The Last Blueprint

My name is Douglas Pike, I'm sixty-two years old, and I should probably start with the last time I touched my wife, because that's where this mess actually begins.

Four years ago. A Tuesday, if you can believe that. Nothing wrong with Tuesdays, but there was nothing right about that one either. Cassandra lay there next to me in the dark, and I remember thinking, this is it, this is the last time, and not in the poetic way. In the way where you both know it and neither of you says it. She patted my arm afterward. Patting. Like I was a dog that had done a trick.

We'd been married thirty-five years by then. Married when she was twenty-three, which makes her fifty-eight now, and she wears those years better than I wear mine, not that she'd ever let me say so. Somewhere in there we stopped being a couple and became a household. Two line items sharing a mortgage.

So six months ago, when I was a young and foolish sixty-one, I did the thing men my age do. I found one of those discreet dating sites, the ones with the tasteful grey fonts and the promises of confidentiality. I told myself I was just looking for conversation. You can tell yourself anything at one in the morning with a laptop on your knees.

Her name was Shauna. Thirty-nine years old, freelance accountant, a profile photo that wasn't trying too hard, which somehow tried harder than all the ones that were. We messaged back and forth for three weeks before I worked up the nerve to suggest a drink. She said yes before I'd finished typing the question, or that's how it felt.

Now, here's the part I keep chewing on. She asked me out to dinner on the second date. She picked the restaurant. She asked about my work with genuine interest, and when I said I was a partner at a firm called Rios & Arthur Design, she didn't glaze over the way most people do. She leaned in. She asked about the partnership structure.

I thought, what a listener. I thought, what a woman. I did not think, why does an accountant care how my shares are held. Love, or whatever this was, has a way of turning the brain to warm putty.

Thursday night, twelve-forty in the morning, and I'm punching the after-hours code into the side door of my own office building as if I were half my age sneaking out of a dorm. The elevator smelled like carpet cleaner, which is six months of Thursdays in one sniff, if you follow me.

The office was dark except for the emergency strips along the floor and the green standby lights on the monitors. Rios & Arthur Design, twelve stories up, all glass and quiet. Out the windows the city did its distant traffic hum. You forget how much noise a building makes when everyone's gone. The HVAC breathing away to itself. The refrigerator in the break room clicking on and off like it's got something to say.

She was at my drafting station. Of course she was.

"You're late," Shauna said, without turning around. She had her coat over the back of my chair and her shoes off, which I have never once gotten a straight answer about. Something about my chairs. Something about dignity.

"Kyle was doing his rounds by the loading dock. I had to wait behind a dumpster like a teenager."

"Like a sixty-two-year-old teenager."

"Thank you, yes. The point stands." I hung up my coat. "He saw me, by the way."

"Kyle? He always sees you. He's been seeing you since October."

"He has not."

"Douglas. The man nods at you. Every Thursday. A little nod, like we're all in on something." She swiveled the chair around to face me. She was wearing that grey dress she knows I like, and she had the good sense not to pretend otherwise. "He's a former marine who works nights and wants to go home. Nobody pays him enough to care."

"Arthur pays him plenty."

"The firm pays everyone plenty. That's how you know something's wrong somewhere." She stood up and crossed the room to me, unhurried, the way she does everything. The half-finished model of the Kessler building sat between us on its table, a foam-core city block with no west tower yet. She stopped just short of me. "Hi."

"Hi yourself."

"Well? You've been grumbling about your wife for three weeks. I've heard the whole sad catalogue. The separate bathrooms. The Tuesday routine." She tilted her head. "You going to kiss me or are we going to keep pretending this is an accounting consultation?"

"That's a direct question."

"I'm an accountant. I like things on the record."

So I kissed her. She tasted like the red wine she thinks I don't know she drinks in my office, and her hand came up and held the back of my neck, and I swear to you the floor plan fell out of my head entirely. Thirty-five years of marriage and four years of nothing, and it took one woman asking a plain question to undo all of it.

When we came up for air she was smiling, that crooked smile, the one I'd put on a poster.

"There it is," she said. "Been waiting on that since the restaurant."

"You could have asked weeks ago."

"You could have." She stepped back half a step, not letting go of my collar. "You're a careful man, Douglas Pike. You were going to take a year. I could see the calendar behind your eyes."

"I'm sixty-two. I don't have a year."

"Don't say things like that." And there was a quality in her voice then, a flat note, quick and gone. I put it down to the hour. I put a lot of things down to the hour, back then.

We stood there in the green glow with the Kessler model between our shadows, and she asked, casual as anything, "How's the buyout coming along? Arthur still circling?"

"Arthur's always circling. He offered me thirty cents on the dollar last month. I told him he could value my share of the firm when he pried it from my cold drafting hand."

"And Cassandra?"

"Thinks I'm here working late." I laughed. "Which, technically."

"Sure. Technically." She looked at the model, then back at me. "You ever think about just selling out? Taking the money, taking me, going somewhere with a beach?"

"Every Thursday."

"But?"

"But I built half of what's on these boards. You don't give away your own skeleton because someone offers you bus fare."

Shauna was quiet a moment, her thumb moving along my collar, and she said, "No. I suppose you don't," in a voice I would think about later, when it was far too late to be thinking anything new.

