The Fixer

10

The town car pulled into the driveway in front of Andrea’s house, a handsome classic colonial on Fayerweather Street, buttery yellow with glossy black shutters, slate roof, and dormers. Rick rang the bell, and she came right out as if she’d been sitting there, waiting. He almost gasped when he saw her. She was transformed. Stunning. No more puffy white down parka. Under a black pea coat she wore a red dress with an asymmetrical plunging neckline. Now she had makeup on-very red lipstick that matched her dress-and understated jewelry, pearl earrings and a gold chain around her neck so dainty it nearly disappeared. Her hair was up.

“You look great,” he said, giving her a kiss on the cheek.

“Thank you. Nice jacket.” She looked over his shoulder at the black sedan. “Uh, what’s this?”

“I didn’t feel like driving into Boston.”

“So… I mean… wow.” She turned around and yelled into the house, “Evan, come kiss mommy good-bye!… Evan?” To Rick, she said, “He was upset I was going out, so I let him watch SpongeBob, and now he can’t tear himself away from the TV.” She turned back and yelled again, “Good night, sweetheart-Mommy’s leaving!” She waited a moment, ear cocked. “I think I should escape while I can.”

As they walked to the town car, he said, “Lived here long?” It was a step up from her parents’ three-decker on Huron Ave where she’d lived in high school.

“Since I moved back.”

They sat in the spacious back of the sedan as it purred through the Cambridge streets. “I don’t think I’ve been in a town car since Goldman,” she said. “Look at this. And you actually got a reservation at Madrigal? You must know someone.”

Rick shrugged modestly.

“Of course you do. You know everyone in town.” She said it with a level gaze, in a lightly mocking tone.

Madrigal’s interior was dramatic and industrial-chic-it was located on the site of an old factory-with the obligatory exposed brick, vaulted ceiling, and rustic beams. It had cast-iron chairs, a poured concrete bar, scarred dark wood factory floor, and big rusted chains and gears and rigging placed here and there as decoration. The menus were heavy, fashioned from large copper sheets, and the edges threatened to slice off your fingertips if you weren’t careful. The lights were so low, the pinpoint lights so sparse, they could barely read the menu anyway.

While they were deciding what to order, their waiter poured them each flutes of the house Champagne and another one brought over amuse-bouches that looked like tiny ice-cream cones wrapped in little white napkins on a small silver tray. They were hard tuiles filled with salmon tartare and red onion crème fraîche, buttery and savory and amazing.

“Oh my God, Rick,” she said, eyes widening.

He smiled. “My bouche is definitely amused.”

As soon as they were finished, a couple of people materialized at their sides to take the napkins from their hands. They each ordered the chef’s tasting menu-champignons à la grecque, butternut squash “porridge,” Wagyu beef tartare, quail pressé en croûte, halibut confit, and so on. Earlier that day, Rick had phoned the restaurant to make sure they still had the appetizer they were famous for, an outrageously extravagant concoction called beggar’s purses: crepes stuffed with beluga caviar, tied up with chives as purse strings, and topped with real gold leaf. He’d read about them in one of the many pieces Back Bay had done on Madrigal. They did still have them, he was assured. He put in a request to have an order of each of them presented before the entrée. A special surprise. “Oh, and can you use osetra instead of beluga?” he’d said.

“Certainly, sir,” he was told.

Rick scanned the wine list, as thick as a Tom Clancy novel. “We’d like the 1990 La Tâche,” he finally said.

“Excellent choice, sir,” the man replied, and he patted Rick’s shoulder. With a wink, he said, “I think you’ll be extremely pleased with the La Tâche.”

When the waiter had left, Andrea said, “Hold on, did you just order the DRC?” She was using insider shorthand for Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, the wine producer in Burgundy generally considered one of the very finest in the world. Also one of the most expensive. The only reason Rick knew about DRC was a piece he’d written about a Boston hedge fund manager’s wine grotto at his McMansion in Weston. He’d never actually tasted the stuff. The fact that Andrea was on such intimate terms with DRC that she used its nickname, its initials, though-that was disorienting. This was the same Andrea Messina who, when last he knew her, didn’t know how to use a corkscrew. We all grow up, he thought. Even high school girlfriends. Maybe especially high school girlfriends.

He nodded.

“Seriously?”

“Hey, you only live once.”

“That’s like… four thousand dollars!”

He shrugged. Like it was nothing. A pittance, a bagatelle. He felt more than a little uncomfortable about it.

