Page 51 of Where Vows Collapse
"I want to delay the divorce. I want to file whatever needs to be filed to put the timeline out — the maximum window the court will give us."
A pause. "Elias, I'm not sure — "
"James."
Another pause. "I heard you."
"Then do it."
James didn't answer immediately. James had been his senior counsel for a long time and had, in the course of that time, pushed back on Elias perhaps four times. This was the fifth.
"I can file for an extension on discovery," James said at last. "I can ask the court for time. Her counsel will oppose it. Feldman will oppose it."
"Oppose it anyway."
"It won't buy you much. A month, perhaps. Six weeks if we're lucky."
"That's fine."
"What are you trying to do, Elias?"
The question was the question, and the question didn't have, at the desk on a Tuesday afternoon, an answer he was prepared to produce out loud. What he was trying to do was slow a thing down, to produce, through a procedural instrument, the one resource a man in his position could still produce when every other resource had been taken away from him, which was time. Time was the resource. Time had always been the resource. A man who had time had, eventually, options. A man who didn't have time had nothing.
"Give me time, James."
"All right. I'll file by the end of the week."
"Thank you."
"Elias."
"Yes."
"Be careful with this."
"Thank you, James."
The phone went down.
James had saidbe careful with this, in the tone James used when he was declining to say the thing he actually meant, which wasthis is not going to do what you want it to do.The tone had been heard. It hadn't been engaged with. James was his seniorcounsel; James's job was to file what Elias told him to file. The filing was in motion.
A month. The month was going to give him time to construct whatever instrument was going to bring his wife back.
The instrument itself … he didn't yet know what it was. That part didn't worry him. Instruments weren't, in his experience, difficult to find; what was difficult was knowing what instrument a situation required. A different instrument, then. He didn't know what it was. But he was a man who'd made a career out of finding instruments for situations he hadn't previously been in, and he'd found them by moving first, by producing motion, by producing the conditions in which a solution could present itself. A man who stood still didn't find instruments. A man who'd engaged his counsel and filed for delay was a man who'd produced motion.
Motion had been produced. He sat at his desk and let himself, briefly, be satisfied with it.
The next several hours produced the surface of working. The folders on his desk got moved through. The pages that required initialing got initialed. Two of the calls his assistant had held for him got returned, and the men on the other ends of the calls received the same version of him they received every afternoon. None of them noticed anything. The afternoon moved the way afternoons moved.
Underneath the surface, something else was happening. A construction was underway: the version of the story in which his wife came back. It was a thing he could construct; he'd constructed, over the course of a career, many versions of many stories, and this one wasn't, as a piece of work, different in kind from what he did every day. The end state was his wife in his apartment.
Working backward: the end state required certain preceding conditions, the preceding conditions required certain events,the events required certain instruments. The first instrument was time. Time had been secured. The second instrument — he thought about this for a while, sitting at his desk with a pen in his hand — was a private conversation. The sidewalk in Lincoln Park had been public, the conference room on Madison had been semi-public, and he hadn't yet had a conversation with her in a room in which the walls belonged only to the two of them. A private conversation would be the instrument that repaired the thing her public sentence on the sidewalk had broken.
The conditions for a private conversation would have to be produced by means other than tracking her to Clark Street again, because tracking her had been the error. The conditions would come by creating, somewhere in the course of the weeks ahead, a moment she'd agree to be in a room with him for.
The thinking about what that moment would be lasted the rest of the afternoon. By five, no adequate version of the moment had presented itself. Every option he'd produced kept running into the same obstacle, which was that his wife didn't, at present, wish to be in a room with him. Her position on the matter had been communicated with a clarity that didn't, reasonably, admit of near-term adjustment.
The pen went down. The desk got turned away from. The window got walked to.
