yours for a song chapter 5

[figureofdismay]

Roman tried to attach himself to her elbow on the way back from Scotland and she had to tell him that, no, he needed to go sit with his family, not back in the staff cabin with her. She was sitting with Baird on the way back, for one thing, and off his blank, muleish look, she’d scoffed and said “I’m sure you remember my husband. You spent all of dinner yesterday making sour faces at him, and he had no idea why. It was entertaining but you’d better not do it again.” And for another, the Roys didn’t belong among the C suite et al dampening the mood and overhearing their gossip. It was gouache on a non-working flight, which Kendall had declared it would be, before popping on his headphones and disappearing into one of the cabins. To do god knew what, probably to sulk in his private, sullen, muleish way after dismissing his wife’s concern, given the way Rava and the little girl were giving a wide and scowling berth.

Baird had given her another saturnine impression of a curious look, his dark brows and wide, soft mouth quirked in a frown of annoyance and pre-emptive dismissal, a readiness to scorn the un-routine and unserious. “What was that all about? Roman’s never taken particular interest in the legal department before, has he?”

“He’s been in LA for years wasting Frank’s time and Waystar Lenstrex’s money, so, No,” she said with an airy shake of her head and then realized she was overselling it slightly. She didn’t want to join in with Baird’s dismissiveness, and she hadn’t done anything serious enough to deflect his interest from it. “He’s been a little aimless, since Logan. I tried to make sure he didn’t slip through the cracks, and I guess he took it as an indication of alliance.”

“Hmm. You know, that’s not a bad idea. With the state of things, it is a little too early to bet too heavily on one prince, isn’t it. I’ve got Kendall in hand, but you keep up that interest with Roman. It would be silly to let him off the lead if you’ve got him.

“Right. Uh-huh. I’ll… definitely keep that in mind,” she said, cutting a glance up at Baird, who was settling contentedly back into his seat and putting his heavy black-framed readers on the end of his nose, and looking distantly pleased with himself. Despite the fact that private jet seats were luxuriously sized, Baird was too long and broad, and in recent years too paunchy a man to look dignified in plane arm-chairs, and he always huffed and groaned his way through long haul flights, puffing little sighs about his back and his knees and not having quite enough bolster space to rest his head, but he nevertheless looked unconcerned and distantly unconcerned, sure entirely that the small behavioral aberration he’d witnessed was explicable and would come to a simple and useful conclusion. She thought of Roman’s gaze scraping over every inch of visible skin the other night in his room, and probably undressing her in his mind, with that hungry, nearly slack-jawed stare. He very well might have been, by the way he’d flushed a pretty pink across his cheeks all the way to the tips of his ears and started stumbling over his words.

She wanted to laugh, looking over at her husband as he pulled his black folio out of his soft leather carry-on, and his usual pen out of his breast pocket, to go through the sheaf of important files that he’d started carrying around again despite his provisional ‘acting’ status, gleaming with self-security and disinterest and utterly unaware a lovely young man might see her differently or might not be a simple pawn in Baird’s chess board. She tapped a thumb to her lip, warning herself to stillness and retrained the impulse. If Baird didn’t see Roman’s thinking mind behind his jaded smirk and his manic giggle, perhaps it was just as well.

Baird had Kendall, or claimed he had, though if she had that boy at the end of her leash she wouldn’t be letting him shimmer off to do fuck all alone in the dark for who knew how long when he should be thinking of the future, loss of the father or no. Kendall held, for the moment, acting CEO and Chairman and she knew Baird wanted Chairman, wanted to be boss again, wanted to scoop the remaining glimmer of Logan’s power and Logan’s legacy in the inner circle for himself before it faded in the wake of the spoiled prince who seemed about to take up the mantle and fumble.

Well, she could have a prince too, in her own way. In her own quiet and different way, have his nascent cleverness, the anchor of his name. Have the heat of his dark eyes and the soft whine of his seeking voice, so eager to say her name. She could keep that much of him anyway, Gerri was already instinctively sure.

