The End of the Book (7 page)

Late that week he steeled himself and dropped into the office of his rival, who was always eating breakfast at his desk as George came in to work and dinner at his desk as George was leaving.

“Why, if it isn't the runaway come home!” Kennison exclaimed. “Where have you been, sport? Mr. Lazar was looking for you.”

George could hear the false ring in his voice as he said, “I had an appointment.”

“You didn't send word. We waited for you past eight on a Friday, and now Mr. Lazar is in New York taking meetings.”

George had heard nothing about that trip. Had he fallen so far that no one bothered to update him anymore? He made a pretense of knowing, anyway. “Yes, right,” he said. “When is he coming back, again?”

“Middle of next week.” Kennison twitched his mustache and leaned back in his chair. Facing outward under his table lamp sat a picture of his younger self, in profile atop a horse, in full Mountie uniform.

“And remind me: what is he doing in New York?” George asked.

Kennison seemed to enjoy offering only the smallest crumbs of information. He took a long drink of water and tapped his tobacco-stained fingers on the desk. “Among other matters, he's discussing the Nuvolia contract.”

“But we only recently drew up a new arrangement with them,” George said.

“There have been developments. I probably shouldn't be the one to fill you in.”

“At least tell me what you know.”

“I should let Mr. Lazar handle that. It's really not my place.”

George was furious with Kennison, but he left the older man's office with a tip of the hat. Within an hour he had sent a messenger to deliver a note to Margaret Lazar expressing his interest in seeing her on the day after New Year's. She replied the next morning, and they agreed to meet in the Demidoff Collection at the Art Institute, where George had decided to ask for her hand surrounded by paintings of the Dutch Masters.

The Demidoff had been his sanctuary soon after he'd arrived in Chicago. Those days had been so bewildering; he could hardly believe he'd come this far. How many times had he nearly been shouldered into the street as he wandered over the worm-eaten sidewalks from one hopeless newspaper interview to the next? Ma Kavanagh's looked like the Palmer House compared to the coal-blackened hotel at the thundering heart of the rail web where he spent his first weeks in the city. He remembered climbing the crumbling steps, pulling the loose doorknob to let himself in, how the clerk had burst out laughing when George had asked for a view of the lake. The view, in fact, was of a filthy alley. The windows opened over the hotel's garbage box, and his room was dark and cramped, with damp, yellowed linens. The whole building felt damp and greasy, and he cursed his father, who had recommended the place. But what did Tom Willard know of Chicago? He had barely left Winesburg his entire life.

George had happened upon the Demidoff Collection by chance. In much the same way that he later collided with the Lazars' Duryea, George had been wandering abstractedly along Michigan Avenue one day when he saw a crowd of students, palettes under their arms, headed up the lion-flanked steps of the great Beaux-Arts building. He followed them in and up the marble staircase to the Dutch Masters' room, where he sat on a bench eavesdropping on the art teacher's lecture about Rembrandt, Jan Steen, Pieter van Slingelandt, and Hans Holbein the Younger. There were landscapes and historical paintings and pictures of rustic and social life, maritime and rural settings, secular and religious subjects, scenes that took place in bawdy taverns and in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy. George used to come here every few days for a respite from the hurly-burly. The democracy of the collection appealed to him, the way it showed the full panoply of Dutch life, and he was especially drawn to the portraits of the common people, the ragged, scarred, and overlooked: Rembrandt's
The Child of the State
, Slingelandt's
The Hermit
, Holbein's
Portrait of an Ecclesiastic
.

He planned to make his proposal in front of Jan Steen's
The Family Concert
, which showed the painter strumming a lute while his wife sings along and the rest of the family gathers around, talking and playing instruments. It's a portrait of domestic leisure and marital harmony, the only tension an amusing standoff in the foreground between the family cat, who is enjoying the lion's share of table scraps, and the family dog, who is looking on in abject frustration.

