The Book of Jonah Read online

  Ten minutes later, this beer was three-quarters gone and he was strolling the path of the catwalk. The silent auction had been set up along its perimeter: Tables were arrayed with paraphernalia representing the various items up for bid—a cluster of La Mer skin-care products for the spa package; a monogrammed plate for dinner with Aaron at Minetta Tavern; a cheese basket for a private tour of the Murray’s cheese cave. He was considering making a bid on an aromatherapy massage for Sylvia when he noticed Seth Davis, an acquaintance from law school, standing on the opposite side of the catwalk. Because of Philip Orengo’s role in the group, Jonah often saw members of his law school class at QUEST events. Jonah had always liked Seth, though they’d never been friends, exactly. Seth had once explained his decision to get his dual JD/MBA and go into finance rather than law by saying, “If I’m going to spend my twenties working hundred-hour weeks, I’d rather get really rich than a little rich.” The financial crisis had probably bent the curve of this accumulation—but Jonah had a feeling Seth was doing just fine.

  “Jacobstein!” Seth called when he saw him. He was standing with a group of other men, all in suits like Jonah, all holding beers. Jonah went over and joined them. Introductions were made, hands were shaken. Seth’s group was made up of his coworkers at the financial-services firm where he worked and their friends in the industry. (Finance people tended to find one another at parties, Jonah had learned from almost a year of dating Sylvia.) The jocular rowdiness of the conversation suggested that all these men were several drinks ahead of him. An argument was going on over a five-hundred-dollar bid for a Derek Jeter–signed baseball.

  “You could get that ball for a hundred fifty bucks on eBay,” someone was saying to the man who’d made the five-hundred-dollar bid.

  “But why would I want to give a hundred fifty dollars to some fat guy in his underwear, living in his mother’s basement?” the bidder replied, and the others laughed.

  “You guys aren’t factoring in the tax deduction,” said another man—and he dramatically wrote a bid for six hundred dollars, to a chorus of “Oh!”s from the others.

  “Yeah, but your deduction is based on what some GED meathead at the IRS decides the ball is worth, right, Jacobstein?” Seth asked Jonah.

  “Hey, if you want my counsel, you have to pay my retainer,” Jonah replied, and the others laughed again. He didn’t usually engage in greedy-lawyer humor—one tended to hear a great deal of it as a lawyer—but he’d found it always played well with the financial crowd.

  “Can you even afford six hundred dollars?” someone demanded of the man who’d made the most recent bid. “I saw the ring you bought for Melissa, I know you’re overleveraged.”

  “First of all, that’s a CZ,” he replied, to more laughter. “Second of all, as long as no one starts buying real estate in the Las Vegas exurbs, my bonus this year will provide all the liquidity I need.”

  “I’m sure that’s a comfort to all the people in Vegas underwater on their mortgages,” one of them joked.

  “Hey, if you bought a house in the Vegas exurbs in 2005, you deserve to be underwater on your mortgage for at least another decade,” Seth said.

  They all laughed some more. Yes, they were assholes, Jonah thought, but they seemed to know it, which somehow made it more forgivable. Besides, he suspected there was something to the collective American superstition—enduring despite the events of recent years—that the economy couldn’t function without assholes.

  At this point, the group was joined by a smiling, gangly man, with flushed cheeks and a long, ovoid face, a puff of disordered blond hair. His name was Patrick Hooper—Jonah had met him through Sylvia—and he was often at events such as this. Some of the others in the group evidently knew him, too, as they exchanged (somewhat) surreptitious eye rolls when he joined them. He looked at the bid list for the baseball and then wrote in a bid of five thousand dollars. He looked up from the page, laughing delightedly.

  “The funny part is I don’t even like baseball,” Patrick said.

  “That is funny,” Seth muttered.

