THE GLASS FLOOR

On the forty-first floor of the Draycott Meridian Tower there was a room that no one but Callum had ever entered without being told to take off their shoes.

It had been built eight years earlier for a purpose he had never explained, and it had never been used. The architects had called it the Observatory. The board had called it a liability. It was a square chamber, forty feet to a side, walled on three sides with plain black panels and on the fourth with a single sheet of curved glass that looked out over Midtown. And the floor, the whole floor, every inch of it, was glass.

Not tinted. Not frosted. Clear structural glass, three layers thick, laminated with a film of polymer so transparent that, standing at the door, a man had the distinct and physical sensation of looking down through the soles of his feet into the exhaust-colored dark of Park Avenue, five hundred and seventy feet below, where the taxis moved like drops of molten brass.

He had put it in for himself.

It was the sort of thing he did. Some men bought boats; he built rooms in which, a few times a year, in the dead hours, he could stand at the center of a plate of glass above a drop that would kill him, and feel the old sensation arrive. Not fear. He had never once felt fear there. Only the memory of fear, like a phantom limb: the faint, patient ache where something had been.

It had not helped. It had never helped. But he'd gone on standing there.

…

She came at ten o'clock on a Friday night in the middle of November, in a coat the color of wet slate, with her hair down.

He was watching her on the monitor in Margaux's office, as he had told himself he would not. The private elevator had delivered her to the forty-first floor. She stood a moment on the black marble apron, looking at the door of the Observatory. She glanced at the discreet brass plaque, which said only SHOES, and then she bent and, one foot at a time, removed hers.

She hadn't been told to. He had written remove footwear on the card, in plain type. But she did it with a small, private smile that the camera caught from above, and when she straightened she was barefoot, in a gray silk slip dress that showed the bones of her shoulders, and she pushed open the door with her elbow and walked in as if she were stepping into a lake.

"Report," said Callum.

"She's late," said Margaux, at his shoulder. "By four minutes."

"She's never late."

"She stopped at a pharmacy on the way."

"Which?"

"The Duane Reade on Fifty-Sixth. She was inside for eleven minutes. The clerk says she bought lip balm and a packet of mints." Margaux's face revealed nothing. "She paid in cash."

Lip balm. Mints. He filed it, with the other things.

On the monitor Win stood just inside the door. She had stopped, he saw, and he saw the exact instant at which she looked down. The camera was positioned beneath the ceiling, so he could not see her face, only the crown of her head, the line of her neck, the pale clean curve of her back. But he saw her shoulders rise. He saw her draw a breath that took a long, long time.

Then she began to walk.

…

He had told her to come to the center and wait.

He had meant it as a test. It was a long way from the door to the middle of the room, twenty feet, and every step of it was across a drop of five hundred and seventy feet with nothing underneath her but three inches of laminated glass and the opinion of a Swiss engineer. He had built the rest of the game out of the old chestnuts, the ones that had worked on seven women: the breathless stillness, the trembling arms, the half-sob, the eventual, abject, beautiful moment in which the guest turned to the host with wet eyes and said please.

He wanted to see her do that.

He wanted to see her do that more than he had wanted anything in eleven years, and he did not entirely know why.

She did not tremble. She walked as she had walked the terrace, with her chin up, one bare foot in front of the other, her toes curling very slightly on the clear surface. The city lights rose around her like phosphorescence in dark water. At the center of the room she stopped, and turned, and looked straight up at the camera in the ceiling, as if she had known exactly where it was.

She waved.

"Oh, for God's sake," said Margaux, very softly.

Callum got up.

…

He went down the corridor and through the door and stopped at the edge of the glass. He had his shoes on. He always did. It was a rule he had made for himself and told no one: that on this one floor, in this one room, he would keep something between his skin and the drop.

She was dancing.

It was nothing formal, nothing he could have named. She had no music. She stood at the exact center of the Observatory in her gray silk with her arms loose at her sides, and she was turning, slowly, on the balls of her feet, with her head tipped back and her eyes closed and her hair swinging. Below her feet, five hundred and seventy feet down, the whole bright glittering mechanism of the city ran on its wheels. Above her head, the black ceiling. She was a small gray figure suspended over an abyss, and she was humming.

"What is that?" said Callum.

He had meant to say her name. It came out otherwise.

She opened her eyes. She smiled at him over her shoulder, wide and delighted and unguarded, with the flush high on her cheekbones that he had come to know the shape of.

"It's 'La Vie en Rose.' My mother used to hum it when she did the dishes. Badly." She stretched out one foot and pointed her toe over the drop. "Did you know you can see the Chrysler Building from here? It's very small. It looks like a lamp."

"Come here."

"You said to wait at the center."

"I'm revising the rules."

"That's against clause three."

"I'm the host," said Callum. "I may revise anything."

