State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [9]
She fell onto the leather seat just as she might have fallen out on the pavement in front of the house had she been forced to wait there another minute. “Just take me back to my car,” Marina said. Her hands were shaking and she pinned them between her knees. She had spent most of her life in Minnesota and yet she had never been so cold. All she wanted in the world was to go home and sit in a hot bath.
It had stopped snowing but the sky hanging over the prairie was swollen and gray. The interstate, once they found it, was nothing but a beaten strip of badly plowed blacktop between two flat expanses of white. Mr. Fox did not take Marina back to her car. He was driving instead to St. Paul, and once in St. Paul to a restaurant where in the past they had had remarkable luck not running into anyone they knew. When she saw where he was going she said nothing. She could understand in some dim way that after all they’d been through it was better for them to be together. It was well after five when they slid into a booth in the back of the room. When Marina ordered a glass of red wine, she realized she wanted it even more than the bath. The waitress brought her two and put them side by side on the table in front of her as if she might be expecting a friend. She brought Mr. Fox two glasses of scotch over piles of ice.
“Happy Hour,” she said with no particular happiness. “You folks have a good time.”
Marina waited until the woman had walked away and then without preamble she repeated to Mr. Fox the single sentence from Karen’s monologue that had stuck in her head so clearly after all the others began to melt together. “If Vogel has inflated its stock price then that’s Vogel’s problem.”
He looked at her with what might have been called a wan smile except there wasn’t quite enough smile in it. “I can’t ever remember being this tired.”
She nodded her head. She waited. For a long time he waited
with her.
“You know the stock price is up,” he said finally.
“I know it’s up. I guess I don’t know why it’s up or that it has anything to do with Anders.”
Mr. Fox drained his first glass easily and then rested his fingers lightly on the rim of the second. He would be sixty-one in a month but the events of the day had put him safely beyond that. In the dim light of the low-hanging swag lamp with a faux Tiffany shade he could have been seventy. He sat hunched, his shoulders pressing towards one another in the front, and his glasses dug a small red groove into the bridge of his nose. His mouth, which in the past had been generous and kind, now cut across his face in a single straight line. Marina had worked at Vogel for more than six years before they ever came to this restaurant. It was plenty of time to think about Mr. Fox as her employer, her superior. For the last seven months they had made an attempt to redefine their relationship.
“The problem is this,” Mr. Fox said, his voice turned sullen. “For some time now there has been . . .” He waited, as if a combination of the cold, the exhaustion, and the scotch had stolen the very word he needed. “There has been a situation in Brazil. It was not a situation that Anders was meant to solve. I didn’t ask him to solve it, but I did think he would bring back enough information so that I would be able to handle it myself. I saw Anders as the person who would set things in motion. He would explain to Dr.