Chapter 2

Conference

“Sorry,” said Rachel after a while.

“What?” said Paul, making an effort to stir his mind from a deep and transcendent peace, to remind himself that his situation—lying beneath the lovely weight of a colleague on a hard table in an unlocked conference room, stripped from the waist to the ankles, with bare legs and flaccid pants dangling off the side—was in fact far more dangerous than his body believed at the moment.

“I said I’m sorry,” said Rachel. She shifted and slid off him, to the side. His skin prickled with cold.

“Why would you be sorry?”

“Well, I don’t normally do this,” said Rachel, with just a hint of frost in her voice.

“Well,” said Paul. “Um. Right. Yeah. Of course. But—”

“I’m not in very good control of myself right now, these days,” said Rachel. “I—I think I just needed some kind of human contact, something real and strong, and—”

She sounded more fragile than he ever would have believed. Fragile and yet, possibly, in the process of blowing him off. His mind was still too sex-sodden to figure it out. “It’s okay,” he said, uncomfortable. He put his arms around her.

Rachel let out a long sigh and laid her head on his chest. Her chin dug into him slightly when she spoke. “My husband’s dying,” she said.

There were too many ways to respond to that statement; Paul was certain no one of them was right. He said nothing.

“It’s just a matter of weeks now,” said Rachel. “He’s in hospice. He’s been in hospice for a month.”

“What is it?”

“Cancer. What else does anyone die of these days?” She gave a low, bitter laugh.

“Oh,” said Paul.

“It was an astrocytoma, at first,” she said, “a brain tumor. They operated. They did all the chemo. Then it came back—these tumors are very aggressive; they send out these arms into the brain, they don’t just grow, they invade—that’s what it means, astrocytoma, it’s star-shaped—and—well, basically, they said they could lobotomize him or just let him die now. He said, Okay, then, I’m going to die—he could still make decisions then—and so—so—” She broke off. “So he’s dying.”

“That’s terrible,” said Paul.

Rachel made a noise that sounded like a laugh.

“I mean it,” said Paul. “I had no idea.”

“It is terrible,” she said. “You’re right. It is. It was terrible for a long time and then for some reason it just—it changed. It’s a contest of wills, now, me against life. And it’s kind of funny.”

“I don’t—I’m not sure I see how,” said Paul, his brain still too befogged to follow her.

“It’s funny that I’m here with you,” said Rachel. “Isn’t it?”

Funny did not seem to be a terribly flattering concept.

“It’s funny that most people would say I’ve just cheated on this man, this man I have been completely, entirely faithful to. Most people would look at this and look at me like I had hurt him. But the thing is, I can’t hurt him. I can’t hurt him any worse than this has, and I can’t hurt him, any more, because what was him is pretty much already gone.” She sniffled, and again her face felt damp through his shirt. “It’s funny that I have just cheated on him because I love him so much, because watching him go through this—this stupid, pointless agony—has pretty much convinced me that love is a scarce, scarce commodity, and you should jump on it every time you find it—and I haven’t found it in a long, long time—”

“It doesn’t seem all that funny,” managed Paul.

“I have to look at it that way,” said Rachel. “Or I’d go insane. I’m close enough to crazy as it is. I’m not in control of myself—well, like I need to tell you that. But it still just comes over me at times, all at once. You know, right before you came by my desk, I’d been in the bathroom. I’ve been pretty good about only crying there. I’ve kept it together at my desk. But today I got in there and I sat down in my little stall and all of a sudden I realize there’s somebody in the stall to my left and there’s somebody in the stall to my right and all three of us are crying. We’re all trying to be quiet about it, of course, but it’s a goddamn echo chamber in there, and it becomes this weird thing of crying but not crying because we’re really paying a lot of attention to how much the other two are crying. Then the one on my right just starts flushing. Over and over. To mask the sound, drown herself out. And I just thought: You know, this is ridiculous. I’m going to my desk like a sane, brave woman, and if I cry there, I cry there.”

“And you did,” said Paul.

“Of course I did. By that time I’d put so much effort into it, I had to.”

“Oh,” said Paul.

“That was a joke.”

“Sorry,” said Paul. “I was thinking about why the other two people would be crying.”

“Probably the usual reason,” said Rachel. “I mean, you’ve heard the rumors, right?”

“What rumors?”

