“Not me.”
“You’re prefect of Hamilton College,” she asserted, as if he were questioning her status by doubting his own.
“Headmaster Reynolds made me prefect because the prefect automatically becomes head of alumni fund-raising after graduation. All the other boys resent me. At least thirty of them deserve it more than me.”
“Hatred is a sign of jealousy.” The maxim instant on her lips.
He was already appalled by her. “I bet all the girls at Amherst love you.”
Anna laughed, a bright and silvery sound like the tumbling of knives through the air. “They resent me, too. They resent me as much as the etiquette teacher.”
“Because you’re cruel or because you’re polite?”
“Ask me a less rude question.”
“All right.” He straightened. “Where are you going next year? That’s what I’m supposed to ask, right?”
“I’m going to travel,” she said. “Then, I don’t know where. Probably Princeton. Like my dad.”
“I’m going to Harvard,” Ben said.
“Harvard? How very interesting.” She was obviously wondering what donation his father was making and he nearly told her about the shrubberies.
“Not really,” he said instead.
“No, not really. But you know what is interesting?”
“What’s interesting?”
“If you can find us a private place, I’ll teach you how to fuck me.” Her eyes fixed his with expansive phoniness.
They sneaked through the halls, away from the music and light. Headmaster Reynolds, a defeated man terminally spooked by his wealthy charges, poked his head around the corner at the sound of their rustling and instantly ducked away. Ben froze, hissed, “He’s seen us.”
“You want him to see,” Anna whispered. “That way he won’t interrupt.”
In the locker room of the hockey rink, among bags stuffed with fish-scented gloves and the splintery planks of the sweaty shin guards, she spread her floral skirt and tucked out her limpid bee-sting breasts.
She showed him what it was. She showed him how it worked.
Afterward, she straightened herself out, sheathed the blade of her smile, and stole away without a word, and he remembered, for some unknown reason, Mrs. Lansing, the mother of one of the boys, from earlier in the week, by the school gate. Wreathed in a fox stole, with its sad glass eyes questioning the whole of the human race, she had sized him up properly, head to heel, the petrified stink of her foundation mixed with rouge. At the mention of his name, Mrs. Lansing’s eyes had opened like the delayed headlamps of a Porsche with faulty electrics. “You’ll be quite the catch, won’t you?” she had cooed.
Alone in the locker room, Ben would have cried if he hadn’t just come.
*
The last time Ben and George shared a cage was the night before Ben left for Harvard. The Wylie men rarely shared each other’s company by then. What do mere men have to say to one another? Better to sit in the cage, waiting. After the ancient beastliness flowered up in George’s veins, Ben would silently stroke his father’s fur in the darkness. The wash of the wolf’s lick on his cheek was a rugged bath, lovely and cleansing. One last time, they leaned their heads back together, man and wolf, and howled into the emptiness.
Like many self-deprecating men, George had discovered that the humility he had been feigning all his life turned out to be justified in the end. He had nothing he wanted and nothing to complain about. Hadn’t he lived up to his responsibilities? Even if Lee had run the whole business, even if Lee had made all the money, hadn’t George found Lee? Hadn’t he done exactly what was expected of him?
George sat in his cage, waiting for the beast, worrying about his children. Poppy had finally returned from Switzerland only to flee for New York, buying a pricey white cube of a Manhattan penthouse that was, at least, a decent appreciating asset. George had wanted Poppy to stay in Pennsylvania. She’d been expelled from her school in Saint Moritz—a complete shock to him. Lavinia had shown him the girl’s high marks, the class photos with the daughters of the global elite, girls of every creed and color whose fathers owned the world, either through capitalism or dictatorship. In twelfth grade, she had developed a patent with her class for a kind of cheap solar-powered water pump usable in Third World irrigation systems. The news that she had run away was nonsensical. She ran away with a Cherokee boy, too—a boy who was somehow Cherokee in Switzerland. And they’d stolen a car and crashed it, and when she broke it off with him, the poor kid stabbed himself three times in the heart. George couldn’t understand how that was even possible. Lavinia had shown him the letter of expulsion from the headmistress and the phrase had been written there: “stabbed himself three times in the heart.” Very quickly, he guessed.
