That spring there was an epidemic of gaffes among the associates, beginning with Freya Amari-Bonn, who uttered the phrase “nits and grits” in her trial presentation. We were faint with happiness at the time, for this was a very beautiful flub, and we were twenty-five years old. “Nits and grits,” we said to each other, voices weak, tears in our eyes, our laughter flaring up and down Manhattan’s thawing avenues as we jostled and wheezed our way to lunch. “Nits and grits,” we snorted into conversational lulls all afternoon, recalling her verbal toot, relieved that someone as poised as Freya had finally shown her ass. Those summers in Morocco, where her mother, an heiress, was born and raised; those formative years in London, Zürich, and Brussels, funded by Credit Suisse; the triumphs at Yale, including the full trifecta of summer internships; her purchase of a three-bedroom apartment in Murray Hill at the age of twenty-four; her abrupt promotion, the following spring, to lead consultant for Émigré—all of this cresting deliciously in a moment of pure goofiness in the presence of our senior brass at ten o’clock on a Wednesday. Marooned between the idiomatic Scylla of “nuts and bolts” and the Charybdis of “the nitty gritty,” she’d said, “I’ll spare you the nits and grits,” and flooded our veins with toxic glee.
“A blooper,” she said, shrugging it off, sipping her whiskey sour with regal indifference. It was six o’clock, and we had claimed our regular booth at Garfunkel’s, an ancient pub on Fifty-Third with jaundiced memorabilia from Radio City Music Hall and gashes in the leather.
“Parapraxis,” Gavin said. “Also known as the Freudian slip.”
“I don’t think it was Freudian,” Nish said. “Just a regular slip.”
“An error of speech,” Freya agreed. “A minor glitch. An accident.”
Gavin smugly hoisted his beer. “Freud would say there’s no such thing.”
“Malapropism might be the more accurate term,” said Olive, who was leaving us for graduate school in the fall. “Not that it matters.”
Gavin took another sip. “Mala-who?”
“Malapropism,” Olive repeated. “The simple misuse of a word.”
“Jesus healed the leopards,” I said. I don’t think anyone heard me.
“You’re all just jealous,” Freya said, “because Hellman sang my praises.”
Hellman—Stewart Hellman—was the partner who supervised our class of junior associates. Retired Marine, fastidious dude. He clipped his nails and nose hairs in the men’s room after lunch. He was miserly with encouragement, so the fact that he had celebrated Freya was significant. She was now a senior associate, as we all desperately hoped to be. At the Providence Group, it was up or out. A quarter of us would be tossed into the streets when the program ended.
“You’re right,” Gavin said. “I’m red with envy.”
“Green,” I said, to no response.
“Tell you what,” Freya said. “Let’s get another round—on me. The rule should be that for every verbal slip, you have to pony up.”
“Yooo,” said Nish.
“Deal,” said Gavin.
Jen and Spencer exchanged a glance. The couple liked to refer to themselves as “third culture kids,” having grown up in Asia and the Middle East respectively, though of course they went to American schools and talked and dressed like everyone else. “Sounds like hazing,” Spencer said. “We didn’t grow up with that kind of thing.”
Olive frowned. “It does seem cruel.”
“It’s a show of camaraderie,” said Hakeem. “It softens the pressure.” Hakeem was my only friend at the firm. His parents were from Nigeria, but he had been born in Houston and was named after the Rockets’ towering center Hakeem Olajuwon. He confessed to me during a urinal chat that this was in fact an albatross, for he was only five foot nine. Attempting to reciprocate, I explained that I had grown up in a suburb of Milwaukee and that both my parents were pharmacists.
I scratched my neck. “A drink per slip?”
“Better save up,” Hakeem laughed. We all knew I was gaffe-prone. The previous week, in a meeting, I’d said “Mill and Belinda Gates” during my only contribution. I was not a powerful speaker. Indeed, I lacked all charisma. “You sound like a wounded hostage,” Hellman said in my performance review. “Use your fucking vocal cords. Gesture. Use your body.” Harsh but fair, I thought, back then. At the Providence Group, we valued candid speech, or parrhesia, afundamental component of Athenian democracy. Besides, I needed some tough love. Later that month I would give my own trial presentation on Utôpia, my assigned client, an event-space firm that was purchasing a portion of Hudson Yards. It was owned by one of the families ruling the Emirate of Dubai, and there’d recently been a scandal involving the company’s director, who had kidnapped his niece in London in violation of international law. I was just about to broach this delicate topic with my colleagues when I noticed they had turned away to greet a new arrival. It was Freya’s boyfriend, M.C. He scootched gracefully into the booth and was debriefed on the gaffe situation.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” he said, gamely. “It’s false consciousness. Your gaffes are like the wrinkles in your ideological fabric.” M.C. was an adjunct professor of politics at the New School. I don’t recall his actual name. We’d dubbed him M.C. because in every conversation he said “material conditions.” I think he was eight years older than us and earned a fourth of our salary. He wore a jean jacket with a Workers’ Defense League pin at the breast.
