Dave, she saw, had joined Sadie and Tal. “Oh, neither,” she said, laughing. “Those are our friends Dave and Tal. From Oberlin. We all, you know, went to Oberlin together.”
“Dave and Tal,” the man said ruminatively. “From Oberlin. Of course.” What this meant, she had no idea, but it led her to a horrible thought: Sadie and Dave. No, she thought, impossible.
“I’m Will,” the man said finally. “Will Chase.” He put out his hand to Beth and she shook it lightly.
“Another William,” she said.
He stared blankly.
“Like Tuck. Tuck’s real name—”
“Oh, right. Yes, of course.” He sipped loudly at his drink and ran his eyes around the room. “And you, it seems, are part of the Oberlin mafia.”
Beth laughed. “I guess. Except I didn’t know there was an Oberlin mafia.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. The city’s overrun with your kind. It’s a well-known fact. Scheming Oberlin grads dominate the publishing industry, hold all the important positions in the more humanistic subjects at major universities, and so on.” Beth smiled. This was sort of true. “Oh, and you must know this,” he went on, “they control the waste disposal industry.”
“I thought the waste disposal industry was all, you know, Harvard men,” said Beth, sipping at the dregs of her drink. She was thirsty, but the journey back to the bar for water seemed far too long, too arduous.
“Oh, no. Don’t be naive. It’s Oberlin, all the way.”
“Really?” said Beth, warily allowing herself to smile. British men, from her experience, were better at chitchat than their American counterparts, but ultimately unable (or unwilling) to drop the witticisms in favor of real conversation. She had dated a Welshman in Milwaukee who’d proved a cruel companion in the end. And yet she sometimes still thought of him with longing. “How would you know? You’re clearly not one, or I’d know you.”
“Well, that’s simply untrue. I left university”—he hit all four syllables, mocking the American habit of saying “college,” though Beth had no idea what, exactly, made one term more proper than the other—“in 1988, when you were still playing with dolls.” Beth started to protest—she’d been sixteen in 1988!—but he held up his hand and shook his head no. “I could easily have come and gone before you even arrived.”
Beth smiled. “But you didn’t.” She was beginning to feel the effects of her two drinks. “You’re a friend of Tuck’s?” she said. “From Columbia?”
“Pretty much,” he said, rocking back on his heels.
“What’s your field?” she asked, pleased that she’d correctly assessed him.
“I work for the Journal,” he said.
“The Journal,” she repeated slowly, wondering which journal he meant.
“Sorry. The Wall Street Journal.”
“Oh,” she said, growing hot. She’d been wrong. “And here I thought you were some kind of pathetic grad student like Lil and Tuck, scribbling away on”—she searched her mind for a suitably obscure author—“Aphra Behn.”
“Aphra Behn! Lovely! Well, yes, you’re quite right. I was. I was indeed. But I had an epiphany of sorts…” He paused, a bitter smile on his wide mouth. “Academia is the biggest racket of all. And if I’m going to be involved in a racket, I may as well make some money, and the world will have to go without my monograph on Defoe. Terribly sad, I know.” Distantly, Beth heard Lil making her toast to Tuck.
“So you’re a reporter?”
“Hmmm.” He drained his glass of champagne and placed it on the table behind them. “Technology. But the business end. Start-ups. You know. I’m interviewing all these CEOs, analyzing the viability of corporate strategies, all that.”
“Oh, interesting,” Beth murmured, slipping a shard of ice under her tongue. She knew nothing about business but that it was boring—though an acceptable profession for men of her parents’ generation, like Sadie’s father, except Sadie’s father was closer in age to Beth’s grandfather, who still worked two days a week, filling cavities and making crowns alongside Beth’s father, at their practice on Popham Road. Interesting people of her own age were writing novels or making films or acting, or perhaps organizing Wal-Mart workers into unions, like Meredith Weiss, who’d signed up with the AFL-CIO after college. Beth would never marry some sort of lawyer or doctor, like her mom and all her mom’s friends, and she knew Sadie and Emily—and, clearly, Lil—wouldn’t either. “It sounds interesting,” she said.
“It is. It really is. This is such a cool time to be immersed in the world of commerce. Everything is changing so quickly, old models being thrown out, new ones being tested. Seventeen-year-olds making billions. And destroying the infrastructure of corporate giants. It’s the only revolution our generation will ever see. And it just happens to be economic.”
“I see,” said Beth, troubled. “And was it you who convinced Tuck to drop out of the program and work for that magazine?”
“Well, it is possible I planted the seed in his head,” he told her, placing his hand on her arm as if to steer her somewhere—but there was nowhere to go; they were locked in on all sides. “And I told him, yes, about the job. And put in a good word for him with the editor. He’s a brilliant writer, Tuck. Really.”
“Really?” said Beth, relieved to hear this.
“Yes, really. And Boom Time is a cool magazine. All eyes are on it, you know?”
Beth nodded, though she didn’t really know anything about it.
“Do you know Ed? Ed Slikowski?”
“Er, no—”
“The editor…”
Beth was mystified by this question. How or why on earth would she know the editor of Tuck’s magazine, which she’d never even heard of. “Um, I don’t think so. Did he go to Oberlin?”
Will shook his head, a sly smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Caltech. Then MIT.” He gave her a strange look, his head cocked to one side. “You’ve really not heard of him.”
“No.”
“He’s kind of famous.” Beth didn’t know what to say. It was beginning to strike her that she and her friends had been living in parallel universes these four years. She’d not realized that an editor of a magazine could be famous. “When Boom Time launched, the Times magazine did a cover story on him.”
“Oh,” said Beth. “I guess I’ve, you know, been in Milwaukee.” She could, of course, have subscribed to the Times in Milwaukee, she realized as she said this. “I just got back,” she said dumbly, waiting for him to explain. “So, who is he exactly?”
“He’s one of those wunderkinds.” Will rolled his eyes. “He started this usenet board”—this Beth understood; she was on various pop culture listservs—“on start-ups. A few years ago. He was a grad student at MIT. Artificial intelligence. Did a lot of stuff at the Media Lab. And it became this big thing. These VC guys—”
“Vee cee guys?”
“Venture capital—”
“Oh, right.” Beth had no idea what this meant, but she nodded and smiled.
“He was scooping all the business mags and these VC guys were all over it. They think he’s a visionary. So one of them gave him money to start a magazine.”
“Wow,” said Beth. “Just like that.”
“Just like that.” Will smiled. “Do you want to meet him? He’s over there, talking to your friend Sadie.” Indeed, a third man now stood in Sadie’s thrall, a shiny fringe of black hair falling over eyes that Beth could see, even from this distance, were the palest, coldest blue—wolf eyes. He was thin and wore his beard full, like a seventies rock star or an Amish farmer, and his feet, below a well-cut suit, were clad in Converse One Stars. “In the gray Armani.” Will shoved his hands in the pockets of his pants and let out a guffaw, like a bark. “Boom Time is a heavily financed venture. Even a lowly staff writer like Tuck commands the kind of salary that can pay the rent on”—he waved his hands toward the loft’s high ceiling—“a place big enough to hold a wedding.” Beth nodded and smiled. It hadn’t occurred to her that the rent might be steep. The neighborhood—well, the brief glimpse she’d caught of it—struck her as bleak: low, off-kilter houses covered in vinyl siding or roofing tile, with no sign of people living behind their facades but the glare of the television; cracked, weed-sprouted sidewalks; a profusion of nail salons and dollar stores. At least Queens, from the little she’d seen of it, had trees.