“I’ll take a vodka soda,” she said. He cleared his throat and spent a few seconds longer than necessary unraveling and folding his scarf.
“I’m not sure it’s a great idea for me to buy you alcohol,” he said. “I think we’re probably squeaking by right now because, this early in the afternoon, this place is sort of a restaurant, too. But it’s basically a bar, and if they haven’t noticed you in here yet, I don’t think we should flag ourselves.”
“All right,” she said, “you’re probably right. I shouldn’t be here at all.”
He went to the bar.
What’s the harm in talking to him again? Amanda had said to her. You haven’t even looked at any of the papers. You haven’t asked your dad about them specifically. For all you know, the key isn’t still in the same place. You have literally no information yet, nothing he’d want to trade. So what could it possibly hurt?
“I’m glad you called,” he said when he returned. He lowered his neck to sip directly from his full glass, swiping at the foam that clung to his lip afterward with one finger. Then he pulled out a reporter’s notebook, a pen, and his iPhone.
She had looked at his card so many times. She’d been keeping it in her wallet, next to her school ID and her Pinkberry punch card. She slipped it out sometimes in the middle of class, slowly, letting the sharp, thick corner poke up out of the wallet. First she’d thought she’d call him right after Christmas, and then it seemed that she’d left it too long. And now she was here.
“No,” she said. “I’m not going to talk about anything with you today. I have some questions for you.”
She marveled at the smoothness of her voice, the way she wasn’t even having to pause at the beginnings and ends of her sentences to take a breath. With every sentence uttered this way, she felt better, more confident, felt the hard, glassy shell she wanted to feel all around her when she talked to this guy.
“Fire away,” he said.
“I want you to tell me a little bit more about your site.” She removed the two thin red straws from her glass and wrinkled her nose, dropping them onto the etched and re-etched wooden table.
“It would be financial news, from a human angle. It was an idea I’d been batting around for a while, with a friend, actually, but when Bear happened last spring, we figured it might be even more essential now than ever.”
He didn’t interrupt his speech to ask her if she knew what had happened with Bear.
“Basically, you know, what’s happening now in very specific neighborhoods in Manhattan is going to affect everyone in the country. But so few people in this country even understand what’s going on. And it’s so easy to fall into a very simplistic view of what’s happened—Wall Street is evil. That’s what a lot of people think. And we just think that fleshing these banks out, making these men real people, reporting on every part of what’s going on—we think that could be a real game changer.”
It must be so sad, she thought, to use that term, game changer, to refer to yourself. Not to realize that it’s only people who will never be game changers at all who see that as an impressive way to speak.
“So, financial gossip,” she said. He jutted his chin out slightly.
“Not at all. That’s one way to go, of course, but we’d consider that a failure. That wouldn’t be true to our vision, really, at all. And there’s plenty of that already. The market’s pretty well glutted with it. My partner runs one of the smartest ones—Of Hedonists and Hedge Funds? I don’t know if you’ve ever read it.”
“No, but that’s a dumb name,” she said, crunching an ice cube between her molars.
“It’s not the snappiest title. I’d be the first to admit that. But in any case, what he’s been doing over there is much more in the vein of overheard in the elevator from a first-year analyst, stuff like that. Gossip, just as you said. And he’s very critical of that world, all the more so because he’s a part of it.”
“What’s his name?” Madison asked.
“That’s the thing. He’s anonymous, and I have to protect that. He’s an investment banker, and if he were to be found out, he would be summarily fired. And he’d also lose his access to that world.”
“So,” Madison said, crunching another ice cube, “he makes fun of the people he works with, and he won’t sign his name to any of it?”
Gabe lifted his beer and took a gulp.
“Like I said, he’s looking to make a change. And I’m obviously looking for a little more flexibility than I had at DealBook.”
“I looked you up,” she said. “You haven’t written for them since last year.”
“I left to do this.”
“And why do you care about someone who doesn’t even work in finance anymore?”
He set his beer to the side and moved her drink, too, leaning forward over the table.
“Your father works in finance.”
“You don’t seem all that up to speed, for a future game changer.”
“You think your father’s going to get a different job? Like what? Cardiac surgeon? Electrical engineer?”
She felt it suddenly as a struggle, the effort to hold her jaw steady, to keep her gaze even.
“Thank you for your concern,” she said, “but I’m pretty sure my father is qualified for all kinds of jobs.”
“Madison,” Gabe said. “He’ll be working in finance forever, now. One way or another. You’ll be a daughter of finance for the rest of your life. You get that, right? This is exactly what I want to talk about.”
She didn’t know what her own face did, but his slowly creased as he watched her. He looked down at his beer and passed a hand over his face before drawing it away and leaving two index fingers pointed at his temple. As he spoke, he kept them cocked there, like a rifle, and every so often waved them into the air just next to his head.
“I didn’t mean for that to sound the way it did. Okay? But I told you. I truly believe the most incredible things anyone could learn about Bob D’Amico right now would be, what is he like as a man? A husband, a father? To humanize him. People want to demonize these guys, but they don’t know anything about them. All we know about you guys is, some of the wealthiest people in the country fucked things up for everyone else.”
He held up his hand when Madison started to speak.
“I wasn’t saying that critically,” he said. “Your father couldn’t possibly have known what would happen to the world right after he bought that second uptown apartment, for example. But that’s my point. All people have from him is what’s on paper. And, if they’re motivated to do research, his congressional testimony. But most of America, even most Times readers, have absolutely no motivation to explore anything that might broaden their outlook on anything. Not to mention, that testimony is pretty dry.”
Madison swallowed the rest of her drink.
“I haven’t watched it,” she said.
“No,” he said, his voice softer. “Of course. I wouldn’t, either.”