The Doorman: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

All the bumpers and windshields are filled with signifiers. Sports teams and military insignia and silhouettes of assault rifles and, most of all, American flags, thin-blue-line edition. The final tailgate also sports a big Confederate flag. Chicky doesn’t understand how anyone can possibly believe in both things at once.

Chicky hopes that Canarius won’t turn out to be a guy who uses his origin story as an excuse to be an asshole. But you never know. Evolution isn’t always the same as improvement.

Emily did not lose control of her emotions. Or if she did, she did not let it show, and though that may not be the same exact thing, it’s awfully close.

He was interested in art, or at least interested in being seen to be interested in art, which was close enough.

“Some people are just not good cultural fits.” Good cultural fit was impossible to argue with: there was no fact to dispute. The only evident fact was that this was racist.

What infuriated her wasn’t that Whit was not tough, it was that he pretended he was.

“That,” he said, “is what makes it clever.” “Do you really think so?” This was the sort of conventional idea that passed for cleverness among extremely conventional people. Like wearing sneakers with a tuxedo, or ordering in fried chicken for a fancy party. The opposite of the expected thing wasn’t clever. It was just as predictable, and obnoxious to boot.

Maybe some guys enlisted because of patriotism. Some certainly made this claim. But in Chicky’s experience most of these were white dudes who also happened to be the most gun-happy motherfuckers he’d ever come across. This uniformity made it impossible to believe it was coincidence. Chicky suspected that patriotism was often just an excuse to do fucked-up shit.

“You know that having children is your actual job?” he’d eventually said. This was a particularly low moment in her life, and her husband chose to make it lower. If Emily had to pinpoint the source of their demise, that choice of his would be it.

Plenty of couples went forth into the world and bickered. They bickered in restaurants, at dinner parties, just walking down the sidewalk disagreeably, disputing the other’s recollections, anything. Emily would not air dirty laundry like that. She made damn sure that the Whitaker Longworths hated each other quietly, privately, while in public they continued to look like a happy couple. That was another one of her responsibilities.

If you think about sex too closely, it’s ridiculous. What is this? Sliding a temporarily hard part of him in and out of a temporarily wet part of her. How can this be worth ruining your life? There were a lot of things it was better not to think too closely about.

Had this man appeared in her life at just the right moment? Or was he right because of the moment?

Those were also the days when people like Julian’s parents—an academic and a therapist—could afford a big apartment on the park, and send their kids to private schools, and expect to retire on a pension with comfort. It was a very brief moment, wedged into the middle of the last century, when it looked as if egalitarianism would become the natural state of human affairs. The rest of the history of human civilization presented incontrovertible evidence of the opposite.

The more moneyed the population, the better looking the women and the worse looking the men. An inverse relationship.

Griff Merriweather, like his daughter, had always been a Democrat. He’d voted for Obama, twice. But then he’d told a dirty joke at work, got called out by a young woman of color, canceled, bought out of his partnership, career over, and suddenly he was watching Fox News day and night. Emily recognized that her dad was being pushed away from the left more than he was being pulled in by the right—it wasn’t the port that was appealing, it was the storm that terrified Griff Merriweather, not to mention Whit Longworth. Men like her dad and her husband were becoming terrified animals, backed into the corner, lashing out in the same way. Being rich and powerful and white and male doesn’t prevent anyone from being scared.

Emily had once heard Whit admit, reluctantly, that yes, straight white men had clearly enjoyed a good long run of it, but that was over. Whitaker Hamilton Longworth had been born a generation too late.

All those Merriweather men believed they’d earned their good fortunes, and never seemed to ask themselves this: if everyone you know has achieved the same success, is that really success? Has it been achieved? You make your own luck: that’s something lucky people say.

Whit didn’t pursue money because he needed money. He pursued money because he needed something to pursue, and he already had everything he wanted. Money was infinite.