentatiously cold that a less handsome man could never have pulled it off. “Nobody is getting fired over this,” he said, “so there’s no need to start eating each other. Look. We can argue about strategy in here all we want, but what we do outside this room—what we do in the world—is predicated on belief. Everybody has to pull together, everybody has to believe in the idea at hand just as you would if you thought of it yourself. Everybody has to not just understand but completely internalize what we are fighting for. You can’t be an impartial advocate. You are either all in or you are part of what we’re fighting against. Do you understand what I mean when I use the word ‘belief’? Not a performance, but the real thing. Not ‘I will act as if my client is in the right.’ The public sees through that in a second. And I see through it. Doubt is a cancer, whether it’s doubt in our strategy or doubt in the people we represent. The distinction doesn’t matter. Cancer is cancer. When you walk out of this room in a minute, do it with a sense of your mission on the other side. And if you can’t do that, don’t come back at all.”

He closed his briefcase and left the room. They watched him through the glass walls all the way to the elevator bank. “Wow,” Shelley said. “Extra hot when he’s angry.”

Helen, despite herself, was stirred. There goes a leader of men, she thought. I could never do that job. The more she thought about Arturo’s words, the less sure she felt what he was actually talking about—it was really just sort of a variation on my way or the highway, with a little Messiah complex thrown in—but still, he was right, it wasn’t just about what you said to the world, it was about what was in your heart when you were saying it.

FREEDOM FROM HER FAMILY, freedom from a sense of place, freedom from peers who knew all about her, freedom from familiar objects: all of this had happened to her once before, Sara reflected, but not when she was old enough to remember any of it. “Rebirth” was too strong a word, maybe, but it was both truer and more mischievous to say that she felt like she was up for adoption again.

Here was one of the differences between her parents: she knew she could never figure out her father’s email password in a hundred years, but it had taken her all of five seconds to correctly guess her mother’s, which was “Sara.” Sara sent an email, from her mother’s account, dropping out of the basketball program entirely; she carefully deleted both the sent email and the coach’s understanding reply. She still rode the bus across town every Tuesday and Friday after school, though, usually just to wander in and out of stores or, when the weather got a little warmer, to lie on the grass embankment between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River, a spot she found soothing and also far enough from most human traffic that detection wasn’t a worry. Once in a while she’d take a picture of the river and upload it straight to Facebook, less for the benefit of her few friends from school who might see it than just to create some record of where she was. Sometimes these friends would respond, sometimes they wouldn’t, and then one day a few of them came and surprised her en masse, two she knew and three others. They sprinted across the highway like idiots to reach the embankment, rather than go two blocks out of their way to take the underpass.

They sat and watched the boats, Sara’s cheeks growing hot in the midst of them, talking about nothing—mostly waiting for some jogger to go by, or for some middle-aged guy to emerge from below the deck of his weathered boat, so they could fall silent and then mock him after he’d disappeared again. One of them, a boy in a green army jacket and a sad Jewfro that the wind off the Hudson kept shaking like some kind of jello mold, had a pocket-size bottle of Jägermeister with him; but after one swig everybody pretended they were buzzed just so they wouldn’t have to taste it again. Sara’s sort-of-friend and chem lab partner, Tracy, seemed to want to cultivate the impression that she was with one of the other guys, a fellow eighth grader named Cutter (at least that’s what he had named himself), whose family, she’d heard, was more well off than anyone else’s in the school, which, because he was black, probably shouldn’t have seemed ironic but did. Cutter kept catching Sara staring at them, which was not cool; she made herself look instead at the tide racing upriver toward the George Washington Bridge.

She heard his voice on the hill behind her, diluted by the pulse of traffic sounds from the highway, and then she realized he was saying, “What’s her name?”

“Sara,” someone answered him.

“Hey, Sara,” Cutter said, “you live near here?”

She swallowed. “No,” she said, “I’m all the way across town. Not too far from school.”

“So you just like boats?”

She laughed, still without looking at him. “My mom thinks I’m playing in a basketball league,” she said. “But I just come here.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. ’Cause I like boats?”

“What about your dad?” Cutter said. “Where’s he think you are?”

“Don’t know,” Sara said, but none of them heard her because they were all yelling at Cutter to try minding his own f*cking business and stop asking people personal questions. “This is why no one will hang out with you except us,” the Jewfro guy said.

Next Wednesday in school, Sara was standing in the cafeteria line, which stretched out the door, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, boat girl,” Cutter said. “What’s your first class after lunch?”

“English,” Sara said.

He snorted. “Come on,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day.” He took her hand, which kept her from dwelling too much on anything else that was happening as they walked straight through the kitchen and out the fire door onto Seventy-seventh Street. He hailed a cab going west, and at first she thought he wanted, for some bizarre romantic reason, to go back to the embankment by the boat basin where they’d met, but no, the cab kept going south all the way to the Hudson ferry slips, where he bought them two tickets for the Circle Line. They sat on the deck—it was two-thirds empty, no one but out-of-season tourists and a couple of lame class trips—and circled the island of Manhattan, watching the sun split by the peaked tops of the buildings, the silent cars, the way the crosstown streets would open up to their full depth just at the moment you passed them and then flatten out again. Cutter pushed her hair out of her eyes with one finger. Sara felt a bit like she’d heard drugs were supposed to make you feel—dangerously receptive, like in the future it was going to be too hard to resist knowing that you had the power to feel this way again.

“Better, right?” Cutter said. She looked at him quizzically. “To be the one on the boat,” he explained, “getting looked at by the people on the shore.”

He had a thing for boats, it turned out, even though they were no great novelty for him since his family owned one, which they kept at their place out in Sag Harbor. It was a little disappointing to Sara to realize that that was the initial basis of his interest in her—that she reflected an interest of his own. On the last Friday of the nominal basketball season, he took her to ride the Staten Island Ferry. The ferry itself was about the least quaint thing imaginable, and the harbor was surprisingly crowded, and if you looked too closely at the water it was pretty full of garbage, but Sara loved it anyway, in large part because of the uncharacteristic smile it put on Cutter’s face. When you got to Staten Island there was really nothing to do—some storefronts, an empty baseball stadium, MTA buses that went God only knew where—but there was the ride back to look forward to, with Manhattan expanding in front of you, as you tried to pick out from the forest of mismatched structures along the water the one small maw toward which the ferry was pointed.

