by Alan Glynn
‘So, Teddy,’ Shaw says, after his first couple of bites, ‘that was a nice little speech and all, but you didn’t answer my question.’
Which was?
Holding my fork over the plate, eyebrows furrowed, I try to remember, the delay now as much about avoiding the food as working out how to respond to Shaw.
‘PromTech?’ he says, nudging me along.
‘Yes.’ I put the fork down. ‘You want . . . you want me to sign.’
‘Of course. But what I really want is harmony. What I really want is for Paradime to show a united front. Is that so much to ask?’
I have no idea what to say, because, let’s face it . . . harmony, a united front, it sounds reasonable, but is that what Trager would think? I have to admit I’m lost here, and skating on very thin ice. I don’t know PromTech either, or what their deal is. Actually, I can’t even believe I’m having a conversation with Doug Shaw. The thing is, I find all of this thrilling, but part of the thrill is knowing I’m only ever a few seconds away from everything imploding. Because what if Teddy Trager were to call Shaw up right now on his cellphone, or to walk in the door of the restaurant? Or how about this? What are the odds – if I actually make it through lunch here – that when Shaw goes back to the office, the first person he meets, wearing a different suit and talking about going for lunch, is Teddy Trager? Pretty high, I’d imagine, so in a way does it really matter what I say? Where I take this?
‘Well, you see,’ I say, picking up my fork again, ‘that’s exactly what I’m talking about, Doug. PromTech. We need to wean ourselves off this kind of thing, I don’t know, these . . . sugar-rush start-ups, these . . .’
Shaw laughs for a second, then shakes his head. ‘Are you drunk? These start-ups are our bread and butter for Christ’s sake.’
‘Yeah, but . . . it’s . . .’ I’m floundering now. ‘It’s all short-term thinking, it’s—’
‘Okay, okay, okay.’ Shaw waves this away, dismisses it. Then he says, ‘Tell me. How’s Nina?’
‘Nina?’
‘Yeah.’ He takes another bite. ‘Tall chick? Good-looking?’ He smiles. ‘What’s going on with you guys?’
I want to throw a counter jab here but realise I know nothing about Shaw, if he’s married, gay, attached, whatever. I don’t know anything about Nina either. But I do remember reading this one thing.
‘We’re good,’ I say. ‘She keeps telling me she wants a baby, though.’
Shaw nods his head. ‘Yeah, I can see that. You should go for it. Nothing like a kid to give you a little perspective on things.’
Lost for a response, I manoeuvre a small slice of the hamachi onto my fork and raise it to my mouth. I feel sick, but pop it in anyway. As I’m chewing the food, I look at Shaw, but he’s already cleared his plate and seems distracted now. He keeps glancing around, checking his phone.
When it comes time to leave, I have a brief moment of panic. Brian arrives with the cheque, Shaw is texting, and it looks as if I might have to pull out my wallet, which is worn and faded and only contains a photo of Kate, two maxed-out credit cards, a Metro card, and twenty dollars in cash.
But without looking up from his phone Shaw reaches out and grabs the cheque.
A few minutes later, standing on the sidewalk in front of Barcadero, I still feel a little sick and know instinctively that getting into the cab Shaw is hailing will end badly, so I tell him I have a ‘thing’, an appointment, that it’s nearby, a couple of blocks east, and that I’ll be around . . . maybe later, maybe tomorrow.
As the cab pulls up, Shaw says, ‘Just remember who you are, Teddy. Remember what you are.’ He opens the door, and holds it for a moment, gazing along the street. Then he turns to me. ‘And let’s keep our eyes on the real prize, okay?’
He gets in, and I stand there, watching, as the cab pulls away again and disappears in traffic.
*
I go straight home and, without changing out of the suit, grab my laptop, sit at the kitchen table and start researching PromTech. It turns out they’re just what you’d expect from the name, a tech start-up . . . robotics, drones, quadrotors, nano solutions, all that stuff. They operate out of a lab in New Jersey, probably some windowless, stinky, oestrogen-free geek pit, but the guys there must be cooking something up because it seems that Paradime – or Doug Shaw, at least – really wants to fund them. After that, I look up Shaw, and the first thing I find is a Bulletpoint.com profile by Ray Richards with the header ‘The Other Side of Paradime’. It describes Shaw’s legendary deal-making skills and goes into detail about his activities prior to, during, and after the late-nineties dot-com bubble. It also transpires that he’s married and has a very young daughter, with a second one, from a previous marriage, in high school. He does a lot of charity stuff and likes Broadway musicals. None of this does anything to quell the sick feeling in my stomach. I found Shaw weird and his attitude opaque.
