Part Seven: The Drive
He drove and his mother sat in the back with Nora and the babies, and this arrangement had happened naturally, without discussion, in the way that practical arrangements sometimes sorted themselves when everyone was moving toward the same thing.
He called his assistant. He said he needed the guest suite prepared. His assistant had long since stopped being surprised by anything he asked and simply said yes and how long.
He said he didn’t know yet.
He called his building manager about the boiler situation at Nora’s address. He asked for a recommendation for a qualified engineer and received one. He called the engineer and explained the situation and asked what same-day repair would cost. He was told. He authorized it.
He did these things efficiently, the way he did everything efficiently, and from the back seat he heard his mother and Nora talking in the low, specific way of women who had known each other and liked each other and were picking up a thread that had been dropped rather than starting a new one.
Mia had woken. He heard Nora’s voice doing the thing voices did with very young babies — not quite language, not quite music, somewhere between the two.
He drove.
He thought about a conference panel about last-mile logistics, seven years ago, and a woman with a notebook full of better questions. He thought about the first dinner, which had been Tuesday and which had gone until the restaurant closed and the staff were visibly waiting for them to leave. He thought about the apartment they had shared and the notes on the refrigerator and the slow, undramatic way things had run down, and about how he had concluded from that experience that the running down had been inevitable, that they had simply been incompatible in the structural sense, that this was nobody’s fault and was simply true.
He was revising this conclusion.
The revision was uncomfortable, in the way that revisions to load-bearing beliefs were always uncomfortable. He wasn’t revising it completely — he was not yet sure what he was revising it to — but the simple version, the incompatible, nobody’s fault, inevitable version, was no longer quite sufficient as an account of what had happened.
He thought about the fact that she had written the message three times and not sent it.
He thought about what that meant — the specific scruple of it, the refusal to use something as leverage that she didn’t believe should be leverage — and he recognized in it, with a precision that surprised him, the quality that had made him fall in love with her in the first place. The quality he had called, at various times in his own thinking, integrity and stubbornness and impracticality, depending on the circumstances and his own mood.
He had called it impractical when it was directed at him.
He saw now that it was the same quality in all directions.
