“How have you been, sir?” he said finally.
“Busy.” He smiled perfunctorily. “So have you come here to accept my offer?”
John laughed. “Well, not exactly, sir, no.” Osbourne’s gaze did not waver. “There are … there are a lot of variables. I have to admit I’m intrigued by all you have to say about what you want to do. But it’s a risk. I have — I have commitments here.”
Osbourne sat back into the banquette and began nodding sagely, as if he had heard what he was listening for.
“And if I were on my own, if I were a younger man, with no one else’s wishes to consider—”
Osbourne held up his hand. “Listen, before I forget,” he said, “how much money do you make now?”
John reddened, but he saw no reason for squeamishness. “Seventy-five thousand,” he said.
“I can match that. If there’s a bonus involved, I don’t know about that, but I can keep paying you that salary.”
“For how long, though? I mean, forgive me for—”
“I have no idea for how long,” Osbourne said, in a friendly manner. “The point is, the risk is minimized in that sense. And if we should fail, I know you could come back to New York with your book and get another job in a day, if that’s what you wanted to happen.”
The waiter, who had been not there, was suddenly and discreetly there; but Osbourne waved him away. Only John’s menu was open.
“Have you ever been down to Charlottesville?” Osbourne went on.
“Several times. I had a cousin who went to UVA.”
“Then you know what a beautiful place it is. You might not know that the housing market is also very reasonable down there. I don’t have any idea what your wife earns or how much you might have saved but it might even prove feasible to hold on to your place in Brooklyn, as a kind of hedge, if that’s what you … So you didn’t want to go to UVA yourself then?”
John shook his head.
“You went all the way to California, as I recall? Wanted to get away, was that it?”
John swallowed. He couldn’t remember when he might have told Osbourne this about himself. “Yes, sir, I suppose so.”
Osbourne, this time, was doing nothing to discourage John’s addressing him as “sir”; possibly he just didn’t hear it. “And now you’d like to go back?”
“Well, Virginia isn’t really my home, but in a way yes, I suppose you’re right.”
“Fascinating.” Osbourne shook his head abruptly. “Anyway, the financial risk, to you at least, seems pretty minimal. What does your wife do?”
“Girlfriend. She’s a trusts and estates lawyer.”
“Well, they’ve got rich people down in Charlottesville, too, you know. Lawyers, too. Law firms even.”
John finished his water; he was starving, but didn’t want even to start in on the bread until Osbourne relaxed the pace of his interrogation a bit. “She has a job here she likes, and she feels she’s put a number of years into it, toward partnership, years that I guess she would feel were wasted if she quit.”
Osbourne nodded again. “She doesn’t want to start her life over again.”
“Well, maybe just not in Virginia,” John said, laughing.
“And what about you?”
“Sorry?”
“I mean, we’ve been here awhile and I haven’t heard anything about you, about what you might want. So how about it? Do you want to start over again?”
Osbourne’s back was to the mirrored wall, and, as if by some trick, John, sitting across from him, could see simultaneously both his face and the back of his head, like the barmaid in Manet’s Folies Bergère. The restaurant was full, and where silence might have been there was the gentle ring of silverware and the low burble of unfamiliar voices.
“Yes,” John said. He was surprising himself now. “I do want to start again.”
“Because I’ll tell you what it sounds like to me. If you don’t mind my interpreting your personal life. I’m not unmindful of the risks for you here. But it seems to me that, for your girlfriend, the real fear is not that our idea will fail. It’s that we’ll succeed.”
The waiter appeared again, his face betraying nothing that would indicate he had been there before.
“Actually, I’m starving,” Osbourne said. “John, do you like cassoulet? They do a fine one here.”
“I’ve never had it,” John said.
Osbourne raised his eyebrows. “Well, I can tell you you’re never going to get a decent one in Charlottesville, so I’d suggest you try it now.”
“All right,” John said.
While they were waiting for their lunch, Osbourne suddenly said, “Listen, while we’re in this territory, let me ask you another personal question: is that all right?”
John nodded.
“How long have you and — I’m sorry, what is her name?”
“Rebecca Sanders.”
“How long have you two been together?”
“Three and a half years,” John said.
“And you’ve been living together for …”
“About eighteen months.”
“I’m guessing,” Osbourne said, “there are no children then.”
“No, sir.”
“No, of course not. It’s not something you would have left unmentioned.”
John smiled.
“She’s not pregnant, then, is she?”
Blushing uncontrollably, John said that he was sure she was not.
“Okay,” Osbourne said. “Forgive me. I can see I’ve overstepped my bounds. Let’s change the subject then. What are you working on now?”
John told him about the Beef Council campaign. Osbourne’s expression did not change.
“And is it work you’re proud of?” he said simply.
John thought for a long time before answering, mostly because he was afraid to say no out loud. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “I mean, we’re doing basically the same thing we’ve been doing, for years, but lately I feel like I don’t get how it all works. Which would be fine if I was sitting at home watching it all on TV, but I’m the one making it, and I still don’t understand how it gets made. It’s a weird feeling.”
“Have you shared this feeling with your partner? What’s his name?”
“Roman Gagliardi.”
“Roman? Or with anyone else there?”
“No.”
“You feel you have to act a certain way, don’t you? In your work environment? You have to take a certain less-than-honest attitude, not just about colleagues’ work, but about your own?”
John nodded.
Osbourne winced sympathetically. “Don’t you get tired,” he said, “of all the lying?”
Back at the office, light-headed, lazy from the rich food, John stared without seeing for what remained of the day; then he took the subway to Brooklyn. The apartment didn’t seem comforting either. He sat by the window until Rebecca came home. He expected her to take a sarcastic tack in asking about his lunch; instead she was quite grim and serious, and he didn’t know whether to take that as a good sign or not.
“He’s invited us down to Charlottesville, not this coming weekend but the next,” John said in a breezy, high voice that didn’t sound right to him. “He has the offices about finished, and we can just, you know, tour the town, see if we like the feel of it or not.”
Rebecca was squatting in front of the open refrigerator, washed in the white light. Her heels came up out of her shoes.
“So is that a problem for you, next weekend?” John said.
She straightened up. “Is that a problem for me? In what respect?”
John swallowed. “Do we have anything that would conflict with that, I meant.”
“No. I’m sure we don’t.” She stooped and looked again through the empty shelves.