THE HERMIT IV: BIRTHDAY PARTY

On the day of his birthday garden party, Andy and Ava drove to Westchester from Manhattan. Andy’s six-bedroom colonial in Bedford Manor, a quaint, leafy, old-money community 40-minute train ride north from Grand Central Terminal, was concealed from the unwanted gaze by five-foot tall hedges of thick, geometrically trimmed boxwood shrubs and a long, private gravel driveway that, after a hundred yards, wrapped in a perfect circle around an ornate, multi-layered fountain in front of the main entrance. Four limestone ionic columns supported a triangular awning above the heavy, custom-carved doors, with ivy crawling, in a cultivated pattern, over the mansion’s red brick walls up towards the second-floor windows. Countering the regal front yard symmetry, a wild pine and birch forest encircled the estate on all the other sides, extending uninterrupted, as Andy believed, all the way to Canada.

Andy pulled up the driveway and saw two dust-covered contractors that he had hired earlier to touch up the drywall in the upstairs bedroom after a small leak. The duo was headed by a burly, thuggish-looking Russian, a former boxer named Oleg. Oleg’s teammate had a long Slavic name that Andy never bothered to remember. They stood on the driveway next to their van, smoking, looking a little lost amidst all the party-related commotion of the arriving and departing delivery trucks.

Oleg was happy to see Andy. Andy remembered that he owed Oleg the next cash installment for his work, and that Oleg texted him, mentioning that he’d stop by to collect it today. Andy forgot about it, until now.

Seeing Oleg’s smiling face, Andy was overcome by a sudden bout of hospitality. “I’m fifty years old, can you believe it?” he said. “Come and join us, there will be food and drink.”

The Russians looked at each other in silent agreement.

“Just for a little while. Very nice of you, Andy,” Oleg said, scratching the back of his thick neck.

“Follow me,” Andy said.

They stepped inside the house, into an airy foyer with a curved staircase and a polished baby grand piano in the center. The baby grand was a decorating decision of Andy’s interior designer, as no one in the family played the instrument. Vases and family photos crowded the piano’s surface. There were pictures of both Madeline and Ava on their horses, and with their equestrian prizes, pictures from Madeline’s and Andy’s wedding, and pictures of Madeline’s parents, both now deceased. Andy’s parents were absent from the photo collection.

To the right of the foyer was a cozy sitting room with a stone fireplace, dark wallpaper, a Persian rug, four leather armchairs facing each other, and heavy built-in bookshelves, featuring picture books, travel mementos, and economics textbooks written by Madeline’s late father. The room would enthrall, if only for a moment, any distracted New Yorker visiting Andy’s estate, with intriguing potential. Slow, intellectual, face-to-face discussions of weighty matters of the world could be held here, with a group of intelligent people, into the wee hours of the night, fueled by an eighteen-year-old scotch and crackling fire. In practice, however, the room was the most dead-end space of the house, both architecturally and functionally. In the age of text and snark it was condemned to languish unused, its promise lay unfulfilled. A guest would enter, imagine the possibilities, and walk out to dive back into the bustling party.

To the staircase’s left was a much lighter — in mood and color — dining room. It was equipped for a full twelve-person affair, with a long table and fine china sets in the glass closets along the wall. The dining room had a bigger fireplace of white marble, a higher ceiling, and its windows faced both the front yard and the backyard.

The dining room converged with a large kitchen, that led, via the sliding doors, to the deck and, down the steps, to the backyard lawn.

The contractors followed Andy, carefully treading in their dusty boots through the polished foyer and the dining room to the deck.

A big white tent was stretched in the middle of the freshly mowed lawn. Madeline was already there. She was dressed in an oversized white knit sweater and light beige linen pants. On her feet she wore her old riding boots, that she kept in the basement, while her delicate suede mules that she came in with (she loved everything suede) were left on the mat by the deck’s sliding doors. At the moment she was busy coordinating the catering and entertainment crews, crisscrossing the large green lawn, soggy from last night’s rain.

Andy waved at Madeline and pointed at Oleg and his comrade. “They will be joining us,” he shouted. Madeline came over. With an impenetrable expression she looked at the workers, then at Andy, smiled and said: “The drinks bar is open, the snacks will be served soon. Please make yourself comfortable. I’m Madeline. If you need anything please feel free to find me.” There was not a hint of surprise or condescension in her voice.

The Russians walked to the bar, cautiously asked for a beer, received two canned beverages, then went to the far corner of the yard at the very edge of the forest, and placed themselves on wooden lawn chairs.

