A busboy in a white smock rushes through the swinging door and discharges a fire extinguisher. Light smoke replaces the dark and something somewhere sizzles.
‘It’s just a little grease fire,’ Sergeant Walrus reassures. ‘Everything is under control.’
Collective relief is sighed, disappointed and guilty. Julian looks towards his trembling hand and realizes that it, without his conscious agency, has settled on the smooth skin and angular bone of Chloe’s knee. He snaps it back.
‘Sorry, I —’
But he stops himself, for now he is looking into her eyes and what he sees there is something he never would have expected.
‘The next round’s on the house,’ the walrus shouts.
Collective cheers. Julian flails an arm. Chloe gestures with a finger.
Already this year, the firm has doubled revenue, and last month Forbes did a feature on Chloe as part of its ‘30 Under 30’ series. Still, she and Julian are just eighteen months removed from business school and have agreed to reinvest the majority of whatever they bank into growing the business. The hotel in Back Bay is a little pricier than either of them would have liked, but the pitch meeting is early and they don’t want a repeat of the Cleveland RTA nightmare.
‘Checking in together tonight?’ the desk clerk says. She is young and bored and attractively plain, the set of her lips poised on the cusp of gossip.
‘Yes,’ Julian says. ‘But separate rooms.’
‘Of course, sir.’
The clerk clickety-clacks her keyboard in search of their reservation, and Julian knows, as he has done at numerous other reception desks in numerous other cities, exactly what she is thinking. There is something, he supposes, about the way he and Chloe stand together, an enhanced awareness of each other’s space honed by three years of studying and working and travelling together.
The clerk, with a hollow-cheeked smile, hands over keys for adjoining rooms on the sixth floor.
‘Come on, dah-ling,’ says Chloe, her voice hoarse from travel, and leads Julian to the elevator where Glenn Miller bleats from the speakers. She hums along as she reads emails on her phone. ‘You hungry?’ she says, without looking up. ‘I’m peckish.’
‘I told you,’ Julian tells her, ‘to eat something real in Chicago.’
‘But everything there was icky-gross.’
‘You think you’ll find non-gross food anywhere at this hour? What time is it?’
‘Eleven seventeen,’ Chloe says, ‘but I’m still on West Coast time.’
The elevator doors open on a taupe hallway hung with pictures of smoky shipyards. Chloe checks her room number and sets off wheeling her case.
‘If I go to the bar,’ Julian says, ‘I’ll drink.’
‘So, drink.’
‘But I want to be clear in the morning.’
‘So, don’t drink.’
‘It’s just that easy for you, isn’t it?’
‘Well, I’ll order room service, then,’ Chloe says, dipping her key card and jiggling the handle. ‘Come drink. Or don’t drink. Or eat. Or don’t eat.’
In his room, Julian unpacks his suit and hangs it to de-crease. He lays out an undershirt and underwear and socks. Through the wall, he listens to Chloe murmuring, most likely to her mother in Portland, who hasn’t been well, and who Chloe has called every night without fail since Julian has known her. He changes into sweatpants and his red Stanford sweatshirt and lies on the bed to watch CNN. The news cycle is dominated by a hurricane that has hit the Florida Keys. Julian watches footage of palm trees bending, rowboats in the street.
When he hears another voice in Chloe’s room, he kills the TV and gets up to knock on the adjoining door.
‘Go Cardinal!’ Chloe laughs, pointing to his sweatshirt.
The room-service guy is old and thin and smiling. He bows when Julian tips him and walks backwards from the room. On Chloe’s bed lies a tray containing a chopped salad, a brioche roll and two bottles of Diet Coke.
‘Will we rehearse this one last time?’ she says.
‘Why?’ They have gone over the pitch together so many times in the past few days that anyone, Julian thinks, would know it backwards by now. ‘Something isn’t bothering you, is it?’ he says. ‘The unflappable, the indefatigable …’ But he trails off because he sees that Chloe’s lips are taut.