But towards the end of the piece, he is referred to as ‘probably the one man who knows Teddy Trager better than Teddy Trager knows himself’, and it concludes with the observation that Shaw’s only real rival in Tragerworld is Nina Schlossmeier.
So I switch my focus to her.
I hit Google Images first, predictably, but man, there’s plenty to look at – glamorous Nina wearing Tom Ford, casual Nina in a windbreaker on the side of some mountain, Nina at a web summit, Nina on the red carpet. She’s a native New Yorker, brought up in Tribeca, but her parents, both artists, are German. She speaks the language, it appears, along with Russian, Italian and Japanese. A couple of years ago she founded Pincer, a search-engine app, and built the proprietary algorithm herself. Although she has led the start-up to profitability, the company is apparently still small, and Trager has had no direct involvement in it.
I look her up on Twitter and scroll through her feed for a while. Then I search around for some video and find a YouTube clip from an interview she did for a TV profile of Trager. In it, she talks quite frankly about her relationship with him.
‘It’s not easy, that’s the first thing, because a guy like Teddy can’t be tied down, you know, his head won’t let him, it’s taking him in too many directions at once. But I understand that, and I support him. I mean, what am I going to do?’ She laughs here, leaning towards the interviewer, her laugh full and generous. ‘Rein him in? You try it. Good luck with that. Listen, every day with Teddy is a challenge, every day is an adventure . . .’
I pause the clip and linger over the still of Nina on the screen. How long would I last talking to her? Lunch with Doug Shaw was a strain, but would I even get through five minutes with Nina? Someone who expects me to make every day of her life an adventure? It’s preposterous. And it’s not just that she’s out of my league in the crass sense of her being too good-looking for me. What did that profile say? She built the proprietary algorithm herself? She speaks fucking Japanese?
Yeah.
Still, I can’t look away and am sort of mesmerised by her now – the expression in her eyes, her intelligence, her overall quality of ‘highness’. Whatever that means. High cheekbones? High German? (High Anxiety?) I eventually take a screen grab of the frame and print it out. It’s on plain paper and the quality isn’t very good, but I lay it down on the table next to the laptop and glance at it every now and again as I continue reading and following links, burrowing down into a rabbit hole I have no idea how I got into or how I’m going to get out of.
At some point (I’ve lost track of time, but it must be late afternoon), I hear a key in the latch and look up to see Kate coming in. She sort of slopes through the door, flicks it closed, and leans back against it. She’s still dressed up, which is when I realise that I am too (and inexplicably, it must seem to her). Then I remember how I ended our phone conversation earlier.
Mid-sentence.
In the street.
Mid her sentence.
Bad enough doing it so abruptly, but not calling her back? There’s no excuse that’ll undo that, and I’m not going to
try. Besides, I have a sudden feeling that what happened earlier might not even be on her agenda any more.
‘What are . . .’ She’s still leaning against the door and has a quizzical look on her face. ‘What . . . no, why aren’t you at work?’
I hesitate, but then just say it. ‘I quit.’
‘Oh.’ She furrows her brow. ‘You quit?’
‘Yes.’ I don’t know what I can add to that.
‘Well, that’s nice. I guess. For you.’
She stands there staring at me, looking a little confused, as though I’m out of focus or something, and then I get it, I am out of focus, because she’s shit-faced, or approaching it.
‘Why are you wearing that God-awful suit again, Danny? Did you have another interview?’
‘No,’ I say, shaking my head (and shock-absorbing the ‘God-awful’), ‘I didn’t.’
Pushing back at the door, she launches herself gingerly across the room. When she gets to the table, she reaches over, and before I can stop her, before I realise what she’s doing, she picks up the printed screengrab of Nina Schlossmeier. After studying it for a couple of seconds, she says, ‘So, who’s your girlfriend?’