She’d never been anybody’s girlfriend before, and she wasn’t sure she was now; the most official-seeming aspect of it was that Tracy wasn’t speaking to her anymore. She and Cutter never went to each other’s homes, though if the weather turned wintry again and they kept hanging out like this, she could see how that was going to emerge as an issue. For now they dated the way she imagined two homeless people might date. The first time he tried seriously to make out with her, they were on a bench on the East River promenade, and she was freezing. She pulled her head back and looked into his desire-clouded eyes.

“What is your real name?” she said, stalling. “I don’t see how I can kiss a guy when I don’t even know what name your mother gave you.”

He shrugged. “What name did your mother give you?” he said.

Which undermined her just enough to make her want to end the conversation; she unzipped his jacket so she could get her arms inside it for warmth, and kissed him until she could feel that her whole throat was bright red.

He talked a lot about adoption, actually, and about race, with passion but with no sense that these were subjects about which she might know something he didn’t. He claimed that a lot of people assumed he was adopted, since he was black and had money. Sara had never seen any instance of this assumption, though, and she decided that it was probably something that had happened to him one time but had become such a big deal in his mind that his recollection of it had swelled. It was true that no one knew why his family had him in public school when they had the resources to send him anywhere they wanted. Liberal guilt, Cutter said: it isn’t just for white folks. Though in the next breath he’d insist that he wouldn’t go to one of those elitist private banker-factories if you paid him to. Not many of his friends had actually seen where Cutter lived, but those who had, or said they had, all agreed solemnly that it was enormous.

“I have everything,” Cutter said to her, “but people are afraid of me because they think I feel entitled to what they have. Because I’m black.” They were sitting on a stoop just off Park Avenue, near Ninetieth Street, having cut last period; now other schools were letting out left and right, and sometimes they’d watch a pack of younger kids go by wearing uniforms and texting on their phones. Cutter and Sara were passing a pint bottle of warm cranberry vodka in a paper bag, though Sara had stopped after two revolting sips; now she just took it from him and then passed it back a minute later, while he was talking.

“White people are afraid of us, because they project their guilt onto us. They assume that we spend our lives thinking about them, measuring ourselves in terms of them. That’s what gives life to their guilt. It’s guilt over racism, but the guilt itself is racist, right?”

This wasn’t a side of him Sara particularly enjoyed, though she was impressed that he thought about this conceptual stuff at all. She wished there was a way to get rid of the vodka, because that seemed to draw it out of him. The only way to get him to drink less of it was to drink more of it herself. She had another small swig and passed the bag back to him.

“I don’t really see people reacting to us like that, though,” she said, in a near whisper she hoped would induce him to lower his own voice.

“Well, not so much to you, because you’re Asian,” he said. “That’s a whole other set of prejudices.”

“Okay,” she said, a little irritated, “thank you for the deep insight into my Asianness, but I meant I don’t see people reacting like that to you, either.”

Another group of middle school boys in blazers made their way down Ninetieth Street; one, who looked about ten, stopped right in front of them to tie his shoe. He had an iPod in his ears and showed no awareness that Sara and Cutter were looking down on him from just a few feet away.

“You don’t,” Cutter said, with a muttered, throaty laugh. The boy in the blazer straightened up and moved on. Cutter stood and hopped down the steps.

“Hey,” Sara said weakly. She thought he was angry and ditching her. Instead, when he caught up to the boy in the blazer, who’d fallen behind his friends, Cutter tapped him on the shoulder and started talking to him. They were only about thirty feet from the intersection, in front of a townhouse whose courtyard was filled with manicured bushes. Whatever they were doing or saying, Sara couldn’t make it out—Cutter’s back screened her from seeing much more than the loafers on the boy’s feet. Then the feet turned and ran toward Park Avenue, and Cutter spun and walked leisurely back to the stoop, a grin on his face so wide it opened his whole mouth in wonder, and in his hands the boy’s iPod, as well as what looked like forty or fifty dollars in cash.

“I didn’t even ask him for the money,” Cutter said, shaking his head delightedly. “How f*cked up is that?”

JAIL, FOR ALL HIS FEAR OF IT, had proved mostly just another iteration of the limbo in which Ben had been living for six months now. It even, like Stages, housed one or two minor celebrities who might brush by you on their way to the cafeteria or the gym, acknowledging with a rueful smile that they were who you thought they were. And on the day it was over, Ben once again was released into the bright sunshine with his car keys, less than a hundred dollars cash—though to be fair he still had access to much more money, in accounts in various places—no home, and nowhere special to go. To those who knew him, he was defined by his transgressions now, by the things for which he would not be forgiven, and, as rough as that was, it seemed pathetic to think about going to some random town or city just to start all over again—to pretend, at his age, to be anyone else. Not to mention that, in order to get at his money, he would have to make at least one trip to Bonifacio’s office and sign a few instruments he might well wind up drafting himself. Half out of spite for himself, therefore, and half out of the absence of other pressing business of any sort, he took the bus to Poughkeepsie, where his car was still parked, crossed the thruway, and ended up back in Rensselaer Valley. First he stopped and checked in to a motel just off the Saw Mill, a motel he had driven past ten times a week for the last fifteen years but had never been curious enough to see the inside of. Everything he owned fit in one bag now—well, maybe not everything, but having no idea where your belongings were was pretty damn close to not owning them anymore. Storage, if that’s where they were, was where they would stay. Offhand, he couldn’t remember what, other than a whole lot of suits and shirts and neckties, was even in there.

He was starving, but when the route to town took him past Meadow Close, he couldn’t resist turning in for a quick look. A few months of neglect weren’t really enough to change the appearance of a house; still, he inhaled sharply when he saw it, dark and clearly uninhabited, sitting in a chaotic brown yard that must have been giving Parnell and their other neighbors fits. The paint job was holding up, and the shutters were open and hung fine, and yet it still managed to look like a place where a disaster had happened. Kids would be daring each other to hit the windows with rocks before long. He had an urge to get out of the car and walk around the back to check on the screened porch. But it was the middle of the day. He pulled into Parnell’s driveway, backed out again facing the other way, and continued into town.

He parked his car on Main Street and walked up and down, peering into familiar shop windows, absorbing the looks of surprise and even horror on the faces of those who still recognized him, which happened maybe half a dozen times. He stopped in to the Polish grocery where he and his daughter had met back in December, and he ordered another one of those cream-filled rolls; hungry as he was, after a month of prison food it was so rich he couldn’t finish it. Then, on his trip down the opposite side of Main Street, in the shade of late afternoon and the corresponding chill, for which he was not appropriately dressed, he passed the hardware store, and the shingle that hung by the stairs running up the side of the two-story building, leading to the Offices (the “s” was a hilarious touch, Ben thought) of Joseph Bonifacio, Attorney at Law.

