[Don's apartment, West Village — January 26, 2013, 10:44 AM]
The book was still on the shelf.
It was on the third shelf from the top, wedged between two volumes that were Don's, occupying a space that had been empty before Scottie had been in this apartment enough times to leave things without noticing. The spine faced outward — a history of the Bretton Woods negotiations, cream spine, her name inside the front cover in the specific handwriting she used for ownership marks: neat, fast, a little backward-leaning.
She had not taken it. She did not know she had left it.
Don had not moved it. Not from sentimentality — at least, not primarily. From the specific calculation that moving it would constitute an act, and acts had meaning, and the act of moving it would mean more than the act of leaving it where it was. Leaving it where it was was not an act. It was the state of the shelf.
The coffee was good this morning. He had made it from the Breville — properly, the way Harold had demonstrated three or four times over two years while Don had watched with the half-attention of a person who was tracking something else. The Breville produced good coffee every time regardless of whether the person making it was paying full attention. This was Harold's argument for it and Harold had been right.
Don was at the window with the coffee, the city visible in the specific way the city was visible in January: clean, cold, not unkind. The index card wall was to his left, visible in peripheral vision, its strings and cases and accumulated thinking organized in the three-color system he had developed in year one. He was not looking at it. He had not looked at it in three weeks.
The Library, in the background, offered a tag chain he had not requested: #zane-referral-2 — construction sector, regulatory enforcement. Preliminary analysis:
He dismissed it.
The Library ran a brief on the new Kellner follow-up Zane had mentioned.
He dismissed that too.
This was the ongoing negotiation with the powers: they did not do stillness. They had never been designed for stillness. They were engines that ran on inputs and produced outputs and the output queue was always populated with something, and Don had learned to push the queue to the side when the side was where it belonged.
His phone vibrated on the coffee table.
He looked at it. Harold.
Harold: Client just called re: quarterly compliance review schedule. Am handling. No action needed. Enjoy your Saturday.
Don looked at the text for a moment. He put the phone face-down.
Harold had sent that text on purpose. The "no action needed" and the "enjoy your Saturday" were Harold's version of: I see what kind of morning this is. I am running point. You are allowed to have the morning.
Harold had become, over three years, the kind of person who could read the type of morning without being told. This was a form of partnership that had not been planned and was one of the things that made the firm's foundation real. The cost of the sacrifice cascade was real, and the foundation under it was also real, and the foundation included Harold sending text messages that said "no action needed" and meaning it and being right.
Don looked at the city.
What had been built, since March 2011: a firm with ten active matters, one formal alliance, a CFIUS specialty that no boutique in the same bracket could match, a regulatory practice that was seeding itself, a partner who found things the Library missed, a co-counsel network that was now documented. The LP reserve sat at 3.2 — earned, not purchased, for the first time in months. Personal savings were at $1,440 — not comfortable, but not a crisis, and the cross referral revenue was coming in steadily enough that the crisis window had closed.
The costs: Edith Ross, whose non-intervention was in the bottom desk drawer as a reminder and a fact. The Scottie arc, which had been real and was now a scar and a book on a shelf. Fourteen months of LP purchased at a hundred dollars per point from personal savings that had run down to $40 before the Kellner win started the replenishment. The sixteen LP spent on Veridion analysis with no fee return. The contamination wound, now resolved, but in the record.
The book on the shelf.
The costs were real and permanent and Don was not going to pretend otherwise. The "pretend otherwise" mode was one of the modes he had watched other people use — the aggressive amnesia that reframed every cost as a necessary price for a greater good, the comfortable story that made the ledger cleaner than it was. He had not used it. The Edith file was still in the desk. The book was still on the shelf.
The scotch glass was on the corner of the desk. He poured it at eleven AM, which was slightly earlier than his usual ritual, and he was aware of the slight earliness and did not adjust it. The ritual was the ritual when he chose to do it, and this morning he chose to do it at eleven, and that was fine.
He did not drink it. He never drank it. The ritual was the pour and the placement and the glass sitting at the corner of the desk where it could be seen — the thing he owned that was on his desk because he put it there. Wakefield had said something, once, about the specific value of having objects that were simply present and simply yours, not functional, not referential, not performing anything. He had said it about the Wakefield photo on Don's W&G office wall, the Manhattan skyline from the Brooklyn Bridge, which had come with Don from W&G to Klein Legal and still hung crooked because it had become its character.
Don had not fully understood the observation at the time. He understood it now.
He stood at the window for a while with the coffee, which was good, and the city, which was present, and the book on the shelf, which was exactly where it was, and did not try to do anything with any of those things.
The Library offered nothing he had not asked for.
At noon, he turned around and sat at the desk and picked up the Zane referral brief. Construction sector enforcement action, New York State regulatory. Harold had done the preliminary pull; the document review was complete. Don read through it and found two things Harold had noted in the margin and one thing Harold had not noted.
He added the one thing to the brief and sent it back to Harold with a note: Week looks good. See you Monday.
Harold replied in eleven minutes: Monday.
The world had resumed. It had been an hour.
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