“The Clarlignes have always been good to us,” Timon’s father said. “It’s a historical thing. You know that. If we’re talking about you or someone else visiting Charleston and dealing with some prehistoric-sized bugs, well, so be it.”
Timon nodded, then stilled the phone. At some point, he had been able to converse with his family about matters familial and matters technical and keep the two separate: he could wish happy birthdays without the topic segueing into talk of contracts, or inquire about the state of distant cousins and not fear that he would be asked to board a plane in thirty-six hours for a distant city. All of that had changed at some point, a shift so subtle he found it impossible to denote, but he feared that some line had been crossed: that he was at once more the trusted associate and more the petulant child. He wondered for how long the two could coexist.
“What’s the assignment proper?” asked Timon, and then cleared his throat. It seemed to him then that his words seemed terse and overly formal, birthing a tension requiring immediate dilution. Thus, coughs. Easier, Timon thought, than jokes.
“It’s an antiques job,” replied his father. “Matching some items, some heirlooms, in old photos with what the family thinks those items are today.”
“And I’d need to go down there, you think?”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Maybe not. I’ll see what I can do about getting anything transportable over to you out there. Photographs and…scans of letters, that sort of thing. Watch for it.”
“Okay,” said Timon.
“In about a week or so, I’ll arrange a call between you and your contact for the Clarlignes. We’re not sure yet if it’s going to be Jonathan or the family’s attorney. It’s been informal so far, the talks we’ve had on it, but I’m sure we’ll need to sign something or other before we can get the archives over to you.”
Timon found himself nodding again, found himself wishing that there was something he could say to acknowledge what his father was saying in a neutral manner, neither brusque nor overly casual.
“It’ll be the usual Clarligne fee,” said Timon’s father. “On completion, they’ll hand off the check, either literally or metaphorically. Send us a report, and confirmation of your tithe.”
And here Timon sighed, dredging up the same frustrations he had hoped to bury at the start of the call. “Really?” he said. “You know my feelings on the tithe.”
“And you know ours,” his father said. “The tithe isn’t up for negotiation.”
After a pause, Timon said, “All right.” His father said the same and hung up. Standing alone in his apartment, Timon remembered questions he had wanted to pose to his father, remembered things he had hoped to ask about the family entirely removed from the business, information he had hoped to learn about a cousin’s wedding, the sale of a house, a few fresh addresses. He felt nerves and hunger and a sudden and lasting restlessness.
Plates before them, Marianne’s friends Esteban and Iris talked about the storefront museum they planned to open. It was a late dinner in Belltown, with Esteban taking the evening’s role of chef.
“I’ve been wondering what curry spices could do with bacon,” he said from the kitchen; that helped Marianne to place the odors she detected hovering from there, an almost sacrilegious succulence. She knew the both of them from a grim cafe several miles away, one that they had all frequented during a time when they lived in other apartments. They had gotten to know one another over time through recognition of like-minded tastes. Books and T-shirts were identified and decoded and something vaporous had been determined to build upon that. Marianne had witnessed Iris and Esteban’s slow shift from friendship to something else, and now to this, a comfortable cohabitation and an elusive intimacy. Esteban spoke about a vacant space he’d been eyeing for months now, spoke of proximity and foot traffic and how it called out for something unique. Iris picked up the thread and gestured, slipped in a few scenarios, balancing between her pride in her work and her frustrations with the time it required.
“I live a small-scale life,” Iris said at one point as they sat, wine glasses and lips mottled red, the food at center-table devoured. “Still, I like thinking in terms of beams, of acres, of support structures and arches that span hundreds of feet. Sometimes that gets to me. I realize how much that dwarfs me, and it throws me off.”
Marianne raised her glass to her lips and paused, thinking that she should say something in return. Nothing came to mind, and she drank after the stutter in her hand ceased. Her work seemed less adventurous, less meaningful, and she wondered what she could offer. She wondered if there was anything she could offer, and even whether there was anything that she should offer. She thought about the open spaces at her own job, the occasional dawn-chasing night there, the quiet collegiality.
“It’s funny,” said Esteban. “Because I don’t ever see that. I don’t know if I’d know about that if you didn’t tell me about it.” And then he laughed, as though he realized the impracticality of what he was saying, and the flaws that it might open. “I guess what I’m saying is: you transition well.”
“Yeah,” Iris said, “but it helps, too. It helps because I can save those smaller spaces, I can keep them private. I can put things in them during the day and bring them to mind without reviving the day’s stresses on me when I get back here. It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right.”
Marianne looked on. The talk of distances sparked thoughts of atlases and demarcations of scale. She cleared her throat. “I used to collect maps,” she said. “Something from everywhere I’d been. I used to think about breaking them down and, I guess, making art from them. Sometimes that seems utterly alien to me now, and sometimes it seems like the most natural thing I could do.”
“Did you ever do anything like that?” Iris asked.
