by Shamim Sarif
“I didn’t expect you till tomorrow,” he tells her, his face flushed, excited.
“I was able to get away earlier. Sorry to interrupt… Betty said I could put my head in…” She glances around, conscious of the room full of people watching them. “Anyway, I didn’t have the house keys, so I stopped here.”
“This is Lauren Grinkov, my niece,” he explains, more for the visitors’ benefit, since most of his own team have met her previously. Melissa computes the name.
“Shareholder,” she says. “Forty-nine percent.”
Lauren cannot help but stare. Melissa’s gaze is direct, her posture in her chair upright and yet also very much at ease, as though the company is somehow already hers. Except for her perfectly highlighted dark blonde hair and clear grey eyes, she seems an entirely different person from the tense but polite individual of five minutes ago. There has been no greeting and not even a nod of acknowledgement. Instead, with four words, Lauren feels she has been stripped of all human traits and reduced to the essence of what she represents here and now, in this boardroom, for the purposes of this meeting. She puts down her handbag and holds out her hand. She will force a modicum of courtesy into this exchange if she has to.
“And you are?”
“Melissa Johnson.”
“Ah. The potential purchaser.”
“Yes.”
“Nice to meet you.” The comment is more than a little pointed. She pauses, looks more closely at Melissa. “You okay?”
Melissa looks somewhat less comfortable in her seat now.
“Fine, thank you.”
Lauren looks at her uncle. Alexander is giving her a look of query, an invitation to stay for the meeting. She nods to him, takes a place on his right hand side and settles quietly into her chair, accepting with a smile the coffee that he places before her.
“We’re stalled right now,” says Alexander, “and I was telling Melissa that I’d like for us both to be open to compromising a little, if we can.”
“For instance?” Melissa’s eyes are intent upon him.
In response to a glance, an assistant hands Alexander a printout, several items of which are typed in red ink. His eyes pass down the list and return to the first item.
“The homeless initiative. This was one of the things agreed by your company at the start of negotiations – that they would continue the facilities we have that get the homeless off the streets.”
“We’re agreed to keep at least 50% of the current shelters. If we can do more, we will.”
“They’re not just shelters,” says Lauren quickly. She had planned not to say anything during this meeting, mainly because her awareness of her uncle’s business has always been taken only as far as is needed to understand him. She has always loved the basis of it, his passion for food, the recipe creation; but the intricacies of management and growth and company structuring have never held much interest for her. This point, however, is not about numbers – she knows something about this side of the company. She also knows that she is needled by Melissa Johnson, and she feels the impulse to prod at her a little, to see what sort of woman lies beneath the crisp, brisk exterior. Melissa turns to her now, waiting. She is composed; there are no signs of headaches or cleansing breaths or anything else that might suggest any vulnerability.
“People can go to those facilities, get cleaned up, get clean clothes and live while they try and get work,” Lauren continues. “They get help with the interview process, and when they do get jobs, they can stay till they can afford rent of their own. They’re not just places to sleep. They help people into homes of their own. If anything we need more of them.”
“With all due respect, I’m looking to run a business, not a charity foundation,” replies Melissa.
“So are we,” says Lauren, crisply. “Isn’t that why you’re buying us?”
“These are minor issues,” Melissa says to the table in general. She seems to be trying to avoid Lauren, to slide out from beneath her haughty gaze.
“Not to the people being helped.”
For the first time, Alexander sees Melissa falter, and he is surprised. Certainly Lauren’s earnest argument is the kind she would have shredded to pieces with a few pointed rebuffs if he had given it. He looks at his niece. Her head is up, her dark eyes fierce. Melissa takes a moment before replying – she is experienced enough in boardroom tactics to know that snapping back now will only allow Lauren to retain the upper hand.
“You’re right, you have a very good business,” Melissa says at last. “And it is entirely your prerogative to give away as much of your profits as you like to charitable causes. But it’s equally my prerogative, assuming I buy the company, to give nothing if I choose. I respect your choices, even admire them, but they’re your choices. Not mine.”
It is a clear, logical response and it forces Lauren to nod in acknowledgement. Alexander clears his throat.
“The philanthropic side of things has always been a very major part of our business, Melissa. It’s a huge part of who we are as a company.” Alexander says. “More to the point, I believe I made clear from the start that it’s very important that they are continued by whoever takes over. What chance is there that you can continue everything as is?”
“Everything?”
“The homeless initiatives, the arts foundation, the micro-financing for immigrant start-up businesses…”
“At a cost of eighteen million dollars a year? It’s unlikely.”
“But not impossible?” Lauren smiles at her encouragingly, radiantly, and Melissa blinks, tapping her pen. She reminds herself that this woman probably doesn’t even know a cashflow from a bank statement.
“I’m afraid it is impossible. Maybe we should move on with the rest of the deal.”