“That we’re being bought out? Everyone on this floor is convinced they’re about to lose their jobs. It’s a big deal every Tuesday.”

“Tuesday?”

“That’s the best day to lay people off.” She seemed startled that he didn’t know this.

“There’s a best day?”

“The thinking goes, if you do it near the end of the week, they spend the weekend wanting to look for jobs but unable to do anything about it, and so they wind up killing themselves.”

“Well, it isn’t a rumor,” said Paul. “We are being bought out.”

Rachel sat up and looked down at him. “What?”

“By Johnstone.”

“How do you know?”

“Reg just told me.”

“Is that the gay guy in HR?”

“He’s not gay,” said Paul.

“Are you kidding?” said Rachel. “He works in HR!”

“He’s straight,” said Paul, at the same time wondering how genuine Reg’s fantasies about Kelly Poindexter really were.

“Isn’t he always hanging out with Becky Turndike? She’s a fag hag if I ever saw one.”

“She’s married,” said Paul.

“Maybe she’s a closeted fag hag,” said Rachel. In the darkness she seemed to be buttoning up her shirt, briskly shutting him off from a world of bliss. “So it’s true then? No more P&B?”

“I don’t know about that. Reg didn’t say anything.”

“Well, he doesn’t have to, if Johnstone’s buying us.” Rachel felt her collar, putting it to rights, and groped for her blazer. “We actually did some M&A consulting for them a few years back, right before they acquired Rankin Phyle, that other HR consultancy. They’ve never acquired a company without laying off at least twenty percent of the workforce.”

Twenty percent. Twenty percent was a lot. Paul wondered whether he was among the eighty percent of P&B employees who could be deemed unexpendable. Probably not. He didn’t seem to do anything that any other junior actuary couldn’t do. Johnstone probably had its own actuaries already. They had no reason to pay for his continued training, nor Sheldon’s, nor that of the twelve other junior actuaries whose educational program was one of Artie Branks’s innovations, his legacy at the firm. “Maybe that’s why Branks jumped,” he murmured.

“What?” said Rachel, clambering off the table, shimmying her skirt back into place around her thighs.

So he told her about what he’d seen, about the security guard, about what Reg had whispered. Her face was grave. “Did you know him?” he said.

“Not really.”

“Yeah, me either.”

“But it—I don’t know what it means,” she said, “but it can’t be good.”

Paul nodded.

“I mean,” she said, half to herself, “if I wanted to jump out of one of these windows, I wouldn’t even know how to go about opening it. It’s not something you could do on the spur of the moment—unless you threw yourself through the glass—but I’d like to think it’s stronger than that—”

“Reg says he was supposed to be in the meeting with the Johnstone people when it happened.”

“Oh,” said Rachel. “That is not good. That is definitely not good.” She looked down at him. “Are you going to go to sleep?”

It was, in truth, rather an appealing proposition. Paul sat up so quickly his head swam. “No, no, of course not.”

“It’d probably be okay as long as you pulled up your pants first,” said Rachel. “I don’t think anyone ever comes in here but the cleaning staff.” She put her hand on the doorknob, her posture impatient. “Ready?”

“Uh,” said Paul, struggling with his shirttails and pants in the dark. “Hang on a second.”

“Do you want the light on?” Without waiting for his answer she flipped a switch, and fluorescent panels flickered on over half the room. In the washed-out light it was the least sexy setting imaginable. Paul cringed against the livid brightness, against the sterility of the corporate–Danish modern cabinets along the wall and the blank whiteboard and the flipchart still bearing the scrawled notes of some ancient meeting in orange magic marker. He squinted at them. Were they blurry, even this close, or was that just the effect of his eyes getting used to light again? No, he could read the notes—Try shift est. to 8.1625%—but the edges did seem watery. Maybe as a matter of habit he read with his face too close to the page. Maybe all the sheets of numbers in eight-point type were finally taking their toll—or maybe it was, plain and simple, macular degeneration, and he had only a matter of months before the world darkened forever. He fumbled with his belt buckle. His hands felt clammy.

He looked up and Rachel was watching him intently. He gave her a grin that was less confident than he wanted it to be. “You know,” he said, “if you—if you ever need to do this again—”

She let out a low chuckle. “I’ll keep that in mind.” Well, then, that was that.

Rachel opened the door and they made their way back through the warren of desks. Across the tall windows the shadows of buildings fell like twilight.