The Overton Window

  As they sat together at the sunroom table he focused on his food while she returned to chipping away at her half-finished crossword puzzle in the next day’s Sunday Times.

  “You like word games?” Noah asked.

  “I love word games.”

  “Well, if you get stumped over there let me know. Not that I’m so brilliant, but I was on the spelling bee circuit when I was a kid.”

  “Wow. Nerdy.”

  “Yeah. I was a late bloomer.”

  “Here’s a long one I need to get. Twelve down: One deeply devoted to wine.”

  He thought for a moment. “Sommelier.”

  She counted down with a fingertip, shook her head. “Not enough letters; you need eleven.”

  “I wish you would have told me that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Try … connoisseur.”

  “Nope. There’s a gimmick this week: the answers all start with the first letter of the clue. So ‘one deeply devoted to wine,’ it has to start with an o.”

  “Again, that would have been really useful information about twenty seconds ago. You’re making it hard for me to help you, Molly.”

  “Just trying to keep you humble.”

  He finished his coffee and put down the cup. “It’s oenophilist.” She gave him a skeptical frown, so he spelled it out. “O-e-n-o-p-h-i-l-i-s-t. Oenophilist. Wine lover. The o in the beginning is silent.”

  She filled in the letters one by one, her lips pronouncing them soundlessly and precisely as she wrote, eyes darting to follow the hints provided by each new entry. It occurred to him that he could have happily watched her do that simple thing all day long.

  “I would have gotten that,” she said quietly.

  “You know, if you like word games so much I might have a better job for you down at the office.”

  She put down her pencil, but kept her eyes on the paper in front of her.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something,” Molly said. She got up and took his empty plate and silverware to the sink.

  “Okay. Let’s talk about it.”

  “I’m not going to be in town very much longer.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m just not. There were some things I wanted to do here, and I’ve done them now, so I’ll be leaving.”

  He sat back. “When are you thinking of leaving?”

  “Soon.” Her attitude had changed abruptly, as though she was steeling herself for a discussion she didn’t want to prolong.

  “Look, I didn’t mean anything when I mentioned a job, I know how you feel about that place—”

  “You didn’t say anything wrong. This is just the way it is, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She’d busied herself in silence in the kitchen for a little while, rehanging pans and tidying up briefly, but soon she sat down across from him again, reached over, and put her hand on his.

  “Cheer up,” Molly said. “Go get ready, and loan me a jacket. I think we should take a walk.”

  When he came back dressed from the bedroom he found her at the table again with a framed sheet of his childhood schoolwork in her hands, reading it over.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “That was a penmanship exercise, from the fifth grade.” He pulled up a chair and sat beside her. “I don’t even think they teach that anymore, do they? Penmanship?” She tilted the frame a bit so they could both see it clearly. “They asked us to write down something we liked, obviously as neatly as we could, and that was my dad’s favorite poem, the last bit of it anyway.”

  In the upper corner was the first gold star he’d received at his new school, near his new home, in the year that everything had changed. One of his nannies had framed the paper to commemorate the occasion. The movers placed it on a vacant desk in the study when he got this place, but he was certain he hadn’t looked at it a second time within those years. And it wasn’t quite right to say it was his father’s favorite poem; more like the old man’s justification of his life set in verse. He’d directed his young son to study it so he’d always know the way things really worked in this world.

  Noah picked it up, let his thumb brush the dust from the corner of the glass, and read each metered line aloud.

  Then the Gods of the Market tumbled,

  and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew

  And the hearts of the meanest were humbled

  and began to believe it was true

  That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four

  And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up

  to explain it once more.

  As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

  There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

  That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

  And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back

  to the Fire;

  And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

  When all men are paid for existing and

  no man must pay for his sins,

  As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

  The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror

  and slaughter return!

  When Noah had finished they sat in silence. Seeing these words again seemed to have taken something out of him. Molly must’ve sensed the change as well. She took the frame from his hands and laid it on the table.

  “Who wrote that?” she asked.

  “Rudyard Kipling, in 1919. Not one of his better-known pieces. He’d lost his son in the war and his daughter a few years earlier, and I guess he wasn’t so happy with the way things were starting to go in the world. This is only the last few stanzas of the poem; that’s all I could fit on the page.”

  “Pretty heavy stuff for a ten-year-old.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “The Jungle Book, it’s not.”

  “And what do you think he was telling you with this, your father?”

  “He told me the poem meant that history always repeats itself, that the same mistakes are made over and over, only bigger each time. The wise man knows that if you can’t change that, you might as well take full advantage of it. But to me it meant something else.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “It’s a warning, I guess, about what happens when you forget common sense. You have to read the whole thing to get it. I think it means that there really is such a thing as the truth, the real objective truth, and people can see it if they’ll just look hard enough, and remember who they really are. But most of the time they choose to give in and believe all the lies instead.”

