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By the time Caroline approaches Gerri is three martinis in, the minimum number needed tonight to still the shaking of her hands, the maximum allowable number when, for all she knows, she might still have to maneuver out of something. She thinks at first that Caroline is here to twist the knife; nothing she loves more than someone else’s juicy story, a story where someone else gets hurt. It will be messy, Gerri thinks. Caroline has always been territorial over Roman. The runt of the litter, the one in whom she sees the most of herself. Shiv has probably told everyone by now, Gerri thinks. Back in Chianciano Frank and Karl looked like they knew, wouldn’t meet her gaze, or maybe they were just reading the room. Could see Logan’s rage, pulsing about them like a living thing. Logan hasn’t spoken to her directly but it’s almost worse that way, the endless waiting for the shoe to drop, the guillotine blade to fall.
“Geraldine,” Caroline says, settling herself in one of the wooden chairs. “Fancy a fag?”
Gerri, who quit in the early 2000s, takes the proffered cigarette. “Where’s your husband?” she asks as Caroline picks up a candle from the table, burned down to a stub of wax, the flame still flickering. Caroline holds it out as Gerri passes the tip of the cigarette through the flame, breathes in.
“Fuck if I know,” Caroline says, fishing another one out of the pack. “Where’s yours?”
It is, or it ought to be, Caroline’s wedding night. The sun set hours ago and the party is winding down, the waiters clearing away silver tureens of untouched food. Gerri has been drinking at the edge of the crowd since Logan shipped her back from the war room. Now she regards Caroline for a moment, trying to determine whether this is a joke.
“Couldn’t make it,” Gerri says at last, “on account of the fact that he’s dead.”
“I swear I saw you dancing,” Caroline says, crossing her bony legs, leaning back in the wooden chair. Like mother, like son, Gerri thinks. Though in Caroline’s defense, they’ve barely spoken since the divorce. Early on in the process, Logan impressed upon Gerri and Baird the importance of choosing a side. Gerri and Caroline were—in hindsight, Gerri supposes they were friends. For a time, she missed Caroline’s company, the snide running commentary whispered in Gerri’s ear at the holiday parties, Caroline’s willingness to say what everyone thought about Logan Roy, often—increasingly, toward the end—to his face, in public settings. But Caroline faded out of all their lives, and within a year or so, Gerri stopped noting her absence.
“That was Laurie,” Gerri says.
“Laurie? Who’s Laurie?”
Gerri lets it bubble up despite herself. Maybe it’s the drink, or her shredded nerves, or the forty-eight hours—feeling like years—of heightened paranoia: thinking, when somebody looks at her, they know. Thinking, when someone refuses to meet her gaze, they can’t even look me in the eye.
Gerri takes a drag of the cigarette, lets the smoke coil up from her mouth. “The retiree I’m fucking to keep your ex-husband and his idiot sons out of jail,” she says.
“Oh.” Caroline smirks. “And how is that going?”
“It’s working,” Gerri says.
Caroline’s brow furrows. “He really does look an awful lot like…”
Gerri shrugs, noncommittal. Laurie is shorter than Baird, with the wrong shaped face, but looking over the image in her mind, she can see a slight resemblance around the mouth, the nose. Maybe Baird would have looked something like Laurie if he’d lived to that age. Men of a certain age all look the same, she thinks. Hairlines receding, faces converging into a single, nondescript face.
“I mean,” Caroline adds. “He’s balding, but they do that.” She ashes her cigarette into someone’s discarded plate of wedding cake. “Does he have personal qualities?”
Gerri’s phone rings. It’s the burner phone, one half of the set she bought for herself and Roman two days after she got the CEO call. Not wanting anything too risqué on any device whose contents might turn up one day in discovery. Roman managed it for a couple weeks—“just don’t shine a blacklight on this thing,” he quipped, brandishing the phone, and she grimaced, rolling her eyes—before reverting to type. Texts and calls at all hours on her personal phone if she was lucky, on her work phone most of the time.