The guests started to trickle in. They were mostly couples — traders and portfolio managers with their wives and girlfriends. The men were dressed casually, in polo shirts and khakis and sports jackets, one indistinguishable from another. The men’s ranks, out there in the real world, could be discerned from their female companions, whose image consciousness and anatomical aspirations varied in range and intensity. Some pursued a tight, curated look of a female TV anchor, with long blond hair abused by the curling iron, with loud-logoed purses, with too much exposed skin, and visible augmentations to their lips and noses. Others, a less numerous group, sought to conceal more than to reveal. Their faces were skillfully preserved to look exactly the same as they did twenty years ago, their hair was made to appear slightly unkempt, and their expensive light lambswool coats of indefinable color and nameless handbags were pointing to the kind of wealth that wished to remain anonymous.

The men were chronically unamused people, who had seen and done everything, but who could, in certain social situations, discard their default indifference and conjure up amusement on cue. Right now, on the lawn, there were cries of delight and chummy conviviality.

Andy zigzagged between the groups of people, gladhanding the men, and complimenting the women. He halted a browsing waiter with the drinks tray to get a refill and scanned the crowd. He spotted his old friend Misha Pomerantzev, who stood alone by the bar, with a forlorn expression, clutching a can of Coke.

At the moment Misha was in a career transition. Misha was a former quant, who turned a star credit trader. Last year Misha made his company, a large hedge fund, two hundred and fifty million dollars by betting on a basket of corporate debt contracts. After a dispute with his firm’s management about the size of his bonus, Misha wrestled a twelve and a half percent of the total profit, about thirty-one million dollars, but still resigned, saying that the dispute left a ‘bad taste in his mouth.’ He was now a free agent. Any credit desk on the Street would snatch up Misha in a second, and he already received several high seven-figure offers, but he was biding his time. Industry insiders speculated that he was thinking of starting his own shop.

Andy scooped a glass of champagne from a passing tray and walked towards Misha. Misha was unshaven and dressed in an odd combination of cargo shorts, a white business shirt with a couple of missing buttons on the belly, and a sports jacket. A green baseball cap with an ‘Ace Accounting’ logo covered up his longish, unkempt hair. On his feet he wore white tube socks up to mid-calf and old black sneakers.

“If I saw you on a street corner, I’d give you a coupla bucks,” Andy greeted Misha, handing him the champagne.

Misha chuckled and ran his fingers across his throat, signaling that he quit drinking. Andy put the glass on the nearby table. They slapped their palms bro-style and patted each other.

“Why didn’t I see you at the Bohemians’ party?” Andy asked Misha.

“I, uh...”

“You should’ve come. I made a killer John Bonham impression. We totally trashed the place.”

“It’s bullshit,” Misha said. He spoke with a very slight accent, but the earnestness and the urgency of his delivery betrayed his Russian roots. “That whole thing is bullshit. My first time there they didn’t tell me it was gonna be a roast. They just told me to prepare a talent bit. So, like an idiot, I practice a piano piece for two months. I show up there and see all those people dressed like clowns and I realize that I fucked up, that I was expected to come up with some stupid joke. But it was too late. So, I go and play my classic piece, a mazurka, play it badly, and everybody is expecting some kind of punchline or some joke at the end, like I’m gonna jump and strip naked and dance to YMCA or something. And then I finish and stand up and everybody’s quiet. I’d rather got booed. Never forgot the feeling. I felt so stupid. Someone in the bathroom later asked me: Misha, I didn’t quite get your sketch, what were you trying to say? I told him to fuck off. I never went again.” He scoffed. “Don’t want to partake in that simulacrum of rebellion.”

“Anyway, it was wild,” Andy said.

Misha took a sip of Diet Coke.

“The wilder the party the bigger the grief that they’re trying to assuage,” he said.

“Huh.” Andy patted him on the back. “Whatever you say, bro.”

“Misha!” Madeline chimed affectionately, walking towards them. There was a genuine ring of delight in her voice. Madeline and Misha air-kissed each other’s cheeks two times, European style.

Madeline liked Misha from the first time she met him years ago at the Keating Mills Christmas party. At the party, a drunk analyst, trying to be cute or to ingratiate himself with portfolio managers, made a crude joke with a punchline that revolved around a sexual innuendo, the kind of joke that’s not really funny but is simply used to gauge the rottenness of a listener’s imagination. Everyone laughed, except Misha and Madeline. An instant bond was born. They started talking and Madeline told Misha that she was writing a thesis on nineteenth century Russian history. They talked the entire evening, and, afterwards, she consulted him about some difficult Russian-to-English translations.

