Answerable
Excerpt from The Comb, a novel (Coming late 2014)
I walked the stack of folders down the hall, which was quiet except for one housekeeper and two carts.
One cart for clean sheets and towels, the other for soaps and bibles, pens and candy, and a side hamper for things already soiled. I considered pilfering notepads; they’d probably be useful. Yet this cart seemed to be out of the little notepaper cases, the ones that reminded us that we were in a Laura Ashley Inn, as if we couldn’t already tell by our floraled surroundings.
I said hello to the housekeeper, realizing that I’d forgotten her name but knowing that she was the tall one that Zane had thanked two days ago for making sure we could cut off the security cameras in appropriate locations for the duration of the Minister’s stay.
Her brother, whose name was Stephane, worked in the security room. She explained his tasks in a beautiful accent, of a faraway place I had never been to but Zane probably had lived in as a child for year or so, before his father announced that they were leaving to go somewhere else.
“There are more reporters outside. This meeting is tres speciale, non?”
I hadn’t heard Zane’s chat with her.
But if he’d made sure to kill the cameras, to make sure that no one saw him furtively exiting my room this morning?
I could live with that.
Or so I told myself. After I’d asked him three times what he’d talked about with the housekeeper, and he acted mysterious and did not tell me.
And after I joked that I would tell his wife he hooked up with a tall maid.
In a room filled with bottles of chemical cleaner.
Made by Leapfront, I added, noting that a hotel filled with so many scented intersections of potpourri and fresh white lilies, the petals of the dead drifting among the living, should not use cleaners that smell like anything.
“I’ll say you grabbed her arm and led her into the nearest doorway. I’ll say you couldn’t wait. How’s that?”
Wink.
“You’d be such a fine person to be telling her that.”
“I know,” I said, without missing a beat. Making sure to look him right in the eye as I did.
The President’s suite was guarded, but the door was ajar. I could see her. She was alone in a very large chair. Her legs were crossed at the knee. She was reading.
I entered and presented the files. One for each central bank. Top files for the top six. Yellow. Peripherals, red or blue depending upon role.
The first page of each had the contact information and profiles for the newly installed communications staff, the ones who would be on today’s call, a call to coordinate them. And send them forth, with tongues filled with message.
They were all going to say different planned versions of the very same planned thing.
The last file set, which was green, had the final reads of the recent, sequenced cyberdrills run by each bank.
The drills, which were mock versions of actual cyberattacks, all had names of predatory fish. The London test, which had been the first conducted and provided direction for all of the others after, was called Great White Shark.
Hong Kong was Blowfish and Moscow was Piranha. Frankfurt was Hammerhead and our test was called Orca. Other banks had chosen less toothy and more creative fish for their names, fish with special powers involving camouflage or luminescence. I wondered how long the bankers argued over which fish would be theirs.
They actually had argued. We’d been on a conference call, and they interrupted each other for what seemed like hours. Until the President just told them all to shut up.
She then assigned all their fish names.
And there was silence. Her strong action, however bossy, had saved us days of hem and haw.
Moments like these almost make advance girls happy. Even though we aren’t supposed to be happy. It’s not our job.
I wanted to applaud. But I knew better, and did not.
This was not the only moment like this. Lately, there were a lot of them. The President calling the question.
The President saying what was next.
The President saying no.
In the public mind, I suppose this seems normal.
“But it’s not what the Presidency IS,” Ash said on the phone in a muffled voice. But one I could hear, because I listen to everything he says with greater vigilance now, especially when we are in the back of the same towncar, driving east toward the shore.
In this conversation, his slender frame was unusually folded up against the leftside car door, about as far away as he could get from me in the shared back seat. I was on the right side, so I could communicate with the driver on a diagonal through the screen.
I knew I smelled appropriately so it had to be what he was talking about. Or about the driver.
Ash said he did not like the driver’s face and so he wanted to sit behind him so he did not have to see it.
I wondered why he’d bothered to add that part about the driver’s face. He could have just said “you sit on the right.” And that would have been that.