Gerri weighs her options: frying pan, fire. Safer in the frying pan with Caroline, she thinks. She silences the phone, drops it back into her purse.
“Ex-DOJ,” Gerri says. “Responsible for some Enron executives’ very bad days.” She fidgets in her chair, adjusting the neckline of her dress. “He’s reliable. Shows up to things on time. Very… straightforward person.”
Caroline makes a noise that Gerri can only describe as a cackle. “Oh, you’re just enamored, I can tell.”
“Shut up.”
“Even by candlelight I can see how your eyes light up when you think of him.”
“Well, the market’s tough,” Gerri says, dropping the cigarette butt on the ground, stamping it out with her heel. “All the good British grifters are getting snapped up by their doting fifth wives.”
Caroline blinks down at the crumbs on the tablecloth. “Well, I suppose I deserved that,” she says. As always: gleeful in dishing it out, blinking back tears when it’s time for her to take it.
“Have I congratulated you yet?” Gerri says. “Congratulations. It was a lovely ceremony.”
“You know, I really thought it would be Rory,” Caroline says.
“Who?”
“You met him at the wedding—Shiv’s.”
Rory, Gerri thinks. Of course. He’s filed in her head as “the chinless hippie prick,” Logan’s chosen epithet.
“What happened?” Gerri asks.
“He was always saying I was distant and frigid and inaccessible,” Caroline says, in a neutral tone, as though she’s reporting on the weather, “and he was never sure if I really loved him or not, or if I was even capable of love.”
“Oh, that old chestnut,” Gerri says.
It was like this sometimes, in the 90s. The two of them drinking off in a corner somewhere, poking and prodding at each other until one of them drew blood. But Gerri doesn’t want to look at Caroline’s misery, lying on the table between them with the wilting floral centerpieces, the candles burned down to vaguely phallic nubs.
Caroline sighs, touching her collarbone. Her ring—gaudy, the diamond the size of a chickpea—shines on her hand. “It just gets harder, doesn’t it?” she says. “Because eventually they start dying off. Women live longer—for what, I’m not sure.” She picks up someone’s discarded wineglass, swallows a mouthful of red. “I give it two years. Five, if I can make myself useful. There might be another flat somewhere that he wants.”
Right on cue, Gerri’s phone rings. It’s the work one, which means she has to pick up. “Logan,” she says, lifting the phone to her ear. It’s Roman. Caroline nods.
“Gerri, thank God,” Roman says. Gerri holds her hand to the speaker, muffling sound. Moves away from Caroline, toward the shadows at the edge of the lawn.
“I know I fucked it,” Roman says. “Please, just—I tried your room but you were—”
“I appreciate the need for expediency,” Gerri says, arranging her face to neutrality. Long-suffering suit, all business at all hours, can’t even chat with a decades-long friend about the friend’s disappointing new groom without some obligation pulling her away.
“Gerri, please,” Roman says, “I just torched my entire fucking life. Actually”—a pause—“arguably you just torched my entire fucking life.”
She presses her lips together, biting back a retort. There are things she’d like to say to that but she can’t say anything here on the lawn, waiters and women in floral prints drifting by, bearing chocolates, bottles of champagne.
“I’m on that path by the cliff,” Roman says. “It’s a fucking graveyard over here. No one will see. Please. I just want to talk, you have to talk to me.”
He knocked on her door last night and she sent him away. Laurie was there and there were the guests in the other rooms, the oil-painted eyes of the saints, the gargoyles grinning down from their niches. She hesitated before she did it: wanted an apology, wanted it desperately. One of the real ones, the kind where the offending party understands what they did, vows to change in the future, then changes. Just another stupid little daydream, Gerri thought, closing the door and turning the key in the lock. It wasn’t Roman’s nature, wasn’t part of his vocabulary.
“I’ll get that to you by the morning,” she says. She wonders if that was sufficiently clear. Maybe she’s left him with the impression she’s coming. She wonders how long he’ll wait, pacing at the edge of the path, biting his nails, as the darkness gathers and a chill creeps into the air.