“Are you here with a date?” Madeline asked Misha. “I put you as ‘plus one.’”

“No. Just me.” Misha slouched and looked down. “We broke up.”

“What a pity,” Madeline chirped.

Andy’s phone buzzed. It was Lauren. She was here, she said, in front of the house. Andy excused himself and went to meet her.

Lauren got out of her BMW SUV, looking chic in a body-hugging grey wool turtleneck dress, grey puffy vest, and knee-high white leather flat-heeled boots. Her hair and half of her face were concealed by a silk scarf and large square-shaped black sunglasses. Not underdressed, not overdressed, just perfect, Andy thought. He liked that about Lauren. They hugged and kissed. She smelled of expensive freshness.

She took off the sunglasses and squinted.

“How does it feel to be an AARP member?”

Andy paused, trying to come up with something witty.

“Liberating,” he spilled.

Lauren’s face could be described as pretty if it wasn’t for a slight overbite and a weak chin. This type of face looks angelic in youth, but it does not age well. Andy didn’t care about that. Lauren had an ideal body, slim, flexible, with long limbs, capable of arousing him naturally — an important detail for a man his age. Besides, she knew how to look gorgeous in pictures she took with her phone, rendering that minor handicap irrelevant.

Lauren was a bit jittery about Madeline’s presence. Andy placated her with a dismissive ‘she’s ten years older than you!’ and that seemed to do the trick. When she saw Madeline, she relaxed. Lauren had a keen eye for a fellow woman’s status and mindset, and she was pleased to see a fortyish woman who looked and acted like she moved on from — or never even participated in — the rat race. She did not detect a suppressed spring of accumulated frustrations, hidden behind a cheerful front. There was a tiredness, perhaps, but no cattiness.

When he introduced them, Andy made sure to register both of their reactions. Lauren radiantly greeted Madeline and complimented her on her sweater.

“Andy told me that you organized all of this,” Lauren said. “This is wonderfully planned. Trust me, I know some professional party planners who can screw up a kids’ matinee. But this is well done. I’d love to get your catering contact.”

Madeline smiled and thanked Lauren, and Andy noticed in her fleeting expression and in a slight bend of her lips that she approved of what she saw, and that approval made him uncomfortable.

He left Lauren at the mercy of Madeline and went to get drinks. As he was walking back with the drinks, he overheard Lauren telling Madeline about a charity for inner city children that she was currently active in. Lauren was always active in something. He saw Lauren open her crossbody Chanel bag, take her business card that, he knew, described her as ‘philanthropist, filmmaker, entrepreneur’ and hand that card to Madeline.

“You’re multitalented, Lauren,” Madeline said after politely examining the card.

“And we have an annual gala. You should definitely come,” Lauren said.

“I think what you do is admirable,” Madeline replied. “However, modern day philanthropy is not something I would want to encourage with my participation.”

 Lauren doesn’t know what she got herself into, Andy thought.

“I totally understand,” Lauren said. “But this charity had been in business for forty years.”

“Oh?” Madeline raised her eyebrow. “For forty years? They seem to be doing something right.”

She’s so good and so cruel, Andy thought.

 “Call me anyway,” Lauren said. “We should do lunch when you’re in the city.”

“We definitely should. Let’s stay in touch.”

The Boston Dynamics robot, powered by Scotty with the remote, passed them by, and Lauren squealed in surprise. Madeline smiled at her, excused herself and went to greet other guests.

In the far corner of the garden, Oleg and his stern-faced teammate were still sitting on the lawn chairs, now observing the guests with a quiet, dogged interest. They were smoking, and even though the party was understood to be smoke-free, neither Andy nor Madeline wanted to enforce the code.

Oleg’s eyes were glued to the robot. Scotty directed the metallic creature at groups of people, bumping it into the back of people’s knees and then, when they turned in confusion, made it do a shimmy. Oleg observed Scotty’s spiel with an intense opprobrium, his jaw muscles flexing. He leaned in and said something to his friend, and they bobbed their heads in grim, silent agreement. When Scotty finally got bored and left the robot near the gazebo at the other end of the lawn, Oleg stood up from his vantage point and crouched through the lawn to the abandoned machine. He examined it with great interest and care, cleaning its metal legs from the pieces of grass and soil that got stuck there from all the human encounters. He went to the bar, got a glass of vodka, took a table napkin, dipped it in the alcohol, and wiped its metal carcass from all the crumbs and debris. “Tough day, huh, buddy? Nichego, we’ll get you out of here,” he kept saying.