But on the appointed day when George met Margaret at the front entrance of the Art Institute and was leading her toward the staircase, something caught her eye. She grabbed his hand and took him to Galleries 25–30, on the first floor, where a new exhibition—
Portraits of Influence: Chicago and the World
—was on display. The opening reception had happened the month before, and though she hadn't been able to attend, many of her friends had gone. It was the talk of the town, she said, and added: “I have a surprise for you.”

“But wait.” George hesitated. “I have a surprise for you.”

“Ladies first,” she said.

Margaret was a curious blend of youth and sophistication, tremulousness and confidence, and though she spoke with sympathy about the working classes she could not disguise her pedigree. She was young-looking, with soft ginger curls playing about the pale, translucent skin at her temples. In her Nile-green tea dress and long white gloves she rushed through Gallery 25, scanning each painting before moving on to Gallery 26. “There's Nettie McCormick.” She pointed to one of the portraits, of a silver-haired woman in a red velvet toque with teal feathers. “She's looking awfully stern.”

“You know her?” George asked.

“She's been to the house many times. She's actually a lovely woman, one of the city's great philanthropists. Her late husband, Cyrus, invented the grain harvester. As you might imagine, she's richer than Croesus.

“And look,” she continued. “It's Valerie Root! I recollect the very day she sat for that portrait. We were in school together, and she broadcast the news unabashedly. A bit of a spoiled girl. Her father was the architect John Wellborn Root.”

“I know that name,” George said.

“Of course you do. He designed the Monadnock Building. You work every day in one of his masterpieces.” George was six years older than Margaret, but she had a way of making him feel as if their ages were reversed. She went on, “Father says that John Wellborn Root would have been the finest architect of his generation had he not died young. Valerie has some talent, too. She's quite good on the piano. Just the other day she sent us a wedding announcement. She'll be marrying a Mr. Edgar Fletcher of Winnetka. I can't tell you how many of my schoolmates are getting married this summer.”

“It appears you're at that age,” George said. “I've been thinking a lot about marriage myself—”

“And over there is Marshall Field.” Margaret glided across the threshold to the next gallery and stood before the portrait of a nattily dressed but dyspeptic-looking man who held his cane and hat in a way that suggested he was eager to get to his next appointment. “Have you met the great man?” Margaret asked.

“I've shopped in his store.” George had removed the ring from the box this morning and nested it in an inside pocket. He touched his coat to confirm that the ring was safe.

Margaret held up her hand to whisper, “He's rather intolerable. And if the rumors are true, his first wife was a drug addict and died in France under mysterious circumstances. He had a longtime affair with his best friend's wife. And his son, Marshall Field Jr., is a well-known habitué of the famous Everleigh Club.”

“The bordello?”

“Yes. I hear it's very posh. Have you been?”

George reddened and shook his head. “Certainly not!”

“I've embarrassed you,” she said with delight, then whirled around the room browsing the other portraits.

George was about to cross into the last gallery of the exhibition when Margaret extended her arm to stop him. “Not another step,” she said. “Now put your hands over your eyes. No peeking! The surprise is in this room.”

George did as he was told. Margaret's behavior gave him pause, and reminded him acutely of their different origins. How could she consent to marry the son of a small-town innkeeper? And even if for some curious reason she did say yes, he had to wonder why he would want to spend the rest of his life feeling like a hanger-on. His every accomplishment from this day forward would be attributed to his marrying well. He could choose not to work another day in his life or, like the Canadian Mountie, spend all his waking hours at the office, and the perception would be the same. He felt as if the eyes of the elite were following him from room to room, impressing upon him that he had no business consorting with the only and eligible daughter of Alfred J. Lazar.

George had a passing wish to be back among ordinary people, the hermit and the child of the state, the bouncer and the night-shift chiropodist, the lonely souls he remembered from home: Wing Biddlebaum, who never left his porch but had the most expressive hands; the dissipated Doctor Parcival, who had few patients and once told George that “Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.” He thought of Helen White, daughter of the richest man in Winesburg, but who never gave him the sense that she dwelled in some Pantheon; the sphere of influence in that town reached no farther than Banker White's lawn.

