Adrian Voss, At Ease

The board dinner was in March, at a restaurant with a view of the Sound, and Voss was the best company in the room.

That was the thing about him. Everyone in Seattle who mattered had an Adrian Voss story, and all of the stories were about his generosity: the postdoc he'd quietly funded, the technician whose visa he'd fixed, the time he'd paid a competitor's legal fees out of pocket because the competitor had been right. He was tall, silver at the temples, his hands always in motion — sketching on napkins, turning a wine glass, folding a menu into a small precise square.

Nora sat at his left. He had asked for her.

"You've been asking about Dex," he said, before the first course. No preamble, no warmth. "I'd rather you didn't. But I'd rather you asked me than anyone else."

"Then tell me why he's in your will."

"Because I owe him a debt I can't discharge any other way, and because you would find the truth dull." He smiled. "You've met him. He's a vulgar young man from a vulgar part of the city. I met him four years ago, and he did me a service, and the service is not a thing I say out loud. Since then I have kept him. That's the whole of it."

"That's not the whole of it."

"You're right." He turned his glass by the stem. "The whole of it is that I have a medical condition, Miss Bellamy, and Dex is — a treatment. Not a cure. A treatment. And when a man finds a treatment he tends to stop asking what it is and start asking what it costs, and I've made that accounting and I'm at peace with it. Don't go looking for him again. I'm asking you as a client and as someone who respects you."

After the dessert he took her upstairs.

The clean room was on the fourth floor, behind two doors and a badge reader and a corridor that narrowed like a throat. Inside: white walls, white light, white counters, and in the middle of the white room a stainless cabinet the size of a refrigerator whose display counted down while she watched, nine and then eight, and which she would learn in the spring was counting doses. Voss badged them in and stood in the doorway with his hands behind his back, and for the first time all evening he looked his age.

"Everything I am," he said, "is in there."

"What is it?"

"A correction," he said. "The body makes a mistake in the second decade and never stops making it. I know how to make it stop. I do not yet know how to make it stop without the other thing." He said the phrase the way a man says a word he has decided not to use, and watched her to see whether she would ask, and she did not. "You'll excuse me." He looked at the cabinet, and his face did something complicated, and then he was urbane again. "You'll excuse me. I have a call."

That night she wrote the visit into a memo, and then, because she was thorough and did not care to be thought sentimental, she added a second page and did not file it.