  Patrick Hooper was, by all reports, a financial genius. According to Sylvia, during the financial-products boom years he had devised a series of commodity trades for Goldman of indisputable profitability and at least theoretical legality. Patrick had earned enough from this to retire by the time he was thirty—which he had—The Wall Street Journal marking the occasion with the headline A WALL STREET WUNDERKIND TAKES A BOW. Even now, Goldman kept him on retainer, presumably on the chance that he might interrupt a marathon session of World of Warcraft to concoct some new infallible profit-making financial device. What made all the wunderkind talk hard for Jonah to take seriously, though, was the fact that Patrick was among the most socially inept people he had ever met. He wasn’t a bad guy, really; he just had an astonishing talent for annoyance. The massive overbid on the baseball—ruining the entire fun of it—was, sadly, typical: Patrick seemed possessed by the very simple and very dumb idea that he could invest his way out of his social awkwardness—discover some trade of assets that would return him genuine affection, or at least popularity. Hence the parties he regularly threw at his massive Tribeca loft; the invitations he sprayed wildly to just-opened restaurants and to exclusive-ish clubs; the outsize donations to next-gen charities like QUEST. And, predictably, the more lavish and transparent these efforts were, the less success they met with.

  “I’m impressed you guys came out tonight,” Patrick observed. “Y’know, Aaron and I had dinner a couple nights ago,” he continued, not knowing, or not wanting, to disguise his pride in this achievement. “We were talking about how important it is to get people to these events who don’t actually care about charity.” Patrick laughed again, though, again, no one else did.

  “Well, if I knew you were coming…” one of them said.

  “It’s really ironic, though,” Patrick went on. “Finance is supposed to be so evil, but Goldman does more in terms of corporate citizenship than an organization like this could ever dream of. Even though I retired several years ago, I’m still active in their—”

  “Anyway,” Seth interrupted, making a show of turning his shoulders away from Patrick. “They’re probably going to close the open bar in a few minutes.” He turned to Jonah. “You want to come?”

  Jonah knew he ought not glance over to see Patrick staring into Seth’s shoulder with guileless hope of being invited, too. But he did; and somehow the idea of ditching Patrick struck him as counter to the entire spirit of QUEST—whatever that was supposed to be. “No, I’m gonna make a bid or something,” Jonah answered, regretting it even as the words left his mouth.

  Seth shrugged, almost sympathetically. “Suit yourself.…” And he and the others moved off toward the stairs.

  “So, I didn’t know you were involved with QUEST,” Patrick said as they left.

  On top of everything, Jonah’s beer was now empty, which only seemed to confirm he’d made a mistake in remaining. “A friend of mine is on the board,” he replied.

  “Adrian? Jin? Kent? Abbey? Philip?”

  It didn’t exactly surprise Jonah that Patrick could recite the names of the entire QUEST board from memory; he’d probably been asking them to dinner for months. “Philip and I went to law school together,” Jonah explained.

  Patrick nodded, a pair of dips of his long head. “And Philip went to undergrad at Princeton with Aaron.”

  “That’s how these things work,” Jonah replied.

  “So how are things with Sylvia?” Patrick now inquired a little too eagerly. “Things good with you guys?” And he then finished off the glass of champagne in his hand a little too gulpingly.

  Of all the irritating aspects of Patrick’s personality, this one was the hardest to reconcile with a belief that he was not really a bad guy: Before Jonah met Sylvia, Patrick had been not-so-subtly courting her—and had never fully stopped courting her, despite the fact that he knew she and Jonah had been dating seriously for months. Granted, Patrick not-s
o-subtly courted every woman in finance he met; and, in more dispassionate moments, Jonah could even identify a certain integrity in Patrick’s attempts to find a romantic partner with her own career and money, rather than just dating a platinum-blond Russian whose greatest aspiration in life was to be spoiled. But even so—how friendly could you be to someone openly hoping to steal your girlfriend?

  “Things are great,” Jonah lied. “Things are going great.”

  “We should all have dinner sometime,” Patrick said. “She’s a rock star, she should be working with my old team at Goldman. Definitely tell her to shoot me an email.”

  “I definitely will,” Jonah lied again. It occurred to him that maybe Patrick deserved to be ditched. “Anyway, I should go downstairs and find Philip.”