She gave him a sidelong glance. “Did you just rob a bank? Or does journalism pay better than I thought?”

“And they say print is dead,” Rick said, smiling.

“I hope this is on Back Bay magazine’s expense account. Oh, wait, you said you moved on. Who are you working for now?”

“I’ve got a number of things going on,” he said vaguely. “Online start-ups and so forth.” The less said about his employment situation, the better.

There was a gleam in her eye. “What kind of start-up?”

Rick shook his head, as if it was just too boring to explain. He didn’t want to lie to her, nor dig himself in deeper.

“Nineteen ninety La Tâche.” She nodded appreciatively. “So… let’s see… the grape crushers were getting jiggy to M. C. Hammer’s ‘U Can’t Touch This,’ I’m thinking.”

He laughed. “How was Evan’s birthday party?”

“It was nice. It was sweet. Loud. Nine seven- and eight-year-old boys.”

“His dad… is he in the picture?”

“Vance lives in New York, so not much. Luckily.”

“Vance. Hmm. Didn’t end well?” She was divorced, he reminded himself; of course it didn’t end well.

“We were oil and water. Chalk and cheese, as the Brits say.”

“Goldman Sachs guy?”

She shook her head, clearly uninterested in talking about her ex. “We met at Wharton.”

So she’d gone to business school before Goldman Sachs. “And you? When you’re not being a mom?”

“I started a little venture called Geometry Partners.” She spoke as if he must have heard of it.

He nodded as if he had. She’d left Goldman Sachs to start her own investment firm. A go-getter for sure. He really hadn’t known her at all, back in the day.

“Tell me about Geometry Partners.”

“You first. I want to hear about these ‘online start-ups’ of yours.”

He drained his flute. A slight commotion caught his eye-their waiter standing at the maître d’s podium near the entrance, consulting with someone in a dinner jacket, maybe the maître d’, who had an air of authority. They both glanced over at Rick’s table, and then the authoritative man came walking over.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Hoffman, may I have a word?”

Rick knew right away what it was. The damned credit card he’d given them to guarantee the reservation. Normally they wouldn’t have run the card before the end of dinner, but he’d just ordered a four-thousand-dollar bottle of wine. Maybe they wanted to be sure he was good for it.

This was best handled away from the table. “No problem,” Rick said. “Why don’t you take me to your wine cellar?” As if the problem had to do with a wine selection they were unfortunately out of.

The manager, or maître d’, smiled uneasily. This was awkward and unpleasant for him. The two of them walked to the back of the restaurant near the kitchen, then stopped. “Is there a problem?” Rick asked quietly.

The man bowed apologetically, moving his head close to Rick’s. “Would you happen to have another credit card? This one was, er, declined.”

“You know, I just remembered-I canceled that card. My bad.” He reached inside the breast pocket of his preposterously expensive new sport coat and pulled out a sheaf of hundreds, flashing a wad of Benjamins as if it were a gangster’s bankroll. “In any case”-and he rifled through the banknotes like a blackjack player with a deck of cards-“I’ll be paying cash tonight.” He slid a single hundred-dollar bill off the wad, folded it between forefinger and thumb, and slipped it to the man. “Sorry for the trouble.”

“Absolutely, sir-my apologies for the, uh, misunderstanding.”

When he returned to the table, Andrea was looking at him with a half smile, her head tilted. “You know, I always thought you were going to be the next, you know, Woodward and Bernstein.”

“Me?”

“Isn’t that what you always wanted? The crusading investigative journalist? Unmask conspiracies, flush out corruption, all that?”

Rick shrugged. “Well, I don’t think I really was-”

“But that was the plan, right? Sunshine’s the best disinfectant, all that?”

“A guy’s also gotta earn a living.”

The tilted head, the half smile. She looked skeptical. Almost as if she could see right through him. Her smile turned a little sad, and she shook her head. He could almost hear her words: That’s too bad.

“Remember when you almost got Dr. Kirby fired?” she said, smiling. “That whole plagiarism thing?”

He shrugged modestly. “More like, I almost got myself kicked out of school.”

