“Stephen, here’s the truth. You want the truth? Here it is. The partners around here are beginning to talk. Your billable hours are terrible. Again. You’re not bringing in any work. You have no clients. You have no files of your own except for the pro bono case with the Chinese seafarer and even that you can’t get done. And don’t forget I went to bat for you for that. You’re coming up now on your eighth year and decisions have to be made and right now for a lot of these guys around here you’re a giant question mark. That’s what they see when they see you. A big fucking giant question mark. But I get you. You work hard. You care. But it’s important for your own personal growth that you start pushing back against all the Harker doubters by delivering above and beyond what you’ve come to expect from yourself. Any associate can drive a car to Pennsyltucky and dig some dirt out of a backwater courthouse. But you have to up your game, man, and I know you can. Christ, do you really think I want to spend the rest of my career working with Whitey? No. I want you here. And Attika as well. I love you both. But these guys also know what they’re doing and how to spot talent and they need to see that from you.
“Are you even listening to me?”
I told him yes.
“What did I just say?”
“That I’m a giant question mark.”
I didn’t want to stand here anymore. He stood and approached me. A tic commenced beneath the soft flesh of my right eye, where the ocular muscle attached to the cheek.
“Look, we have a big night tonight. Some clients who send me a lot of work are coming into town for this Risk Rewards thing and it wouldn’t be a bad idea if they got to know you a bit. Rick Hemmings will be there tonight. Really good guy. I’ll give you him. You know why? Because I have enough work and because I care about your professional development. Get him to like you and I’m sure he’ll send you some cases. Christ, I’ll tell him to send you some cases. But you have to earn it. I can’t keep re-drafting your shit forever, Stephen. I don’t have enough time for that. At some point you have to fly.”
He opened his mouth and flapped his wings as if he was a baby pterodactyl. Attika entered his office holding a folder and a winter coat. Tiny bandages fastened to where her heels had worn through the skin of her ankles.
“Am I interrupting something?” she asked.
“Not at all, Attika,” Fleeger said. He accepted the folder and thanked her. Told her good job. He gripped my tricep.
“You lifting weights, Steve-O? Getting firm there, buddy.”
I shrugged away from him. Attika discerned I was pouty. That this little meeting with Fleeger had been rough. She asked if we could all head uptown together to Risk Rewards. A town car was en route and she was meeting Tucker in the lobby. We’d all fit. Fleeger declined, said we still had some things to discuss, that we would see her there. She exited his office.
“Rework this and give me something we can use,” he said. “I know you can do this. You have an hour.”
14
FLEEGER’S CRITICISM WAS LEGITIMATE. My analysis was hazy, my recommendations regarding strategy and future handling flaccid, with too much emphasis on the conflicting facts and not enough on the tactics of refuting specific allegations. The reality was that WorldScore would have to pay Thomas something. It was our job to ensure it was something very little.
“Ready?” Fleeger asked, standing in my doorway and wearing a freshly dry-cleaned suit jacket. We exited the building, both of us nodding good night to the security guard donning saggy pants and an empty holster. I hadn’t thought to call a town car beforehand, neither had Fleeger, and so we stood on Maiden Lane struggling to hail a cab in the cold wind. It was the switching hour, all lights on, medallion and off-duty, as the taxi drivers raced north on Water Street to hand over the keys to the nightshifts.
Fleeger nodded toward the uptown 2/3 and we walked to the subway. My phone double vibrated with a new message. The vibration made me feel whole, like a whole note, with the spaces filled. It was a new message from Kath. I read it inside my jacket pocket as Fleeger walked a few steps ahead of me.
“I want to taste you.”
Followed by a photograph of red lips eating a banana. My tuning fork hummed. I looked ahead at Fleeger, also lost in his phone. We pushed through carousel doors and entered a fake oasis of plastic palms and old black men playing chess and mirrored ceiling tiles and descended into the subway station. The turnstile blocked me when I swiped my MetroCard. A homeless man yelled into the empty tunnel. Tyndall effected by carbon dust and strong dirty yellow lights.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Give me a swipe,” Fleeger commanded.