Caroline is still seated when Gerri returns. “You simply must tell me,” she says, lighting another cigarette. “What do you make of Peter?”
It’s a trap, Gerri knows it’s a trap. “I’ve been… preoccupied, to be honest,” she says. “I haven’t been able to give it much thought.”
“Please,” Caroline says. “I won’t tell. Be honest, I know you’re thinking something.”
“He could be worse,” Gerri says. “I hear you married Logan, once.”
Caroline lets out a harsh bark of laughter, folding up on herself, her cigarette emitting a thin ribbon of smoke into the temperate air. “That’s lovely, actually,” she gasps. “I’ll have to remember to look at it that way if I’m ever feeling down.” The little mountain of ash continues to grow beside the scraps of cake, smears of colored frosting, rubbery fondant that no one will touch. “It really was lovely of him to come out,” says Caroline. “Screwing me out one last time, just for old times’ sake. I just wish he’d done it at the bachelorette, and not interrupted my wedding night.” She sighs, exhaling smoke. “Though I suppose it’s good to know the years haven’t softened him.” She fixes Gerri with her piercing gray gaze. “Do you think I’m really awful? The business with the trust? I can only imagine what they must be saying about me.”
Caroline was wild and vibrant when she and Gerri first met. It was 1982, maybe ’83. Caroline had shiny brown hair and stayed out all night dancing, sleek in designer dresses, chunky heels. It was ’82, maybe ’83, and every subsequent year with Logan seemed to age her a decade, like he was chiseling lines in her face, dulling the color of her hair. She looks—older now, of course. But more of a living, breathing thing than she did in the end, in 1997, maybe ’96, when she finally ran. Leaving the kids in New York, taking her things.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Gerri says, smoothing a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Why should I take their side? It’s not as though they’ll ever take mine.”
“Honestly, Caroline, I see your point.”
Caroline raises an eyebrow, waits expectantly.
“You should try working with them,” says Gerri. “Bunch of selfish little pricks.”
Caroline lights up at that, straightens in her chair. “Oh,” she says, “I wish you’d told me sooner! If I’d known you felt that way we would have had so much more to talk about back in the day.”
Gerri didn’t think about the Roy children back in the day, just dropped off the obligatory birthday gift totaling $100 or more at Shiv’s birthday every year until she turned eighteen. Watched Roman skulking around on occasion, wondered what happened behind closed doors, when she heard Logan shouting and saw Roman leave the office with his shoulders raised up to his ears, scurrying back to his room, face drawn. No, Gerri didn’t think about them. Not until they grew up, waltzed back into her life and became her problem to solve.
“Shiv’s playing three-dimensional checkers against herself,” Gerri says, “and I think she thinks she’s going to win.” She snorts. “Or did, until today.”
Caroline grins, her eyes gleaming. “Oh, do Kendall next.”
“Thinks he’s a killer, can’t shoot straight.”
“And Ro-ro?”
“Weak-willed,” Gerri says. “Press on him and he folds.”
Caroline’s face softens then, becoming almost wistful. “He was always my favorite,” she says.
Gerri grimaces, twisting her hands in her lap. “Mine, too,” she says, quietly, though no one is around to hear.
After the fiasco she locked herself in the single-occupancy gender-neutral bathroom at Credit Suisse intending to cry, then realized she still had the jet ride back to Tuscany to get through. And she wouldn’t put it past Shiv to be waiting outside the door, watching for a chink in her armor, getting ready to twist the knife. If she really let it out she’d fuck up her makeup and her eyes would be red and her face would look puffy, and everyone would know. Thankfully Roman covered for her, huddled in the corner of the jet, blinking back tears and snuffling in increasingly undignified fashion until Tom of all people passed him a pack of tissues. Then back in her room there was Laurie, somehow she’d forgotten about Laurie, and she had to wait until he drifted off to sleep to close herself in the bathroom, running the shower and sink to cover the sound.