‘It’s no one.’
‘Oh, come on, Danny.’ She’s swaying slightly on her feet now. ‘I’m sure the nice lady wouldn’t like to hear you say that. She’s very cute.’
I find the sudden collision here between reverie and reality unnerving, which maybe explains how I’m able to say what I say next. ‘Kate, have you been drinking?’
Her response is a grunt mixed with a laugh. ‘Oh, I think you could say that.’ Staring at me, she holds up the sheet of paper again. ‘So. Who is this?’
‘It’s no one.’ I roll my eyes. ‘Jesus.’
Then, within seconds, we’re arguing, full-on, about the picture, about the phone call, but eventually about everything . . . money, commitment, the apartment, our future together, when (or if) we’re ever going to have a kid. It’s no surprise that we end up there, since the question is something we’ve discussed so many times before.
‘I DON’T KNOW, KATE.’
But when I say this, when I shout it, I simultaneously bang my fist on the table, causing Kate to recoil, as though from an explosion, and something in the room changes, there’s a dynamic shift – in temperature, or mood, or even at some molecular level – because right in front of me Kate recovers, she regains her equilibrium and almost visibly sobers up. She sits down at the table, looks into my eyes and starts trying to engage with me, rationally, to connect. Fighting back tears, she describes a recent conversation she had with Harold Brunker about the complex nature of PTSD and how it can present in a whole variety of ways.
‘. . . so maybe, I don’t know, maybe it could help explain—’
I swallow. ‘Explain what?’
She shakes her head in what looks like disbelief. ‘You, Danny . . . explain you, and what’s been going on. You haven’t been yourself lately, you need help, you—’
I bang my fist on the table again and stand up. ‘What, so this is the support I get?’
‘Danny.’
‘You go sneaking off to Harold fucking Brunker and talk about me behind my back? You diagnose me? What’s next? More medication? A straightjacket?’
Kate deflates, seeming tired all of a sudden, and maybe halfway back to being drunk – but not empowered drunk this time, not smart-ass drunk. More the drained, addled kind.
‘No, Danny, of course not.’ She looks up at me. ‘But you . . . you’re not alone, you know . . . listen, they say at least ten or twelve per cent of returning—’
‘Oh please, Kate, you have no idea about any of this, no idea what you’re talking about at all.’
I take the sheet of paper from the table, the picture of Nina. I crumple it up into a ball and fling it across the room. My anger is real, but there is an element of misdirection to it, of calculation. Because I don’t want to talk about this stuff, I can’t, I’m too far gone in the other direction – and while I might not know where that direction leads, it’s more real to me now than anything happening here in this room.
Which is why I have to leave it.
I close my laptop, pick up my phone and head for the door. As I’m going out, I look back. Kate is still sitting at the table, slumped forward now, her head in her hands.
*
I go to a bar on Second Avenue, thinking that if she can drink in the afternoon, then so can I . . . except that now it’s late afternoon, early evening really, and the place I’ve come to is filling up with a noisy after-work crowd.
Besides, I don’t really want a drink.
I order a club soda and sit at the bar with my phone. Within a minute I’m scrolling through Nina Schlossmeier’s Twitter feed again. Most of it is incomprehensible to me, references to tech stuff, Pincer updates, links to articles, as well as the occasional jokey or personal tweet. I go back to the top. This is her most recent one, from three hours ago: Totally stoked for @pollylabelle’s opening at the Carmine tonight. Be there or be polyhedral. I google the Carmine. It’s a gallery in Tribeca, off Hudson, about fifteen blocks from here, give or take.
I nurse my club soda for another twenty minutes or so and then leave. I walk across town, moving slowly, block after block, a warm tinge of dusk seeping into everything. When I get to the Carmine, the place seems fairly quiet and dark. It’s barely recognisable as a gallery, and, apart from its big windows, looks more like a warehouse or an abandoned factory.
I stand in a doorway across the street, watching, waiting. But soon, and as though I’m somehow conjuring it up, lights come on inside the gallery, then town cars and limousines start arriving, and people appear from everywhere, hipsters, arty types, collectors, critics, photographers, so that within minutes, literally, the joint is jumping, and Polly Labelle’s opening is in full swing.
