Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“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, manage trillions of dollars.”

“Why do they want me to talk to them?”

“On paper, they want you to talk because you are a thought leader and will help guide their decisions, and any amount of insight they gain from you could be extremely valuable.”

The phrase “thought leader” made my eyes roll so far back into my head I could see my brain, but that didn’t mean that there was anything in the world I wanted more than to be a thought leader.

“What do you mean, ‘on paper’?” I replied skeptically.

“Well, it’s also a show of power. Their event happened to be on the anniversary of the Carls showing up, and I think some of the conference organizers felt it would be a big get to have you here. If you weren’t here, it would be like them admitting that this isn’t the most important place in the world right now, which gave me some negotiating leverage.”

The yacht we ended up on was, I guess, tasteful as far as yachts go. It definitely wasn’t the biggest boat in the marina, though it did have a spiral staircase enclosed in mirrors, so maybe “tasteful” is the wrong word. Weirdly, and even though I was dramatically underdressed, I was more or less comfortable as Robin and I were shuffled around to speak with various VPs and managing partners. I made jokes about jet lag, talked about how beautiful Cannes was, and everyone was astounded when they heard I’d never visited in the summer, as if all people regularly come to the South of France.

And then I met Gwen Stefani. She had also been invited to the event for a performance, and my dumb brain did the dumb brain thing and said, Oh my god, you have to find April, she will be so stoked to meet Gwen Stefani. But, of course, April wasn’t there. I was only on that boat because I had stormed out of a room right when my best friend needed me the most and then she had gone and burned to death in a warehouse and that’s why I was hanging out with Gwen Stefani.

I muttered some nonsense to Mrs. Stefani with tears starting to sting my eyes and ran out of the room onto the deck.

I looked out at the Mediterranean and all the yachts and the powerful people and tried to pull myself together.

“You OK, man?” It was Robin. He came up and put his hand flat on my back.

I turned around and grabbed him and held on.

“I’m sorry I don’t treat you like a person.” I was actually crying. Crying and holding another man. I know it’s not supposed to be weird, but there was still a hurdle there.

He moved his hand up and down my back and said, “I know,” and I could hear he was crying too.

“She should have been here,” I said. “I don’t deserve any of this. I’m only here because she’s not.”

He pulled back from me to look at my eyes. His eyes were rimmed in red. “You’re only here because I …” And then his face crunched together and his throat slammed shut.

“No, Robin.” Someone came out onto the deck. I locked eyes with them and they turned around like they hadn’t seen a thing. Rich people, I have noticed, are good at looking the other way. I continued, “You can’t still be blaming yourself.”

At that he just cried softly into my shoulder. It was the first time we’d actually talked about April. We’d both been sad, and I’d assumed I knew all about his sad because I knew about mine. Except, of course, he was dealing with even more guilt. I wasn’t the only one who had let April down that day. Finally he said, “Of course I blame myself, it’s literally my fault. I should have told her about Putnam … any day before that day.” I could feel him shaking, so I led him over to a plush outdoor lounge chair, which he sank onto. Helping him helped me feel stronger.

I sat beside him and put my arm around him. He leaned into me. I talked in a low voice. “No one is responsible for what happened to April except the guys who lit that fire. Friends hurt their friends’ feelings sometimes. April hurt my feelings a thousand times. She knew I loved her. Sometimes she was a bad friend. You screwed up, but that is not why she’s dead.”

Robin leaned out from under my arm and looked up at me, and I was suddenly worried that he was going to try and kiss me. I pulled back a little bit. He noticed and laughed.

“You dork! You thought I was going to kiss you!” he said.

“What?” I said, convincing no one.

He laughed a little more, sniffing up his snot. “Jesus, guys are screwed up, aren’t we. There’s no space between being emotional and making out. How have any of us survived? We’re so bad at this.”

“Agreed,” I said, still feeling awkward.

He stood up. “Let’s leave this boat.”

Over the next few hours, we wandered around Cannes together. We didn’t try to network or make connections; we just went to fancy shops and gawked at all the rich people who were somehow way richer than me. We talked about relationships and life and the internet, and I didn’t think about IGRI a single time. Before I knew it, it was time to check in to give my talk. Just as I was going onstage, Robin grabbed my shoulders and said, “You deserve to be here,” and at least in that moment, I believed him. Here’s the juiciest part of what I said that night: