Robert, Her Billionaire Widower

“Hey!” she said brightly, getting into his car. “How are you?”

“Pretty great,” said Robert. “It’s such a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“It is!” said Marie. “I can’t believe New York is giving us such wonderful weather. I’m rather suspicious about it in fact, our city doesn’t give us good spring weather very often. I get the feeling that it is setting us up for disappointment.”

“What a cynical way to think about it,” said Robert teasingly. “Are you always this cynical, Marie?”

“Only on beautiful days in spring in New York,” she said with a wink and this made Robert laugh.

They decided to go to an Italian restaurant for pizza. There was nothing quite like New York pizza, nothing that was as delicious and essentially “New York”. It was the kind of thing that practically every New Yorker would encourage you to try and for good reason.

They ate their pizzas and talked about a number of things, enjoying sips of ice cold beer that really took the edge off of the hot spring day that they were going through. They talked about a number of things, mostly about each other. There was a hunger of sorts in the way they spoke to each other. They spoke to each other the way ants would devour a grain of rice on the ground. They spoke to each other with the sort of hunger that only new lovers feel, and it was a very beautiful feeling for both of them to share in that moment.

They ended up feeding each other pizza which was an incredibly intimate thing to do on a first date. The problem was that it was the kind of thing that they felt like doing. It had seemed utterly right to them in that moment. It had felt like what they were supposed to do.

After they ate, they decided to go for a walk in park. It was a gentle stroll and they talked about a number of things. It was then that Robert finally started to tell Marie about his work.

“I still feel guilty about all those people working in the sweatshops,” said Robert. “They were being taken advantage of, and no matter how much anybody tries to say that it was the subcontractors we hired that were doing all of this, at the end of the day I know that it was my fault. My company should have been more careful while hiring subcontractors. My company should have been more alert, more aware, because at the end of the day we are part of a world that is bigger than us. We don’t even represent one percent of the worlds population with what we do, not even a fraction of a percent in fact. We manufacture clothes that a small portion of the world buys. We don’t even cater to the people that were working at our sweatshops because they’re too poor. That’s what really got me, you know? The fact that the people making my products were too poor to buy them themselves. They made things that they themselves would not be able to afford. I could not take this vicious irony. I could not take it at all.”

“So you compensated all of them?” asked Marie.

“Yes,” said Robert. “I felt like I had to. I felt like it was only right, after all.”

“Why didn’t you make it public?” asked Marie. “I mean, your image has suffered quite a bit after that debacle. If you had told everyone that you were paying the people that had been working in your sweatshops you probably would have saved yourself from a great deal of stress.”

“Because it wasn’t about that,” said Robert. “It wasn’t about me improving my image. This was about those people. This was about the people who had been taken advantage of, getting them the rights that they deserved. This was about them managing to get out of the terrible place their lives were in and somehow managing to get happy for once. I just… I felt responsible for them, you know? Here I was, getting rich off of their labor and not even knowing who was actually making the products that my company was selling. Does that sound at all responsible to you in any way? Does that sound like the behavior of a good man? I don’t think so. I am so ashamed of that happening I can’t even tell you.”

“You know,” said Marie, “I agree that, to some extent, what your company did was extremely irresponsible and that at the end of the day you were the person in charge and you should have known what was happening. However, at the same time, I think it’s important you realize that the way you handled the problem was really beautiful, truly it was. You didn’t just cover your own ass. In fact, you didn’t cover your ass at all. You did everything you could to ensure that the people that suffered because of your negligence were able to get out of the horrible situations that you put them in and this makes you a good person, Robert. It makes you a good person because most people would not have cared. Most billionaires would have been far too focused on making sure that their company did not suffer, that they did not lose any money because of lawsuits. Most billionaires would have simply done what everyone wanted them to do and in the least invasive way possible, the least amount of effort that would eventually get them to a better place as far as public perception goes, and then leave it there. What you did was very, very good. You are a good person, I hope you know that.”

Robert smiled at Marie. “You really think I’m a good person?”

“I do,” said Marie. “I really do. I mean, I just met you but we’ve been talking for quite a while as you already know. Over that time we were talking I started to realize what a genuinely kind person you were, how you always managed to see people and relate to what they were feeling.”

“That’s really important to me,” said Robert. “I mean to say that it means a lot that you say that. I… I’ve been feeling rather down in the dumps, I’d say. I’ve been feeling like everyone hates me and although I shouldn’t really let that affect me at the end of the day, it does and there is nothing really that I can do about that. I think that you thinking so highly of me makes me feel better about the whole situation. It makes me feel like there is hope, you know? Because if you think so highly of me then other people will too, it’s only a matter of time.”

Marie smiled at him and kissed him on the cheek. She looked surprised at her own boldness, surprised that she had allowed herself to do something so intimate with a man on their very first date. She was surprised that she had allowed herself to be so utterly vulnerable when she had wanted to keep her distance at first.

However, the fact of the matter was that she had not been able to help herself. She had not been able to help herself because in that moment she felt true, genuine affection for Robert. She felt something that she had never felt before, and that was the first stirring of true love inside of her.

Robert knew this by looking into her eyes. They communicated so much through that single look that there was nothing really left for them to say afterwards. The look was everything. The look spoke in ways words would have simply been unable to. The look ended up telling them everything they needed to know about how they felt about each other.

And so, with words now obsolete, Robert and Marie held hands and strolled through the park. They walked in silence except for the odd comment about the beauty of the area they were in, about the greenery they were enjoying, the birds and the flowers. They walked in silence, and silence is, after all, one of the most intimate things there is. It is far more intimate than its opposite, conversation, and even more intimate than that most intimate of acts: s*x. It was the sort of thing reserved for old lovers, people that had spent decades with each other and had said everything there was to say and now were comfortable enough with silence that they could be with each other without feeling the need to break it.