This was the deal. Clay wanted to recruit a handful of graduating seniors for a new business venture. The original idea came from Robert, which was to sell political information to large companies on a subscription basis. We don’t need poli sci majors, he said, just people with a strong grounding in the humanities and an interest in world affairs. There would also be plenty of part-time work to go around, consultancy jobs, office management positions.
Meanwhile the food kept coming. Amuse-bouche. Bottles of champagne to start and then two kinds of wine. Someone had taken care of the ordering; there were no menus, no choices. Waiters just came and went, always with full hands.
Clay sat between Robert and Beatrice, and she did a good job keeping the professor entertained, leaning in to make herself understood. Putting a hand on his elbow. I figured she must have patched things up with Robert. Later it struck me that maybe she wanted to make him jealous, but at the time it seemed she was just helping out. It was an awkward meal. Even when they got drunk, nobody had much to say.
“I mean, for God’s sake,” Walter said afterwards. “I’m a theater major.”
Robert kept trying to draw everyone out, to talk them up. But this was never one of his skills, running a conversation. His manner was dry and economical; he did better at introductions. Then he started bragging to Clay about Beatrice’s scholarship to the Kennedy School.
To Beatrice he said, “You could probably earn something like forty thousand dollars a year on top of that, just for putting us in touch with the right people there and spending maybe five hours a week doing research for the company.”
For some reason, this set her off.
“Come on, Robert. Give it a rest,” she said. “I don’t care about money as much as you do.”
“That’s because you don’t need to.”
“And I’m not going to the Kennedy School for connections.”
She sounded calm enough, but Robert, who had been acting nervous and stiff all night, lost his cool. “Stop it. You’re embarrassing me. And there’s no point to it. You made your point six months ago.”
So Beatrice said, “I don’t have to sit here,” and stood up.
Robert started going after her, but Clay put a hand on his shoulder. “Sit down, Robert, sit down. Have a glass of water.”
When she was gone, Robert stopped talking for a few minutes and did what he was told. He had a glass of water. His face was pretty red; he always had a sandy complexion. But he was also a bit drunk and looked like a young Wall Street type after a bad day on the floor. Clay made a little general conversation. Have you enjoyed Yale? Do you think you’ve changed much since you were a freshman? What do you think you’ll remember about your time here?
Walter answered, in his serious way, “I don’t think I’ll forget this dinner, sir.” Clay had the decency to smile.
At the end, Robert tried to salvage something from the evening. He stood up and made a speech. “You all know Professor Greene,” he began, “but let me tell you a few things about him maybe you don’t know.” And so on. Finally he said (a line he had probably prepared): “I don’t need to tell you what opportunity looks like. It looks like this.”
AS IT HAPPENS, CLAY AND Robert did go into business together. They opened their first office in New Haven, since it was convenient for the university. Robert was the only full-time employee; he was also a minority partner in the firm. They set up an office in Manhattan a year later.
I kept hearing updates from Walter, who sometimes crashed at his place when he needed a weekend in the city. Robert had a small one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, with a fire escape balcony overlooking Chumley’s bar. By this stage he was paying himself something like a hundred thousand dollars in salary. Their monthly subscription rates went as high as thirty grand.
Walter said he hadn’t changed at all, he looked just like he used to in college. Robert bragged that he never wore a tie to work. It was his job to bring in clients, something he turned out to be good at. Just before the dot-com crash, he sold his stake in the company for $17 million.
7
I stayed with Robert in Detroit for a little over two months. It took me that long to build up the nerve to move out, into a 1930s double-decker not ten blocks away, on a street in which about half the buildings had burned down. Also, I was waiting for Walter to come up from Indiana. We had a plan of living together for a while.
For most of that time I had a pretty good time. In the morning, I went over to work on the house, which had broken windows and a leaky roof but looked presentable enough. Squatters had burned garbage and newspapers in the downstairs fireplace, and there were burn scars around the hearthstone. When I picked at the paint job a layer of wallpaper tore away with it. There was another layer underneath, leafy and yellow and rough to the touch, like the wallpaper in my grandmother’s house in Puyallup. As a kid, I used to rub my thumb against the grain; it made your elbows shiver.
One summer in high school I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, and a bunch of us middle-class teenagers stripped walls, sanded floors, and painted a run-down row of old Victorians outside of Denham Springs. Plumbing and roofing were beyond us, but we helped and watched. I kept thinking about that summer and what it meant that fifteen years later I was fixing up one of these down-and-out places for myself.
There was no running water, and the toilets started out bone-dry. But the pipework seemed to be intact, which was lucky — people stole copper. Instead of grass, the garden grew mattresses, tires and broken bricks, but this kind of work I could do myself, with gloves on, and I spent most dry mornings wheelbarrowing junk from the backyard to the front. On wet days, the house felt pretty depressing since the upstairs living room ceiling dripped — not much, but enough to fill a bathtub someone had dragged under the drip. I spent maybe half an hour emptying this out, bucket by bucket, throwing the dirty water down the toilet. The damp smell wouldn’t go away, and every sunny day I forced open the crack-paned windows at the front and back to get a breeze going through.
I didn’t like hanging around after dark. Also, I wasn’t in much hurry to move in. Mrs. Rodriguez, the cook, laid out hot lunch for us every day at Robert’s house, around the twenty-seater mahogany table in the dining room. So I came back for lunch. I looked forward to this walk all morning. You could see the neighborhood shifting from street to street. Burned-down houses were replaced by boarded-up houses were replaced by empty houses with for sale signs in the window. By the time I got to Robert’s house I had climbed about two-thirds of the way up the class ladder.
ROBERT FLEW HOME REGULARLY TO see his new baby and also traveled around to drum up sponsorship. In his opinion, Detroit could be useful as a model for urban regeneration only if it made money. Somebody had to get rich off it, and it was his job to persuade investors that they would. A certain amount of money he was willing to put up himself, and didn’t mind losing it either, for his own sake, but the only clear-cut way of judging this kind of scheme was by the profit it made. So it needed to be profitable.
Beatrice served as his deputy whenever he went out of town. We saw a lot of each other those first few weeks since we both lived in the house. She had become an efficient and organized person who could deal with lawyers and manage a large staff. My second day there I saw her dismiss one of the real estate agents Robert had been using to buy up properties — an unhappy, smiley, middle-aged man.