  “I’ll bet your father was disappointed to hear that coming from his own little boy.”

  “You know,” Noah said, “if I’d ever had the guts to say it to him, I’m sure he would have been.”

  Getting outside turned out to be a good idea. Noah was still aching from the thumps he’d taken the previous night, like the random pains you feel only in the days after a rear-end collision, but the cold city air and exercise were relieving a good bit of that.

  They’d talked some along the way, though for the most part it had been a quiet walk. But there was nothing tense or self-conscious in those wordless stretches. He found himself at ease in her company, as if a conversation was always in progress, only spoken in other forms. She stayed close to him, at times with an unexpected gesture of casual intimacy: an arm around his waist for half a block, a finger hooked in his belt loop as they crossed a busy street against the light, a palm to his cheek as she spoke close to his ear to be heard over the din of the traffic.

  At Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue she gradually slowed her pace and then stopped just outside the bustling flow of midtown pedestrians.

  People say you never forget your first kiss, but that wasn’t the case in Noah’s life. Superficial things don’t carry enough weight to make a lasting memory. For him the first kiss had faded grad
ually into the hundredth, the faces and names and situations long ago blending together into a vague, pleasant, collective event. A little thrill, a tentative awkwardness, those sweet few seconds of breathless discovery shared with another, and a momentary sense of what the immediate future together could hold, however brief that time would likely be.

  This wasn’t like that.

  Molly looked into his eyes, and what he saw in her was a perfect reflection of a wanting that he also felt, so there was no delay of invitation and acceptance. It was a different sort of desire than he’d known before, an understanding that something now needed to be said that no language but the very oldest could possibly convey. He bent to her, closed his eyes, and her lips touched his, gently, and again more urgently as he responded. He felt her arms around him, her body yearning against his in the embrace, a knot like hunger inside, heart quickening, cool hands at his back under the warmth of his jacket, searching, pressing him closer still.

  With everything to see and hear around them there at the very crossroads of the world, soaring billboards, scrolling news crawlers, bright digital Jumbotrons that lined the tall buildings and blotted out the whole evening sky, it all disappeared to its rightful insignificance, flat as a postcard. That place was left outside their small circle, and if asked right then he might have stayed there within it forever. But he felt her smile against his lips as they were brought back to where they stood by the brusque voice of a passing man, who advised in his native Brooklynese that maybe they should go and get a room.

  A light drizzle had begun to fall, and down the block they found a coffee shop with two seats by the window where they could wait out the patch of rain. When he returned from the counter with their cups he found her sitting with a folded newspaper, not reading it but lost somewhere in her thoughts. It was a while before she spoke.

  “Noah?”

  “I was starting to worry you’d forgotten I was here.”

  Molly took a deep breath and seemed to collect herself for a moment. “I need to ask you something.”

  “Okay”

  “If we hired you, your company, what would you tell us to do?”

  He frowned a bit. “You mean if you and your mom hired us?”

  “It’s more than just the two of us, you know that. A lot more.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “What is it you want to accomplish again?”

  “We want to save the country.”

  “Oh. Okay. Is that all?”

  “That’s where we start, isn’t it? With a clear objective.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So?”

  “Okay. Let me think for a minute.”

  Molly had become deadly serious; this wasn’t party talk. She didn’t take her eyes from his as she waited.

  “I guess,” he said, “I’d begin by sitting down with all these different groups and trying to focus everyone on the things they agree on—the fundamentals. A platform, you know? Make it easy for people to understand what you’re about. Propose some real answers.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “I don’t know—start with the tax code, since your mom is so passionate about that. How about a set of specific spending cuts and a thirteen percent flat tax to start with? Get that ridiculous sixty-seven-thousand-page tax code down to four or five bullet points, and show exactly what effects it’ll have on trade, and employment, and the debt, and the future of the country. And I’m winging it here, but how about real immigration reform? The kind of policies that welcome people who want to come here for the right reasons, and succeed.

  “Get the fear out of those big questions, and talk about a brighter future, you know? In our business we call it the elevator pitch: how you’d explain your whole outlook, features, and benefits if you had only a ten-floor elevator ride during which to get it across to a stranger. So start with a platform. At least that way they can start to speak with one voice occasionally. You have no political power otherwise.”

  “And what next?”

  He held up his hands. “Slow down for a minute.”

  “No. What next?”

  “Do you see that you’re maybe putting me on the spot a little here?” Noah tried to take a sip of his coffee, but it burned him. It was still much too hot to drink. “And what did you mean, save the country, by the way? Save it from what?”

  She looked at him evenly. “You know what.”