In his junior year at the Linwood Academy, Rick became editor in chief of the Linwood Owl, the student newspaper. One of the first issues he published contained a bombshell. It accused the legendary, and much feared, Latin teacher (and Classics Department chairman), Dr. Cadmus Kirby, of plagiarism. That June, Cadmus Kirby had given the commencement address to the graduating class of 1994, entitled “Why Study Classics?” Dr. Kirby had passed out copies to all his Latin students. It turned out to have lifted passages directly from a speech by the president of the University of Chicago decades earlier. The only reason Rick knew that was that he was going through a book of Great Speeches he found in his dad’s study, in prep for that fall’s debate competition, and he came upon some very familiar prose.

Working almost single-handedly, he put out a special issue of the Linwood Owl with a seventy-two-point headline on the front page: OWL QUESTIONS ORIGINALITY OF DR. KIRBY’S COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS. In the piece he ran chunks of Dr. Kirby’s speech alongside identical chunks of a speech by Robert Maynard Hutchins.

It was as if a bomb had gone off at the school. The response was swift, but it wasn’t quite what Rick had expected. Rick was suspended from school for a week for failing to submit the issue to the headmaster’s office in advance. Rick had deliberately ignored protocol because he knew the headmaster would kill the issue. Dr. Cadmus Kirby got off easy by blaming “some accidental borrowings” on his eidetic, or photographic, memory. An honest slip.

Rick got a C- in Latin that fall.

“My God, the hell you raised at school,” Andrea said. “You were fearless. Nothing ever stopped you. Your dad must have been so proud of you.”

“Dad? Want to know what he told me? He said, ‘You didn’t play by the rules, Rick.’ And he smiled. Like he was watching a bloody scrimmage on Monday Night Football. You didn’t play by the rules? You call that pride?”

She shook her head. “Well, I was impressed.”

Pleased, he said teasingly, “You must have been easily impressed.”

She gasped comically. “Thanks a lot! Hoffman, do you remember what you did to Mr. Ohlmeyer?”

“Not really.” Mr. Ohlmeyer was a sadistic teacher who used to stroll through the dining hall stealing food off students’ trays. He had a particular fondness for the little bags of barbecue potato chips the school served with sandwiches.

“The way you pranked him with the potato chips?”

“Oh, right.” One day Rick took a potato-chip bag home, razor-bladed it open, sprinkled the chips heavily with cayenne pepper, and carefully sealed the bag up. He brought it to the dining hall, and sure enough, Mr. Ohlmeyer stole his bag of barbecue chips, tore it open greedily, and raced out of the dining hall, roaring in pain. A round of applause broke out in the hall.

With a crooked smile she added, “You were always so ballsy, Hoffman.” She shook her head. “I bet you haven’t changed.”

“I’ve grown up since then. So how’d you like working at Goldman?”

She shook her head. “Hated it.”

He was surprised. Not what he’d expected. “It’s a pretty high-testosterone place, I imagine. Strip clubs and steak dinners, right?”

“Look, I like steak. And I don’t mind the strip clubs, really. I mean, so the traders need to blow off steam, and one way is to pay women with silicone breasts to do lap dances for them, since their wives won’t. That’s fine, I get it. I can deal.”

“But?”

“But in a lot of ways it felt like a frat house. Most of the inside jokes are from dumb comedies. If you never saw Caddyshack or Fletch, you miss half the jokes. ‘Just put it on the Underhills’ tab!’ Like that.”

Rick shook his head. He knew they were classic dumb comedies but he’d never seen them either.

A sommelier arrived with the wine and the whole elaborate ceremony: the display of the bottle, the careful extraction of the cork, the presentation of that cork, the tasting, the nod, the decanting.

“Would you like to wait for the wine to breathe, sir, or would you like me to pour some now?” the sommelier asked.

Rick looked at Andrea, who nodded. “We’ll have some now.”

The wine glasses were as big as a baby’s head. He swirled his wine, watched it run down in legs along the side of the glass. It smelled a bit musty, almost barnyardy. He took a sip, sucking it in as if he were drinking through a straw. He’d gone to wine tastings, written about them. He knew good wine in theory. A wine person would probably say this one had a complex nose. Exotic hints of anise and soy sauce, floral and herbal notes, and a long finish. At least, that’s how the wine gurus would probably put it. He decided the wine was probably excellent. It had to be. It cost a thousand dollars a glass.

Andrea was watching him, her head tilted, a wry smile, amused. He noticed her crooked tooth in the corner of her smile, and he smiled back. She used to be cute. She’d become gorgeous. She was also confident in ways she’d never been before.

She took a sip and nodded. “I’m sure it’s great. But it’s definitely wasted on me.”

