The 500: A Novel (7 page)

They applauded, then passed me around, shaking my hand and clapping my shoulder. I’d been at Davies for four months—May through August. Someone told me it was the shortest time to promotion in the history of the Davies Group.

Davies raised his hand, and the room quieted. “Now let’s get out of here,” he said in his half whisper. “I’ll see you all at Brasserie Beck in half an hour. We have the back room.”

The principals made their last congratulations as they ambled out. Davies walked me down to the second floor to a beautiful office, as cozy as an Oxford library.

“We’ll move you up here on Monday.”

He caught me measuring the distance, not more than fifty feet, to Annie Clark’s door. He gave me the faintest smile but didn’t say a word. The guy really did know his levers.

“What do you want, Mike? Name it.”

I blanked. I had everything I’d been gunning for. A decent life, a good job, respect. And more, something I never thought possible. Going after Gould had thrilled me in a way I’d missed for years, ever since I’d given up hustling. And Davies was happy with it, the honest work and the not-so-honest habits I could never shake. I could be the man I wanted and not have to hide where I’d come from.

“I’m happy, sir. Really. This is all too much.”

“Anything,” he urged me. This wasn’t some inspirational exercise, I realized. He was serious. I was silent for a minute, daring to take him at his word.

“I don’t know if this is the right…” I trailed off. He probably thought I was calculating a doable ask: a Benz SLK350, a private bathroom. But the only thing I could think of to ask for was trickier than that, because I’d been covering it up for so long, and because, to tell a hard truth, some part of me didn’t even want it.

“My father,” I said. “He…” I trailed off.

“I know about your father.”

“He has a parole hearing coming up. He has sixteen years in, and eight left. Can you help get him out?”

“I’ll do everything I can, Mike. Everything.”

CHAPTER THREE

IN THE WEEKS
after my promotion, I kept being assigned to cases that Annie Clark was also working on. I began to wonder if Henry Davies was somehow behind our being thrown together so often, though it was never exactly seven minutes in heaven.

We were both now senior associates, but she was very clearly the boss on every project. She’d already been at the firm for four years, and rumor had it she was on track to be the first female partner. She clocked a lot of one-on-one time with Henry, the ultimate sign of clout around the office.

Davies Group had a macho, competitive streak that reminded me of those Harvard Law seminar rooms. Annie could more than hold her own against the boys. She did it with poise, a dry humor, and a toughness that, coming from a woman so graceful, was especially lethal. The downside, for my purposes, was that she wasn’t someone you could just flirt with. She scared the shit out of most guys.

Working the kind of hours we worked, we developed a rapport and grew to be good friends around the office. Every so often, sitting at the end of an empty conference room at eleven at night, going over the final revisions on a report for a client, I would pick up on a shared vibe: a warmth from her that made it seem like the most natural thing for me to slide closer to her, to touch her arm, her shoulder, stare into her eyes. I got the strangest feeling that she was watching, testing me, to see how bold I really was.

I could easily have been deluding myself, however. I had a serious crush going. And it seemed a uniquely bad idea, now that I’d clawed my way into the good life here at Davies, to make a pass at a woman who, while not quite my boss, was definitely a higher-up and close to Davies himself. And I certainly wasn’t going to pull anything in the circumstances we usually found ourselves: sweating a tight deadline surrounded by colleagues.

My schemer’s mind was always revving red, contriving ways to throw us together, but she caught me first. Davies Group had a gym in the basement. You opened an unassuming door in a back corner by the parking garage and then found yourself in a twelve-thousand-square-foot fitness utopia: rows of gleaming new equipment, flat-screen TVs, and workout clothes with the Davies Group logo carefully folded and waiting for you.

Around midnight or one a.m., after the cleaning folks had left and the whole building was empty, when you’re still working and starting to get the crazies from staring too long at a computer, that gym was heaven.

I was down there one night, and with sixteen hours of bottled-up energy to burn off, I guess I was going a little overboard, doing rounds of treadmill sprints, pull-ups, push-ups, and thrusters, sweating and panting and blasting my iPod. In the course of trying not to retch or let the weights fall on my head, I perhaps forgot myself. In my entire time at Davies, I think I’d seen one other person in there that late. I mean, what kind of maniac uses the office gym at one in the morning?

