“Hello?”
Mrs. Freeman turned to discover a young man with dirty blond hair standing uncomfortably in her doorway, looking as if he intended to ask her for directions.
“Yes,” she said, “yes, what is it?” And she cocked her head to signal she was already moving on.
“Ruth Freeman?” The quaver in the young man’s voice clashed with the bright confidence of his smile.
Her one-fifteen. Yes, of course, she remembered now. A reporter of some sort from one of the papers, a man to whom she had promised a few minutes of her time. Fine. But giving the young man a second look, Mrs. Freeman found herself growing less certain. The person standing in her doorway was a tall, handsome young man, his jaw square, his white teeth strikingly rectangular. There was a color to his skin that suggested a familiarity with sunlight. Except for the standard-issue khakis and the light-blue button-down shirt, the young man looked nothing at all like a reporter, the pale, sickly breed that generally eked out its existence under the fluorescent tubes of newsrooms.
But perhaps, she supposed, her notions about newspapermen were becoming old-fashioned. Those dinosaurs were dying, and soon, she understood, the newspapers themselves would be extinct. But how then would her poor husband fill the hours? Perhaps this young man was one of those emissaries from the Internet age, in his well-worn Chelsea boots, the only part of the ensemble that suited him.
He had called her two days before to set up this meeting, saying he wanted to talk about the protests, about the drone, about the school, about the accident. Tiphany had tried to tell Mrs. Freeman it was a bad idea.
“Come,” Mrs. Freeman said, “come,” and she waved the young man over to the window. But he had taken only half a step when Tiphany’s voice erupted again from the speakerphone.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, Ruth,” the voice lied. “I just wanted to remind you the board meeting has been moved up to one-thirty. I’m just about finished with the presentation for Arthur—”
Taking one last disappointed glimpse out the window, Mrs. Freeman shuffled her flat-heeled shoes over to her desk, cutting Tiphany off before she could say any more. The silence that followed would be fleeting, Mrs. Freeman knew, but nonetheless she smiled at the young man, and his long eyelashes fluttered in return, and for a moment it almost seemed he was he trying to flirt with her. Or did he sense the conspiracy she was inviting him to share?
Still, though, she couldn’t quite shake the peculiar feeling she had about this young man, with his broad shoulders and his gelled hair. He was exactly the sort of young man she was used to seeing in five-thousand-dollar suits strutting the marble halls of investment banks, the sort of young man who at an earlier age would have been charging off Viking ships, hell-bent on rape and pillage. Every woman in her circle, it seemed, could lay claim to at least one such son. Cassandra Boyle had two — twins even — and every time she saw them, Mrs. Freeman felt a chill.
“Come in,” Mrs. Freeman said again, “and shut the door behind you.” Perhaps it was the mother in her, but her first instinct, as he approached, was to look around her desk — an executive excess large enough for five or six of her employees to share — for something to offer the young man. Finding nothing other than a stale, half-filled cup of coffee with a stained rim, she frowned apologetically and directed him toward a chair.
As the young man approached, he paused to glance out the window, and Mrs. Freeman saw the rain had stopped. Some of the clouds had even parted. But now, improbably, fat white flakes appeared to be falling from the sky.
“Is that snow?” she said. And then, “It’s almost the middle of May.”
“You know what they say,” the young man said hesitantly, and a single ray of sunshine streaked through the glass, falling upon his cheek. “Global—”
“What are you?” Mrs. Freeman asked, studying him now for the first time in profile. “Twenty-five?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your age,” Mrs. Freeman said.
The young man hesitated, remaining at the window but eyeing the chair, as if torn between the two. “Eight,” he said. “Twenty-eight,” and his Adam’s apple poked out above the top button of his shirt.
“I was thirty-seven when I got my first job,” Mrs. Freeman said, leaning back in her chair. “Thirty-seven.” She paused to read his reaction, but the young man seemed to have little idea what to make of this. “I’m now nearly twice as old as I was then,” Mrs. Freeman continued, “but I still remember the day of my interview. I remember it vividly. On the man’s desk there was a box of cigars in a fine wooden case etched with fleurs-de-lis, and I recall thinking it magnificent, like nothing I’d ever seen, representing everything I’d imagined an important businessman being. I’d never worked a day in my life, and I was starting at the bottom of the bottom. It was the year I finally finished college. My first husband and I had married young, and I was only nineteen when my first daughter was born. My second came a year later. I raised them for fifteen years, and when they were finally old enough to take care of themselves, I went to college. I had no qualms about leaving my first husband to do it. I was thirty-seven, and I’d never had a cigar.
“The man who was interviewing me was named Maxwell, I believe, undoubtedly his last name, since in those days I would never have had occasion to use his first. Mr. Maxwell was a connoisseur of fine cigars, and even kept a what-do-you-call-it … humidor in his office. I remember being surprised at how otherwise shabby his office was, considering that Mr. Maxwell owned a textile company, which he had inherited from his father, who had inherited it from his father, and he from his. For all I know, they brought a bolt of cloth over with them on the Mayflower. As Mr. Maxwell’s assistant, I was obliged to take minutes during meetings with his management staff. I was the only one to whom he never offered a cigar. And do you know what?” Mrs. Freeman said, inching toward the edge of her seat. “I’m one of those managers now. I have been for a very long time. I’ve gone through more than thirty years of meetings since then — more than your entire life — and I’ve still never been offered a cigar.”
Mrs. Freeman wished she had a box of her own now, a fine box to offer the young man. She knew how it was done. She had watched captains of industry guillotine the tips and light them, sucking grotesquely. She knew how they smelled. She knew everything except how they tasted.
“Coffee?” she said.
“Please.”
Mrs. Freeman gestured for him to sit, and with a finger raised in expectation, she searched the instrument panel of the phone for her administrative assistant’s extension.
“Would you mind getting Mr. … Mr. … would you bring a cup of coffee please, and make it black.”
And then it was quiet again.
“Tell me, Mr. …”
“Fitch,” the young man said, clearing his throat of the word, as if it were the first he’d spoken in days.
“Is that your last name or your first, Mr. Fitch?”
The young man seemed vaguely panicked by the question, and she watched his fingers walk across his shirtfront, tugging nervously at his top button, and she saw with perfect clarity that it was one he normally left undone. It disappointed her to think he had mistaken her for someone who cared about proprieties of dress.