“The way you pranked him with the potato chips?”
“Oh, right.” One day Rick took a potato-chip bag home, razor-bladed it open, sprinkled the chips heavily with cayenne pepper, and carefully sealed the bag up. He brought it to the dining hall, and sure enough, Mr. Ohlmeyer stole his bag of barbecue chips, tore it open greedily, and raced out of the dining hall, roaring in pain. A round of applause broke out in the hall.
With a crooked smile she added, “You were always so ballsy, Hoffman.” She shook her head. “I bet you haven’t changed.”
“I’ve grown up since then. So how’d you like working at Goldman?”
She shook her head. “Hated it.”
He was surprised. Not what he’d expected. “It’s a pretty high-testosterone place, I imagine. Strip clubs and steak dinners, right?”
“Look, I like steak. And I don’t mind the strip clubs, really. I mean, so the traders need to blow off steam, and one way is to pay women with silicone breasts to do lap dances for them, since their wives won’t. That’s fine, I get it. I can deal.”
“But?”
“But in a lot of ways it felt like a frat house. Most of the inside jokes are from dumb comedies. If you never saw Caddyshack or Fletch, you miss half the jokes. ‘Just put it on the Underhills’ tab!’ Like that.”
Rick shook his head. He knew they were classic dumb comedies but he’d never seen them either.
A sommelier arrived with the wine and the whole elaborate ceremony: the display of the bottle, the careful extraction of the cork, the presentation of that cork, the tasting, the nod, the decanting.
“Would you like to wait for the wine to breathe, sir, or would you like me to pour some now?” the sommelier asked.
Rick looked at Andrea, who nodded. “We’ll have some now.”
The wine glasses were as big as a baby’s head. He swirled his wine, watched it run down in legs along the side of the glass. It smelled a bit musty, almost barnyardy. He took a sip, sucking it in as if he were drinking through a straw. He’d gone to wine tastings, written about them. He knew good wine in theory. A wine person would probably say this one had a complex nose. Exotic hints of anise and soy sauce, floral and herbal notes, and a long finish. At least, that’s how the wine gurus would probably put it. He decided the wine was probably excellent. It had to be. It cost a thousand dollars a glass.
Andrea was watching him, her head tilted, a wry smile, amused. He noticed her crooked tooth in the corner of her smile, and he smiled back. She used to be cute. She’d become gorgeous. She was also confident in ways she’d never been before.
She took a sip and nodded. “I’m sure it’s great. But it’s definitely wasted on me.”
Four thousand dollars and neither of them was experiencing a sensory orgasm. At least, he thought, it’s not my money.
“So you didn’t get the jokes,” Rick said, back to Goldman Sachs.
She shrugged. “You play along. So you’re trading credit derivatives. Credit default swaps. You’re basically betting against some poor cash-strapped company and hoping they go down the tubes so you’ll get rich, cashing in your death-spiral convertibles-oh, sorry, I meant ‘floating convertibles.’ You’re inside the donut machine making… synthetic collateralized debt obligations and selling them to rich schmucks. Arcane, exotic financial instruments no one understands. And so what?”
Rick didn’t understand most of what she’d just said. She might as well have been speaking Serbian. He took another sip of wine. He could taste a little cherry, some tannin in the aftertaste. It was actually quite good. It was definitely opening up. “But at least you’re making good money.”
“Crazy money. Ridiculous money. Enormous amounts of disposable income. But you know what? You’ve got no time to spend it anyway. Because you’re working a hundred hours a week or more and that’s all you’re doing. You have no life.”
Rick nodded. “I get it.” He took another sip. He noticed a grapefruit note, and something dark and dusky, almost bricklike. It was truly a spectacular wine.
“I mean, you spend every minute of your day buying and selling shit for someone else. Really. That’s all you’re doing. Meanwhile, you’re looking at the hedge fund guys and thinking, how come I don’t bring home that kind of money? If they ever stopped to think about it, which they usually don’t, they’d consider it a waste of a life. I mean, I think that’s why some of those guys throw their money away without even thinking about it, so they can at least have something to show for all that wasted life. So they can feel their life has some kind of meaning. So they can tell people they saw Paul McCartney or Sting on the beach at Saint Bart’s. Or they’ll go to Per Se and dump thousands of bucks for a single bottle of… of freaking fermented grape juice, you know?” She lifted her giant wine glass. “It’s stupid. It’s obscene. It’s gross.” Then she smiled. “No offense.”
Rick smiled back, starting to feel a little queasy. “So Geometry Partners is, uh, what, a hedge fund?”
“Oh,” she said with a quick, musical laugh. “Oh, God no. It’s-well, I took some of the money I made in the Distressed Opportunities Fund at Goldman and started this little nonprofit. We try to make low-income kids fall in love with geometry.”
It was his turn to laugh. “So you mean actual geometry.”
She nodded. “I did Teach for America for a year before Wharton, and, well, I liked it, but I figured I could do a lot better someday. Just dealing with math-you remember how much I loved math, right? I mean, geometry is so concrete. It’s so visual. It’s real world. It’s buildings and houses and rockets and baseball-the angle of a pitch, right?-the sun and the moon. And if you bring it to them that way, kids get it. They love it. They realize they might actually be good at math, and that gives them the confidence to do well in school.”
Rick nodded, took another sip of the four-thousand-dollar wine, which was starting to taste a little like a horse barn.
“We bring in math teachers and train them how to make math fun-we pay them for it, of course-and then we get the kids in there, and the damn thing is, it works, Rick. Like today-there’s this kid Darnell who goes to this school in Dorchester, and the teachers all hated him because he was so hostile. His brother’s in prison and his mother has a drug problem. I mean, Darnell’s exactly the kind of kid the gangs would love to sweep up, help them count keys of coke or cash or whatever. You can just see him disappearing into the life. But today I was showing him this math game on the iPad? And I could see him transform before my eyes-that hostility, that wariness-it was all gone. He was into it. He felt empowered. And I think-I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy, but I think this kid might… just might… make it.” Her eyes were moist, shining. “Distressed opportunities? One day it just popped into my head: How about public education? Isn’t that a distressed opportunity?”
Rick had fallen silent. He was fairly drunk by now from the Champagne and the wine, and his head was reeling. He hadn’t just underestimated Andrea. He realized he never knew her.
A couple of waiters appeared with golden plates, which they set down in front of Andrea, then Rick. Rick peered bleakly at the obscene display, crepes stuffed with caviar, tied up with chives, actual gold leaf on top of each one. They were loathsome now to look at, and besides, Rick had lost his appetite.