Ryan Grady felt the courage of a man who has mixed alcohol and painkillers. He rode on the current of a steady imperturbability, a defiant nonchalance, a sense that things were drastically wrong coupled with an inability to understand why, exactly, that should bother anyone. His workload had dropped dramatically since the return from Texas; partners seldom called him and, when they did, prefaced all requests with disclaimers that he shouldn’t take on anything he didn’t feel up to. They’re worried I’ll sue, Ryan decided eventually, and accepted the invalid’s role gladly.
It was a welcome change. The partners had been making his life difficult for a while. They might have been good lawyers, but they weren’t very good at taking no for an answer. He’d tried to let them down gently, making excuses about other projects he’d been assigned. “That sounds great,” he’d say. “But I’m really kind of swamped right now.” They didn’t get it; they’d ring back the next day, sometimes the next hour, wondering whether his schedule was clearing up. Ryan took to screening his calls, asking his secretary to tell people he was in a meeting. He waited several days before calling back; he maintained a three-to-one ratio between the pink message slips and his responses. All to no avail. Nothing dampened their ardor; they kept after him.
His practice of walking the halls had only made things worse. It wasn’t even flattering, Ryan thought, the way they’d stop him to offer assignments. He knew they didn’t see him as a person. Just a producer of billable hours, one of many, interchangeable object of undifferentiated desire. Some kinds of attention, he was learning, were worse than being ignored. At first he’d tried to show them how wrong they were, projecting
an air of intense concentration, toting a notepad or a stack of books. I’m a good associate, his serious frown asserted. Not someone you can grab for whatever monkey work you can’t lay on a paralegal. Nothing changed, and lately he’d taken to hiding in his office, almost wishing for a way to become invisible, to make them pass his door without even glancing in. Now he had it, a set of foolproof, can’t-miss lines that did not attract but repelled.
He deployed them liberally. I’ve been having difficulty concentrating, he told the partners. I might take a little longer on that memo because I’ve been getting these blinding headaches. Concern bloomed in their faces; they raised open palms in acquiescence, surrender. These were more than just good lines, Ryan thought; they were almost like hypnosis. No more cursing and yelling at him, as that lunatic Harold had once. No more throwing papers in his face; no more chill statements about observing the standards of an elite law firm. My short-term memory isn’t quite what it was, he said cheerfully. I need to make time to see some neurological specialists.
Many evenings now he left work early, roaming the streets of Georgetown. There were specialists aplenty in the bars and clubs, not neuroscientists, to be sure, but perhaps more helpful for a man in his condition. And things were going better with the women too. Ryan had devoted more hours than anticipated to reading his new stock of magazines, but it was time well spent. There was something to be picked up on almost every page, if you knew how to use it. The tips on the kinds of guys to trust and to avoid; those were the mother lode, the pure stuff. But the sex pointers would surely come in handy. The readers’ stories of what boyfriends had done that made them feel beautiful or ugly, appreciated or neglected; those were good too. The advice on makeup and fashion let him get inside their minds. Even the advertisements helped fill out the picture. Ryan pored over the pages with a cryptographer’s eye. He could feel knowledge swelling inside him, connections forming within his brain, patterns emerging. For the first time, he was starting to understand what it was all about.
So why this sense of looming disaster?
Ryan glanced around the bar. His afternoon had begun as most did these days, with him staving off some hopeful partner, this time Larry Angstrom. Angstrom was one of the more skeptical of the bunch, and he required the heavy artillery. With a little practice, Ryan had developed
the ability to keep the left side of his face immobile while smiling with the right. This technique, coupled with protestations of enthusiasm and a pronounced limp, was almost too effective, and he reserved it for the most serious occasions. “Interrogatories?” he slurred from the side of his mouth. “I’d love to handle those. Get back in the swing of things. Would you believe some people don’t want to give me work?”
Angstrom narrowed his eyes in concern. Ryan put his right hand on the desk and pushed himself upright, threw in a quick facial tic, and began a hideous, lurching progress across the room. “Got the file?” he croaked, dragging the left side of his body behind him and working the half smile. Angstrom’s frown gave way to an expression of frank terror, then a less than fully successful attempt to hide his pity and revulsion.
“You know, actually it’s not that urgent. I should probably think a little more about what we’re looking for before anyone does any drafting.” He backed out of the room.