“You’re dating an heiress,” Hakeem said. “Your ideological fabric is silk.”
“He might have a point, though,” Nish said. “Sometimes, in meetings, I feel this static building in my head, like I’m caught between frequencies.”
“Too much caffeine,” Freya said.
“Cognitive dissonance,” Olive said.
“We’re drones,” I said. “We’re marionettes.”
Gavin frowned. “What did you say?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Forget it.”
I could already see that I was doomed. Until then, I had clung fast to a leaky outer lifeboat of the USS Meritocracy. I was really good at email. Ask anyone—I was one of the best. My emails were little works of art. Clear, concise, stylish, even humorous when they needed to be. I drafted weekly bulletins on Hellman’s grooming practices—this was a man who carried emergency Q-tips in a cigarette case—which everyone seemed to appreciate. But now the decisive wave had arrived to prove whether I would sink or swim.
“You good? You look kind of pale,” Hakeem said.
“I’m fine,” I replied. “I’m naturally pale.”
“I think we should have a mercy rule for those of us with chubbier tongues,” said Gavin, clearly referring to me. “Otherwise, we’ll just run up the score.”
“Be nice,” Olive said. “Nobody’s perfect.” Her kindness only made it worse.
“Our minds betray us,” Nish said. “It is kind of spooky.”
“Maybe that’s what we want,” said Freya, pensive now in the glow of success. “Maybe we want to betray ourselves.”
On Saturday I met Dahlia, my girlfriend, for a late lunch on 135th Street. I was living in Prospect Heights, and she was in West Harlem, so I rode the subway and walked north on Broadway for a few blocks to Café Lima, her favorite spot. She lived two floors above the place, so her journey was all of fifteen steps. The distribution of effort here was typical, regrettably. I knew she was only dating me for meals and tickets to classic plays—her only recreation—and because I would always travel to her. Dahlia was thirty-two, an actor and, to a much greater extent, acting instructor. I had signed up for a class she taught called Acting in the Real World, with the goal of improving my confidence and presentation chops. It was method-based, a synthesis of Adler, Strasberg, and Stanislavski, but most of the students were bankers, lawyers, realtors, or consultants with abysmal public speaking skills. It was ninety percent men, I should add, the result perhaps of Dahlia’s own advertising strategy: her personal website featured her in a loose, thinning tank top that exposed her areolas. On the first night I attended her class, she directed me to perform Orestes’s monologue to the group for a baseline assessment of my acting capabilities. “Holy shit you’re tame,” she said. “Like a little puppy.” After class, she invited me to take her out for a midnight snack and offered “private tutoring.” I thought she might be speaking euphemistically but no such luck: It turns out she’d committed to a period of abstinence on the grounds that sexual energy yielded more dynamic performances. She did, however, masturbate for ten minutes a day, “just to keep the engine purring,” she said. The play she was in, Fire Escape—a moody, nostalgic period piece set in the nineties, “before,” as she said, “the city became a Chipotle”—was scheduled to close in three weeks to make room for a musical she described as “pornographically twee.” I didn’t mind waiting. What I craved more than sex or love was the affirmation of someone who could represent Manhattan, who was plugged into the current of the city’s manic energy. Someone in whom I might invest my pittance of personality.
I arrived to find her seated by the window in her sweatpants. “I’m starving,” she said. When the waitress appeared, she ordered two Heinekens and six giant pupusas. I ordered a black coffee and a quinoa salad.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “Are you sick?”
“Nervous,” I said.
“Everyone’s nervous.”
I told her about the gaffe tax that my colleagues had agreed to. “I think I’m in big trouble,” I said. “I’m headed for disaster.”
She gulped her beer. “Have you done your études?” Études were studies of physical action, a kind of daily exercise. Mine were a series of alpha-male white-collar gestures: nodding, smirking, shuffling pages, watch-wriggling, grasping hands, clicking a PowerPoint clicker.
I shook my head. “Not every day.”
“Well, there’s your problem,” she said, slicing off an oily, starchy bite of her pupusa. “Do you have your justification?” This was a method technique where you conjured the motivation to behave a certain way in a scene.
“Sure. I want to keep my job.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean ‘why’?”