So Poppy returned home, spent a tumultuous week at Larchmount Crescent, and moved to the penthouse on Park Avenue. “She will have to find her own home,” was all the clarification Lavinia would offer.
His children were gone. His search for meaning had failed. He had been left alone to live out his irrelevant magic.
*
Ben arrived in Champlain Station after his freshman year, relishing a summer away from Harvard, away from being a “legacy,” a “valuable connection,” “a good contact.” He could do what he wanted. He could hole up in the basement, in the cages, and make things. He could draw and paint for a season. But as he strolled out into that delicious promise, a Porsche 911—silver, spangled—waited in his father’s parking spot where he had expected a town car. Anna Savarin’s smile lurked in the cool, smooth black interior.
They went slower this time, drove out beyond the cut-down steel mill to a ruined drive-in foaming with yellow reeds, the big screen peeling away.
“The beautiful thing is that you can’t talk about this to anyone,” she said afterward.
“Why’s that?”
“Because you’re at Harvard and I’m going to Princeton. You won’t be able to ruin my so-called reputation.” She was connecting her bra around her back. Her porcelain stilt fingers, elegant as Scheherazade stories, sloped up her back, the hint of her breasts like a delicious rumor in the court chambers of some oriental potentate.
“The reputation of the girls at Amherst Prep is that they take it in the ass,” Ben said.
“Is that what they taught you?” She smiled, so far beyond cynicism that she had arrived again at innocence. “That’s the Catholic girls at Saint Agnes’s. We’re WASPs. We screw regular.”
Now he laughed. In the field outside the steamed window, a flock of several hundred returning sparrows scoured and hallelujahed the air. She curled up into her knees, pouted airily.
“It’s going to be good to hear you laugh when you’re an old man,” she said.
“What’s that mean?” He wanted to sleep but Porsches are not built for sleeping. Screwing, yes, but not sleeping.
“We’re going to get married someday,” she said. The air wilted, the birds in the sky dropped dead in his panic.
“Anna …” he began.
“Oh no, I understand. You don’t know. I’ve talked it over with your mother. We’re going to leave each other now. We’re going to screw around, live in foreign cities, the rest of it. Then we’re going to come back here.” She pointed to the kingdom of rusted car stalls, curlicued wires vining over their gratings. “We’re going to live together here. This is our fate.”
“I don’t believe in fate,” he said, gulping up a spirit of hope.
“You’re one of the only men in the world who has a fate. You’re like a prince.”
He found himself thinking about his painting. He couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t tell anybody. “Maybe I won’t be a prince. I want to do something else maybe.”
“You may want to, but you won’t.”
The pity in her eyes seemed genuine. The perfection of her manners made Anna’s mind mythically unfathomable: Behind those porcelain eyes lurked a goddess or a stooge. Wolves running through the aband
oned drive-in brushed against Ben’s imagination. He remembered the envelope crouching at his father’s elbow.
“What are you doing?” Anna asked.
Automatically, by instinct, he had begun to draw, tracing figures with his finger on her back.
*
In May of 1987, a photographer from Spy magazine—to whom small-town Pennsylvania was as exotic as the veldt—drove his powder blue Volkswagen Beetle to the front of Larchmount Crescent, unfolded a Hasselblad 500 EL/M, and took unremarkable photographs of an unremarkable house. Later Graydon Carter stood over the big table in the Puck Building offices, looking over the prints, exuding quiet fury. He had paid for glamorous photographs of a rich man’s house, not this impossible banality, unbelievably middle-American. Kurt Andersen saw the potential, however. Money rendered the banality lunatic. The photograph ran in the “Weirdest Rich People in America” series. Spy had ranked the Wylies third.
By 1987, the spirit of the eighties had truly arrived, fashionably late to its own decade. Any residual hopes or values remembered from the sixties had been digested by the Quaalude loucheness of the seventies and then efficiently excreted in the first seven years. The only thing people believed in anymore was home espresso makers and The Price Is Right. Everybody agreed. The goal of humanity was to have stuff.
