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When did you first meet is a loaded question. It’s a gun against her head in the guise of small talk. It’s the clink of glasses and the twinkle of soft piano music.
It’s all things and no things.
Don’t you find it odd to think back to that moment, the before. When you see a kid across a corridor and he’s facing away from you and in that moment, he’s just a shadow. Broad shoulders and close-cropped hair.
He was just a kid. No name. She didn’t know it, but she remembers seeing him and not having that short circuit memory that he was Harvey and what it meant to know that.
Remembering before you remember. When did you meet? Was it the first time she saw him, just a blurred out boy that she took no second look at.
People always think, they have always been this way. Pearson Spectre. Their names running into one another. They forget there was a before.
The boy turned around and she didn’t know his face. She kept walking into her office, which would much later become his, and she had no idea about it then. So was that it, that moment and it wasn’t great flashing lights - *this is Harvey and he’s the greatest goddam lawyer you’ll ever meet*. It was just the tap of her high heels and the rustle of envelopes in the early morning quiet.
They always got in before other people, when the world was just waking.
She measures it from then, so is that it? That first sighting, though she knows that almost certainly passed him in the hall before that. Anonymous, and she saw him and she forgot it; didn’t even register.
How did you meet?
She laughs and says something else, some bullshit answer to another question. Confidence. Nobody goes back when she keeps speaking.
Was it the first time he brought a letter to her desk, and without a word, placed it before her? She was writing a brief; he was smooth and silent, quick moving efficiency and there was nothing special about it. He was gone in thirty seconds.
No words. He was still just the kid, the mailroom kid. And you don’t think about that too often, do you, the part when they’re just someone else. Because later, later, he’ll never just be the kid; he’ll be Harvey and you’ll be able to read his face better than your own and it’s impossible - it must be - for there to have been a time when that’s not true.
But it was. They have known each other twenty years and for six months they didn’t even speak to each other. She would see him in the hallway, next to the mailcart and people would think, later, that you could tell from the way he stood that he was an ambitious man but it’s not true. He worked, simply, with no pretence; that trademark arrogance was yet to come.
She called him a screwup; and he reformed himself but it’s still there. Other people don’t see it. They probably think Harvey Spectre was born exactly the same as he has always been but that boy, that before-memory kid wasn’t like that.
She can remember Harvey before he was Harvey to her. Dark circles around his eyes and a tie slightly off centre. Old shirts and ill-fitting jackets. Now-Harvey wouldn’t be caught dead being a boy like that.
Was the first time they met the time they took the elevator down together, a couple months in? When they stood side by side, the floors flickering away and it was just the two of them. And she knew he was the mailroom kid, and he knew she was a partner and when they reached the lobby he held the door for her but neither of them said anything.
There were seventeen Harvey’s at the firm. They worked out the second floor. The mail floor. Sorting and stamping, delivering when they thought nobody else was looking. He got the job out of college, she learned later, up to his eyeballs in debt and not just to the American education system. A job to pass the summer, to pay the bills on his shitty little apartment.
He had wanted to build himself back up. This had been the first rung on an unsteady ladder. He had worked at the firm for three months before she had started noticing him.
People always want to know, don’t they - but they never ask. Loyalty’s the question and they want to know what inspired such blind devotion. But the thing is, Jessica never asked. Nope, not once in twenty years. Maybe she didn’t want to know the answer. Why’d he go to her. All those floors, those innumerable offices and Harvey Spectre chose hers.
She has never worked out what it was she did. Was it cause she smiled at him when they passed in the hall? Was it the gentle marking of their routine, the two of them passing like actors with well-rehearsed roles: the mail at the same time every morning. Her, at her desk, the small nod of her head. She said there were seventeen Harvey’s but there were three dozen Jessica’s in that building too. So no, she never asked him, and it’s sat with them all this time.
How did you meet? She inwardly cringes at the question, at the easy assumption that there’s some clever story here given how clever the two of them are with each other. She’s told the basic story over and over. At the mock trial she had said the day we met, you were working in the mail room of this law firm.
And he had said, I don't recall that day.
She has learnt to tell it that way, to swiftly overwrite those early, tip-toe days. They didn’t count. They couldn’t. She had said: on the day that they met he had come to her office and no one ever asked, if that was the day you met then why’d he go to you, some junior partner, some nobody at the firm.