  “I saw you in the West Village the other day,” Patrick answered—apparently well accustomed to continuing conversations his interlocutors wanted to end.

  “Oh, yeah?” Jonah said, glancing down from the catwalk, searching the crowd for the shaved black pate of Philip Orengo.

  “You were in Corner Bistro with some girl.”

  Jonah’s heart immediately launched into sharp, agitated thumping—each beat seeming to clang across his mind with the words, Think of a lie, think of a lie, think of a lie. Unfortunately, this mental activity did not bring him any closer to actually thinking of a lie, and the most he could manage was, “Uh, when?” Fixing on a lie was made still more difficult by the fact that he didn’t know whether Patrick attached any significance to what he’d seen: whether he was just making conversation by whatever means necessary or, more ominously, whether he understood there was a connection between the girl he’d seen Jonah with and his own prospects with Sylvia. Who could tell how clueless or calculating Patrick was outside the world of currency derivatives and whateverthefuck?

  “Maybe two weeks ago?” Patrick went on, twirling his empty, fingerprint-smudged champagne glass at the stem.

  “Oh, yeah, right,” Jonah said, as blithely as he could manage. “I was out with some work friends.”

  “The girl I saw you with was cute.” Jonah was tearing through his brain, trying to remember if he’d been stupid (read: drunk) enough to have done any public canoodling that night. “Is she single?”

  Was Zoey Rosen single—that, at least, he could answer honestly. “Sorry, man. She has a boyfriend.”

  Patrick threw back his head in a show of exaggerated disappointment. Then he asked, “Who’s she dating? Somebody at your firm?” And again, was he asking because he knew he had Jonah on the hook, knew he was now in a position to get him to acquiesce to any number of dinners, trips to the Hamptons, nights at the club? Or was he—ironically more benignly—just hoping to move in on Zoey now, too? This was what Jonah got for indulging his liberalism.

  But he got some sense of deliverance from Patrick’s next comment: “Anyway, if they ever break up, give me her number.” Still more deliverance came a moment later when Aaron Seyler—six foot four, corn-husk blond, former captain of the Princeton swim team, Rhodes Scholar, MBA, and the person Jonah would have judged most likely to solve (if any one person could solve) the education crisis, or the energy crisis, or whatever crisis caught his attention—stepped to the microphone on the stage. From the catwalk, Jonah could see the ripples of awareness of Aaron’s presence spread across the room, as conversations ceased and people adjusted where they stood to get a better view of the stage. Not that Jonah blamed anyone: Aaron stood before the microphone with all the self-assurance and faith in collective approval of an actor who’d just won his third Oscar of the night. But Jonah didn’t begrudge Aaron his poise, his charm, his magnetism—he admired it more than he was taken in by it, but he didn’t begrudge it. He had the sense that if someone had to be Aaron Seyler, Aaron Seyler was the right man for the job.

  “Don’t worry, this won’t take long,” Aaron began. “I know you all have drinks to finish, and, frankly, so do I.” This joke got more laughter than it deserved, but Aaron could have been reading selections from The Tibetan Book of the Dead and gotten a laugh. “First, I want to thank you for coming tonight. Your donations keep the lights on at QUEST, and more important than money, I want to thank you for giving what’s most precious of all, your time. I also want to direct your attention to the silent auction, which will close at eight, and I want to thank the organizations and individuals who contributed items. I should point out that this year we have two Mets season tickets up for bid, in case anyone is crazy enough to want them.” (Laughter.) “I am pretty sure my bid of five dollars is still leading.” (More laughter.) “So if anybody wants to buy my tickets for the first Mets game this year…” (Sustained laughter.)

  At this point Aaron put his right hand in his pocket, moved his face a bit closer to the microphone—getting serious. “We try to have these drinks for the friends of QUEST every year. A lot of you have been with us from the beginning, back when we weren’t getting grants and I was giving the spiel you probably all have memorized by now in my living room to small groups of you. We try to do this every year because it’s good for the staff and the board and myself to relax and socialize with so many old friends. But we also do it because QUEST, at its heart, is still about those late-night bull sessions in Abbey or Adrian’s kitchen, when all we had was an idea of how to fix New York City schools, and the faith that if we gave people a chance to do the right thing, they would.

