“He is. Shall I let him know you're here?” She smiled at him, and he felt his eyes drawn to the carefully concealed figure. Marion Hillyard did not approve of sexy secretaries, even for her son … or was it especially for her son? Ben wondered as he shook his head.
“No, thanks. I'll announce myself.” He strode past her desk, carrying the files that had been his excuse, and knocked on the heavy oak door. “Anybody home?” There was no answer so he knocked again. And still got no reply. He turned questioningly to the secretary. “You're sure he's in there?”
“Positive.”
“Okay.” Ben tried again and this time a hoarse croak from the other side urged him in. Ben cautiously opened the door and looked around “You asleep or something?” Michael looked up and grinned at his friend.
“I wish. Look at this mess.” He sat surrounded by folders, mock-ups, drawings, designs, reports. It was enough to keep ten men busy for a year. “Sit down, Ben.”
“Thanks, boss.” Ben couldn't resist teasing him.
“Oh, shut up. What's with the files you brought me?” He ran a hand through his hair and sat back in the heavy leather desk chair he had grown accustomed to. He had even gotten used to the impersonal prints on the walls. It didn't matter anymore. He didn't give a damn. He never looked at the walls, or his office, or his secretary … or his life. He looked at the work on his desk and very little else. It had been four months. “Please don't tell me you've brought me another set of problems with that damn shopping center in Kansas City. They're driving me nuts.”
“And you love it. Tell me, Mike, what was the last movie you saw? Bridge on the River Kwai, or Fantasia? Don't you ever get the hell out of here?”
“When I get the chance.” Michael looked at some papers as he answered. “So what's with the files?”
“They're a decoy. I just wanted to come and talk to you.”
“And you can't do that without an excuse?” Michael grinned up at him. It was like being Kids again, visiting each other's study halls with fake homework to consult on.
“I keep forgetting your mother isn't old Sanders up at St Jude's.”
“Thank God.” Actually they both knew she was worse, but neither of them could afford to admit it. She detested seeing people “float around” the halls, as she put it, and she was usually quick to glance at whatever files they were carrying. “So what's up, Ben? How were the Hamptons this summer?”
Ben sat very still for a moment, watching him, before he answered. “Do you really care?”
“About you, or the Hamptons?” Michael's smile looked pasted on, and he had the ghostly pallor of December, not September. It was obvious he had gone nowhere all summer. “I care a lot about you, Ben.”
“But not about yourself. Have you looked in the mirror lately? You'd scare Frankenstein's mother.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Don't mention it. Anyway, that's why I'm here.”
“On behalf of Frankenstein's mother?”
“No, mine. We want you to come up to the Cape this weekend. They do. I do. We all do. And listen, if you say no, I'll come across that desk and drag you out of here. You need to get out of here, damn it.” Ben wasn't smiling anymore. He was dead serious, and Mike knew it. But he shook his head.
“I'd love to, Ben. But I can't I've got Kansas City to worry about, and forty-seven thousand problems with it that we just can't seem to solve. You know. You were in that meeting yesterday.”
“So were twenty-three other people. Let them handle it. For a weekend at least. Or is your ego such that you can't let anyone else touch your work?”
But they both knew it wasn't that Work had become his drug. It numbed him to everything else. And he had been abusing the job since the day he walked into the office.
“Come on, Mike. Be good to yourself. Just this once.”
“I just can't, Ben.”
“Goddamn it, man, what do I have to say to you? Look at yourself. Don't you care? You're killing yourself, and for what?” His voice roared across the office and hit Michael with an almost physical force as he watched his friend's face convulse with emotion. “What the hell's the use, Mite? If you kill yourself, it won't bring her back. You're alive, damn it. Twenty-five years old and alive—and wasting your life, driving yourself like your Goddamn mother. Is that what you want? To be like her? To live, eat; sleep, drink, and die this Goddamn business? Is that it for you now? Is that who you are? Well, I don't believe it. I know someone else in that skin of yours, mister, and I love that other person. But you happen to be treating him like a dog, and I won't let you do it. You know what you should be doing? You should be out there, living. You should be out there making it with that good-looking secretary who sits outside your office, or ten other broads you meet at the best parties in town. Get off your ass and get out of your casket, Mike, before—”
But Mike cut him off before he could finish. He was leaning halfway across the desk at him, shaking, and even paler than he had been before. “Get the hell out of my office, Ben, before I kill you. Get out!!” It was the roar of an injured lion, and for a moment the two men stood staring at each other, shaken and frightened by what they had felt and said. “I'm sorry.” Mike sat down again and dropped his head into his hands. “Why don't we just let this go for today?” He never looked up at Ben, who walked slowly across the room, squeezed his shoulder, and walked out, closing the door quietly behind him. There was nothing left to say.
Michael's secretary looked at Ben questioningly as he walked past, but said nothing. She had heard Mike's roar at the very end. The whole floor could have, if they'd been listening. Ben passed Marion in the hall on the way back to his office, but she was busy with something Calloway was showing her and Ben wasn't in the mood for the usual pleasantries. He was sick of her, and what she was letting Mike do to himself. It served her purposes to have him work like that; it was good for the business, for the empire, for the dynasty … and it made Ben Avery sick.
He left the office at six thirty that night, and when he looked up from the street, he could still see the lights burning in Mike's office. He knew they would still be lit at eleven or twelve that night. And why not? What the hell did he have to go home to? The empty apartment he had rented three months before? He had found an attractive little apartment on Central Park South, and something about the layout had reminded Ben of Nancy's place in Boston. He was sure Mike had noticed that, too. Maybe that was why he had taken it. But then something had happened. What little life had been left had gone out of him. He had begun this insane work thing, a marathon of madness. So he never bothered to do anything with the apartment. It just sat there, cold and empty and lonely. The only furniture he had put in it were two folding chairs, a bed, and an ugly old lamp which stayed on the floor. The whole place rang with empty echoes; it looked as though the tenant had been evicted that morning. Ben got depressed just thinking about coming home to such a place, and he could imagine what it did to Mike—if he even noticed his surroundings anymore, which Ben was beginning to doubt. He had given him three plants for the place in early July, and all of them had been dead by the end of the month. Like the ugly lamp, they just sat there, unloved and forgotten.
Ben didn't like what was happening, but there was nothing anyone could do. No one except Nancy, and she was dead. Thinking about her still gave Ben an almost physical pang, like the twinge he felt in his ankle and his hip when he got tired. But the breaks had repaired quickly; youth had served him well. He only hoped it did the same for Mike. But Mike's breaks were compound fractures of parts of him that didn't even show. Except in his eyes. Or his face at the end of a day … or the set of his mouth in an unguarded moment as he sat at his desk and looked into the distance, at the endless stretch of the view.