The Will

by Reed Arvin

  Anger and disbelief spread over her face. “You will not do this to me,” she said sternly, pulling away. “You will not do this on my night. You will not ruin what I’ve worked to achieve for three solid years with some stupid argument with Sheldon. You simply won’t.”

  “Then why did you push me?” Henry said bitterly. “I didn’t want to talk about it in the first place. I wanted your night to be perfect as much as you did.”

  “It is going to be perfect, Henry. It has to be. I’ve earned it.”

  He looked at her, feeling, for the moment, surprise that he had ever thought he might love her. But he knew now that it had never been love, only intense, consuming desire. “Yes, Elaine, you have. In every way.”

  She gathered herself together, rebounding from the surprise of Henry’s statements. Composing herself, she stood up tall, almost imperious. “I will give you ten seconds to tell me what this is about. Then maybe I can salvage something out of the mess you’ve made.”

  “I can’t do that.” She began to speak, but he stopped her. “Believe me, I want to. I want to tell you every unethical, grimy detail. Some of why I want you to know is for good reasons, some of it not so noble. But I can’t violate my fiduciary responsibility, Elaine. If I breathe a word of what I know, I could be disbarred.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic, Henry,” Elaine interjected. “It’s me. We don’t have secrets.”

  Not in words, he thought. But in places we can never understand about each other. You were simply so beautiful, I never saw it before. “I’ve been asked to do something I know is wrong. Sheldon gave me an ultimatum, and I won’t do it. I may have already been unwittingly exposed to something questionable. I know it’s hard, and I know it’s unfair not to say more. But you’ll have to trust me on this.” Suddenly, even though he knew their relationship was ending, it was important to him to have that trust from her. It might validate the time they had spent together, at least. “Can you do that, Elaine?” he asked earnestly. “Can you believe in me that way?”

  “Sheldon is asking for your support, Henry. The bigger the request, the bigger the payback. Things get sticky sometimes in the real world, and people like Sheldon take care of their own.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “You didn’t answer mine.”

  Henry looked at her; she would never lose. Giving in simply wasn’t a part of her nature. He looked at his watch. “You have to go,” he said. “Hargrove will be looking for you about now.”

  “This isn’t Kansas, Henry,” she said, fixing her hair. “This is real, this is our life. Business isn’t always black and white. Your small-town morality is going to ruin your career.”

  More and more, she reminded him of Parker. “I didn’t know morality changed with the size of the town.”

  She stared at him a moment and said, “I won’t go down with you, Henry. If you screw things up at the firm, you do it for one.” She turned crisply on her heel and walked to the door. As she was about to leave, she hesitated; turning back briefly, she whispered, “I hope you’ll change your mind. I do love you, of course.”

  The door closed behind her, and Henry stood in the empty room, suddenly reverberant with her absence. He walked numbly to a chair and sat, leaning back and closing his eyes. She had never told him that before. He had longed to hear it, unwilling to reveal his own feelings until he was sure. And now, in the midst of destruction, her beautiful mouth moved and those words came out. But it was too late, and in his deepest self he knew it. He would never be sure if the words were nothing more than a carrot, a dangling jewel to make him grasp. In that insecurity the power of the phrase was drained, and in a matter of seconds he had regained his equilibrium. The room was cool, and in the dim lighting he felt almost peaceful. He wanted that feeling to stay; he had meant it when he said that things were happening too fast. He needed a time-out, a chance to think without a timetable. But he had not constructed a life like that. His life had transpired in broad stages of ever-increasing pressure: college, and the rush into law school after the accident; the competitiveness there, clerking and law review; and then the firm, clawing his way to the best position under Sheldon’s personal care. And then, magnificently, Elaine had entered his life, and with her had come one more layer of pressure to do more. Now, with transcendent suddenness, all the layers were removed. He felt light—so light, in fact, he thought he might float from the chair. The future and its inevitable concerns had not yet descended; now, all he felt was the relief of not having to accomplish more than he had ever dreamed possible.

  He actually thought he might sleep, smiling at the irony of dozing in Charles Hargrove’s mansion, Elaine getting her award a few feet away. Noise was filtering through the door; there was a cheering, followed by quiet. It was time; Hargrove was calling the troops.

  Henry rose, left the room, and walked to the entryway of the great hall. It was crammed with bodies, a remarkably homogeneous group of lovely, successful people. Six weeks ago he would have craved entrance to their innermost sanctum. Now, the sight of them nearly made his skin crawl. At the front stood Hargrove, a distinguished man of about sixty, with silver hair and an intelligent, highly acquisitive face.

  “I love rewarding hard work,” the man said. “And this little lady has worked as hard as anybody I’ve seen around here. But that’s not why she’s getting this award. She’s getting this award for results. She doesn’t just talk about it, she brings it home. And over the past twelve months she’s brought more of it home to Hargrove and Leach than any other broker. We like that.” Chuckles filtered through the room. “Elaine, come up here, please.”

  Elaine floated up from the side of the crowd, her steps elegant and contained. Hargrove put his arm around her, and she drew close to him, willing to be engulfed. “Elaine, I’m proud of you. Damn proud. And I can’t think of a more deserving person to receive this award.” He held up a large plaque. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the outstanding broker of the year.”

