I, Daniel Manning, am the commoner in a family renowned for its brilliance: mother, father, much younger brother, all masters of their particular universes.
My mother’s fame and glory blazes as bright as ever, though she ceased writing long ago, had, as I believed, given it all up. Manning, my father’s name—my name—is appended to all the miraculous ocular surgeries he has invented. And then there is my brother for whom everything has come so easy. A self-taught wunderkind whose company holds the copyright to the astounding computer program he created at thirteen, that hotels the world over are using to run more efficiently, soon to be implemented by a rash of other industries. He’s worth something like a billion now, at twenty-two.
Oh, I was told I was special when I was a child and I believed it, until I absolutely could not. Since then I have feared my own mediocrity, wishing my own innate genius would appear. I have roiled for a long time with anger and frustration and the hot hatred of knowledge that I was not born marked for greatness like the rest of them, the small clan I am tied to for life. No one knows how I really feel, my placid exterior shrouds it all. I think, in that way, I am like my mother. Only recently did I realize that she is a cipher, a chameleon, hiding her secrets away and out of sight.
I did not always feel this way.
For a while, it seemed words would unleash my internal powers. I was five and a half when I began writing a whole lot of little stories about a squirrel I named Henry, and I demonstrated great talent for putting that poor squirrel through his paces, inventing dangerous situations for him to overcome, each story a whole new world I invented from scratch. The writing of those stories meant everything to me, made the earth spin right on its axis, made me feel actual and definite in a way I otherwise did not. This, I knew, was my present, and would be my future.
Although my father talked about reading the dreams of the people he operated on when he was deep inside their eyes, and my mother told me elaborate tales at bedtime about rare babies, critical to my understanding of myself was that my parents may have been storytellers, but I was the writer in my family, the only one who wrote his stories down.
As I look back over those early years, I remember strangers stopping my mother on the street, saying a few words, but I was only interested in tugging her away, wanting her all to myself. Even had I overheard what I imagine now were compliments and praise about her work, none of it would have resonated, for my mother never told me about her life before marriage, I was not privy at all to her past. And so, if, as a young child, I had ever known she was a famous writer, that knowledge had long emptied out of my mind by the time I learned the truth about the awesomeness of her achievements, her might and her reach. I was eleven when forced to confront who my mother really was, and I was devastated, her history wresting away what I had long believed belonged only to me. And then, when I forced myself to read just a single one of her stories, called “Deep in the Valley,” its mere existence shattered me completely.
Perhaps if I had come up against Joan Ashby when I was older, I would not have had such a visceral reaction, would not have immediately doubted myself, feared that the best I wanted to achieve might be beyond my capabilities, beyond the gift I had then displayed. I was a competitive boy, and that I was comparing apples and oranges—an eleven-year-old versus an award-winning writer at the height of her powers—was meaningless to me. I raised my boyish defenses, threw overboard my own desires, abandoned Henry the Squirrel to find his own way, and thereafter protected myself from anything Ashby-related.
Treacheries experienced in childhood are among the most difficult to overcome, or to forgive, as are dreams crushed when one is too young. Having to acknowledge your weaknesses can make the best of us fall into a very dark place.
Five years ago, recently graduated from the undergraduate program at the Wharton School of Business, I was nine months into my tenure as an associate at a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, intent on making myself a master of that universe. But I hated everything about venture capital. I loathed its abbreviated acronymic language, its locker-room atmosphere, that everything was measured by size: the deals, the bonuses, the cars, the outlandish vacations. I knew early on that either I did not possess whatever was required to succeed there, or I did, but the environment would make it impossible. The equation was already solving itself because I was failing spectacularly.
I lived in a depressing apartment, my room furnished with a cardboard bureau, an air mattress blown up on the floor, a single uncapped bulb overhead. Sometimes I ran into my roommate, a guy named Carlos Wong, who remained during all of those months a pleasant phantom, although we worked for the same company, he a few years ahead of me. At the firm, he was solidly contoured, leap-frogging rapidly over those more senior. The only thing working in my favor was that I was tall, in decent shape from competitive swimming in high school and college, still deft enough with words to talk to girls, get them easily into bed.
When Ashby was forced back into my life, I was twenty-two, and had just finished rambunctiously fucking the girl I was sleeping with. Christina leaned away, grabbed something from her bedside table, said, “Read this,” and thrust into my hand an old anthology, Best American Short Stories of 1984.
In her few off hours, Christina was trying to expand her education, which had been purely focused on macroeconomics and statistics. She, too, was in venture capital, but she loved it, and she liked me. I liked her, and I liked her apartment, which had lamps and rugs and a good TV and food in the fridge, and a bedroom with a big bed and nice sheets, and a comforter that was not molting, and walls painted a happy shade of yellow, which reminded me of my childhood bedroom, and her bathroom, which she did not have to share, as I did with Carlos Wong, was always spotless and smelled nice.
What I brought to our informal relationship was an understanding of the hours we both kept, my eagerness, if not talent, in all things coitus, and my willingness afterward to read and discuss with her the stories she was making her way through. She was the only person I knew in venture capital reaching for something beyond the requisite business and finance journals.
Unlike Christina, I had always been a voracious reader. My business school education well mixed with liberal arts, and I had surreptitiously minored in English literature, always keeping the venerated Ashby at bay, which had not been easy to do.