Quite at His Ease

The invitation came on cream stock, the kind of paper that costs more per sheet than a man's conscience, and it was written in Vale's own hand, which was itself a kind of apology. Martin Wells read it twice at his desk and then put it in his coat pocket, where it rode against his ribs all afternoon like something warm-blooded.

Dinner, it said. Just the two of them, and the house on Broadway would be quiet. The word quiet was doing a great deal of work in that sentence. Wells had known Adrian Vale for thirty years, since a dormitory room at Berkeley with two desks and one bottle of bad sherry between them, and he knew that when Vale wanted to talk about a thing he arranged to talk about everything else first.

Two weeks had passed since Wells had stood in Harriet Alley in the small hours and spoken to the thin, stooped figure that came out of the steel door with a check signed A. Vale. Two weeks of not sleeping well, of reading the codicil again in the fireproof room with the door shut, of the same two words going around his head like water finding a low place. Silas Crow.

The house on Broadway was one of the old Victorians that had survived the city's various appetites, painted the color of wet slate, with a bay window that looked down the hill toward the water. Denise Marsh opened the door before he knocked. She had kept the house for more than twenty-five years, and her face, when it wasn't attending to something, had the settled quality of a face that has seen everything worth seeing and decided against remarking on it.

"He's in the study," she said. "He asked me to tell you the club is off. He sent the others away."

"The others?"

"There were going to be others. He changed it this morning." She took his coat and held the door wider. "He's been in the study since four."

The hall of the house was long and dim, hung with dark landscapes of a sea that no longer existed. A mirror had stood at the end of it for as long as Wells remembered, a tall cheval glass in a walnut frame that caught the light from the transom and threw it back in a pale wedge. Tonight the mirror was turned to face the wall, its back a flat brown oval of nothing, and Wells noticed this the way you notice a picture hung crooked, and then, being a lawyer, did not stop noticing it.

"Housekeeping," he said, nodding at it.

"Mr. Vale's instruction," Marsh said, and said nothing else, which was its own instruction.

Vale was in the study at the back of the house, standing at the window with his back to the door, and he did not turn when Wells came in. He was holding a glass of wine and looking out at the fog coming off the bay, though from this side of the city it was only a gray thinning of the evening, a suggestion. The cane was there too, propped against the window frame within reach of his hand, as it always was — the whalebone handle, the silver head worn bright by his father's grip and now by his own. Vale had carried it for twenty-six years, since the morning his father put it in his hand. Wells had never once seen him without it, in the laboratory or at the opera or on the beach at Stinson with his trousers rolled. It was less a stick than a limb, and less a limb than an argument: this is mine, it said, and I came by it honestly.

"You got my card," Vale said, to the window.

"I got your card." Wells took the chair across from the desk without being asked, because being asked was not the point of the evening. The room smelled of woodsmoke and something else, faintly chemical, like the air near a photographer's darkroom, though Vale had converted the darkroom years ago.

Vale turned then, and Wells made himself look at him properly. Forty-eight years old and he still had the face of the man from the dormitory, the good bones, the premature gray that everyone at the benefits called distinguished. But there was a thinness to him tonight that was new, or that Wells had not let himself see before, a drawn quality around the mouth, as if the face had been slept in by someone else.

"Say it," Vale said. "Whatever you drove over here to say, Martin. Say it before we eat, so the lamb doesn't have to listen."

"The codicil," Wells said. "Silas Crow."

Vale smiled. It was the smile from the charity dinners, the one that went all the way up and got nowhere near the eyes, and he came around the desk and sat down across from Wells with the ease of a man settling into his own certainty. He set the wine glass down and laid his hand on the cane, fingers finding the whalebone handle the way a hand finds a banister in the dark.

"So you found him," Vale said.

"Found him in a document. Then I found him in an alley, or he found me. Adrian, I've drawn wills for twenty years. This one reads like a threat. Everything you have — the company, the house, the patents — to a man with no existence I can verify. No history. No passport. A signature and a name out of some Victorian novel."

"Crow comes out of a glossary, actually. There's a longer answer, and I have never once wanted to give it."

"I'm asking about it now."

"You're asking about it the way you asked about my father, the year after he died. You already know the answer. You want to hear me say it so you can disagree." Vale reached over and turned the lamp down half a notch, and the room got smaller and warmer and more dishonest. "The document is valid. You validated it yourself, in your own fireproof room, with your own hand. You wouldn't be here otherwise."

"The document is valid," Wells agreed. "That was never the question."

"No. The question is what's happened to you." Vale looked at him steadily, and for a moment the charity-dinner smile fell away and there was something underneath it that Wells had never seen in thirty years of looking, something that looked almost like relief, like a man laying down a load he had carried so long his spine had grown around it. "You've heard him. You've spoken to him. You stood in the wet and watched him walk into my building through my father's door, and you've spent two weeks trying to find a version of this that doesn't end with your signature on the probate. I'm going to spare you the two weeks. Everything you've heard is true."

It was so far from the scripted denial Wells had prepared for that he sat without speaking. The fire ticked. Somewhere upstairs Marsh moved across a floor with her vacuum or her griefs, it was impossible to say which.

"Then you know what he's done," Wells said finally. "The girl with the dog. I have a witness who watched him walk over a human being and go through that door, and three minutes later the door produces a check from you."

