On Saturday morning, Matt announced he had to go back to the office. Keen to work on her essay about nutrition and educational outcomes, Karen gave herself a temporary dispensation to remove all limits on screen time enjoyed by her daughter. As it happened, Karen ended up reading the paper and falling asleep. But the three of them went on a family outing to the zoo on Sunday morning, which Karen didn’t exactly enjoy, since it was still freezing outside and, at that point in her life, animals were not of particular interest to her. But returning to their warm home, she was happy to have gone, if only because, for once, the whole family was together and because it seemed like the kind of thing families did on weekends. And there was still a side of Karen that wanted to do things right, even though she felt haunted and repulsed by the sight of the baboons, whose bulbous red anuses suggested to her in a dispiriting way that we were all just animals whose sole purpose on the planet was to create offspring and then die.
On Monday, Karen met an old college acquaintance named Clay Phipps for lunch. Having tagged him as a potential Hungry Kids donor and possibly even a candidate for its board of directors, she’d e-mailed him cold and asked to meet. From what she’d read in the financial press, he’d founded his hedge fund, which used a new quantitative trading strategy, while he was still in business school. He was now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not a cool billion, and had homes in Jackson Hole, Bermuda, and probably three other places. Though he’d hardly started out in life poor. His father had been high up at Morgan Stanley and his mother—Karen remembered someone in college telling her—was related to the Vanderbilts. Or maybe it was the Astors.
It had never been among Karen’s life goals to suck up to rich guys and cajole them into parting with fractions of their fortunes—far from it. After college, she’d actually considered becoming a social worker. But a hands-on job leading arts-and-crafts workshops at a battered-women’s shelter had convinced her that her talents, such as they were, lay elsewhere. She’d felt awkward around the women, and they didn’t seem to connect with her either. Though a few did ask for money, which made her feel even more uncomfortable. As a result, Karen changed direction and lent her passion for social action to various left-leaning advocacy groups in Washington, DC, where she became expert at press releases.
But after Bill Clinton more or less killed welfare in ’96, Karen realized that the groups she worked for had pretty much no influence whatsoever. She pivoted yet again, pursuing a master’s degree in public health, which also led nowhere. It was mostly by default that she wound up in the world of philanthropy. A job offer to help raise money for a national reproductive-health and -rights organization came through a friend of a friend. Needing employment in any case, Karen decided it was better to help by some means than not to help at all. She also came to believe, contrary to the mantra of the hippie era, that everything important was predicated on money. Love and good health could not always be purchased, it was true. Nearly everything else could be.
During Karen’s first two years at Hungry Kids, she’d concentrated her efforts on grant writing, submitting elaborate proposals to faceless and secretive nonprofit organizations as well as the charitable wings of multinational corporations. But in the past few years, it had become clear to her that members of the .01 percent with autonomy over their own fortunes and family foundations were a far more expedient source of cash. In an ideal world, the IRS would be collecting enough taxes from these very people to feed the nation’s poor. But to Karen’s mind, the U.S. government had long ago stopped taking responsibility for the needy, so it was left to people like her, and organizations like Hungry Kids, to lead the effort.
But direct fund-raising had changed her. Despite Karen’s innate discomfort with the idea of so much money being concentrated in so few hands, a part of her had come, if not to idolize, then certainly to find fascinating the very demographic from whom she solicited funds. She studied their clothes, their mannerisms, their speech patterns, and their lifestyles. The most curious of her findings? The .01 percent didn’t decorate their own Christmas trees; rather, experts were called in to distribute the baubles evenly and drape the skirts just so. They purchased wine at auctions, not stores. And each child got his or her own nanny, all the better if the caregivers spoke to their charges exclusively in Mandarin before the kids entered their foreign-language immersion programs at their exclusive private schools.
As Karen made her way to the restaurant, she tried to remember how she and Clay had actually met, but she couldn’t. All she recalled was his undying crush on her beautiful lesbian roommate from Toronto, Lydia Glenn. To the extent that Karen and Clay had bonded at all, it had been over his unrequited love for Lydia. In fact, when Karen had e-mailed two weeks earlier, she hadn’t been entirely sure he’d remember who she was and had actually signed off Karen, former roommate of Lovely Lydia :-). But his e-mail back had been immediate and enthusiastic, which had surprised and flattered her. He’d insisted on making the lunch reservation himself—at some seafood place near his office. Concerned about being late, Karen had arrived early, and first.
Elegant but antiseptic, it was the kind of establishment that owed its existence to corporate expense accounts. Everything about it, from the napkins to the waiters to the kayak-shaped dishes filled with glistening Italian olives, was a shade of off white. It was also eerily quiet but for the occasional high-pitched laugh that floated over the tables like a harmonic overtone. “I’m meeting Clay Phipps,” Karen murmured to the hostess, who murmured in response, “Follow me, please,” then led Karen to a corner table in back.
Clay arrived shortly after her. Up close, he looked surprisingly similar to the way he had in college, his dark blond hair still wavy and windswept, if somewhat wispier, his good looks still boyish. Though he was significantly shorter than Karen remembered. The most visible indicators of time’s passage were the knife cuts on the outer corners of his light blue eyes and the strands of silver that were now threaded through his hair in the manner of an Indian textile. He was dressed like a college student also, in faded Levi’s, white sneakers, and a ratty gray fleece pullover with a zipper at the neck. Against trend, he looked thinner than he had at age twenty-one, even verging on gaunt. The thought crossed Karen’s mind that he was probably on one of those strange diets involving raw kale or whatnot that the rich sometimes went on at the advice of their personal trainers. “Karen!” he said with a big smile.
“Clay!” she said, hugging him hello.
“So, how are you after all these years?” he said, sitting down. He propped his elbows on the table, just as Karen’s mother had always warned her not to, leaned forward, and gazed at her intently.
Embarrassed by the attention and also feeling overdressed in her black skirt suit, Karen looked away. “I’m good!” she said. “What has it been—like, twenty-five years?” Regaining her composure, she turned her gaze back to him.
“Probably,” he said.
“To be honest, when I e-mailed you, I wasn’t even sure you’d remember who I was.”
“Of course I remember!”
“Are you still in touch with Lydia?”
“God, no. Are you?”
“I haven’t seen her since graduation, but we’re Facebook friends. Unless I’m mistaken, she’s the director of a women’s theater collective. I get announcements about her shows.”
“That’s so perfect,” said Clay, rolling his eyes. “And let me guess—she lives in Portland, or something.”