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“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Harvey tells Dr. Agard, “because I’ve lived my whole life not to be her.”
“And when people do that, they very often become that very thing in a different way.”
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If Harvey could choose, this is what he’d remember: sitting against the radiator, white-hot heat muted by his sweater. Mom laughing as he tripped through his do-zwee-bop scat singing while Marcus tugged on the rug’s loose threads, little head bobbing to the beat. Dad by the record player, humming along to as many brass parts as he could, keeping up a running commentary whenever he hit a rest, quoting every musician Harvey knew and plenty he didn’t. Don’t forget Miles Davis, it’s the silences that make the song.
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Love is the explanation Gordon gives. Love is why Harvey straps on the boxing gloves and floats light on his feet, too swift to catch. It’s how he learns to flinch early before the blow can sting.
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Usually sober and quiet, the house comes alive the second Gordon returns from touring. He carries the sound in with him, jazz and guests and parties, and Harvey stays up late to eavesdrop on the glasses clinking and the noise crackling up the stairs from the record player. Some nights his dad breaks out the sax, and his mother joins in, singing in bright, perfect harmony.
For Lily’s birthday party Gordon lets his sons tag along to buy the gift, and so Harvey tip-toes for the first time into a liquor store. He marvels at the neatly shelved containers, some tall and swanlike, others squat like potion bottles out of a fantasy book. His favorites are the spirits he can’t see, concealed in ornate, richly colored boxes. When he asks his father why there are so many kinds, Gordon answers that it’s the same as art or music– connoisseurs savor their alcohol, holding out for notes of oak or lemon or caramel.
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Harvey catches his mother three times. The first time he’s eight, and he swallows her lie about “cousin Scott.” The second time he’s sixteen, old enough to realize exactly what he’s discovered, and after a couple more years he broaches the subject with a plea for her to stop. They reach an agreement.
He adds adultery back to his list of secrets and keeps quiet for another decade.
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Gordon fills their lives like he’s swaggering around a stage, with a loud machismo that doesn’t yet come naturally to his sons. Harvey acquires it slowly, as his father teaches him to hurl fastballs instead of throwing like a girl and glide through class presentations on the strength of his charisma. When Lily serves wine with dinner, Gordon imparts other lessons, tips about girls that make Harvey and Marcus flush, and he inevitably winds up declaiming on respect and loyalty and the right way to lead a life. He teaches Harvey how to take a joke and a punch.
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Donna doesn’t say it outright, only that Gordon had a heart attack. The tears come in right on time but fade out earlier than convention might dictate, prompting Zoe to lament how Harvey’s lost his way. He passes his perverse happiness off as glee over his gleaming new promotion: Harvey Specter, junior partner, apathetic narcissist who can’t even miss his dad.
That evening he leaves the office early and forgoes his accustomed one-night stand, and he tugs a bottle of Macallan scotch whiskey from the back of a cabinet, untouched for so long he nearly forgot about it. He puts on that new Charles Bradley record, the one Gordon asked him to bring the next time he visited, and sips his liquor and figures his dad’s not really gone.
He’s glad it was only a heart attack.
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At some point Harvey settles into a groove– the life plan Jessica composed for him, the cyclical dramas of the firm, rapid but steady as he runs circles around everyone. Then Mike Ross crashes in, and Harvey scrambles to improvise.
When he finally gets a moment of quiet during their first case he fills it with an old vinyl record from his office shelves, one of Charles Bradley’s. Halfway through a song Mike crashes in again, glowing and high on lack of sleep, gloating in a crinkled shirt and skinny tie over his first victory, pretend-shooting Harvey in the heart.
"This world is going up in flames."
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The first anniversaries, Harvey comes empty-handed. Sometimes he kneels by the stone (Gordon Specter, Loving Father) and stumbles through a few tunes, a poor offering; his mother has long since begged him to give singing up. When Harvey finally breaks, deigning to pay his respects in a way the dead might have actually appreciated, he springs for Macallan.
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Mike is a goddamn symphony. A cacophonous symphony, impossible to conduct and forever skipping ahead, the din echoing in Harvey’s ears. Harvey tries to rein him in, to at least predict his next step, and he fails so often and so gloriously he can’t even give a damn.
His voice fails any time he tries to utter any of this out loud.
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Harvey gets high and almost tells Mike about his dad.
He tells Mike about his music, then about Lily and his unfortunate belief in love at first sight. Because it’s Mike Harvey keeps going, tells him how he was sixteen when he first understood his mother’s infidelity. “I knew if I told my dad, he'd–”
He cuts himself off. Jaw tensing, brow darkening, fist clenching violently, but he cuts himself off.
Harvey drifts through the rest of the story, a story without much remembering where he was going. He looks over at Mike, his expression so open, his eyes sea-blue, and Harvey would dive in right now if not for the soap opera with Rachel, if he hadn’t made a promise to never, ever . . .