Nina Schlossmeier’s entrance is unmistakable. She emerges from the back of a black SUV, alone, and glides inside. I watch from my post across the street as the energy of the event, the heat of the room, seems to coalesce around her. I realise I’m in the grip of some kind of fever now and that nothing will satisfy me except one thing.
To be there, in the room, standing next to her.
I keep glancing around, checking my phone, delaying, expecting Teddy Trager to appear, but as each minute passes I become more firmly convinced that he isn’t going to. So on an impulse I propel myself forward, cross the street and walk straight into the gallery. I continue moving, like a targeted drone strike, until I’m in Nina’s direct line of vision.
‘Teddy,’ she says, as I close in. ‘Oh my God, I thought . . .’ Then she smiles and holds up her glass.
I’m unsure how to read this, but I think it’s okay. And in what feels to me like only a few seconds, a glimmer, the next twenty or thirty minutes disappear down some weird sinkhole, part dream, part hallucination. Nina parades me around, introducing me to one bizarre group of people after the next, then introducing me to Polly Labelle herself and getting me to pledge what will easily be the biggest sale of the night, and the centrepiece of Polly’s exhibition, The Circle of Willis. I nod along, saying, ‘sure, sure,’ my throat so dry I feel I’m on the point of asphyxiation. Then, slightly panicked, I pat my jacket up and down to imply that I’ve left my wallet at home, but this just cracks Nina and Polly up.
After that, I find myself being led by the hand and taken through a maze of hallways and corridors to a cramped, dimly lit back office, where Nina shuts the door, locks it, and turns to face me. Leaning forward, she takes a firm hold of my belt and, before undoing the clasp, whispers in my ear, electrifyingly, ‘Teddy, I’m so glad you made it tonight . . .’
*
In another glimmer, I find myself rolling off a hastily cleared mahogany desk, and, as Nina reassembles herself in the corner – muffled, distant music thumping in the background – I notice for the first time that the walls of this little room are eerily adorned with dozens of framed black-and-white
photos of the city’s high-society gallerati, most of whom I don’t recognise, though out of the corner of my eye I do spot De Niro, and there’s Mario Batali, and there, in front of me now, wielding a champagne flute, looking directly out – looking, in fact, it seems, directly at me – is Teddy Trager.
I feel a rush of guilt here, but also, as I glance over my shoulder at Nina, of dread, because in the afterglow of such intimacy how will it be possible, I wonder, for us to talk to each other, to even look at each other, without the truth becoming immediately apparent. But a combination of Nina’s phone going off, a burst of raucous laughter out in the hallway, and a strange forward momentum sweeps us back into the main exhibition space.
At a certain point, Nina is whisked away for photos with Polly, and I slip outside. It’s ostensibly to get some fresh air, but once I start moving I can’t stop, driven forward by a dynamo of thoughts spinning inside my head, a flickering blooper reel of the past half hour, the past few weeks. Was that me trying to negotiate a garter belt? Was that me cheating on my girlfriend? Was that Danny Lynch stalking some billionaire tech guy he bears a resemblance to – stalking the man like an overexcited web rat who’s ventured out of his mom’s basement? Jesus. At the end of the block, on the corner of Hudson, I look back towards the gallery and feel dizzy. I keep walking, but it doesn’t take me long to realise that I’m heading back the way I came, that I’m heading east . . . that I’m . . .
What? Going home? Back to the apartment? To Kate?
After what just happened?
On West Houston, I hail a cab and tell the driver to go uptown. I get him to stop at 57th and Sixth, and for a while I circle the area. I’m still operating on nervous energy, but I eventually slow down and come to rest on a stretch of the sidewalk directly opposite the Tyler Building. I give it a few minutes, then cross over, step onto the plaza, and head straight for the entrance. The security guy lets me in, no questions asked, and within seconds I’m in the elevator and surging up towards the fabled seventieth floor. I wonder who’ll be up here. Maybe Teddy Trager? Who knows? If he is, though, wouldn’t the security guy have been puzzled just now? Whatever. I don’t really care any more, and perhaps there’s even a part of me that hopes Trager is up here, that we’ll get to look each other in the eye, and even talk.