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

a romantic activity, because the moment of the telling, the moment of you two sitting with each other, is the endpoint to the narrative, and that makes you, the hearer, indispensable to the story.

“He’s older,” she said. “From this oligarch-rich family. They split their time between Delhi and London. The wealthy Indian-Indians at Stanford had none of the baggage of us ABCDs. They’re, frankly, bored of all our identity shit. You couldn’t call him fresh off the boat—he was fresh off a private jet, you know? Jimmy—that’s his name, Jimmy—just waltzed into Stanford and owned the place. Me along with it. He believed in me, you know? I was overwhelmed there—everyone was so smart—and he still looked at me and said I could be someone. He just handled life for me. He’d read my papers, fix my résumé, help me get job interviews—we actually worked at the same venture firm. And I knew I’d only been hired because of him. He gave me pictures of the world in a way my parents never could. . . .”

As she went on about what it was like to vacation with Jimmy’s mother in the Maldives and catch his father on a layover in Dubai, and how they never worried about what tomorrow would bring, they simply incarnated the future they desired, sometimes buying it, other times negotiating for it, I understood something new about her. We were both conceptual orphans. Perhaps that is the condition of any second generation. In the space between us and the rest of adulthood lay a great expanse of the unknown. We had not grown up imbibing stories that implicitly conveyed answers to the basic questions of being: What did it feel like to fall in love in America, to take oneself for granted in America? Starved as we were for clues about how to live, we would grip like mad on to anything that lent a possible way of being.

“Did he have to do with what you talked about in that MTI video? Leaving Stanford?”

“He was part of it. He broke up with me after graduating to go to Oxford for a year, and that unleashed a lot of stuff I hadn’t dealt with yet. I stopped eating and sleeping, and my grades slipped, and my mom and I were in a cold war because I’d said a bunch of awful things to her about how she’d fucked up my life. So, I withdrew. There was this farm-retreat place that a girl in my sorority had gone when she cracked up—it’s not uncommon, at Stanford, to suddenly . . . run out of whatever got you there. Anyway, I stayed at that farm for about a year.”

“I’m sorry. You lived on a farm?”

“I was shit at it.”

“What’s there to be shit at?”

“An ostrich attacked me once.”

I chuckled. She was laughing, too. The air lightened. My belly and throat were bloated with beer, and I was aware of how the drive to Berkeley would feel—fizzy and swimming.

“Did you feel different? After the ostrich incident?”

“Yes, I did,” she said. “After the farm—not just the ostrich—I was less . . . ruthless.”

“You?”

Now Anita was looking at me funnily, surprised. “You’re letting me go on and on.”

“You never used to tell me so much. It’s a nice change. Less ruthless, you were saying?”

“Well. After Shruti, I wished I’d wanted less. If I had just been okay being average—”

“You were never at risk of average.”

“If I had been okay being any old person, not obsessed with being the best, there would’ve been no lemonade. And the same thing with Jimmy—if I hadn’t needed someone to tell me I was going places, I could have picked a boyfriend I just liked spending time with. But I needed Jimmy because I needed what he promised me about my future.”

I remembered one of Anita’s old Halloween costumes when we were in elementary school. She’d gone as a businesswoman, in my mother’s black suit jacket, nineties shoulder pads and all, wielding her father’s briefcase and PalmPilot. “Your mom seemed unhappy that you’d quit your VC job.”

“Frankly, she’s never really worked,” Anita snapped, “so she has no idea.”

“Ani,” I said. “She worked, just not—”

“She has no idea what it felt like to be there as Jimmy’s nepotism hire. I had to get out, and I couldn’t stomach walking into another office on Sand Hill Road and starting over on this path that belonged to him. Anyway, my old boss at Galadriel got pregnant and those assholes didn’t give her flexible hours, so she quit and started this event firm. She’s giving me some work. I’ll have to figure out what to do, soon. But for once it doesn’t feel like I need to obsess about tomorrow today. I think that . . . shrinking of things—I think it’s saved me.”

I nodded. She didn’t seem shrunken. She seemed more real. I remembered how her ambition had sometimes made her almost illegible to the present. This Anita felt honest.

Around us, people had begun pairing off and making their way to their rooms. I’d heard about the Sonora from Chidi—it had a reputation for being not only the site of handshake agreements for exorbitant sums of money but also a meeting spot for high-end escorts and their clients. It was the kind of place that prides itself on discretion. I had not yet realized that this quality was exactly why Anita had chosen it that night. She looked to the farthest side of the bar, which was empty. She gestured in that direction, and we absconded into the shadows.

Anita pulled a pack of gum from her purse. “Nicorette,” she said. “I smoked for a few years.” Then: “Listen. Did you think my mom seemed—”

“Different?”

Anita nodded.

“I guess. It’s been a while.” I picked at the table in front of me, hesitating. “She was on campus for something—a memorial. For a man.”

Anita sighed. “I knew someone important to her had died. And I suspected he was more than just a dear friend, or however she kept putting it.” Anita clenched her fist a