Keep Looking at Me

The front step gave under her.

Not much — a sixteenth of an inch at the nose, the sort of movement you would feel in your knees and not your ears — but Naima Bassey stopped on it anyway, the way she stopped anywhere a room told her something it had not meant to. A limestone townhouse on a block where nobody parked badly. No plaque. No number worth reading. A black lacquered door with hinges somebody had clearly paid to keep silent, and one loose tread underneath her good boots, rocking on its back bearing like a floor tom with a bad lug.

"Careful on the step," said the man who opened the door. "It's always been like that."

"You could bed it in an afternoon."

"We could," he agreed, and took her coat as though she had said something about the weather. "Ms. Bassey. Theo. Ms. Rourke is in the reading room."

The foyer smelled of beeswax and cold stone and flowers — a heavy gray jar of something white at the turn of the hall, blown wide open, dropping. Warm lamplight on dark wood. No reception desk, no glass, no signing-in, no cheerful girl with a headset: just a man in a good suit holding a leather folio like an usher at a funeral he had been to before and did not intend to cry at.

What Naima noticed, because she could not help noticing, was that the house had no room tone.

Every building had one. Every room she had ever walked into announced itself before anyone in it spoke — the fluorescent hum, the fridge compressor two walls over, the ninety-cycle buzz of somebody's dimmer, the particular splash a hallway made when a hard floor met a hard ceiling and neither of them forgave. This hall did nothing. Heavy drapes, a runner thick enough to lose a coin in, a staircase that took her weight without a single complaint. Somebody had spent money making this house shut up.

She approved. She distrusted it. Both at once, which was, more or less, her working condition.

The reading room was off the foyer, and the first thing in it was a table with no head to it.

That was deliberate; you could see the deliberateness from the door. A long dark table, oval enough at the ends that nobody could claim one, and two chairs set exactly opposite each other and exactly equidistant from the middle of everything, and a pair of plain unmatched chairs at either end that were emphatically not those two — one drawn up at the near end with a folio squared in front of it, and one at the far end with the particular emptiness of furniture nobody had ever been invited into. A carafe of water already poured. Shutters half over the windows. One good lamp lit, though there was plenty of afternoon left outside. On the far wall a little dark seascape, hung lower than anybody hangs a picture.

And no clock. Not on the mantel, not on the wall, not on the woman standing at the near end of the table with her hand out.

"Naima Bassey," she said. "Odessa Rourke. Dess, if we get on."

She was tall and unhurried and somewhere in her late fifties, warm deep-brown skin, silver-gray natural curls cropped close to a well-shaped head, and a suit in a dark oxblood that had been cut by somebody who had measured her twice and been paid for both. One gold ring, old, heavy, worn smooth. Nothing else on her anywhere.

"Naima," said Naima, and shook the hand, and thought: one glint of gold, one lamp, no clocks, and a table you can't sit at the head of. A room built by a person who understood that everything is a signal whether you mean it or not. She had built a control room on the same principle and paid for the acoustic treatment out of her own pocket in the second year.

"You brought it."

"I brought it."

She took the envelope out of her bag and put it on the table and slid it across the wood, and Odessa Rourke sat down and opened it and read it — by hand, unhurried, one page at a time, all the way to the bottom, without once looking up to see how Naima was taking being read.

It took a while. Naima had written eleven pages.

She had written them at two in the morning at her own console with the monitors off, which was the only condition under which she had ever been able to tell the truth about herself, and she had written them the way the house's instructions asked for — fill it out like it's true; it always goes better — and she had meant it, and it had cost her something, and she was aware, sitting in a chair in a stranger's house watching a stranger read it, that having meant it was going to be the expensive part.

Odessa turned the last page over and squared the stack and set her hand flat on it.

"Thank you," she said. "Most people write the version they'd be willing to have read aloud. You wrote it like it's true."

"You asked for true."

"I ask everybody. I get it about one time in six." She did not smile, exactly. "You want protocol. You want to be given things rather than take them. You want somebody exacting and slow and entirely without cruelty, and you have written half a page on why slow is the load-bearing word in that sentence, which I want you to know is the most useful half page anybody has handed me this year." She set the pages aside. "You also want it term-limited, written down, and revocable at a word. That's the house. That part is easy."

"And the rest?"

"The rest," said Odessa, "I already did." She drew the folio in front of her closer and turned it around and pushed it across the bare wood with two fingers. "Alistair Grayling."

Naima put her hand on it and did not open it.

"Before I read this," she said, "I want a pen."

Odessa reached into the drawer at the near end of the table — the one where the lodged documents lived, Naima would learn later — and put a pen down on the wood between them, and said nothing.

Naima opened the folio to the first page, which was a photograph.

She did not look at it. She had spent twenty seconds in the car deciding how she was going to not look at it and had settled on speed; she took it out by the corner, face-down, turned it over on the table face-down, and slid it back across to Odessa like a card she was declining.

"Take that out of the file, please."

"All right."