Andy spotted Dave Pinkus who was talking to Misha and two hedge fund guys and walked towards them to say hello. Misha had somehow scored a cigarette from his working-class compatriots and was smoking it, quietly listening to Pinkus.

“Anyway, I almost retired at fifty,” Pinkus spun a yarn of his failed retirement. “I had enough money. My kids were out of college, two houses paid off, a comfortable conservative portfolio.” Pinkus scoffed. “And you know what? I felt castrated. By the lack of access to the tape, by not knowing where the spreads were for this or that. That informational void was debilitating. I missed midtown and the crowds and the shop talk and the afterhours. People stopped calling me after a few months. A few more months in the wilderness and nobody would even remember that there was this guy Pinkus, and he did some crazy shit in his heyday.” He looked wistfully at the woods and sighed. “So, I came back. That was fifteen years ago.”

“I guess it’s not about the money then,” a bald hedgie in jeans and a puffy vest said.

“I guess not.” Pinkus shrugged.

“It’s about our limited imagination,” Misha inserted.

Scotty, with a plate full of snacks, elbowed himself into the circle.

“Did you land anywhere yet?” Scotty asked Misha, biting into a mini hotdog.

“Not yet,” Misha replied.

“Hey, I always wanted to ask you,” Scotty said with a mouthful, “if your full name is Mikhail, why did you shorten it to Misha? It sounds kind of effeminate.”

“First, it’s a custom abbreviation,” Misha said. “And second,” he puffed the smoke into Scotty’s face, “it is interesting how you, Americans, evaluate everything on the degree of masculinity. Says a lot about you.”

“Is it different with the Russians?” Scotty asked, grinning.

Misha didn’t respond.

“Give me that,” he stopped a passing waiter with a tray full of wine glasses. “You have any hard liquor?”

“What would you prefer, sir?” the elderly waiter asked him with a crisp diction.

Misha dipped into his pocket and found a ten-dollar bill. He slipped it to the waiter.

“Grey Goose. No ice.”

“Right away, sir.”

After gulping down the vodka, Misha wandered into the nearby woods. He reemerged half an hour later carrying several large, spongy porcini-like mushrooms. His red face brimmed with joy.

“You can’t get these in any store,” he exclaimed. “Only in the woods.”

“What kind of mushrooms are they?” Andy asked playfully.

“Not that kind,” Misha said. “These you eat. Fry them with potatoes. You have a plastic bag I can use?”

“Go ask Ava. She’s in the kitchen.”

Andy scanned the lawn to check on Lauren. He found her immersed in some chit-chat with a trader and his wife. She was giving the trader’s wife her business card. A party photographer snapped their picture. Andy came over and ran his hand over Lauren’s back and squeezed her butt. “I’m glad you’re not wasting any time,” he whispered in her ear. He thought that maybe it was a mistake to bring her here.

He went to the kitchen where he found Misha mid-speech, drawing invisible schemes in the air, and Ava listening to him, cradling her chin in her palms.

“Reason gave a man a guillotine and an atom bomb. One cannot be an industrialist, a techie and build a pristine, harmonious community, unspoiled by ambition, a Shire so to speak, as those two are antithetical, mutually exclusive notions,” Misha rambled. “Even if one spends the money building a replica of that kind of community, it will only resemble it visually, but its essence will be missing. It will be an ersatz copy. Potemkin villages. Look it up. I can send you a link later. You have to familiarize yourself with these terms.”

Andy sat on a stool and signaled to Misha to continue his thought. Ava leaned towards him and whispered: “We started with the mushrooms.”

“I had a VC friend once who bought several hundred acres in Colorado with a river and a giant rock cliff,” Misha continued. “He made a big project out of turning those big rocks into these fifty-foot-tall statues, standing with their hands athwart, as if guarding the property.”

“Like Argonaths,” Ava said.

“Yes. Like in a movie. They carved one statue out of the existing rock. The other, on the other bank… They had to transport large boulders there, then carve them into building blocks, then assemble them. There wasn’t a road big enough for the trucks to come in, so he built the road just for that. Had to cut down trees. It was a protected habitat, but he went around the law somehow. The funny thing is, he spends about one week a year in that place. He doesn’t even go look at those rocks. He just wanted to have them, so that he had a cool story to tell. Anyway, then the arm on one statue crumbled to the river below. Couldn’t hold its weight.”

“Life imitates art,” Andy said.