  Applause broke out across the room as Elaine took the plaque. She looked, Henry had to admit, absolutely, triumphantly happy. It’s what you want, he thought. It’s what makes you happy. It was, he realized, what he had always assumed would make him happy as well, and he was utterly surprised by the realization that it wouldn’t. Somehow, without being aware of it, he had changed. He drifted through the crowd, staying to the back as he made his way toward the front door. It was time to leave, in every sense of the word. He turned, and suddenly he found himself face-to-face with Sheldon Parker.

  “Quite a woman,” Parker said, his face serious. “Remarkable.”

  “Yes,” Henry said. “She really is quite wonderful.”

  Parker looked at him sideways a moment, reading him. He shook his head and said, “Like I said, you could have been a hell of a lawyer, kid.”

  “Be good to her, Sheldon. She likes flowers and jewelry.”

  Parker stared back at him a moment, then turned away toward the stage without answering. Henry moved on through the crowd, eventually making it to the great front doors. Before he left, he turned back and looked; he could just see Elaine in a crowd of people at the front. Sheldon was with her, and she looked happy, almost euphoric. Henry opened the door, and a valet in a tuxedo looked at him expectantly.

  “BMW,” he said, handing him a ticket. “Dark green two-door.”

  Henry hit the couch fully clothed, taking off only his tie, and slept a shallow sleep for two or three hours. When he woke it was nearly one. He pulled off his pants and fumbled his way to the bedroom, flipping on a bathroom light. They had kept separate apartments, but there were still some of Elaine’s things casually tossed about, artifacts of womanness: a nightgown, a pair of silk panties, a sheer black slip. His apartment he had kept, if not scrupulously clean, at least orderly. But these mysterious objects he had felt a kind of elation at allowing to fall where they would, settling like exotic strangers in his masculine world. They were signs of intimacy, reminders
of sweat and warmth and her soft hair falling down on his face as she lowered herself onto him. He stared at the slip, following its shape as it spilled down off the edge of the bathtub onto the tile floor. He had watched her step out of it the last night they had made love, and the sight of it brought all of that back with a rush.

  He had walked into the bathroom feeling disastrously tired; the emotions of the last several days had finally broken through his determined, law-school endurance. In that exhaustion, surrounded by remembrances of her, he felt her absence more strongly. Her femaleness, the comfort of her weight lightly against him in sleep, the presence of her sensual beauty—to lose all of that left him feeling hollow, as if, having been with her, he was less than complete alone.

  He stripped, preparing for bed. Naked, he stood before the mirror, his shoulders tired, the determined posture momentarily gone. The sight of his exhausted eyes disturbed him, and he flicked off the light to brush his teeth in the light from his bedroom. He crossed to his bed and fell upon it, thinking. He felt terribly alone, and missed his father very much; it would have been good to talk about things with him at such a time. But both father and mother were gone. None of his friends at the firm would understand; besides, there were ethical constraints on even discussing his problem. But the need to unload was palpable, and he searched his mind for someone who would listen and reach back. He closed his eyes and saw a face: an unlikely surrogate, but the only man still living who had ever touched him in a truly fatherly way.

  Samuel Baxter spent half his day on the campus of Trinity Seminary in ancient Greece and the other half working in the projects of Louisville. Of all his teachers, Baxter had seemed the most real, the most unafraid to get his hands dirty. He dug in, rattling cages and spending his life for the underclass of society. Samuel Baxter. God, he must be in his sixties by now. Maybe retired. The man saw ghosts, Henry remembered; not literal ghosts but the Hand of God behind innocuous, apparently unrelated events. Someone died; Baxter saw God. Another lived; God again, Baxter proclaimed. No matter what result, no matter what the circumstances, God was at work. Henry worked at Wilson, Lougherby and Mathers; God had brought him there. He was quitting; God again, moving behind the shadows for His own, inscrutable purposes.

  Henry turned and stared at the wall. Sarah had hinted at it. Where was God when you needed Him? For everyone in Henry’s current world He was invisible, unthreaded into life, rarely discussed and mostly unlamented. And then came moments when you needed meaning, needed design so badly you couldn’t face the grotesque possibility that life just was, that every choice you made was neutral and, in the end, void.

  But he couldn’t deny the tingling, the sense of awe building in his brain. There was nothing that anybody would describe as a miracle in what had happened to him. There was instead a sense of connectedness, willowy and indistinct, but nevertheless discernible. His life was spinning—not out of control, but as if in someone else’s control. And if this extravagant set of circumstances were built for him, why not for the others? Why not for Ellen, for Roger? Even for Amanda and Elaine? Somehow Ty Crandall’s will had picked up all their lives and spun them like tops, flinging off nonessentials, forcing them into unfamiliar territory. It was, if not God, a brilliant opportunity, a set of circumstances so interconnected that its happening accidentally required its own leap of faith. But it all depended upon the perspective; from the outside, looking at each individual piece, it seemed only like life happening one person at a time. Ty Crandall died. He left a will. People reacted. Things happened.

