The Book of Jonah (2 page)

He found himself standing beside a scruffy-looking black man—lanky, in a sweat-stained Yankees cap and cargo shorts, with large headphones over his ears, smoking the fingernail-sized remnants of a joint. He was rapping along with the music he was listening to: “Everybody got they own thang—currency chasin'! Worldwide through th'hard time—worryin' faces! Shed tears bury niggas close to the heart, was a friend now a ghost in the dark,” the man chanted rhythmlessly, raspingly, then took a hit. Jonah knew he'd heard the song many times, though he couldn't immediately identify it. And it occurred to him how much more comfortable he was standing here beside this man than he was with the Hasid. Then Jonah remembered.

“Tupac,” he said aloud.

The man with the headphones turned and looked at him, glanced up and down at his suit suspiciously—and then laughed huskily, smoke pouring from his mouth. “Tupac!” the man cried. “He ain't dead!”

“He ain't dead,” Jonah agreed.

This encounter, Jonah felt, was a better answer—a better retort—than any he might have given to the Hasid. Who could ever say who was righteous, and who was not; who was saved, and who was damned? Staying open to the world and its inhabitants—living life—having fun—that was what mattered. If he had a circle, Jonah thought pridefully, this was the compass with which he would draw it.

*   *   *

After a few minutes the storm had diminished to the stray drop here and there, and Jonah began walking the last blocks to the QUEST cocktail party. As he made his way down the damp sidewalks of Greenwich Village into SoHo, wet and wary people emerged from doorways and bars, casting mistrustful eyes skyward. At a crosswalk he had to leap—phone clutched tightly—over a massive puddle at a clogged storm drain. Then, going a few blocks farther south, he reached the venue: the unelaborately named 555 Thompson Street, a blue-tinted sign mounted behind glass on the door confirming that this was indeed the location of the 4th Annual QUEST for New York Schools Cocktail Event and Silent Auction.

As he restraightened his tie, neatened his hair by way of running his fingers through it, he tried to recall precisely what QUEST stood for; something like Quantitative Educational Skills and Tools was about right. The organization was a nonprofit started by a dazzlingly charismatic Harvard MBA named Aaron Seyler, who did quantitative analysis consulting on Wall Street. As the narrative on the QUEST website had it, Aaron had decided he wanted to do more with his life than improve annual returns by quarter points: He wanted to make a lasting contribution to the city where he'd become a success (though having met Aaron and seen him schmooze, Jonah suspected he'd have been a success even in a city where they still used shells and beads for currency). The idea of QUEST was to apply the quantitative tools of finance to improving what were called educational outcomes: graduation rates, test scores, college matriculation, and so forth. Aaron's vision, as he was wont to explain, was to harness the energy and insight that daily went into generating billions of dollars for banks and hedge funds toward the betterment of New York City's public schools.

Which was all well and good as far as Jonah—now pushing open the door to 555 Thompson—was concerned. He had been raised in a terrifically liberal household and town—and though his politics had been moderated by exposure to the non-terrifically liberal world outside of Roxwood, Massachusetts (and lately by necessity from working for the sort of megalithic corporations he had been brought up to despise), his politics remained essentially liberal in character. He had yet to hear an argument that made him doubt you should do all you could for the underserved and underprivileged. More money for schools? That sounded good to him. But he was not much of a joiner—not really one for causes, groups, committees. His politics were manifested mainly in voting Democratic, reading some Paul Krugman, and avoiding racial/sexual invective. In fact, it was unlikely he would have attended the QUEST event at all, except Philip Orengo, a friend from law school, was on the board, and Jonah hadn't seen him in a while; and he had gotten out of work relatively early; and Sylvia was out of town and Zoey was with her (nominal) boyfriend; and, not least, there would be an open bar. All that plus successfully completing a major case had seemed to him a good reason to have a few drinks. Yet though he understood it was this combination of convenience and circumstance that had led him to buy the seventy-five-dollar ticket—as he emerged from an entry corridor into the venue proper—it still struck Jonah that his attendance proved some implicit point in his argument with the Hasid.

The space was massive, square, brick-walled, with mod-industrial stylings: exposed ducts ran along the three-story ceiling, a catwalk was suspended above all four sides of a central floor area, where people mingled and later might dance. The walls were hung with gold-red bunting and drapery, which made a nice complement to the red brickwork and the black of the catwalk (and the fact that Jonah recognized this color coordination made him realize just how much time he was spending with fashion-conscious young women, between seeing his girlfriend and his not-his-girlfriend). A bar stretched the length of one wall, and a stage toward the back was set up with a microphone flanked by placards displaying the QUEST insignia: the dollar-bill eye pyramid, with a sort of archetypal schoolhouse in its pupil. The space was nearly filled, as Jonah had guessed it would be. It was a large though not unpleasantly packed-in crowd of men and women, mostly Jonah's age or thereabouts—professionals, for the most part, dressed in the suits and skirts they'd worn to work. As Jonah made his way inward, he passed several quite attractive young women; everyone had drinks in their hands, and something in a Cuban jazz mode played as background to the great indistinguishable mix of genial or perfunctory or flirty conversation. In short—the entire scene looked like a lot of fun.

And in hypothetical continuation of the dispute with the Hasid, Jonah acknowledged to himself the frivolity of all this—and by way of riposte, thought of all the times in which life made frivolity impossible, how frivolity was a sort of collective decision by those engaged in it, how often life conspired against it: So why not drink, flirt, and make merry? There were meetings in the morning, there were breakups down the road, everyone in this room would attend their fair share of funerals. He was not really a fatalist, but his training and experience as a lawyer had taught him that you didn't have to believe in an argument for it to be effective—and so he felt justified in starting his evening of charity by grabbing a beer.

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.