Worthy Opponents(10)

Mike came by his knack for picking great opportunities with a Midas touch. He loved talking business with his father, he always learned something from him. Max had never gone to college, but he was brilliant at making money, and so was Mike. Mike didn’t build businesses from scratch the way his father did. He invested in them, in widely diversified fields. He invested in high-tech, the pharmaceutical industry, large real estate developments, minerals, and oil. He had learned something about fashion from his mother and had done very well buying low-priced brands and multiplying their volume of sales exponentially before he sold them or took them public. He had a nose for great deals and was highly respected for his successful ventures. He had a group of solid investors desperate to get in on his deals.

By the time he was thirty-four Mike had made his own fortune, which was even greater than his father’s. He was more willing to take risks, within reason, and chase industries he studied carefully, and so far he had never gone wrong. Ten years after he had won his reputation as the golden boy of the investment world, his corporate involvements were as diversified as his interests. At forty-four, he was still moving at lightning speed and on the rise. And along with his brilliance, he was a strikingly handsome man. He appeared to have it all. He made a fortune for his investors and himself.

Mike wasn’t some crazy wild man jumping off a cliff. He calculated everything he did with infinite precision, assessed the risks, and then took the leap, which was why the investors who followed him trusted him implicitly. They’d ridden the internet wave early, at the right time, and he’d played with some fun investments too, but only if they made sense financially. He had made astonishingly few mistakes. He was relentless to deal with, and honorable. His competitors and his allies respected him, even though they said he was tough. But he had to be, so he didn’t let his investors down. He hated to have anyone lose money on a deal.

He wasn’t the young golden boy of Wall Street anymore. He had grown up, and he was said to be brilliant and an honest man. Time had flown while he was working hard, always chasing deals, and he couldn’t believe how old his kids were now. His daughter, Jennifer, was nineteen and a sophomore at Stanford. She wanted to go to law school after she graduated. His son Zack’s strong suit was science, and Mike thought he should go to MIT, but eighteen-year-old Zack had decided to take a gap year instead after high school. He had been trekking through Europe for six months. He’d been in Turkey, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Germany, and was currently in France. Mike was eager for him to get back into school, but Zack didn’t have his sister’s ambition or his father’s. He was a gentler, less driven person. It was the one thing Mike and his son disagreed on. He didn’t want Zack to get lost in the woods. He needed a direction, a trajectory he hadn’t found yet, and a burst of energy to go with it. Mike wasn’t sure that discovering the wonders of French wine, the churches in Italy, and the beauty of the wild horses in Camargue were going to be part of a career path for him. He was a sweet boy with a warm heart, searching for a sign from the universe about what direction to go. Mike hoped he’d find it soon. He worried about Zack a lot and couldn’t wait for him to come home. He missed him terribly.

It was one of Mike’s many disagreements with his wife, Maureen. She thought Mike pressured Zack too much to find a career path. Maureen was the keeper of Mike’s long list of past sins, and there were many according to her, most of them related to his career and success, which she listed among his crimes, more specifically that he worked all the time and never came home except to sleep, spending more time on his deals than with his wife and kids, which he conceded was not entirely untrue. But he would never have achieved all that he had if he’d been around more. You didn’t craft a success like his by going to Cub Scout meetings, ballet recitals, and cocktail parties with your wife, which were all low priorities to him, and always had been. But then one day, the kids grew up and left and you’d missed the boat. He was well aware of that now. He had regrets about it and he loved them, but he couldn’t turn back the clock. Jennifer understood, was all forgiving of her father, and had the same drive he did. Zack was out in the stratosphere, and had his own priorities and style, very different from his father’s, but Zack was tolerant about him, and wasn’t angry at what they’d missed. Both of his children understood that he’d been building an empire and a safety net for them while he was busy. Maureen didn’t, and gave him no free passes.

Zack was still a little lost, which Maureen claimed would not have been the case if Mike had been around more. Now Zack was eighteen and had no idea what to do next. Maureen blamed his father, as she did for almost everything. She painted Mike as a bad guy, even to his kids, which didn’t seem fair to Mike. She was seething with anger at him, for all the things he hadn’t done for twenty years. They’d been in a bad space for the last three or four. Mike had lost count, but it seemed like a long time. He had gotten used to the tension between them and hadn’t noticed precisely when it slipped from occasional to their normal state. She was angry all the time now, whenever he came home.

They had drifted apart even further since the kids had been gone, Zack to Europe for the last six months, and Jennifer to Stanford the year before. Ever since the kids left, Maureen had dropped the pretense that she even liked him. As a result, Mike had given up and they had stopped making any effort with each other. She was always burning with anger about something. With the kids gone, they no longer had to pretend that they got along. Their animosity was a poorly kept secret anyway, and Mike was sure it was part of why Zack had taken a year off and left. He couldn’t stand the tension at home anymore. Mike was used to it, and he was away a lot for work. And Maureen’s constant sarcastic remarks and complaints no longer hit their mark nor wounded him as deeply. Most of her complaints were ancient history, since the kids were gone, but she complained anyway. It had been the language of their relationship for years. She claimed that he expected too much of the kids and said that not everyone was as driven as he was or wanted to be. He believed in hard work.