“I don’t come with the copier and the paper clips,” she muttered over her tandoori. “I’m not a piece of fucking office furniture.” She got tired of talking about it halfway through dinner and flicked on the television. She surfed through the channels and leafed angrily through the pages of another fat travel magazine and finished her meal in silence. I carried the trash to the chute down the hall, and when I got back Jane was sitting on the sofa. The travel magazine was in her lap and the TV was off. She was staring at me.
“So, have you figured out what you want to do about this vacation thing yet?” she asked. Her words were quick and taut, as if she’d had too much coffee, and her eyes- though tired in her tired face- were looking for something. Like a fight.
“What do you mean?”
“You said there was a chance your client might reconsider over the weekend- that your job might come back. Are you still waiting for that to happen, or has something else come along?”
I sighed. “Is this really the best time? Don’t you want to get some sleep?”
“Sleep’s overrated,” Jane snorted. “I just want to know where I stand with this trip. How much time can that take?”
I went into the kitchen and poured a glass of water. I drank some of it and cleared my throat and looked at her over the counter. “We’ve talked about this. We-”
“No, we haven’t. We’ve talked around it- for weeks now. Now I actually want to talk about it.” Her dark eyes narrowed and color rose in her face. “Did your job come back?”
“Not exactly.”
“That’s nice and direct,” she said. Her laugh was short. “Is there an explanation to go with that?”
“Sachs hasn’t changed her mind, but there was a breakin at Pace-Loyette over the weekend, in Danes’s office. I’m looking into that.”
“They hired you?”
“Not exactly.”
Jane’s brows came together. “Has anyone hired you?”
“I told Irene Pratt I’d look into it. And I told Nina’s kid, Billy, that I’d keep looking for his father.”
“So they’re your clients now?”
“It’s more of a pro bono thing.”
Jane shook her head. A tiny smile, equal parts incredulous and bitter, played on her perfect lips. “Pro bono is right. The question is: good for who, them or you?”
“They need-”
“What do you need, John? What is it that you want?”
I put my glass down. “I’ve told you, I don’t think a trip is a bad idea, I just-”
“I’m not talking about the trip anymore,” Jane said. The silence afterward was ringing.
“I was starting to suspect that,” I said, after a while.
Jane’s face darkened. “Don’t be funny,” she said quietly. “Not now.”
“What do you want me to say, Jane?”
Jane looked down at her stockinged feet for a while. Then she raised her head and locked her eyes on mine. “You can say what it is we’re doing here, for starters. You can tell me what this is supposed to be. Whether it’s just something convenient, that fits into the time you can’t fill up with work, or… something else.” Jane’s fingers were white at the edges of the magazine, and a pulse was beating quickly on her neck.
“I’ve never thought of this as just handy,” I said softly.
She took a deep breath and dragged a hand through her cropped hair. “And was there some way I was supposed to know that? Was there a sign I missed? Maybe it’s the lack of sleep- or maybe I’m just no good at parsing the oblique stuff- because the only signal I get from you says convenience.”
I drank some more water, but it didn’t relieve the churning in my gut. My ears were full of a rushing sound. “Convenience is a two-way street,” I said.
Jane’s mouth tightened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that your work is important to you, and you like your life organized a certain way, and all of this is pretty convenient for you too. It fits nicely into what little free time you give yourself. It’s close to home and to the office, and-”
“You really think that’s why I’m here, because of… geography?” she asked. Her magazine had fallen to the floor but she didn’t seem to notice. Her face was very still.
I shrugged. “I think we’re alike, Jane. Both of us like things neat, and we like them on our own terms.”
Jane looked at me, and after a while she sighed. “I think that’s facile bullshit,” she said. “And what’s more, I think you know it.” She went to the table and picked up her jacket and slipped her feet into her shoes. “I think you know there’s a difference between being dedicated to your work and hiding inside it. And an even bigger difference between being self-sufficient and… whatever it is that you are.”
She slung her bag over her shoulder and turned when she reached the door.
“But you were right about one thing,” she said. “This wasn’t a good time to talk.” She closed the door softly behind her.
I ran long on Tuesday morning, and worked my way through the weight stations at the gym a few times, and stood under the shower afterward until the wobbly feeling in my limbs passed. I called Irene Pratt from a diner on Eighth Avenue, over my first cup of coffee. She answered right away, but when I told her who it was she said she couldn’t talk and to try her later. I finished my oatmeal and read the paper, and over my last cup of coffee, I called again. She kept me on hold for five minutes.
“Just checking in,” I said, when she came back on the line.
“Uh-huh. Well… thanks, I guess.”
“Everything all right with you?”
“Me? I’m fine- great, in fact.”
“Any more signs of that guy?”
“I haven’t seen anything or anybody. In fact, I’m thinking now that I was just being paranoid.”
“The breakin wasn’t paranoia.”
“Yeah, but the business of people watching me-”
“A black Grand Prix followed me too. I don’t think you imagined that.”
“How do you know? There are probably hundreds of cars like that in New York- maybe thousands.”
I was quiet for a moment. “What’s wrong, Irene?” I asked finally.
“Nothing- nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I just need to get some work done, that’s all. I think I was being paranoid, and now I need to cut it out and get back to work.”
“I won’t keep you, then. I’ll call if I hear anything.”
“Don’t bother,” she said quickly. “I mean, not on my account. Like I said, I’m fine and I just want to get back to work. I don’t want to think about this stuff anymore.”
“I can understand that, but these guys may have other ideas.”
An edge came into Pratt’s voice. “These guys? You talk like there’s some big conspiracy, but I’m telling you I’m not sure I even saw anything, okay? Now let me get back to work.” The line went dead.
I pocketed the phone and the waitress dropped a check on the table. I sat there and looked at it and thought about Pratt. On Monday morning she’d been scared and worried and had taken comfort in hearing from me. Twenty-four hours later, she wanted me to go away. I had no idea why.
Plenty of people have taken sudden dislikes to me before, but I didn’t think that was Pratt’s problem. Fear was a possibility. Fear of getting any more involved in whatever was going on, perhaps, or of having anything more to do with me. Fear of Turpin finding out. Fear of losing her job. Pratt had had a bad case of nerves when I’d seen her on Saturday, and I was willing to bet it had only gotten worse and more corrosive with each passing day. Maybe she figured to put it all behind her with a hearty dose of denial. Or maybe she just had a lot of work to do.
I paid the bill and walked home. And kept right on walking, past my building. I didn’t feel like sitting in an empty apartment just then, or hearing the echoes of Jane’s voice, or the silence upstairs, so I headed east- to Union Square- and spent much of the day roaming in a very large bookstore. I wandered the science fiction and the history aisles, and read some essays on contemporary politics and world affairs, and when I was sufficiently disheartened I drank a lot of coffee.