“Speaking of good-looking,” said Luisa, “what’s the story on Peter’s colleague, Abigail?”
Abigail lived here in San Francisco, where she ran business development for the West Coast office of Peter’s company. She’d started working for him the previous fall, and it had been a bit unnerving at first to realize he was spending most of his waking hours with someone who was both brilliant and looked like a better version of Christie Turlington, but fortunately her tastes ran to women rather than men. “I think she’s single,” I told Luisa. “Peter says she’s sort of guarded about her personal life. Not shy so much as cautious.”
“I wonder why that is,” said Luisa. “You’d think somebody that beautiful wouldn’t have anything to worry about.”
I brightened. Hilary might not want my help on the romantic front, but maybe Luisa would. “You know, Peter and I could set you—”
“Thank you, but I can handle my own personal life,” Luisa said.
“Because we’d be happy to—”
She interrupted me again. “Rachel, that’s very thoughtful but not necessary.”
“Since when are you so eager to get involved in other people’s love lives, Rach?” asked Hilary. “First offering couples therapy to Ben and me and then trying to hook Luisa up with Abigail?”
“I need something to do. My own love life is so normal. Isn’t it better to take an interest in other people’s relationships than look for reasons to mess up my own?”
“Have you considered simply enjoying the normality of your own life while simultaneously staying out of the lives of others?” asked Luisa.
“I know that’s what I’m supposed to do, but I have all of this free emotional energy that I used to expend on maintaining my neuroses, and now I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Rach, don’t take this the wrong way, but you haven’t exactly perfected normal yet.”
Hilary was hardly in a position to be evaluating who was and who wasn’t normal. “It took a while, but I’m totally normal at relationships now,” I told her, trying not to sound defensive.
“Of course you are,” said Luisa, but her own voice held a note of skepticism.
“While we’re talking about normal, I still wouldn’t describe him as such, but our old friend Iggie looks a lot better than when he lived across the hall from us sophomore year,” said Hilary. “He’s almost attractive, in a revenge-of-the-nerds type of way.”
“Huge piles of money will do that for a guy,” I said, glad of the change in topic from my relative normality to somebody else’s.
“Will he really be worth that much, Rachel?” asked Luisa.
“That’s how things are shaping up.” Winslow, Brown, the investment bank where I worked, was competing with several other firms to handle the initial public offering—IPO—of Igobe, an Internet company founded by our former classmate, Igor “Iggie” Behrenz. Iggie had been the quintessential computer geek in college, except instead of being shy and dorky he’d been arrogant and dorky, so confident in his future success that he was frequently unbearable. He hadn’t changed much since then, but I was still repairing the damage from a minor misunderstanding in which I’d ended up as the lead suspect in my boss’s murder. Winning his IPO business offered a chance to shore up my position at the office, however unbearable Iggie might be. Our pitch was conveniently scheduled for Tuesday morning at Igobe’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, and I’d invited him to the party tonight hoping it would improve our odds. “Iggie’s stake will be close to a billion dollars when his company goes public,” I told my friends.
Hilary whistled. Her admirer below turned to look, wondering if she was belatedly returning his show of appreciation, but her thoughts were somewhere else entirely. “A billion? As in a one with nine zeros after it?”
“That’s obscene,” said Luisa. Her family practically owned a small South American country, but even their fortune seemed modest in comparison.
I worked in an industry where the net worth of the top performers regularly topped the hundred-million mark, but I had to agree: a billion did seem excessive. “Everyone’s looking for the next MySpace or YouTube, and a lot of people think Iggie’s got it,” I said. “This IPO should be the hottest deal of the year.”
“You know the article I’m working on about the newest generation of Internet start-ups?” Hilary asked us. We nodded as if we did, but while I had a vague recollection of her mentioning a San Francisco-based assignment that dovetailed nicely with the party, I tended to lose track of what she was working on at any given moment. A freelance journalist, she jumped from topic to topic much as she jumped from man to man. “I’ve decided to make Iggie’s company the focus. It shouldn’t be hard to score an exclusive interview with Iggie, and I’ve been digging up some interesting material on Igobe.”
“What does the company do?” asked Luisa.
“It develops technology that masks people’s identities online,” I explained. “Once you download its software to your computer, your privacy is protected when you’re surfing the Web.”
“Which means you can visit all the porn sites you want and nobody will ever know,” translated Hilary.
“Isn’t that a relief,” said Luisa dryly.
“A lot of people seem to think so,” I said. “And they’re going to make Iggie a very rich man.”
“I only remember him as the geek who was handy to have around whenever that evil bomb icon popped up on my Mac,” said Luisa.
“Well, he’s still a geek, but he’s a billion times handier now,” said Hilary, her smile mischievous. “And he might just come in handy tonight.”
“Why do I have a feeling I don’t want to know what you’re plotting?” I asked.
“Plotting?” she asked with mock innocence. “Moi? ”
“You’re incorrigible,” said Luisa, something she’d said to Hilary on more occasions than any of us could remember.
“And that’s why you love me,” she replied easily.
“Oh, is that why?” asked Luisa, but she was laughing.
“I knew there had to be a reason,” I said, but I was laughing, too.
A gust of frosty air rose up from the Bay just then, and we all shivered in our lightweight summer dresses. “We should get back to the party,” I said. “It’s freezing out here, and Peter’s probably wondering where I am.”
“And Ben’s probably wondering where you are, Hilary,” said Luisa pointedly.
“Probably,” said Hilary, but the mischievous smile was still there. “More importantly, I promised Iggie a dance.”
2
T he Forrests’ house was a three-story Victorian, painted pale yellow with glossy white gingerbread trim. It looked a lot like the house in Party of Five, which was rumored to be nearby—not that Peter or his parents had any idea what I was talking about when I asked. Still, I’d found myself half-expecting to run into Bailey or Charlie ever since we’d arrived the previous day, and Hilary and I debated the relative merits of the Salinger men on the walk back to the party. “Don’t forget Griffin,” she said. “Not a Salinger, but still hot.”
“As if I could forget Griffin,” I said.
“Who could forget Griffin?” said Luisa, but she was teasing us—she’d never seen even a single Party of Five episode. Except for college and law school, she’d lived most of her life on another continent, privy only to a sadly limited selection of high-quality American television. This didn’t bother