Of the roughly forty people crammed into the suite, I recognized five from my office. There were Jim “Button-Fly” Nance and “Tender” Eddie Adagio of the fourteenth-floor trading desk, ashing cigars out the window. There was Caroline Dworkins, who stole my promotion in 2015, sucking face with someone who looked like Elaine’s old boyfriend from Seinfeld, the deep-voiced David Puddy—or perhaps it was the actor himself, handsomely aged and bearing a stripe of Sontag-silver.
Button-Fly and Tender hailed from Princeton and Dartmouth, respectively, where they’d played squash and water polo, respectively, and had been members of eating clubs that excluded all but the most corporately connected undergraduates. These weren’t Bushes, Clintons, or Kennedys like the bluebloods from Harvard and Yale, but bona fide titans: Rockefellers, Van Lewigs, and Kochs. The rest of the partygoers were recognizable by type: hedge fund guys in Yankees caps playing quarters on the coffee table; JPMorgan clones in suits and skirt suits, laughing their hissy, reptilian laughs; brokers from smaller firms hovering at the edge of conversational circles. A couple of Goldmanites sat cross-legged on the kilt-patterned couch, lording silently over the proceedings.
Aside from the suite’s gratis stabs at bohemian decor—e.g. the Banksy stuff and a framed fashion shot of two beached models leaning in for a kiss—a few additional, and seemingly emblematic, decorations had been installed by our hosts. Mirror-green streamers dangled from the molding, and clear garbage bags full of green confetti were taped to the ceiling, to be opened and poured upon us at the stroke of midnight. Green bulbs had been fit into the lamps, throwing a limón glow on the Goldmanites. One wouldn’t have guessed Gatsby, but the theme made more sense in this context than it did at the recent wave of Gatsby-inspired weddings that Wendy was always pointing out on Pinterest, with their grooms in riding breeches, their take-home bags of chocolate coins. At least this party had the right mix of flamboyance and subsurface despair.
I was making my way toward the bar, eyeing a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle, when someone approached the human platter, grabbed a slider, and dragged it through the happy trail of hoisin sauce—making circular motions at the pubic root to sop as much sauce as possible—before popping the sandwich whole into his mouth.
“Dude,” I said.
Instead of answering, Ricky raced across the room, wrapped his arms around my knees, and knocked me over. The vape must have upset my inner-ear balance. He mounted me, tickling under my armpits and repeating my name so that my face was purposely sprayed with spit. I pushed him off and we stood.
“Hey buddy,” he said. A pasty residue dripped onto his upper lip. Ricky sucked the string of cocaine-tinted snot back up his sinus canal and wiped at his nose. The SD bracelet rattled on his wrist. We made our way to the makeshift bar. Ricky poured us tequila shots, and I chased with a tumbler of Pappy.
“So what’s the deal with this party?” I said. “It’s supposed to be Great Gatsby, right? Why is there a Lego sculpture of the Titanic on that mantelpiece?”
“Oh you know, death of the American dream and whatnot. Death of a Salesman, Death in Venice, the petite mort of my drippy dick pulling out of the Titanic’s ass to make room for the ice crater. This is the end, as Jim Morrison once said while wagging his cock at a photo of Barbra Streisand. The end my friend, and here we are: the fall of Rome, the decline of derivatives, the rise of dildos made from real human skin like Hitler only dreamed.”
“We’re celebrating the crash?”
“Absolutely. You know why? Because it puts things in perspective, buddy, reminds us of what’s really important, you know? The real gay-ass shit like love, family, and friendships like ours.”
I didn’t laugh.
“Aw, I’m kidding you, Mikester. We’re celebrating because the world is going to shit, and how hilarious is that? We’ll watch the plebes run through the streets while us pharaohs sit tight on our thrones and think about the long strings of zeros at the end of our bank statements. Most of us, anyway, you being the exception. You really should have listened to me about not putting all your eggs into stupid investments, but bygones be bygones, buddy, speaking of which . . .”
Ricky pulled me into a smaller second bedroom. I assumed this had to do with the investment opportunity he’d mentioned that morning. I’d thought it over on the taxi ride here, as I scrolled through my missed calls and texts from Wendy. At this point, I assumed that she knew we were insolvent. She’d be asleep when I came home, but in the morning, I’d be asked to explain. And while the old Michael would have jumped at the chance to risk all our remaining assets on Ricky’s recommendation—a last-ditch effort at easy redemption—I’d decided I would no longer be that person. Instead, I would beg my wife’s forgiveness. I would tell her I loved her and that I was sorry. We’d go from there. Whatever we did would be decided together. I was planning to explain all this to Ricky.
The other bedroom was shrouded in herb smoke. Bankers stretched out on the floor, vegging out for what may have been the first time in their lives. They were twinkle-eyed and flirty, some barefoot, some in sheer navy dress socks. Jay-Z, patron saint of reckless spending, spit through a small pair of speakers, proclaiming himself “Che Guevara with bling on.”
A familiar-looking guy on the corner of the couch fidgeted with a lighter and followed the bong’s progress around the room. The man looked older than the others, with a receded hairline gone gray around the ears. He wore a ring of razor burn like a necklace, and his eyes were barely visible beneath his lowered lids. In jeans and a hoodie, he stood out among my business-casual colleagues.
“You recognize him?” asked Ricky.
And then it came to me.
“Holy shit,” I said, and Broder must have
