—Not to rubber-stamp the historically less-than-airtight strategy of Russian campaigns, said Dale, but if PH wants to use Pegaswipe and that’s that, shouldn’t the blueprint be, like, a hundred percent done?
Diana looked at him like a schoolteacher pleased by a precocious student, and Dale was momentarily incapacitated by hot librarian vibes again.
—Obviously Mercury wants to use Pegaswipe, she said. I mean, it makes sense from a labor arbitrage perspective alone, right? But they can’t. At least not as is. Weren’t you paying attention in any of the meetings this morning?
—I may have been a touch distracted.
Diana smiled wryly.
—Pegaswipe has an Achilles’ heel, she said.
—What?
—Fraud.
—What? Dale whispered in disbelief, twisting it into a new word. No way. Nothing like that came up in the due diligence. Does Jack Howard know about this? I audited their books myself—they were totally clean. This could invalidate the acquisi—
Diana took an enormous bite of her Napoleon that only marginally impeded her ability to dismiss his anxiety. Dale felt silly for misunderstanding. It was the first piece of evidence he’d garnered thus far against their mutual telepathy, and in a strange way it stung.
—No, no—not fraud in their business, fraud as their business, she said in between wolfy, inelegant bites. As in Pegaswipe’s ability to detect credit card fraud for their customers. The missing piece of the blueprint boils down to a security issue. Their fraud-detection technology is woefully inadequate for US standards, let alone European regulatory requirements. Mercury can’t scale Pegaswipe as is. And no, Jack Howard does not know. I think PH actually hired us just so she didn’t have to tell him. Can you imagine—spending millions of dollars to avoid an uncomfortable thirty-minute conversation?
—Sure. It’s one of the main reasons people hire consultants, don’t you think?
Diana reluctantly conceded in a nose scrunch.
—It makes sense now why Merchantes and Settlmnt have been so recalcitrant, Dale continued a moment later, inhaling audibly. Without a tenable fraud solution, Pegaswipe’s platform can’t replace theirs—
—and Pegaswipe’s employees can’t replace them.
—Correct.
—Eric—or should I say, you—had the rest of it backward. Our project doesn’t give Mercury political buy-in, getting political buy-in is our project. Mercury needs Merchantes or Settlmnt to play ball with Pegaswipe to build a tenable fraud solution. They’re holding out mutually for respective survival. We can’t complete the blueprint, or the operating model for that matter, without finding some way to get one of them to capitulate.
—The question is, how do we shift the incentives?
Diana put down her sandwich abruptly and leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms and narrowing her eyes. In an apparent non sequitur, she asked if he’d ever been to the University of Virginia.
—Unless you count Florida, I’ve never been south of the Mason-Dixon line.
—That is such a snobby Bostonian thing to say, Diana chastised him, rolling her eyes. It’s beautiful—UVA, I mean. Sympathetic red brick, glistening white colonnades, Palladian symmetry. The whole Academical Village is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
—Not to discount your educational utopia, but I don’t believe that academical is the preferred adjectival variant.
Diana ignored him.
—The prettiest part is the Lawn, though. At the north end is the Rotunda, which is basically the university’s profile picture. It’s flanked by ten pavilions and fifty-four individual student rooms evenly distributed along the east and west colonnades. These things are, like, dripping in charm. I mean, each one has its own fireplace.
—Sounds desirable.
—So you’d think. Except that it’s actually a pain in the ass of a place to live. The rooms have sinks, but no toilets. It’s legitimately an outhouse situation. Perhaps worse, there’s no air-conditioning. As newer dorms and off-campus housing with, like, twentieth-century amenities built up in the fifties and sixties, living on the Lawn started to decline in popularity. Pretty soon, no one wanted to live there—thousands of students, and the university couldn’t sign up fifty-four. Now, these are precious, very early nineteenth-century buildings designed by Thomas Fucking Jefferson. The university couldn’t afford for them to be empty. So how do you think they filled them?
—By letting in women?
Diana erupted in laughter.
—No, but really not a bad guess! Increasing supply would be the more logical way to compensate. But no, no; the university actually did just the opposite.
—They restricted demand? Dale was tracking.
—Exactly. They turned it into a competition. Drew up an elaborate application process. Lots of barriers to entry. They made it “prestigious.” Called it an “honor.” They pitted the students against one another; made it seem like you were “winning” a slot.