“Jacob Marley’s ghost!” Bonifacio said when Ben walked in. It took him a surprisingly long time to stand—he’d had his feet on his desk and was watching something on his computer. “I should have marked my calendar. But honestly I was pretty sure I’d never see you again. Certainly not here in the Valley. Returning to the scene of the crime, eh what?”

“Something like that,” Ben said.

“Well, listen, let’s have a drink to celebrate the end of your sentence. That is, if there’s a bottle of anything around—well, what do you know?” he said, producing a bottle of Jameson from the top drawer of his desk. “What are the chances of that?”

It was about four-thirty, and an hour later—during which time Ben didn’t hear the office phone ring once—the lawyer invited his client over to his house for dinner. There was a real edge to Bonifacio’s aggressive friendliness, an edge Ben thought Joe himself was mostly unaware of. He seemed proud of how small and cluttered and poorly insulated his house was, proud that someone like Ben—just the kind of privileged guy he’d always hated—was brought so low as to have to be grateful even for the tepid, perfunctory dinner put before him by Bonifacio’s resigned and surly wife.

“So how long are you back in town for?” she asked him. “Just picking up some things?”

He struggled to finish chewing a rubbery piece of beef. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t really have any plans, to tell the truth. I guess I just came back here to regroup.”

“Regroup for what?” she said skeptically.

“Not sure. I’m thinking.”

“Thinking about what?”

“Ginny, let’s not be rude to company,” Bonifacio said. “My client has paid his debt to society. Also his bill, which puts him in rare air around here. So as far as we are concerned, he is washed in the blood of the Lamb.”

Ginny shrugged and began clearing the table. “You’ll have to go back to work,” she said to Ben without looking at him. “Everybody has to work.”

“Demonstrably untrue,” Bonifacio said.

“All I really know how to do is practice law,” Ben said, “but with a prison record, that might be difficult for me.”

“Anyway,” Ginny said, pointedly on her way to the kitchen, “one lawyer is already plenty for a little town like this.”

Ben and Joe looked at each other, eyebrows up, realizing together what Ginny had been talking about all along: she was worried that Ben was planning to open up his own law office in town and drive her husband out of business. In her mind this was how well-off people behaved, and Ben had to hand it to her—as stereotypes went, it wasn’t a bad one.

“I wouldn’t worry, honey,” Joe said, struggling not to smile. He had been drinking Jameson, however leisurely, for at least three straight hours now. “Ben’s a smart enough guy to know that he’d be better off hanging his shingle in some town where he has less of a preexisting reputation as a scumbag.”

Ben smiled; then, to get off the subject, he said, “Joe, can I ask you something? I drove by my old house earlier today, before I saw you, and it looks very much like no one’s living there. You handled the sale for Helen, right? Is it some kind of absentee owner or something?”

“No. Well, yes, in the sense that the absentee owner is your ex-wife. The sale fell through, although it took months to declare it dead because Helen kept giving these deadbeats extra time. It’s still technically on the market. Not a great moment for real estate around here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Are you kidding me?” Ben said loudly. “What the hell is she living on?”

Joe shrugged, as the ice from the bottom of his glass hit his teeth again.

Ben returned to the house on Meadow Close the next morning. First he looked through the intact porch screen while standing on the back lawn; then, on a whim, he tried his key in the front door lock. It still worked. All the furniture was gone, and the rooms smelled of moisture and what was probably mice. He stood in the center of each empty room. He opened all the windows and then, before leaving, shut and locked them again.

It felt strange, after that, to go sit on his bed in the motel room. He held his phone in his hand and reflected that it—a cellphone—was probably the closest thing in his life to a home right now, the object most linked to his sense of identity and with the longest association to his past. Whats a good time to call u? he texted Sara, and she did not reply. Then it occurred to him that she might have thought he was still in jail upstate, but when he texted to let her know he was out now, she wrote back yes I know I can count. She did not ask him where he was.

Two nights later Bonifacio called him when he was watching TV in the motel room and said, “Listen, I have a proposition for you. You’re a trusts and estates guy, right? Or were. Anyway, I just caught a probate case that is a real bear.”

“Who died?” Ben asked.

“You know the Feldmans, who live on Colonial Ave.? Husband was a commodities trader?” Ben did know them, a little; he saw Jay Feldman ten times a week back in the early years, when he used to take the train. “Well, he died of a heart attack while jogging, if you please, and the weird thing is the Feldmans were like two days from finalizing their divorce when it happened. Anyway, it’s a mess, and I was wondering how you’d feel about coming in for a week or two to help me sort it out. If you’re not doing anything.”

Bonifacio was loving this a little too much, Ben thought; but he agreed to it anyway. For a week, he sat in a folding chair with his feet on Joe’s windowsill and helped him craft a brief on the angry widow’s behalf that was bound to blow the mind of whatever hack rural circuit-court judge caught the case. The bottle of Jameson usually came out of the drawer around four o’clock. Ben understood that it was tied in some way to the difficulty Bonifacio had not with his work but with going home. At the tail end of the Friday before his court appearance on behalf of Mrs. Feldman, Bonifacio brought up with Ben the question of money.

“It’ll have to be under the table,” Bonifacio said. “I hope that’s not going to cause you any problems. I can offer you two grand. I know you’re worth much more, but I mean, look around you.” He waved with the glass in his hand to indicate the tiny lamplit office, the sun already descending behind the muddy train station across the road. “It’s all I’ve got.”

The proper thing for Bonifacio to do, Ben knew, was to offer him instead a cut of the eventual settlement; but he didn’t care to pursue it. He had something else on his mind.

“Keep it,” Ben said. “I was happy to help out. You did plenty for me, so it’s good to give back.”

“I did do good for you, didn’t I?” Bonifacio said. “I mean, I couldn’t keep you out of jail, I am sorry about that, but you were able to hold on to a fair amount of money in the end, considering you were getting prosecuted and sued and divorced at the same time.”

Ben raised his glass in salute. “Very true,” he said. “Which is why I don’t need your lousy two grand.”

Bonifacio laughed. “Have it your way,” he said. “Regardless, you were the best little assistant I’ve ever had around here.”