“You know,” Caroline says, “some of these balding little American men, they love a boot in the face. You learn to recognize it after a time. But you? I always wondered why you stayed.”
Gerri bites at her cuticle, tastes blood. Gazes at the shadows at the edge of the lawn. For the past thirty years, she’s always had an answer: the money, the pleasure of competence. International travel. When she was young she got to see the world, got close to the heart of things, her hands on the ropes. But the question only gets harder to answer. The money is building up in the bank, more than she could ever spend, and she wakes up sick to her stomach most days, when she sleeps at all.
Maybe it’s a young person’s game, Gerri thinks. Maybe Logan has the right idea. Cash out before any more losses accrue, scrub the mess from her hands.
“I had a theory you loved him for a while,” Caroline says, “back in the 90s. But then I thought, she’s too clever for that. Aren’t you?”
Caroline watches expectantly, waiting for an answer. “I’m thinking about retirement,” Gerri says, testing out the words. “Starting to feel I’ve overstayed my welcome.”
It doesn’t feel like any kind of relief, just more dread churning in her gut. She could move in with Laurie in Chappaqua, do the crossword Sunday mornings. Laurie can cook a decent pancake and thanks to the miracle of modern medicine his dick still works, which is more than Gerri can say for some people she could name.
But it won’t just be Sunday mornings, she thinks. It will be every day of the week for the rest of her life. Twenty, thirty years. Longer, even. Same length of time as her career, but instead of the constant motion, the endless churn of activity, an endless stretch of empty time. What do people do? Most books bore her, and you can only go to the opera so many times, only drink so many martinis over lunch in hotel lobbies. She’s not even sure she’ll be able to show her face in New York when all this is done.
Really, she thinks, it won’t be her choice. She’s been around the block before, knows merit-based is code for fire anyone over sixty. Double firing for the double sin of being female and old. They’ll bring in some hotshot Stanford JD in Louboutins with shiny hair, Botoxed to hell already at thirty. Still riding the upward arc of her career, an arrow just loosed from the bow. Gerri wonders if Roman understands she’s trapped in the burning building with him. Almost certainly not, she thinks. As usual all he can see is his personal tragedy, filling up his narrow field of vision.
She was playing an angle, she thinks. She was always playing an angle—even with Baird, with Logan, back in the day. And then one day she wasn’t playing anymore. She got sloppy, slipped up. Acted out of—what? Something squishy and soft, so squishy and soft it disgusted her. She let Roman into her head, under her skin, an itch too deep for her to scratch. She should have known not to trust it. She’s never trusted that kind of squishy feeling, the kind where you lose your head.
What did she expect? It was reckless, he was reckless, she was. A child sticking her hand in a flame over and over again, awaiting new results.
“You think you’ll marry him?” Caroline asks.
“What?”
“Laurie,” Caroline says, raising an eyebrow. “That was his name, wasn’t it?”
I loved your son, Gerri thinks. I loved your son, and in the end it came to nothing.
“Maybe I will,” she says. “Not much else to do.”
Caroline shrugs, a noncommittal assent.
“And you can come to my wedding, and I’ll tell you all about my sad little life of quiet desperation.”
The candlelight throws Caroline’s face into shadow, all angles and planes, like a modernist sculpture. “You really are a nasty little cunt, aren’t you?” Caroline says.
Gerri’s head aches, a pressure she can’t release, like water building up inside her skull. She thinks Caroline probably started this, but through the haze of cigarette smoke and gin she can’t be sure, her memory of the arc of the conversation distorting, bending into shadow.
“Enjoy your wedding night,” says Gerri, gathering her purse.
“I thought it in the 90s, too, you know.”
“Goodnight, Caroline,” Gerri snaps. “It’s been a pleasure.”
Caroline raises her wine glass, a mockery of a toast. “And the same to you, Geraldine.”
Gerri pulls the burner phone from her purse as she trudges back to her room. She’s missed thirteen calls, has five separate voicemails. It's Roman, of course it's Roman, he's the only one who has the number.
