It was supposed to be the end of a good week. His client was almost out of the woods They were close to a deal on some messy litigation, but he felt nauseous and he knew why.

“They want Bendell.” Marty Bernstein looked across his desk at Steve. He exhaled the smoke through his nose, the last puff of a filterless cigarette. When it started to burn his fingers, that’s when he knew it was time to light another one.

Steve listened impassively, as if he were hearing a report on hog futures on the commodities exchange. “What about the fine?”

“We’re sort of stuck on that one right now. Your guys are trying to keep the number down but the Justice Department guys are looking to out-do the SEC.” Another drag on the cigarette. “Look, they’re at three hundred million. They want it to be bigger than the GE fine, you know, the one for Kidder. I know you said Moore wouldn’t go above two-fifty. So maybe the thing comes down at two seventy-five, but you gotta get your guy used to the fact that it’s gonna be a huge number.” Bernstein leaned back in his chair, pursed his lips, and exhaled as if he were writing the number in smoke in the air.

Steve noticed the stainless steel lighter with the Semper fi. They had not known each other in Vietnam and in fourteen years practicing law together, it only came up a handful of times. They talked about the memorial when it was dedicated in Washington, but only in brief clipped sentences. They both went to the funeral of a colleague who shot himself, a delayed casualty of the Tet Offensive. But otherwise, their common experience was merely something that was there, like so much else not talked about but always looming, a shadow that seemed to alter the visible light spectrum and their capacity to see the world.

Steve exhaled to expel his thoughts of the past out with his breath. “What if we agree to the fine? Can Mary Beth’s office do without the criminal indictment?”

“Stevie, Lis… en… to… me.” Bernstein punctuated each syllable with a short karate chop in the air and then he put the angular ax blade of his palm against his own forehead. “You’re not getting this.” He leaned forward in his chair. He put out the cigarette by crushing it into tobacco, paper and ash fragments in the lunch plate on his desk. “The crowd wants a head. They wanna do the whole thing with the handcuffs and the TV cameras. Yeah, the fine is important, and yeah, we’re gonna agree on that. But there’s no fuckin’ way they’re gonna settle this without blood. You’re a smart guy, Stevie, so you gotta make it clear to Moore.” He reached for the lighter and another cigarette and inhaled deeply before he continued. “The crowd wants a head and they’re not goin’ home unsatisfied. You got it?”

At this point, Steve was merely marking time in Bernstein’s office. Of course he got it. He noticed the way his partner took another drag on the cigarette, pressed his lips on the thin paper and inhaled as if he were drawing life itself through the thinnest filter of a burning poison. This was just one of the more common addictions, afflictions, compulsions, distractions, whatever, that either got him and his partners through the day or kept them from getting through it more effectively.

He thought of the M&A partner, Lee Torrel, who was working on the New York Trust deal with him. The guy gave up booze twelve years ago, not a drop since, but he drank Diet Pepsi like a lab rat pressing on a dispensing bar. It had become a wholly unself-conscious addiction. The guy walked into all-day conference room meetings with a six-pack of two-liter containers in a carry bag and swigged the stuff warm from the bottle.

The deal they’d all made, the agreement that no one talked about, was that they each had their own thing, their own way of surviving or coping or just getting through the day. No one ever mentioned any of this except in the lightest teasing, because that might mean a serious conversation about his or her own stuff and that was way out of bounds to everyone.

There were guys who took long lunch breaks to eat pussy or suck dick in some studio apartment conveniently located on Second Avenue or Tenth Avenue, the outer boundaries of where their real lives were supposed to be lived. A quick half-hour, maybe even ten minutes, not even enough time to take their socks off, but just enough to satisfy a hard-wired oral craving.

Then there were the ones who Steve called the robots, the ones who so thoroughly obliterated all recognition of desire that they were left like napalm-scarred emotional landscapes, hard-won territory cleared of enemy thoughts, but unable to support what may have once been lush and fertile consciousness. They came from their Upper East Side townhouses or their Connecticut farmhouses. He thought of the journey Thoreau described from the “desperate country to the desperate city,” the perfect phrase for their condition, a practiced resignation without hope.

Of course, there were the exceptions, the guys who seemed to have it all put together. For however many there were who had given up, or covered up, there were the few who had come through childhood and adolescence into adulthood and who could say they were happy. He counted himself among the lucky few. He had no delusions about the mass of men but he had a sense of himself that was fundamentally different from the world he observed. And though he had the real comfort to know himself as an exception, he let himself be sad to think of how different the world could be, how different he wished it were.