Really, it was like he kept digging around until he stumbled on the remark that would make you want to slap him in the face. That seemed to be what he wanted. No wonder he didn’t appear to have other friends in town. Ben drained his glass and held it out cheerfully for a refill.

“You make a better lawyer than a boss,” he said. “And you’re still the only advocate I’ve got. Which brings us to new business. I have a job for you.”

ANEW KOREAN-MADE ECONOMY CAR got a “Satisfactory” rating from Consumer Reports, whereupon the Crisis Management team assembled as immediately and instinctively as a team of superheroes; but then most of their subsequent time and ingenuity was spent moving ninja-like through the immense trivialities of the various social networks, countering complaints, planting favorable remarks. The question of whether the client might instead address the crisis by building safer cars was a nonstarter. Helen understood that once you got out of the realm in which your clients were individuals with whom you sat down face to face, your power diminished, and your thinking had to change; still, though, even their most detailed and intense strategies often seemed to her like confoundingly small potatoes.

A company that made artificial knees hired Malloy the week an FDA report was released suggesting that the knees were failing far more quickly than predicted and that the resulting complications had contributed to one death. The two orthopedic surgeons who had invented the device, which, having enriched them beyond the dreams of avarice, was now poised to ruin them, were turning on each other. One insisted almost dementedly that the device was working exactly as intended and that, since any response to the charges only gave them further credence, they should be ignored. The other, whose lawyer seemed to have all but moved in with him, said that silence equaled guilt, but that there was a way, in these matters, to apologize without actually admitting anything, a way that only lawyers understood.

“This is what happens when people’s attorneys get involved,” Arturo said at the Fishtank meeting where this new business was introduced. “They specialize in selfish thinking. So what does he suggest we ask people to believe about these failing knees?”

“Acts of God,” Shelley said, “was I believe the phrase he wanted us to use.”

Arturo snorted. “There are no acts of God anymore,” he said. “Americans believe in negligence. Helen, what do you think?”

This was a question Helen had never yet heard in the weeks of her employ. “I’m sorry?” she said.

“About the notion of the non-apology apology. You’re supposed to be the apology expert. This is the word from on high, anyway.”

Everyone turned to look at her. “Well, it has to be sincere,” she said, reddening. “It has to be sincere and thorough. If it gives off the whiff of having been vetted by a lawyer, to me that’s worse than saying nothing at all.”

“But it will kill them,” one of the other group members said. “If they get up there and say hey, our bad, our knees don’t work the way we thought they would, no way they stay in business, at least not with this product.”

“So, Helen, you’re suggesting we counsel our client to embrace their failure?” Arturo said.

Helen, unused to being asked to justify her instincts, faltered, and there was an awkward pause.

“I can sort of see it, actually,” Arturo said at last. “If you want to be resurrected, you have to be dead.”

The following Wednesday, Helen was gathering her things to leave for home and maybe make Sara a decent dinner for once when Arturo popped up unprecedentedly in her office doorway, his hand on the shoulder of a miserable-looking Ashok. “We’re looking for the sorry maven?” Arturo said brightly. Poor Ashok, on a cold streak as it was, had been battling all week with a roomful of unsmiling dogmatists who handled in-house PR for Pepsi. New York’s city council, they were reliably informed, was about to reintroduce a bill to establish a so-called sin tax on sodas, which, even if it didn’t significantly harm their sales, would lump them in with cigarettes and gambling and open a sort of moral door that everyone agreed should stay shut if at all possible. Such was their panic that Ashok’s mild proposal, at a meeting that morning up at PepsiCo headquarters in Purchase, of a “two-pronged approach”—one prong of which was admitting that it was theoretically possible for a person to drink too much Pepsi—had led to their demand that he be fired.

“I’d like you to go up there tomorrow,” Arturo said. He was composed and smiling, but the expression on Ashok’s face hinted at a recent closed-door reaming. “The two of you, though I think it’s better if you do all the talking. Mr. Malloy tells me you’re good at apologizing, so let’s see those mad skills in action, okay?”

He didn’t have that last bit quite right, of course, but Helen saw that Ashok’s job might be in the balance, and so she said okay. The next day she sat at a conference table across from six people in suits; their designated spokesperson was, refreshingly, female, though whether that might make Helen’s own task easier or harder, she had no clue.

“Obviously we have to get on an attack footing as quickly as possible,” the woman said. She looked about twenty-two, except for her taut corporate hairstyle, which was forty or forty-five. “We should paint this as the work of an out-of-control government. In that folder I brought you”—she reached over and tapped it—“are some polling numbers on various key phrases. ‘Nanny state’ is second highest but also shows the highest increase since the last time we polled. We’ll want to hit that one hard.”

Helen flipped listlessly through the research. “Americans Against Higher Taxes?” she said. “What is that?”

The Pepsi woman looked confused. “That’s the nonprofit we established to serve as sponsor for our TV and print ads against the bill,” she said. “To make them look like PSAs.”

Helen pinched the bridge of her nose. “I feel like you’re reacting emotionally,” she said. “In terms of long-range thinking, I know you know better than this. This kind of aggression ultimately gets you nowhere. Soda is not particularly good for you; in conjunction with other things that are not good for you, it can affect your health. You can keep contesting the facts, or commissioning new studies. But do you really want to keep bailing the boat, or do you want to get in a different boat?”

The Pepsi woman sat stone-faced.

“Well, whatever, the point is you have to adapt. Fifty years ago cigarettes were being marketed for their health benefits, for goodness sake, but if you tried that today you’d be laughed out of business, right? So here’s what you do: you admit it. You take away their weapon. You admit your complicity in the sins of the past, because that way you take the past out of the conversation. You resolve to conduct yourself differently in the future, and then—you know what?—you conduct yourself differently in the future. This is how you stay in business. People relate to brands as if that relationship were emotional. So you have to play the role they want you to play, you have to personify it, and ask forgiveness the way you would if you were talking one on one. The first thing you do is kill off this ridiculous Americans Against Higher Taxes. People are too smart for that nowadays. You can’t predicate your PR strategy on the idea that people are morons. Whose gem was this idea, anyway?”

“Yours,” the Pepsi woman said irritably.

