Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian [hardest books to read .txt] 📗

of someone swimming upstream. History let him live in its hot, complex swirl for a few decades. And soon it will close in on him, as it takes us all. He shuts the newspaper door and walks to town, where, against all odds, and at all costs, he has made himself a home.

•   •   •

On the day I roared down the 880 to meet Anita, Isaac Snider, marvelous distraction though he’d been, was relegated to the back of my mind. As I swung through the bosomy yellow hills on the San Francisco Peninsula, I kept remembering the intensity of adolescence, how everything Anita had said or left unsaid could send pin prickles along my flesh.

I parked my Honda in a venture capitalist office lot with a view: yellow headlands, highway curve. Buildings down here were invariably beige or brown or other neutral or neutered colors, earthlike tones that blended into the landscape, as though to normalize Silicon Valley wealth, as though to pretend there was something natural about such vertiginous valuations, such sums passing through term sheets every day.

Anita had asked me to meet her at a restaurant in a posh hotel called the Sonora. She stayed alone in an apartment in the terrible suburban purgatory that was the peninsula; she’d moved there when she was working at Galadriel, she said, which was headquartered on moneyed Sand Hill Road, and she hadn’t yet bothered to relocate. “Sit at the far end of the bar,” she’d said. “Beneath the TVs. It’s quieter.” The lobby was all smooth tile floors, high stone ceilings. An austere chandelier with iron limbs dripped from its apex. Above the bar hung bare bulbs, Californian minimalism. The walls looked to be made of redwood. The bartender wore a blue corduroy vest over a navy plaid button-down. Above him, in a half-hearted gesture at proper bar culture, two screens showed the Giants playing. I sat.

Around me: older women, several surgically enhanced, wearing cashmere sleeveless sweaters and tight suede skirts and leather pants that hugged their lifted asses; men in T-shirts beneath tossed-on sport coats, flat sneakers, dark jeans—conspicuously casual. A pruny-skinned man in a Cardinal red Stanford hat threw an arm around a younger woman in a corner booth. “You know a little guy,” he said into the woman’s cocked ear, loud enough that I could hear him, “named Mark Zuckerberg?” She sipped her wine, tolerated him. “I knew him when!”

“Neil!”

Anita stood in front of me for a dreadfully long moment. She wore a rose-red silky blouse with a ruffle interrupting her breasts, black pleated dress pants, and silver earrings.

“You look exactly the same,” she said. There was her unblinking gaze. And there, too, was some reverberation of my old desire—to make those eyes look at nothing but me.

“You don’t.”

She didn’t. And, actually, I resented the notion that I did. I was now six-one—some three inches taller than when she’d last seen me. I’d filled out. I maintained a good beard line. I’d figured out how to do this thing with my hair, thanks to some pomade Prachi had bought me. In the Bay Area, where a Los Angeles four is a seven or an eight, I’d come a long way.

She was leaner in the cheeks, muscled in the arms. Her hair was shorter, angled, streaked with chestnut brown, still thick. It was a good result, if you considered the countless ways time could affect people. I dredged her external appearance for signs of the gossip about her at Prachi’s party. What I saw: a woman, comfortably adult. Straight-from-work attire. Quick, evaluating expression. Having located her there, I immediately granted her, once more, power over me. Highly functional, decisive, competent women have always compelled me. The world is enough for them, and they are enough for the world.

“I’m wrong,” she said, sitting down. I realized we hadn’t hugged, so I leaned over, but we were on barstools and mine was uneven, and I sort of toppled, and she stopped me with her knee. We tried again. A real hug. Warmth. Even a bit of an up-down stroke of her flat palm on my upper back. “You do look different. Older, but also . . .” She paused, reassessing.

I took it up for her. “Weathered. Wiser. More gallant?” I said. “Wiser? Philosophical.”

A full laugh erupted, like a hiccup. “Looser. That’s what I mean. Looser. I always think that when I see people from high school, you know? I saw your friend Wendi Zhao one time at this sushi place on Castro Street and she was slouching a little. She never slouched.”

“Never.”

“Oh, and Manu!”

“I see him sometimes.”

“He’s lovely. Super successful, and now he’s getting very political, isn’t he?”

“I think that’s relative. The political part.”

Anita was trying to catch the bartender’s eye and missed my response. “I like their Napa chardonnay. A little oaky, but.”

“You know wine? Classy.”

“The basic adjectives. My college roommates only want to hang out by taking these wine tours of Sonoma, and if I want to have any social life at all, well.”

I ordered an Anchor Steam. The bartender poured Anita’s chardonnay and cranked the tap forward for my beer. Anita pressed her knuckles to the glass and frowned. “I’m sorry, but it’s warm,” she said. The bartender nodded rigidly, and went back for a more properly chilled bottle.

“Neil,” she said, after taking a sip of the corrected drink, “I’m truly glad to see you.”

“Me, too.”

“I’m sorry it was so long.”

“Me, too.”

“I didn’t mean for it to be so long, but you look up and all this time’s gone by.” She blinked. Her eyes, though wide, with a tendency to catch the light, revealed little about her emotions—as though something constricted them from behind the pupils. “How’s your sister?”

“Settled, as my dad says. My mom’s over the moon about the wedding.”

“Is she chasing after you about your turn?”

I grimaced. “I’m far from that—what was it you said? The way opposite of engaged?”

Her lips quivered, as if to imply that she was unsurprised, or maybe that my singlehood was not quite like