"I thought the whole point was that you didn't."

"The point," he said, "is that I decide the point."

"Then come and fetch me."

It was only a sentence. Words she might have said to a man across a dance floor in a hotel in 1952. But she said it in the hush of that glass chamber, with the lights of the city flowing beneath her bare feet like a river, and he had a violent and absolutely irrational impulse to refuse. To stay where he was. To stand on the black marble apron with his shoes on and his watch in his fist, and not set one foot on the clear surface of the thing he'd built.

He stepped onto the glass.

…

Nothing happened.

That was what astonished him. He had expected the lurch, the old phantom ache, the thing that had always arrived by the third step. He walked toward her in the dark, across five hundred and seventy feet of nothing, with the monitor lights of Park Avenue blinking up through his reflection, and nothing came. The glass was cold. His own steps rang on it softly. And then he saw her face, tilted up to him with that wide gray look, and the lurch arrived all at once, from the opposite direction.

It was not the drop.

It was her. It was the fact of her, standing there in a silk slip, six weeks into a ninety-day contract, so thin that he could have counted the ribs through the silk, laughing at the thing that had made a man out of him and then taken it away. It was her chin. It was her ankles. It was the way she had turned her head, in the half second before he reached her, to look not at him but at the reflection of the two of them in the black panel on the far wall, as though committing it to memory.

"You're not looking down," she said.

"I'm looking at you."

"That's cheating."

"It's the only strategy I've ever found that works."

She laughed. It was a low, lovely, surprised sound. He took her wrist, lightly, in his right hand, and she let him, and the pulse under his thumb was quick and light and a little uneven. He didn't count it. For the first time that he could remember, he simply held it.

"Look at me," he said. "Not the floor."

"I wasn't looking at the floor."

"You were looking through it."

"It's a very good floor." She tilted her head. "Did you build it for this? Is this what you do? You bring them up here and make them cry?"

"I built it for myself."

"For what?"

He did not answer. She waited. The silence stretched, and a taxi horn sounded very far below, thin and sharp as a bird's cry.

"Ah," said Win quietly. "Clause eleven."

"Clause eleven."

"You keep hiding behind it."

"I wrote it," said Callum, "so there'd be somewhere to hide."

She looked at him for a long moment with her head on one side. The reflection of the city moved in her eyes like something drowned and glittering. And then she did a thing that he had not planned for, in any version of the game, in any of the eleven years: she stepped forward, so close that her bare toes touched the edge of his shoes, and laid her forehead against his chest.

She stood there. She did not embrace him. She simply rested, as a swimmer rests against a pier.

"I'm tired," said Win, into his shirt.

"Then we'll stop."

"No. I don't mean tonight." She breathed out. He felt it, warm, through the cotton. "I mean in general. It's a nice thing, to be tired against somebody."

He didn't move. He didn't know how. The hand holding her wrist had gone slack, and he laid it without thinking on her back, on the cool silk, in the hollow between the shoulder blades, and felt her breathe.

Hum it, he thought stupidly. Hum it again.

She did.

…

It lasted perhaps two minutes. Afterward he tried to find the end of it and could not. At some point the humming stopped; at some point his arm had come fully round her; at some point she had lifted her face and he had kissed her under the unbroken sky of the glass, and the city had gone on turning below them like a slow, brilliant wheel.

It was she who broke away. She did it with a small exhalation, a little shake of the head, and her hand went to her side.

He saw it.

It was a tiny movement. A flick of the fingers, down and to the right, just beneath the lowest rib, as if brushing off a crumb. Her face did not change. But the color left it, all at once, from the forehead down, like water leaving a basin; and her mouth went tight at the corners. Her free hand came up. It closed round his forearm, and he felt the nails go in.

It was gone in under a second.

"Sorry," she said, lightly. "Cramp. I stood up too fast."

"On your side."

"It's a stitch. I've had them since I was a girl."

"Win."

She froze.

It was only the second time he had used her name. He saw it land. He saw her eyes come up to his, wide and dark and instantly, perfectly guarded, a door closing without a sound.

"Clause eleven," said Win.

"I haven't asked anything."

"You were about to."

"I was about to say that you should sit."

"Oh." The smile came back, brilliant and brittle. "Well. In that case, thank you, I will."

She sat down on the glass. She did it with an elegant little collapse of the knees, cross-legged, her skirt pooled round her like water, and put her palms flat on the transparent floor on either side of her and tipped her face up to the black ceiling. He saw her breathe: in, slowly, and out. He saw her lips move.

She was counting.

He knew the shape of it. He had seen it on the face of a boy in a morgue. He had, in the dark hours of a lake in August, done it himself.

Ten. Nine. Eight.

He sat down beside her. He did not touch her. He set his shoes on the glass, and his watch beside them, and he looked, for the first time in his life, straight down.