“The manner in which he went about it mocks the art’s very purpose. He couldn’t see a disconnect between the visual attributes and the essence those visuals claim to represent.” Misha sighed. “We’re all drowning in irony. Nothing we do is serious anymore.”

“Yeah.” Andy leaned towards Misha and poked him in his pasty belly showing through the hole in his shirt. “That’s why you dress like a schmuck. An ironic schmuck.”

Misha fell quiet.

“Maybe we are all just poseurs,” he said after a long pause. “We don’t know what else to do.”

“He-hey! There you are.” They heard a loud, clownish voice and saw Doug Caldera, coming in from the dining room. Caldera wore a black Catholic priest frock. A three-foot-long ragdoll dressed as an altar boy was attached to Caldera’s trousers, its face buried suggestively in his crotch.

“How the hell did I think it was a costume party?” Caldera said.

Madeline stepped in the kitchen from the deck. She stared at Caldera and his blasphemous wardrobe, wincing, but did not say anything.

“Sorry, Madeline,” Caldera said. “I thought it was a costume party. I must’ve read the wrong email. I get so many invitations.”

It was getting dark. The electric garlands that hung along the edges of the white tent and on the deck railings lit up. On the lawn, a hired cover band began to play feel-good oldies from the 1980s, and Scotty and a couple of drunk traders were dancing. Lauren swayed along, with a drink in hand. She saw Caldera walking towards them, and, upon seeing his getup, she bent with laughter.

Madeline gave Andy an exasperated glance, then took scissors from the kitchen drawer and went outside. Andy watched her through the kitchen window as she marched across the lawn towards Caldera and gestured at the misfortunate ragdoll. Caldera resisted limply but complied with her orders. He lifted his arms and froze and, as Madeline fiddled around his crotch with the scissors, grimaced in mock horror. Scotty and the traders watched the impromptu wardrobe surgery and laughed. When she was done, Madeline pointed the scissors at them sternly and said something, and they straightened up, saluting her as if she were a military officer. Holding the ragdoll under her elbow, she then came up to the party photographer and ordered him — Andy discerned from her uncompromising hand signs — to delete the problematic images from the camera. She watched the photographer as he obediently clicked through his reel.

“Come on,” he said when Madeline returned to the kitchen. “People are having a harmless fun.”

“It’s atrocious,” Madeline said.

She turned to Ava.

“Are you ready?”

“Are we leaving now?” Ava asked, sounding disappointed.

“Let’s allow Dad to have some quality time with his barbarian horde,” Madeline replied.

Andy chortled and looked at Ava with a helpless smile.

Ava collected her backpack, came by, and kissed him on the cheek.

“Have a good time, Dad. See you next week.”

Madeline gave Misha a hug.

“Keep an eye on this saturnalia for me,” Madeline instructed Misha before leaving.

“I’ll make sure everything is up to par,” Misha replied.

“So, you broke up with Joanna, huh. What happened?” Andy asked Misha when Madeline and Ava left.

“She’s impervious to introspection,” Misha said. “She’s always in elevated mood.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s unnatural. I guess, for anyone but an American,” he scoffed and looked at Andy. “We had some good times though,” he added wistfully.

“We will find you a nice Russian girl then. So that you can brood together. And go mushroom picking.”

“No,” Misha said grimly. “I want nothing to do with the Russians. They’re a lost people.”

Andy and Misha went back to the lawn and joined a cluster of chatting traders.

“A commercial space tourist,” the chubby, pink-cheeked trader was saying as they came near. “That’s what I want for my birthday. I often imagine how it would go. I’d probably have to go through some training and get on a special diet and stop dining at steakhouses.”

“You’d have to give up your coke habit,” Caldera inserted, unsolicited, to a round of rowdy chuckles. The trader mock-wrestled Caldera, locking his neck in an arm vice and knocking his knuckles on Caldera’s head.

“You can just jump with a parachute,” Scotty said. “Then you won’t have to give anything up.”

“Nah,” the trader replied. “A parachute is different. You don’t actually experience any weightlessness. But in space you do. And there, for a brief moment, nothing matters. Not your positions, not your P&L, not your counterparties. All is meaningless dust. Even what you do doesn’t matter. ‘Cause you can’t do anything. All the controls are back on the ground. And that, I guess, is the beauty of it. The total helplessness. The letting go. Like in a song. I’m floating in the most peculiar way.”

“If you like feeling helpless you can go to a dungeon and get yourself a dominatrix. She’ll float you in a peculiar way,” Caldera said, causing even louder hoots and cackles. He sipped his vodka-cranberry.