“I’m out.”
“Come on, man, we’re going to be late.”
“Don’t you have one?”
Robert watched me, mouth agape. Yet another example of me once again failing. Some sticky goo coated the kiosk’s touchscreen. My credit card was unreadable; contact your bank. A quick blast of the subway horn announced the train’s impending arrival. The machine dropped a new yellow card into the lit chamber and I swiped us in.
“I can see what you all trying to hide in there,” a brown kid yelled on the platform, muscles flexed as he gripped the handlebars of his fixed-gear bicycle. “Don’t think I’m unsuccessful because I’m a nigger. Ha ha. Ha ha.”
He laughed like a barking madman, hopped-up on synthetic marijuana—K2, Scooby Snax, Mr. Nice Guy—and slurping from a bottle of cherry-red cough syrup to control the anarchy of the vicious high. The long train entered the station, silver corrugated sheds, small blue lightning, red and green signals, a procession of unfathomable American flags. Fleeger and I boarded the crowded subway. Japanese tourists clutched their expensive handbags as the black kid jammed his bicycle onboard. An African woman with medusa-like curls wept. “You know when you cry and fall asleep that be the best sleep ev-ah,” her friend consoled her, clutching her arm. Bandages and Betadine. Velcro sneakers. Hand sanitizer tubelettes dangling from parachute packs. Sixty-four ounces of Cola Icee. Candylicious. Oh we can handle that jelly. Then the ominous opening of metal latches, the echoing tunnel as the train raced north, the closing of internal subway doors as we entered the stretch between Union Square and Forty-Second Street, prime turf for begging.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” a homeless man began. His jaw scissored and missing dentures. “We are out here tonight because we’re homeless. And we need food, and donations. Because we’re homeless.”
The brown kid holding the bicycle stumbled into Fleeger.
“My niggers, I want to let you know,” the kid menaced his captive audience, competing with the homeless man. “They got gold glitter in all your sidewalks.”
Fleeger pivoted away. The kid watched Fleeger, rested his bike against a pole, and moved through the subway car, slowly, as if he owned the space. “Don’t want to look at a black man?”
Fleeger ignored him.
“The real racists are upstate. The real white racists are upstate. They kill a motherfucking nigger. Go up there and tear up and eat the motherfucking sidewalk. Tear it up and eat.”
He was boiling, on the threshold of berserking while having a conversation with himself. Fleeger continued his pivot away from him.
“Conventional man residual racisms. Ha ha. Ha ha. Damn, did I say all that? Goddamn. Where is my respect? Where does my respect come from? Telling people what’s going on that’s where from. Nah nah nah nah nah nah. I ain’t disrespecting myself. I help the cause. You don’t help the cause, bro.”
He was almost in Fleeger’s face.
“You don’t help the cause bro. Because you think I’m one of those niggers on the train going nowhere?”
My intestines stiffened. The kid’s shoulders bigger than Fleeger’s and his face cascading sweat. I felt responsible for some reason. Fleeger gripped the subway pole and turned away from him.
“Pay attention to me you white racist. I’m going to work.”
“Why don’t you stop disrespecting yourself, young man
,” the homeless man exhorted him, breaking the kid’s grip on Fleeger.
“You old fool, you smell like piss.”
The doors opened at Forty-Second Street and the subway disgorged its contents, the urgency of public discomfort compelling the riders’ quick exit. I shuttled Fleeger out the door. The black kid and the homeless man now almost alone in the subway car and yelling at each other behind shatterproof glass as the train proceeded north.
“Thanks, man,” Fleeger said. Puffing his cheeks to communicate that could have been bad. He removed a tiny bottle of hand sanitizer from his jacket pocket and rubbed the contents into his hands.
“You OK?” I asked.