Ryan’s smile resumed its normal dimensions. He turned to his time sheet and made a quick entry. Conference w/ LA re: interrogatories—.25 hours. He turned off his computer and swallowed one of the Norco pain pills the firm’s doctor had prescribed. Then he limped down the hallway and out into the evening.
On the sidewalk, moving away from the firm, Ryan watched the pedestrians. It was only a little after six, and the people leaving work now weren’t the high-powered ones. There were many secretaries on their way home, also some older established types who no longer had anything to prove. Gradually, glancing about for Morgan Siler employees, he eliminated the limp from his gait; he straightened his shoulders and shot his cuffs. The George Washington campus spread itself to the south, and on K Street he encountered the occasional stray coed to favor with an inviting smile. They walked by without looking, in sweatshirts and jeans, apparitions of a world now drowned in his past. College, thought Ryan. Atlantis, lost paradise. He took deep breaths of the cooling evening air. A crisp, metallic taste summoned memories of burning leaves, intimations of snowfall. He crossed Rock Creek Park and headed into Georgetown.
Ryan had not yet decided on a favorite bar. None had proved especially reliable as a place to meet girls, and at some there were regulars or waitresses who remembered his visits from the earlier, less informed days. Chadwicks was off limits for that reason, likewise Third Edition.
The place he’d settled on this evening was more upscale, less of a college watering hole, with countertops of luminous granite and some kind of undersea theme he couldn’t quite figure out.
A cute blonde at the bar attracted his attention. Her hair was glossy, her build slender and boyish. Appropriately, she had chosen jeans with flap pockets on the back to enhance the appearance of curves. Good for her, Ryan thought. But was it good that he was noticing this? He delved into his repertoire and insulted her drink. The stratagem proved a failure; she defended its Brazilian origins with a vociferousness that went beyond the playful. Perhaps she was Brazilian herself; perhaps she had simply read the “Guys Talk” section where some tool had offered the insight that men appreciated being put in their place on occasion. Ryan didn’t appreciate it at all.
Ryan settled himself at a corner table with a beer. Across the room he saw a girl with dark curly hair looking at him. She was wearing the colorful eyeliner Glamour recommended to brighten up fall evenings. Meeting his gaze, she gently bit the inside of her lower lip and looked at the ground. Good, thought Ryan, good. But she had chosen the wrong jeans for her body type, tapered legs that thickened her waist; worse, they were cropped above the ankle, a serious mistake for a short girl. Even from a distance her curls looked stiff, the result, he surmised, of an alcohol-based hair spray.
Ryan shook his head. He sipped his beer and was again assailed by the impression that something was deeply amiss. Something was happening to his sense of the world. It was not, as he’d initially thought, simply that he was becoming more perceptive. He had learned a lot from the magazines; there was no doubting that. He read them cover to cover, the beauty tips and the advertisements, the sex surveys and the makeovers. And now, as he looked around the bar, he knew that the research had paid off. He had been reading about the women there, or they had been reading the same things he had, and he could see what they had done, or, if not, imagine it: how they were trying to make their teeth whiter, their tans darker, their legs thinner, their cleavage deeper, their hair thicker and shinier, their tired eyes perky.
Free grace and salvation by works. The phrase entered his mind again, as surprising, as unbidden, as it had been in Texas. It had seemed like an inspired analogy at the time. He worked hard to make himself attractive
to women; they were attractive to him without even trying. But they did try, and now he could see their effort. He could see the successes and the failures, the ones that didn’t need it and the ones that would never pull it off.
It was like reading their minds, like having broken the code. And it had, he was sure, given him an edge in the bar pickup scene. But the knowledge came at a cost. Increasingly he found himself musing over the questionnaires in his magazines. Would you date a divorced man? What’s your girlfriend style, your ego health, your sexual temperature? He was starting, there was no other way to put it, to see things from their perspective. It was inevitable, when you thought about it, like the CIA moles who gained sympathy for the Russians. Living in deep cover, absorbing their world, as he had been, he couldn’t help but start to internalize their values.
