All You Could Ask For A Novel - By Mike Greenberg Page 0,94
“Let’s do it again soon. That’s my number, ask Andrew to call me.”
And she was up and gone, just like that.
KATHERINE
I HADN’T CALLED HIM Phillip in almost twenty years.
That wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t as though he hadn’t noticed. Back when he first hired me, when he was a managing director, eighteen months after graduating from HBS, he told me everyone called him “Phil,” but that I was welcome to still call him by his full name.
“That’s all right,” I told him that day, “you feel more like a Phil to me now.”
So when his full name came up through the intercom, I froze.
“Ms. Emerson,” the doorman said hesitantly, after a moment, “shall I send your visitor up?”
Well, wasn’t that an interesting question?
On the one hand, the last thing in the world I wanted was to see him, and on the other, there was nothing I wanted more. Which hand takes precedence in a moment such as this? I swear, they don’t prepare you in life to make the decisions that really matter. In school they teach you how to add and how to play nice with other kids, and there are books to help you with everything from meditation to how to dismantle a nuclear device, but no one ever tells you what to do if you’re staring your own mortality square in the face and the man who ruined your life shows up at your apartment with a conciliatory opening line.
“Of course,” I found myself saying, “send him on up.”
Then it was like I was on autopilot, drifting from the living room to the study and glancing into a mirror. Not so bad. He hadn’t seen me since I began my treatments, since I quit my job. Could that really have been just a few months ago? It felt like a different lifetime.
I went to the sofa and sat with my legs crossed beneath me, took a deep breath and held it, then slowly let it out. Then in again, and held it, and out. Again and again, as deeply as I could manage.
May I be filled with loving-kindness
May I be well
May I be peaceful and at ease
May I be happy
When the doorbell rang, I pressed the button to allow Phillip entry, keeping my eyes closed, continuing to breathe all the while. I heard the door open, then shut softly. Footsteps on hardwood floors, loud, as only expensive dress shoes on wood can be. Then the footsteps stopped and I could faintly hear his breathing over the sound of my own, but I did not open my eyes until he spoke.
“Hi, Kat,” he said, in his scratchy baritone. “You are a sight for sore eyes.”
I took one last deep breath, let it out, then I opened my eyes. The man before me was one I did not recognize. For the first time in all the years I’d known him, from the boy who was Phillip to the man who was Phil, from the most impressive student at the finest school in the country to the shrewdest chief executive on Wall Street, I couldn’t see any of it. It was as though his spirit had vacated his body, leaving only the limbs and flesh behind. He was pale and wan, and his lips were severely chapped. He also looked heavier than I had ever seen him.
“My lord, Phil, you look like shit,” I said. “I’m supposed to be the one who’s dying, what the hell is the matter with you?”
I stopped him dead in his tracks with that. People don’t talk like that to him, not even me, not back then or any time since.
To his everlasting credit, he started to laugh. Not just a giggle, but a hearty, chesty laugh, the sort I hadn’t heard much from him since Harvard. Wall Street is not an especially funny place. It was good to see him laugh, he looked healthier, but he sounded awful. I could hear it in his chest, in the deep breaths he took between chuckles, in the wheeze of his inhale.
“You’re smoking again, aren’t you?” I said.
He threw up his hands. “Guilty as charged.”
I sighed and patted the sofa beside me. “Come sit down,” I said. “You look like you need to talk.”
And talk he did, though he didn’t sit down. The first thing he did was pull a cigarette from the breast pocket of his sport coat and fiddle it about nervously between his fingers. I watched silently until he fished a silver lighter