Excuses, excuses for the inexcusable. A certain song, let’s say “Respect” by Aretha Franklin, came on shuffle on my iPod, and I may have been belting it out at the top of my lungs. And maybe dancing a little between sets. I’ll blame the endorphins.

Regardless, just as I was hitting my crescendo during the chorus, I did a little half turn and found Annie, faking innocence, on the elliptical eight feet away. This was the second time she’d sneaked up on me. I stopped dead in the middle of the “sock it to me”s.

She performed a very polite golf clap.

“Oh boy,” I said.

She walked toward me and looked at the screen of my iPod. “Aretha, huh? I didn’t quite peg you for that.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That?”

“Soulful.”

“Ouch.”

“Not like that,” she protested. “I mean, it’s not exactly a sound track I had imagined when I saw you down here, doing…what was that thing on the ground?”

It was called a burpee, though I wasn’t about to say that to Annie. “Nothing,” I said. “I happen to have a lot of soul.”

“I could tell. Snazzy moves.”

“Thanks.” Deep breath. No time like the present. “Hey, why don’t we get together outside of work. What are you up to this weekend?”

She frowned. “I’m busy.”

Damage-control time. “That’s cool. We should hang out sometime, though.”

“I’d really like that,” she said, and she draped her towel around her neck. “Actually, do you like hiking?”

If she had asked if I were into metal detecting, I’d have said yes. “Oh yeah.”

“Some friends of mine and I are heading out to the country on Saturday, if you’re free.”

And that’s how I found myself scrambling hands and feet over granite boulders in Shenandoah National Park, with Annie chugging along ahead of me in hiking boots and knee-high wool socks that gave her a distinctly Swiss vibe. Somehow, when I’d pictured her off the clock, I had conjured up scenes of her as a high-society dame in a period drama, waltzing. So imagine my surprise when Annie Clark—blue blood in her veins, Yale on her résumé—led me to a swimming hole in moonshine country.

Her friends said that the water would be too cold for swimming, but she shrugged and looked at me. I didn’t care if it was the North Sea. We headed down, just the two of us.

A cascade dropped forty feet through a gorge surrounded by old-growth forest. It was early September, still hot, but the water was ice-cold. Annie took off her shoes and socks and long-sleeved shirt and dropped in first. Seeing her glide through the clear water and then lie out on the bank in her sports bra and hiking shorts, patches of sunlight moving across her smooth skin as the wind moved the branches overhead—to this day that memory stops my heart. I stripped down to my shorts and jumped in. If she were a Siren, I’d have gladly drowned trying to get to her. I didn’t think she’d actually call me out on that, though.

“You want to go under the falls?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. I managed to restrain my first answer:
Yes, God, yes.

“It can be a little scary,” she said.

“I think I’ll be okay.” I mean, really, what could this sheltered little pixie have in store that could possibly scare me?

She walked up to a rock face formed by two massive boulders—each thirty feet tall—wedged together. “In here,” she said, and pointed at something between them that wasn’t even a crevice; it was maybe a crack. Inside, it was pitch-black. She wedged herself in and inched into the darkness. I followed. Eight feet in, we were totally blind. There was no space. You could feel your breath bouncing back off the wall in front of you, and hear, distinctly, the sound of rushing water ahead.

“Watch your step here,” Annie said, a disembodied voice in the blackness. I brushed against her hand, and she took mine and led me around a sharp corner. We were in a pocket deep in the side of the mountain. Water dripped from overhead, ran down my face.

“And then into this pool.” The floor fell away. We dropped into ice-cold water up to my belly button. The roof of the cavern sloped down, and the pool got deeper until there was about a foot of headroom above the surface of the water. It was getting a little claustrophobic and drown-y even for me, and I’d spent my fair share of time in windowless ship holds and had gotten suffocated by the best of them at the navy’s Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes.

