The Book of Jonah

by Joshua Max Feldman

  “Quant analysis at work,” Jonah laughed. “You going to ask her if she wants to do a quick abs session after this?”

  “Unfortunately,” Philip sighed melodramatically, “by rule I am no longer permitted to make such invitations. Aaron sent a rather strongly worded email regarding proper conduct at QUEST events. Evidently there is concern that certain members of the board do not display the appropriate motives in attending these gatherings.”

  “I wonder what that could refer to?” Jonah said.

  Philip sighed again. “If I am not for my cock, who am I for?” As their drinks arrived, he added, “I may resign in protest.”

  “But then what about New York City’s schools, right?” Jonah said, and Philip laughed.

  This laughter was not surprising—but Jonah had not entirely been joking. He understood that Philip’s membership in QUEST was mostly gamesmanship—part of a rivalry that went back to the days when Philip and Aaron were both charismatic freshmen on the same floor at Princeton. Yes, it helped Aaron to have a black mayoral aide on his board, but it also gave Philip access to all of Aaron’s contacts; and he could always vent his frustration at being hierarchically beneath Aaron in the organization by trying to sleep with as many of these contacts as he could (though it seemed Aaron had put a stop to that tactic within their “friendship”). But either as a lingering effect of his conversation with the Hasid, or because of Aaron’s speech, or because of what Patrick had seen him doing—or from some combination of all the events across the entire evening—Jonah found he wanted some reassurance that there was more going on that night than an open bar and calculated networking. He took a sip of his Scotch and said to Philip, “Seriously, though. Don’t you think QUEST makes those schools better?”

  Philip gave him an amused, quizzical frown—and in his imitation of an American accent (which veered sharply toward the Texan), he repeated, “Seriously?”

  This skepticism wasn’t surprising, either. Seriousness had never figured prominently in their friendship. “Indulge me,” Jonah said.

  Philip tapped the tip of his broad, somehow regal nose, making a show of thinking. At this point Jonah realized he should not have sought reassurance as to the hopes of saving New York’s schools from a man with a career in city politics. “When you consider this notion of applying the tactics of the financial industry to schools, you ought to remember what happened to the financial industry. More fundamentally, I would not rely too heavily on improved standardized test scores as an indicator of improved education. It would seem to me that filling in bubble sheets is a bit of a skill unto itself, maybe not so different from being good at Halo. That hasn’t helped New York students much, either.” He took a long sip of his drink, put the glass gently on the bar. “White liberal guilt is really all this is in aid of, I am afraid. White liberal guilt and another bullet point on Aaron’s résumé. You want to see a school in need? Come to Africa.” He shrugged nonchalantly. “But then perhaps I am compromised by my irritation at the founder’s sudden bout of Puritanism. Do you, Counselor, believe QUEST does any real good?”

  Jonah thought for a moment—and then held his forefinger and thumb apart as if he were presenting an invisible jelly bean. “A smidge,” Jonah said. “Even if the tools are imperfect, even if the motives are, let’s say, mixed—it’s still more effort and attention than these schools usually get. It’s better than nothing for your poor black future constituents in Harlem, who deserve something, even if they do have access to clean drinking water.”

  Philip smiled, and then let out with one of his great, sustained, diaphragm-supported laughs—his most distinctively Kenyan feature, Jonah felt, even beyond his accent. “I concede to the smidge,” he declared. “It is a smidge more than we would do otherwise, it is a smidge more than not doing anything at all.”

  “It’s the twenty-five percent tip for the cab driver,” said Jonah. “It’s holding the door of the elevator for someone crossing the lobby.”

  “It is helping an elderly lady get her bags from the overhead compartment,” said Philip.

  They toasted to the smidge. It was an idea coated in irony, of course—but it had a core of comfort, too. As they lowered their glasses, Philip asked, “And where is the lovely Sylvia Quinn this evening?”

  “Chicago,” he answered. “Work.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Interesting enough that she can’t tell me anything about it.”

  “She is an impressive woman,” Philip said. “You are a lucky man.”

  Jonah sighed uneasily. “Patrick Hooper saw me and Zoey out the other night,” he told him. He added, “Not doing anything, I don’t think, just—out.”

