“Imagine,” I said. “Studying in the library.”
“I know—it sucks. Because she’s amazing. She wants to be a writer. And she isn’t just talking about it, she’s doing it. She writes stories all the time, and she’s going to apply to take a class with Ray Campanaro next semester.”
Tonight the cafeteria was serving pork loins, an unfortunate entrée too often thrust upon us. Up and down the cafeteria’s long wooden tables, students were eating cold cereal, salads, heaping plates of instant mashed potatoes.
“You should offer to read her work,” Nolan said. “You know, before she applies to that class.”
“That’s a good idea,” Jeffrey said. “But I’d only be doing it as a friend. She has a boyfriend back home. By the way, we were right—she is from Texas.”
“I hate it when they bring up the boyfriends back home,” I said.
“The kiss of death,” Jeffrey said.
“Doesn’t have to be,” Nolan smirked.
“Yeah, well she brought him up about nine hundred times. He’s a baseball player.” Jeffrey stuffed a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth.
“Texas is a long way from here,” Nolan said.
“Maybe it won’t last with this ballplayer,” I said. “You never know.”
“Sure,” Jeffrey said. “Maybe she’ll wake up one day and tell him that he’s too good-looking and all-American for her, and that she prefers the nerdy, unathletic type.”
We all laughed and finished dinner, having no idea that several months later this was essentially what she would do. This sexy, intelligent woman would fall for him. They would date all four years, and then after graduation they would move to California together and get married in a Pacific Heights mansion overlooking the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, a view that they would, in time, buy for themselves. Young and in love, they would settle in the right city at the right time. And along with a million other prospectors in that modern-day Wild West, they would soon discover untold riches and ride the wave of their American Dream right into a new, shimmering millennium.
6
“How could you lose all that money?” I asked Jeffrey, alone with him now in the control room. Through the window, we were watching Nolan speaking to Marie, preparing her for our desperate bribe.
“Everything was tied up in company stock when it crashed,” Jeffrey said. “I held on, figured it couldn’t get worse. But it did. It got a lot worse—as in, it’s all gone. And now I have mortgages on my house, and houses for my parents, too, and Sara’s parents.”
He had always been an unlikely millionaire. He might have been a Princeton legacy, but he was no go-getter. He’d thought about going to graduate school in English, maybe becoming a professor, but then he missed all the application deadlines. Story of his life. In that modern European authors class, he pulled a C for the term. He became so interested in Thomas Mann that he decided to read his collected works instead of what was on the syllabus. The papers he wrote always came back with gushing comments about his insightful readings and the quality of his prose, but marked way down for being days or even weeks late.
When it became April of our senior year and he still had no plans, he decided to look for a job and then apply to graduate school in the fall. He applied for a few computer programming jobs in California, despite having no formal training. He figured that if he could get it, a job writing code in shorts and a T-shirt in a warm climate was a reasonable way to spend a year. In 1994 companies were desperate for programmers. When a start-up company in San Francisco made him an offer, the path of least resistance was to take it. Then the path of least resistance was to keep it. He was a quick learner and kept getting promoted. After a year he was making six figures. After two years, he stopped telling me his salary.
The nineties dot-com boom was on. Stocks were soaring and portfolios bursting. (Not mine, though. I had no portfolio. What little money I made playing the drums was tied up in things like groceries. And heat.) I remember Evan, who’d majored in economics before going to law school, explaining to us once why Internet stocks were wildly overvalued. How a market correction was only a matter of time.
“People will lose everything,” he’d warned.
Jeffrey didn’t want to hear it. The business he’d been working for since graduation was about to go public. He stood to make millions.
“You’re telling me that you don’t have any money invested in Yahoo or AOL?” he asked Evan.
“Well, of course I do,” Evan had said, and shrugged. “Because, you know, what if I’m wrong?”
He wasn’t wrong, though. And now the wave that Jeffrey was riding had evidently come crashing down, as all waves must.
“And you know I don’t care about money,” Jeffrey was saying now. “You know that, Will. But you try kicking your folks and your wife’s folks out of the houses you bought for their retirement.”