“It is,” Doug said, looking deeply pleased. “I shot him in ‘92. He was in the study for the longest time, but that way, nobody else ever got to appreciate him.”
Lillian stood to examine the head better, looking impressed. “We’ve never gone hunting together, have we?”
“We haven’t,” Doug said. “We should.”
“With Carver, of course,” Lillian added.
Carver ignored this. He’d been hunting before, and he knew a bad time when he heard one. Up early for a long drive and frigid march into the woods of Finger Lakes National Forest with his armed father and wife, who were both better shots than he. He had already experienced his father staring at him in confusion and disgust as his nerves caused him to miss deer after deer. Worse still to have Lillian there cooing, “Baby, it’s easy. Baby,watch this,” while she dropped dozens of animals, half of them not even fair game.
“Sure,” Doug agreed, and changed the subject back to the wedding and their preparations for it. There was going to be a big rehearsal dinner tomorrow night, or something. Carver mostly tuned this conversation out, his mind wandering to work. He was jarred out of this by a hand on his shoulder; he looked up to see Conway, saying hi on her way back out of the room.
“How you doing?” she said conversationally.
“Uh, good,” Carver said.
“You’re thin,” she noted, sipping her wine as she walked away.
“He’s always thin,” Doug said accusatorily. He gave Carver an intense once-over for several seconds, as if to confirm that he remained the same person, then looked away.
“We’ve been doing Pilates,” Lillian said in an explanatory tone. She was too blinded by Manhattanism to realize this would just make things worse.
“Pilates,” Doug repeated.
“To stay limber,” Carver said.
“Doesn’t your mom do Pilates?” Doug said to Priscilla.
“Mmm-hmm,” Priscilla said. “She says it keeps things tight,” she added, making a face.
“Tight, huh?”
Carver sat in irritated silence. He was muscular. His father and Chip could probably still outbench him, sure, but he ran triathlons. Could either of them run even one leg of a triathlon? No. He did not spend his afternoons napping in a chair. He did not eat donuts.
He had to be some kind of throwback to their immigrant ancestors, the ones who’d staggered over from England and Germany all desperate to make something of themselves. His head was constantly on a swivel. Sometimes when he wasaround his family and got that painful lump in his throat, he imagined their ancestors watching them all on a big screen — like sports fans at a bar — and cheering only for Carver. Come on, Carver! Carver gets it! He knows life is a battle that never ends!
“It’s a client-facing thing,” Carver said to no one in particular. “You’re more trustworthy to them if they know you can control your urges.”
“Right, yeah, must control those urges,” Scott said, despite the fact that nobody was fucking talking to him, were they?
“But don’t they also expect you to go out and party with them, though?” Doug said. “That’s what my buddy Pete always has to do. Lots of dinners and drinks.”
“Who’s Pete, what does he do?”
“Financial advisor at Morgan Stanley.”
“So he’s sell side. Private equity is buy side. It’s a different relationship.”
Doug shrugged. “Either way you’ve got clients trusting you with their money. Investors. I don’t see a huge difference.”
“The difference is I’m an MD and I’m not competing with a bunch of other guys on my floor.”
“No, just competing with the other MDs,” Lillian said, laughing.
Carver ignored her. “Lillian and I oversee transactions, we plan and manage acquisitions.”
“The question from our investors is more, are we outperforming the market or not?” Lillian said. “And we do outperform. But we also do get drinks with them, Carver.”
“We aren’t their dancing monkey intermediaries, was more my point.”
