Item three came quick enough: “Okay, this offer on the building. What are we going to do?”
She stared at the others, and Dana, also a lawyer, said, “We’re obliged to answer them, legally, and just as a matter of doing due diligence.”
“I know.” Charlotte hated the phrase doing due diligence, but this was not the time to mention that. I do do-do on your dumb due diligence. No.
“So,” Dana continued, “the covenant requires we put any ownership question to a vote of the membership.”
Charlotte said, “I know. But I’m wondering if this is an ownership question.”
“What do you mean? They’re offering to buy us out.”
“What I’m saying is, is it a real offer? Or is it some kind of stalking horse that is being used to find out our valuation, or something like that.”
“How would that matter?”
“Well, if it’s just a test for a comparative valuation, we as a board could just turn it down outright, without putting it to a vote.”
“Really?”
“What do you mean, really?”
“I mean do you think we could determine it was a fake offer with enough certainty to bypass our obligation to put it to a membership vote?”
Charlotte thought it over.
While she did, Dana said, “It wouldn’t really do to turn the offer down as a board and see if they came back again, because if they did, we would be retroactively out of compliance.”
“Out of compliance with our co-op covenant, or with city law?”
“I’m not sure, but maybe both.”
“I’d like to know before we decide,” Charlotte said. “Maybe we can hold off on this again, poke around a little, study it a little, before we act either way.”
By now she was frowning, she could feel her face bunched. She wanted to refuse the offer so much it hurt; her guts twisted, and she could feel her temples begin to pound. But Dana was a good lawyer and a good person, and probably it was true that they had to conform to the guidelines, do everything legally, so that she didn’t accidentally give the enemy here, whoever they were, a hand up in the game. So Dana had to be listened to. “Listen, can we table this for tonight, do a little more research and then get back to it at our next meeting? Please?”
“I guess so,” Dana said. “Maybe we do need to know more before we decide. Can we talk to the people making the offer, find out what they have in mind?”
“I don’t know. Morningside won’t tell us who it is. That’s part of what I don’t like about it. I want to ask Morningside again to let us talk to the people making the offer.”
“Let’s do that, and table it for now. I move we table it.”
“Second,” Charlotte said.
They passed the motion and moved on.
So, the next morning Charlotte gritted her teeth and called her ex, Larry Jackman.
“Hey Charlotte,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Are you going to be in New York anytime soon?”
“I’m here today. What’s up?”
“I want to meet you for coffee and ask you some questions.”
This was something they had started doing a few years back, meeting from time to time for coffee, their chats usually having to do with city business, or old acquaintances in trouble who needed help, neither of them favorite topics of Larry’s, but he had always been agreeable, and after a while they had an established tradition of getting together. So after a short pause he said, “Always, sounds good. How about four twenty, at the pavilion in Central Park?”
This was one of their hangouts from the old days, so it was with a little lurch that Charlotte agreed.
Then it stuck at the bottom of her mind all day, like a burr in her sock, and yet even so she got lost in work and it was four before she noticed the time, and then she had to hurry. No way to walk twelve blocks uptown at high tide, when the first three blocks of it would be under shallow water, so she stepped onto an airboat taxi that then skidded up Fifth, over shallows, breakers, and seaweedy street, until turning and letting passengers off at the high tide slide, a floating pier now grounded in the middle of the street waiting for water. This quick if expensive run left her with just the fifteen-minute walk up into Central Park. She lumped along, wishing her hip didn’t hurt and that she had lost more weight than she had managed to. Walking was hard.
And yet she needed the walk to compose her mind. She was never quite comfortable meeting with Larry, there was too much history between them, and much of that history was bad. But on the other hand some of it, a lot of it, was good, even very good, if you could drill down to those layers of the past under the bad years. When they were young law students in love, almost all of it had been good; then came the years when they were married, and good and bad were so closely mixed that you couldn’t differentiate them, they were just the mix of those years, glorious and painful, and ultimately, in retrospect and even at the time, frustrating; for they had not been able to get along. They hadn’t seen eye to eye. No one does, but they couldn’t seem to agree on what they weren’t agreeing on. They hadn’t figured their relationship out, not even close. And then the good and bad had destranded, separated out, and suddenly they could see that there was a lot more bad than good. Or so it had seemed to Charlotte. Larry had said he was fine with a little discord, that she was being too demanding, but whether that was true or not, ultimately the whole thing had fallen apart. Neither of them had the feeling anymore, and by the time they separated, though there had been some very bitter angry moments, it seemed that mostly they both felt a sense of exhaustion and relief. That whole sorry era over; new incarnations for both of them; stay civil when they had to be in touch, which they didn’t, not having kids. After some years that had mellowed into a kind of rueful nostalgia, and later still, getting together over coffee satisfied a little itch of curiosity in Charlotte, an urge to see how Larry’s story had continued. Especially after he shifted into finance and rose in that world, and became, she assumed, both rich, while working for Adirondack, and powerful, being tapped to be chair of the Federal Reserve. At that point her curiosity outweighed her uneasiness when they got together.
Still, every time, as now, when the time came for them to meet, for him to be there in person across a table from her, she felt a qualm, a little twist of dread. How would she look to him, working as she did in the depths of a bureaucracy so marginal it had been demoted to public/private NGO status, doing the legal equivalent of social work? She didn’t like to be judged.
“You’re looking great,” he said as he sat down across from her.
“Thanks,” she said. “Your job must make you good at lying.”
“Ha ha,” he said. “Good at telling the truth. Telling the truth without people freaking out.”
“That’s what I meant. Which people, who would freak out at the truth?”
“The market.”
“The market is people?”