The Humanity Project (34 page)

The bells chimed, the questions seemed to drop through the top of her head one at a time, like something heavy and silver. Did she need to build an authentic spiritual self? Did anyone else care? Did she? Why fight against her every instinct and impulse, bend herself into some impossible and hobbled shape, hold herself back with every step?

The bells stopped chiming. She put the questions aside,
all right,
because there was work to do, and anyway, it seemed a little silly that she’d taken so long to even ask them.

Meanwhile, there were calls from one of the local television stations, and from the bookseller who was handling the sale of the famous author’s books at the lecture. A freelance investment broker had set up his own table and was handing out flyers and had to be shooed away. Mrs. Foster went home for an afternoon nap before the dinner. Conner opened the car door for her, and Leslie Hart, wearing her peculiar hat over her peculiar hair once more, hovered nearby. Maybe it really was a wig, maybe Leslie had cancer and Christie should feel sorry for her. But she didn’t, she wouldn’t. It felt exhilarating not to.

In the lull between the last sessions ending and the evening events, Christie and Imelda supervised the setting out of tables and chairs, inspected the kitchen, double-checked with the caterer, with the media escort who would deliver the famous author, then sat with their shoes off and their feet up in the ladies’ lounge, drinking sodas.

Imelda called home, cooed to her baby, instructed and reinstructed her husband. “He sucks at child care,” she announced, hanging up. “He wants a kid who can go to the refrigerator and get him a beer. Can I ask you a dumb question? What does it mean, ‘The Humanity Project’?”

“It’s an initiative to help, ah, people. Determine their material, social, and moral needs and how best to meet them.” She’d helped write this stuff, and now it hurt her ears. “To help us be more comprehensively human.”

“What would people act like instead, angels? By the way, His Famousness is big on angels. Expect to hear a lot about the spirits that walk among us.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Listen to you, all snarky! Girl!”

“Snark,” Christie said. “Snark walks among us.”

Maybe she was just tired. Or maybe she had been tired for a long time. Well, she was going to be tired for a while longer. The conference attendees were drifting back, thirty hopeful minutes early for the cocktail reception, milling around outside the doors. Racks of glassware bumped into walls, ice cubes rattled, something heavy landed on the floor. But then the doors opened, and the guests found their way among the tables to the drinks and the serving platters of bruschetta and mini-quiches and vegetarian spring rolls. At the far end of the room, other servers were busy setting out pans of food for the buffet, surely too early if they had to sit for another forty minutes. Christie added food poisoning to her list of things to worry about.

“Hello there!”

She turned to see Mr. Kirn, wineglass in hand, smiling fondly at her. He was dressed in his usual lawyer’s full-dress uniform, and a faint scent of barbering rose from his pink, well-tended face. “How’s it going? It looks like everyone’s enjoying themselves.”

“I hope they are. So far, so good.” She was relieved to see him. He was going to sit at the head table with Mrs. Foster and the famous author and keep the conversation from straying into unpleasant areas. “As long as our main speaker shows up on schedule.”

“He’ll be here. He’s not one to miss out on television coverage.” Mr. Kirn pointed to the camera crew setting up in one corner.

“I should go check the sound system.” She was having trouble standing still for more than two minutes without fretting.

“Could you spare me a moment? I’d really appreciate it.” Mr. Kirn took hold of her arm with his free hand and steered her toward one of the windows looking out on the terrace. She had to admire the way he always got his way, even as it irritated her. Once they reached a corner out of the traffic pattern he said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t offer to get you a drink.”

“Thank you, I’m fine for now.” His oily manners. She could get her own drink.

“This is really amazing. Everything you’ve done here.” He nodded at the room, the sociable crowd. He seemed to want to commend her as well for the beautiful parquet flooring, the massive hearth, the general excellence of the setting.

“Thank you. I had a lot of help.” Waiting. What did he want? She had things to do.