  He turned over. What, in the end, was there to depend upon besides Baxter’s Hand? It was one thing to walk away from Elaine and the firm. But the idea of living without some animating idea filled him with a sense of dread. What if he had exhaled one life only to find that there was nothing at all to inhale, that he lived in a vacuum? What if all there was to breathe in was just some other work, a few years of eating and sleeping, some moments of the chemical confusion of love, certain to fade, and then a final, infinite darkness?

  He could hear, through the double-paned glass of his downtown seventh-floor apartment, the faint, diffuse blare of car horns and traffic. Without Baxter’s Hand his building, the entire city—the whole earth—was nothing but a kind of ant farm, countless millions burrowing through life, heads down, mindless, pointless, a flickering struggle ending in nothing.

  The finality of that thought turned through his mind for several minutes in the quiet of his bedroom. Then, with deliberation, he turned over and picked up the phone. He stared at it awhile, then pushed the numbers of Louisville Information. “Samuel Baxter,” he said quietly. He listened, clicked the phone off, and sat up in the dark, not moving for some time. At last he pushed the buttons once again, and after a moment heard a voice, full of sleep, answer. He didn’t speak. The voice came through again, this time more distinct, with concern. At last, Henry spoke. “Dr. Baxter? This is Henry Mathews. I quit my job today.”

  “Let me get to my study. Niva’s asleep. Go ahead, I’m taking you with me.”

  “I’m sorry to wake you. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “It’s all right. Tell me what’s happened.”

  “I quit my job. I left my girlfriend. I went home.”

  There was a pause on the line. Baxter said, “Which came first?”

  “I don’t know. I went home.”

  “I see. That makes sense.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Home can be a dangerous place.”

  “Look, I don’t even know why I’m calling you. What time is it anyway?”

  “I don’t know. It’s about two.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You already said that.”

  “I went home on a case. I had to handle a legal matter.”

  “I had heard you were a lawyer.”

  “Who from? I haven’t kept in touch with anybody from those days.”

  “Career services. Your firm called for a reference. I was quite surprised. But then I remembered your father had been a lawyer.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “I checked up on the firm, out of curiosity. Quite an industrious organization.”

  “You could say that.”

  “But now you’ve quit.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you wanted to call me in the middle of the night and tell me.”

  “It doesn’t make sense, I realize that. I’m not sure anything makes sense anymore, to be honest.”

  Neither spoke for some time, and Henry began to wonder if the call was a mistake. Then Baxter said, “I think it makes perfect sense.”

  “Why?”

  “Listen, Henry, since you woke me up, I’m going to be blunt and tell you some things you probably won’t like. But at this point I figure you owe me a favor.”

  Henry closed his eyes. “Go ahead.”

  “First off, I thought this might happen, to tell you the truth. Not the call, but the meltdown. I’m actually surprised it took this long.”

  “That’s fairly presumptuous.”

  “I suppose. But seminary is a magnet for the damaged. In thirty years of teaching I’ve become an unwilling expert on pain.”

  “Not exactly a ringing endorsement for the clergy.”

  “On the contrary. I don’t want a doctor who’s never been sick.”

  Henry paused. “All right. So you think you understand my pain.”

  “No. I only recognize it.”

  “And what would you call it?”

  “A simple word that carries a world of meaning. It’s anger, Henry. Consuming and all-encompassing, but only anger. And that’s why I thought you would come apart. I couldn’t believe that kind of anger would last. Not in you anyway.”

  “So it’s my anger I’m losing. I thought it was my reason for living.”

  “The thing is, Henry, for you I’m not sure there’s that much of a difference between the two.”

  “I have a right to that a
nger,” Henry said tersely. “But you’re wrong if you think I live for it.”

  “I agree you have the right,” Baxter said quietly. “But I’m not so sure about the rest of it. Look, when your folks died I bled for you. The shock wave went through the whole school. You didn’t see that, first because you were suffering, and then because you left before we could show you. And I watched you shake your fist and create a kind of anti-life. I’m going to be completely honest with you, because I can tell you’re finally through with anything else. Like a lot of people, you thought you had finally cut through the great religious fantasy to live life on your own terms. But all you were really doing was saying no.”

  “No to what?”

  “Not to the ministry, if that’s what you’re thinking. I never pegged you for that. That didn’t bother me, in itself. A lot of people pass through here on their way somewhere else. But you were saying no to the life you were supposed to lead, wherever and whatever that life is. You were saying no to a life that includes death. To the dangerous and unpredictable. To the Mystery.”

  “I’ve worked too hard to hear that all I’ve done since I left school is encased in some negative,” Henry said with irritation. “There’s a yes in every decision I’ve made.”

  “I had you in my office for hours at a time, Henry, before the accident. I know where you come from. I know what’s in you. This isn’t it.”

  “You’re saying I should be back in seminary. That’s impossible. Maybe I shook my fist at God. But I’m not prepared to shake hands again.”

  There was a pause, and Baxter said, “No, to be honest, I don’t think you should come back. Every choice has a consequence, and doors close. But that doesn’t make the life you’ve lived the right one.”