Then she uncapped the pen and went through the rest of it before she read a word of it, hunting for a particular kind of sentence and striking it out wherever it appeared. Height, gone. Colouring, gone. The two lines under a heading called Presentation. A reference letter that opened by describing a man walking into a room, which cost her the first sentence of the letter and nothing after it. She worked quickly and she was thorough, and when she had been through all of it she went back to the beginning and read the whole file the way she had told the house she would read it: all the way down, without skipping.

Name. Forty-eight. British-born, twenty years in New York. A profession she had to read twice, not because it was obscure but because it was hers, sideways: he tuned and voiced concert halls and private listening rooms. Paid — extremely well, by the look of the client list — to sit in the dark at the back of an empty hall for a week and tell people what their room was actually doing, as opposed to what the drawings had promised.

She sat with that for a second longer than she meant to.

Then: history. Hard limits, listed in the first person and stated flatly, with no apology anywhere in them and no theater either. Prior terms with the house, all completed, all with the release clause unused, all with a note in counsel's hand confirming aftercare protocols observed. Vetting — actual vetting, medical, financial, criminal, a page of it, signed by somebody named Diaz who had apparently been unable to find anything about this man more alarming than an unpaid parking summons in a city he no longer lived in.

Not one word anywhere in it about what he looked like. She had seen to that herself.

"Well?" said Odessa.

"He'll do."

"He'll do." Odessa repeated it without inflection, the way a producer plays a take back to the person who just sang it.

"He's the only file you've given me."

"He's the only file there is. I don't guess and I don't hurry." She folded her hands. "Ninety days is the term I'd propose. Cadence you two settle between you at the reading. Counsel walks you both through the floor clauses before anyone signs anything — the word, the release, the exit. Those are not negotiable in either direction, and they are the reason this house exists."

"Good." Naima put the pen down. "I want a clause."

"Then say it and I'll write it."

"For the first thirty days of the term, I don't see him." She heard her own voice do the thing it did in a room full of engineers, going flat and pleasant and slightly bored, and let it. "I arrive first. Alone. I put the blindfold on myself, with my own hands, before he opens the door. Not him — me. Every time. No exceptions, no lifting it, no photographs, no lights-off compromise where I could look if I wanted to. Thirty days. Then it comes off and the rest of the term runs however he likes."

Odessa took the cap off her own pen.

"Say the last part again."

"Then it comes off."

"Thirty days," Odessa said, writing. She wrote in a long, upright, unhurried hand, and she wrote it as Naima had said it and did not tidy it. "By your own hands, before the door opens, no exception in either party's gift. It'll sit sixth in the schedule. Clause six." She read it back aloud, word for word, and looked up. "Is that your clause?"

"That's my clause."

"Then it's in the term, and it's yours, and nobody in this house will move it — not him, not counsel, not me. The term belongs to the person who drafts it." She capped the pen. "And now I'm going to tell you what I think it's for, because I say it in this room or I don't say it at all, and I'd rather you heard it from me than found it out on your own in about a month."

"Ms. Rourke —"

"Dess." She was entirely unhurried about it. "A woman who has been looked at all her life doesn't black out a room to hear better. She does it to get a night off."

The lamp hummed. Actually it didn't; there was nothing in this house that hummed, which was somehow worse, because it meant there was nothing in the room to hear except the sentence.

Naima gave her the answer she had ready.

"Do you know what happens," she said, "when you put a singer in a dark booth? Not dim. Dark. You lose the take for about ten minutes because they're performing at the glass out of habit, and then they stop, because there's no glass to perform at, and what comes out after that is the only part you keep. I've made a living off that ten minutes. Every honest thing I have ever got on tape, I got by taking somebody's audience away from them." She let a beat sit, because she knew what a beat was worth. "I'd like to know a man the way I know a take. I can't do that while I'm busy deciding what his face is doing. That's all it is. It's method."

"It's a very good answer," said Odessa Rourke.

"It's the true one."

"It's a very good answer," she said again, pleasantly, and stood, and that was the end of it. She did not say it a second time in a different shape. She did not press, or soften, or lay a hand anywhere near Naima's arm. She squared the eleven pages, put them in the drawer under the near end of the table where the house kept the things people had written like they were true, and closed it. "Counsel will have the draft ready for you this week. You'll sign here. I'll ask you one question before you do and I'll only ask it once."

Theo brought her coat. The step gave under her again on the way down, exactly as much as before, and the car was already at the curb, and the door of the house closed behind her without any sound at all.

In the back of the car, going over the bridge with the light going amber on the water, Naima put one earbud in and pulled up the vocal she had been fighting all week — Ijeoma's third pass, the one with the crack in it at the top of the second verse, the one Naima had already comped out twice and put back once. She listened to the repair. It was clean. It was seamless. It was better in every measurable way and she had known since the first time she heard it that she was going to keep fixing it.

A night off, she thought, and laughed, once, out loud, in the empty back seat.

She had gone in there and got exactly the term she wanted out of a woman who did not give people what they wanted, and she had got it in under an hour, and it was hers, drafted in her own words and read back to her in somebody else's handwriting. She rode the whole way home extremely pleased with herself.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

Get the e-book