Mr. Kirn smiled. Christie found herself fascinated by his white, fortunate teeth. What care, and how many resources, had gone into that smile. How many dental professionals had labored over it while Mr. Kirn lay back in the dentist’s chair, mouth agape. His flossing habits were excellent, his X-rays without flaw. Never once had he worried about cavities, impactions, gingivitis, halitosis. His teeth were a perfect instrument of mastication, the front line of digestion. There was nothing he could not engulf and devour. After the examination he shook hands with the dentist, thanked the hygienist in a way that made her blush, then went about his business, on good terms with all he surveyed. Christie became aware that he was speaking, and that she had not been paying attention: “. . . entirely too modest. It’s just like you, not to take all the credit you deserve.”

“It is?” she said stupidly. It confused her that he was speaking about her as if she were someone he knew particularly well.

“I don’t think you realize your own power. The effect you have on other people.”

She was attempting to connect the notion of “power” with anything about her, she was thinking,
Aw crap,
first Art, now this, but Mr. Kirn’s voice had turned husky and urgent, startling her in a different way. “When I first met you, I’m afraid I didn’t take you that seriously. You were in so far over your head.”

Was she supposed to agree? Demur? She didn’t like that phrase “in over your head.” It made you sound as if you’d ignored a No Swimming sign.

“But by God if you didn’t just keep going, working hard and letting your faith in the basic decency of people carry you through.”

“I’m not sure I really have that, you know? Faith in people’s basic whatchamacallit. Decency.”

“I have to tell you, all my smart, cynical, self-serving attitudes began to seem so . . . unclean.”

She wanted to say that “unclean” was the last thing that came to mind when one thought of him. But Mr. Kirn was hurrying his speech now, fumbling his way through, words and whole ideas dropping off the edge of his agitation. “Because of your example . . . your, may I say, purity? Yes, purity of motive. Your, what this whole conference is about. Personal virtue. I feel like, who is it in
Hamlet
? ‘Thou turnst mine eyes into my very soul, and there I see such black and grained spots . . .’”

“Mr. Kirn, I can’t imagine you’ve ever done anything that terrible.” At least, she didn’t want to imagine it, and if he had, she didn’t want to know.

Mr. Kirn shook his head. “There have been occasions . . . I have not always been worthy of the trust placed in me.”

Oh please, she begged silently. No more. But he staggered on. “My own arrogance. My own stupid greed . . .”

What was he mumbling about, had he stolen money? Had he stolen from the Foundation? Why was he telling her this? Was she supposed to call somebody? Make a citizen’s arrest?

He seemed to catch himself then, recovering his professional caution. “But never mind any of that. It’s nothing that can’t be set to rights. Because you would want me to make it right. You are my, I know how it sounds, so trite, my polestar.” Mr. Kirn squared his shoulders and held out his free hand. “So no matter what happens from this point on, I want you to know and believe that you’ve been a profound influence in my life, and a force for good.” Christie extended her own hand, and they shook. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He hurried away and Christie lost sight of him in the crowd.

She was not a repository of personal virtue. She was not pure of motive. She didn’t even especially
like
Mr. Kirn, either the old, crass version or this new, ranting one.

She went to the bar table and picked up two glasses of wine, one for each hand, and drank them in quick sequence. Across the room, Imelda was waving at her, semaphore-style, as if she were trying to signal a ship at sea. Christie put the empty glasses down and went to join her. The alcohol made her feel ever so slightly brain-damaged, slow and blurry.

“He’s here,” Imelda told her, once she’d come into hailing distance. “Mr. Higher Wisdom.”

At the entrance to the room was a small crowd of excited people, and video cameras held aloft. The crowd parted enough for Christie to view the figure at its center. “Wow, he’s short!”

It was true. She recognized the massive shoulders, the craggy face, the white hair and stern black eyebrows, from the book jackets. But this edifice was balanced on top of a runty bottom half.

“It’s because of those feet of clay,” Imelda said. “So how about I introduce you before I leave.” Imelda was going home to tend to her baby. She peered more closely at Christie. “You OK? You look a little, I don’t know, cross-eyed.”

“I’m fine. My strength is the strength of ten because my heart is pure.”

