Chapter 11

At work, he was rarely indecisive.

Give him a problem complicated enough to frighten everyone else away and he became calmer. Complexity narrowed his attention rather than scattering it. He could sit for hours with reports spread across a conference table, following one inconsistency into another until the thing that had seemed hopelessly tangled began to reveal its structure. People had learned to bring him the problems no one quite understood, and he liked that reputation more than he admitted.

There was comfort in a problem that could be studied.

People were more difficult.

The invitation arrived on a Monday.

A woman he knew through work was having a gathering at her apartment Saturday evening. Nothing formal. A few people from the office, some friends, food, music. She handed him the invitation almost casually, as though accepting or declining would require no more thought than deciding whether he wanted another cup of coffee.

"Come if you can," she said. "It'll be fun."

He thanked her and slipped the invitation into the folder he was carrying.

That should have been the end of it.

Instead, sometime during the afternoon, he took it out and read it again.

The card itself offered no difficulty. Saturday. Seven o'clock. An address he recognized. A telephone number at the bottom with a request to let her know.

He put it back into the folder.

He intended to call that evening.

By Tuesday morning, he had not.

The curious thing was that he liked the woman who had invited him. He liked most of the people he expected would be there. He was not antisocial, though the distinction sometimes seemed too subtle to explain. He enjoyed people individually and in small groups. He could spend an entire evening talking with one person and leave wishing the conversation had lasted longer.

A room full of people was something else.

Large gatherings seemed to require a skill everyone else had learned while he was absent. Other people entered a room and simply joined it. They walked toward conversations already in progress, introduced themselves to strangers, laughed easily, and moved on when the conversation had run its course.

He tended to enter a room and assess it.

Who was there? Who was talking with whom? Which conversation might tolerate another person? Was the man standing alone beside the bookshelf hoping someone would speak to him or hoping very much that no one would?

These were not questions he consciously formulated. He simply noticed things, and noticing them sometimes made joining in harder.

At the office, observation was an advantage. In social situations, it could become a form of paralysis.

Tuesday passed.

On Wednesday he placed the invitation beside the telephone when he got home.

That was progress of a sort.

He made dinner, washed the dishes, and sat down to read. The card remained beside the telephone.

At nine-thirty he decided it was too late to call.

Thursday evening seemed more promising. He picked up the receiver once, then remembered something he needed to finish for work. An hour disappeared. When he noticed the telephone again, he told himself he would call tomorrow.

There was no fear involved, at least none he would have recognized by that name. Calling required almost nothing.

"Thanks for inviting me. I'd be glad to come."

Eleven words.

He could deliver presentations to senior managers. He could defend a recommendation in a room where considerably more experienced people disagreed with him. He could tell an executive that a project costing hundreds of thousands of dollars was headed in the wrong direction and explain precisely why.

Yet somehow eleven words into a telephone acquired weight.

Years later, Focus Man would understand that procrastination was not always laziness. Sometimes it was simply avoidance dressed in respectable clothing. The mind was remarkably skilled at finding useful things to do when confronted with one small thing it preferred not to do.

His apartment had seldom been tidier than it was that week.

By Friday, the unanswered invitation had become ridiculous even to him.

He came home from work, loosened his tie, and found the card exactly where he had left it. For several seconds he stood looking at it.

Then he laughed.

There were moments, even then, when he could see himself clearly enough to be amused.

He picked up the telephone and dialed before giving himself time to manufacture another reason not to.

She answered on the third ring.

He identified himself and thanked her for the invitation. Before he could say anything else, she told him she was glad he'd called and hoped he could make it.

"I'd like to come," he said.

"Good. Seven-ish. Don't bring anything."

That was it.

The entire conversation lasted perhaps thirty seconds.

He hung up the telephone and stood there feeling vaguely foolish.

For five days he had carried around a decision that required half a minute to resolve.

Saturday evening presented another opportunity for delay.

He spent more time than usual deciding what to wear, which was particularly pointless because his choices differed so little that almost no one else would have noticed. He considered arriving late enough that the gathering would already be underway, then realized entering a room full of established conversations was precisely what he disliked most.

So he arrived nearly on time.

He could hear music before he reached the door.

For a moment he remained beside his car, looking toward the lighted windows.

He could still leave.

The possibility was strangely comforting. No one had seen him. He could drive home, make coffee, open the book waiting beside his chair, and spend the rest of the evening in the uncomplicated company of himself.

He knew exactly what that evening would feel like.

Perhaps that was the problem.

He locked the car.

Inside, the apartment was already warmer and louder than he preferred. Someone took his jacket. Someone else handed him a drink. He recognized two people from work and was introduced to several others whose names he immediately worried he would forget.

For the first half hour he did what he usually did.

He watched.

Gradually, though, the room became less like a room full of strangers and more like a collection of individual people. He found himself talking with a man who had recently returned from Europe. Another conversation began over a disagreement about a movie. Someone discovered that he knew something about computers and asked a question that turned into an unexpectedly funny argument among four people who knew almost nothing about them.

He began to enjoy himself.

Not spectacularly.

Nothing happened that changed his life.

That would come later, at another gathering he would almost decline.

This evening mattered for a smaller reason.

He stayed.

When he finally left, considerably later than he had expected, the streets were nearly empty. He drove home with the radio low and the window cracked enough to let the cool night air into the car.

He thought about the week he had spent avoiding the telephone.

There was a lesson in it, although he wasn't yet inclined to turn ordinary experiences into lessons. He only knew that the thing he had resisted had been easier than the resistance itself.

His ability to focus had already carried him a considerable distance. It had helped him learn, work, solve problems, and earn the confidence of people whose approval once intimidated him. For a long time he had assumed that competence in one part of life would somehow spread naturally into the others.

It didn't.

A man could be confident in a conference room and uncertain at a front door. He could solve complicated problems for a corporation and still postpone a thirty-second telephone call. He could understand systems better than people and feel more at ease with work than with the unpredictable business of belonging.

There was no great defect in that.

It was simply another part of himself he had not yet learned very much about.

Years later, he would remember that invitation whenever he caught himself delaying some small uncomfortable thing. More often than not, the anticipation proved heavier than the thing itself.

And sometimes, though he could not have known it then, the decision to walk through a door would matter far more than whatever had made him hesitate outside it.