them from previous dissonance.
“That’s right,” I said.
“But I built this firm with a team of partners,” Kyle proclaimed. “Not with lone players.”
“Yeah. Well. Fine.” Giving ground would only give him momentum.
“I’m sure the directors would be interested in having their newest executive vice-president give them that fuck-you attitude at the next board meeting.”
This was sour. And suspicious. Kyle gathering fuel from as many sources as possible to ensure that his accusations consumed everything in their path.
I refused Kyle sufficient quarrel, or voice, to let it go any further.
Scooping up the silence, Kyle regrouped, resumed his original censure. “You bring this deal to us last summer, sell us on your promise to pull if off, and then you miss half the meetings, missed half of everything around here, once we take it on.”
This was a portent. Kyle resuming the course of least resistance. Refusing to concede the possibility of success for the bond sales, leaving me with the minimal defence of trying to brush aside the potential for failure. Seeking to lay the predicament at my feet in his indictment of my consistency, if not my competence. It was unsafe to remain in the path of such determination. Kyle had already choreographed this entire meeting in his mind ahead of time. There was no use trying to change any of it now. If I was lured into trying, I would be absorbed into his agenda. Better to cut it off. Get out.
“I missed those meetings for a reason,” I told Kyle succinctly. “You know why. You saw it then. You just don’t want to see it now.”
It was a weak statement that I didn’t feel entitled to truly believe. But it served. I watched Kyle’s face slowly fill with coppery indignation, spreading from his nose out across his cheeks towards his temples.
“If you don’t want to,” I added, losing momentum, “I can’t make you.”
That was the end of it. We had both circled our conflicts long enough, talking around them to purposely ignore each other’s points. Neither of us owned any progress. Neither could be bothered with any further arguing. Both of us were equally betrayed by it.
“Get out,” Kyle grumbled blandly.
As much as I wanted to stand, pivot, and leave without another word, let Kyle re-breathe the staleness of his own aggression, I needed Kyle’s cooperation. I needed the firm. I needed its capital and resources to ensure the success of my bonds. Let myself be reduced to striking back in similar rage and I would dilute the mortar necessary to join my deal and my career, to mend my life with fresh momentum.
Ducking his disregard, I tried to purge my tone of any admission or apology. “Give me a chance to make a few calls and check my faxes and email. And double-check our financing arrangements in Singapore overnight. It’ll take the best part of twenty-four hours. We might as well put the exact numbers on the table. First thing tomorrow morning.”
“We might as well, Paris.”
Kyle was dismissing me; making it apparent that, in his opinion, I had lost the argument, if not something more.
As I turned, he caught me between the shoulder blades with a parting thrust. “If you had bothered to come to the office yesterday we wouldn’t have to waste time waiting for this information now. Would we?”
Another of Kyle’s perfected tactics, reducing the conflict to a personal criticism and leaving you with two losing choices: strike back and stray from the real issue; or stick to the issue and let the criticism stand undefended, making it valid, and making you pay a price in frustration and bile whenever he dredged it up against you in a future confrontation.
Doubly angered, I was tempted to collect on past debts. But this morning was not other mornings. My reserve of confidence was meagre, and I cautioned myself against squandering it by engaging in a retort.
Without response, I walked out, back to my office.
Why hadn’t Kyle already gone storming to the board of directors? I had to ask myself. Why was he holding back?
There was more threat lurking in what he had not done than in anything he could have done by denouncing me to the board before I could defend myself.
Twice along the hallway, I touched the walls with my fingertips, unsure whether I was steadying myself or merely testing my connection with something solid.
* * *
In my office, I closed the door. Pulled the creased message slips from my pocket and flipped them to a corner of my desk. Sat motionless.
I refused to look at the calendars on my desk and computer. I had become afraid of the dates, afraid of their measuring of my life. I feared that I had already lived too long, experienced too much, used up my luck and all of my chances.
I tried to concentrate on suppressing the uncertainty that seeped into my thoughts from some deeper place within me.
In my mind I saw myself sitting out yesterday morning next to the electric kettle in my kitchen, its white plastic shell, cracked behind the spout, leaking steam for months, my shopping for a replacement lost within my overall procrastination one weekend to the next. There would never be a language affluent enough for me to explain it in words spoken aloud to another person: how not leaving my apartment had been necessity rather than choice.
I had woke in an unfamiliar bending of space and shadow in the false light before dawn, feeling as if I had been dug out of sleep by a blunt shovel.
In a stale bathrobe, I prowled the clamorous silence of my empty rooms. Sick. Unsteady after a murderous night of murderous dreams that had all been rinsed away at that exact second my eyes fluttered open, leaving me with ragged effigies of the dense emotion and confusion. I chased the fading dream images, stretching to heal myself by somehow linking the broken ends of my feelings to the raw ends of my broken-off dreams.
My concentration absent, my hands unguided, I fell into familiar routine. Fussing to fill and plug the kettle, spooning ground coffee into the glass carafe with the plunger. Pouring the boiling water. And then pouring the coffee. Inhaling the fragrant gush of steam from the mug.
It was not until I had lifted the mug and sipped that I noticed the second steaming mug still waiting on the kitchen counter.
I could not prevent myself from glancing to the hallway leading from the bedroom. Like grabbing at empty air halfway through an unexpected fall. I could not stop myself from expecting her to come shuffling into the kitchen.
Parked, then, at my kitchen table over slowly cooling bitter coffee, without her, I could think of nothing but all of the things now undone between us, all of the things we would now never share, our lives forcibly unravelled by a specific minute in time. I seemed to breathe by having to remember how to do it.
Breaking dawn brought a ferocious sun, shooting blindingly through the floor-to-ceiling windows; diffusing all the angles in the rooms and corners and hallways. Their shadows bleached away, the straight lines melted back into the walls.
How was I to navigate with no exact points of reference?
Anxiety swirled in my blood, bringing a headache that was too stubborn to either bloom or depart.