She waited in line and was duly presented. The great man clasped her hand in both of his and gave her his trademark searching, bullshit look. The pale and dolly-like mistress drifted in his wake. She did have peculiar hair, crinkled and nearly colorless. What did they see in each other? What did anyone ever see in anyone? It was a mystery. She was happy to keep it that way.

Christie put one of the office staff in charge of fetching them drinks and leading them to their table. Mrs. Foster and Leslie Hart were just now coming in from outside, and she went to meet them. “Is that him over there?” Mrs. Foster asked. “Is that why everybody’s milling around and rubbernecking?”

“Mom, chill,” Leslie Hart said. “Try not to say anything too awful to him.” She rolled her eyes at Christie, to indicate that awful things had already been said, or at least rehearsed.

“And that’s the—what do they call such people these days? The girlfriend?” Mrs. Foster sniffed. “Surely she’s up past her bedtime.”

“You don’t have to talk to her, Mom. In fact it’s better you don’t.”

Christie smiled. She didn’t much care who fought with whom. She had already checked out, in some sense, and was done with worrying, and with worrying about worrying. The wine had turned her good-humored. If people decided to make faces, or hit each other with their shoes, well, that would be interesting. She steered Mrs. Foster and Leslie to the head table. Mr. Kirn was already there, once more his smoothio self, smiling as he stood to greet them. Had she hallucinated everything he’d said earlier? Had he always had his secret yearnings, so well concealed? The famous author and the pallid girlfriend were advancing from another direction, trailing a crowd of admirers. Christie dispatched a waiter to their table and left everyone to sort it out for themselves. Then she stopped by the bar table for another glass of wine.

Some of the attendees decided that dinner must be ready, and lined up to get their plates.

Christie saw Conner come in at the door and look around for Mrs. Foster. Then, once he’d located her, he strolled around to the back side of the food tables, procured a plate, and, managing to avoid the entire line thing, filled it from the different foods and retreated to a corner to eat, standing up. He moved with such slouching grace, even as he was trying to evade attention. Most of it was youth, of course. Bye-bye, she said to Youth, waving from across the abyss.

It was hard to tell how things might be going at the head table. The two men, the author and Mr. Kirn, appeared to be engaged in some agreeable conversation, while Mrs. Foster, Leslie Hart, and the girlfriend each looked off in different directions. Then waiters arrived with their wine, salads, entrées, and those who were in a bad humor already were able to feel bad-humored about the food. Mr. Kirn spotted Christie across the room, nodded and raised his glass to her.

Polestar? Who wanted to be a polestar?

She decided it would be nice to be an engineer, somebody who worked with blueprints, steel, equations, building bridges or roads. It was possible to build a better bridge. But how did you go about building a better human?

Most of the guests were seated by now. Christie was thinking she might have to eat something herself, as well as locate the introduction she had prepared for the famous author, several painstakingly typed sheets that she could not remember having seen lately. But then a new commotion announced itself at the room’s entrance.

A dozen or so people stood in the doorway, and Christie, craning her neck to see, was at first unable to make them out, or determine who they might be. Three of them—a man, a woman, and a little boy—were Mexican or Guatemalan, short, dark, watchful. The rest were ordinary-looking men dressed in army surplus jackets, knit caps, different flapping layers. They seemed stuck in the doorway, neither advancing nor retreating. Then a young man with a furry chin and an untidy head of dark hair stepped forward, his voice loud and shaky with self-importance.

“May I have your attention, kind ladies and gentlemen! I hope you’re enjoying yourselves this evening, this lovely evening, in this lovely spot, and that you’ve had some really great discussions, you know, theoretical-type discussions about pressing social issues and all, and I sure hope you got your money’s worth. But meanwhile, I’m here to ask if you’re willing to share your actual food with actual hungry people.”

The young man raised an arm to indicate the group in the doorway, who seemed to have shrunk together, timidly staring.

The camera crew and the other journalists, who had been lounging around in the back of the room eating sandwiches, came to attention.

Silence, and then the occasional voice, rising in whispers and questions, and everybody looking around the room to see what was going to happen next, and then Christie, unhurried, walked up to him. “Hi, Scottie.”