Ghosts of Manhattan: A Novel(20)



So delighted to hear about it? Did Julia set this up with Sybil or Oliver? Maybe I misheard or misinterpreted. Maybe it doesn’t even matter. She could have called the house and Oliver picked up instead of Sybil. Christ, why am I even thinking of this? We just sat and already I’m down a path.

I order a gin and tonic. The other three each have a glass of sauvignon blanc. I don’t know why people stopped drinking chardonnay but it seems to have happened in the last couple years.

“Now, Julia, where are you from?” Sybil seems to be the mistress of civil small talk. This type of person is always useful to have around when you have no interest to engage in anything more meaningful than the time of day, like listening to golf on television while taking a nap.

“Locust Valley.”

“Oh, how nice. Oliver grew up on Long Island too. Just near you in Old Westbury. So beautiful out there.”

“It is. I miss it. My parents are still there and I try to visit as much as possible.” I know this to be patently false. I avoid the pompous Mr. and Mrs. Pembroke like the Black Death, and Julia’s not so hot on them either. At most they get half our major holidays each year, and one of our best arguments for having kids of our own is so that we have an excuse to stay at home on some of these holidays and get the number of visits down even further. But Julia is just trying to be friendly to Sybil.

“I love it out there.” Oliver smiles knowingly. God, he’s smug. “The North Shore is the most beautiful place in the world.”

“I’m from New Canaan.” Sybil jumps in the middle. “Oh, what about you, Nick?”

“Bryn Mawr. Near Philadelphia.” My drink arrives. I manage to block the ice with my upper lip forming a tight seal around the bottom rim of the glass so I can suck down about half the drink in one pull without making a slurping sound.

“Oh, the Main Line. How lovely.” I nod. I’m now keyed in on her annoying habit of starting sentences with the word “oh.”

I realize I can’t get away with just a nod. “Thanks, it was a great place to grow up. A lot like New Canaan, I guess.”

“Yes, I suppose.” There’s a lull now that we’ve completed the round of city of origin. Julia leans forward and I can tell she’s looking for a toehold in the conversation to regain momentum. She knows she can’t rely on me.

“Oliver, where did you go to college?” I already know the answer. Oliver somehow finds a way to let people know within five minutes of meeting him, with all the energy and unabashed praise of a proud parent except directed toward himself. Julia has just saved him the conversational maneuvering to get there.

“New Haven.”

Christ, here we go. This clown is right out of a Salinger novel. There’s nothing worse than people who say New Haven and Cambridge, pretending to be too modest to say Yale and Harvard when all they’re really looking to do is draw the whole thing out. The false modesty is irritating and shows a total lack of self-awareness of what an insecure snob he really is. Just say Harvard or Yale and move on. Don’t invite additional questions so you have to put on your uncomfortable act when pressed to answer the name of the school. Loser. Hasn’t Oliver accomplished anything more in life to be proud of than a high SAT score when he was seventeen?

“New Haven?” asks Julia.

“Yale.” Sybil steps in for Oliver with a smile and pats him on the knee, like a routine they’ve practiced for years. Could she possibly think he’s modest? “What about you, Nick? Where did you go to school?” She asks this with such a perfect smile that I can’t tell if it is a taunt or polite reciprocity.

“Cornell.” I finish the second half of my drink with my second sip. “It’s in Ithaca.” I look at Oliver with an unconcealed sneer.

Oliver nods. “Good school. You get a great cross section there. I applied there too. I’m encouraging our son to include some schools like that for his applications next year.” With this obvious placement of Cornell into the safety school category, he has let me know that he recognizes that we are now sparring. I’m no longer just shadowboxing. I rattle the ice in my glass, wishing the waiter would come back. “Where did you go to school, Julia?”

“I went to Duke.”

“Great school!” He responds with more energy than he had for Cornell. “Beautiful campus. I’ve done some recruiting trips there for Bear Stearns. The chapel and those amazing gardens. So much land.”

“I loved my time there. It was magical.” I turn to Julia, trying to remember if I’ve ever heard her use the adjective “magical” before. “What about you, Sybil?” she quickly adds, probably also feeling odd about her word choice.

“Oh, I went to Vassar.” Another lull. Another round completed.

“Let’s go to the table,” I say, slapping the tops of the chair armrests harder than I mean to. It has the desired effect though, as everyone rocks forward with a start like passengers on a train that stopped short, and I carry the momentum by standing right up.

We walk to the back dining room, which is a little dark and feels like a library in an old mansion except for odd trinkets that hang everywhere from the ceiling representing companies and mergers that have happened over the decades. I sit under an airplane with the logo of an acquired airline. Just like the pecking order in a big bank, there is a hierarchy in the dining room. The tables closest to the left wall are for the bigwigs. The farther right you go across the room, the farther you are from power. Oliver made the reservation and seems to take pride in pulling back a chair at our table one row off the tables against the left wall. This placement is probably due more to the ma?tre d’ remembering Oliver’s father, who had been a top banker at Morgan Stanley, big enough that I remember his name in the Journal a few times years ago. Morgan is a more prestigious bank than Bear Stearns. Goldman and Morgan are the two top firms. In broad strokes, Goldman Sachs is where all the Jews work. Morgan is the white-shoe firm where all the WASPs work and act as though J.P. Morgan were still walking the halls anointing them the kings of investment banking. The fact that Oliver is at Bear Stearns, which isn’t even in the conversation, especially when it comes to investment banking, has to bother him. And the fact that his dad was a senior guy at Morgan has to be the source of a huge chip on his shoulder.

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