I was starting to wonder just how brass Annie’s balls were when that sweet voice informed me: “Okay, now we’re going to duck under and sort of swim through this little underwater tunnel. It’s about twelve feet, and then the current will take you the rest of the way and spit you out in this cave under the waterfall.”

“Uhh…okay.” Except not okay. I’m not too proud to admit that sounded pretty fucking scary.

“You trust me?”

“Less and less.”

She laughed. “Just hold your breath and don’t fight the current. Ready? Go!”

I heard her inhale, then saw her drop under the surface. I dove down and slipped underwater along the smooth rock walls. I fought back panic. The tunnel was maybe two feet wide, too narrow to use my arms, and completely full of water. There was no way to come up for air. I could only move ahead by kicking. The current picked up, and a second later a wall of water plowed into me from the side and dragged me out into a larger stream. The sunlight hit me like a camera flash after so long in the dark. I shot out of a chute ten feet in the air and landed in a pool in a little open cavern behind the deafening curtain of the main waterfall.

We both came up panting, eyes wide. I was so wired and glad to be alive I grabbed her in a bear hug. “Holy shit!” I said.

“Right?”

I probably said
holy shit
a few more times and then realized I was in a grotto with Annie. We were both feeling punchy from our near-death dunk. Of course it was too soon to try anything; overeager, I could have ruined the good thing I had going with my dream girl. But come on. A grotto. Under a waterfall. What else could I do?

We looked each other in the eyes. Nothing from her—not a quick look away, but neither that gauzy smooch-me look. No guts, no glory. I got a little closer, a little closer, and…still nothing. No lean in, no lean back. A hundred percent poker face. Stand your ground, man. I closed the distance by 50 percent, 70, 90, 95… When you are on a very clear descent path to a kiss, maybe not at the very beginning of it, but certainly when your faces are two inches apart and closing, you expect that any halfway decent young woman will give you at least a little sign to tell you if you’re home free or blowing your chance.

Nothing. I’ve never seen anything like it. She didn’t react.

I was between the trenches, totally exposed, stranded in no-man’s-land. I wasn’t going to park one on Miss Annie Clark without getting a welcome sign, however tiny.

So I stopped, an inch away from bliss. This was high stakes: dream girl, see her at work every day, and so on. I pulled back. She was still staring. Still the poker face.

“It’s hard not to kiss you in a place like this.”

“I’d have kissed you back,” she said. “I guess I was just curious to see how far you’d go.”

I thought about this for a second, then ran my fingers through her hair above her ear, cupped her nape gently, and gave her the kind of leading-man, swelling-strings, knee-weakening kiss they just don’t make anymore.

When she dropped me off at my house later that night, I asked when I could see her again.

“We’ll see,” she said, and blew me a kiss. “I try not to shit where I eat.”

I was reeling, still a little shocked that I had broken through with Annie so quickly and trying to square that badass girl from the mountains with the Washington sophisticate I knew from work.

The whole romance had happened, and kept happening, so naturally.

There were a few formal dates in the beginning where I tried to impress her with highbrow delights—tasting menus, wine bars, after-hours drinks at the Phillips Collection—but I was surprised by how quickly we fell into the habits of a contented couple. If we didn’t have to work, we could hang out the entire weekend at my place: walking through the neighborhood, spending half the day sitting outside a café, or just reading on the porch. We didn’t want to be apart. I watched happily as she colonized my bathroom, one item at a time—first a toothbrush, then a shampoo bottle—slowly staking her claim. My place was bigger than hers, and closer to work. There was no reason for her to go back to her one-bedroom in Glover Park. Like the apartments of most DC workaholics, it was sparsely furnished, with packed boxes hidden in the closets.

One night about three months after that first kiss, she came over straight from work with a bundle of dry cleaning she’d had done near our office. We had a late dinner. I was sitting up on the couch, and she was lying down across it, her legs up on the arm, and her head on my thigh as I stroked her hair. She put her book down and looked over to her outfits hanging in plastic on the doorknob of my front-hall closet.

“Would you mind if I left those here? It would probably be easier than running home at midnight all the time.”