  “Oh, come on now, Molly. Please tell me you’re not really one of those people, I know you’re not—”

  “I know there was a meeting at the office yesterday afternoon,” she said, lowering her voice but not her intensity. “I saw the guest list on the catering order. I know who was there. I know you were in it. And I think I know what it was about.”

  “Okay, yes, big surprise, there was a meeting, but I wasn’t there for all of it. And do you want to know something else? I don’t even know what it was all about, so how could you?”

  “Then let’s both find out.”

  “What?”

  “Prove me wrong. Let’s go right now and find out.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Yes, you can. We’ll go to the office right now, and you’ll show me that I’ve got nothing to worry about. If that’s the case then that’ll be the end of it.”

  “You’re not listening to me, I said I can’t—”

  “You would if you knew how important it was.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. There are a lot of things I’d do for you, but I can’t do that.”

  “When are you going to grow up, Noah? I know you’re not who your father is, but then the next question is, Who are you? It sounds to me like you knew the answer to that when you were in the fifth grade, but you’ve forgotten now that it’s time to be a man.”

  “I am a man, Molly, but I’m not going to risk everything for nothing.”

  “Do you want me to leave?” Her voice was tight and there were sudden tears in her eyes. “Do you never want to see me again? Because that’s what this means.”

  Now they were starting to attract the attention of those nearby.

  “That is so incredibly unfair. Did you even hear what you just said? I can’t believe you’d put me in a position like that.”

  But he’d lost her already. She got up as he was speaking, turned from him without a word, and walked straight out the door.

  Noah watched her through the glass and let himself hope for a few seconds that she’d have a change of heart and turn back into his waiting arms so all could be forgiven. But, just like falling in love with someone you’ve known only for a single day, those things really happened only in the movies.

  She was going to leave him sitting there. She wasn’t coming back. By the time he’d decided what he had to do, Molly had all but disappeared into the river of weekend tourists and theatergoers flowing through the heart of Times Square.

  CHAPTER 19

  “You must be out of your mind,” Noah said, under his breath. He was addressing himself directly.

  Molly was right behind him, holding tight to his hand as he led her through the aisles and racks of designer skirts and blouses toward the store’s back rooms.

  “You’re doing the right thing,” she whispered.

  He’d elected to avoid the main lobby entrance at 500 Fifth Avenue; too many cameras there, not to mention the sign-in desk that would make a record of the weekend visit. A private elevator led to Arthur Gardner’s suite of offices on the twenty-first floor, and that was the way they’d be going in.

  The elevator had originally been an auxiliary freight lift, largely unused until its luxury conversion when Doyle & Merchant established their New York offices here in the 1960s. There was only one wrinkle in the layout: the ground-floor entrance to this elevator had to be located on the next-door tenant’s property, which was currently a multilevel, tourist-trendy clothing store.

  The employees of this shop were aware that well-dressed strangers might occasionally be seen entering and leav
ing through their employees-only swinging doors in the back. D&M paid the tenant a monthly fee for the easement, and executive assistants occasionally escorted the firm’s more reclusive clients into the agency by this odd, private route. The idea of a semisecret entrance added an extra bit of intrigue to the visit for some.

  During normal business hours the protocol was simply to raise your company ID above your head and quietly proceed to the rear of the store, as the floor manager knowingly waved you on. Since an encoded swipe card and a restricted key were required to operate the elevator, no further checks were really necessary.

  This was Saturday night, however, and the two of them were dressed more like college students than business executives. Consequently they received a good deal of extra scrutiny as they passed through, and the store’s rent-a-cop tracked their progress from a discreet distance, all the way down the back hallway and inside the elevator car. So much for keeping a low profile.

  Noah swiped his card and the doors closed, then he inserted the stubby cylindrical key and turned the elevator’s panel switch to Enable. There was no vertical line of buttons to choose the floor with; this thing went only two places: all the way up and back down again. With the click of relays and a deep ascending hum the car set into motion.

  He was silently watching the wall above the doors where the advancing floor numbers should have been when Molly stepped up to him, close.

  “Thank you, Noah.”

  “I’m not really speaking to you right now.”

  She touched his chest and put a hand on his shoulder; he looked down into her eyes.

  “I hope I’m wrong,” she said. “I want to be wrong; you should know that. Now please just decide to forgive me, at least until we’re out of here again.”

  He looked away, but after a time he nodded.

  “Okay.”

  There was only one way to warrant a blatant breach of business ethics such as this, and that was to attribute his actions to a higher cause. If Molly was right, then a cute but quirky mailroom temp had identified a grand, unified, liberty-crushing conspiracy that had been hatched in the conference room of a PR agency. The benefits of learning that would easily outweigh the consequences: forsaking his father’s trust and violating the ironclad, career-ending nondisclosure clause of his employment contract. After all, with the fate of the free world in the balance, the prospect of getting fired, disowned, and probably sued into debtor’s prison should be among the least of his worries.