His eyes still closed, George felt a hand take him by the elbow, an arm entwine with his, and he imagined it was Helen, leading him blindly toward some new and astonishing place. The eyes of the elite no longer scrutinized him; he stepped into the darkness, heard footfalls call and respond across the floor, and he believed for the first time something he had always doubted: that his restlessness was curable, and he could achieve the greatest freedom, not alone, but in the company of another soul.

He stopped when he heard the words, “Now you can open your eyes,” but instead of looking up at the two portraits Margaret had been wanting to show him, he reached into his pocket and brought out the ring. Without a pause or catch in his voice he said, “Will you marry me?”

“George!” she exclaimed, then glanced about, as if to be sure they were alone.

Her self-consciousness only emboldened him. “Remember what you told me in your parents' library, how you might be in love with me? Well—” He advanced the ring toward her, and heard himself say, “I have no doubt that I'm in love with you.”

She looked away, and he followed her eyes to the wall where, presiding over the occasion, in frozen judgment, were the portraits of Alfred Lazar and his wife, Harriet.

“So that's what you wanted to show me?” George asked.

“I guess your surprise trumps mine,” she said.

“Well, Margaret? Will you have me?” He knew he couldn't keep this up much longer, this show of authority and confidence. He remembered how as a boy he used to test his balance by walking on the railroad tracks that ran alongside the New Willard House. This moment gave him the same feeling, as if he might lose his footing, or a train might barrel out of nowhere and lay him flat.

Margaret fixed her gaze on the portraits of her parents—one blasé, the other imperious. With her gloved hand she brushed curls away from her forehead. “Have you talked to my father about this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you asked for my hand?”

“Was that the expectation?” George was teetering. He knew little of the social codes of Margaret's class.

“So you haven't made an official request?”

“No,” he exhaled, figuring all was lost.

“Why don't you talk to him now? He's right here.” She pointed to the portrait. “Go on.”

And so George did. He asked the oil painting of Alfred J. Lazar for his daughter's hand in marriage. When he had finished speaking, Margaret said, “There, see, he approves, just as I suspected.” Then she smiled and pulled off her long white gloves. She put out her left hand, and as if by reflex George slipped the diamond ring onto her finger.

Everyone wanted to work for Imego. At the main campus in Silicon Valley, where Dhara and I went on business three times a year, employees had all the perks they could imagine: cafeterias serving gourmet meals; snack rooms stocked with fresh fruit, candy, protein drinks, and cappuccino; gyms; a swimming spa; decompression capsules; on-site masseuses and physicians; day care; language classes; laundry; dry cleaner; a twenty-four-hour concierge. Workers dressed purposefully casual and the techiest engineers got loose in Chuck Taylors and Battlestar Galactica T-shirts, and, though the sun rarely kissed their skin, cargo shorts. Imego knew that to keep the children happy work had to feel like fun, so we had fire poles and slides connecting floor to floor, foosball, pool and ping-pong tables, video games and lava lamps in primary colors, and along each wall, whiteboards where the inspired and punchy alike jotted down formulae, graphs, and assorted nonsense like the quote I could see from my office desk that day:
Spandex: It's a privilege, not a right
.

Dhara loved Imego and couldn't understand why I called it The Cruise That Never Ends. On the nights when she came home at 1:00 a.m. and I was in bed struggling to keep my eyes on a novel I'd been trying to read for a month, I asked her how many hours she'd worked that day, that week. I could understand what kept the engineers haunting the hallways at three in the morning, talking embrangled algorithms. But I worried that Dhara racked up hours just to be noticed or because she preferred to be at work rather than anywhere else. When she got hired out of Ohio State's business school she bought the apartment where we lived now, not because Harbor City was an architectural landmark or in the heart of downtown, but because all she had to do was take the elevator to the lobby, walk a single block up State Street, turn left, and there she was, at the glass gates to the mother ship.