on a Brazilian pipeline bond without looking up from their sandwich. And how when it came time to charm the Ivy League VPs, he'd just opened with a compliment and let them do the rest of the talking. And later, when he fired some of them, how disdainful the look in their eyes had been, as if all along they'd known he was a hustler and that they should never have let him into the club they were so fond of saying no longer existed, believing with fervor that all of finance was a meritocracy now.
"You'd recognize it," Doug said. "Bullshit hierarchies and a bunch of rules you got to get around to get anything done."
"You married?" Vrieger asked.
"No. You?"
"Are you kidding? Nine months is my record. And she was a drinker. But you? I mean, come on. You're a pretty boy. You must have to fight 'em off."
Doug couldn't remember the last time he'd been asked such questions by anyone. He and Mikey never talked about personal stuff and no matter how often Sabrina Svetz tried, he'd never given her much detail either. The one woman he'd stayed with for more than a few weeks was Jessica Tenger and he hadn't thought about her in ages.
They had met at a party in SoHo. Vrieger was right that Doug had grown used to girls requiring nothing more than a few minutes of easy flattery before they made it clear they were willing to be led. The thing about Jessica had been how directly she played the game. Her second question was where he lived, and her third when he planned on leaving the party. Back at his apartment they had ordered food and already finished having sex by the time it arrived. She hadn't slept over that night or any other.
They hadn't asked each other questions about work or discussed current events or how their days had been. In fact, they said very little to each other at all.
As he described her to Vrieger, her narrow hips and pageboy haircut, he remembered how he'd kept the lights on during sex and how she preferred keeping her eyes closed, allowing him to look at her without being watched. She could give herself over to whatever waking dream occupied her mind, the particulars of which he didn't need to know. Raised over her in a push-up position, he would watch himself: the pleasing proportions of his biceps; his gleaming chest; the flat shield of muscle running across his abdomen into his groin; and the splendid view of himself disappearing inside her like the fluke of an anchor grabbing the seabed. The tightness and precision of his body felt alive then, and he would come to the sight of it in motion.
They might have continued on indefinitely. But one evening, after leaving work early, Doug had phoned her and she'd said to come by her apartment, which he'd never seen, over by the Hudson on Washington Street. The place was a semi-converted warehouse space with rough wood floors, iron columns, and windows high up the walls. It turned out she was some kind of sculptor. A series of worktables occupying one side of the apartment were covered in small bins of everything from copper wire to sand. On one of them, a few pale white heads, human size and made of wax by the look of them, lay on their sides. She poured wine, and as soon as they'd sat down on her couch Doug had realized that whatever they'd had was over. It had nothing to do with her being an artist or living in that apartment. She could have been a lawyer or an actress or a grad student. It was the specificity of the circumstance that broke the circuit. The particularity of her life, as he could see it now. Like all particularity, it had a terminal air about it. At work, which was to say in his life, his mind glided over the present, headed always into possibility. But that apartment - that announcement of all those specific, irrevocable choices - it demanded that he stop. That he remain still.
"I don't have a lot of time these days," he said to Vrieger. "To tell you the truth, I don't think about relationships much."
In the pause that followed, Doug began to wonder why he had agreed to come here. Was it out of obedience to his old commanding officer? This made no sense; he wouldn't have so much as taken