And that was not helpful; it was not helpful at all. In fact, there was something discouraging about it; there was something almost heartbreaking. Ryan was beginning to understand the psychology of the defector, the double agent. Knowing your enemy may help you in the struggle, but it may sap your will to fight too. For you may come to discover that your terrible enemy isn’t so terrible after all; that in fact she’s confused, insecure, human like you. This was terrifying disequilibrium for Ryan, who had no faith in God and the Devil, or West and East, but had seen the world defined by the eternal struggle between those two great antagonists, Man and Woman, and now was realizing that there were people out there who weren’t women by choice, who’d fallen into it as much as anything else, not seizing the power to crush his heart but having it thrust upon them, and unsure what to do with it. That, perhaps, among the ranks of his great adversary there was no one but such people, getting their marching orders from the same magazines that sent him out into the field with his hair gel, square-toed shoes, French blue shirts, and arsenal of silly lines.
Not the same magazines, of course, but their counterparts. Close enough; probably they all worked together. Reading both sets at once had built the suspicion in Ryan’s mind that the men’s magazines were not truly on his side, nor the women’s against him. Instead, he thought, the magazines were on the same side, their own, setting up complicated sets of mutually reinforcing insecurities, reasons to seek next
month’s guidance. The editors doubtless got together at rooftop parties in Manhattan to look out over the darkling plain and laugh, planning reciprocally outflanking maneuvers for their ignorant armies.
If the magazines were in it together, what did that mean for men and women? That they too were on the same side, or at least in the same boat? Ryan hadn’t liked the reminders of his imperfections, the models he resembled less every day, and he was sure the women didn’t either. The advertisements alone were enough to induce some sort of complex: the shampoos that moisturized, colored, enhanced curls, conditioned, detangled, purified. The menstrual heat patches, the fat burners, breast adhesives, masks of mint or egg; the body washes, controlling underwear, depuffing eye gel, and renewing night cream; the removers for shine, eye makeup, polish, scars, and stretch marks; the pore minimizers and brow tweezers; the skin-firming moisturizer and odor-absorbing tampons. So many things to fix, so much to worry about.
And what was it that made a reader feel beautiful? That a boyfriend had told her she looked good when she was dirty from doing housework; that he’d shaved his head in sympathy when she had chemo; that he’d taken her to a model search for plus-sized women. Such simple things. That’s your free grace, Ryan thought; quite likely that’s all the grace there is.
He finished his beer. The bar looked suddenly grotesque, a collection of mannequins and advertisements come alive, confused alarms of struggle and flight. What have I done to myself? Ryan wondered. He didn’t want these thoughts. He didn’t want this knowledge, this multiplicity of perspectives, this world shifting beneath his feet. He wanted a drink. In fact, he wanted many drinks. All problems were soluble in alcohol, he’d heard once, and that seemed like the kind of bedrock truth on which one could build.
Crouched over the toilet some hours later, Ryan wiped his lips with his sleeve. Chunky vomit laced his shirtfront; the hammering on the stall door felt like it was inside his head. “Closing, buddy,” someone called. “Time to go home and sleep it off. You’ll thank me tomorrow.”
Ryan had wit enough to recognize that for the snare it was. Let tomorrow deal with tomorrow. He was re-creating himself this night; he was constructing identity from the ground up. Sleep was a distracting
temptation, and he would not leave the work unfinished. “You got any coffee?” he asked as the door burst open.
“Right outside,” the bouncer said, taking Ryan by the collar and dragging him across the tiled floor. “Check under the lamppost; the light’s better.”
“Hold on,” Ryan protested, as the man thrust him roughly outside to collapse in the leaf-strewn street. Shapeless thoughts winged through his mind, obscure and vengeful. Something important had happened, but he no longer remembered what. Or even to whom. There was some significance to that. He frowned. “Do you know who I am?” The bar’s door shut. He fumbled in his pocket, feeling the business card the caterer had given him at the associate dinner. That had been a neat trick, he thought, and he had carried the card with him since then in the hopes of offering it to some sufficiently credulous undergrad. Now its shape and texture brought a flash of clarity. One particular thought assumed a definite form, pressed its way to the front of his consciousness. “I’m Peter Morgan,” he said, enthusiastic, authoritative. “I’m the managing partner of Morgan Siler.” A few passersby favored him with quizzical glances. “Don’t you get it?” Ryan cried to their blank faces. “I’m Peter Morgan. Don’t you know who I am?”