During this time, the Wylies became more than wealthy. The ice spiders of Lee Taggart’s mind strung unlikely bonds across the globe—a data entry facility in Manila with a cruise line in Trinidad, a shortbread factory in Colchester with a recycling plant in Seattle, a forty-story tower in midtown Manhattan with a rare-earths mine in the Congo. To WylieCorp, the world was not people or places or substances. The world was numbers. The self-connected threads of the information business, on which Lee had imposed, for tax purposes, a twenty-year period of dividend reinvestment, resolved themselves into an unbreakable knot. The North American profits had bought up the European companies, and the European profits had bought up the Asian companies, and the Asian profits had bought up the South American companies, and the South American profits had bought up the African companies, until the roundelay coughed up a number: 12.35 billion.
The Wylie fortune had emerged organically, like a seed tucked under the soil straining to light. If business models can have beauty, the simplicity and elegance of Lee Taggart’s model was beautiful. The information business grew with the growth of the professions, swelling with prosperity yet completely recession-proof; no matter what happened in the economy, pharmacists needed to know what the latest drugs were. The costs of producing and transmitting information halved every two years. As the world prepared to digitize itself the Wylies could let others build the subcutaneous rivers of light; they would paddle along them with their bounties of necessary data. A used-car salesman requires much more cunning and daring to run a car dealership than the Wylies needed to run these transglobal information businesses. Such was the genius—there can be no other word—of Lee Taggart. And the genius of George Wylie was to step out of his way.
The money brought unavoidable prominence. Lee had come to the office one morning with an envelope sent to him by Otto Cameron, an Anglophile bully who was threatening to start a newspaper war in the northeast. Newspaper wars are won by whoever has deeper pockets and George liked his chances. In the envelope were photographs of Lee at gay clubs and bathhouses, with street hustlers in various poses that would once have been called compromising. Both men laughed. “This guy thinks that’s the darkest secret we share,” George said, and called the editors of several papers to say it would be a shame if anyone reported anything inappropriate about Lee Taggart.
In 1989, the family’s net worth surpassed 16 billion and they entered the list of the world’s ten richest families, which at that time included the Waltons, the Wylies, and a bunch of Japanese. Despite that wealth or because of it, George Wylie lived a life indistinguishable from the everyday existence of middle management. When he appeared at the Wylie offices on Fifty-second Street, he brought his own cup of soup down to the basement cafeteria for lunch, scrupulously purchasing a 99-cent coffee so he would have the right to use the microwave. If his wife was visiting, they might splurge on a bowl of minestrone. He was unfailingly polite to everyone, offering business tips to the shoeshine man, whom he never tipped in any other way.
He wasn’t a nobody, but he wasn’t a somebody either. His reality constituted the end point of all the struggles of the rich and would-be rich—a life of fluid, effortless expansion—and yet he never attained real respect on Wall Street. The traders considered George a cipher, a conductor between the hardscrabble gamble of his father and the purified business mind of Lee Taggart, a figurehead, a legal fiction. George never hustled. He never scammed or bullied or deceived. He never devised strategies or thought outside the box. He never seemed to think at all. In 1960, he had decided that the free flow of information would eventually constitute a massive and easy source of profit. By the time the idea bore fruit, in the mid-eighties, the few who could understand the significance of his insight regarded the decision mostly as luck.
There was luck, certainly. WylieCorp diversified into every aspect of the news business—softwood lumber, the chemical plants that produced ink, the manufacturers of television camera parts—and there were occasional windfalls. One of the camera parts manufacturers developed the patent for nontoxic inflammable plastics, and burgeoned into a company that now generates a dividend of 50 million dollars a month. In order to mine a rare earth necessary for the manufacture of a television component they were developing, which never turned into a product, WylieCorp purchased concessions throughout central Africa. Twenty-four years later, portable music players all needed these rare earths. The company made 4 billion dollars in straight profit. The windfalls were beside the steady, enormous returns of the professional information division, and the twenty-three percent profit margins of the newspapers whose cyclical nature had been balanced by the purchase of a fleet of cruise ships that ran through the summer season as a counter to the September-to-April run of ad sales.