She taps on the first one. 10:35. “Hey, uh, Gerri?” Roman says. “Just wanted to make sure you can find the location all right? It’s the field with the donkeys, I’ll drop you a pin if you need. Uh, okay, yeah, that’s all. See you soon? I guess?”
Second voicemail, 10:59. “Jesus, Gerri, please pick up the phone, this isn’t fucking funny anymore.”
Third voicemail, 11:23. “So I’m standing in this field in Tuscany like some kind of fucking idiot and all these donkeys are bleating at me and I’m starting to think you’re standing me up so—honestly, fuck this. Fuck you. If you want to fucking talk you can find me in the Contessa’s room, banging her fucking brains out.”
All this braggadocio. He should remember who he’s talking to, Gerri thinks. He knows she knows he’s not capable.
It’s quiet on the line for a moment, a crackle of static. “You know I fucking loved you?” Roman says. “And you shoved my dick in the meat grinder. Fuck you.” He inhales loudly enough that the phone picks up the sound. “You fucking bitch,” he says.
“Fuck you,” she hisses back as his recorded voice cuts off. No one hears but the painted saint in the stairwell, the boy in black slipping by, clean towels folded in the crook of his arm.
In the penultimate voicemail, Roman is swearing in Italian. At least, it sounds like swearing; Gerri can’t understand the words. In the final one, left eight minutes ago, Roman’s voice breaks. “Fuck, Gerri,” he says, “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I fucked it all. Please.” He’s sobbing now, sounding plastered out of his mind; it’s undignified, Gerri thinks.
“Please, please,” Roman begs, “just talk to me. Just tell me how to fix it. Tell me how to make it right.”
Gerri’s finger hovers over the message. Is it more incriminating to erase the evidence or save it? Keep it, she thinks. If they’re going to force her out, the messages will net her a bigger payment. She’s been on the legal end of this enough that she can run the calculations in her head. A few thousand dollars more per incriminating text. If Roman’s voice is audible, even better. And it’s Roman, not one of the C-suite goons, which should drive the payment up even further—though that’s assuming Logan still wants to clean up. Assuming Logan has anything to do with it at all.
Stop contacting me, she texts. Work calls only, to the company phone. She’ll have a stronger case if she’s put it in writing that she wants him to stop, if it comes to that.
She should block his number, she thinks. Her finger hovers over the button. It will stop the messages getting through. She might need them, she thinks, and turns off the phone, slips it back into her purse. Passes Roman’s door, where she sees that the light is on. Keeps walking, around the corner and up a final flight of stairs.
Back in the room Laurie is snoring, sprawled out across the bed. She shoves him gently, making space. Crowded into the side of the bed, she wonders if Laurie would leave her if he knew. It could get messy, embarrassing. Then again, how many other prospects does he have? Besides, he won some kind of award for mentoring women back at DOJ. She found it on his resumé when she did her research for the initial approach. Took care to seem out of her depth, but not hopeless: a woman treading water, keeping herself afloat. She left a curl of hair free, which she twirled around her finger as she spoke. It worked; he took pity on her, guided her through the process with a hand on the small of her back.
Maybe he’ll take pity again, she thinks.
Gerri thinks of Roman. Imagines him lying awake, thinking of her. She doesn’t like to admit it but he impressed her back in the room: he shrank into himself and he cried a little but he stuck to his guns. He’s learned something, she thought. Just internalized the lesson too late, timing bad as always.
Really, Gerri thinks, the problem was the garden. As she passed, he looked at her and said: “yeah, go jump on that grenade,” and she looked at him and saw Logan Roy. There were, for a moment, two Logans, one shouting her name from the pool, the other at the table, staring at her through shades which obscured his eyes. Twinned instincts to twist the knife, to kick her while she was down. Roman looked sharp in his trousers and button-down, hair slicked back and helmet-like. He was seated at the table playing a children’s game, colored paper money in his hand. He was getting into it, trying to win.