Four thousand dollars and neither of them was experiencing a sensory orgasm. At least, he thought, it’s not my money.

“So you didn’t get the jokes,” Rick said, back to Goldman Sachs.

She shrugged. “You play along. So you’re trading credit derivatives. Credit default swaps. You’re basically betting against some poor cash-strapped company and hoping they go down the tubes so you’ll get rich, cashing in your death-spiral convertibles-oh, sorry, I meant ‘floating convertibles.’ You’re inside the donut machine making… synthetic collateralized debt obligations and selling them to rich schmucks. Arcane, exotic financial instruments no one understands. And so what?”

Rick didn’t understand most of what she’d just said. She might as well have been speaking Serbian. He took another sip of wine. He could taste a little cherry, some tannin in the aftertaste. It was actually quite good. It was definitely opening up. “But at least you’re making good money.”

“Crazy money. Ridiculous money. Enormous amounts of disposable income. But you know what? You’ve got no time to spend it anyway. Because you’re working a hundred hours a week or more and that’s all you’re doing. You have no life.”

Rick nodded. “I get it.” He took another sip. He noticed a grapefruit note, and something dark and dusky, almost bricklike. It was truly a spectacular wine.

“I mean, you spend every minute of your day buying and selling shit for someone else. Really. That’s all you’re doing. Meanwhile, you’re looking at the hedge fund guys and thinking, how come I don’t bring home that kind of money? If they ever stopped to think about it, which they usually don’t, they’d consider it a waste of a life. I mean, I think that’s why some of those guys throw their money away without even thinking about it, so they can at least have something to show for all that wasted life. So they can feel their life has some kind of meaning. So they can tell people they saw Paul McCartney or Sting on the beach at Saint Bart’s. Or they’ll go to Per Se and dump thousands of bucks for a single bottle of… of freaking fermented grape juice, you know?” She lifted her giant wine glass. “It’s stupid. It’s obscene. It’s gross.” Then she smiled. “No offense.”

Rick smiled back, starting to feel a little queasy. “So Geometry Partners is, uh, what, a hedge fund?”

“Oh,” she said with a quick, musical laugh. “Oh, God no. It’s-well, I took some of the money I made in the Distressed Opportunities Fund at Goldman and started this little nonprofit. We try to make low-income kids fall in love with geometry.”

It was his turn to laugh. “So you mean actual geometry.”

She nodded. “I did Teach for America for a year before Wharton, and, well, I liked it, but I figured I could do a lot better someday. Just dealing with math-you remember how much I loved math, right? I mean, geometry is so concrete. It’s so visual. It’s real world. It’s buildings and houses and rockets and baseball-the angle of a pitch, right?-the sun and the moon. And if you bring it to them that way, kids get it. They love it. They realize they might actually be good at math, and that gives them the confidence to do well in school.”

Rick nodded, took another sip of the four-thousand-dollar wine, which was starting to taste a little like a horse barn.

“We bring in math teachers and train them how to make math fun-we pay them for it, of course-and then we get the kids in there, and the damn thing is, it works, Rick. Like today-there’s this kid Darnell who goes to this school in Dorchester, and the teachers all hated him because he was so hostile. His brother’s in prison and his mother has a drug problem. I mean, Darnell’s exactly the kind of kid the gangs would love to sweep up, help them count keys of coke or cash or whatever. You can just see him disappearing into the life. But today I was showing him this math game on the iPad? And I could see him transform before my eyes-that hostility, that wariness-it was all gone. He was into it. He felt empowered. And I think-I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy, but I think this kid might… just might… make it.” Her eyes were moist, shining. “Distressed opportunities? One day it just popped into my head: How about public education? Isn’t that a distressed opportunity?”

Rick had fallen silent. He was fairly drunk by now from the Champagne and the wine, and his head was reeling. He hadn’t just underestimated Andrea. He realized he never knew her.

A couple of waiters appeared with golden plates, which they set down in front of Andrea, then Rick. Rick peered bleakly at the obscene display, crepes stuffed with caviar, tied up with chives, actual gold leaf on top of each one. They were loathsome now to look at, and besides, Rick had lost his appetite.

“Sir, madam? Your beggar’s purses. Osetra instead of beluga, just as you requested!”

“Thank you,” Rick said weakly.

Andrea glanced from her plate to Rick’s eyes. Her smile now seemed chilly. “Beggar’s purse, huh?” she said.