What Wall Street could never fathom, or perhaps could never allow itself to fathom, was that George Wylie triumphed by doing nothing, by removing himself, by stepping aside. He was absent in charity as well. In other cities, particularly in London and Boston, certain society families dominate by nonparticipation, attending only the biggest parties, donating sparely, intervening in business maybe once a decade. Their power, they intuit, dwells in an aura of exclusivity. Thus the wide culverts and open sloughs between suburban mansions, the gilded epaulets and terse smiles of the Manhattan doormen. More civilization is more opportunity to say “I am not you.” The whole world shakes with men and women sieving themselves out. But the Wylies were never strategic in their separation from the world. They simply never showed up.
The Spy magazine photograph appalled George. Why would anyone care about them? They were just insignificant businessmen. Then Poppy appeared, to George’s horror, in a spread in Tattler, dressed in Chinese Communist suit with a little Mao cap, under the title “China Girl.” At least she had chosen to be photographed there. The predatory snapshots on yachts and in nightclubs—he tried to pretend they had never happened.
George could have been a new Medici but the idea would have been monstrous to him. He did not consider himself better than a gas station owner who makes sure his station is clean and profitable so that his sons and daughters can go to college. The difference between himself and the next man was nine zeroes. George’s contribution to the eternal debate about whether the rich are different from you and me is this: The rich should be different from you and me but they’re not.
*
Ben never showed anybody his paintings at Harvard, not the secret society boys who cultivated his membership, nor the art history girls with their pearl necklaces and nascent sexual dysfunction who would run all the museums and galleries soon. He never took an art class, never showed up at the office hours of the professors. He could n
ever show anybody his paintings for the same reason he could never tell who was a real friend or a real lover. The money sucked all possibility of genuine recognition into its void.
He sometimes hid in North Lake, where winter covered him comfortably. He took long walks over the property, a prairie scattered with lakes, rampaged by herds of elk and their inevitable followers, the wolves. He could return to the cages in the basement to stash his nature onto canvas. His paintings grew claw and tooth, red and black. He destroyed them all, usually after waiting a week to see if he could like them.
The solitude suited him except that he couldn’t lock the cage in the basement. With his knees curled up under his chin, he sat naked on the dirt floor and knew that his imprisonment was ersatz. The problem was the same as being rich: He could do what he liked. Anytime he liked he could run out into the snow over the fields into the trees. All he could do was exactly what he wanted.
I am an experiment, Ben thought. Every billionaire is a distinct experiment in what happens when everything is permitted.
*
At his father’s prompting, Ben moved to New York, and to the family holdings at Morgan Stanley. It was 1990, the year the world decided it wanted to be money and nothing else. The Berlin Wall had fallen like a curtain—on tragedy or farce? Capitalism was like the last standing contestant at the ideological beauty pageant and broke down gushing at her own triumph. Cocaine was the confetti at the parade.
The year 1990 brought this item from the New York Post:
A FIVE-GRAND DISAPPOINTMENT
A Manhattan waitress was disappointed by a $5,000 tip. Howzat, you’re asking yourself now. “I’m pretty happy, but it’s less than a measly ten percent,” said Sandy Bellman, server at swank TriBeCa eatery Bouley. She was the lucky girl who served a meal valued at over $52,310.59 to a quartet of Morgan Stanley traders. The really pricey part was the fancy French wine that accompanied the ten-course meal. Two bottles of Château d’Yquem, 1885 and 1900, at ten grand a pop, and the Petrus 1945 at $18,000. Ben Wylie, son of the one of the richest men in the world, picked up the tab. “He just handed over a black card,” according to sort-of-stiffed Sandy. Don’t feel too bad for her. She already has plans for her windfall. “I’m going to take the kids to Disneyland!”
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