—And it worked, then?
—Well, they didn’t have to resort to Chapter 11. I lived there.
—And did it feel like an honor at 3:00 a.m. when you had to pee?
—Honestly? I just slept at Wes’s apartment most nights—but, um, that isn’t the point.
It was the first time Diana had mentioned her husband by name in Dale’s presence. Instinctively it irritated him, but she didn’t look like she’d been trying to spur his jealousy. If anything, her face betrayed the regret of having made some sort of rare miscalibration, a human sort of technical error. She started fumbling in her bag, as if to hide that she was avoiding eye contact. The muscles in his face relaxed. It was a startling, almost heartwarming possibility to him, that Diana might be capable of insecurity.
She pulled out a bottle of Maximum Strength Visine. Dale felt the need to rescue her.
—You’re saying we set up a competition, between Settlmnt and Merchantes, he circled back, to her visible relief.
—May the best fraud win.
—It doesn’t even matter who the winner is, actually, Dale clarified. We just have to get them to earnestly apply, for the Russians to learn what they need to learn.
Diana blinked as the clear round droplets hit her eyes. When she met his gaze, their white borders were blinding. It was ferociously penetrating.
—That sounds like an elegant, round stratagem to me, Diana said.
—But is it a clever Trojan horse, backed by divine justice?
—Divine justice doesn’t come cheap.
—Well, there are some things money can’t buy.
—But for everything else, there’s MercuryCard.
CHAPTER XII.
Of all the dangers in life, there is perhaps none more treacherous than getting precisely what you want. As it has been said, the mistakes we male and female mortals make when we have our own way persist in raising wonder at our fondness of it. For unbought dresses can never be stained. Uneaten food doesn’t make you fat, and unconsumed alcohol won’t give you a hangover. Only unwritten novels are perfect.
Most relevant to Vivien Floris on the morning of Tuesday, May 19, 2015, was this: no one, not even a prehistoric-looking woman in brown polyester pants pushing a walker with tennis-balled feet, could—by accident or otherwise—take a watery shit in your unhung exhibition. But Vivien had managed in only her third year post-PhD to stage a diplomatically and logistically challenging show as a visiting curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and such realized success today entailed physically guarding Narcissus and his other admirers from the human fecal matter between her feet, taunting her in the Versailles-style mirror. She tried to remain calm, instructing one guard to alert facilities while another escorted the poor woman to the closest restroom. This kind of thing actually happens in museums more often than you might imagine, and Vivien was well versed in the canon of Visitor Horror Stories and knew all the protocols, but experiencing one firsthand and with a hangover was nevertheless sensually alarming and sufficiently horrible. Let this be sai
d of portraits and mirrors: as often as they are objects of devotion, they are vessels of ridicule.
Art and Myth: Ovid’s Heirs was closed to the public a good two hours for obvious health-code-type reasons, during which time Vivien washed her hands with Lady Macbeth–level fervor before walking to Eighty-Sixth Street to buy a new pair of shoes, little desert boots that she wore out of the store. She spent the rest of the morning at her desk, compulsively checking her phone, uncertain of what, exactly, she should expect it to herald. The prior evening’s enchantment had been so powerful that she’d awoken still feeling the lingering effects of it, marveling at the persuasive force her person had impressed on Charles Wesley Range IV. He wasn’t the type to act lightly in such matters; neither, of course, was she. The anomalous nature of their actions lent them an extra weight and velocity—an unspoken and unearned but viscerally propulsive quality. That they’d done what they’d done seemed to carry a deterministic significance. It would be messy and painful, for a time, unwinding and rearchitecting their lives, but the broader narrative arc gave such a satisfying roundness to the story of her life, and Vivien didn’t mind a little dramatic conflict—so long as she could see where it was leading.