*

The stock hovered and sunk, stumbled and held again. Christmas was looming and it was a bad season for the parks but the cruises were up from last year. People were going to see Waystar movies again but the consumer economy was tepid all over. The stock price wasn’t in immediate danger of dropping below the debt trigger one day to the next, but it was a slow creep downward and while Roman and Kenall bickered daily about buying up newspapers and spending their way out of debt with streaming (Kendall), and carving up the company to get rid of the antiquated arms of the company to focus on movies and digital (Roman), and Kenall did a series of carefully manicured, say-nothing, smoothing the waters style interviews about the loss of Logan and his commitment to the company, no firm blueprint for the future emerged.

Baird was away almost all the time in those weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. He was taking all the right meetings with all the right faces, reassuring and glad handing. Brunch with board members, drinks with key shareholders, poker into the night with friends and enemies while pressing the idea that while Kendall was the new-crowned king of Waystar Royco, the boy king had an expert regent who wouldn’t let him rock the boat too violently, who knew Logan’s mind and Logan’s plans and Logan’s loyalties and wouldn’t let them falter in a spray of youthful exuberance and cocaine. Putting the word out that the market could have confidence in the ship of Waystar Royco even though her captain was new, that their pilot was experienced and could keep the even keel.

The message would start to ring hollow if there wasn’t actual governance from the new CEO in a hurry, but full disaster hadn’t rained down on their heads so Gerri assumed that Baird’s campaigning had done some good. It had also done the good of keeping their townhouse very quiet while Gerri flitted in and out of it in the late hours and the early mornings.

A dead CEO and an unconfirmed succession was a legal difficulty of more than usual scale, and the proposed sell-offs, not yet confirmed but seemingly inevitable barring a miracle from unknown direction, meant many more headaches. There were things buried deep, Parks, Cruises, Tabloids being the main culprits, whispers and non-specifics she’d always kept well clear from, but they needed to be shored up against in case selling them off or shutting them down broke something open. Waystar was not a rotting, derelict corpse of a house, but it was like one of those money sucking country manors like Lady Caroline’s family laid claim to, fine facade and gravel drive and the rolls and the bently and a hundred years or more of fine loot glittering in the parlors but behind the public face, worm-eaten and sagging, with the dry rot and the rising damp and the rain coming in at the roof and birds nesting in the chimneys. In short, a mess. Logan had always lacked focus, for all that discipline was his credo and his whip. He’d built and built and the market had let him because he was a power house and filthy rich and he could shout you up to the heavens with visions of glory just as easily as he could torment his staff, but he’d never been willing to prune, and horribly reluctant to admit defeat on ventures that only served his vanity instead of the entity of the company.

They were supposed to have had at least another few years while Logan made both Kenall and the company ready to hand over. Though Gerri doubted how much making ready would actually have happened in those intervening years, given how little had happened to prepare in the previous five – Logan had certainly never believed he was mortal or that he had a worthy heir – but the upper echelons would still have had time to put their own transition plans in place for the eventually of Logan’s death or his forcible removal in the event of coup or incapacity. Gerri had never worked such long and thankless hours. That was saying something on top of the demanding career she’d had thus far.

As peculiar as it was to say, the weekend of the funeral in Scotland had been like some kind of quiet dream. The calm in the center of the storm, a few rainy days in a picturesque castle laying Logan to rest, and unwittingly winning Roman’s trust. She thought often, not often but in rare unoccupied moments, of the mournful wistfulness softening the perpetual veneer of sarcasm across his pale, stricken face.

She knew she hadn’t imagined it. He’d turned that look on her again in the weeks since, in fleeting moments he found to be at her elbow as they shifted from one meeting to the next. The boy wasn’t subtle, though he was surprisingly good at picking his moments to flash her that heavy eyed questioning unobserved. A father like Logan and a school like St. Andrews was probably good for training up furtiveness in even a rich man, if his mind was fleet enough to adapt. That’s the bare impression she’d had of him, a fleeting creature, sneaky and sly. She’d accepted it as untrustworthiness at a surface glance years ago, but she understood now, with the furiously earnest, half-trained flailing at the job before him clearly on display that what he was hiding wasn’t a lack of will or a shiftlessness. She was curious. What he would do. What he could bring to the table. How willing he would be to reach for her, specifically.

