The Ledger

Chapter 5: The Hale Floor

Chapter 5: The Hale Floor

11

Tommy's alarm went off at six. I'd been awake since five, lying on his floor with my hand on my chest, listening to the building wake up one pipe at a time.

I dressed in his bathroom with the door shut. The cut had stiffened overnight, so I ran the hand under hot water until it opened, then wrapped it in whatever was in his drawer. Gauze and athletic tape. Nothing else. I picked up a pen and closed my fingers around it. The pen stayed.

Tommy was standing at the counter with his arms crossed, still in the T-shirt he'd slept in.

"It needs stitches."

"It needs to get me through a meeting."

"There's a clinic two stops up. They open at eight."

"I'm due downtown at nine."

He looked at my hand, then at my face. Then he took the ibuprofen off the counter and put it in my jacket pocket, and that was him giving up on it, and both of us knew it.

The train at six-forty-eight was full of people in good coats. Nobody looked at me twice. I stood the whole way with my right hand in my pocket like a kid hiding a cigarette.

The Hale building takes up a block on the river. Glass, a wall of water behind the security desk, a doorman whose whole job is to look at you in a way that makes you check your shoes. I gave my name, and the woman at the desk called upstairs and said somebody was coming down, and I stood in the elevator hall with the set against my chest and waited.

What came down was a man in a short overcoat, talking on a phone. He finished the call as the doors closed behind him, put the phone in his pocket, and looked at me the way you look at a cab you're not sure is yours.

"Cole?"

"Ethan Cole."

"Marcus Hale." He put his hand out. I gave him my right without thinking, and he had a grip like a man closing a car door. I kept my face still. When he let go he glanced down at the wrap on my hand, then up at my eyes, and said nothing about it. I'd have rather he made a joke about it.

"You're the designer on West Harbor."

"I am."

"I read a memo that had your name on it. I like to put a face to a name."

"Okay."

"You're the one who walked out on my sister."

There were three women behind the security desk. Two of them could hear him. Any one of them could have known somebody who knew somebody on my floor, and I stood in that hallway with the set against my chest and felt my neck go hot.

He laughed. "Relax. It's a small city."

"I don't talk about her."

"Good. Neither do I. Not at dinner, anyway." He rocked back on his heels. "You know what I do here?"

"You develop."

"I put West Harbor on the board three years ago. Before anybody in this family could find Milwaukee on a map. You've read the brief, so you know what it's worth." He tipped his head at the elevators. "Come upstairs. Different floor. I'll pay you more than that studio pays you, your name stays on the boards, and I don't make you sit in a room with my sister to get a note."

"No."

"You haven't heard the number."

"I don't need the number. The studio put me on this project. I finish it with them."

"Good answer," he said. "Wrong one."

The door behind me pulled the air, the way lobby doors do, and heels came across the stone, and I knew who it was before I turned around.

"Marcus."

"Vivian."

"You're poaching on my project in my own lobby."

"He's not on your payroll."

"He's the designer on West Harbor, and West Harbor is mine. Go find your own."

"Everything's yours. That's the whole trouble with this family." Marcus straightened his coat and looked at me and not at her. "Offer stands. She wanted West Harbor, she got it. Ask her how long she thinks she keeps it. I'd wish her luck, but I'm not a liar."

He walked to the elevator and got in, and the doors closed on him.

She was looking at her phone. She didn't look up.

"My office. Nine o'clock. Don't wander."

12

Her office was in the corner. One wall of glass, one wall of lake, a desk with nothing on it but a laptop and my set, bound at the edge and laid open flat in the middle. No photographs, no mug, no coat on the hook. The room of somebody who could leave in under a minute.

She kept me nineteen minutes.

She came in and pushed the door shut behind her with her hip and went around the desk and sat down and put both hands flat on the pages, and did not offer me a chair.

"You and my brother."

"Today was the first time I met him."

"He doesn't like anybody. He likes you."

"He read the drawings."

"Did he." She turned one page, and then another, at a rate that meant nothing. "How long have the two of you been talking?"

"Eleven minutes. At the elevators."

"So how does he know your name?"

"Because my name is on the drawings."

"Or because somebody put your name in the room and you stood there and let them." She looked up. "I've had designers come through here with less on their boards than you have and better manners about where the credit comes from. I want to know if I'm paying for the work or for my brother's new friend."

"Believe whatever you want. I did the work."

"I was in your apartment the night you laid this out on the floor." I hadn't meant to say it and it was out before I had the sense to hold it. "You sat on the rug with a beer and told me the lake edge was the best thing I'd ever drawn. Nobody was on the phone to your brother that night."

Something happened in her face and stopped happening.

"You think that means something," she said.

"It means the work is mine. Whatever happened between us, you can't put it in the drawings, because it isn't in there."

"Whatever happened between us." She said it slowly, like she was tasting it. "You're the one who left."

"You're the one who lied." I kept my voice down. "You had three years."

She stood up. Not all the way — half out of the chair, one hand flat on the desk. She didn't come around it and she didn't sit back down, and I stood in the middle of her office with the set against my chest and didn't move.

Then she sat down.

"I read it," she said. "All of it. Twice."

"And?"

"It's garbage." She closed the set and picked it up off the desk with both hands. "Every page. High-end clients don't sit in a room like this one, and you've never been in a room like this one in your life, so you don't know what they want, so you filled it with things you've read about."

"The lake edge is the best ground left in the district. The brief puts the conservancy on the north line and the faculty housing behind it, and neither of those is for sale at any price. That's what people are paying to live next to. The buildings are the easy part."

"People pay for the address," she said, "and the address has to want them. You've sketched a very nice building for people who don't need you to tell them they're welcome."

She threw it.