He could’ve walked straight up to Gordon, or Schmit or Van Dyke. They had their names on the goddamn door. She barely had an office. That never seemed to surprise anyone, not when they saw them later because it was her name, then, and people forgot that it hadn’t always been the case.
The first thing he ever said to her was, I think there’s been a mistake and she said, think? And he laughed and said, with more confidence, there’s been a mistake
And she didn’t even know his name, even though he wore a badge with it on. He knew hers. It was on the office door.
Back dated postage and the fear of fraud. Blah blah. He stood in front of her and explained, simply, that he didn’t want to get in no trouble. He didn’t want people to lose out because of what he was saying.
He smiled at her, arrogantly. And maybe that was the first time. When he seemed like the Harvey she would know later, the one she would help shape. He has not always been this way, she knows. The screw up, the shadow, the boy with the broad shoulders.
When he left, she called out to him. He stood in the doorway, stuck in some liminal space where he was Harvey and he wasn’t. They knew each other, then of course, but there seemed no easy way to define when it had begun.
All this time later she remembers calling him back, but for some reason she can’t remember what she said to him.
After, he would come and sit with her. Some mornings when the whole of New York was blinking into life out the window. Tentatively, at first. She would bring him a coffee and he would accept it without questioning why.
He would tell her, once, offhand: I wanted to be more than this but I’ve spent ten years saving other people.
And she said, time someone saved you, kid.
When she tells the story, she thinks people must imagine it differently to reality. Her saying, I’ll pay for your law school in some fancy overpriced restaurant, the two of them dressed all nice in clothes that cost more than a year’s pay-check most places. That seems like the right kind of recollection to have about it; about the two of them and who they’ll become.
But it’s not how it played out. Nobody’s ever bothered to ask for details. She wonders if he’s told Donna the truth of it. The way it was way early and so quiet and he had a whole days mail stacked up in his cart and she was supposed to be in court all afternoon.
I’ll pay, she said.
He laughed. Pay for what?
Law school.
Ha, good joke.
It’s not a joke.
No pause, he snapped round to look at her. He said, no way.
She raised her eyebrows.
No way?
Nope, I don’t accept charity. He shook his head. I’m not gonna owe you for the rest of my life.
Jessica’s never told nobody that story, because she didn't want questions. Had it been about saving? About giving him some reward for what he had found in the mail room? The why, driving a beat in the back of her skull. Harvey’s never asked either, the same way she’s never asked why her. The two of them and they got so far away from the people they were in that moment. It’s too late to talk about now.
She persuaded him, in the end, to take it.
She said, I’ve got some rules.
He said, rules about what?
She said, about you and me.
They made a map of it. Border towns. Lines drawn and never re-made. Walls build so high, impenetrable. You and me, and they could never cross it. Rules, spoken and unspoken. It was like writing a contract, legal and precise, no room for emotion.
She would help him, pull him up by his bootstraps. In return, she had his loyalty, his promise of big cases and even bigger wins. He didn’t have to do it. He could have taken her money and walked away.
But he came back.
Pearson and Spectre.
He had said, the first time she had gone to see him at Harvard, we’re gonna have our names on the wall. You and me. Worth every penny. She had laughed at him.
They had made promises without ever saying the word promise.
Did she first meet Harvey Spectre the first time she walked into a courtroom and saw him a tailored suit and listened to him wax lyrical as an ADA? When she sat in the back row and watched, without a word and he had noticed her and at the end had come and sat with her.
She had said, good job Harvey.
And he had said, thanks, Jessica. I’m only what you made of me.
He seemed more of himself, the later Harvey, then. In his expensive clothes and slicked back hair. More like the charismatic bastard everyone else knew. Was that the real Harvey, was that seeing him for the first time?
There was never a moment when it went how it goes in the movies:
Hi, I’m Jessica
I’m Harvey.
Cue opening titles, etc. They never did that bullshit. It was slow and sudden and it seemed like it was happening over and over. They never defined it in any way. No milestones and memorials.
Just the two of them, carrying on. They don’t give themselves a chance to look back.
It’s all things and no things.
It’s Pearson and Spectre. The mailroom kid and the junior partner, never having the time to say hello. Rushing around and growing old under the weight of it.
People always ask, don’t they. They want to know why she protects him, and they think - they know - there’s a story behind it.
And Jessica just shrugs. She delays and changes the subject. They keep asking.
All she says is, he was working in the mail room.