  Philip gave him a sad sort of smile. “That is still going on, then?”

  “The worst part is I told Sylvia I’d move in with her,” he said, feeling guiltier than usual at verbalizing this.

  “So much for the smidge.”

  Jonah made small half-turns of his glass on the bar, watched the liquid slosh in tiny waves. These moods came over him, too—guilty, remorseful—but he’d learned that unfortunately, like their antipodes, they never lasted long, eventually gave way to lust, or boredom, or whatever name he might use for the inexplicable attraction that drew him to Zoey—over and over and over. “I guess I did sort of lose my bearings,” he confessed.

  Philip gave a noncommittal shrug. Jonah was sure Philip thought what any reasonable person would think: that he should end it with one or the other. But along with its lack of seriousness, their friendship did not admit the giving of sincere personal advice, either. It was a limit Jonah had noticed in nearly all his male friendships (maybe it was as much a foundation as a limit). So whatever Philip actually thought, all he said was, “Well, these things do happen.”

  Aaron Seyler was working the crowd not far away—drawing in all the nearby attention rather in the manner of water flowing to a drain. The brunette Philip had been eyeing was herself now making moon eyes at Aaron. He accepted all the adoration with an affability that approached grace. “Was he always like this?” Jonah asked.

  Philip watched Aaron for another moment, weighing, Jonah guessed, all manner of respective advantages and deficiencies in a man who could quite possibly be his rival one day for the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York. Finally he said, “Aaron sees himself as entirely smidge. He makes no distinction. He believes in QUEST, he believes QUEST is improving schools, he believes he is the person best suited to lead such an organization, or any organization, for that matter. In brief, he believes in something. Namely, in Aaron Seyler, which is what makes him so extraordinary, even in this room of rather extraordinary people.”

  Jonah watched as Aaron went on smiling and accepting congratulations and paying earnest attention to everyone and evidently doing as much—more—than anyone could ask to elevate the underserved and underprivileged. But it occurred to Jonah: If Aaron cared so much about New York City students—if any of them did—why weren’t they teachers? “He believes his own bullshit,” Jonah said. And somehow it was at this moment that he decided, with full conviction, that he would end things with Zoey. It was, he concluded, the right thing to do.

  He sustained this conviction through the rest of the cocktail party, and through the point on his cab ride home when he sent Zoey a text message: “Lunch tomorrow?” Then he immediately felt the uneasiness and preemptive regret that always accompanied his decisions to end relationships with women—but he told himself this was just the inertia and selfishness talking.

  Zoey didn’t respond for more than an hour, which wasn’t surprising, since she’d told him she was spending the evening with Evan, her (quasi-) boyfriend. By the time his phone finally chimed with her reply, he was undressing in his bedroom. “yes but only lunch. Z = busy bee tomorrow.”

  Jonah smiled and wrote, “Busy tonight?” because the fact that she was texting meant maybe that Evan had left, and with Sylvia in Chicago, they— He resummoned the guilt—he erased the message. I
n its place, he wrote, “Cool, only lunch. Meet @ 1 @ yr office?”

  It was several minutes before the reply came: “i’m too fat for lunchtime quickies now??” Then, in another minute: “i know, i know. don’t judge. i have the spoon in my hand. dignified lunch @ 1, schtupping to be scheduled.”

  He smiled again at the text—and then frowned. Didn’t he find all this charming? Didn’t he want to schedule schtupping as much as she did? Why exactly was he going to do this again? The answers came to mind: Sylvia, Evan, the momentum he’d built up toward doing it—the guilt now reasserted itself. “See you tomorrow,” he wrote—then added, “baby,” because he didn’t want to worry her (or at least that was why he told himself he did it).

  But after he’d hit send and tossed the phone onto the bed, he did feel better: relieved that at least there’d be some resolution—and proud of himself that he had dealt (or anyway was going to deal) with a difficult situation, rather than be tossed back and forth between guilt and self-indulgence. More: He had done the right thing.