Despite the fact that this is clearly part of the ebb and flow of working out a business deal, Lauren cannot help but feel this response as a personal affront. More concerning to her is the fact that she can see her uncle wavering. Surely it cannot be so easy for all that he has worked for and believed in to be lost? She can see that Melissa’s headache is back, or is at least on its way. She holds her look for a long moment, then turns to her uncle. Alexander has already outlined in his mind a contingency plan. A situation where one of his subsidiary companies would retain control of the charity initiatives, in exchange for an increased purchase price up front, and perhaps a small percentage of sales ongoing. He is considering whether to suggest this to Melissa now, when he catches his niece’s look. What he reads there surprises him, but also reassures him in some way – because he finds that he is in agreement. There is a moment’s pause as he looks down and examines his pen thoughtfully. Nobody is moving, no coffee cups touch the table, the shifting of pressed cotton shirts against the leather chairs has stopped. Only the background drone of the computers fills the space. He looks at Melissa and shakes his head.
“I’m sorry. Without the initiatives, there’s no deal to be made here.”
With considerable dramatic flair, Lauren silently zips up her handbag, finishes the last gulp of her coffee and starts to put on her sweater. Melissa looks from one to the other calmly, giving not the slightest hint of her internal impulse, which is to lay her pounding head against the table and close her eyes in resignation.
“Fine,” she says, and before anyone else can speak, she excuses herself and is gone.
There is a lively, light feel to the large house now that Lauren is here. From the kitchen, he can hear a jazz CD playing above him, the upbeat sound of it bouncing down the stairs. He wipes his hands and makes his way upstairs. The bathroom door is open, and the bathroom itself empty, but it is still hung about with moisture and steam and scent. The music is coming from the suite of rooms that he has always kept for Lauren alone; here too, the door is ajar. He walks towards it slowly and quietly, wanting to savour this moment, when his niece is home earlier than he had hoped. And some other, smaller part of him is already lost in dreams as he stands there on the landing, imag
ining a world where he always comes home to find someone there who lives with him, and waits for him and expects to hear his step in the doorway. It is a pleasurable feeling, one that suffuses his whole being for a few moments, and confuses him, the way the gentle waking from a wonderful dream overwhelms and unbalances.
He stops just before the open door. Through the crack of the hinges, he can see her. While the music jumps and dips all around her, Lauren is lying on the bed, entirely motionless except for the occasional blinking of her eyelashes.
He knocks at the open door, loudly, and she sits up at once.
“You look thoughtful,” he says.
She waves away the comment, and swings her legs off the bed.
“It’s good to be here. Feels like home.”
“Good. This is your house, you know. I wish you’d live here.”
“I’d drive you crazy,” she smiles.
“You mean, I’d drive you crazy,” he replies. “Don’t say anything. I know. Your ‘fastidious uncle’.”
“You always throw that back at me, Uncle Alex,” she said. “I meant it in a nice way. Anyway, I might stay a while, if it’s okay with you.”
She is avoiding his look slightly and he at once infers why.
“And Carol? How is she?”
She turns away slightly and takes a long time to fasten her leather-strapped watch onto a fragile-looking wrist.
“I don’t know,” she says, still looking down. “I haven’t seen her in a few weeks.”
He waits, but she does not elaborate. “I’m sorry,” he says at last.
“Don’t be. It hasn’t been working out for a while now. It’s for the best. I guess I was just surprised at how much I missed her. When she left.”
There is a weight to her voice which lends it an unnaturally low tone and which tells him that she is only a step away from tears.
“So it’s definitely over?”
“Yeah, but it’s fine.” She looks up at him now. “You know me. Easy come, easy go.”
She regrets saying this as soon as the words are uttered. It is the kind of blithe, throwaway comment that she might be able to get away with amongst people who don’t know her so well, but her uncle’s kind eyes see directly through her. He read her meaning in the meeting earlier that day, and he can read her now, though he is, of course, too considerate to say anything.
“Anyway, I thought an extended time away from New York might not be a bad thing.”
“I would love it,” he tells her, and takes her hand encouragingly. “And if your performance this morning was anything to go by, you can help me complete the sale.”
“What sale? I thought I blew it.”
Alexander shakes his head. “I think you may have saved it. Let’s wait and see.”
“I hope so. Last thing I wanted to do was ruin your deal.”
“Our deal,” he corrects. “And I made the decision.”
It is typical of him to try and remove the responsibility from her shoulders, for what could turn out to be a bad mistake. She nods.
“Let’s go get something to eat,” she says. “I’m starving.”
Downstairs, she rummages in her bag and hands him a bottle of wine, which he holds at arm’s length in order to read the label without searching for his glasses.
“Lauren!”
It is an excellent wine and an excellent vintage. He knows she must have spent a fortune on it.
“Well, I wanted to bring you something nice. I have another – a Burgundy this time – for Christmas dinner.”
“You shouldn’t be spending your money like this.”
“Stop. I do well with my painting,” she shrugs. “I’m getting a lot of private work now. Everybody wants to see themselves up on a wall. Apparently there was an article in Vanity Fair or The New Yorker or somewhere, recommending it. So now I’m in great demand. I’ve been spending my time in the houses of some of New York’s finest. I could tell you some tales.”
“Here, have a glass of wine, and let’s talk.”
She laughs, a deep, happy sound and takes his hand, the affectionate grasp of a mother telling off an errant child. “I have to respect client confidentiality, you know.”