Only in the aftermath of straddling someone else’s shit did Vivien’s illusions begin to unravel, slowly at first, almost invisibly, as if a moth had nipped a single thread, creating a weakness, a vulnerability, but not yet quite a hole. Was it possible the route to drastic action was a bit more circuitous? That first came a thorough, extended affair? This had its advantages, too, basking in the magic for a while longer, delaying the inevitable unpleasantness—and yet—
Vivien had never had an illicit tryst before, and her first whiff of anxiety found its foothold in her unfamiliarity with the proprieties of her impropriety. For there were proper ways to manage things, surely; there was a right way and a wrong way to have an affair. Vivien always wanted to follow the rules, even for how to break them. How would they choose the most suitable course? And—what of the wedding? A logistical snag, for sure—but they’d figure it out together. They’d both, she reminded herself, have to deal with their partner’s devastation. So . . . was Wes going to text her? Or call to minimize the data trail? No, calling was even more suspicious. No one called anyone anymore. But, if Wes did call—what would he say? What would she? What was she supposed to say to him? When—where—would they meet next? Vivien racked her brain for guiding examples of stylish affairs, but her mind only drifted to Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. This seemed the crux of the problem. Her experience of adultery was so remote as to rest on fictional women from the nineteenth century who didn’t exactly inspire confidence.
She took another field trip, this time to Dean & DeLuca for lunch. Vivien ate at her desk with care after another obsessive hand-washing session, but with every bite, a new stray thread of concern caught in her teeth. They seemed to wrench and pull with Raffaela’s blathering, as she recounted every episode involving bodily fluids she could remember from her twenty-seven-year history at the Met. Unfortunately, she had an excellent memory.
—This is reminding me, Vivien, did I tell you my sister is planning to kill Mike Tyson?
Vivien ignored her, looking down at her lifeless phone.
—Because of his pigeons.
Raffaela raised her precision-painted eyebrows, her eyes seeking Vivien’s, nodding with latent meaning. She was wearing an ancient yellow skirt suit, half a size too small and with borderline-hostile shoulder pads, which made her resemble an overstuffed steak fry.
—A few years ago, Mike Tyson moved to Phoenix, right near where my sister lives, and he brought his pet pigeons, and some of them, they escaped. Now they are out of control. They have been pooping all over my sister’s gazebo and in her pool. My brother-in-law is fit to be tied.
—Are you comparing the woman in the exhibition today to the pigeons who poop in your sister’s pool? Vivien asked her absently.
—You know, I don’t know, but I just thought to tell you, because he has a reality television show, Mike Tyson, about him and his pigeons, in case you were interested.
—I’m interested, the head curator said playfully, surprising Vivien from behind.
Victor Barlett, the Cortland R. Young Jr. Curator of European Paintings, had come over to thank Vivien for her Highly Professional Behavior in Such an Undeniably Difficult Situation that morning, and proceeded to recount a similar story from years ago that Raffaela had already told. This time Vivien listened to it with expressive interest, rewarded in the form of a request for her to attend a mid-level donor reception in his stead that evening. Donor receptions in general were the purgatorial babysitting jobs of curatorships, sure to spoil your after-school plans and likely to involve a fair amount of ass wiping. But mid-level donors were unquestionably the worst: rich enough to make statistically significant gifts on an individual basis, not so rich that such gifts were personally inconsequential to them. This was insecure, hard-earned upper-middle-class Protestant-work-ethic-type money you were going after, rarely separated from its type-A producers without engendering heavy expectations and feelings of entitlement to some sort of remuneration (institutional lexical insistence on gift notwithstanding). Compensatory benefits were usually payable in the form of unlimited alcohol and a conversation at an evening reception with someone like Vivien, whose reflective glow validated their sense of their own cultural refinement and social importance. Such indirect purchase of obsequious flummery was undeniably the more common method for shitting on a curator.
—Of course, I’d be delighted to go, she said.
It was after 11:00 p.m. by the time Vivien unlocked the door to her hotel room and was forced to fully confront the treachery of another precisely fulfilled want. She had forgotten to remove the “Do Not Disturb” tag from the door—stupidly—and the unretouched space now possessed a preserved sort of quality, less like a museum than a crime-scene cliché. Articles of clothing littered the floor. The sheets, settled in specific rumpledness, looked dirty and cold. For Vivien, normally emphatically neat, one of those people for whom cleanliness is well-nigh a moral issue, the tableau was not only jarring, it was a judgment. Surrounded by the evidence of her success, she felt nefarious and ashamed, and not in a Bond villain or sireny hot mess kind of way. Her offense suddenly had all the wrong aesthetics. The price of the hotel couldn’t hide the tacky averageness of her actions. What had she been expecting? For Wes to be sitting there in a silk robe and Moroccan slippers, awash in tenebrific light? He hadn’t even stayed until morning. She checked her phone again, then chastised herself for checking it, her anxieties now unraveling rapidly. How could she have allowed herself to be surprised by such predictability? While the idea of losing Wes came as a devastating blow, she could have handled and perhaps even reveled in being the victim of some kind of cruel, grandiose tragedy. But Wes hadn’t cared enough even to deliberately wound her, and without him in the picture, their rendezvous fell out of high art. It became the generic backstory from some episode of Law & Order: SVU.
