by Alan Glynn
I expect to see Teddy Trager in the restaurant that day. It seems like that would be fitting, that it should happen, but it doesn’t. And the later it gets, the less inclined I feel to look at the now crumpled-up magazine page in my back pocket, to take a hit from it.
At home, I’m tempted to pull my laptop out from under the bed (something I haven’t done since I got back from Afghanistan) and conduct an in-depth search on Paradime Capital (and its founder, and his girlfriend), but I hold off. I don’t know what this resistance is, if it’s a creeping resentment towards Teddy Trager, or just self-consciousness on my part, or embarrassment even, but the more I resist the easier it gets. In fact, before I go to bed, I tear the folded-up page into little pieces and throw it in the garbage.
On waking the next morning, however, my first thought is . . . where’s the photograph? I want to see it again. I need to see it again. Of course, I could conjure it up on my phone in a matter of seconds. I could print a large version out and stick it on the fridge with a magnet. I could show it to Kate and say, ‘Get a load of this guy.’ But I don’t do any of that. Instead, on my way to work. I stop at a news-stand and buy a replacement copy. By the end of the week I’ve bought and disposed of three more.
It’s on my next day off that I give in and pull my laptop out from under the bed. Kate is deep into her coding MOOC now – maybe using it to shut me out, maybe not, I don’t know – but I decide to give her a little space anyway. I take my laptop to a café on Third Avenue and get settled in with a sixteen-ounce latte. I put in earbuds and get started.
So.
Teddy Trager.
Right off the bat, I OD on Google images. I scroll through dozens and dozens of pictures of someone who could be me, but isn’t, and in settings – conference rooms, symposium panels, art galleries, yachts – that are too numerous and too diverse, too weird and too glamorous, for there to be any chance that my brain might trick itself into thinking I even vaguely remember them. Trager also looks great in most of the photos – he’s in good shape and is handsome (something I wouldn’t ever think in relation to myself). In a few of them, he’s with Nina, and they exude, I don’t know . . . something.
I click back to the search results and look for information, basic stuff – how old he is, for instance, his date of birth. And as soon as that thought occurs to me, so does the obvious follow-up: maybe we were born on the same day. We weren’t, as it turns out. But we are the same year. I’m April, he’s September.
Which makes me older. Technically.
Anyway, personal info on Trager is sketchy. He seems to have first appeared on the radar about ten years ago when he and a partner co-founded a tech start-up called Janus. Then they hooked up with an investor, private-equity ‘maven’ Doug Shaw, and two years later sold the company on for $1.9 billion. Trager’s original partner dropped out, and together Trager and Shaw went on to form Paradime Capital, which has since invested in countless start-ups, including some of the biggest names out there.
As I read through this stuff – articles, profiles, interviews – I find it hard to get a handle on where Trager is positioned, which side of the divide he’s on. Is he a money guy or an ideas guy? At a glance, it would seem clear-cut – Shaw is money, Trager is ideas – but I don’t think it’s ever that simple, because surely it’s a false dichotomy to begin with, surely the two sides are bound up with each other in ways that are inextricable and maybe even mysterious. But listen to Warren Buffett here, right? Because what the fuck do I know?
Nothing.
And what’s the best thing to do when you know nothing?
Watch some YouTube clips.
And there’s a ton of them. I’m wary at first, because with a photograph, if you see a likeness, okay, it’s there, it’s in front of you, but it’s frozen, it’s two-dimensional, you don’t really have to believe your eyes. With video – I’m assuming – it’s a different story.
Anyway, the first thing I watch is a two-year-old clip from Real Time with Bill Maher. Trager is on the panel alongside Nancy Pelosi and Ezra Klein, and it’s definitely him, but it’s a wide-angle shot at first. They’re talking about the economy. Maher says something I don’t catch, Pelosi laughs, and then Trager says, ‘But look, let’s not get started on these giant food companies, okay, the biotechs, and the way they’ve got everyone hooked on their trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup . . .’
After a moment or two, they cut to a close-up, and the effect – on me at any rate – is electrifying. I’m sort of used to the look by now, the strange familiarity of it, but there’s a density to this, a complexity, with physical movement, with his voice, that I hadn’t anticipated. If there are subtle but significant differences between us, they’re not in his appearance, they’re in his gestures, in how he sounds. When he’s talking, he does things with his hands that I would never do, little movements that make him look confident and assured. Same thing with how he uses certain words. And we have different accents too. Mine has traces of where I’m from, smoothed over but still detectable, his is Rich Person Neutral. It’s weird but in all the things that I’ve read about Trager I’ve never once seen it mentioned where he is from, but my guess is that it’s not anywhere near Asheville, North Carolina.
‘. . . and then, of course,’ he’s now saying, ‘there’s what my dad’s generation used to innocently call “the phone company”, the same people who are currently carving up any semblance of what we all once considered our private lives.’
Bill Maher smirks, throwing his hands up in mock resignation.
The clip ends, and the screen does that YouTube thing of showing the six or eight or ten relevant ones you’d maybe want to watch next, my reflection now visible against a grid of small and varied Teddy Tragers.
