I’m a deer in headlights, gathering my wits.
“Stella from Bexley for your emotional intelligence training,” he says, quickly closing the door and leaving me alone with him.
“I-I’m here with a delivery for you,” I say, walking to his desk like a trembling virgin approaching a powerful god.
“You’re to be the new executive coach?” he clips out in his English accent. “You?” This as if it might be the most bizarre happenstance ever.
“Seems I am,” I say, taking a seat across from him.
“What was all that down in the lobby yesterday, then? Recon?” he asks.
He remembers me? One split second of interaction and he recognizes me, even when I wear the uniform? Nobody does that. “It’s not important,” I say.
“It’s important to me. And what the hell kind of methodology is this?” he asks. “A letter carrier? Good god, tell me it’s not to deliver a dose of reality or something.” His accent makes everything he says sound more angular, somehow.
I suck up my courage—I have less than twenty minutes to get him to understand how much we cherish our building. “My methodology will not be part of the program.”
I pull out the iPad, willing my fingers not to tremble. It’s his stare. He has the fiercest eyes I’ve ever seen. True dagger-staring eyes. Make that longsword, crossbow, and battering-ram-staring eyes.
I set up amid the onslaught of his gaze.
“An iPad? That’s your delivery?”
I punch in my code and Maisey’s face fills the screen, telling how she’s been in her apartment since 1972. She shows where she knits every evening. “This home is everything I have in the world,” she says.
Malcolm snorts. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“No.”
“What is it?”
“This is your training,” I say, trying to sound in control.
“Please,” he says, voice dripping with annoyance.
I stop the video, trying to remember the words that Stella used in the elevator. “This is your court-mandated session,” I say. “Court-ordered.”
“A video of some old lady? This is what I’m meant to watch? Hard pass.”
Can he refuse like that?
I’m supposed to be training him, but it feels like he’s the one in charge. The silence grows. A panicky feeling washes over my skin.
But then I remember this one time at the Bronx substation, when a police officer tried to bully me into handing over a postal customer’s mail. The postal customer was a suspect in something, but the mail is sacrosanct. I informed the police officer that he couldn’t take the mail without a warrant. The police officer kept hammering at me, giving reasons why I had to give it that minute.
I felt so scared and unsure, so I called my postal inspector and she told me it doesn’t matter what anybody says or demands. “Just repeat what you know over and over,” she’d said. “You don’t need more argument than a rule. A rule is the end of an argument.”
I jut out my chin and repeat Stella’s words best I can, “You were mandated by court of law to undergo a program designed by an accredited coach to improve your emotional intelligence. Th-this is that program.”
“I don’t think so,” he says.
“It’s court-mandated,” I say.
He just glowers.
I draw in a breath. “You were mandated to undergo a program to be designed by an accredited executive coach, were you not?”
His gaze burns at me. “And this is what you designed? What does whining about a building have to do with emotional intelligence?”
Repeat the rule, repeat the rule. “This is a program designed by an accredited executive coach,” I say.
“And will the film be featuring Corman at some point? Telling the tragic story of being fired by me?” he asks. “I’ll tell you right now—it was worth it. I’d do it again, lawsuit and all.”
I blink, unsure what he’s talking about, though I’m thinking Corman must have something to do with why Malcolm ended up with a court-ordered coach.
I’ve never met anybody like him. He’s a powerful, world-class beast of a man who belongs in a powerful world-class beast of a city like New York. A man who thinks Jada’s film is a joke. It’s not a joke, and Maisey is not “some old lady.”
Straighten up, make eye contact, speak from the belly, feel your voice resonate—that’s what my actress friend Mia always says when she tries to get me to be more assertive.
I straighten up. “You were mandated to undergo a program to be designed by an accredited executive coach.” I continue, feeling my voice resonate. “You are to watch it. Or...we’ll add more time to the back of the schedule, the back of the court-mandated hours.”
Oh my god. I sound demented. What am I even saying?
I hold my breath. No way will this work.
A muscle in his jaw fires. He gestures at the iPad. “Get on with it, then.”
Wait, what? It worked? I can’t believe it worked.
I start the iPad again. We have ten minutes left. Maisey tells about the time Jada cared for her when she got her broken hip. How the building is her only family. The movie cuts to Lizzie, telling how much she missed her family in Fargo. “All my friends in the world are here. This is my home,” Lizzie says.
I feel his eyes on me.
I straighten. Speaking from my belly best I can, I say, “You’re not watching.”
“Yes, I am.”
The video plays on. Jada really did a nice job on it—she’s an actress but she’s really interested in the filming side of things, too.
After a few more minutes, he says, “I have an eleven hard stop. Compelling as this all is.”
It’s ten fifty-two. Disheartened, I stop the video. “Those are people who live at 341 West Forty-fifth Street,” I say. “Are you familiar with it? It is a building that you’re about to tear down.”
His eyes narrow, as if in confusion, and then he smiles. His smile is huge and beautiful and it lights up his face and sets my heart pounding. His smile is the sun, blazing with light and warmth.
Am I actually getting through to him?
“That woman was Maisey Belleweather,” I continue. “She’s seventy-three, a retired Macy’s clerk. Without that community in that building, she’ll be alone in the world.”
“Very good, very good.”
What?
He stands and leans in toward me. I’m aware of him the way I was in the lobby—his size. His heat. He whispers, “I know what you’re doing, of course.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh come off it. This isn’t leadership sensitivity coaching or emotional intelligence training or whatever it’s supposed to be. They mean to fucking torture me.”
I stare at him, stunned. “That’s what you think I’m doing?”
He looks back. “I’d fire my employment law firm for agreeing to this if I didn’t already do it.”
“It’s not torture,” I say. “It’s real.”
5
Malcolm
One of the most diabolical punishments devised by the monsters who ran Soviet-era prison camps was to force an inmate to toil away for days on end digging a massive hole. As soon as the unfortunate prisoner had completed a big, beautiful perfectly-shaped hole, they would force them to fill the hole back in with dirt.