Five hundred and seventy feet below, the city shone up at him through a layer of cold and clear.

"Do you do that often?" said Win, eyes still closed.

"What?"

"Look down."

"Never."

"How is it?"

He considered the question honestly. The lights flowed along the avenues, red and gold. A bus turned a corner, no larger than a bead.

"Smaller than I thought," said Callum.

"Things usually are."

"Is that a general principle?"

"It's a professional one." Her eyes opened. She smiled at him sideways, tired and fierce and a little sad, and for a moment he saw the whole length of the thing she was carrying, the weight of it, like a coat that was too heavy and too well cut to be taken off. "Most disasters, Mr. Draycott, turn out to be a column of figures. It's only the waiting that's large."

He did not ask what she was waiting for.

He wanted, with a heat that startled him, to ask. It lay on his tongue like a coal. And he thought of the clause, and the line he had drawn with his own hand, and it came to him that for the first time in his life he was sitting in a room he'd built to be alone in and wanted, more than the silence, to be told.

He closed his mouth.

"Ten minutes," said Win, and let her head fall against his shoulder. "Then you can take me home."

"Which home?"

She was quiet for a moment.

"I haven't decided," she said.

…

Margaux was waiting at the end of the corridor.

She had not moved from the doorway of her office. The monitor behind her showed the empty Observatory: the floor of glass, the black walls, nothing in it but two pairs of shoes. In the elevator lobby, the lights for the private car were lit. Win had gone down twenty minutes ago, in the lift, with Anselmo's hand under her elbow and a pallor that Callum had decided not to see.

"May I speak?" said Margaux.

"You usually do."

"She flinched at the left side of the ribs." Margaux's voice was precisely flat. "At 11:06. The camera shows a hand to the right flank. She asked for water at the elevator and took a pill, white, from a compact, with the mints. She did not know I was watching."

"I saw."

"It's a medical matter."

"It's a personal one."

"Mr. Draycott." Margaux took a breath, and when she spoke again it was in the register he had heard from her twice: at his father's funeral, and the night of the Vance collapse. "I'd like to run her. Not the name. The whole record. Insurance, pharmacies, the rest. If there's something wrong with her, I'd like to know before it becomes your problem."

"It won't become my problem."

"It has already become your problem. I've watched you for sixteen years. You looked at her wrist for forty seconds before she took it back."

He did not answer. The fluorescent hum of the corridor ran on.

Medical record. The words sat in his mouth like iron. He thought of the clause. He thought of a woman on a cold floor with her palm against the glass, counting down from ten. He thought of the phrase she had used on the terrace, I price risk for a living, and of a pale band on the third finger of her left hand, and of the way she had said tired, not like a complaint but like a person naming a country.

"Financial only," said Callum.

"Mr. Draycott—"

"Bank records. Credit. Property. The money she has, the money she spent. Nothing medical. No prescriptions, no hospitals, no doctors. Not one line, Margaux. If it touches a chart, you stop."

"And if the money tells me what the chart would?"

"Then you'll tell me about the money."

She looked at him for a long time. He could see her calculating, the exact tolerance of the man she'd worked for since he was twenty-three. At last she bowed her head.

"I'll have it by Monday."

…

It came on Sunday night, in a plain gray folder, delivered to the study at Halcyon by a courier who had driven all the way from the city.

He was alone. The fire was lit, for the first time in three years; he had no idea why. He sat at the walnut desk with the folder open under the green lamp and read it through once, carefully, and again.

It was a short document. There was not much to say.

Subject: W. Callaghan. Age 30. Residence: Cleveland, OH (vacated). Employment: Hartwell Mutual Insurance, six years, senior death-claims adjuster, resigned effective October 15, immediate. Savings account, JPMorgan Chase: $212,600, closed October 15, cashier's check. Engagement ring, sold October 15, $15,000. Fiancé: K. Pruitt, 32. Relationship terminated. No other financial ties. No property. No debts. Vehicle: sold November 2. Apartment lease: terminated, prepaid.

Expenditures since October 15: $11,400 (hotel). $50,000 (Pell fee, cash). $32,600 (boutique). $14,880 (misc.). $93,100 in total. Balance estimated: 140,000.

Assessment: Margaux had written, in the neat flat hand she used for these. Subject has liquidated her entire adult life in thirty-one days. She has no apparent reason. She has told no one. She has paid cash. She does not appear to be planning a future.

He turned the page. There was a last line, set apart, underlined once.

She is spending like a woman who does not expect to be audited.

The fire popped. Somewhere under the floor the old house ticked and settled.

Callum Draycott sat very still, and looked at the sentence. And his right thumb, without his permission, found the lid of the silver watch on the blotter and turned it once, slowly, to the left.

Click.

Four seventeen.