I hover over a couple of likely clips and pick one of Trager and his partner, Doug Shaw. They’re on the sidelines at some investment conference being interviewed by Bulletpoint.com journalist Ray Richards.
Shaw is older, mid-forties. I think I recognise him from that second time I saw Trager at Barcadero. The discussion is lively, but it’s technical, with lots of financial lingo, the kind of terms and acronyms I’ve heard a lot over the past few years but still don’t really understand. As I watch, I wonder if there isn’t a hint of tension between the business partners. Ray Richards certainly picks up on this and tries to stoke it, but Shaw sees what’s going on and quickly shuts it down.
In another clip, some money-honey type on MSNBC is quizzing Trager about his ‘passions’. He gives her what sounds like a standard spiel about how hard he works, and about wishing there were more hours in the day, but then he tells her what he’s into anyway – and what he apparently does have time for: collecting art, learning to play the cello, and white-water kayaking. ‘Another interest I have,’ he adds a little tentatively, ‘is space exploration.’
‘As in tourism?’ the interviewer asks.
‘Well, yeah, that too, but also from a business point of view . . . you know, the possibility of taking a closer look at the asteroid belt, for example. There are abundant resources out there and sooner or later we’re going to have to find a way to access them.’
I look up for a moment and glance around the coffee shop.
I’m transfixed now, and don’t want it to stop. In fact, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get enough of this shit.
I glug down some of my latte and return to the screen.
*
Over the next few days, I find that I really can’t stop watching and re-watching these and other clips I come across. It gets to be addictive, a compulsion, and whether consciously or not – I don’t know – I start to mimic Teddy Trager’s gestures and way of speaking.
It’s not hard either. Even the accent thing isn’t an issue. If you’ve lived in different places, if you’ve been in the military, if you’re circumspect by nature, then your accent is up for negotiation all the time. Put me in a room with my cousins or people I worked with back in Asheville and it’
s only a matter of time before I’m dropping y’alls to beat the band. But on an FOB or in the kitchen of a fancy New York restaurant you wouldn’t know where the hell I was from. Trager’s cadence I can get pretty much with a little tinkering, and as for the gestures – there’s a hand roll, a head tilt, he’s big on eye contact – I just have to remember to include these, to space them out, and to not overdo it.
But it’s not as if there’d be consequences if I were to fuck it up. I’m alone here. I’m in a tiny bathroom. I’m looking in a mirror. No one’s watching. No one can hear me. In fact, there’s probably a clinical element to this, but who cares? As pathologies go, you’d have to consider it fairly benign. And it’s definitely making things a little easier with Kate. Maybe focusing so much now on Trager, on this strange likeness, this alignment, has quietened something in me, my anxiety, calmed the outward ripples of it. We’re not talking yet, not the way we should be – the elephant is still in the room, but he’s slouched in the corner and seems a little sedated. Kate and I are both busy, okay, we’re both working hard, and there’s a rhythm to that, sometimes a lulling one. But I’m also less tense, and therefore probably less intense to deal with.
Anyway, time passes, and, inevitably, something starts to bother me, to gnaw away at my equanimity. Why is it that Teddy Trager and Nina Schlossmeier don’t show up at the restaurant any more? I can’t understand it. I take every opportunity that arises to scan the whole dining room and I even finally get to have a quick look at the bookings database. This happens one morning when I’m in the office. Stanley is outside, pacing the corridor, arguing with a supplier on his cellphone. I’m near his desk and see what’s on the screen, so I very discreetly scroll back through a few weeks of bookings. It’s only a matter of a minute or two, but I’m pretty sure I see Trager’s name all of three times, which is precisely the number of times I’ve seen him from my prep station in the kitchen – twice with Nina Schlossmeier and once with that pair of paunchy, middle-aged fucks, one of whom might have been Doug Shaw.
In one way I’m relieved to find this out. It means I haven’t missed anything, but it also means that Trager isn’t exactly a regular. Maybe he won’t be back for months. Maybe he’ll never eat at Barcadero again. Then something so blindingly obvious occurs to me that I have a hard time understanding why I’m only thinking of it now.
Teddy Trager – I’m assuming – exists independently of Barcadero. He goes to other restaurants. He has an office. He walks around. He interacts with people. He lives somewhere. So if I want to see him again, why does it have to be through the pick-up window of the kitchen where I work?
And, of course, it doesn’t.
With this in mind, I go back over all the web searches I’ve done on Trager, but this time with a slightly adjusted focus.
*
According to one website, Paradime Capital is a stalwart of New York’s Silicon Alley, which apparently isn’t a geographical location any more but a state of mind. Anyway, they’re based in Midtown, in an office building on Sixth Avenue somewhere in the low fifties. I track down the exact address with a quick search. Not surprisingly, Trager’s personal address is a different matter. There are references to his several ‘homes’, but nothing specific, no giveaways.
And what do I do with this information?
To begin with, nothing. I delay and vacillate, but it doesn’t take me more than a couple of days to reach the conclusion that either I forget about the whole thing and move on or I take some kind of action.
