The Book of Jonah Read Free Page A

Seth was doing just fine.
    â€œJacobstein!” Seth called when he saw him. He was standing with a group of other men, all in suits like Jonah, all holding beers. Jonah went over and joined them. Introductions were made, hands were shaken. Seth’s group was made up of his coworkers at the financial-services firm where he worked and their friends in the industry. (Finance people tended to find one another at parties, Jonah had learned from almost a year of dating Sylvia.) The jocular rowdiness of the conversation suggested that all these men were several drinks ahead of him. An argument was going on over a five-hundred-dollar bid for a Derek Jeter–signed baseball.
    â€œYou could get that ball for a hundred fifty bucks on eBay,” someone was saying to the man who’d made the five-hundred-dollar bid.
    â€œBut why would I want to give a hundred fifty dollars to some fat guy in his underwear, living in his mother’s basement?” the bidder replied, and the others laughed.
    â€œYou guys aren’t factoring in the tax deduction,” said another man—and he dramatically wrote a bid for six hundred dollars, to a chorus of “Oh!”s from the others.
    â€œYeah, but your deduction is based on what some GED meathead at the IRS decides the ball is worth, right, Jacobstein?” Seth asked Jonah.
    â€œHey, if you want my counsel, you have to pay my retainer,” Jonah replied, and the others laughed again. He didn’t usually engage in greedy-lawyer humor—one tended to hear a great deal of it as a lawyer—but he’d found it always played well with the financial crowd.
    â€œCan you even afford six hundred dollars?” someone demanded of the man who’d made the most recent bid. “I saw the ring you bought for Melissa, I know you’re overleveraged.”
    â€œFirst of all, that’s a CZ,” he replied, to more laughter. “Second of all, as long as no one starts buying real estate in the Las Vegas exurbs, my bonus this year will provide all the liquidity I need.”
    â€œI’m sure that’s a comfort to all the people in Vegas underwater on their mortgages,” one of them joked.
    â€œHey, if you bought a house in the Vegas exurbs in 2005, you deserve to be underwater on your mortgage for at least another decade,” Seth said.
    They all laughed some more. Yes, they were assholes, Jonah thought, but they seemed to know it, which somehow made it more forgivable. Besides, he suspected there was something to the collective American superstition—enduring despite the events of recent years—that the economy couldn’t function without assholes.
    At this point, the group was joined by a smiling, gangly man, with flushed cheeks and a long, ovoid face, a puff of disordered blond hair. His name was Patrick Hooper—Jonah had met him through Sylvia—and he was often at events such as this. Some of the others in the group evidently knew him, too, as they exchanged (somewhat) surreptitious eye rolls when he joined them. He looked at the bid list for the baseball and then wrote in a bid of five thousand dollars. He looked up from the page, laughing delightedly.
    â€œThe funny part is I don’t even like baseball,” Patrick said.
    â€œThat is funny,” Seth muttered.
    Patrick Hooper was, by all reports, a financial genius. According to Sylvia, during the financial-products boom years he had devised a series of commodity trades for Goldman of indisputable profitability and at least theoretical legality. Patrick had earned enough from this to retire by the time he was thirty—which he had— The Wall Street Journal marking the occasion with the headline A WALL STREET WUNDERKIND TAKES A BOW . Even now, Goldman kept him on retainer, presumably on the chance that he might interrupt a marathon session of World of Warcraft to concoct some new infallible profit-making financial device. What made all the