‘It’s my mom,’ she says. ‘Her insurance is just, like … Something about a fucking pre-existing condition … I just — I really need this to go well right now.’
She is within arm’s reach; he could hug her, he thinks, or lay a hand between her shoulder blades.
‘Well, then,’ he says. ‘Let’s fire it up.’
Chloe nods once, twice, then touches each cheek lightly with her fingertips. She tugs her T-shirt over her hips and opens her laptop on the desk.
‘Good morning,’ she says, and at once the stiffness of worry leaves her body; her back is straight, her arms are loose, her chin is high.
She hits her PowerPoint marks cleanly each time, cycling through slides without ever glancing at the screen; spouts fluently the figures that Julian has projected; speaks urgently, persuasively; asks rhetorical questions. Julian knows that even if he weren’t the only other person in the room, she still could make him feel as though he were.
‘And that’s the game,’ he tells her, exactly twenty-three minutes later. He holds a hand high in the air for her to five it. Chloe stretches to throw a jab into his open palm and shadow-boxes on the spot.
Julian twists the cap from a Diet Coke and hands it to her. Chloe makes a fist around the bottle, and for a moment they both watch the cables of her white arm bulge and release, bulge and release.
‘Hey, Chlo?’ he says.
‘Yeah?’
‘Are you going to eat your roll?’
The sky is low over Dartmouth Street. A salt wind rolls in off the Charles. Chloe’s hair sails behind her, and her jacket, caught on her shoulder-bag strap, rides up to reveal the brass-toothed zipper of her skirt. On Boylston Street, she and Julian join the progress of commuters rising from the Copley T stop and hurrying headlong through the wind towards their offices.
Outside the public library, a raw-boned man in military fatigues dances a one-legged jig and shakes a can. The sky is clear but cold and the last of the winter’s snow lingers on the library steps in diminished heaps. Chloe and Julian enter the Prudential Center, a great biodome of chain-store shopping and food-court dining. At the Tower lobby, they give their names to a desk clerk who furnishes them with visitors’ passes and leads them to the elevators.
‘Ready?’ Julian says as the floors tick up.
‘As I’ll ever be,’ Chloe says.
‘Here,’ he reaches for her jacket, ‘you’re snagged.’
‘I’ve got it,’ she says and steps away from his hand.
The offices of Bobst and Law are spread across three floors, the conference room located at a corner of the seventeenth. Chloe connects her laptop to a projector at the head of the table while Julian takes a seat and pours himself a glass of water.
The CMO, Tom Bobst, convenes the meeting. The nephew of the founder, he looks to Julian as though he skis yearly, golfs weekly, and climbs mountains for fun. He is trim and tall, with a big toothy face. His blue jacket is nipped at the waist and short in the arm to show monogrammed cuffs. His watch, undoubtedly, cost more than Julian’s last two cars. Flanking him are a short bald man from Compliance, with bulging eyes and a collar at least half an inch too tight, and a woman from Fiscal whose glasses have thick frames and whose eyes Julian can’t see because they are locked on her phone.
‘Good morning,’ Chloe says.
The conference room has two glass walls that give on to an open bullpen crammed with cubicle-jockeys, and two floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Boston skyline. As Chloe speaks, Julian watches for the moments when the Bobst people take notes and scribbles answers on a legal pad for the questions they will ask. Beyond Chloe he can see the clay roof of Trinity Church in Copley Square, the collegey-graveyardy stillness of the Common and the golden dome of the Statehouse winking from the hillside. And for a moment, he pictures himself living here, in a tight Beacon Hill brownstone or a big old Cambridge Queen Anne; sees himself riding the T each morning to a salaried job that demands fewer than eighty hours per week, spending weekends in some mall or other. He has never before wanted regularity; the ‘intense, think-tank atmosphere’ of the Palo Alto office is not only, as Forbes wrote, a key to Chloe and Julian’s way of business, it also has been the key to his way of life. But this other life enjoyed by the people assembled here this morning — he sees now how it could offer a different kind of reward.