He gestured, taking his hand away from his mouth. Perhaps by accident.
“Now what did she mean by that word?” He said, with an uncharacteristic tone that sounded like urgency. He bent his knee up, and it looked uncomfortable and skeletal. I looked at his bony ankle, visible through its thin navy blue sock.
He’d lost weight, I thought. Though considering how many meals were on the schedule for St. Michael’s, I trusted that issue would be addressed. Another car was bringing a few cases of wine down from New York. From the Minister’s home cellar.
I pretended to look at the schedule, but saw that he was adjusting himself in the seat again. This included grabbing his tie, in a forceful start that almost choked him midsentence.
“Man hangs self with own tie.” It would be a compelling headline. Though people probably wouldn’t imagine it having happened by accident in a towncar with tinted windows.
He was turned almost directly away from me. I figured he wanted to prevent my lip reading capability from mattering.
But it wasn’t a big enough car for that. And he wasn’t willing to stick his head out the window, like a puppy on a roadtrip.
“She is trying to change the job,” he said. “She’s not going to do that.”
“Whether she likes it or not,” he paused, giving the next word a delectable slowness,
“Answerable.”
Which was followed by two minutes and some twenty three seconds of listening to a male voice read through what may have been a list.
I counted the seconds.
Then Ash again.
“ I don’t care if it’s good or not good. What I mean is the job is the job. It’s happening. What she says is not changing that.”
And then, with the oft-called upon line which will be on his grave someplace if the elusive, lithe, the quietly pale and greyed yet wine-blooded Adam Ash ever gets around to doing something so ordinary as dying, will be on his gravestone
“It is not good, or bad. It just is.”
**
I kept this overheard bit to myself, knowing that context may have been missing.
“It’s happening” could have been about no more than dinnertime, I thought.
I wasn’t convincing myself.
The friction was obvious. Minister Ash and The President. Those they considered their inspired, brilliant, future-focused cohort. Once a single cohort. Now one with questions, and codewords, and names of predatory fish. Quiet glances and silences, and other things less quiet, and more divided.
The toast for example, which was to be offered for the visitors from London.
The Shark people, I called them.
Ash stood to give the toast, and I rushed up to remind him that the President would be walking down the hall within three minutes. Felice had just given me the sign, down the hall, with a two and a three with her fingers, palm out , palm in, buy , sell, two, three.
“Will you sit down Lucie?”
“But Minister,” I whispered, “the President is in the hallway”
“I said to sit down.”
He gave the toast, and when she walked in it was done.
Felice looked at me. “What the…?”
I shrugged. Looking more bewildered than apologetic. She slipped me a notepad and I handed it back. Apparently she found a cart with notepads on it.
Not in writing, I mouthed silently — I’ll tell you later.
I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to tell her, except that Ash had gone right ahead and given a toast.
And it was his wine, from his cellar.
It was expensive. It wasn’t on the wine list.
**
I placed the files across the coffee table so that The President could see the title of each. I stood until she asked me to sit, my function being to hold the files she’d already read and take notes in my own handwriting of what she said about each.
They weren’t to look like she wrote them.
I had planned for ninety minutes but we were done in forty six.
She was astonishingly prepared. She always is, but something was different today.
Maybe it was the toast. The one she had not heard.
We sequenced all the fish operations and wrote five talkpoints and five backups. I read it all back. I would type it and feed it up for review. The review list from Ash, I noted, did not include our own Central Bank Chair.
“Madam President, should I add her?”
“Is she not there?”
“No.”
She looked briefly thrown but recovered seamlessly. I knew why. She had not made the mistake. Ash had. That changed the whole matter.
I played along.
“Perhaps Minister Ash just forgot?”
“I think so. Yes. Add her.”
I nodded. She looked over my notes. She changed a few words. We were almost done.
“Madam President?”
“Yes Lucie, what?”
She did not look up. But she wasn’t dismissing me either. I know her voices now. Judging from her silence while reading, I suspected that she actually liked my organization and recap of the fish matter.
“Can I ask you a question?”
Her lips pursed in momentary irritation.
