She checked her watch again; she’d checked it just a few seconds ago, but somehow five minutes had gone by, and she quickened her pace. She didn’t want to get there after the bell. Walking in the bright sunlight gave her a piercing headache, sort of like being drunk and hung over at the same time. As she searched her bag again for the sunglasses she already knew she’d left on the hall table at home, she heard a voice through the uncomfortable buzz inside her head, a voice that whispered too late. Too late.
Which was ridiculous. She was barely thirty. At Adam’s old job there was a broker who used to be a professional dog walker, who graduated from business school at age thirty-five. Too late for what, exactly? It might have made a difference if there were some type of work she felt passionate about, or some particular skill she might cultivate into excellence, something a little more marketable than just above-average intelligence and fear of idleness. Marietta loved to make fun of her dissolute clients, but if you got her drunk enough she would start talking in dead earnest about her job in terms of second chances and the desire to repent. Well, if you got Cynthia drunk enough, Cynthia thought, she would cop to wanting to do some good in the world, or at least to feel like her presence in it was value-added. How, though? Without some framework, some resources, even your secret aspirations just curdled into sentimental bullshit.
A lot of time seemed to have gone by very suddenly. The injustice of it, the knowledge that one could never go back to where one had started, to the old advantages, didn’t subside that day or the next. She knew that, every day, some woman somewhere did exactly what now seemed so impossible to her. Nevertheless she persisted in feeling that some sort of privilege had been stolen from her, not by the children, of course, but by someone.
Private equity was considered old-school in some ways, because it still had one foot in the reaclass="underline" IPOs, profits on actual goods sold, even the occasional start-up, compared to which the ethereal instruments hedge funds dealt in were like some branch of astrophysics that generated money. It even called upon some old-fashioned people skills, which Adam turned out to possess in precocious abundance. You had to sit down with a guy, to listen to his pitch or to listen to whatever it was he talked about when he thought the pitch was over, in order to gauge whether he himself was the key to his own company’s prospects or whether, at some point down the line, extracting a worthwhile profit was going to require taking the whole thing out of his hands.
Still, the ethereal was where the real money was, and everybody knew it. Parker in particular loved to bitch about how working at Perini was like driving some financial horse and buggy and how he couldn’t wait for the old man to loosen his grip a little bit so they could start making themselves into real players. He was eaten up by envy of guys he’d gone to Wharton with who were worth fifty million in these high-flying VCs they’d started maybe three years ago. At least once a week he tried to draw Adam into some conversation about how the two of them should walk out and start their own fund. It might even have been worth listening to, Adam thought, if it wasn’t for the fact that Parker sucked so bad at his job. He’d played football at Cornell and it was easy to see what Sanford had once liked about him, but lately the old man seemed to have soured on him completely. The more Parker worried about his own job security, the more contempt he showed privately for the whole operation, and the stupider high-risk shit he proposed in the hopes of proving his indispensability to the place once and for all.
He came over to Adam’s desk one morning holding a manila folder and said, “Dude, can I run something by you?” He’d gone to Los Angeles for the weekend, to some decadent birthday party one of his B-school classmates had thrown for himself, and he’d returned to New York with the notion that Perini should get into the movie business. Commercial credit was tight enough now, apparently, that rather than scuttle existing projects, the smaller studios would take financing from anywhere. “Here’s the thing,” Parker whispered. “It’s kind of an outside-the-box idea, and if I go in there alone with it, he’ll hand my balls to me before he’s even heard what I have to say. But if you go in there with me, he’ll give it a chance. He fucking loves you. So will you just go in there with me? You don’t even have to say anything.”
Adam was pretty sure that even five minutes’ thought would reveal the idea as a terrible one. But he felt both pity and fascination when it came to Parker, who seemed more and more capable of some kind of epic crash and burn; and he knew Sanford would recognize that he was there only as a favor. Plus it was such a lunatic idea that he hated the thought of not being in the room when Sanford heard it. “When?” he said.
Parker beamed. “No time like the present,” he said.
The rear wall of Sanford ’s office was floor-to-ceiling glass that looked out over the Hudson. It was all dark wood and leather and had so much nautical crap in it that he might have stood by the window and imagined he was in some sort of high-tech crow’s nest. It was pouring rain out there and much darker than it should have been. Parker nervously laid it out for him, and with a glance at Adam the old man gestured for the manila folder to be handed to him. He pored over Parker’s analysis, not impatiently. At one point he looked up and said, “But who is Joe Levy?”
“Production head,” Parker said.
“Yes, I see that, but who is he? What’s he done? What sort of track record does he have in terms of, you know, actually making money?”
Parker shifted in his seat. “Well, he’s produced numerous films as an independent,” he said. “Boathook was one that did pretty well, in a box-office sense. But really what’s intriguing about him is mostly a matter of pedigree. He’s the son of Charles Levy, who was the head of UA back in the glory days. A legendary guy. Something like five or six Oscars. Joe grew up surrounded by all the great minds in the business.”
Sanford made a snorting noise. “That’s it?” he said, and leaned back in his chair. “His father? What is it, some sort of feudal system out there?”
“Kind of, actually,” Parker said.
But Sanford was getting on a roll. “Were more chilling words ever spoken,” he said, putting the folder down, “from the investor’s point of view, than ‘he’s the son of the founder’? He figures the old man made it look so easy, how hard can it be? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure he’s a lovely guy. I’m sure the parties are amazing. But I’m always leery of guys who do that, who step into their fathers’ shoes. You know why? Because usually they’re Pete Rose Junior. I mean, my father was a tailor. Should I have gone into that business? Do you suppose I had some kind of genetic affinity for it? What about you? What does your father do?”
Parker was nodding now, trying to get out in front of the idea that the whole proposal had been a lark to begin with. “He’s a tax attorney,” he said.
“Well then maybe you missed your calling. Maybe you should be a tax attorney too. Adam, how about you? What’s your father’s trade?”