Marianne shook her head. “Well, maybe. There’s a box somewhere, maybe in a storage space, that has a couple of older ones. I was just out of college then; I had no fixed location. I practiced a bit, I guess—studies for something that never got finished.”
Iris said something to Marianne about how she’d love to see this work sometime, and Esteban agreed. Marianne thought about her half-formed case studies locked away somewhere to the north, thought about their assembly and how she thought to lose herself in it, of reassembly and collage carried out with no formal guidelines. It had brought a fleeting bliss, but that bliss was supplanted in time with vertiginous unease. She filed them away and let them idle; occasionally, her thoughts of them seemed to be the work of another.
The dinner plates were cleared and the red wine had given way to a port, recently acquired by Iris at a shop discovered while taking an alternate way home. The three of them were sitting on couches, and Marianne knew that if she stood at that moment she would sway. In some corner of her mind she felt shame and vowed to carry through, hoped that her car could be left overnight. Iris was speaking about colleagues of hers, peers whom she had met through the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “Sometimes—they do fantastic work, some of them. There’s a space out here for that, for the experimental, for the things that seem impractical. This guy, Richard something, has been playing with modular housing, has commissions, has been talking about quitting, about doing that full-time.”
Esteban’s face puzzled. “But that’s not—”
“No. Not at all. Maybe it’s…I don’t know.” Iris’s manner calcified, her demeanor summoning an academic gravity. “I guess it’s the grass always being greener. It’s something like that.”
“What about,” Marianne began, and then stopped. The idea had entered her head when she heard the word modular, and the words had lined themselves up—too formally, she realized as she began to speak them. She was among friends here, not a detective on an investigation. “This is going to sound strange,” she said, addressing Iris, “but there’s…do you know a coffee stand an hour north
of here, just off the interstate, murals all over it?”
“It sounds familiar,” said Esteban. His face still bore a quizzical appearance, and he had now squinted one eye closed. Iris, Marianne noted, was nodding.
“You don’t happen to know who designed it, do you?” Marianne asked. Iris shook her head.
“I wish I did, though—if it’s the one I’m thinking of, it’s got a smart look to it.” She paused. “Why do you ask?”
Marianne inhaled. “Couple of weeks ago, I thought I was going to punch this drunk asshole at a show I was at. He was flailing, doing everything I hate when I’m watching bands. Reeked of whiskey and vodka; there were…stains on his shirtsleeves.”
“I think I remember you telling us about that,” said Esteban, his face now relaxed. “Your confrontation.”
“Well, I keep seeing evidence of him. His face on a mural on the coffee stand, for one. So I’ve been trying to find out more. Who he is, what he haunts. Why this berserk drunkard is important, basically.” By the end of it, she noticed that both Iris and Esteban were looking at her, their expressions sobered. She herself felt more steady, felt clarity returning.
“This might sound strange,” said Iris. “But why bother?”
“I don’t know, really,” said Marianne. “Maybe to take him down a peg. Maybe to unsettle him like he unsettled me. It’s a behavior…you know how I feel about that.” She breathed deeply, sounding it out. “My work’s not as exciting as either of yours. Maybe I just need something that’s a kind of mystery.”
5
After three days of waiting for documents, of expectations of newly-arrived packages clad in shrink-wrap and swathed in padding, conveyed in corrugated cardboard and transported via air freight, Timon received word that Jonathan Clarligne would instead be bringing the materials to him directly. The younger Clarligne would be in Seattle the following day, Timon was told, for reasons unrelated to this assignment. Timon’s father had called with the news. “Buy him a meal,” he said. “Somewhere generous. Impress him. And make sure you get a receipt.” Timon acquiesced to this plan of events.
The night before Jonathan’s arrival, the nature of their meeting still unclear, tentative plans circulated for a brief conversation at a sophisticated establishment, Timon ventured to a distant venue to watch a trio of bands clatter and roar their way through three-minute pop songs, sneers in tow; the chords played staccato, the vocals barked, the lyrics composed of accusations and denunciations. The beer present at the venue wasn’t enough to get Timon drunk, and the beer wasn’t enough to provoke movement. He stood toward the back of the space and nodded his head and wondered about running, either into the fray before the stage or for the door. The night and a handful of confused pedestrians would be there to greet him if he walked out front or stumbled out front.
He had met Jonathan Clarligne once before. Jonathan had been twenty, which still earned him the tag of prodigy. It had been in Los Angeles, and by chance: Timon had followed a friend of his there, had gone there to profess something like love, had been carefully deflated and had stumbled out of a bar at five in the afternoon not wanting any sort of company, no matter how politely an expression of honesty had been delivered. And halfway down the block, Jonathan Clarligne had been there, a face he knew from photographs and a name he knew from familial conversations. In Los Angeles for his sideline in business, Timon later learned, the genius-boy consultant. Jonathan had been at the center of a beautiful crowd and Timon had been devastated, and their conversation had been brief and formal and, if not traumatic for either man, than certainly something neither of them saw fit to repeat.
