“Jewish?” She smiles. “Don’t you think you can be more than one thing?”
“Oh, I, of course—”
She waves it away. “And of course, this is the other thing my grandmother gave me.” She holds up the white disk. “It’s a mud cookie. She said to remind me where I come from. Sort of a Don’t get too big for your britches, missy.” Brian had been about to reach for it, but she slides it to the edge of her computer. “I grew up in a very modest home. I like to think of it as a reminder of what I’m never going back to.”
She looks so self-possessed, Brian can’t help but admire her: the secrecy, the flecks like gold leaf in her irises — old bloodlines. It seems to Brian there is an untouchable quality to her. A veil laid over her features. As with Avis. He glances at the goddess. “Your grandmother sounds like a genius.”
“That would be the nicest way of putting it.” Fernanda laughs softly. “Listen, I wanted to thank you — again — for the other day. Javier can be a bit, well…” She lifts her eyebrows. “You know.” She taps a sky-blue pencil against the edge of her desk. “Ever since I moved into this office, he’s been coming around. The way he stares… Like I’m a penthouse unit and he can’t wait to make the sale.”
“I’ll have a word with him.” Brian glares at the view through the swooping glass wall. Beyond the glass, the ocean looks like molten nickel. “It’s unprofessional. Javier has no business coming around, pestering you when you’re trying to do your job.”
“Oh, please don’t.” Fernanda hunches forward. “You’ve been so kind — terribly kind. You’re the only one who — the others—” Then Brian watches, dumbfounded, as Fernanda lowers her head and starts to cry. Her breath catches and she hides her face in her hands.
He is paralyzed. The last real tears he remembers seeing were from his daughter, the long nights after her returns: how she’d sob in her room, while Brian hung back in like ghost in the corridor, bewildered and angry. He feels impossibly clumsy: he tries to behave — as best he can — in the manner he thinks a compassionate person would. He bends toward Fernanda, placing one hand on her shoulder, and says, almost inaudibly, “Oh, my dear…”
She sniffles and lifts her face to him: her eyes and nostrils are barely inflamed, rimmed faintly pink. “I’m in a… some kind of situation… I don’t have anyone to tell.”
“Well.” He hesitates. “Can you tell me?”
She shakes her head, then looks at him, smearing away tears with her fingers. “How could I? I wouldn’t want to burden you — of all people. You’re overloaded as it is.”
He draws himself up, making fun of himself. “If it helps at all, I am a lawyer. I’m a professional at keeping secrets.”
She laughs and sniffles again. “Well… maybe… if you swear…”
He draws an X over the front of his suit jacket.
She nods and lowers her head, then murmurs something so quietly he has to ask her to repeat it: “I’m seeing Jack.”
“Jack?” he echoes, so relieved that she stopped crying that he barely registers her confession.
“You know. Jack.”
Brian smiles apologetically: it sounds like the name of some kid at UM.
“Parkhurst.”
He stares, still uncomprehending.
“Jack Parkhurst.”
Suddenly it feels as if his heart is swelling beyond its natural dimensions: it’s difficult to breathe. What? “How did you—” He doesn’t know what to ask. He shakes his head dumbly, an empty, horselike motion. Jack Parkhurst, company president and CEO, head of his own pseudo-dynasty of developers, free-trade cronies, and rich, Old Florida Bubbas. But even so — even considering the flotilla of wealth and influence — change-jingling, seventy-four-year-old neglector of wife and children—that Jack Parkhurst? “How did — how could—”
“He was very attentive,” Fernanda says stiffly.
“I’m sure he was — is?” Brian amends. “Are you still…?”
“Is — I suppose. I want to end it, though. It’s not right for either of us.”
“No, well…”
“I’m sure I sound awful. It’s so hard to explain about Jack… He can be so charming.”
Brian has been upper management too long to be surprised at the hidden seams of the business world. Still. He can hardly believe that Jack Parkhurst has laid his crepuscular hand on Fernanda, caressed her shoulders, that his cottony mouth has gone anywhere near her neck. “Oh, my dear.” Outside the window, a replica of his own office view — a perpetual motion of cars, chips of light flowing along the causeway a mile away, heading out over the water — now sapphire brilliance under a break in the clouds.
Fernanda seizes his hands. “I feel like, sometimes, more than anything I just need a really, really good — I mean, a wonderful friend, you know? The sort of person who’s so close to you that you can say anything.” A shadowy dimple appears at her left jawline. “Brian. You’re just — you’re a real guy. The old-fashioned kind — like Jack likes to think he is.”
Brian lowers his head. He notices her glance fall on the violets again and he stares at them a moment himself. Slowly, he lays them on her desk. “For you.”
“Oh Brian.” She holds them to her nose. “They’re just… they’re lovely.” Leaning forward, she slips them into the carafe of water on the corner of her desk, and Brian notes, with embarrassment, that the flowers are dwarfed by the container.
“I must — I should get back to the millstone—” He half rises, half bows out of his seat, and eases out of the office.
THE TELEPHONE; the glass walls; the gray condition of office light. The day has passed into afternoon and outside Miami is burning like a scarlet orchid, bursting into flame. Brian sits motionless at his desk. If he turns to the west, he will see at least thirty-eight cranes and rigs grinding away, and almost all have some connection to PI&B. A stack of ever-renewing contracts to review and assign to his underlings; proposals for still more deals, piled in folders a foot high. He picks up a folder labeled Bonsai Towers and attempts to browse through it, but the pages smear into each other. He attempts to stack them, tapping the pages against the desktop, but they splay against the glass. He drops the paper: Who does he think he is?
Randy old Parkhurst. Past company rumors — insinuations of sexual bullying, intimidation, advances — rise to the surface of his memory. It’s one of Brian’s tasks to make bad things go away, and he usually shuffles these cases to his underlings, each of whom is authorized to bestow modest settlements and severance packages. As Jack’s counsel, he thinks, he should personally warn him away from Fernanda. He winces again at the thought of them together. Jack, he will say, the liability exposure — it’s not worth it. What if things go sour? How can they not, eventually? Thus saving both the company and Fernanda much unhappiness. Win-win. He stares at the slippery image in the darkened screen. Remember where you come from. He imagines the young Fernanda, her hair in two braids, a wise grandmother from a Caribbean place.
He decides to take a break, wanders down to the lobby and finds himself in the gift shop, chatting with the high school kid about Stanley and Felice as if they both still lived at home: “I can’t believe where the time has gone. My boy Stan’s got a serious girlfriend now. And it’s going to be my daughter’s eighteenth birthday… big one, right? What do you get for an eighteen-year-old girl?”
As he strolls back toward the elevators, the lobby doors open and a phalanx of upper-mid management enter, fresh from a four-cocktail investors’ meeting, heels clicking on the marble. Brian halts as if pelted by buckshot. There’s Parkhurst blowing hot air while the others double over with laughter. Esmeralda is stationed at his side, aloof as Eva Perón. “So Warren calls me—” Parkhurst’s voice booms all over the lobby. “Fella brings me out in the jet to Omaha—have you ever been to Omaha? God-forsaken place. Middle of nowhere — to a restaurant with animal heads, all staring down at us. Steaks as thick as my arm — they’re hanging off the plate — lying right on the goddamn table. And Warren leans over and says to me, I bet you don’t get that in Miami!” The last line is delivered in a thrombotic bellow and everyone around him breaks up.