"I know what he's done."

"He's a criminal, Adrian. Or you're paying him, which is worse, or you're him, which is worse than that, and none of the three is a thing I can put in a will."

Vale laughed then, a real laugh, short and hard, and it was worse than the smile had been. "You always did think in threes. Law school did that to you." He stood, went to the sideboard, and poured two glasses of the Bordeaux he saved for occasions he judged himself unworthy of. When he came back he set one in front of Wells and kept the other, and then he did something Wells had watched him do a hundred times at a hundred dinners without ever once seeing it: he turned his back, tipped something from a slim envelope into his own glass, and stirred it with one finger.

"What is that," Wells said. It was not a question either.

"Mine." Vale drank half of it in one motion, grimaced at the taste — a small involuntary flinch, the face of a man swallowing medicine — and sat back down. "Sit. Listen. I'm going to tell you a thing, and then you're going to eat my lamb and go home, and you're going to keep your promise, which I haven't asked for yet."

Wells looked at his own glass and did not drink.

"You know what I do," Vale said. "The publicity version, the brain is a country we are learning to map, all of it, for the dinners. The real version is narrower. The real version is dissociation. Identity. How many people are in a room when I'm the only one in it." He turned the glass slowly on the blotter, and the light moved in the wine. "It's the oldest problem in the species, Martin, dressed up in instruments now. Man is not one. He never was. He is two, at minimum — the one that signs the checks and sits on the boards and buries the father and carries the cane, and the other one, the one we do not discuss, the one that pays for everything the first one does. Every civilization we have ever built is a machine for keeping those two apart. Mine is more direct. That's all the compound is. A fence."

"That powder in your glass."

"Is my affair. It has a bitter taste, salt under the bitterness, like a wharf at low tide. You get used to it. You get fond of it, which is the trouble with everything." He said it lightly, and the lightness was the frightening part. "Here is the part I want you to have, because you're the executor and you think in instruments. In chemistry there's a concept called half-life. Every compound has a half-life — the question is what remains when the parent is gone. You start with a substance, and it comes apart on its own schedule, and what it becomes is not nothing. It's daughters. Decay products. Things with the same atoms arranged into something else, something with its own appetites. The parent can be entirely gone, Martin. Completely, measurably gone. And the sample is not empty. The sample is full of what it turned into."

The fog had thickened outside the window without either of them marking it. It pressed against the glass now the way weather presses in the old houses, as if it had come up the hill on purpose.

"You're talking about yourself," Wells said.

"I'm talking about chemistry." Vale smiled again and this time it reached his eyes, and Wells wished it hadn't. "The codicil is the most honest document I have ever executed. It says: the man who signs the checks will one day not be here, and when he is gone, what remains is Silas Crow, and Silas Crow should have the estate, because everything in it was purchased with his labor too. That is all it says. You read it as menace because you're a decent man and it was written to be read that way by decent men."

"Then change it. Revoke it. You're alive, you're competent, you're sitting here drinking a six-hundred-dollar bottle. Revoke it now and I'll witness it and we can both sleep."

"No," Vale said.

"Why not?"

"Because I might be rid of him." Vale set the glass down with great care, precisely at the center of the blotter, and when he spoke again his voice was almost gentle, the voice of a man explaining death to a child who has earned the truth. "You want the sentence, Martin. You've been circling the sentence all night. Here it is. I can be rid of Mr. Crow the moment I choose. He's my creation. He answers to me. When the time comes that he's no longer useful — or no longer containable — I'll end him, and it will be final, and the world will not miss him, because the world has never met him. That is the promise I can make you tonight, and it is the only one." He waited until Wells looked up before he said the rest. "And I'll ask one thing back, Martin. If the day comes when I can't make good on it — stand by Mr. Crow. Not for his sake. For the ledger's."

"Then make the will wait until he's ended."

"The will is his guarantee of good behavior." Vale picked the cane up off the floor and laid it across his knees, and his thumb moved over the whalebone in small circles, an absolution or a negotiation. "And mine."

They ate after that, because the lamb was ready and Marsh had a system, and Vale was quite at his ease through all three courses, better company than he had been in years, funny about the trustees, merciless about a rival's new building. It was only afterward, over the coffee, that Wells noticed the other thing. A cabinet across the study had a glass door, and in the glass door, doubled and inverted, was Vale's reflection, and all through dinner Vale had sat exactly where he was sitting now, at the angle of the room that put the cabinet at his back. When he rose to stand by the window he stood with his shoulders square to the glass, refusing it. When he crossed the room he crossed the room the way a man crosses ice, keeping to the pieces that will hold him. Thirty years of dinners, and Wells had never once seen Adrian Vale look at a mirror.

"Adrian," Wells said, standing to go. "If you can be rid of him whenever you choose, why hasn't he been rid of already?"

Vale looked out at the fog. The cane stood against the window frame, silver head catching the last of the lamp.

"Because the parent isn't gone yet," he said. "Ask your chemist friends. Nothing decays on command."

In the hall, the cheval mirror stood face to the wall like a punished child. Wells let himself out. On the doorstep he stopped, because the fog had come all the way up from the water and taken the street, and for a moment he could not tell which direction was downhill. The taste in his own mouth, he realized, was only the coffee, and he stood a long moment testing that, the way you test a floor, before he went down into it.