Near the end of college, Cory thought there ought to be a book called The Alcohol Speaking, in which people wrote about all the things they had done while drunk. The problem was that they might not remember them when it came time to write them down. Princeton was full of decisions made while drunk. Cory had hooked up with Clove Wilberson twice sophomore year and then again once junior year. It had been the alcohol speaking, he knew, and he had been full of regret and remorse each time it happened. He couldn’t really blame it on Clove, but there she was one night, practically doing a lap dance for him. Cory had such long legs that they often just fell open when he sat in chairs. Years later on the subway in New York, women would look annoyed with him and he didn’t understand why, until once during rush hour a woman stared him down and said, “Enough with the man-spreading.” He was mortified, and clapped his legs back together like a machine part.
But in a butterfly sling chair in an overdecorated suite at Princeton sophomore year, after a vodka tasting given by a senior named Valentin Semenov, the son of a genuine oligarch, Cory leaned back and let Clove pour herself over him like syrup. “Oh my God,” he said when the lights went low and she opened his fly. A zipper being opened was like a little shock, especially when the hand holding the zipper pull was not Greer’s. Greer, whose absence was now as strong as a presence, and the worth of whose love was unquantifiable, making Cory perhaps richer than the richest oligarch.
I’m sorry, he thought, I really am, but as he was thinking this, the alcohol wasn’t just thinking but was in fact speaking; and beloved, invaluable Greer, with her blue streak and her sexy little body and her growing desire to be more outgoing and do something of meaning in the world, fell straight down through a trapdoor, away from him, away. Meanwhile, Clove Wilberson cleverly sidestepped that trapdoor, straddling Cory on the butterfly chair and then eventually in her bed. Finally he saw her dorm room not from below but from within. Loads of ribbons and trophies for field hockey. Loads of doodads that belonged to a rich girl. While they were in her bed, her parents called twice, and both times she took the call. She told him she had a horse named Boyfriend Material, who would be running in Saratoga that summer. “Bet on him; I’m confident he’s going to win,” she said sweetly into Cory’s ear.
The next day he said, “Clove, listen. I can’t do this again.”
“I know you can’t.” She didn’t seem upset, and he thought: Was I no good? But he knew he was good. He was unruined, and strong and energetic. Because of Greer, mostly, he knew what he was doing sexually. Clove smiled at him and said, “Don’t worry, Cory Pinto.”
So he didn’t worry, but two more times over the course of college he returned to her, starting up the pattern of shame and absolution and cycling unhappily through it. But it was the alcohol speaking every time. Being apart from Greer allowed these changes to happen. There were other changes, too. During the fall of the presidential campaign, he and Greer skipped weekends that they were meant to see each other, and instead went separately campaigning. Greer went to Pennsylvania on a Ryland bus; Cory went to Michigan on a Princeton bus. Clove was somewhere on that same bus, but he sat up front with Lionel, and across the aisle from Will, his two future microfinance startup partners. They were all overexcited by the campaign, and could stay up all day and night in the way you could only do without penalty when you were that age.
For weeks after the election Cory was so elated; elated and relieved and unworried about the future.
“Hey, Cory, Will and I wanted to talk to you,” said Lionel one evening as the three of them walked across campus. “Looking ahead here, we can’t get going on the startup right out of school. We’ll need a year or two. By then we’ll have more capital.”
“The thing is,” said Will, “because of the economy our dads are feeling less generous.”
“So we should all make a pact to go out there after we graduate and earn a shitload of money ourselves first, and use it later,” said Lionel. “Like saving up acorns for winter. Will and I are both going to try to get jobs in finance or consulting. You should do that too.”
At first this news depressed Cory, and he refused to consider their suggestion. But much later, as graduation drew closer, he became more comfortable with the idea of consulting for a year or two, though it wasn’t at all what he had planned. So many people around him were becoming consultants. Along with banking and business school it was one of the paths of least resistance. The top firms swarmed the top campuses, and many of the students went willingly.
Over a designated period during Cory’s senior year, recruiters from consultancies and VC firms and banks descended upon Princeton in their good tailored suits. They distinguished themselves from the students, who carried backpacks and were dressed in rumplewear; and from the male faculty in their oatmeal tweed and low-slung corduroys that revealed their deflated, tenured asses; and from the female faculty in shaggy, earthy, academic, latter-day Stevie Nicks dress, ambling into the long, less frequently tenured (as Greer had pointed out) homestretch of the rest of their lives.
After the initial interview, a man and a woman from Armitage & Rist took Cory out to dinner in downtown Princeton, at one of those Ye Olde restaurants where parents took their sons or daughters when visiting from far-off hometowns. The consultants urged him to get an appetizer first; did they think he was hungry? he wondered. Were they thinking of him as Vaguely Ethnic Scholarship Male, Exhibit A?
“Get whatever you like,” one of the two recruiters said, a man ten years older than Cory and wearing a stylish suit and narrow Beatle boots. His female colleague, with hair and skin that looked highly touchable, wore a red leather skirt and jacket that fit her tightly, futuristically.
“You know, it’ll be fun to see where you go,” the woman said to Cory as he ate, and as the two of them simply watched him eat, rather than actually eating much of anything themselves. Ordering was not the same as eating.
“Even if you already know you don’t want to go with us,” added the man. “Even if you’re fielding offers, Cory, but are leaning in another direction.”
“I’m not doing that,” Cory said, but because there was food in his mouth, it came out like “Uhnahdoonthah.”
“The world is totally open now,” the man went on. “It’s changing before our eyes. When you look at the profile of our firm—of all the firms, really—it’s a great time to be you. I envy you, actually, Cory. I’m excited for you and all your options.”
But what did they mean by you? Did they mean because he was a millennial? Or was he being lumped into the minority category again, because of his last name? Back during freshman year someone had slipped a flyer under his door inviting him to a meeting of one of the campus Latino organizations. “We’ll be serving chalupas,” it had read.
In the candlelight of their corner table at the restaurant, the man and woman from Armitage & Rist wooed Cory Pinto like two lovers proposing a three-way. So Cory ate salty smoked salmon on crisp little rounds of black bread, and a rack of meat like something on The Flintstones, followed by a ramekin of crème br?lée with a hard scorched crust on top that, when you cracked it with the tip of your spoon, felt as satisfying as if you were breaking ground to build your dream home. The recruiters were so complimentary throughout dinner, even as they left out a lot of specifics. The firm had offices in New York, London, Frankfurt, and Manila, they said, but Cory stressed that he definitely needed to be in New York. “We hear you,” said the woman.
Back in his dorm room after the meal, lightly burping little bursts of aerated fish and mustard, Cory had Skyped with Greer at Ryland. “Well, guess what, they sold me on it,” he said.
“Is that right?”
“Yep. They threw a lot of red meat at me and that did it. You would’ve hated what I ate. You would’ve actually been grossed out by the whole evening. But I have to admit I was into it. I mean, it was so ridiculous, having strangers from a ‘firm’—even that word is so weird—fawn over me like I was somebody. Having capitalism itself seek me out and think I might actually have something to offer it! It’s just for a year—two, tops—but I’m telling you, Greer, if you’re down with it, I really might do it.”
“You say it like you’re talking about some dangerous activity.”
“Everything has risk.”
“What do you think the risk is here?”
“Oh, just that I will become a consulting asshole, while you become someone good.”
“I don’t know why you say that,” Greer said. “I don’t even have a job yet.”