Helen did not look over at Ashok. Instead she got them to agree to at least try to draft a hypothetical release in which they applauded the motivations of health-minded politicians and looked forward to playing a leading role in helping Americans of all ages live longer. They’d call it The Next Century Initiative or something forward-looking like that. She wasn’t positive they’d be able to go all the way through with it, but the look on Ashok’s face as they rode back to Manhattan in the town car—the look of a man who’d been called down from the gallows—made the day feel like a success in any case.

The next day—again, just as she was packing up to leave for home—he walked into her office and gently shut the door behind him. “I just wanted to say thank you,” he mumbled.

“No problem. They’re living in a kind of bubble up there, that’s all. Sometimes you have to explain your client to people, sometimes you have to explain people to your client.”

“Right. So listen, I was thinking that, being at home with your daughter, you probably don’t get out much—”

“I don’t know that it’s as bad as all that,” she laughed, though in fact it was.

“—and I have these two premiere tickets for Code of Conduct next Tuesday night. Julie in Promotions gave them to me. I thought maybe you’d like to go.”

“Tuesday,” she said, thinking how nice it would be to do something with Sara, to let her share in a big-city perk. “It’s a school night, of course.”

“Sorry?”

“You remember the whole school-night phenomenon? But I don’t think Sara would mind if I made an exception this time. Thank you. We’ll take them.”

“Ah,” Ashok said. He turned to look behind him at the closed door. “Well, you’re very welcome. I mean of course I couldn’t use them, which is why … So Sara is your daughter’s name. Very nice. Okay then.” But he didn’t move.

Did I say something wrong? Helen thought, and then it hit her: he was asking her out. He was asking her out on a date. Sweet Jesus. It was staggeringly inappropriate of him; and yet her first reaction was shame at having humiliated him by not even realizing what he was doing, by not taking him seriously enough to say a proper no.

But he had to be fifteen years younger than she was. Maybe more. She had no idea what to make of it. Maybe he had some kind of depraved mommy issue. Maybe he sensed that she was somehow ascendant around there and was just trying to advance his own career. In fact maybe he knew she would say no, but gambled that the flattery of his asking her at all would linger and maybe work to his advantage down the road. Because who would ever ask her out, right? An old lady like her? Why not give Grandma a little thrill?

“I never said we don’t get out much,” she said, a little more angrily than she meant to. “She just turned fourteen. It’s not like I’m upset she’s not out more. What is Code of Whatever, anyway?”

“It’s a movie.”

“What’s it about?”

“What’s it about? I don’t really know.”

“Who’s in it?”

“Hamilton Barth, Minka Kelly, Bradley Cooper.”

Helen’s eyebrows shot up.

“Why do we get tickets?” she said.

“Because we get tickets to everything.”

“But I mean do we represent all of these people? Is Hamilton Barth a client of ours?”

“Not really. I mean, in a sense,” Ashok said, relaxing as he saw her expression change. “We represent the studios, the studios make movies with him in them, so you could say he’s sometimes a client of ours. You’re a fan?”

“So he’ll be there?”

“I imagine they’ll all be there. You know how it is with him. He’s expected, but there’s always some suspense.”

Helen smiled.

“So you’ll go?” Ashok said. “Great. I’ll tell Julie to put you on the list. It’s at the Ziegfeld.”

Helen knew her daughter well enough not to overplay the element of glamor in attending a red-carpet premiere; at Sara’s age, what you wanted most was not to be looked at too hard or by too many people. “It’s supposed to be a good movie,” Helen said, “and we’ll get to see it before anybody else, and we’ll get a good look at a bunch of celebrities probably.” She did not mention Hamilton, in order to spare herself the torrent of eye-rolling abuse that name always provoked.

“I don’t have to buy a new dress or anything?” Sara said warily.

She was a very different girl than her mother had been. But they were all like that now. “You can wear what you want,” Helen said, “within reason.”

“Cool,” Sara said. “And I have to go with you?”

These moments had been coming more regularly of late: cold-eyed expressions of disregard from her own daughter, made more stunning by the offhandedness with which they were delivered. Helen had been spoken to disrespectfully for at least two years, but this was different. Remarks like this used to be intended to hurt her, which was hard but at least comprehensible. Now it was more like the effect of her words didn’t matter to Sara at all. She even looked a little different lately, in the face mostly. She was spending more time out, at night and on weekends; Helen thought maybe there was a boyfriend in the picture, though she had made the mistake of asking about it only once. She’d signed Sara up for weekend soccer, but for some reason Sara had actually extracted from her a promise not to attend the games. She said her mother’s presence, since unnecessary, would be embarrassing.

The insults, though, were not the issue; the issue was that they made Helen feel her child was slipping away from her. She kept trying to think of new approaches. They ought to take more advantage of the city, Helen knew, and go to museums together, or to shows or on walking tours. They ought—both of them—to be a little more cognizant of their own good fortune and find some volunteer or charity work that they could do together, preferably on weekends. Not that arresting Sara’s drift was a simple matter of tacking on a few supplementary lessons in culture and humility: Helen’s own positive influence was, she feared, being trumped by unseen bad ones, and in that light she started wondering about how to get Sara out of that awful school all the published rankings had told her was so good. Forms were already beginning to show up in the mail from the high school she was slated to attend next year, a place reportedly, as even Sara admitted, not much different from where she was now, just bigger, and therefore likely worse. Why not private school instead of public next year? Helen thought; but when she called Trinity to ask if maybe there were still spaces left for the fall, the woman on the other end actually laughed, before apologizing politely and profusely, saying she had assumed Helen was kidding. Maybe for tenth grade, Helen resolved. They’d come up with the money somehow.

“Stop trying to improve me,” Sara would snap when topics such as this came up. “Like you’re so perfect.” Helen was terrified by the guilty thought that it was all some delayed reaction to the trauma of the move, or of the divorce itself—that she herself might be a source not just of love but of damage. But if her own actions had contributed to this damage, then her own actions could put it right. Not that she was willing to take all, or even half, of the blame for events that had knocked Sara off the loving equilibrium that, as a child, she’d always shown. But Helen was the parent who stayed, the one who was always right there, so naturally she was the one who got excoriated. One day soon she would get up her nerve to pursue the issue of contact with Ben, but, truth be told, she was scared he would use the opportunity to open up the custody issue too, and that she could not handle just yet. Anyway, she scolded herself, wanting to share some of the burden of getting insulted was not a very admirable reason to try to bring Sara’s father back into their lives.