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Harvey never learns to predict Mike’s next step. He doesn’t see it coming when Mike switches to banking, or when he takes the deal and goes to prison– officially to save all of them, but Harvey knows better– or when he informs Harvey that the wedding’s still on and he’d like to host it in Harvey’s apartment. Seattle comes as a bare-knuckled punch to the face.
"Gotta be a better world, gotta make it baby, gotta make it right."
It’s a familiar sensation, how the wedding party’s music softens at the edges, the way Harvey’s vision blurs and narrows to the neat shelves of liquor bottles as Mike leaves him at the bar.
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Harvey believes in love at first sight.
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The third time, Harvey lasts two weeks. He’s in law school now, hopped up on visions of justice and people getting what they deserve, and so he opens his fat mouth the second he sees Bobby with his cheating mom and the chicken parm. Then he storms out and retreats to the only place he can.
Strapping on his gloves, he spars with a stranger and lashes out with a viciousness that had never come naturally to him. Gordon closes in only a few minutes later and demands a fight and Harvey begs, no, and since when has that ever mattered.
In the pale light filtering through dust from the gym’s high ceilings, Gordon looks eerie, face contorting in monstrous ways, and his snarl resounds too loud in Harvey’s ears as he calls out his disrespect. Harvey disrespected his brother and his mother and their guest. He disrespected his father. Every “respect” lands like an extra blow.
Harvey lets his guard slip for one second and catches a jab right in the face. His eyes go wide, bewildered.
“Why are you doing this?” His voice pitches high, almost breaking, and he already knows the answer, ‘cause there’s something wrong with my boy.
Harvey cracks halfway through. Turns on him, shouts him down for never paying any goddamn attention, batters his father’s ribs with his own hands and doesn’t listen when Gordon says stop because when has that ever mattered, and after he finally tears himself away and utters his mother’s grand secret he flees with tears in his eyes.
Though Harvey’s skull rings and the world dons a faint, hazy quality, he runs home and tells his mom to get out while she still can. Marcus keeps asking where the hell Dad is and Harvey doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to guess how close his father’s gotten, whether he’s still wearing the gloves or he’s finally surrendered that pretense.
But when the grandfather clock in their living room tolls midnight, pounding the beats throughout the house, Harvey shrugs on his jacket and returns to the gym and finds his father frozen, still slumped against the ropes inside the ring.
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Harvey stays at the reception. He lingers for hours, long after the happy bride and groom have departed for their flight. For hours he sits slumped in his chair, him and Robert and a second bottle of champagne, drinking themselves silly and plotting their next moves in the ring.
Robert goes home to Laura and a hotel employee calls Harvey a cab, her palm gentle on his arm before he yanks it away, and so he hauls himself to his apartment and collapses on his couch, half-smug that he managed to smuggle the bottle out. He wakes up that way a couple hours later, arm still wrapped snug around it.
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Harvey hasn’t fought this hard for the machismo since he was a kid hitting on girls for the first time. He rehearses in the mirror, fishing his voice out of its bottom octave, forcing his gaze to focus, sharpening his shoulders into a line. He never fools himself– his bones droop, and sullenness renders his lips near-unrecognizable. There are bloodshot hollows where his eyes should go.
If Mike was a symphony, Harvey is an off-key dirge.
Some nights he’s too damn tired to sleep. He opts for a couple fingers of scotch, sometimes a couple more, settling into his leather chair with a record playing. He brings all his Charles Bradley records home– "they don’t hear me cry, they don’t hear me try, don't stomp on that light"– and fails to notice some nights when the music slips away, leaving the scratch of a record spinning for no reason.
He knows this refrain.
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He lives off muscle memory, throws out his caricatured refrains– “I don’t follow orders, I don’t bend a knee, I win”– and paints them with enough Specter spirit to deflect suspicion. No one asks. He drinks at the office and no one asks, since corporate lawyers celebrate with whiskey and mourn with more whiskey. Sometimes he invites his colleagues to join him, for drinks or boxing or popcorn and Rocky, so he has a fighting chance of ignoring the quiet, of maybe even smiling. They rarely have time.
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Harvey wants Mike.
He holds off that thought for a few seconds, long enough to call Donna and ask her out for a drink as if he hasn’t just opened his latest bottle of scotch, and gets her voicemail. So he calls Mike and gets his voicemail, automated with a dull robotic shadow of a voice, and he stumbles through half a story and an ill-disguised plea for Mike to call back.
He hangs up and stares into the silent dark of his apartment.
He wants to beat the wrong out of himself and can’t, so he settles for another sip, for scraping it out of his intestines with whiskey that smolders its way down.
