2
Robert James was one of the exceptions. I ran into him at our ten-year reunion — outside Zapatas, a Mexican dive bar we used to go to for the cheap sangria. His friends were leaving while mine were going in, but they had to wait for a girl to come out of a bathroom, and I stood around with Robert for a while, catching up.
We’d been drinking since four in the afternoon, and the street lamp light gave me a headache. My jet lag was pretty intense, it left me open to strong impressions. All these people I hadn’t seen in years, these people who knew me, or knew what I used to be like. And here I was again, seeing them again. It was like a big chemical experiment, where you took these known quantities, these guys you used to live with and eat with and sit in class with, and poured them out into the world, to see what they turned into. Of course at the same time you were trying to work out what the chemical reaction had done to you.
“I hear you made a lot of money,” I said to Robert.
You wouldn’t know it by the way he dressed: North Face jersey, loafers, a pair of clean blue jeans belted high. But it didn’t matter anyway, with his looks. In college we called him the Greek God — he had the face of one of those statues. There was something impersonal about it. You could never tell what he was thinking, not that this meant he was particularly smart.
“I did okay.”
“So what do you do with yourself all day? Kick back?”
He began to explain himself very carefully. Lately he’d been working on a couple of political campaigns, mostly fund-raising — fund-giving, too, he said. There was a guy we both knew in college, a law student at the time, who lived in the dorms and used to play squash with us occasionally in the steam-tunnel squash courts. A big barrel-chested black guy named Braylon Carr, with a football background and postgraduate degrees from Cambridge and Stanford. Anyway, Robert had helped him run for mayor of Buffalo. These Rust Belt towns were having a hard time — American cities all over the place were dying out. But if Braylon could make a difference in Buffalo, it would turn him into a major Democratic player.
“I’ll let you in on something. He’s going to be the first black president of the United States.” For some reason this mattered a lot to Robert. “Wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing to be a part of?”
“It doesn’t sound like a full-time job.”
But he’d started a hedge fund, too — a hedge of hedges. Basically, he went around the world picking funds to invest in.
“Does that keep you busy?” I said.
“I just got back from two weeks in China.” He had to repeat himself, because of the noise inside, and leaned towards me with his hand on my elbow. “You get to a point,” he said, “after a few days, when you know the routine. You’ve got two pairs of shorts and socks, a spare shirt, another pair of pants. The hotel takes care of the washing — they fold it up nicely and hang it outside your door in the morning. You’ve got passport and tickets. And you think, I could just keep going. I could go on like this as long as I wanted to.”
“Somebody said you got married.”
But he didn’t seem to hear me; he was drunker than he looked. “I take two percent of the capital and twenty percent of the profit. Even if we lose money, I make money. It’s not very hard to make money. You just need to be able to work out what two percent is.”
“Is that right.”
We stood there in the street while people went out and in. Everybody we saw was thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three years old. There were bald guys with guts and desk-chair asses, wearing suits and looking like your parents’ friends when you were a kid. I recognized some of them, too — like those Escher pictures, where the real image hovers under the surface. If you screwed your eyes up right, you could see the guy you knew. At least I still had my hair, I weighed what I weighed in high school. But I also thought, something has happened to them that hasn’t happened to me.
“Maybe I should move to Buffalo,” I said.
“Tell me why.”
“Or Detroit or Cleveland. It doesn’t matter. Somewhere you can buy a house on eBay for a few hundred bucks.” He looked at me and I said, “We could all buy houses. You could probably buy up a neighborhood. I still have roommates.”
“I thought you were teaching somewhere.”
“That’s right. At some Podunk college in Wales. I don’t know how much you know about the academic rat race. There’s a window of time to get on the ladder, but if the window closes, they don’t kick you out, they keep you on. They make you teach so much you have no time to write, and unless you publish you can’t get a permanent job. So this two-tier system develops. I’m on the wrong tier.”
“Why don’t you come home?”
“I’d love to, but there aren’t any jobs. And I don’t have health insurance. That’s the trouble with Europe — the welfare state sucks you in. I tell you, this is not how I figured things would pan out. I don’t mean to embarrass you, but my plane ticket out here cost me more than I can afford. I didn’t come over to put up a front. I wanted to have some real conversation.”
“You haven’t changed much, Marny,” he said.
Marnier’s my last name, pronounced in the French fashion, which my college friends refused to do. So I got called Marny. Greg is my Christian name, but at Yale only my professors used it.
“That’s not how it seems to me. Or maybe I should have changed more. I don’t know.”
The girl came out of the bathroom and waved — I recognized her, short hard curly hair, freckles, she used to be a gymnast. Robert and I once drove out to the beach together. He borrowed his roommate’s car, there were four or five of us and she sat in the backseat. This was freshman year. She wanted to be a vet, I remembered trying to talk to her, and she stood in the street now calling, “Come on, Robert, I’m hungry.” The rest of their friends started drifting away, but one thing I always liked about Robert is that he never hurried anywhere for the sake of girls.
“Where are you staying?” he asked.
“One of the dorm rooms. I think I’m sharing with somebody.”
“Listen,” he said, “you’re drunk, you’re tired. Get some sleep.”
“I’m embarrassing you.”
“You’re not, but they’re playing my song. I’ll see you later.”
Robert likes to joke that this is where it all started, because of some half-drunk conversation. But that’s just one of his stories. In college he was the kind of guy who would ask you about some writer, some class assignment, okay, so what’s his deal, what’s his line, what do I need to know. As if you could break a book down into two or three usable ideas. He was famous for walking out of a three-hour philosophy exam after sixty minutes. He strolled to the front of the class, he laid down his paper, and he looked up at the rest of us. “Good luck, folks,” he said. I think he did fine, not great but fine. What I mean is, he made quick decisions, but he was very deliberate, too. And when I saw him that day he was already getting restless, he had backseat political ambitions, he had money to spend, he was looking for something new.
3
When I woke up the next morning, I had ten or twenty seconds of real confusion. Partly because of jet lag. It didn’t feel like waking up, it felt like being hit on the head and slowly coming back to consciousness. I was lying on the bottom half of a bunk bed and looking out, through an arched window, at a sycamore tree full of campus sunshine. It took me a while to get my bearings, to realize where I was. But even after I did, for ten or twenty seconds, I couldn’t remember what I was doing there — how old I was, or if I had to make a class. Then I remembered and the hangover kicked in, but that didn’t matter because the years were gone anyway.