I never found out whether she aimed. The corner of it caught me high on the cheekbone and the edge of a page opened the skin under it, and the set came down face first on the floor and stayed where it landed. I felt the wet before I felt anything else.

I put my fingers up and brought them down and looked at them.

She was half out of her chair again. One hand flat on the desk. She didn't come around it. I don't know what that was. I've gone back to it more than I should.

"Don't," I said. "Leave it. Nobody asked you to do anything about it." I wiped my cheek with the back of my wrist, and made it worse. "I told you to leave my apartment. You went. That's yours. But this is my work and you just put it on the floor, so don't stand there and look at my face like that. Keep the two things separate."

"Separate." She came around the desk. "You want to stand in my building and tell me what separate is."

She took hold of my wrist.

She got my right wrist, the wrapped one, in her whole hand, the way you take something off a table, and the pain went up my arm to the shoulder. Her face was near mine. Her mouth was moving, and she was saying something with a lot of words in it, and I could hear the sound of it and none of the words, and the wrap on my palm was warm.

Her mouth. The lamp behind her. The lake.

The floor came up like a page turning.

13

Fluorescent light overhead. A plastic pitcher of water on a tray with a straw bent over the rim. My shoes under the bed in an order I hadn't put them in.

Someone had cleaned my hand and dressed it properly, and someone had put a needle in the back of my other hand, and someone had written my name on a whiteboard where I couldn't read it.

"You're awake."

She was standing at the end of the bed with her coat over her arm, and she looked at me like I'd spilled something.

"How long."

"Four hours. Maybe five."

"Did you sit here?"

"You had a fever and you stood in my office and argued with me for twenty minutes." She said it the way you tell somebody the score of a game. "I could have had you taken out."

"Then you'd have to explain me."

She didn't answer that. She turned and said something to the nurse at the door in her office voice, short and specific, times and names, what she wanted brought and what she didn't, and the nurse wrote it down.

"You're on leave," she said, back over her shoulder. "When you can hold a pen again the work will still be there."

"Whose work?"

"Don't be dramatic. It's a headache and a fever. You didn't lose the account." She picked up her coat. "Somebody will be here tonight."

"No."

"It's not a question."

She left.

At seven a woman came in with a tote bag and sat down in the chair by the window and asked me if I wanted the television on.

"Who hired you?"

"The young lady."

"Then I can't use you."

"I'm paid for the night either way, honey."

"Take it back to her."

She looked at me for a while and then she got out her phone and put her feet up, and she didn't go anywhere, and I lay there with the needle in my hand and thought about the five hundred dollars in my account and about what one woman in one chair for one night costs in this city. I hadn't asked. I didn't want to know the number. Somewhere near the end of the shift she refilled the pitcher without being asked. That was the only thing anybody did for me in that building too.

When the fever broke I took the needle out of my own hand badly, the way anybody would, and got dressed, and somebody in the hall put a clipboard in front of me and I signed it without reading it, and I walked out past the desk and down to the street and took the bus back north.

Tommy was at the table when I came in. He stood up. Then he sat back down and went to the microwave and put something in it and stood with his back to me until it beeped. He handed me the plate and watched me eat with my good hand for a while, and then he asked how long I was out. I said she didn't say. He asked what she did say, and I told him the part about the work still being there when I could hold a pen.

"Good," he said, in a voice that wasn't, and went to work.

14

I went back to the studio on Thursday.

Ray was in the corridor outside the kitchen with a coffee in each hand and he stopped when he saw me coming, and I watched him do the check, hand, face, hand, and I watched him decide not to say anything about either one.

"Ethan. I thought you were out."

"I'm back."

"You look like a fight."

"I fell."

"Sure you did." He handed me one of the coffees even though he'd been carrying both of them for himself. "So. Doug called. Tuesday, Wednesday, this morning. And I want to say up front that none of this is coming from me, because it isn't, I've been carrying this project in this building for two years and nobody ever once—"

"Ray."

"They're putting a second name on the set. Interiors. Another pair of eyes, is what Doug said. More hands on it, not different hands. I put that in an email and sent it back to him, and he called me and read me my own sentence." He drank some of his coffee and made a face at it. "Second name on the cover. Same deliverable. Same deadline."

"Whose side asked."

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to me."

"Come on." He drank again, and this time it wasn't the coffee he was making the face at. "You want me to fight this and lose the client? I've got a lease. This is the account that pays for the lease. Two years I built this thing, and then you're out for two days and they want another name in the room, and I'm supposed to say no to a client who's already had one of us on the carpet."

"I didn't get sick."

"I know. You fell." He said it the way people say a thing they're finished with. "Three months. That's the number they gave me. Hand the working files to my assistant so nobody's blocked, and I'll call you when there's something."

"Something to do."

"Something to do."

I went to my desk and sent them everything before lunch, every version, the whole drawer, and then sat with my name on a cover page and tried to care about the font. Nobody in that office asked me a real question all day. Two people asked whether I was feeling better, which is not the same question. By three o'clock Ray was on the phone with somebody and laughing, and I could hear it through the wall, the way people laugh when it isn't their problem anymore.

I printed the set at home that night and put it in the bottom drawer of my desk at work, where you put a thing you're not coming back for.

Ray said my name stayed on it, and he said it twice, like it was good news.

By Friday it would have a second name on the cover and I would still have my name on it too, and nobody in that building would ever have to explain anything.

Author’s Note

This chapter, the thing I kept turning over was small: Ethan tells the caregiver he won't use her, and it changes nothing. She's paid for the night either way, so she stays, feet up. Every no he gives in that building is like that — reasonable, firm, and unable to move a single person. I keep wondering how long a man keeps saying no when none of it ever lands. How long would you?

If you'd like to keep going past this one, the chapters ahead are up on my p*****n: https://www.patreon.com/c/TranKhang