“Lucie.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve told you before. Do not ask me if you can ask a question, just ask your question.”
She looked me in the eye. She was firm. She had told me before.
I’d expected mild anger. I didn’t see any.
Strangely, the tension in her forehead had left for a moment.
Her tone was one of warning, and instruction. Not contempt.
I nodded. The nod of a pupil who has accepted her teacher’s guidance. Not an errant subordinate.
I was about to ask a question about the post it note.
On the inside back of the green file.
It said, “Wake the shark.” It was followed by a colon and a series of scribbled numbers and hash signs. I could not tell whose handwriting it was. It was not hers. Nor was it Zane’s or Minister Ash’s.
I’ve signed things for both of them, so I know.
Might have been Dr. T, though I joked that if T had been scribbling on a post it, it would probably have some spilled food on it. His genius tended to occur concurrently with the rapid and messy consumption of snack food.
It wasn’t Arthur’s writing either, though I’ve never actually signed for him and it’s harder to pull off a southpaw anyway, to forge a lefty. I would have the angle all off.
The slant seemed right-handed.
Who wrote that number?
What’s happening in London? Shark meant London, didn’t it?
Not wanting to ask too much, I was only going to ask her what the number was. In my most innocent voice, hoping that she’d inadvertently tell me and I could tell Zane, and we could make a trade.
I’d make a deal to know what he’d been negotiating with the tall French speaking housekeeper working at an Ashley Inn in Maryland.
Since he was being weird about it.
But I asked the President something else. By accident. Or fate. On my mind, but not in my mouth. Not planned to be. And to this day I don’t know why the words I was going to say went away, and the words held all too high in my head fell forth into the open.
Less like song, and more like vomit.
“Why do the men hate us so much?”
My body stiffened. Starting with my diaphragm, which is inconvenient as it relates to breathing, and meant that my voice was not going to attain full volume for the next several minutes.
Whatever had just left me was out in the open and I had to look at it. No choice.
So did the President. I felt like something irreversible had happened. I’d asked something I would have asked Felice, getting a mid-afternoon manicure on an outdoor patio on break time. I’d asked the President of the United States who happened to be going over highly secret cyberdrill files.
I had no time to be shocked. I needed to rationalize it.
Before it looked like a mistake. An error of judgment.
I reminded myself, almost medicinally, that the question had been concise.
I was always instructed to be specific with the President; she had no time for my roundabout ways of getting at a subject. Arthur had coached me. And I knew he was trying to help.
Just get to the fucking question. Don’t paint the movie set so much, he’d say. Fucking would be muttered in a quieter voice than all the other words in the same sentence. That was how Arthur always did it.
My question was brief. But I had not defined “men.” More importantly, I had not defined “us.”
As my words hung in the unresponding air, I realized that I could have meant all women.
Or just the Aboves.
Or maybe I meant just us.
The only two people in this room right now, not counting the earbuds in the doorway, who were just out of earshot.
In a room decorated in too much Laura Ashley. All smashed up in one place.
Just us. The President and me.
She had not looked up.
“I don’t know honey.”
I jumped inside.
Then I looked around the room.
Her daughter was not here. It was just me. I’d known that already. Still, I looked around.
Honey?
What had she meant by that?
The President’s words were always planned. Or so I reassured myself.
And then the President seemed to read my jostled mind, and repeated herself, as if in responsible, sensible, thorough self-correction.
“I don’t know.”
This time her voice was flatter, cleaner, more aloof. Sounding more like Adam Ash. Like Minister Ash would talk if he were a woman.
She looked down. Fiddling with her reading glasses just a bit, in a motion another might have assumed was controlled.
It wasn’t.
I just knew.
She hadn’t meant to say that, I thought. For a moment I imagined her doing needlepoint. My Gramma, and her needlepoint. Her crossword puzzles. The cookbooks, and the history books about war heroes and kings and queens. Patriots and pioneers. And the atlases, and the almanacs of weather.
My mother, and her bookkeeping. The lists of transactions. The debits and credits. The rules of households and corporations, of clubs and of countries. Shared by all, as one language, carrying truth and nuance all at once, into war and peace.