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Before it all went to hell, Gordon had planned out a dignified retirement. He sticks to the latter half of the plan, abandoning his tours, giving up the band. But the music deserts him when Lily does, the agility of his fingers on the keys and the force of his breath, and his house stands empty and quiet besides the occasional clinking of glass. Harvey visits in that suffocating quiet, when even the creak of the front door sounds out of place. On one such occasion Gordon elicits a promise from him, a vow to never, ever.
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Harvey wakes up from tearful dreams he doesn’t remember, hot and half-crazed with inexplicable rage. The stress never bleeds away through the workday, instead flaring every time a so-called colleague stabs him in the back. When he comes home the whiskey washes it down for a few hours, and so he drinks deep, numb to the notes of ginger and vanilla.
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Harvey remembers.
The asphalt wavers under a haze, a mirage in the heat, or perhaps the tears are making it quake. Harvey is ten years old and weeping because it won’t matter, not when he can attribute the water to sweat and the gasps to sheer exertion. He swivels his head around, scanning the blacktop, and finds it empty.
Boxing camp.
Gordon drives Harvey to boxing camp in the summer. Each morning the kids split up and spar, scrabbling around green foam mats in a hall without air-conditioning, and the coaches worry Harvey’s too cruel for someone so young. The instant before a fight begins he lunges, attacking with a wild frenzy of blows, aiming for kidneys and heads when the coaches aren’t watching. Sometimes he forgets the rules and tackles his opponents, pushing them down into the mat until an adult physically hauls him off.
After sparring the kids go out for endurance training, up to a hundred laps on the asphalt and fifty push-ups. The coaches set the bar too high on purpose, a gold standard for kids to strive for one day. Aware they’re dealing with different ages and abilities, they remind kids every day to respect their own limits and quit as soon as they need to. Still some children compete among themselves, sprinting until they throw up or faint or both in hopes of showing up their rivals. When Harvey arrives the camp record is seventy-six laps, set by an older kid three years back on a particularly cool day.
Harvey reaches one hundred every single day.
He ignores the mediocrity of his fellow athletes and sets out, easily overtaking the pack on the first lap. He ignores the immediate throbbing in his legs and keeps his eyes forward, only slightly smug when the other boys start peeling off and giving up. He ignores the sore spot where his shoe rubs his heel wrong, the airless humidity that threatens to press him into the ground. He ignores how his heartbeat turns faint, fluttering like a wobbly vibrato. He ignores it when everyone else has cried uncle and left the blacktop, he ignores how his vision nearly goes dark, he ignores how his skin is mysteriously cold even though it’s nearly a hundred degrees. He quits a thousand times and keeps running in endless circles, and he ignores how he’s sobbing loud every time his foot slams the asphalt because it doesn’t matter.
“Don’t you ever,” Gordon had murmured before his first day of camp, “let me see them break you.”
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Harvey suffers temporary insanity when his mother brings Bobby to his father’s funeral. She shouldn’t, she can’t, not when they all know Gordon’s heart was hers to its last ragged beat.
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A whole lifetime’s worth of bad decisions comes to collect. Harvey wrenches himself out of bed each morning to face another day of firm crises, person A and person B both bellowing over something that rightfully belongs to neither, an endless cyclical civil war that Harvey gave up on winning the second he ceded managing partnership.
It spirals to a halt when Donna turns on him. When he shatters, ordering them all to leave him the hell alone, words crumbling and slurred though he doesn’t remember or much care if he drank.
Donna gets caught breaking privilege, and he should fire her. Barring that he ought to throw himself into her legal defense, yet he looks around at his life, the quiet nights in his cavernous flat, and resolves to pretend he was guilty.
It’s martyrdom. An elegant career suicide– the end of his license, prison time if he gets caught perjuring himself. He wants to lay himself on the train tracks and watch everyone he knows tie him down. If he closes his eyes he can hear the promise of the distant rumble. He’s not sure it’s a metaphor anymore.
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Robert beats him to it, and Harvey should have known better than to think he could quit so easily.
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The next morning, Harvey stands half-dressed in Donna’s bedroom when the doorbell rings. He ignores it– most likely she ordered in a hot breakfast– and carries on scanning the floor for his cufflinks while waiting for the coffee she promised, with the shot of vanilla. Then her voice filters through the walls, along with another man’s.
Harvey flattens himself against the wall, tie loose around his neck, pants still crumpled at the foot of the bed. He catches every other word, enough to guess the gist, the grief in his voice against the steel in Donna’s. Harvey’s breath catches as he recognizes the theme, as he realizes what he would have known last night had he been himself. As he listens to Donna break up with Thomas.
Up swells the vertiginous nausea of a eight-year-old boy sent home sick from school to find rumpled bed covers, and dear cousin Scott who never got along so well with his dad. Harvey chokes laughing as a whole life in the ring breaks apart, disintegrating like so much sand and washing away with the tide. In the next second he stills himself and bites his tongue, settling for silence.
He’s still got more circles to run.
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