What He's Poised to Do

“There’s no way to salvage it?” Her tone was pained. “I feel like I’m on the line.” That night, trying hard not to help Jeff, I helped Lisa. I knew how to rescue the model, and came in early the next morning to explain the solution to Mortenson. He was instantly alive with the idea. “We put a camera right up against the model and give the jury a projection? This could work. This could work. Beautiful.”

We took it to Schiff, who was in the conference room with the model. “I don’t think it works,” he said. “I think it’s wrong to take to a jury.”

“What do you mean?”

He wasn’t the sort of man who was accustomed to explaining himself, but it was not for lack of skill. “It’s just wrong. Putting a little camera in there and projecting the image on a screen would turn it into a show. The jury will feel it was made with a kind of pleasure, and that’s the wrong message to send.”

“I disagree,” Mortenson said. “I think it’s great.”

“Do you talk so much so that you don’t have to listen to me,” Schiff said, “or to yourself?”

Ordinarily, Mortenson would have returned fire, and the volley would have gone on. But he just picked up the model and walked past Schiff silently. To ignore him outright was one of the most final things he could have done.

I WAS GLAD I HAD NO GRASP of the practical details of my plan, because it gave me a justification for involving Lisa again. She was good with those kinds of things, and she helped rig the camera and test the projection. The effect, the white model on the white screen, was both alienating and intimate. Mortenson was immensely pleased.

But Schiff was right. Schiff was always right. Whatever magic there had been in the idea—and in the office there had been a considerable amount—came off as legerdemain in the courtroom. I did not know this firsthand. I did not go to court. I could tell from the stormy look on Mortenson’s face as he entered the office the day of the verdict. Schiff followed, triumphantly defeated. They had Stacy cut a check to Jeff and send it off and that was the last of him. Lisa began to work hard again in all things, convinced that she needed to prove her worth again. She also began to allow me more latitude in romantic matters, but it was the concession of a defeated woman. I accepted it nonetheless.

Over the next few weeks, Schiff and Mortenson grew apart. Lisa noticed first, and reported the breach in an aggrieved tone. I nodded sadly. But perpetrators always think of victims: though Lisa had suggested Jeff, I had suggested Lisa, and when Jeff had failed the first time, I had rescued him so that he could fail a second time, more profoundly, and by doing so bring down the entire house. I knew that Lisa would figure this out soon enough, and that when she did, she would be gone.

It took a week. One Thursday night we were in her car, doing what we always did, when she announced that she felt something missing. “Is it your blouse?” I said. She laughed and drew close to me, but in drawing close she pulled away for good. She was giving me a farewell gift. The next evening, she left early. “I’m going out with friends,” she said. “See you Monday.” It put me in a black mood that permitted me to see everything else all the clearer, as a man in a darkened room at night has full vantage of the sky outside.

My situation, at any rate, was trivial compared to what happened to that little world I had inhabited. It had been teetering, I now saw, and before I could truly understand what that meant, it fell. Schiff and Mortenson were through with each other. It happened very quickly: one shouting match in the conference room in which the model was mentioned as proof of incompetence, withdrawn, and then thrust forward again with a stabbing motion. Mortenson stormed out and did not return, not the next day or the day after that. When he did, it was with a stack of papers that he said were for the purpose of dissolving the partnership. None of us could believe it, and we believed it less when they began to sign the documents. Schiff’s signature on top, Mortenson’s on the bottom: It was difficult to understand this togetherness in the service of separation.