Station Eleven

Clark came over for dinner last night, first time in six months or so. Was nervous about seeing him, partly because I find him less interesting now than I did when we were both nineteen (unkind of me to admit, but can’t we be honest about how people change?), also partly because last time he was here I was still married to Miranda and Elizabeth was just another dinner guest. But Elizabeth cooked roast chicken and did her best impression of a 1950s housewife and he was taken with her, I think. She kept up her brightest veneer through the whole evening, was completely charming, etc. For once she didn’t drink too much.

Do you remember that English teacher we had in high school who was crazy about Yeats? His enthusiasm sort of rubbed off on you and I remember for a while you had a quote taped to your bedroom wall in the lake house and lately I’ve been thinking about it: Love is like the lion’s tooth.

Yours,

—A.

26

“PLEASE TELL ME YOU

’RE JOKING,” Clark said when Elizabeth Colton called to tell him about the book. Elizabeth wasn’t joking. She hadn’t seen the book yet—it wouldn’t be released for another week—but she’d been told by a reliable source that both of them were in it. She was furious. She was considering litigation, but she wasn’t sure who to sue. The publisher? V.? She’d decided she couldn’t reasonably sue Arthur, as much as she’d like to, because he apparently hadn’t known about the book either.

“What does he say about us?” Clark asked.

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “But apparently he talks about his marriages and friendships in detail. The word my friend used was unsparing.”

“Unsparing,” Clark said. “That could mean anything.” But probably nothing good, he decided. No one’s ever described as being unsparingly kind.

“He liked to describe the people in his life, apparently. At least he had the grace to be upset about it when I called him.” A fizz of static on the line.

“It’s called Dear B.?” Clark was writing this down. This was three weeks before the pandemic. They still had the indescribable luxury of being concerned about a book of published letters.

“Dear V. She’s his friend Victoria.”

“Former friend, I’d imagine. I’ll call him tomorrow,” Clark said.

“He’ll just start rambling and deflecting and obfuscating,” she said. “Or maybe that’s just how he talks to me. Do you ever talk to him and get the sense that he’s acting?”

“I actually have to run,” Clark said. “I’ve got an eleven a.m. interview.”

“I’m coming to New York soon. Maybe we should meet and discuss this.”

“Okay, fine.” He hadn’t seen her in years. “Have your assistant talk to my admin and we’ll set something up.”

When he hung up the phone, Dear V. was all he could think about. He left the office without meeting anyone else’s gaze, mortified in a way that somehow precluded talking to his colleagues—had any of them read the book?—and stepped out onto Twenty-third Street. He wanted to track down Dear V. immediately—surely he knew someone who could get him a copy—but there wasn’t time before his meeting. He was conducting a 360° assessment at a water-systems consulting firm by Grand Central Station.

Over the past several years, these assessments had become his specialty. At the center of each stood an executive whom the client company hoped to improve, referred to without irony as the target. Clark’s current targets included a salesman who made millions for the company but yelled at his subordinates, an obviously brilliant lawyer who worked until three a.m. but somehow couldn’t meet her deadlines, a public-relations executive whose skill in handling clients was matched only by his utter ineptitude at managing his staff. Each of Clark’s assessments involved interviewing a dozen or so people who worked in close proximity to the target, presenting the target with a series of reports consisting of anonymized interview comments—positive comments first, to soften the blow of the takedowns—and then, in the project’s final phase, a few months of coaching.