This was the primary humiliation—not the categorical presence of their affair, but the inability of its visuals to support Vivien’s romantic narrative of it. The scene design had screwed up her inner monologue, and the death knell of her illusions rang. There was a fine line but an essential difference between an illicit tryst and cheating, and a steep downward slope from ease to easy. It was a lexical rift with devastating emotional implications, and an association it was hard to unsee. When she tried to reclaim proprietorship of the former argot she found it razed by pathetic pretension worse even, somehow, than honest vulgarity. This is all the room’s fault, she thought. If only she could fix the room. Vivien closed her eyes, trying to remember how it had looked, how orderly and inviting, on Sunday night when she’d first walked in. She took a deep breath, then opened her eyes and set to work with Marie Kondo diligence.
She tackled the clothes first—sorting, hanging, folding. She threw the offending underwear in
the sink, and the navy dress, stained and reeking of beer, into the designated hotel laundry bag. She fanned the magazines and arranged the desk. She made the bed, charily turning over the pillows, tidied the towels, wiped down the bathroom countertop, and organized her toiletries. At this juncture, she briefly considered requesting off-hour maid service, but decided against it. No one ever asks for housekeeping at midnight when everything is, like, totally all right. Abnormal behavior was a form of admission, a maid a credible attestant to her shame. She only slightly more seriously considered a personal expedition to CVS or something for Lysol and Febreze. But the closest drugstore was on Second Avenue, and a French bath wasn’t going to cut it on those sheets anyway. A hot shower was tabled for similar reasons, and Vivien was forced to admit that, at this particular juncture, she had done the very best she could reasonably do.
Vivien undressed and performed her nightly ablutions with all of her customary fastidiousness. The room looked undeniably better now—lived in, yes, but hardly sordid. Still, as she approached the bed, Vivien found herself unable to lift the covers. Thankfully there was an extra blanket in the closet, a sateen-bordered lightweight quilted down topper that Vivien willed herself to assume had been seldom used by prior patrons. Wrapping herself up in it, she settled on top of the coverlet, lying prone, staring at her phone forlornly. She had checked it dozens, maybe hundreds of times that day, but this was the first in which it occurred to her that Wes Range was not the only person from whom she had no report.
It was exceedingly unlike Dale not to call when she hadn’t, not to text her at the very least. No, she thought, attempting to head off the question: Could he possibly know? Vivien frantically examined her memory for witnesses and evidentiary cracks. Could Julian have said something to him? No, there hadn’t been any real impropriety at dinner, certainly none before Julian left. Someone at Lord Henry’s, then? But for all of the night’s supporting doppelgängers, neither Vivien nor Wes had run into a single acquaintance there. Some unseen pro-Dale lurker seemed preposterous. Nearly all of her fiancé’s friends in New York were aggressively married Whartonites—parents of newborns or pregnant or nearly pregnant—the sort who ran marathons and hired night nurses and went to bed before ten. Vivien briefly indulged in outright paranoia—the Uber driver? The bellhop? She knew she was venturing into Ms. Scarlet in the Library with the Candlestick territory, and willed herself to cease and desist. A tip could only have come from someone so tangential and unreliable that Dale would’ve been, if anything, more inclined than usual to call. Yes, that’s right, he would have demanded an explanation. She felt better for a brief moment. Unless there was a picture! Lord Henry’s back room. There was a kiss. And an inherent validity to photographs, to images generally. Vivien tried to channel the force of reason that had neutralized Clue in the direction of Gossip Girl (really, Vivien? Prep school paparazzi?). But it was too late. The recollection of pleasure had already transformed into the luxury of self-reproach; she’d waded into the possibility that Dale’s love might fall short of unconditional, and found the silver pool quicksand. Unconditional love only ever really comes up when people behave very, very badly, Vivien thought. When she gazed into her phone, her old life seemed trapped behind its glass.
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