  “Now, our generation gets accused of apathy a lot. And as a member of the MTV generation old enough to have actually watched videos on MTV, I understand why. No, our generation by and large doesn’t affiliate with religious institutions. We view politics with deep skepticism. We’ve seen the limits of what conventional charities can do. But that to me isn’t apathy. That’s realism. When our generation identifies a problem—and identifying problems is something I think we’d all agree our generation excels at—when we identify a problem in our government, in our society, in our schools, instinctively our first thought is not to turn to some pastor or politician or pundit. We turn to one another. We look to our friends. We go to a friend’s kitchen, and we sit down, and we say to one another, How can we make renewable energy affordable? How can we drive social justice in this country? How can we fix New York City’s schools and lift up New York City’s students?

  “Are we that arrogant? Yup. Are we that foolish? Maybe. But we’re also that brave and hopeful and confident. And we are not—we are not—apathetic. Yes, we’ll do it our way, yes, we’ll do it a new way, our own way, but we’ll do it. This is year five of QUEST. We’re in dozens of schools, we’ll double that number in three years, our success metrics are off the charts—whether you want to talk about attendance, exam performance—you name it, we’ve optimized it. And we did it with cocktail parties, we did it with white-box Chinese food, we did it by trusting each other and believing in each other and that is how we are going to keep on doing it. So please: Make a bid, buy a ticket to the gala this fall, be bold enough to bore your friends and colleagues with our story. And if we do all that, we will be the generation of New Yorkers that saves this generation of students. Have a great night, and thank you for coming.” The applause from all corners of 555 Thompson was warm, sustained, heartfelt.

  As Aaron’s speech began, those on the catwalk had moved toward the railing to see, and in this realignment of bodies Jonah had managed to detach himself from Patrick and their deeply uncomfortable conversation. He’d spotted Philip almost directly below him, standing with other members of the QUEST board. During the speech Jonah noticed that Philip divided his attention between Aaron and the face and figure of a bare-shouldered brunette in a green dress, directly at his two o’clock. As Aaron entered his peroration, Jonah started down the catwalk steps to join Philip, and by the time the applause diminished and the mingling and music resumed, they were greeting each other with a back-pounding hug. “How goes the fight against corporate legal liability?” Philip asked in his lilting Kenyan accent.

  “Better th
an the mayor’s plan to turn all of Broadway into a giant bike lane,” Jonah answered. Philip was an aide to the mayor, could frequently be seen (“as an advertisement of his honor’s diverse administration,” as Philip put it) standing back and to the left at press conferences. “Was that your idea?”

  Both without drinks, they reflexively started moving toward the bar. “Your attendance tonight is a pleasant surprise,” Philip told him. He’d been educated in British boarding schools, and as a consequence tended to speak in these grandiloquent, contractionless sentences.

  “We finalized a settlement today, so I got to leave before midnight.”

  “Congratulations on both counts.” As they made their way through the crowd, Philip stopped every so often to shake a hand. Watching him—dressed nattily in a powder-blue suit, smiling with consistent gladness into every face he recognized—Jonah could easily imagine Philip in the role he openly aspired to: mayor of the city. It wasn’t impossible, either: He had the intelligence, the résumé, the politician’s instinctive cunning (he always won when he and Jonah played chess); he networked relentlessly (though not as effortlessly as Aaron); and, as he often pointed out, there was now a Kenyan in the White House and a bachelor in the mayor’s office. The political era redounded favorably on his prospects.

  When they reached the bar, Philip ordered a vodka tonic, Jonah a Scotch. As they waited for their drinks, Philip eyed the same brunette in green whom he’d been all-but-ogling during Aaron’s speech, now a few feet up the bar from them. “I have observed a strong correlation between QUEST donors and Pilates classes,” Philip murmured.