Alternate Side(17)

Nor did she intend to mention that the legendary Bob Harris had been so very anxious to meet with her. When she had finally agreed to sit down with him, she had insisted on meeting on an evening when she knew her husband had a client dinner across town. When Nora arrived at the office she slunk onto the executive floor as though she were there for an assignation, and indeed Bob Harris had attempted to corner her in the past at at least two office functions. “Can’t blame a guy for trying, now can you?” he’d said. Unlike many of the New York transplants Nora met, Bob Harris did not pretend to be to the manor born, but instead went the opposite way, milked his origins preposterously. He twanged like a banjo, called soda “pop,” and liked to say things like “when pigs fly.” His firm was called Parsons Ridge, after the town in West Virginia where he’d been born. “That sounds picturesque,” the PR-assistant wife of one of the short-pants boys had said at a cocktail party.

“It’s a shit hole,” Harris had said.

“You look fine,” he said now, Nora sitting opposite him in his office.

“And you, Mr. Harris.”

He sighed, reached for his bourbon. He always took it with a maraschino cherry for some reason, and Nora had noticed that the level in his glass stayed more or less the same through any event or evening. Nora had passed on a drink. She’d worn a black fluted skirt not conducive to giving the person sitting opposite a peek at her panties. Some of the men she had to do business with would drop their pens so their eyes were level with her knees and any gap between them. Bob wouldn’t see the point of that.

“No matter what I do, you’re never gonna call me Bob,” he said. “Even if I get you to come work for me.”

“Hard to figure how that would happen,” Nora said, “since I know next to nothing about your business.” She’d noticed that when people were around Bob Harris they tended to lapse into his syntax and vocabulary. She’d once heard a partner who had attended prep school and Yale unthinkingly use the verb “reckon.” As in Bob saying:

“I don’t reckon it’s much of a secret that I’m putting a pile of money into a foundation. A pile of money.”

“How much is a pile?” Nora asked.

“You are a pisser,” Bob Harris said, shaking his head. “Anybody else sits there all quiet and mealy-mouthed, butter wouldn’t melt in it. Thinking what you’re thinking but not saying it. For now, let’s keep the exact number on the QT. Let’s just say it will make all these folks sit up and take notice. What do you think about education?”

“Do you care about education?”

“Hell, woman, everybody cares about education. Not that I did much with mine. Just—” He chuckled and gestured to the enormous plate-glass window as though it were a trophy case, assorted skyscrapers just beyond the sill. Bob Harris liked to make much of the fact that he had gone to a third-tier state school and gotten thrown out for making a chain of women’s undergarments that stretched around the entire administration building. Twice. “In every color under the sun, boys, not just your white ones, either. A lot of black and red. A lot.” He had a mysterious wife whom various profiles said he’d married while he was still in school, who was never seen and was said to live nearly all the time at their farm, which was in Virginia. There were no photographs of her in his office, nor of their son, who was said to be a geologist in New Mexico.

Nora refused to fill the silence. “So what about it?” Bob continued. “Come run this foundation for me. People I know think you’re good at what you do. You got to have better things to do than shepherd a lot of housewives around looking at bracelets.”

“It’s a museum. We offer historical and educational programs.”

“There you go. You’re already in the education business. You got no learning curve, and a nice manner.” He leaned forward, and Nora pressed her knees together and smoothed her skirt, she thought surreptitously, until he grinned. “You know why you’re really here? One time I asked you about that museum, which I have to say I don’t get the point of one bit, and you said to me, All jobs sound silly unless you’re a pediatric oncologist, or a plumber. You remember saying that?”

Nora shook her head, although it was certainly possible. Somehow she always found herself more outspoken with Bob Harris than she was with almost anyone else.

“I’d need to know a lot more about how you plan to proceed to even think about this, Mr. Harris. The regulations governing foundations are pretty stringent. And the foundations that do good work do it because they’re focused, certain of their mission, with a clear sense of where and how to spend their money.”

Bob Harris waved his hand in the air, picked up his bourbon glass, looked at it as though he were admiring the brown velvet color, which Nora had to admit was pretty, put it down again. She couldn’t help herself; she said, “Do you ever actually drink one of those?”

Bob Harris raised the glass to her. “Smart. Smart girl. ’Scuse me, woman, smart woman. That’d be good, too, have the foundation run by a woman. Whatever needs to be done, we’ll do it. Whatever you need, we’ll get it for you. Just have a little think on it, all right? Just a little think.”

On her way out Nora turned and said, “May I ask a small favor?”

“God bless you, girl, I love the way you put words together.”