  And then Jonah caught sight of himself in the full-length mirror on the inside of his closet door. He was naked by now—and for an instant, he saw himself as he would a naked stranger, without the benefit of protective biases, the protective measures he reflexively took. He saw himself with his stomach unflexed, his shoulders slumped, his expression dull—flaccid dick exactly as large as it was. He was confronted with the image of a man closer to full-blown middle age than full-blown youth: He saw flabbiness at the torso, he saw roundness at the thighs and arms, he spotted grayness among the trimmed black hair above his ears. And even more—he saw in the lengths of pink-pale flesh a naked man of jarring vulnerability, of shockingly finite proportions—woefully overmatched for the events of the day, of the life to come. He turned from the mirror uneasily—immediately pulled on the boxers he’d dropped on the floor, flexed his abs and chest, closed the closet door. He picked up his phone, thinking he might call Sylvia—but saw he had an email from Doug Chen, a partner at his firm, requesting a meeting the following day. Jonah had good instincts for these things; he sensed there was something positive in this for him. After he’d replied to the request in the affirmative, he scrolled through some other emails, checked the weather for the following day, checked the Yankees score, added the meeting with Doug Chen to his calendar, added the lunch with Zoey without any attendant emotion, shuffled idly through the phone’s collection of names and numbers and apps and games—tools to reach and decipher and shape the entire world if he wanted. The world was so fucking manageable when you looked at it through an iPhone. He turned off the light in his bedroom and got into bed; he wrote Sylvia a text message: “Hope you get out of there before midnight. Love you”; he set the phone’s alarm for six the next morning, the glow of its screen on his face the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes—

  And Jonah felt much better.

  1. THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD

  By the next morning the rain had stopped, and any sign that such a thing as rain was even possible had vanished. The sky was immaculately clear—a uniform metallic blue, undisturbed by cloud—and down from this sky, and from a sun that looked like a hole burned out of it to reveal inestimable radiance behind, poured the heat of mid-August. It filled the streets and parks, the doorways and alleys; it infused the concrete and asphalt like water soaking into a sponge; it clung to the windowpanes, it hung in the canyon-walled avenues like great heavy curtains through which pitiable pedestrians had to make their way—mouths open, collars open, sweat at minimum dotting their upper lips in tiny beads, in the most severe cases simply pouring down their faces unimpeded. People moved slowly, they didn’t look at one another. If the rain had brought an unusual conviviality to the city, the heat seemed to imprison each New Yorker in his or her own personal lobster pot.

  Jonah, however, awoke in the sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit that his air conditioner made his right. He was apprised of the situation outside by the cheerfully cartoonish sunshine icon on the weather app on his iPhone’s screen—the first thing he looked at when he opened his eyes. Drinking his coffee while standing before the windows of his nineteenth-floor apartment, he could even somehow see the heat—as if it enlarged the sidewalks and people, the air itself, with a visible discomfort. But to know about the heat and to feel it were very different things. Jonah was a chronic sweater: dreaded the sensation, to which he was all too prone, of overheating beneath his clothes, feeling the moistening of any fabric touching his skin. Not to be suffering this when such suffering was so manifestly possible added to the peculiar sense of self-satisfaction with which he had awakened. It was as if he’d already put his relationship house in order, thrown off the indecision and guilt over Zoey just by deciding to do so. And as he showered and put on his suit and skipped breakfast, his mind readily turned to thoughts of work.

  His job was often stressful and more often exhausting, but he identified an enjoyable gamelike quality to it, both in the adversarial nature of the practice of law and in the competitive culture of his firm. The fact that he knew he was good at this game made him enjoy it all the more. Plus, after three years of law school, two summer associateships, five years now as an associate at his firm, he’d found that thoughts about cases and clients had become in some way natural: a relaxation of his mind into its accustomed state, rather than a taking up of a burden.

  The walk from the door of his building to the street was enough to confirm his intention to take a cab in to work. It was only seven in the morning, and it must have been ninety degrees outside. Fifteen minutes later he left the air-conditioned cab, crossed another sidewalk, and stepped into the even more aggressively air-conditioned lobby of 813 Lexington Avenue, where the offices of Cunningham Wolf LLP were housed. He noted with satisfaction that he’d been awake for almost an hour and a half, and had spent less than sixty seconds of that time suffering the heat of the sun.