“Wealth? Power? Status?” she questioned.
“I guess I would say ‘stability.’”
She doused her plate with Tapatío. “Stability? In this universe?”
“Wealth, then. I want to retire.”
“You’ve barely starting working.”
“I know.”
“It doesn’t matter. Here’s what you do.” She took a long gulp of beer, gripping the bottle down near the base. “You need to build a catalog of affective memories.”
“Effective?” I asked.
“Affective,” she said. “Physical sensations tied to emotional events—in this case, happy events. You know, moments that boost your confidence. The time you smooched so-and-so at the Cineplex. Displays of wit. Just write them down in your notebook. I’d say you need about five or six.”
“And then?”
“And then you practice. You perform a simple daily task while holding one of the memories in your mind. A walk to the printer, a meeting. With practice, you learn to summon those emotions—that ambient confidence—to serve you in key moments of stress.”
I picked at the nubby grains of my salad. “How many sense memories do you have in your personal repertoire?”
“Hundreds,” she said. “Binders full. I turn them into symbols so I can annotate my scripts with them.”
I was fascinated by this. “Does it work?”
“It does until it doesn’t. They’re like teabags, weaker with every use.”
I didn’t reuse tea bags—I drank coffee pressed from exotic beans—but I understood the analogy. I asked her about Saskia Pitts, her character in Fire Escape. The entire production took place on a winding metal staircase featuring three levels, with Saskia perched on top, threatening suicide. I’d seen the play twice by then, but I still didn’t understand it. An ex-boyfriend, a cop, a therapist, and a sleazy former professor take turns climbing the creaky steps of the floodlit fire escape hoping to reason with poor Saskia, who jumps and kills herself in the end, but not before delivering an eighteen-minute monologue excoriating the men in her life. Dahlia changed a line or two of this monologue every evening to preserve the illusion of rawness. She swore these lines were improvised.
“How do you know what to change?” I asked.
“Inspiration pollinates the prepared mind,” she said. “I perceive my own emotions through the lens of her zadacha.”
“Her zadacha?”
“Her problem, I guess you could say, if you want to be boring about it.”
One thing Dahlia was not was boring. In addition to being an organ donor, she’d pledged her skull to a local community theater group in the South Bronx. Her Twitter bio said actor | instructor | magician’s girl who does not flinch. A quote from Sylvia Plath, she explained.
“Do you have to become the character?”
“No.” She paused. “Not exactly. We call it perezhivanie, where an actor’s living consciousness and the character’s fictional consciousness meet.”
“So it’s not, like, a subconscious thing?”
“I call it the superconscious.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is huge,” she said. She swallowed a mouthful of beef and paused for another swig of beer. By now she had finished the first Heineken and was pouring the second into a glass with reckless disregard for foam. “You know, Kandinsky used to create special colors for paintings,” she said. “Colors he’d never used before. Colors that never existed. And he’d throw these colors away once the painting had been completed to avoid repeating himself.”
“I see.”
“That’s what I like to do,” she said.
“A fresh teabag every night.”
“A what?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Please go on.”
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “It’s called ‘the understudy technique,’ although I hesitate to bring this up. It’s a little controversial.” She took a foamy sip of beer. The technique, she explained, was heretical to a Stanislavski purist—it was first used by a disaffected protégé of Adler—but she found it highly effective. How it works is you cultivate ashadow self—the understudy—who follows you from role to role and lurks in the wings of your mind and career, awaiting the chance to replace you. “It keeps me motivated,” she said, chewing the last pupusa, “though it does come at a psychic cost.”
“So I have to pretend that someone else will be giving my presentation?”
“No, you have to pretend that someone else could give your presentation. You invent your own rival, so to speak, to improve your own game.”
Immediately I understood the power of this technique. It was a means of personifying my own raging anxiety, of forcing myself to imagine, then achieve, my full potential. Who among us hasn’t considered our genes blossoming differently, our zygote swirling with greater flair? If fate had allowed, I might have become a backslapping bon vivant, a kisser of cheeks, a taker of wide stances at the urinal. I might have been a Marine, like Hellman, a man of courage and grit, a man who could rescue an Emirati princess from a luxury yacht in international waters. I’d been having recurring dreams about this, about rescuing the princess. She was missing, according to CNN and the spokesman for Human Rights Watch.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Dahlia said. She burped softly and tossed her fouled napkin onto her greasy plate. “I’ll introduce you to my cat.”
