In the final week of the term, the department held its advising fair, and Jasmine walked the rows with her transcript in her folder and her future deliberately undecided. She listened to the finance people. She listened to the policy people. Then she sat down across from the international programs adviser, who read Jasmine's record, read her essay grades, and looked up with an expression Jasmine recognized — the look of someone recalibrating.
"You know," the adviser said, "most people arrive at this specialty from one side or the other. Money, or language. You appear to have arrived carrying both, the hard way."
Jasmine thought of a private dining room, a witnessed bet, a stack of papers by lamplight, her father asleep down the hall in a house that was safe. She thought of all the ways a sentence could be made to hide a poisoned harbor, and all the ways it could be made to tell the truth instead.
That afternoon, at the long table in the department office, with the winter light going early outside the windows, she filled in the declaration form in her neat, server's hand and chose to specialize in international business law.
Chapter 18 — The Advanced Program
The letter admitting her to the advanced program in international business law arrived on a Tuesday, in an envelope thin enough to frighten her. Jasmine opened it at the kitchen table after her shift and read it twice before she believed it. Forty-two applicants for nine places, the letter said. She was one of the nine.
She called her father first. Samuel listened, asked her to read the middle part again, and then was quiet in a way she had learned to recognize: a man moving a feeling around until he found words that could carry it.
"Nine places," he said finally. "And they saved one for a waitress from the waterfront."
"They saved one for a student," Jasmine said, but she was smiling so hard it reached her voice, and he heard it, and laughed, and told her to put the letter on the refrigerator where important things went, beside the rehabilitation schedule and the photograph of Grace in the garden. She did.
The program wasted no time justifying its reputation. It met in a seminar room with a long oak table that reminded her, the first morning, so forcibly of the Harbor Room at The Marble Quay that she had to look down at her notebook and wait for the feeling to pass. Around that table sat the other eight: a former naval officer turning to admiralty work, two students who had come straight through from undergraduate honors, a quiet woman from Toronto with a degree in Chinese studies, a brash, brilliant young man who treated every discussion as a closing argument. They were accomplished in ways that had certificates. Jasmine's accomplishments had reference numbers and paid invoices and one night she did not discuss. She took her seat — the one facing the door, a server's habit she suspected she would keep for life — and reminded herself that she had negotiated with Richard Vance and Mr. Chen in the same week and lived. A seminar, it turned out, could try to be worse.
The program's director, and her mentor by assignment, was Professor Edmund Reyes, a spare, silver-haired man in his late sixties who had spent twenty years in practice in Hong Kong and Singapore before returning to teach, and who graded in red pen with a frankness his students described, in whispers, as weather. He returned Jasmine's first memorandum with more red than black on three consecutive pages. Underneath, in a hand like wire, he had written: You think clearly. You write like you're afraid of your own conclusions. Stop that.
She read it in the library at midnight and sat very still.
It was true, and she knew exactly where she had learned it. Service had taught her to soften, to deliver even a refusal wrapped in courtesies until the refusal barely showed. The Quay had rewarded her for making herself easy to overlook. Reyes was asking for the opposite virtue, and he asked for it relentlessly all year. He assigned her the cross-border merger problem no one wanted. He made her defend a position in seminar, then — without warning, and to her fury — made her stand and dismantle it from the opposing side. He sent her drafts back with single-word verdicts in the margin. Vague. Again. Better. Once, after she had presented an analysis of a joint venture dispute with a fluency that surprised even her, he kept her behind and asked, mildly, whether she had ever worked in a bilingual negotiation.
"Once," Jasmine said. "Briefly."
"Then we will build on briefly," Reyes said, and assigned her twice the reading.
The late nights accumulated the way snow does, an inch at a time, until one morning she looked up and the whole landscape of her life was white with them. Casebooks on the kitchen table after Samuel slept. The library's fifth floor, where the radiators clanked and the harbor wind worried the old windows. Group sessions in borrowed rooms where the nine of them, rivals in October, became something like a crew by March, sharing outlines and grievances and terrible coffee. She learned to draft a contract clause the way she had once learned a wine list — completely, or not at all. She learned arbitration procedure, letters of credit, the long, gray border where a translated document stops being a courtesy and becomes the thing itself, legally, with consequences. The Tidewater Quarter papers had taught her that in one night, and every lecture on the subject felt to Jasmine like a professor describing weather she had already stood in.
In the spring, the program sent its students into placements, and Reyes placed her — she suspected his hand and never confirmed it — with a Boston firm that handled shipping and trade disputes, where she spent ten weeks translating deposition summaries and sitting, silent and note-taking, at the edge of conference rooms where men in good suits discovered, one by one, that she understood every word on both sides of the table. She missed nothing. The supervising attorney told Reyes, in a note Jasmine was later shown, that his student had the rarest of legal instruments: a memory that behaved like a transcript and the judgment to keep it holstered. She read the sentence three times on the bus home, while the city slid past wet and gold, and permitted herself the full measure of her pride in it.
Samuel came to the end-of-year reception in a suit she had not seen him wear since before the stroke, walking now with a cane and a stubbornness that the therapists had learned to schedule around rather than fight. He shook Reyes's hand with his good one and informed him that Jasmine's mother had taught her to work like this, at a kitchen table, one character at a time. Reyes received this information as the serious credential it was.
"You were right about my writing," Jasmine told him later, in the corridor, while the reception noise spilled around them.