“I’m staying here, on this shitty earth. I have everything figured out here.”

The guests began to disperse around 9 p.m. Caldera enlisted Scotty to help him search the house for his ragdoll, a costume accessory that he planned to use at several upcoming Halloween parties. They found it on a chair in the sitting room, its ropy arm wrapped around a glass of melted ice. Caldera offered to give Scotty a ride back to town.

The caterers were cleaning up. Andy and Misha got a bag of marshmallows from the kitchen pantry and went to the stone fire pit near the gazebo. They found Oleg there, who was sitting alone, staring at the flames.

“Do you mind if we join you?” Andy asked. Oleg shook his head.

“Please,” he said.

Misha scored another cigarette from Oleg and stretched out on the garden chair, puffing, gazing at the night sky.

“What’s your take on Concordia-Walden?” Andy asked Misha.

“CW is kind of opaque,” Misha said and sighed. “Where do you have it marked?”

“Three hundred and fifty over.”

Misha bent his lips.

“I think it’s way too optimistic. This is where investment grade trades now.”

“Everything trades at investment grade right now.”

“They could trade at IG levels without being IG. But if you rely on spreads, you are mispricing the risk. CW valuation models should be based on the quality of the collateral, not on spreads.”

“Yeah, it’s too labor intensive though. I just don’t have those kinds of resources right now. I’d have to have an oil and gas specialist on hand to get that kind of granular analysis. All I have is Scotty.”

Misha shrugged.

“The easiest way for you to do it is to assume the worst will happen and focus on what can be recovered. I think the risk there is very asymmetric and you should be prepared for all kinds of externalities. If you can, you should run some stress-tests for credit, duration and event risk. If you can’t do that then recalibrate your model to focus on recovery values. If it happens at least you’ll be prepared. And if it doesn’t happen, you book a profit,” Misha said.

“Too bad you’re too expensive. I’d hire you for this project,” Andy said dolefully.

“Caldera would be more useful. He’s, shall we say, a recovery specialist,” Misha said.

They both looked at Oleg who sat quietly, listening to them, fixated on the fire.

“Did we bore you yet, Oleg?” Andy asked.

“Problems at work.” Oleg bobbed. “I understand.” He turned to Misha.

“Are you in accounting?” He asked, pointing at Misha’s hat.

“I guess you can say that,” Misha said. He gave Andy a quick ‘let’s not disappoint this poor guy’ glance, and Andy kept quiet.

“Here, try this.” Misha handed Oleg a stick with a marshmallow. “It’s like pastila. Roast it first, it’s tastier this way.”

“Andy,” Oleg used this moment of attention to broach a pressing topic. “What do you plan to do with the robot?”

“I haven’t really thought about it yet.”

“Maybe I can buy it from you,” Oleg probed.

“Let me think about it.”

“Thank you,” Oleg said. He exhaled with a mix of awe and gratitude. “America is a great country. You open business. Work hard. And become a rich man.”

No one responded to Oleg’s observation. Oleg held the marshmallow over the fire until it darkened on all sides, pulled it out and bit a small piece. He chewed it with a cautious, distrustful expression. He looked at Misha.

“This is not really pastila,” he said wincing. “This is crap.”

Misha laughed.

Andy smiled, looking at Oleg, but his mind was now elsewhere. How touchingly innocent it is to still want to acquire new things, to be excited by owning them, he thought.

He smacked his forehead.

“Damn. The money. You’ve been waiting all this time? Why didn’t you remind me?”

Oleg shrugged and mumbled something about ‘your birthday.’

“Come. Let’s get you paid.”

Andy, Oleg, and Misha went back to the house. Andy brought cash from upstairs and gave it to Oleg, who said that he’ll stop by next week to check if the wall had dried properly.

“I might be in the city. I’ll leave you the key,” Andy said.

Oleg left. Andy looked around for Misha and found him slouching in an armchair in the library.

“I have a wide selection of accommodations,” Andy said. “There’s my office with a couch there. There’s Ava’s bedroom. There’s Madeline’s study. There’s the old nanny’s room.”

Misha said that office couch would suffice. Andy went to fetch a pillow and a blanket, and when he came back Misha was already asleep and snoring.

Andy went to his bedroom. Lauren was waiting for him there, reclining in a feline pose on the bed, wearing a set of lacy black underwear. There was a faint smell of weed. He stepped back, gasping theatrically, as if smitten by the sight of beauty.

“You’re the hottest date in town,” he said. “I’m a lucky guy.”