[Restaurant, West Village — December 20, 2012, 7:44 PM]
Scottie was on her second glass of wine when I arrived.
This was information. We had been to this restaurant three times, and twice she had ordered the first glass when I sat down, and once we had ordered together. The second glass already poured meant she had been here for a while, and being here for a while before I arrived meant she had been sitting with something and had decided that tonight was when she was going to say it.
I sat down.
She looked at me. Not the performance of a look — just looked, the way she did when she had already arranged the interior of her face for the specific conversation and did not need the extra layer.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
Detection ran her baseline the way it always did: honest. The thing underneath the honesty was different tonight. For a year and a half I had been reading a specific quality in Scottie's signal — a growing doubt she was choosing not to surface, a question she had been carrying and deciding each week whether to set down or ask. The quality had changed. The doubt had resolved into something cleaner and quieter. Not anger. Not sadness. Something that was neither of those and had the specific clarity of a decision made.
She had come here to say the thing she had been not saying.
"You look tired," she said.
"I've had a strange December."
"I heard." She turned the wine glass once. The habit she had when she was thinking and didn't want her face to do the thinking for her. "PD's network is small. The Veridion matter circulated."
"I assume."
"They think it was a strategic mistake. Declining the fee at that valuation." She looked at the glass. "I told two partners it wasn't a mistake. I said Klein Legal doesn't make strategic mistakes on case selection."
Detection: the statement was clean. She believed it. She had said it in a professional context and meant it, and the professional cost of saying it had been real and she had paid it anyway.
"Thank you," I said.
"I don't need thanks." She looked at me. "I need to understand what you are."
The waiter came. We ordered. I got something I would not remember eating. She got the thing she usually ordered when she was not paying particular attention to the menu, which meant her attention was elsewhere and had been from the moment she sat down.
The restaurant was doing its December evening thing: warm, full, the specific ambient noise of people who were glad to be inside. The table next to us had a couple celebrating something, the woman wearing the particular expression of someone who had been told good news that morning and had not yet stopped feeling the warmth of it. The kind of table that was easy to be at.
Scottie's table was a different kind.
She waited until the food arrived and neither of us had touched it.
"I have one question," she said. "Not an ultimatum. Just a question."
I looked at her.
"Is there something about you I'm never going to know?"
The sentence had the specific quality she had promised — not an attack, not an accusation. She had left the door open deliberately, the way someone holds a door for a person who may not come through it. If I said "no," she would have to believe me or not believe me, and she knew what she would choose. She had given me the space to say "no" because she wanted to be wrong.
Detection ran the moment. Her baseline: fully honest. No manipulation, no leverage. Someone who has been carrying a question long enough that asking it has become the only way to stop carrying it.
I had been running the sentence from the moment she started it. Is there something about you I'm never going to know. I knew the answer to that question. I had known it since the jazz club, since the wine bar where she removed her lanyard, since the London pub where we both looked at the Thames and I took her hand and meant it in every way I was capable of meaning it.
The answer was yes, and the answer had been yes from the beginning, and it would be yes until the end of whatever this was, and saying no would be a lie she would hear as a lie, and I had spent three years developing the specific professional reflex of not lying to people who deserved the truth.
"Yes," I said.
She looked at me. The look was what I had expected and also not what I had expected. It was not anger. It was not grief, not yet. It was the look of a person who has been carrying a specific weight and has just had it confirmed that the weight is real — a kind of terrible relief. She had been right about the question, which meant she had not been imagining it, which meant she was not unreasonable for having needed to ask.
"Okay," she said. Very quietly.
"Scottie—"
"No." She raised a hand, slightly. Not aggressively — the gesture of someone stopping a sentence that would be harder to hear than what she already had. "You answered honestly. That's — that's good." She picked up her wine glass and set it down without drinking. "It means you're still you."
"What you're asking isn't something I can—"
"I know." She looked at the table. "That's the answer, isn't it. It isn't that you won't. It's that you can't."
"Yes."
She was quiet for a moment. The couple at the next table laughed at something. Outside the window, the December night was doing what December nights did — cold and lit and indifferent to individual tables.
"I've never had a relationship that felt more real than this one," she said. "I want you to know that."
My jaw was locked. I did not unlock it. There were sentences available and all of them were true and none of them were enough.
"I know," I said.
She nodded once. The same nod she used when she was accepting a professional reality she did not like — the specific economy of someone who has decided not to spend more effort than the situation requires.
"Let's have dinner," she said. "And then we'll talk about the week."
We had dinner. We talked about the week — the Kellner matter, the Darby end-of-year function, a case she was working through the holidays. The food was good. The wine lasted until the end. Neither of us brought up the question or the answer again, because neither of us needed to. It was already in the room, already occupying its share of the air, and the dinner was a way of letting it sit there quietly before it became anything else.
I paid. She didn't argue this time.
Outside on the sidewalk I held a cab for her and she got in and she looked at me through the window with the look she had been giving me since October 2011, the one I had never been able to fully decode because it carried too many registers at once.
The cab pulled into traffic.
I walked home.
The question and the answer were still in the room behind me, and they would be there when I came back to the restaurant, and they would be in the wine bar where she had removed the lanyard, and they would be in every room where the relationship had been real, which was all of them, which was the specific cost of the answer being yes.
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