It was true that most of the celebrities at the premiere would be people whose names and faces meant nothing to Sara or anyone else her age. Still, they were going to spend a few hours inside the barricades of that world where movie stars came and went. They were going to walk a red carpet, even if they did so hours before the carpet was cleared for those whom the tourists and gawkers and photographers really wanted to see, even if the sight of a middle-aged mother and her daughter in fancy dress would cause people to turn away in disappointment or derision. It had to mean something to her daughter, whether she was capable of admitting it or not, that, having fallen so low together in the world, they had now risen to the level where they were, if nothing else, visible again.

Helen, at any rate, grew excited about it, and even permitted herself to fantasize that she might get to say hello to Hamilton Barth, or sit near him in the roped-off VIP seats, maybe talk about old times, introduce him to her child. She knew this was not how these tightly scripted public events generally worked, but she indulged the thought anyway. And then her sense that life in general was on the uptick was boosted further when she got a rare phone call from their lawyer from the dark days up in Rensselaer Valley, Joe Bonifacio. She felt fear in her throat just at the initial sound of his voice, but it turned out he was calling with excellent tidings. A new buyer had emerged for their empty house. She hadn’t given up on that, of course, but the fact that the house was long since paid off in full kept its existence from weighing too heavily on her mind day to day.

“Not that I care,” she said happily, “but how far did you have to come down in terms of price?”

“The buyer has offered the full listing price—”

“Are you kidding?”

“—in exchange for a few considerations regarding the closing. Chief among these is that he would like his identity to remain anonymous. He won’t be present at the closing itself, and he has given me his proxy to sign all affidavits, et cetera, on his behalf.”

“What about financing? Won’t all this secrecy be a problem there?”

“He will pay cash.”

“Oh my God,” Helen said. Into their lives, already stabler than they were used to, was about to drop $315,000 in cash. “What is this guy, like some kind of celebrity or something?”

“Yes, actually,” Bonifacio said coolly. “He is something of a celebrity, and for that reason would like everything done as quickly and as secretively and uncontentiously as possible. A fast closing. Is that acceptable to you?”

Helen allowed that it was. The day before the premiere, she took the afternoon off from work to ride the train back up to her old hometown and sit in Bonifacio’s threadbare office and sign a stack of documents, and their last tie to their old life was cut. She was surprised not to feel any more ambivalence or nostalgia than she did. Mostly she just felt an unfamiliar pride. From the shipwreck of her marriage, with no resources at all, she had made a new existence for herself and her daughter, and that existence, at the present moment, would have to be counted a roaring success.

Movie theaters had basically followed the model of airplanes—what once had a now all but unimaginable aura of luxury had become as depressingly cost-efficient as possible—but the Ziegfeld had been left sufficiently alone that it could be pressed into service on nights when a little old-Hollywood glamor was on order. Helen had been instructed to arrive no later than five-thirty even though the movie didn’t start until eight. She understood why. Sara did too, she was sure, though that didn’t stop the poor girl—who looked amazing, Helen thought, amazing and pitiably self-conscious at the same time—from denouncing the whole operation as a perfectly refined symptom of everything fake for which she somehow held her mother responsible. They got out of a yellow cab at the end of the block (as far as the traffic cop posted there would let it go) and walked to the head of the pristine red carpet, where the spotlights were turned off and dozens of photographers, who had to get there early to secure their positions, fiddled irritably with their equipment. Helen wasn’t sure whether to savor the moment and walk leisurely with her head up, smiling, or to speed into the theater as discreetly as possible. Sara walked almost directly behind her about halfway through the bored gauntlet, and then, incredibly, she stopped dead and answered her phone.

“Sweetheart,” Helen said reproachfully, but Sara held up a hand to silence her. She was reading a text; whomever it was from, it put a welcome smile on her face, and she flipped the phone around in her hand and began snapping pictures of the paparazzi. “Smile!” she called out, and one or two of them did, though most simply looked annoyed with her for daring to clog up the charged public space with her ordinariness. Sara’s phone beeped at her again as she was holding it aloft for another photo; she brought it down, read what was on the screen, laughed, and started texting back.

“Sara!” Helen said and put a hand on her shoulder. Sara shook it off. “Who are you texting?” she said, leaning next to her daughter’s face to try to look at the screen; she got a whiff of something sweet and medicinal. “Fine,” Sara said, closing her phone, and marched toward the theater doors, her mother trailing behind.

They were hustled into a very plain-looking reception room full of catering tables, where they spent an hour stuffing themselves with finger food while glancing at a closed-circuit video monitor fed by a stationary camera trained on the same carpet they had just crossed. First came a trickle of anonymous corporate invitees just like them, overdressed people who walked off the bottom of the screen and then appeared a few seconds later in the doorway of the reception room, trying to look nowhere and for a familiar face at the same time. Helen was sorry to see that no one else had brought a young son or daughter. Then came a second round of people, who apparently were well known if you were part of the movie industry, judging by the little, indiscreet grunts of recognition Helen heard moving through the crowd.

“Who’s that guy?” Sara said.

“Not a clue,” said Helen.

Sara shrugged. “They’re going to wait until the last of the genetically inferior walks the red carpet,” she said, “and then they’re going to seal the doors and turn on the gas.”

Her mother was turning to ask her to keep her voice down when a more serious ripple went through the room, and Helen felt her shoulders squeezed as others abruptly tried to work their way toward the door separating them from the lobby. She turned to the screen and saw a face she recognized, though she had no memory of the name, and then a beautiful young woman who was either Amy Ryan or Amy Adams. She didn’t dare ask anyone—certainly not Sara; when she got into a certain mood, anything you said to her was a provocation—which Amy it was.

“Pretty sure,” Sara said, “that I am the only Asian person here.”

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” Helen said, trying to conceal her surprise; that was exactly the sort of thing she’d always taken comfort in Sara not noticing. She kept her eyes on the screen. Though the camera angle excluded the arc lights themselves, you could tell they were on from the glow that now framed the faces on the video feed; and every time they heard the lobby doors open, the sound of a kind of dull human panic reached them from outside until the doors swung shut again. They weren’t really on the inside, Helen thought, where they could see what was going on, but they weren’t on the outside either; she didn’t know where they were. And then there was a collective octave change as the crowd saw Hamilton Barth step out of the carousel of limousines.

The other guests had already begun to exit the reception room, to find good seats and to get a good, clear, casual look at the famous in the flesh before the lights went down; so Helen, with everyone suddenly drawing away from her, could hear for the first time that there was now an audio feed on the monitor as well. Two well-dressed men, just good-looking enough to be unobtrusive, stood on either side of Hamilton with their hands on his two elbows.