He nodded yes without looking at me. The sound of the subway cars entering and exiting the station augmented the silence between us, cars clacking against cars clacking along the tracks. The cracked prerecording in the speakers above announcing delayed service due to a medical emergency at Columbus Circle a scintilla more intelligible than the sound of the sun’s electromagnetic radiation recorded by NASA. I wanted to drape my arm across Fleeger’s shoulders and talk about what happened and tell him it was OK, the kid was a freak, the kid was high as shit, but didn’t know how he would take it and so I didn’t. Regaining his composure was a solo act and I let him let his process unfold. Once that happened it would be my fault for not having ordered a town car. He would mock me for it in front of others. Yet another indignity he suffered in the city. No wonder he lived in Hoboken. Still not speaking, we entered the hotel and departed the lobby in elevators shaped like gel capsules and approached the dining hall, where Attika and Tucker Nelson stood pointing at their table assignments.
“You took the subway, Fleegs?” Tucker said.
Fleeger didn’t want to discuss it. His reboot was still in process and his operating system hadn’t yet reached the point of being able to joke about anything.
“Not everyone gets the town car treatment, Tucker,” Attika informed him. “You’re special.”
Tucker and I shook hands. I told him he looked marvelous as always and Attika struck his arm.
“See, I told you Stephen liked you,” she said.
Together they strolled the reception area pointing at koi fish swimming in a plaster pond as Fleeger sought his guests, still, I feared, somewhat frazzled. I followed him. He located Rick Hemmings, leaning against the cash bar and positioning his pudding-bowl haircut with small hands.
“Man of the hour,” Hemmings cheersed Fleeger.
Fleeger embraced Hemmings with a two-handed handshake and then gripped his arm, thanked him for flying up from Dallas. He agreed that tonight was indeed an honor but it couldn’t happen without his team. I shook Hemmings’s small hand, then stood aft of Fleeger. He was almost back to normal. The two men looked around, taking it all in. I did so as well. Across the room, Lazlis dunked a maraschino cherry into a cocktail glass. Celeste’s confident English laughter rose above the crowd, a substance lighter than air, as Judge McKenzie whispered in her ear. My phone double vibrated. Another message from Kath I prayed. It was. Telling me she needed to see me tonight. Meow. Give me two hours, I replied. Despite the fact that I risked being gibbeted above the cash bar for my crimes against the crown.
“You’ve all been so generous inviting me here tonight to dine with you. Let me get the round,” Hemmings said.
Fleeger wouldn’t hear it. They grappled and shoved each other. Hemmings escaped Fleeger’s grip and handed a platinum credit card to a slender Caribbean bartender with a French name and ordered a round of highballs while tightening his forearm around Fleeger’s neck. The bartender poured three drinks. He moved like a man found in the woods as a child raised by parakeets. We gulped from the glasses and Hemmings out of nowhere commenced denouncing his daughter’s liberal politics, which we in the city must be inundated with, good God. As Fleeger finished his drink he faux-nodded in agreement, yes it’s true that’s the way it is, and a seersuckered Louisianan, as if detecting this topic of conversation via some strange political olfactory cluster of nerves, approached us, looking to gab and network. Nelsonesque but more porkneck. He congratulated Fleeger on the honor of tonight’s Risk Rewards recognition and asked the Kilgore crowd to please consider him whenever we needed Louisiana counsel. He was, he explained, defense minded.
“Because there’s just too much judicial emphasis on compensation and not enough on defense,” he said.
I thought he would spit on the carpet.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Come on now, son.”
Hemmings consumed handfuls of nuts from the hurricane glass positioned above the barman’s icebox. Pecans and peanuts and walnuts and shells dusted with salt and monosodium glutamate spilling from his hand and mouth. I had stood here before and this was its breeding ground. The primordial ooze of tastelessness. It had been so ordained. The Louisianan’s instincts were keen. So be it. He asked if we wouldn’t mind if he told a slightly off-color joke. Fleeger and Hemmings presented him the floor. I looked to ensure Attika was still pointing at koi fish with Nelson. There she was. Thankfully beyond earshot.
“So this teacher says to her student, now Billy, can you spell what your father does for a living? And he says his father is a doctor and he spells that on the blackboard and the teacher says very good. And then she asks Felipe to spell what his daddy does for a living and he spells mechanic. And then she asks Jamal to spell what his daddy does and Jamal is silent and he doesn’t say anything and the teacher asks him to spell again and he says he can’t because his daddy ain’t got no job.”
