Nathan Hill - The Nix

Of course. She owns the whole floor.

And walking toward you right now is someone who is definitely not Bethany. A man, about your age — late twenties, maybe early thirties. Pressed white shirt. Skinny black tie. Perfectly rigid posture and down-his-nose gaze. He’s wearing an expensive-looking watch. You consider each other a moment, and you’re about to say you have the wrong apartment when he says, “You must be the writer.” And there’s something about the way he inflects the word writer that carries an edge, like he doesn’t believe writer is a real profession and so he says it like someone might say, “You must be the psychic.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” you say. “I’m sorry, I’m looking for—”

And at that moment, behind him, just past his shoulder, she appears.

“Bethany.”

For a moment it’s as if you had forgotten what she looked like, as if all those photos she packed in her letters never existed, as if you had never scoured the internet finding all manner of publicity portraits, concert photos, after-party candids with Bethany standing next to some wealthy donor smiling and hugging — it’s as if all you have is that memory of her practicing the violin in her room when she thought she was alone and you were peeking around the corner and you were a child and you were in love. And how much she resembles that vision here in her apartment, that same self-contained, self-possessed, easy confidence — so formal, even now, as she strides toward you and embraces you with a platonic hug and kisses your cheek in the way she’s kissed the cheeks of a thousand friends, fans, well-wishers, where it’s less a kiss than the suggestion of one in the atmosphere around your ear, and how she says “Samuel, I’d like to introduce you to Peter Atchison, my fiancé,” as if there’s nothing at all odd about that. Her fiancé?

Peter shakes your hand. “Pleasure,” he says.

Then Bethany gives you a tour while your heart plummets and you feel like the stupidest man on earth. You do your best to listen, to act like you’re really interested in hearing about the apartment, which is windowed on all sides so you can see the construction equipment over the World Trade Center site to the west, and Wall Street to the south.

“This is my father’s apartment,” she says, “but he doesn’t come here anymore. Not since he retired.”

She spins on her heel and smiles at you.

“Did you know that Teddy Roosevelt used to work here?”

You pretend not to know this fact.

“He was a banker at the beginning of his career,” she says. “Like Peter.”

“Hah!” Peter says. He slaps you on the back. “Talk about great expectations, eh?”

“Peter worked with my father,” Bethany says.

“Worked for your father,” he says. Bethany waves him off.

“Peter is really very brilliant at finance.”

“Am not.”

“Are too!” she says. “He discovered that a certain number, a formula, or algorithm, or something — anyway, it was this thing people were using and he realized it was wrong. Honey, you explain it.”

“I don’t want to bore our guest.”

“But it’s interesting. ”

“Do you really want to know about this?”

You absolutely do not want to know about this. You nod.

“Well, I won’t go too much into it,” he says, “but it’s about the C-Ratio. You heard of it?”

You are not sure if he meant C or see or sea. You say, “Remind me.”

“Basically it’s a number investors use to predict volatility in the precious metal markets.”

“Peter realized it was wrong,” Bethany says.

“Under certain circumstances. Under very specific circumstances, the C-Ratio stops being a useful predictor. It lags behind the market. It’s like…how do I describe it? It’s like believing the thermometer is the thing that’s making it hot.”

“Isn’t that brilliant?” Bethany says.

“And so while everyone was betting with the C-Ratio, I bet against it. And the rest is history.”

“Isn’t that so brilliant ?”

They’re both looking at you now, waiting.

“Brilliant,” you say.

Bethany smiles at her fiancé. The diamond on her finger might best be described as protuberant. The gold band seems to lift the diamond up like a baseball fan who has just caught a foul ball.

Throughout all this banter you’ve found yourself barely looking at Bethany. You’re focusing instead on Peter, because you don’t want to be caught staring at Bethany, by Peter. Looking at him and ignoring her is your way of telling him you’re not here to steal his woman, is something you realize you’re doing after you’ve been doing it already for several minutes. Plus every time you look at Bethany you’re jolted by surprise, how none of those photos prepared you for the actual person. Like how photographs of famous paintings always lack some essential beauty that’s startling when you encounter the painting in real life.

And Bethany is really, terribly beautiful. The catlike features of her childhood have resolved themselves sharply now. Eyebrows like check marks. Stern jaw and liquid neck. Eyes green and cool. Black dress that manages to be both conservative and open-backed. Necklace and earring and shoe combo that is the very definition of well put together.

“Too early for a drink?” Peter says.

“I’d love one!” you say, maybe too enthusiastically. You’re finding the more attracted you are to this man’s fiancée, the more ingratiating you become toward him. “Thanks!”

He explains that he’s pouring you something special—“It’s not every day that an old pen pal comes to visit!” he says — a whiskey they bought on a recent trip to Scotland, a bottle that won certain awards, that a certain magazine gave its only perfect score in history, that nobody can even buy anywhere but at the distillery itself, where the technique and recipe is a guarded secret passed through like ten generations — all the while Bethany is beaming at him like a proud parent — and he hands you a tumbler with an inch-deep pool of straw-colored liquid and explains something about the way it clings to the side of the glass and something about the patterns it makes as it swirls and how you can tell something about the quality of the scotch that way, and also something about the opacity too, and he has you lift up the glass to watch how the light filters through it and the view you get, unexpectedly, is the wobbly lines of cranes over the World Trade Center hole as seen through the liquid’s curvy distortion.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Peter says.

“Sure is.”

“Drink it. Tell me how it tastes.”

“Sorry?”

“I’d like to hear a writer describe it,” he says. “Because you’re so good with words.”

You try to figure out if he’s being sarcastic, but cannot. You taste the scotch. And what can you say? It tastes like scotch. It has a very scotchlike quality. You search your memory for words that are used to describe scotch. You come up with peaty, a word you don’t really know the definition of. The only word that pops into your head as accurate and defensible is strong .

“It tastes strong,” you say, and Peter laughs.

“Strong?” he says, then laughs again, harder. He looks at Bethany and says, “He called it strong. Hah! I’ll be damned. Strong.”

The rest of the morning goes something like this. Bethany regaling you with factoids, Peter finding reasons to expound lavishly on some exquisite purchased thing: the coffee they buy, for example, the rarest in the world, coffee that has actually been eaten and excreted by a kind of catlike Sumatran mammal that has a gift for selecting only the best coffee beans to eat, plus the digestion process aids the flavor when the beans are roasted, Peter insists. Or his socks, sewn by hand by the same Italian seamstress who makes the pope’s socks. Or the sheets on the bed in the guest room with their four-digit thread counts that make Egyptian cotton feel like sandpaper in comparison.