Again, I thought this might be code. My pulse thumped as we climbed her bare staircase to her studio, where she kept a futon, a card table, a bed that appeared dredged up from a shipwreck, and a smudgy, frameless, full-length mirror that was bolted to the wall. As it turns out, though, she did have a cat, a scrawny tuxedo with yellow eyes. “His name is Poe,” she said, when he emerged from beneath the futon. “He’s in poor digestive health right now.”
She put on the Velvet Underground and hopped in the shower—a promising sign. I sat on the futon beneath a poster of Chekhov reading The Seagull to the cast of the Moscow Theater and I tried to imagine the kind of man Dahlia might take to bed. A Russian, perhaps. A man with delicate hands but solid forearms. Her window was cracked, and a breeze came through—the final wintry breeze of March. It ruffled the saplings along her street, which shone as red as a cardinal’s wing. Above, a handful of noble clouds. I pictured the water streaming down her glorious neck, her fine calves, the delicate webbing between her toes.
“I’ll let you go down on me for ten minutes,” she said, when she emerged from the bathroom wearing nothing but flip-flops and a T-shirt. “It’ll keep my blood pumping, and it might be good practice for you.” She propped a pillow against her rotting headboard and lay back. “Pretend you’re someone else,” she said.
I climbed gently onto the bed and did as I was instructed.
“Not like that,” she said. “Just lap. Pretend you’re a doe at a pond.”
“Okay.”
After a few minutes, I began to unbutton my shirt, but she stopped me, rose, and pulled on her jeans. “Sorry, I have rehearsal,” she said. “I left detailed instructions on the counter for how to feed Poe. The syringe is in the lettuce drawer. If you notice any liquid stool, be sure to collect a sample.”
Olive was the next to biff. In her trial presentation for an entertainment company, she advised against the cultivation of “influencer partnerships” as a long-term strategy for even the most youthful brands. The time horizon was too short, the benefits too volatile. Besides, she said, it was totally gauche. Only Olive didn’t pronounce the word gauche to rhyme with brioche, to our infinite delight. She pronounced it gouch, to rhyme with ouch.
“Fuck you guys,” she said at the bar, clinking our glasses. “Bottoms up.”
“We’re cursed,” Nish said. “We jinxed ourselves.”
“I think it’s the observer effect,” Olive said. “Now we’re expecting gaffes.”
The following week, Hakeem said “EST” instead of “ESG” when referencing the trinity of environmental, social, and governmental metrics now used by enlightened investors. For his sins, he bought us all champagne, including our two interns, whom he called Tote Bag and Descartes. Hakeem was having fun that night. I could hear him quizzing Tote Bag on the names of obscure European authors he’d invented. Lazlo Smeerta. Miranda Pukki.
“I’ve heard of them,” the intern said.
Spencer’s gaffe was more contested. In reference to an earnings goal his client was close to achieving, he employed the term inshallah, and we all agreed that this was a violation of human decency.
“But I grew up in Bahrain,” he said.
“Overruled,” Hakeem said, scanning the menu for specialty shots.
“‘Nits and grits’ still takes the prize,” said Gavin, and we all agreed—that is, until Gavin himself ate shit beyond our expectations. In the final snoozy moments of his otherwise flawless overview of regulatory risk in the broadband service industry, he explained that firms would need to account for the “nut neutrality” movement. There was instant pandemonium.
“To you and your chubby tongue,” Freya said, toasting with her complimentary bourbon. It was a house pour. Gavin was famously cheap.
“Dude, karma is real,” Nish said. He had spent the entire afternoon creating a Wikipedia page for the term nut neutrality, defining it as “a man’s indifference to where he plants his seed.”
“Did anyone read the news?” I asked. The director of Utôpia had given a brief interview with the BBC, advising the anchor to mind her own business. There was still no word from the kidnapped niece.
“Gavin will be on the news soon enough,” Nish said. “Offering dating advice.”
“I said net, you deaf bastards,” Gavin raged. “I said net!”
I laughed along, but I was secretly terrified that my own gaffe—or gaffes—would sink my young career. Gavin was now offering bets on this very outcome, in a bid to shift attention away from his own brush with mortality. I sensed my colleagues pulling away. Even Hakeem seemed distant now that he was a senior associate, having shed the gooey membrane of apprenticeship and embraced his role as the airbrushed professional.
Later that night, feeling desperate, I decided to call Dahlia and ask for advice on the finer points of the understudy technique. When she answered, she was out of breath and a little exasperated.
“It’s like creating a legend,” she explained, channeling patience. “It’s a permutation of yourself. An ur-character, a daimon of sorts. You’re close to them, but you never merge, like two blades of a helicopter, spinning so fast they look like one.”
Through the phone, I heard a loud clang, followed by laughter and whispering.
“Is someone there?”
