They had stopped walking. The garden was now abandoned. Devon, head down, nodded sullenly, like a child. Adam put his hands on the younger man’s shoulders.
“No one else,” Adam said gently, “knows the things that you and I know. Now. Speaking of being careful. It’s time for new cell numbers, right? Did you memorize yours?”
Devon nodded, and recited it. “Done,” Adam said, and began bouncing on the balls of his feet again. “Now relax a little. Have some fun. Wait to hear from me.” He ran up the garden steps, headed south until he could breach the low stone wall again, and twenty minutes later he was home. He showered, put on a suit, grabbed his briefcase, hailed a cab, and met Sanford inside the first-class lounge in the Delta terminal at LaGuardia. Sanford was sitting in a too-low club chair in front of a muted TV, holding a glass of wine and looking miserable.
“I can’t tell you how much I hate flying these days,” he said. “Commercial especially. It’s so degraded. Look at what passes for first class now.” His face was tired and florid, even though the glass of wine was his first. They were on their way to Minneapolis to close a deal with the state’s teachers union, which had agreed to let Perini grow their pension fund.
“I almost wonder why we have to go at all,” Sanford said to him as they boarded the plane, a few drinks later. “It’s all in the bag. But they just need a little face time, before they hand over the pension money to a couple of sharks from New York City. Maybe they just want to make sure we’re not Nigerian princes.” Adam had the aisle seat and thus took the brunt of the resentful glances from those who boarded after them and had to stand waiting while others tried to smash their carry-ons into the tiny overhead bins in coach. “You know,” Sanford said once they were in the air, “I spent a lot of time talking you up with them, and then one of them asked me an odd question. ‘If this guy’s such a star,’ he asked me, ‘how do we know he won’t bolt and start his own hedge fund or something?’”
Adam smiled. “And you said, ‘Hey, you’re right, I’d better go and give that guy a massive midyear bonus right away’?”
Sanford slapped him affectionately on the knee. “Good one,” he said. “No, I told him that you were still a young man. And that the best thing about you is that with all the ego in this business, you’re not one of those guys obsessed with having a high profile. Honestly, if you’d asked me ten years ago, I would have bet I’d have lost you by now. But you’re an old-school guy, a throwback in a lot of ways. Put your head down, do your job, respect the traditions, and everybody gets rich enough in the end. Lazard was like that when I worked there, a hundred years ago. Anyway, I can’t tell you what a comfort it is to me now.”
He looked out the window at the ground far below, the lit veins of the empty streets, the bright ball fields and parking lots. “It’s funny how much I’ve grown to hate this,” he said. “I used to take it for granted. Airplanes and airports. But lately I just want to be out on the water. It’s almost all I think about.”
A few minutes later he was asleep, his cheek sunk against his shoulder, his lower lip drooping. Not a flattering look, Adam thought, and closed his eyes.
There was a template for everything somewhere, an overgrown headwater of the original and unprecedented, and you might hack away in search of it your whole life long and never find it. Or, on the other hand, you might. Jonas hated having his ignorance exposed. On the M79 bus coming home from school some fat guy wearing board shorts even though it was about forty degrees out tried to peek over his shoulder to see what he was listening to on his iPod. Jonas showed him the screen. The guy made a condescending face: “Reheated Joy Division,” he said, and Jonas nodded in agreement, like what-can-you-do, but then he couldn’t wait to get home and get on the computer and find out who Joy Division was. And a couple of hours later he had to conclude that the fat guy was right. Mostly just by virtue of being older, but still. The more you learned about something you thought was good, the more holes like this you fell into. His own obsessions tended to bear Jonas backward in time, and eventually they led him to the sad but empirical conclusion that the popular music of his own day and age sucked ass.
In tenth grade this was not a mainstream view. If you wanted to be a music snob, fine, but you were expected to do so by raving obnoxiously about some band no one else had ever heard of because they’d only formed three weeks ago and played one gig. Jonas knew guys like that, older guys who ran the high-school radio station nobody listened to and who were flunking English because they spent so much time commenting on one another’s blogs, and even though he wanted nothing to do with them he had to cop to their being kindred spirits, because really they were jonesing for the same thing he was: the unspoiled, the uncorrupted, the pure of intent. They were just looking for it in the wrong place. Then of course there were all the kids in the happy mainstream, the kids whose moms drove them out to Nassau Coliseum to see some dancing boy-band lip-synch songs of longing vetted by a focus group of ten-year-old girls. That shit was beyond the pale. It was too hard to believe that there was such a thing as not even caring, not bothering to distinguish in terms of value between the simulated and the real.
There was something sort of priestly about him when it came to music, and as with most priests, some people respected his outlook and some people just found the whole attitude a bit much. Certainly it put him outside the realm of anything girls might be interested in. And there was another big downside to having such an exacting ear, which was that it tortured Jonas to know how mediocre and ordinary his own band sounded, himself not excepted. They were never going to be good. Still, he practiced and practiced. The others were blissfully optimistic, which was, he thought, a lovely thing to be able to be. They did a decent “Sweet Jane,” because really if you couldn’t get that down what hope was there for you? They played together once or twice a week in an old boathouse near the FDR Drive, a property that their lead singer’s father had bought up but hadn’t yet gotten a zoning abeyance to convert. It was hard to find places in the city to rehearse-probably easier to find places to perform, which was unfortunately where the fantasies of Jonas’s band-mates tended to drift anyway.
Girls did sometimes come to their rehearsals, though. Even senior girls like the completely unattainable Tori Barbosa. It proved once and for all the tremendous magical properties of rock and roll, Jonas thought, that even a band that sucked as bad as they did still attracted girls. He was the youngest among them and had the reputation of being the best musician as well, but that was because he was the only one who bothered to practice outside of rehearsal. One of the most depressing manifestations of their lameness was how much time they spent naming themselves. Haskell, their singer, thought some preemptive irony was in order and wanted them to call themselves The Privileged, or The Privileges. The notion of preemptive irony made Jonas want to kill himself; since he was always trying to interest them in a more rootsy direction anyway, he kept suggesting The Headwaters, like a kind of quest for the source rather than just some bar band-style aping of that month’s Top 40. But every time they wrote it down and looked at it, somebody would say, “The Headwaiters?” Every time. Then Alex, the drummer, had a revelation while watching a film in 20th Century U.S. History and so their name, at least until the next time they decided to argue about it, was Run Bobby Run.