Had he remembered that she had a husband, she wondered? Or had the sober light of business day in New York given him pause?

Gerri didn’t ask herself what she was willing to give him. She didn’t ask herself how far she was willing or able to forget she had a husband. These questions didn’t matter if Roman wasn’t ever going to do more than sniff vaguely around her. Hadn’t mattered with the men who had done more, had asked for more, had grabbed, or more promisingly had tried in fact to court her in their stumbling, posturing, corporate alpha ways, because it had never occurred to her that anything being offered would be worth her time and risk, or anything but a shrug or a disgusted telling off. But then they’d all looked at her like she was a probability, like another thing they wanted to acquire, all pleasure seeking and arrogance. She’d never had a pretty young vile imp staring at her over earnings reports and exit clause tallies like she was the most interesting, most attractive person he’d ever seen.

Just that would be enough, she thought. That and the work that was, despite the precipitous drop that loomed ahead, threatening, despite the loss that people around her felt, the most thrillingly satisfying period of tension and risk of her working life. Almost as much tension and risk as working for Logan directly, yet without the shouting and the humiliation rituals. If Frank and Baird could lead Kendall to some kind of resolution, it would be the greatest triumph the team had ever had. Gerri headed into the Christmas season alight with adrenaline. She rang with it, with the hunger for success, with hunger for Baird’s machinations to sweep gratitude up to their door, and most distractingly for Roman’s attention to continue just this way, tripping over his own tremulous eagerness in her wake.

Then Estella and Julia washed up home for the holiday break, coaxing Baird back from his ranging ways, the habit of the unified front before their children reasserting itself. And Baird was easier with them than she was, Gerri reminded herself, the benevolent paternal who was only rarely called to be the final enforcer of the rules and was therefore blissfully outside the squabbling of two daughters and their mother in the petty arguments of adolescence.

Kendall, still precariously Acting CEO but apparently unaware that his power or judgment could be contested, took his siblings and a private jet to Lady Collingwood’s on the 20th while leaving the other working executives behind at home and the whole fever-pitched headlong rush started to stumble. Kendall was determined to improve upon his father’s legacy of company morale by not dragging the rest of Waystar along under the carrot and the stick to the family Christmas, but the company wasn’t in a position to simply shut up shop for a week and a half. Not that Gerri believed the Roy kids would last that long under Caroline’s hostessing and rigid idea of a traditional holiday, she was sure they’d all be home before new years, though none of them admitted it. All of that meant that Gerri spent most of the first two evenings that her daughters were home, and many more of them after the holiday, shut up in the guest bedroom conducting conference calls with England and elsewhere into the night, with no clear idea when it would lighten up.

Estella glared at her for her shirking of their company while Baird tried to draw Julia into conversation, or into any activity away from texting on her phone. Baird was back beside her in their large bed instead of on one of his trips, or out wherever he stayed after his poker nights, frowning and mumbling and huffing in his sleep in the way she’d long been used to but now woke and chafed at her in the night. A small sign of something shifting in the balance.

The second day the girls were home, Gerri managed to make a window to take them out for an afternoon of christmas shopping among the crush of holiday shoppers, and for lattes and pastries at some trendy coffee shop. She wound up playing referee between them, as she so often did once Julia entered puberty, but it was a partial truce. More peace than she had expected. Estella had taken up a gently patronizing attitude to her younger sister, a kind of embracing nostalgia about her sister’s boarding school days now that she, Estella, was in her second year in college, living on her own and with one foot into adulthood. Julia was happy enough under the attention from her older sister and hero that she hadn’t yet remembered that she usually rebelled at being treated as a kid instead of a nearly-adult herself.