“He’s bombed,” murmured Sara, startling her mother, who hadn’t realized she was right there. “Nice. He’s so hammered he needs two guys to hold him up.”

But Hamilton, handsome and curious and wincing a bit from the noise, clearly wasn’t bombed, and they weren’t holding him up—their touch was too light for that. While pretending to look elsewhere, the two men—who might have been co-workers of Helen’s at Malloy for all she knew; where else would you drum up people to perform such a task?—were trying their best to shepherd Hamilton into the theater as quickly as possible, to keep his feet moving before some beautiful woman in a gown holding a microphone could step into his path and arrest his attention, which was of course exactly what happened next.

“Hamilton!” the woman shouted at him. He stopped dead and drew back a little at the sight of her. “Hamilton Barth! What a night! How excited are you to be here?”

“How excited am I?” Hamilton said, shouting over the screams of those behind the ropes—shouting, it seemed, over the strobe of flashbulbs. He was grinning, a little gamely and a little condescendingly, and crow’s feet ramified handsomely around his eyes like pond ice someone has stepped on a little too soon. “We’re all overexcited, right! Did your mother used to tell you sometimes that you were getting overexcited? Mine did! What’s your name?”

He brushed his hands through his hair, mostly as a way of getting his elbows out of the palms of his two escorts, who were already visibly worried.

“Everybody’s here tonight! You must have lots of friends here for your big night!”

“I don’t really have a lot of industry friends, actually,” Hamilton said ruminatively, as if they were having a serious conversation at the tops of their voices, “because if you have a lot of friends in the industry, then you wind up spending a lot of evenings like this one.”

“Tell me about this movie,” the woman with the microphone said through her dozens of teeth. “Was it—”

“Maria,” Hamilton said. “Is it Maria? Not that you look like you would be named Maria, just I suddenly feel like we’ve met before.”

“Wow!” said the woman who might plausibly have been Maria. “So there’s already Oscar buzz about this movie. What was it like making it?”

“What is your job?” Hamilton asked her, in the friendliest possible tone. “What do you do?”

The woman’s openmouthed smile gave way to uncertain laughter. The microphone dropped an inch or two.

“No, I’m sorry, right, the movie, the movie,” Hamilton said. “Well, look around you, I mean this evening says it all, right? The movie was just like every other movie I have ever made, an exploration of the self and its boundaries, a pathetic, profligate waste of money, an orgy, a journey, a total clusterf*ck.”

“A what?” said Maria.

“Clusterf*ck!” Hamilton repeated into the microphone, at which point the two handlers put their forearms into the small of his back and got his momentum going toward the theater door again.

“What a tool,” Sara said. “Seriously, with the I’m-too-good-for-this routine. If you don’t like being looked at, don’t spend your whole life in front of cameras.” Helen saw she was texting again.

“It’s hard to be scrutinized all the time,” Helen said softly. “And watch your language, please. Some actors find it hard just to be themselves. I don’t think this is reflective of who he really is.”

“How do you know who he really is?” Sara said. “And do not tell that story again. Can we go get some decent seats, please?”

The theater was already nearly full, though hardly anyone was seated. The lights were still all the way up. The aisles were crowded with people on their phones; Helen saw one woman who was clearly only pretending to talk to someone, then discreetly turning the phone every few seconds to take a picture. She looked around to see who was worth this small subterfuge, but in the front few rows of seats it was hard to recognize anyone, precisely because everyone had that look to them, that look of being someone whom you ought to recognize. “Keep going, keep going,” Sara said to her bewildered mother. “I do not want to get stuck on the side.” Helen pushed gently past five or six standing men, toward what looked like unclaimed space in the interior of one of the center rows. It was impossible to tell which seats were taken and which were not, because no one was willing to compromise his or her view of everyone else by sitting down.

“Can I help you?” a female voice asked incredulously. Helen looked down and saw a beautiful, dark-eyed, pint-size young woman with a headset and a tiny skirt, staring at Helen and her daughter as if they had just broken into her home. Her right arm was thoroughly, colorfully tattooed from the shoulder down to the forearm, at which point the design dwindled gracefully, like an unfinished chapel ceiling. Her red hair was stylishly, boyishly short, the sort of haircut models in fashion magazines sometimes fooled you into thinking you and your imperfect face could get away with. This woman got away with it completely, and it contributed to her air of almost biological disdain. Her question was of course rhetorical; as Helen was still smiling at her, prefatory to explaining how she could indeed help them, the tiny woman said, “This is the VIP seating and I am going to go ahead and guess you don’t belong here.”

“Probably not,” Helen said affably. “Can you tell me where we do belong?”

“Staten Island?” the woman said. “I don’t know. A word of advice, though. Next time you want to try crashing, don’t bring a kid. That’s just shameless.”

Helen’s smile dropped. “Listen,” she said, feeling herself blush, “there’s no call to get personal. I have just as much right to be here as you do. But if you can just tell me where it’s okay for us to sit, we will go sit there.”

“How is it my problem where you belong?” From the suddenly wild look in the woman’s eyes, Helen could tell that someone very important was somewhere behind her. “All I can do for you is tell you where you don’t belong. Do I not have enough to deal with? Do you even know how these events work? What, did you win your tickets in a contest or some shit?”

“Mom,” Sara said urgently and put her hand on her mother’s arm.

“You need to stop blocking this row immediately,” the woman said.

“How can I even get out? You are blocking my only way out of this row.”

“You need to clear this row or I will call security.” She put her fingers to her tiny headset.

Helen’s shoulders sagged.

“Mom!” Sara said.

“Excuse me,” another voice said behind Helen, “they’re with me.” She turned, and there was Hamilton Barth, big as life, in a very elegant-looking dark suede jacket and jeans and cowboy boots. Their proximity to him did not seem quite real. He gave off a sharp smell. He flashed his weathered smile. “Are these my seats? Because these two are with me.”

No sound came from the woman with the headset. Helen was looking right into Hamilton’s face, and smiling expectantly, and he was smiling back at her, but in a reflexive way that made it clear to her he had no idea at all who she was. Not that he should have been expected to recognize her—someone he kissed at a party thirty years ago. Still, she was let down by the realization that as far as he was concerned he was just doing something impishly chivalrous for two unglamorous strangers.

“What’s your name, dear?” he said to her.

“Helen,” she said both pointedly and nervously.