But it was none of those. It was an intelligence briefing. No admission of war, no recognition of peace. A place outside that. A place without rule or cause.
Her knuckles were white.
Was her face paler than before? I couldn’t tell. But her fingers were.
Honey?
She sounded as if she was speaking to a child.
But not in a condescending sense, the way the President talks to stupid women, and calls them “sweetheart” in a way that conveys to everyone who knows the code of Fern that she will never talk with nor mention this sorry excuse for a female human again.
“Sweetheart” wasn’t just a brushoff. It was permanent.
This was a different tone. One of resignation.
Like my Gramma would use, when she was about to tell me that the world was not going to be fair. Not even for me. In fact, it was going to be very, very unfair.
She had to tell me that a lot. I’d never wanted to accept it. I’d rather fold my arms and stomp my foot.
The President had probably told her own daughter some version of that same wisdom. Her daughter, now half my age and about a quarter of hers. Though that would change all too quickly.
I wanted to smile. Not widely, but just a little, like you do when you glance an understanding, conveying a closeness in a moment without ever saying anything.
Just to let her know that I saw the slip up, and knew that it was charming. And might be the only one of its kind. But she was the President. So I didn’t.
Something else was here.
Or had happened. Or was happening.
There was another presence, and it overruled everything else. It crept into me slowly, and made my lungs feel constricted. I wondered if it was dust, and if I would sneeze in a moment.
But this room was so perfectly dusted. As if the maids did not ever have the privilege of sleeping here, as if they dusted perpetually and incessantly.
The President was afraid of something.
What I’d asked had reminded her. Of whatever it was she was afraid of.
She wouldn't ever tell me. But I knew.
It had to do with the men, hating her so much. And maybe also hating me.
Irresolvably, immeasurably. In a way that would never be fixed. Even by the minds of those most gifted, which she considered herself one.
A feeling fought its way in to my stiffened body.
I didn’t want her to be afraid. I wanted her to fight them again, and tell them to be quiet. To choose their fish names for them. And have that be that.
I fought the thought that she was afraid. I told myself it was ridiculous.
And I remained unconvinced by my own efforts.
It wasn’t as if I could measure it, the whiteness of her knuckles or the fear in her voice and the way that her own brain must have been trying to fight it now. She did not fight with her heart, at least not that I had seen. The break between brain and heart, remaining undefined, was not openly discussed.
The light in the room had changed, as the clouds drifted over and past the sun, shifting the light that came into the window and how brightly each of the colorful prints showed themselves, from the furnishings in porcelain blue and pink, the drapes in shades that echoed them, with added droplets of ochre. A narrow sunbeam had hit a potpourri dish, of dried flower petals, and something metal right next to it on a desk across the way, a vanity box that was engraved across the top, with flourish and letters. Next to that was a glass paperweight and a soft-edged knife that opened envelopes. It had cast a glint onto the floor, but now it did not, the light having moved over.
I felt a funny damp coldness on my hands, and against my better judgment, wiped my palms quietly on the couch to dry them off. She didn’t look up. The couch, a print of voluptuous cabbage roses caught falling in midair, showed no sign that I’d even touched it.
I want to feel relieved. That the couch thinks I’m invisible. That my hands made no mark. That my palms were dry again.
That Zane hadn’t put a camera in this room.
Where had that thought come from?
I am nervous. Nervous in a way like something’s about to happen. Nervous in a way that knows, and doesn’t know. I stopped thinking about the numbers on the post-it.
I thought back to the toast.
Ash’s toast, which I had been present for, and the President had not, was brief.
“To the answer.”
Sitting at the small dining room’s side wall, I had looked at Zane as he raised his glass. He told me later that night that the wine was exquisite. He was proud to be at the table; he kept talking about it and wanting me to be impressed with him.
He was the youngest one toasting. The only one without any grey hair.
He had not looked at the Minister, or at me, though I’d tried to catch his eye.
As he toasted, he had looked up. At the ceiling.
Or the sky.