The night involved a joint conference call with Hong Kong to mop up the contract business that Logan grabbed as a ruse and then hadn’t taken care of in the process of not surviving his ill-fated trip, which meant that Gerri was stuck on the phone until an absurd hour of the night. She was tired when she hung up, and peering out the guest room door, down the length of the upstairs hall she could see that the whole town house was dark and asleep.

The weight of the sleeping house was greater than the solitary quiet of the nights of the last few weeks, while Gerri found herself abandoned to Baird’s campaigning. Husband and daughters were tucked up in their beds and had changed something in the air of the place like a thickening of the atmosphere. Gerri hesitated and then quietly closed the door. She got ready for bed in the guest en suite and slipped between the clean but slightly still cold sheets of the taut spare room bed in only the slip she’d worn under her seasonal emerald green sweater dress.

The christmas break, or for pseudo break for Gerri and occasionally Baird, ground on. Snow and sleet closed in around New York and the days were short and dark. The household staff bustled around the townhouse putting up champagne colored fairy lights and evergreen boughs over the mantle pieces and door lintels. Stel and Jules had their first fight over a sweater borrowed without permission. Gerri moved pairs of pajamas and toiletries into the guest bedroom and en suite – in case of further late nights, she would have told Baird if he had been hanging around to notice, but he was ensconced in his own office, fielding his own calls with both the Waystar team in town, and Kendall in England. Gerri had begun to wonder why it was that Baird had an office in their house and she found herself working out of the bedroom when she was home from the office on putative break.

It was Christmas Even when Roman called her. He caught her when she’d stolen away for her own brief and annoyingly last minute Christmas shopping in the morning, for the traditional little trinkets not delegated to the assistant that she picked for the girls each year. She ducked into a corner of the boutique behind a rack of hand painted silk scarves, away from the other patrons. She could see that it was Roman’s number not Kendall’s but that didn’t rule out another work debacle.

“Since you are calling the company lawyer on christmas eve, I’m going to assume either one of you has murdered another of you, or Kendall wants to buy another news network and you want to head him off at the pass.”

“Neither of those,” said Roman, “Well, I guess the first one might still happen, as we’re all out here with guns wounding pigeons. Who knows what could happen if someone’s shooting goes wide.”

“Pigeons?”

“Quails, partridges, I don’t fucking know, small defenceless feathered things bred for my mother and my new uncle William and his dorky friends to shoot out of the sky.”

“And you don’t approve. What, of shooting defenseless birds? Or Lady Collingwood’s gentleman friend? Either way I can’t do anything about it from here.”

“I know that, Ger, I just wanted to– I don’t know. I snuck away because I was freezing my balls off on that hillside and the guns banging away were giving me a giant headache. I’m hiding in the glass house.”

“Uh-huh.” Gerri had no idea why he was calling, no idea what to try to draw out of him in the pause that hung there in silent anticipation. She was glad to hear his voice though, almost relieved. Roman sounded hushed and rushed and boyish, surprisingly intimate. He’d snuck away to call her. But she didn’t know what he wanted and she wasn’t going to guess.

“Shiv brought Nate and he and Kendall went out partying the last couple nights, not that there’s any trouble to get into in armpit-asshole middle of nowhere England, but they’re trying. Or Ken brought shit. So uh, fair warning he’s not so on the wagon anymore.”

“Well, shit. You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I know what Ken looks like on the comedown, and that’s. You know, how it’s been going. Plus Rava looks fucking pissed. He’s got his fucking kid with him, for Christmas at Grandmama’s. It’s grim.”

“Okay. Given how he’s got us running in circles lately, this is not entirely unsurprising. It’s important this gets contained, are you up to that Roman?”

“I mean, yeah, it’s basically been my fucking job to try to get a handle on Ken’s shit like this since whenever I got back from school and got clued in. There’s like, a human limit to what even I, brother and savior, can do to contain whatever meltdown he goes on so that’s… yeah.”

