“I’ll be fine with the press conference,” David said.
The phone rang. They both stared at it. David turned away and stared out the window. Adele’s voice was a low hum, sprightly and not particularly solemn. She was talking to somebody she knew and didn’t mind hearing from.
He was thinking about the Trade Center again when she tapped him on the shoulder. He wondered how many people who worked in the financial district stopped in the middle of their day and thought about the Trade Center. He wished they would clear the rubble and put the things back up. No memorials. No compromises. Put them back up.
“It’s Annie,” Adele said, holding the flat of her hand over the receiver. “I said I’d see if you’d talk to her. If it’s too much with the press conference so close—”
“No, no,” David said. “I’ll talk to her.”
“Good. Maybe she’ll cheer you up. I’m going to go make sure we’ve covered all the details.”
“Thank you,” David said.
Adele handed over the phone. She stood up and straightened her skirt and left the room. David stared at the phone for a second.
“David?” Annie’s voice drifted out at him, sounding tinny.
He put the receiver to his ear. “Hello, Annie. I’ve been thinking about you.”
“I thought you might have been.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. He really was like a fruit suspended in Jell-O. “Sorry. I seem to be having an out-of-it sort of day.”
“That’s bad news. Tony used to say that people on his level could never afford to be out of it, even for an hour.”
“I’m not on his level.”
“You are for all practical purposes, aren’t you? The Price Heaven mess seems to have been dumped in your lap as if nobody else had ever had any responsibility. Not that you necessarily dislike that. I know you’ve always wanted responsibility.”
“I’ve got to go give a press conference in a few minutes,” David said. “Exactly what it is they expect me to say is completely beyond me. There’s nothing to be said that hasn’t been said already. A million times. In a million other meltdowns. Do you remember the Kmart bankruptcy?”
“Not really. It’s not the kind of thing I pay attention to, David.”
“I know. Never mind. I feel the way you do when you wake up in the wrong part of your sleep cycle. Like I’m not quite connected. All I want to do is go home and go to bed for a week.”
“Maybe you should.”
“I can’t. You know why I can’t. We seem to be in nonstop crisis mode here today. We’ve been that way for a couple of weeks, now. Do you know what I was thinking about? I was thinking about what it was like in those five days after the attack on the Towers, when the Stock Exchange was closed. On one level, it was completely insane. We couldn’t get into the building. We still had deals and relationships that couldn’t be neglected. Some of our clients were willing to cut us a little slack, but a lot of them weren’t. But the thing is, even so, it was the calmest period I can remember in all my time at the bank. It was as if we’d all been stripped down to the skin, and nothing mattered except what really mattered. Do you understand that?”
“I always told you it was a bad idea for you to stay in that job.”
“I know.”
“I always told you you’d end up regretting it. And you will, you know. If you don’t already.”
“I don’t know if regret is the word I’d use.”
“I’ll let you go to your press conference, then. I didn’t call for any reason. I just wanted to hear the sound of your voice. I was wondering how you were feeling.”
“I’m feeling fine, I guess. There’s nothing in particular wrong. There’s nothing in particular right. You know how things are.”
“Yes,” Annie said. “I know how things are. I’ll let you go now, David.”
The phone buzzed. David pulled it away from his ear and stared at it. He thought that was the oddest conversation he had ever had. It might never have happened. It was like talking to a ghost.
He took all the copies of The Harridan Report spread across his desk, wadded them up into a single ball, and threw them in the wastebasket.
3
Annie Ross Wyler hung up the phone and stood for a long moment in the shelter of the pay phone cubicle, doing nothing. For a moment, she wondered what had happened to phone booths. One of her strongest childhood memories was of being let loose in a Woolworth’s in central Philadelphia while her mother was otherwise engaged at the jeweler’s. Mademoiselle Chirac, who had been imported only a year before to teach French to both Annie and Tony, was supposed to give them a supervised afternoon in some park. Annie didn’t remember which one, or where it was. Mademoiselle Chirac hadn’t liked parks, any more than she’d liked American cheese, American television programs, or American wine. Her life was one long keening complaint, punctuated at unpredictable intervals by young men whom she seemed to think very little of but could not live without. Annie knew what was going on from the beginning: the clothes that were never put back quite the way they should have been; the lipstick smeared along the curve of the upper lip; the whispered calls in the middle of the night to plan trysts just out of sight of wherever the children would be. This afternoon, Mademoiselle Chirac was sitting at the fountain counter in the back while Annie and Tony ran wild—although, being Annie and Tony, their wildness probably looked like good manners to most of the nearby adults. Tony had found the telephone booths first, a whole line of them, all empty.