“Maybe you should write a Slainspotting book.” He seemed serious.
We took a cab into the city. Robin was really good at making it seem like he was a part of the machinery of the earth. Like he was just a thing that happened and you were grateful for his presence, which was a great attribute for a personal assistant/manager/agent. He was always there, always taking care of me, but never taking any of my emotional energy. Robin worked very hard to be no work for me. He didn’t want me to wonder how he was doing, partially because that would be something I’d have to think about, partially because I don’t think he wanted to think about it either. The result was that one of the people closest to me in the whole world was often, to my subconscious, barely even a person. We had been through the best and worst moments of our lives together, and yet, in the months after things started to take on a new and somewhat stable structure, I very rarely wondered how he was doing.
I had recently decided I was going to remember he was a human more. But then there was a mysterious book and a new girl and a bizarre penny stock and I had forgotten. But not for the whole car ride!
“How are you doing?” I asked after ten minutes of checking Twitter.
“Good!” he said. “The people at Redstone have been really wonderful to work with. Very responsive. They’re pros. It’s always good to work with pros.”
Well, that didn’t work. How about “I went on a date yesterday”?
“Well, that’s been a long time coming. How did it go?”
“It was great, we went to see STOMP.”
He laughed a genuine, high laugh. “Are you serious?” And just like that, I was actually talking to Robin.
“I am, it’s worse than that. I met her at Subway.”
“AT SUBWAY?! Not on the subway?”
“No, at Subway, she’s a sandwich artist.”
“So you’re telling me you went into a Subway and asked an employee to go see STOMP with you?”
“I mean, yes?”
“It just doesn’t seem like something you’d do!” he told me.
I didn’t know how to respond to that because, of course it wasn’t. I would never have done any of that if the book hadn’t told me to.
I was quiet for a while thinking about that, and I must have looked awkward because Robin said, a little concerned, “I didn’t mean to pry.”
“No!” I said. “No, you’re right. I was just trying to figure out how I’d ended up doing something so weird and also, like, slightly inappropriate. She’s really nice. We had a good time. Do you think I should see her again?” I asked unnecessarily, since I was absolutely going to see her again if I could.
“God, don’t ask me.” He looked appalled.
“Yeah, what about you?” It occurred to me then that I didn’t even know Robin’s sexual orientation, so I just said, “Anybody interesting in LA?”
“Honestly, Andy, dating has been complicated. For me, I mean. Not like since, uh, whenever. Just, always. So I don’t really do it anymore.”
That was the most disjointed sentence I had ever heard Robin speak, and I was surprised to find myself legitimately unnerved by it. I had to fight not to tell him he didn’t have to share. Ultimately, that would have been giving him an excuse, and I only wanted to give him that excuse to protect my own vision of him.
“Why is dating hard for you?” I asked.
He gestured up to the driver and said, “I think we’ll talk about it another time.”
We never did talk about it, though. I tried, that was the moment, but he pushed me away a little, and I let him.
“Do you know where we’re headed right now?” Robin changed the subject.
“A hotel, I assume?”
“Oh god, no. The rooms won’t be ready, and even if they were, I wouldn’t let you go into one because you would fall asleep and it would destroy any chance you have at beating jet lag. No, right now we are going to meet the CEO of Redstone on his yacht. And then after that we’re going shopping, because it appears that you did not bring a suit.”
“I did not bring a suit. Should I have brought a suit?”
“Honestly, no, because Cannes is the best place in the world to buy a suit.”
“An expensive suit?”
“Very.”
—
Cannes was gorgeous, though I felt I might have been missing something by visiting this very beach-centric place in the wintertime. It was definitely the off-season.
The taxi dropped us off at the waterfront, and in my blue jeans and hoodie, I followed Robin on some docks through ever bigger and bigger yachts.
“Can you tell me again what the International Private Equity Market is?” I asked as we walked.
“You just had ten hours to read the one-page brief I gave you, and you didn’t do it, did you?”
“Look, we can spend time arguing, or we can spend time learning about private equity.”
He looked at me a little hard and a little sad, but not at all amused.
“When you are normal rich, you can do what you’re doing with your portfolio. You buy stocks on public markets, and those stocks go up as the economy grows and your net worth increases. When you are very wealthy, or when you are an institution like a pension fund or a country, you get to do ‘private equity.’ The stock market is a public equity market. Private equity markets are when, in order to buy some or all of a business, you have to have meetings and sign papers and talk to lots of human beings. There are now big, giant private equity companies that consolidate wealthy people’s wealth, and then they use it to buy whole private companies, or parts of them. The people at this conference, combined,