“Maybe it’s the holiday,” Gerri offered gently, let down by the unhappy turn the conversation had taken, and by the precarious reality it presented about their new CEO, but touched that Roman was sharing all this with her so easily. With such a plaintively confessing tone. “First Christmas since Logan. It’s really only been a month and a half. You’re all shaken.”

“Yeah,” Roman agreed softly, and then sighed audibly over the line, “Yeah. Maybe it is just the holiday.”

“Are you going to talk to him about it?”

“Do you think I should? You don’t think it’d piss him off and make it worse?”

“I think you should trust your judgment, Roman. You certainly know your brother’s inclinations better than I do.”

“Yeah, I mean probably,” said Roman with a bitter laugh, “Just about. If anyone can.”

“Is that why you called me? For the warning?”

“No I uh… I wanted to talk to someone sane and who I’m not related to for a minute, I guess.”

“Oh.”

“Look, can I call you? Later, I mean. Can I keep calling you? I promise I won’t fuck up the timezones. I just. I, you know.”

“No, Roman I don’t. What do you just?”

“I want to talk to you,” he said in an urgent rush, tremulous, “I want to keep talking to you. Let’s be a team, Gerri.”

“What kind of a team do you mean, Roman? Just to be clear.”

“A sane one. An anti-panicking team in the face of Kendall Waystar insanity meltdown. Team secretly sane, what do you say?”

“It’s an idea not without merit,” she acknowledged wryly. “Okay. Tentatively, okay. You can keep calling me. But you better not abuse the privilege or I’ll make you regret it.”

“Promises, promises”

*

The second time Roman called her it was 11pm on boxing day, which meant that it was four in the morning in England. Gerri was getting ready for bed in the master bedroom, around Baird’s own night time puttering, when her mobile went off on the bedside table. She exchanged a glance with Baird and then waited for his Blackberry to ring as well, which it didn’t, indicating it was not – probably – a harrowing and immediate work crisis. Gerri took the phone and after seeing who it was, answered as she slipped away to the guest room. She was sure that whatever Roman had to say she wasn’t likely to want to have the conversation in front of her husband.

“So we may need to change the team name,” said Roman when she answered, forgoing any greetings, “Because I’m pretty sure I’m no longer fucking sane.”

“That one was always debateable,” agreed Gerri.

“Ugh, you’re so mean, it’s so fucking hot,” said Roman in a fervent whine and Gerri revised the number of drinks she guessed he’d had significantly upwards.

“So that’s what does it for you. After the things I’d heard I had wondered?”

“Oooh, Gerri, you wondered about me?”

“Why are you calling me at 4am, Roman?”

“Shit, it’s four am there? I can’t have fucked up the time difference that much, right?”

“It’s 11 here. It’s four in the morning where you are. Were you unaware?”

“I guess. Last I checked it was two. It’s been… completely Roy variety shitfucked. But hey, we made it through Christmas dinner before blowing up which I did not have my money on.”

“Me, too. Holidays are a powder keg.”

“You too, huh?”

“Well…”

“How old are your daughters now, anyway? They must be, shit, in high school right? Fun age.”

“The younger one is, yes. I’m amazed you remember. I didn’t think you’d taken an interest back then.”

“Yeah well. No offense but when you’re a teenager, a couple of elementary schoolers hold, like, zero interest. But I am aware you’ve got your own you know, home whatever. I know you’re not just an advanced contract robot that we keep in an office cupboard.”

“How… flattering.”

“Sure. But I mean, that’s the thing, I’ve been thinking about it. Wondering. You’re married, Gerri.”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“You’re a married woman.”

“Yes….?”

“So why are you flirting with me?” Roman asked, finally, his tone shifting entirely from insouciant to perilously intense. He was plaintive. He was earnest, and in his cups. “You’ve been nice to me, you’ve been… looking at me. You’ve been letting me drool over you, which, fantastic, truly, but the thing is, you’ve been flirting back.”

