The Book of Jonah (3 page)

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-so-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 than 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.

“Quant analysis at work,” Jonah laughed. “You going to ask her if she wants to do a quick abs session after this?”

“Unfortunately,” Philip sighed melodramatically, “by rule I am no longer permitted to make such invitations. Aaron sent a rather strongly worded email regarding proper conduct at QUEST events. Evidently there is concern that certain members of the board do not display the appropriate motives in attending these gatherings.”

“I wonder what that could refer to?” Jonah said.

Philip sighed again. “If I am not for my cock, who am I for?” As their drinks arrived, he added, “I may resign in protest.”

“But then what about New York City's schools, right?” Jonah said, and Philip laughed.

This laughter was not surprising—but Jonah had not entirely been joking. He understood that Philip's membership in QUEST was mostly gamesmanship—part of a rivalry that went back to the days when Philip and Aaron were both charismatic freshmen on the same floor at Princeton. Yes, it helped Aaron to have a black mayoral aide on his board, but it also gave Philip access to all of Aaron's contacts; and he could always vent his frustration at being hierarchically beneath Aaron in the organization by trying to sleep with as many of these contacts as he could (though it seemed Aaron had put a stop to that tactic within their “friendship”). But either as a lingering effect of his conversation with the Hasid, or because of Aaron's speech, or because of what Patrick had seen him doing—or from some combination of all the events across the entire evening—Jonah found he wanted some reassurance that there was more going on that night than an open bar and calculated networking. He took a sip of his Scotch and said to Philip, “Seriously, though. Don't you think QUEST makes those schools better?”

Philip gave him an amused, quizzical frown—and in his imitation of an American accent (which veered sharply toward the Texan), he repeated, “Seriously?”

This skepticism wasn't surprising, either. Seriousness had never figured prominently in their friendship. “Indulge me,” Jonah said.

Philip tapped the tip of his broad, somehow regal nose, making a show of thinking. At this point Jonah realized he should not have sought reassurance as to the hopes of saving New York's schools from a man with a career in city politics. “When you consider this notion of applying the tactics of the financial industry to schools, you ought to remember what happened to the financial industry. More fundamentally, I would not rely too heavily on improved standardized test scores as an indicator of improved education. It would seem to me that filling in bubble sheets is a bit of a skill unto itself, maybe not so different from being good at Halo. That hasn't helped New York students much, either.” He took a long sip of his drink, put the glass gently on the bar. “White liberal guilt is really all this is in aid of, I am afraid. White liberal guilt and another bullet point on Aaron's résumé. You want to see a school in need? Come to Africa.” He shrugged nonchalantly. “But then perhaps I am compromised by my irritation at the founder's sudden bout of Puritanism. Do you, Counselor, believe QUEST does any real good?”

Jonah thought for a moment—and then held his forefinger and thumb apart as if he were presenting an invisible jelly bean. “A smidge,” Jonah said. “Even if the tools are imperfect, even if the motives are, let's say, mixed—it's still more effort and attention than these schools usually get. It's better than nothing for your poor black future constituents in Harlem, who deserve something, even if they do have access to clean drinking water.”