Timon occasionally heard rumors and legends of Jonathan Clarligne. Never via his parents, but through siblings, through colleagues he had met through the family business. Gossip clustered around Jonathan Clarligne like scab to a wound: talk of a child, talk of a brief marriage, of a dawn-lit Vegas wedding. Jonathan Clarligne had made an album in secret. Jonathan Clarligne had made an album in secret that was amazing; bootleg recordings circulating on file-sharing sites under half a dozen aliases. Jonathan Clarligne had left his family’s firm in disgrace. Jonathan Clarligne had folded his consulting business in disgrace. Jonathan Clarligne had returned to the family’s firm in prodigal fashion. Jonathan Clarligne had purchased a Manhattan apartment for an exorbitant sum. Timon heard all of them, declined to make assumptions about which were true and which were not. All he could say with certainty was that Jonathan Clarligne was his junior by several years and yet possessed the gravity of someone a generation older. This fact, unassailable, set Timon on edge.
Onstage, the band had taken up a song that invited the crowd to shake. Timon drained his beer and moved forward and decided to reciprocate. As he moved, his head bobbing and body twisting and legs, yes, shaking, he scanned the crowd and saw no one familiar. He rarely saw those he knew at shows such as this, but he never quite lost that hope, that flash that comes when one sees a familiar face transposed to a new environment and receives a gloried onrush of potential, a kind of renewal of faith. He kept moving for as long as he could before his energy flagged, his eyes still on those around him, hoping for some sense of recognition.
Marianne worked at a job that had not existed a decade earlier. On sporadic visits to her family she often found herself describing it in surreal terms, the disbelief surrounding her fueling her own disbelief, a thought burrowing away into her that this was somehow transient, that this line of work was ephemeral, might vanish at any point, that she might yet find herself in a telemarketing cubicle or offering upgrades of fast food to disinterested customers; these were the kinds of jobs friends of hers had baited her with during her collegiate years, and those old anxieties had never entirely left her. Marianne structured websites, essentially: developed plans and charts and outlines for how information might be navigated. She had been in this job for three years and found a reliable comfort in it.
In her office, she cued up a cover of “Wall of Death” and listened to it again and again. It cleared her head, its repetition summoning a sort of meditation, and soon she was ready for the day’s work: two meetings within the office and one with a prospective client. A third meeting would follow to discuss the result of that, and how the company’s interests might be advanced. There was, Marianne supposed, an aptitude one should have for scenarios such as this. She assumed on some level that she possessed it, though never felt cognizant of it as such. There was a comfort she took in travel, an ease in the moments when she felt her life transitioning from one city to the next, and a shelter triggered by the presence of maps. None of those feelings arose here; the closest she came was the charting, the creation of paths, the documentation of navigation. It never matched up; she felt at times like a documentarian shooting pop videos or a long-haul driver in an off-road vehicle. And yet there was an ease to it, and a comfort in that.
Sometime past eleven, her boss Archer knocked on her door. Archer had an old-money look: he always dressed impeccably, tailored suits that stood in sharp contrast to the casual appearance of the rest of the office, a mode Marianne recognized from celebrity photo shoots and New York Times Men’s Fashion supplements. He ushered himself in and, closing the door, began by saying, “I wouldn’t be putting this on you if we didn’t believe you couldn’t do it.”
Marianne counted the negatives and hoped she had correctly interpreted that which Archer was trying to say, then considered that Archer himself was stumbling. She thought of his expression and trusted in that. “We have a meeting today with a prospect. Not a firm that’s universally known, but one that has prestige; more to the point, we’re also talking about a not-insignificant amount of money to add to our proverbial coffers. Apparently, the fellow we’re meeting with is also something of a patron, so there’s been talk of that trickling down into something as well.”
Marianne nodded. “So how do I figure into this?” she asked. “I don’t normally get involved until
the dotted line has been signed.”
“I know,” said Archer. “I know. But the usual crew that handles these is down a couple: Whitsun’s on his honeymoon and Renata’s on maternity leave. And I’d say you’re good at eyeing people, good at sussing people out. And you know what we’re about, and you can hold a decent conversation.”
Marianne did not dispute any of this. “So do we have information on them? I think I should research some of this.”
“I’ll send it over,” said Archer. “The meeting will be offsite—the theoretical client gets into town in a few hours, so he’s asked that we meet him at his hotel’s restaurant. Five-thirty’s the start time; I’ll be by at six.” Marianne looked at him quizzically. “Board meeting,” he said, his cheeks reddening. Archer was on at least five, by Marianne’s count: two charities, two arts organizations, and something that existed in a realm of the nebulously well-off, an entity that clung to the affluent and seemed to exist in conditions perceptible only to them.
She traveled home at lunch to find clothing more suited to the coming meeting. She worked until four-thirty, reading about the firm whose emissary she was slated to meet, searching for additional information on them, and readying the materials she hoped to have on hand for their meeting. She had been invited to a handful of these over the years, though never as the primary representative, and their formality and content differed radically from client to client.
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