  Inside the building’s lobby, beyond the security desk and before the elevators, was an enormous tree—the trunk black, deeply twisted, the foliage in every season dense and oviform and a bright, almost neon green. It was an obscure South American species, which could thrive in the seasonally air-conditioned and seasonally heated lobby of a Midtown office building, its maintenance paid for by the investment bank that occupied most of the building’s upper floors. Discovering the annual cost of the tree’s upkeep had long been something of an obsession for Cunningham Wolf associates. The most common estimate was sixty thousand dollars a year. Pre-crash, pre-bailout, pre-reform, the first-year i-bankers would run naked around the tree on their first bonus day—one circuit for every fifty thousand. This made an enjoyable spectacle for the lawyers who took a break from late-night briefs to watch: There was something pleasantly paganish about it, Jonah had always thought—the clothingless young people with their checks held aloft, shouting and laughing as they circled the massive gnarled trunk. And while 80 percent of these i-bankers were men, there was still that 20 percent. But then came the global crisis, and with it the necessity for demonstrations of austerity, and the tradition ended—though from everything Jonah had heard, the bonuses weren’t really much smaller. The tree was still there, too, of course, and maybe because of the memory of the ritual, Jonah felt a mild affection for it whenever he bothered to look up from his phone or coffee on his way in to work.

  He rode up to the twenty-ninth floor—went to his office, closed the door, and spent the next two hours before his computer, working. He did not during this time fail to repeatedly check his personal email, and scrutinize baseball box scores, and absorb status updates and photos on other people’s Facebook pages (he almost never updated his own), and read parts of about a dozen articles on NYTimes.com. But he integrated these activities as brief respites among the actual work, allowing him never to feel burdened with the tedium of any one task. The morning was productive, he felt, not despite the diversions, but because of them.

  He emerged from this digital reverie at around 9:30. H
is assistant arrived, greeted him perfunctorily. Dolores was twenty years Jonah’s senior, African American, perpetually unsmiling, partial to shapeless floral blouses. She performed competently and without any interest in performing any better. Their relationship was basically cordial—occasionally more or less than that—and Jonah tried his best to be patient with her lack of excessive interest in her job, because he realized there had been associates before him, there would be associates after him, and a lot of lawyers were pricks.

  “I have to leave early today,” Dolores told him once she’d taken off her coat. “My sister is in town. Her husband is allergic to shellfish all of a sudden, so now I can’t make shrimp for dinner.”

  “Okay, Dolores, no problem,” he said.

  “I need to go to D’Agostino on Second Avenue on the way home.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  He had a second cup of coffee, and this fueled another forty or so minutes of focused work. He was aware that coffee was a necessity in getting him through his days (through his career, really), but he was equally aware of its diminishing returns and so limited himself to four cups a day, unless he was at trial. He was about two-thirds of the way through cup number two when his phone chimed, reminding him that in fifteen minutes he had the meeting with Doug Chen.

  The meeting had been at the back of his mind all morning, and though he’d been trying not to fixate on it, he realized it formed another reason for his good mood. Of the thirty Cunningham Wolf partners in the U.S. litigation and arbitration practice, Doug Chen was among the elite, one of the few the senior partners relied on to handle the biggest cases, the most important clients. He was also something of an iconic figure among the associates. He was an intensely—notoriously—well-groomed man: was never seen in the offices without his shoes aglow in black or brown, the Windsor knot of his tie taut in a mathematically precise trapezoid, his jet-black hair parted along a razor-straight line. All this complemented his reputation—deserved, in Jonah’s experience—of being one of the best legal minds in the entire firm, if not the city: encyclopedic in his knowledge of precedent, insightful in both legal theory and application, shrewd when shrewdness was required, tirelessly attentive to detail. In fact, he probably would have been a senior partner himself except for one aspect of his character, which at once both crowned his iconic stature and was nearly impossible to reconcile with anything else that was known about him: Doug Chen was addicted to strippers. The most frequently repeated rumor was that he was no longer allowed to hold a firm credit card because, during the course of a monthlong trial in Miami, he had charged over forty thousand dollars at strip clubs. More-dubious gossip involved a three-week disappearance to Puerto Rico and a pregnant nineteen-year-old.