The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [55]
SO THERE I WAS, in Jitters at the Briardale Mall, drinking my morning coffee and reading the paper during a power failure. Housed in my gray suit, nicely and distinctly accessorized with a small gold pin David had bought for me, I was sipping a Tip of the Andes specialty blend and checking the New York Times arts-and-leisure section, a feature on the choreographer Mark Morris whose work I happened to admire for its ritualized symmetries. In college I had aspirations to be a dancer, now done for. But I felt relaxed and very expensive, concentrating my forces. I had a large complicated case in the works and I was Zen-ing the whole thing, coolly distant but already imagining through strategy each step and each minute detail how I’d win. I was pre-victoring it. I had a couple of aces up my sleeve, and the anticipation of my winning — my future winnings — made me not happy, exactly, but contented with myself. The client was almost irrelevant by that time.
When the power went off in the mall, I was the power, so I didn’t care. I thought about my four colleagues in their darkened law offices half a mile away. I imagined those contentious characters — nominally friends of mine — stuck in elevators or in conference rooms with no ventilation, trying to figure out who to blame for the loss of electricity.
If God appeared on this earth again, lawyers would sue Him.
I always have coffee before going to work. I tend to get to the office a bit late. I am quite successful — I do litigation — and can pretty much set my own hours except when I go to court. I have to be reckoned with. No one tells me when to arrive at the office. No can do. You don’t dictate anything to me.
My days are segmented, very clearly divided and defined, and that is how I work it. I have a compartment for everything, including getting ready for the working day, down to the coffee and the paper and the arts-and-leisure section. And I have always orchestrated my romances with, well, an icy methodical self-interest. That’s how I managed my affair with David.
As regulated by law, as soon as the power went off, the safety floodlights went on. Certainly enough illumination to catch up on the news. Sounds of meteorological strife resounded above me. From the sound of it, hail was falling out of the sky. I didn’t care. I went on reading.
The manager of the shop appeared next to me.
“How can you read in this light? It’s so dim.”
I didn’t bother looking up. “I’m used to dim bulbs,” I said.
“In that case, you’d be right at home here.”
Oh, a contender. Someone for whom some notice was required. It’s always a key moment when you have to drop what you’re doing to look up at a man who has initiated this sort of conversation. So, noting the paragraph where I had stopped reading in the Mark Morris article, I trained my blue eyes on him and took his measure. Before me, leaning against a chair, stood a tallish man of somewhat uncertain appearance. He gave me a guarded smile. He didn’t flinch when I gazed at him. He radiated a sort of old-fashioned semisexy kindliness planted in the midst of a serviceable face. He had meditative, haunted eyes, a painter’s eyes, as it turned out, widely set apart in his vaguely half-handsome head. I couldn’t yet tell if he was being friendly in order to flirt, or to increase customer satisfaction. Or whether the flirting was specific to me or generic to women. I kept thinking: he’s halfway there, wherever “there” is. Probably the kids in grade school had called him Froggy.
He stood, as if planted, in the cold trashy evacuation floodlight and smiled persistently. He didn’t seem dim in the least. It was all a pretense. He was imagining us as comrades in a weather crisis, elbow to elbow as we faced a green sky. Meteorological solidarity. I heard the hail pounding atop the skylight. Weather is so nineteenth-century in its effects, I thought. “I’ve seen you here before,” he said.
“This place is close to work,” I said.
“I thought maybe the appeal lay in our atmosphere.” He