Outside, the traffic hummed. The fridge clicked off. And twelve floors below, a man who'd been seeing everything all along finished his rounds and didn't write a word of it down.

"Come here," she said, tugging my collar. "Again."

And me, warm putty, went.

She led me over to the drafting table by the window, the big one, the one I actually work at, and set her glass of wine down on the corner where the T-square usually lives.

"Shauna." I said her name like a warning, though God knows I didn't mean it as one.

"What? You have a table free and a door that locks. I checked. I checked twice."

"We're twelve floors up in my office. My office, where my partner has a key."

"Arthur is at home in Wilmette, and you know it." She reached for the top button of my shirt. "So. I'm going to ask you a question, and I want the boring, careful, Douglas Pike answer. Do you want this?"

The honest answer was that I'd wanted it for six months and had been managing the wanting the way you manage a leaky roof, with buckets and denial. What I said was, "I haven't done this in four years. Possibly not well."

"Oh no," she said, deadpan, hand still on the button. "Not well. However will I cope."

"That's not what I mean."

"I know what you mean. Answer the question."

"Yes," I said. "Yes. Obviously yes."

"Then unbutton the rest yourself, because I want to watch."

I'll spare you the idea that I was smooth. I was not smooth. I was a sixty-two-year-old man fumbling his own buttons while a woman thirty-nine years old leaned against my drafting table looking pleased with herself. She stepped out of the grey dress with such ease, and I stood there holding my own cufflink like an idiot, and she took pity on me.

"Come here," she said, softer. "We'll go slow. We can go as slow as you want."

We did not exactly go slow. What I rediscovered, on that table, with the blueprints crumpling under her shoulders and the emergency lights making her skin green at the edges, was that the hunger doesn't die of old age. It just goes dormant, like grass under snow. She got my shirt off me and her hands flat on my chest and made a small satisfied noise, and I thought, absurdly, of the Tuesday routine, of Cassandra saying pass the salt across four feet of table, and then I thought about nothing at all for a while.

She pushed me back to look at her. "Condom," she said. "Jacket pocket, left side. I put one there when you were in the bathroom."

"You planned this."

"Douglas. I plan everything. It's my entire personality." She was grinning, though, and a little out of breath, and it occurred to me that she was nervous too, which made me feel a great deal better about the cufflinks.

"Are you sure?" I asked, because the careful man in me needed the question asked out loud.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, I'm sure. Are you?"

"Thirty-one years of blueprints on this table."

"Then we'll flip the blueprint over. Blueprint side down."

I tore the wrapper with my teeth, which she said made me look about twenty-four, and I said nothing could be further from the truth, and then we stopped talking for a bit. I'm not going to give you the blow by blow. I'll say that she moved like she wanted to be moved, that she said "there" twice and "don't stop" once, that her heels were against the small of my back and the city was spread out beyond the glass, indifferent and glittering. I'll say that when it was over we lay half across the drafting table with our feet still on the floor like two people who had lost an argument with furniture, and she laughed, really laughed, into my shoulder.

"Jesus," she said. "Four years, he says. Not well, he says."

"Flatterer."

"Accountant. I deal in accurate figures."

***

We dressed, more or less. She put her dress back on and my dress shirt over it, which I want noted was my good shirt, and sat on my desk chair with her legs tucked under her, checking her phone. I was re-rolling the blueprints. Domestic as anything. Two people puttering in an office at one in the morning.

Then her face changed. Just a flicker, a bookkeeping entry of a face.

"Everything all right?" I asked.

"Friend from my book club. Drama." She typed with one thumb. Her other hand had found mine on the desk, though, thumb moving over my knuckles like she was counting them. "So boring. You'd fall asleep."

"Book club drama is the only drama worth having."

"Mm." She sent the message and turned the phone face down on the desk. What she'd actually typed, and I know this now, was: progressing. He's in. Nearly there. What she'd felt, with her thumb on my knuckles, was apparently harder to put in a text message.

"Book club," I said. "What are you reading?"

"Hmm?"

"The book club. The book."

"Oh. It's a thriller. Everyone's betraying everyone. Very far-fetched." She smiled at me and my stupid heart did what it did, and she said, "Come sit with me."

I sat. The chair creaked its opinion. I pulled the second drawer of my desk open, the one with the lock that Kyle thinks I don't know is half broken, and took out the folder.

"Now," I said, "I want to show you something."

She went still in a way I didn't read at the time. "Sounds serious."

"Arthur's offer got me thinking about exits. Not selling to Arthur. Real exits." I laid the trust documents out on the desk, next to her wine glass. "I set this up in March. The firm's operating agreement lets me convert my share into a retirement trust instead of a buyout. It's worth roughly nine times what Arthur's offering. And it's structured so that if anything happens to me, it passes whole. No clawback, no Arthur, no complications."

Shauna looked at the pages. She was doing the numbers, I could tell, her eyes flicking down the columns the way they do. "Douglas, this is. This is a lot of paper to be showing me."

"I know what it's worth."

"That's not what I said."

"I know what you said." I tapped the last page. "I had the lawyer leave a blank where a