“We’re rehearsing.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think? I’m here with the cast.”
“The entire cast?” I pictured the men: the ex-boyfriend, the cop, the therapist, the sleazy former professor. I recalled that two were gay, but I couldn’t remember which ones.
“Members of the cast,” she said, giggling inexplicably. “Two important members.”
In college I’d spent the spring of my junior year abroad in Budapest, where I studied the work of Karl Polanyi, the left-leaning economist who argued that markets were always deeply embedded within social life and therefore not as self-regulating as classical economics assumed. I was happy that year, and confident. I went on a date with a girl from London—a peer, a student from LSE. We rented bikes and rode them across a tear-shaped island in the middle of the Danube, then picnicked along the riverbank and talked about our research. It was one of the happiest days of my life, but I saw this only in retrospect. What if that shy student abroad had married the blond Londoner, with her Keynesian analysis and long, pale cycling legs, and moved to a flat in King’s Cross, and worked for Barclays or Chatham House, and become a true man of the world, instead of an angsty Brooklynite who was actually a Wisconsinite? Those were my thoughts at three in the morning, having woken up in a cold sweat. By dawn, however, I understood that this exalted version of myself could be the basis for a powerful understudy, so I set to work fleshing out his résumé and backstory. I decided he was Hungarian, which was not too far beyond the pale, for I had a loose ancestral claim. Tall, certainly. Handsome, bright. A whiz in economics but also interior design, which enhanced his capabilities as a consultant to Utôpia, given their focus on standardizing event space choreography. To compete with someone as sharp as this, I would need to consider investing in some personal augmentation, as I did that very afternoon. I bought a vial of new cologne and a bright maroon sweater vest.
“What the fuck are you wearing?” Hellman said to me the following day. He had just come out of a meeting in the boardroom with the college recruits. I could see them through the glass, gleaming like scrubbed vegetables. I had spent part of the morning wondering which of them would replace me.
“It’s a sweater vest,” I said. “It’s new.”
“You’re an earth-tones guy. Stay in your lane.” He shut the door, approached me, and sniffed. “Christ, is that your cologne?”
“It’s Dior.”
“Lose the cologne, take off the sweater.”
“Why?”
“You look like raspberry jam. The college recruits are laughing at you.”
“They are?”
“They’re snobs,” he said. “They’re dicks. Their families are even richer than yours.”
“My family’s actually not that rich.”
“Oh, boohoo,” he said.
That afternoon, it was Nish’s turn. In his presentation on targeted ads in the age of digital privacy, he referred to our Silicon Valley clients as “spergy engineers” and was reprimanded immediately. Later that night, signing the bill for a tray of martinis, he challenged us. “What would you call them? Geniuses? They work on fucking ‘cookies.’”
Hakeem and Freya were the only ones immediately promoted. Olive had already bowed out, so she was a noncontender. The rest of us, Hellman brusquely explained, would learn our fates at the end of the trial period, after everyone had given their presentations.
“If you bomb completely, I’d love it,” Hellman said, addressing the group but talking to me. “Makes my job much easier.”
The night of Dahlia’s final performance in Fire Escape, I joined her at the after-party, a lively affair at a rooftop bar in Morningside Heights. I was introduced to the full cast: the ex-boyfriend, the cop, the therapist, and the sleazy former professor. As a gesture, I bought them a round of drinks, but then I forgot to close the tab, and the cast took full advantage. Also, I couldn’t help but notice the therapist’s and the cop’s casual handsiness around Dahlia. The three of them retreated to the bathroom several times. “What can I say?” she gusted into my ear after the second time. “I like a little cocaine in my oyster.”
With Dahlia preoccupied, I found myself leaning against the wall with a blond novelist, an acquaintance of the playwright. I told her that I was the grandson of the famous Karl Polanyi and that I was in New York on a mission to the United Nations. To my surprise, the gambit worked. The character gave me confidence.
“Parties are where I come to collect material,” the novelist said. “They’re social laboratories.”
“How do you make money?” I asked, more bluntly than I might have.
“I write for a meditation app.”
“Tragic,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “People are always telling me how interesting it is. It’s not.”
“What’s your novel about?” I asked.
“Winterplan, the literary commune that never was,” she said. “It tells the story of Lou Salomé, the Russian author who, in her twenties, befriended Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud.”
“Didn’t they all propose to her?”
“Nietzsche certainly did—twice. But all she ever wanted was an academic community. Later she wrote a book on him, where she basically psychoanalyzed his tendency to exaggerate. ‘God is dead.’ ‘The last man.’”
“Who’s the ‘last man’ again?”