“To erase him in a way, yes. By the time my father inherited Ocean Oil, my granddad was already blaming his father for destroying the world. It wasn’t just Ocean Oil, of course, but you couldn’t tell my granddad that. Sea temps were up five degrees and sea levels eight inches from when my great-grandfather was born.”
“Everything I’ve read said the company bypassed your grandfather because of his age. Because of lack of interest.”
“And I showed you the real reason.” Ness indicates the leather journal sitting on the coffee table. “My grandfather wanted to dismantle Ocean Oil—”
“And that was why your father inherited the company instead?”
Ness nods.
I make a mental note of this. This is not the history anyone else knows. The popular accounts are of an unchanging and evil empire, handed from father to son, each of them perfectly like the other. A convenient tale, because it’s easy to understand. We can transfer our ire from one generation to the next, no forgiveness required, no need to get to know a man. Just judge him by his father’s sins.
Studying Ness, I allow myself to consider for a moment that I’m wrong about him as well, that he has nothing to do with the fake shells. Maybe the person I think I know is just a caricature of the real man. I’ve sensed this before with other celebrities and political figures I’ve gotten close to, that they’re just people saddled with unachievable expectations. We make of them what we need them to be, good or ill.
“So your father was supposed to keep the company safe,” I say. “But then he was the one who nearly tore it apart.”
“For different reasons. Selfish reasons. He saw the laws making their way through Congress. He knew the end of big oil was coming, saw the peak of production. Hell, this was before Manhattan flooded for the first time and the levee project got underway. My dad refused to waste the company’s money lobbying against the inevitable—not because he cared about the environment, but because he hated to see lawyers get rich when they couldn’t win. The board of directors disagreed. They worked in the background to have Dad removed as incompetent.”
“I didn’t know your dad lost control of the company,” I say, making a mental note of this as well. Henry was going to fall out when he got my edits, and I hadn’t even gotten to Ness yet. But Ness was doing the impossible: convincing me to shelve one story while revising another.
“The board didn’t take the company away from him for long. My dad had been working on his TideGen program for almost a decade by that point, all in secret. It was a personal project. He paid for it out of his own pocket—”
“I’d heard that part.”
“Yeah, it became part of his legend, that he privately financed the oil company’s first green initiative. As everyone knows by now, the whole thing was bullshit. When he couldn’t get the program to work, he turned it into a PR move. Used it for deflection. What’s interesting is when he gave the speech that turned the stock around, he technically wasn’t CEO of anything at that point. The board was waiting until close of markets on Friday to announce, just so they could handle the spin. They were scrambling that same week to name a replacement. Meanwhile, my father was about to shock the world and rescue the company.”
Ness leans forward and places his hands on his knees. He looks at me for a long pause, a half-smile on his lips. The most distracting thing about this man isn’t his handsomeness, but his confidence. It isn’t fair for any human to visibly worry so little.
“Can I show you the video?” he asks.
“I’ve seen it,” I tell him.
“I want to show you something interesting.”
“Is there any way I can verify this?” I ask. “That your father wasn’t CEO at the time of the speech?”
“Let me show you the video,” Ness insists. “You like personal details. I want to show you how my parents met.”
He gets up and disappears down the hall. I take a sip of coffee and count the time between sweeps of light. Twelve seconds, not ten. If I had a chart of the Maine coast, I could find the lighthouse based on its period. I’m thinking of my father and all he taught me when Ness returns with a tablet.