“No I have not,” she said flatly, unnerved. She’d been waiting, she’d even been hoping Roman would do something, say something to show his interest, prove just how much he’d taken notice of her. But now that he had, framed in that way, not to wheedle, not to play, but asking her flat out like he was asking her for something. On only the grounds of a little spark and an almost-dinner and a month of stolen glances like he was going to throw her in at the deep end of she didn’t know what. It left her wrong footed, rooted with trepidation. “That’s not the kind of thing I would do, Roman,” she added, moderating slightly.

“Ugh, fuck, you think I’m dumb or something? I know it’s not something you’d do. But you are. And I can’t stop thinking about it. Even though I’m over here at Mom’s doing Happy bloody Christmas stuffed with enough passive aggressive tension to power Midtown. I mean, it’s great, it’s the best thing to– but what could you possibly… I mean, with me? Really? So I just wanted to ask, because I’m drunk and stupid enough to…”

“Roman,” she said softly. Even she couldn’t tell if she was sympathizing or forestalling. She settled on the edge of the bed and began pinching a crease in the smooth linen of the holiday green duvet cover with a nerve-wracked intensity. Her heart was pounding. She could picture his sad, hopeful eyes boring into her from all the way over the atlantic. What does he want from me, Gerri thought, This isn’t how this game is played, he should know that. Though, if rumor was to be believed, he hadn’t played these games before, had he. “Roman, it’s very late and it’s the day after christmas,” she began again, “It’s emotionally taxing, it’s bound to be. I think you’re all churned up, and this isn’t the time to have this conversation.”

Roman scoffed bitterly. “Oh yeah, and when would be good, can your secretary pencil me in some afternoon to have a talk about if we’re going to fuck or you’re just fucking with me in between panic meetings about the listing ship and the leaking bilgewater of past scandals sticking to us? Would that be better instead?”

“I don’t know, are you going to be a fucking drunken ass in that conversation, too?”

“Fuck. This was a mistake,” he said in a breathy rush of dismissal, “Just, never mind, okay. Never mind the whole thing.”

“Wait, Roman,” she cut in, with a sinking feeling that he meant ‘never mind’ about more than just this conversation, his question. With everything going on, it wasn’t unfair of him to want to know where he stood with her, Gerri was intellectually aware of that. She’d never been accused of being overly sympathetic but it felt unduly cruel to Roman, like she was kicking him when he was already down. She just didn’t have anything coherent to answer him. She hadn’t figured it out herself.

“What, Gerri?” he asked after a pause. He sounded exhausted. “Wait for what? What do you want from me?”

“I… I want you to slow down,” she said at last, her hand came up to play with the buttons of her blouse. It was still mostly open and untucked from when she’d been interrupted getting ready for bed. She wondered, despite everything, how much of an explosion it would cause if she told him she was talking to him half undressed and barefoot. “Just because a woman doesn’t react with disgust to your adolescent panting and staring doesn’t mean you need to rush into… negotiating exact terms.”

“Okay,” he said, sounding deflated. But then he seemed to gather himself and said more brightly, “Okay, Gerri, but in inexact terms, how far does this not-disgust of yours go?”

“You’re relentless,” she said with an unexpected laugh. “It would be fair to say… I don’t do things I don’t want to do. Not this arena. Not even to flatter a Roy. That’s my answer to your question.”

“I guess I can believe that,” he acknowledged slowly, though he still sounded bewildered. “But how far is that, again?”

“Parse it out when you’re sober, Roman. Good night.”

She hung up on him before he could keep digging and prodding and tossed the Blackberry over to the foot of the bed. Of course he was going to complicate matters, of course he was. He was Roman, he never came from the angle you expected. He was fascinating but so very difficult.

Gerri slowly lay back on the guest bed and considered staying where she was, and again telling Baird in the morning that she’d stayed up with a work call and hadn’t wanted to disturb him. She also considered why she hadn’t embraced Roman’s impulse to dismiss whatever was brewing between them and save them both all the trouble, with no very satisfying conclusion. Roman was drinking and brooding over her already, she thought, tucking her arm tight around her ribs in phantom embrace, this was either going to be very good or very, cataclysmically bad, but she knew she’d already decided to spool it out and see where it went.

*