“Really? We’ll test that after the wine.”
She watches him decant the contents of the bottle, slowly and respectfully. Then he loosens a pate of foie gras from its tin and slices fresh bread while directing her to wash salad leaves at the sink.
“Dressing?” she asks.
“I have homemade vinaigrette from last night. Or shall I make fresh?”
“That is fresh. You’d die if you saw what bottled stuff I throw over my salad.”
They transport their meal into the living room, spreading everything over a table that sits between the armchairs, and then they discuss the details of the business sale.
“Uncle Alex, are you sure you’re ready to sell?”
He has thought about this point a lot during the last few weeks. He sips the wine appreciatively.
“You know that after Katya, this work, building this company became everything to me. But for the last few years, I haven’t really felt driven. Not the way I used to. Maybe I’m just getting old. But at my age, I don’t want to spend even another month doing something I’m not excited about. I don’t have to.”
“So what are you excited about now?”
He shrugs. “For now I’ll be happy just cooking, and taking it easy. I’m tired, Lauren. Maybe you can teach me more about art too. How long have we been meaning to go around all the museums and galleries together?”
Lauren nods in acknowledgement. The warmth of the fire and the wine have seeped into her muscles, loosening and soothing them, and her head feels heavy. To shake off the feeling, she stands and walks about the room. Her gaze catches, as always, on the photograph of Katya that sits on the piano. Her aunt. The younger sister of Lauren’s father, Yuri. Lauren was a late and completely unexpected arrival for her parents, at a time when they had long assumed that they could not have children. Her mother was thirty-seven, her father already fifty when she was born. As a small girl in a crowded, slowly decaying area of South Boston, her father would tell her stories about his old life in the Soviet Union; and often these stories were built around his memories of, and longings for, his own parents and his sister Katya. In these tales, she came to know her aunt as a lively, spirited young girl who always outwitted her more pedestrian older brother. Through her father’s stories, Lauren had found in Katya a vivid character for the imagination, to be cheered on in their childhood escapades, in the quiet side streets of a Moscow suburb. She was a heroic, colourful figure in an exotic setting, made up of those qualities that mattered so much to the young Lauren – daring, defiance, laughter, and sophistication of a sort.
It had been a considerable time later that the deeper, more mature knowledge of her aunt had come from Alexander. She remembered only a little of her aunt’s husband from her childhood – he had been a quiet, kind presence, but one without much impact in her life until her parents’ deaths. In quick succession, Yuri had suffered a heart attack, and then her mother died of cancer, and when she found herself flailing in the ensuing void, she had found that Alexander was there, holding out a hand and emotional sustenance, and she had gratefully allowed him to step in, and confide in her, trust her and love her.
She had understood that at least some of his initial interest in her teenage self had stemmed from the fact that she was related to Katya, that she was a strong blood link to that great love of his. But it took very little time for him to come to know her on her own terms; their relationship had deepened quickly, and he began to love her as if she were his own child. If the line of her chin, or the colour of her eyes, or the tilt of her head offered him an occasional, fleeting, aching suggestion of his late wife, then that was only to be expected and understood. Lauren has never felt that she bore a great resemblance to her aunt, but her hair and eyes are dark, very dark. These features, combined with the simpl
e fact that Katya died young, at around the age that Lauren is now, probably continues to make the occasional passing similarity more noticeable.
Alexander understood that the mystery and tragic elements of Katya’s story could have lent it a kind of glamour in his niece’s eyes, for she was distanced enough from the events and emotions of that time for them to seem dramatically unreal. And Katya had lived her brief life with an intense passion and conviction that would be irresistible to any young woman. It was with slow inevitability then that Lauren moved away from her uncle’s reticence in excavating the past, and towards a trip to Russia to explore the places where he and Katya had lived and grown up. It had been a momentous journey for her, a revisiting of roots that was accompanied by all the romance and excitement of a new city and a wholly different culture. She had visited the usual museums and galleries and the Kremlin, but what she remembers best, what she still savours inside when she recalls that trip, are the small, quiet moments. She remembers standing on a street corner outside the building where Alexander and Katya had once lived. She had imagined them returning there, both weary after work. She imagined them walking out together along the snow-crusted river. She rode the metro that her aunt might have taken on her way to work. Or to so many other, secret places. She had sought out archives that might shed more light on her death and her life, but found nothing more than a sparse, clinical summary that added nothing more to what they already knew. She had even looked, without much hope, for their old friend Misha. Someone who might give her a more intense taste of their lives then, of why things had turned out as they had. She had asked Alexander to accompany her, but he had made his excuses and declined. Without wishing to fully consider his own reasons for refusing, he had simply attributed her fascination to her artistic, romantic temperament, and left it at that.
“I wish you could have met her,” says Alexander softly, as he watches Lauren looking at Katya’s photograph.
“I would have liked that.”
Alexander runs a hand over his head. He is weary and an air of melancholy, of unfulfilled longing, has taken him over. She returns to the fireside, where they sit in silence for a few minutes, and when she finally glances at him, she sees that he has fallen asleep. Quietly, she removes their plates and when she comes back he has nodded awake again.