He looked over her head to the young woman with the headset, whose expression was stony, as if determined to face disaster bravely. “Helen and her daughter are my guests. These are our seats, correct?”

The young woman nodded. It wasn’t a lie; his saying it made it true.

“And your name?”

She swallowed. You could see her thinking that Hamilton Barth asking for her name was either the best or the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She wasn’t some ordinary flack: she had bought into the ruthless values of her flackdom so completely that, just as she had not questioned Helen’s inferiority to her, she stood before this famous person as she would have before a judge. “Bettina,” she said clearly.

“Thank you for your help, Bettina,” Hamilton said and sat down. He gestured grandly to Helen and dumbstruck Sara, and they sat as well, so that Helen was between the other two. She felt as if she had crossed into some new dimension. She could have made their forearms touch if she wanted to: he was handsome and rumpled and musky and tan and faun-like, but he seemed to radiate some ethereal quality above and apart from all that. From the corner of her eye she could see people surreptitiously shooting pictures of him, pictures in which she would reside forever and invisibly.

“I hope that’s all right with you,” Hamilton said. “I just can’t stand watching these little martinet bitches treating people like that. A little bit of power, you know?”

“I do know. Thank you.”

“And now she can spend the rest of the evening wondering if I’m going to have her fired.”

“Are you?” Helen asked, idly curious, though it occurred to her that the young woman might even have been a Malloy employee.

“No,” he laughed. “It’s not her fault, really. She has a dark, dark heart.” His eyes seemed to unfocus for a few seconds; then he turned to Helen again and grinned. “I’m Hamilton, by the way.” He put out his hand, and she took it.

“Yes, of course I know who you are,” she said. “But not for the reason you think I do.”

Hamilton squinted. Nearly everyone was seated now, but she could still feel a thousand eyes on them. “Say again?” he said.

“He doesn’t even remember you?” Sara said behind her, uncomfortably close to her ear. “That is priceless.”

“Hello?” said an unfamiliar voice in the air around them; it was the film’s director, who began a short introduction, which after two minutes gave no indication of winding up. Helen, impatient, shifted toward Hamilton and reflexively hunched lower in her seat. Hamilton did the same. “I hate these things,” he whispered. “Always the same. Rituals about nothing. Why is it important that I be here? What does it have to do with me?”

“I can understand why a person would have a few drinks,” Helen said incautiously.

“That gets exaggerated,” Hamilton said, seeming unoffended, “because when I drink, I do stupid things. What did you say your name was again?”

She took a deep breath. “My name is Helen Armstead,” she said. “It used to be Helen Roche. You and I were classmates at St. Catherine’s in Malloy, New York, for eight years.”

She watched his eyes try to resettle on her.

“We lived on Holcomb Street,” she went on in a low voice. His mouth, like hers, was now below the level of the seat back. “My father was the pharmacist at the prison. I was friends with Erin White, whose sister you went out with, or at least that’s what she said.”

She felt terrified, as if she were divulging secrets. Hamilton was doing something with his eyes without even moving them. Sara was nudging her mother in the back to try to get her to sit up straight and stop risking the notice of strangers. There was a tepid rain of applause, and the lights in the theater went down.

“Keep talking,” Hamilton whispered to her. “This is incredible.”

As she did so, her eyes adjusted to the dark and his face came back into focus. “I was at your first communion,” she whispered to him. “I was part of that group that got drunk behind the Little League field after your confirmation. Remember? I was there watching with you when Jerry Merrill flipped his boat on Sylvia Lake. I was there at Sue Coleman’s graduation party when you fell asleep with a cigarette and burned a hole in their couch.”

“Yes,” Hamilton whispered in a tone of awe. “That was me.”

“Sssh!” said someone in the row behind them.

“I sat behind you in Sister Edna’s French class. I knew your mom from when I would help out my mom at the church flea markets on the last Saturday of every month. I knew your little brother who was in the first Gulf War. I can’t remember his name, though.”

“Gilbert,” Hamilton said. “Gil. Oh my God. What else?”

“Would you shut up?” a woman said in the dark above their heads.

Helen didn’t tell him that they had once made out. She didn’t know why. The movie’s opening credits were ending—there was scattered applause for each above-the-line name—and then she had the strange experience of sitting beside Hamilton as he watched himself act on screen. Gradually the sight of his magnified face seemed to bring him out of the trance into which her litany of childhood memories had lowered him. He fidgeted, and chewed at his thumb, until about a half hour into the film he leaned toward Helen and wrapped his fingers gently around her arm.

“I need to hit the bathroom,” he said.

“I hope you don’t feel ambushed,” she whispered. “I didn’t know if I’d get to talk to you at all.”

“Of course not. Hey, I never asked you what you’re even doing here. Do you work for the studio?”

“I work at a PR firm,” she said. “Malloy Worldwide, it’s called, if you can believe it. I think you work with them sometimes.”

“Oh. Sure. Do you have a card or something?”

It was the polite thing you said to someone you knew you were never going to see again. Dispirited, feeling she had said the wrong thing somewhere, she fumbled in her bag for a business card and handed it to him.

“Okay,” he said. “Well, listen.” But then he couldn’t seem to think what else to say. He leaned over and kissed Helen on the cheek, and then, remaining in his crouch, he discreetly exited at the other end of the row.

The movie was about a man who witnesses a killing and has to send his wife and children into hiding while he tries to figure out the murderer’s identity before the murderer figures out his. By the time the lights went up, the on-screen Hamilton had muddied the real but absent one and Helen’s exhilaration had given way to a peculiar, untraceable sadness. She wasn’t particularly surprised that he’d never come back to his seat. She’d upset or offended him somehow. There was a Q and A after the closing credits, but so many people stood and left while it was still going on that Helen took advantage of the general rudeness to leave the theater as well. The street was choked with limos; they had to walk all the way to Madison to find a cab uptown.

Sara texted furiously in the seat beside her as they rode. Helen leaned her forehead against the cool window, staring into the empty boutiques, bright and unpopulated. “So,” Sara said, without looking up. “There it was, right? Your big reunion. Did you reminisce about your great moment in the closet?”

“No,” Helen said. “Nothing like that. I don’t know what I thought would happen. He was a nice man, and I’m glad I talked to him, but in a way I’m sorry I told him who I was at all. People don’t really want to go back to their past. They’d probably rather just get further away from it.” But Sara’s earphones were already back in, so this last thought was delivered to no one.