There is a thing white men do when they switch off a part of themselves to laugh at something that is awkward and offensive. It causes them to laugh harder. Hemmings did that now. So too did Fleeger. A loud, confirming, careless laugh, to establish for the Louisianan that his offensiveness was no big deal. That he was among his tribe of peers. That he too was judgment proof.
“Hey, now see if you can figure this one out,” Hemmings joked. “Why do aspirins work?”
Hemmings matted his pudding-bowl hair while entering a football stance and in doing so knocked backward the hurricane glass of walnuts and peanuts and pecans and cashews and flakes and shells and nut oil and MSG into the cash bar’s icebox. The barman twitched in silent disbelief at the mess we just made for him to clean as a silver bell summoned us to dinner. There was no apology. Because none of these men were capable of speaking to the barman other than to order something, as if the neural passageway from the part of the brain that forms speech to the part of the throat that makes sound had been clogged for life in these circumstances. Fleeger left an extra five dollars on the bar and I topped it with a twenty as the barman shoveled his bin of ruined ice into a trash can only to have to refill it again with fresh ice extracted from some industrial machine located in the service bowels of the hotel. I entered the bathroom and Fleeger followed me.
“Hemmings is a great guy,” Fleeger said. “Loves Kilgore.”
Now it was my turn. As if we were bouncing up and down on some seesaw. I leaned into the urinal and pissed a puddle of frog spawn as Fleeger fixed himself in the mirror.
“How can you stand these guys?” I asked him.
A square device near the bathroom ceiling discharged an atomized cascade of citrus deodorizer that dissolved in midair around his shoulders.
“Put it in a box and forget it.”
We entered the convention hall dining room. Tabletops stocked with multiple wine bottles and a rectangular block of ice sculpted into a model of the Manhattan skyline. It was already melting. Fleeger shook hands with well-wishers en route to his seat at the banquet table on the stage at the front of the room, a dining hallful of Hemmings and Nelsons and porkneck Southern lawyers and the occasional but still rarer Celeste. One of whom now walked my way. Longer black dress, silver rope chain, hair slightly frizzed, shiny black heels punching holes in golden carpet.
“Charlie Parker,” she said. She kissed my cheek and sipped her wi
ne. “I don’t know how much more of Judge McKenzie I can take. He won’t keep his hands off me. Says it won’t hurt a bit. Promise that you’ll shoot me if I give you the sign.”
“OK.”
“OK what?”
“I’ll put you out of your misery,” I played.
“I didn’t say kill me, Stephen. I said shoot me. Maybe in the foot. Just to get me out of here. But don’t cause any permanent tissue damage, OK? Is that a deal?”
She winked. It was a warm, friendly wink. Fleeger stepped between us, still shaking hands. He kissed Celeste’s cheek.
“I was just telling Stephen I could always count on you guys. Even for the dirty jobs.” She nodded at Hemmings and the Louisianan. “How’s the company?”
“Typical,” I said.
“It could be worse, dude,” Fleeger said. “You could be working for Lazlis.”
He had a point.
“Don’t you owe me a report, Mr. Harker?” she asked.
“It’s almost done,” Fleeger said. “You’ll have it tomorrow.”
“You better. Otherwise I’ll take away your Risk Reward. And I know how long you’ve been gunning for it, Robert.”
“One hand giveth,” I added, pantomining.
“And the other taketh away,” she replied.
Celeste kissed us on our cheeks and sauntered to her table, punching a trail of holes behind her. I told Fleeger to make us proud.
“You want my advice?” I asked him.
“What’s that?”
“Don’t fuck up.”
He gave me the finger, the second of the day. It was a friendly finger, and he walked off toward his spot center stage.
Hemmings orbited the round dining table holding a cocktail glass and debating where to sit, displaying no affect in the grip of another awkward moment. A synchronized team of hotel workers donning white gloves filled our water glasses and set small plates of salad before us atop the table. I asked one of the servers how she was doing tonight.
“All right,” she replied.
All the Beautiful People We Once Knew Page 15