So the day after that I leave early for work and get an F train to 57th Street. The morning is sunny, and traffic is flowing along at an unhurried pace. I walk south for a few blocks and pass some of the vast corporate monoliths that line this part of Sixth. At the foot of one of these, in the middle of a small plaza, a tourist is leaning backwards, trying to comprehend – it would seem – the scale of the massive object before him. This is the Tyler Building, home to Paradime Capital. The next building along has a similar plaza in front of it with a fountain at its centre. I keep walking, and, as I get closer to the fountain, the sound of its gushing water gradually emerges from the blanket roar of the traffic.
I sit on the edge of the fountain and remain there for about an hour, watching people enter and exit the Tyler Building, way too many to track. But it’s not as if I really expect to see Teddy Trager in person. Chances are, in any case, that even if he comes here, spends any time here at all, he enters through the underground parking lot. But I want to get a feel for the place, to see the kinds of people who frequent it. And most of them, of course, are what you’d expect, just ordinary people who work in a big, impersonal office building.
Eventually, I stand up, check the time, and head off to work myself.
I do this again the next day, and again the day after that. On the fourth day, I’m sitting at the fountain, crouched over, doing something with my phone, not really paying attention, and when I look up, there he is, standing at the kerb doing something with his phone. He’s next to a parked limo, which it looks like he just got out of. After a moment, he puts his phone away and walks towards the entrance to the building.
I stand up now and watch him as he moves across the plaza. I check the time on my phone.
Through all of this, I remain calm, but as I’m walking to work afterwards I realise something. I’m excited. I’m energised. And as the day progresses, I can think of little else.
The next morning, Trager arrives at the same time, in the same way, and I feel as if I have cracked some sort of code. But it’s all very quick and fleeting, so the day after that I decide to try and get a closer look at him. I position myself, wait for the limo to appear and then move slowly along the sidewalk, passing by just as the driver is opening the door to let Trager out. I catch a glimpse of the car’s interior, a flash of mahogany and leather, a glint of crystal maybe. A few quick steps on, I stop and take my phone out. I pretend to be answering a call, and casually turn around. Trager is doing the same thing, talking on his phone, just standing there . . . the two of us just standing there, eight, ten feet apart, people passing in either direction.
‘Look, that’s not my concern,’ Trager is saying, a sudden boom to his voice. ‘Just arrange it.’
There almost seems to be an aura around him. I know it’s probably my imagination, or the position of the sun or something, but everything has a shimmer to it, an intensity – his suit, his shirt collar, his leather shoes. And I can practically smell his cologne. In a sort of trance, I watch as he puts his phone away and moves off the sidewalk and onto the plaza.
After a few seconds, I turn and look the other way. The limo driver is still there. He’s at his door, on the street side, ready to get back in the car. He glances over the roof in my direction. Our eyes meet for a moment, and I register something, the merest flicker of . . . recognition, puzzlement, I’m not sure.
And then he’s gone.
*
Later, at work, I tell Stanley I need a few days off. It’s out of the blue and I don’t frame it as a request, which clearly rankles, but just as he’s about to read me the riot act, something stops him. I don’t know what it is, a sudden realisation that he can use this to get rid of me? Maybe. In any case, he shrugs, and says, ‘Okay.’
I tell him thanks, that I appreciate it.
‘Whatever,’ he says, and adds, fuck-you style, ‘there’s plenty of cover available out there, you know.’
‘I’m well aware of that, Stanley,’ I say dismissively, in my best Teddy Trager voice.
This confuses him, but he lets it go.
As for my few days off, I certainly don’t need them, and I don’t tell Kate I’m taking them. What I figure is that I can explore this thing a little further, push it to some reasonable limit, then maybe exhaust it, get it out of my system. Because that’s what this feels like, something in my system, a virus.
But if that’s what it is, the next day things ramp up to fever pitch. I’m waiting at my usual spot, at the us
ual time, and at first nothing happens: there’s no limo, it doesn’t appear – not that it arrives at exactly the same time every day or anything. But after about twenty minutes, twenty-five, a half hour, I start to get impatient. I start to resent the position I’m in. I start to resent Teddy Trager – whoever the fuck Teddy Trager might actually be, this guy with all the homes and the suits and the visionary ideas for a better future. And I have to wonder, you know, what if he had spotted me somewhere? Would he have started delving into my life? Would he have lasted five minutes? Would he have even looked twice?
Before I can get anywhere with this, I glance across the street and see a yellow cab pulling up. After a moment, Nina Schlossmeier emerges from it, followed by Trager. Walking slowly, and with Nina doing most of the talking, they move along the block to the lights. They wait, cross, and make their way onto the plaza in front of the Tyler.
As I watch them now, I feel a sense of panic. In a few seconds they’ll be inside the building, and that’ll be it, done, today over. I could wait until one or other of them comes out again, but there’s so much activity around here I’d probably miss them. All it would take is a tiny distraction, and I wouldn’t even know. So what do I do? I can’t go to work. I can’t go home. My throat is dry, and the prospect of the empty hours ahead is unbearable. I’m actually about to freak out, but then something happens. Teddy and Nina stop, maybe ten yards from the entrance to the building, and turn to face each other. Are they saying goodbye? If so, what then?