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I’m glad that when I met him, he was doing what he loved most. Fighting, under the impression that others enjoyed fighting too. He believed in the intimacy of a real argument. It showed him how others saw him and the occasional cruelty of which he was capable. He loved the truthful and meaningful, and there’s a rare truth and meaning in the witness of a real rival. He loved bringing the word ‘love’ into conversations where it wasn’t invited.
But first, it’s March, and he hasn’t disappeared yet. After twenty-five years of things rarely going my way, I give up my childish dream of saving people and glumly head down the path of corporate law. I can’t remember my interviewer, except that she’s kind. I’m in a glass room where the sofas are still three meters from each other, and he’s about to come in.
She sighs. “Hey, sorry about this. Do you have headphones? Can you listen to music or something?”
I choose something loud. I want to be honest, and make sure that I can’t possibly react to what happens next.
He’s beautiful in the old way. Tall, thin, easy smile and natural grace, like a cherub venerated on a glass window. He paragons kindness. He looks too boyish to be forty-five, but he embraces the illusion of his youth. I know his age, because we all do. After today, it will break the record for youngest managing partner. When I learn more about him, how he disappears after graduation until Dumbledore finds him working in a shop, I wonder how such a man can disappear in a city like London.
I cannot look away. A few people will tell me, over time, that he can be impatient. I don’t see it, even today. His face is burning with life. He reminds me of an infant who cannot speak yet, hungry to be understood.
He’s persuading her, or so it seems, to stick to the plan.
She says something like, why now?
He might be threatening her.
She says, okay, Bloomberg?
He nods, and she disappears. He looks at me and taps his ear. I pause the music.
“Harry,” he says, “what can I do for you?”
Seeing me speechless is what makes him smile. I don’t believe there was ever enough space inside his jokes to make room for someone else.
“I’m joking, my friend. I just have to check if you have any questions for Tom.”
“Who’s that?”
He smiles and nods once. His third person usage never grows on me, even in the end.
“Ah,” I say intelligently. “Hello, Tom.”
“You do have something prepared, don’t you? I welcome your curiosity. It’s all I will ever ask of you.”
Curiosity. I was curious to begin with, from the second I saw him. I wanted to know him more than I wanted to be close to him.
For now, I ask him why he likes his job. After twenty-five years of things rarely going my way, I have given up on my dream of making the world a better place, as I glumly head down the path of corporate law.
“I like helping people,” he says, “not in the grand sense of saving the world, mind you. But in this office, I get to spend a lot of time helping my friends tackle the little, meaningless things. Do you like helping people?”
“Uh, yes, sure.”
“You look like a kind person. I like being a kind person. I won’t be wrong, will I?”
It’s uncomfortable that he can talk about such a thing in such a sincere register. He should falter, is my strange instinct, he should hesitate before he paints himself so well.
“It strikes me that you want to ask me something else.”
“Oh, how can you tell?”
“By the lack of satisfaction on your face. Why are you holding back?”
I rifle my pockets for something to say, but coming up hands empty, I have to go with the truth. “I didn’t want to offend you.”
“Why should that stop you? I’m on your side, aren’t I?”
“You, uh, why?”
He looks like he’s told himself a joke. “I would say we’re friends.”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you in good time. Now, hurry up and ask me.”
“Fine. I wrote this down last night: as someone with a strong sense of duty, it matters to me that I’m contributing to people around me.”
“Is that a question?”
I go on bravely. “I was just wondering, what do you do for people?”
He frowns comically wide. “Me? Or the firm?”
“Lawyers like you. What’s the point of someone like you?”
His mouth parts as he frowns.“Well, do you know what I think? I think that you’re a man who needs to believe in a thing.”
The trick about understanding the man is a trick of projection. If he gives me feedback about how I should treat other people, I take it as another suggestion for how to treat him. If he observes a quirk of someone else, I stay vigilant of the extent to which he is talking about himself, even when it seems unlikely, even when other people are explicitly named. It was particularly potent when he wanted to talk about me. I like to think that it’s intentional, that it’s his special way of giving me more details from the secret that might be his identity. I don’t like to think that he can’t do a thing.
He rubs his face with both hands, as if washing the fatigue from his skin. I remember how it startles me, that he can play the role of someone fatally charming, and dispose of his vividness with a gesture.
“It keeps me up at night,” he says.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your question. I think about it a lot lately.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Sometimes,” he smiles, “I wonder if I’m not cut out for this.”
The claim hangs in the air like a question that is meant to be answered, but perhaps not by me. Maybe he means it, but it isn’t useful for me to look back on these rueful things and feel the weight of them in my hand, like a pebble. Even if he does, I think he wants to use it as a test. What will Harry do?
I open my mouth to deny it, but he raises his hand, because why would he want me to answer it, anyway?
“You can relate, I’m sure, being as young as you are. You know, regardless of what happens today, I want you to tell yourself that you’ve done a very good job. Can you do that for me?”
His voice is overwhelmingly gentle. I’m suspicious that he’s going to give up on me.
“I’ll do that,” I say quietly.
“Still, it’s interesting that you should say it today, isn’t it? You’ve come to me at the dawn of a new age.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Which part, Harry?”
“Never mind.”
“To everything there is a season. Are you religious? I don’t suppose you are.”
“I’m not too sure.”
“Well, then. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. Do you like Hamlet?”
“No.”
“Have you read it?”
“I’ve seen it. I thought he was whiny.”
I’m not prepared for the shock of what his laugh sounds like. It’s sonorous and deep, and touches something unreachable in my chest.
“It was nice to talk to you,” he says, “I’ll call you later to let you know.”
“Let me know what?”
But then, he’s gone. I’m back in the lobby, waiting for a phone call. I look through a magazine so that I have something to hold. Five women in a garden are wearing long white dresses. The woman in the centre, distant and radiant, looks like Ginny. When we were at school, she was rarely in the centre of the crowd and I loved her for it. The night I really met her, we were both retreating from a party to watch it die down from a distance.
By the time I meet Tom, I had already become less afraid of my own strangeness, and still, I loved him that he made me stranger. I wonder if she has decided on her dress yet. I leave the magazine open on the coffee table, so other people might see this version of her. A month later, I’ll look at the same table again and remember how there were no newspapers that day.
I know now, of course, that Tom thinks I was talking about the scandal. I won’t know this until I look at my phone on the way back, by which point, it will be too late to matter.
The phone rings.
“Harry,” is all he says.
I can tell that I made it because his tone is as real as it can be. He struggles with being the bearer of bad news, the same way that he can’t wait out the arc of a sad film or story.
Later, in my first week of training, I mention to Draco how my original interviewer leaves before her time is up. And he says immediately,
“Then she was busy stabbing Caesar, wasn’t she?”
Caesar, then, is Dumbledore: the managing partner, thrown out of his role for a scandal that starts before his stint. Perhaps Tom hires me as an apology for sending my interviewer away to leak the story to the media. It seems like a pretty poor trade at the time. One Dumbledore out, one Harry in. When I go upstairs again to sign my contract, the pen feels eerily warm. The theory is compelling. I don’t ask Tom about it, so I don’t find out in the future either. For now, he lets the furore die. He goes to his Portuguese beach, as is his quiet way. He returns when Dumbledore’s office has been emptied, like shaking tissues out of a pair of jeans before washing them.