“We just saw a need, I guess you could say,” Jonathan says. “Just … this space for a company that could collect and interpret data the way that we do. Sure, there were a few big data companies then, but they still seemed to be stuck in the past, you know? Using metrics like page views and click-throughs. Prehistoric shit, really. No one was thinking as far out of the box as we were.” He takes a sip of wine and smiles. “Anyway. The rest is history that you already know.”
Alice considers what this means: how, in eight years since he started the company, Jonathan has turned Think Big Data from a two-man shop into one of the tech industry’s leading big data firms. (Vishnu sold his shares in the company a few years ago for a reported thirty million after some shrouded dispute with Jonathan over a contract that he, Jonathan, had accepted from the NSA. Moral disagreements were the words that Alice had heard thrown around. She doesn’t know many more details of the argument—Jonathan doesn’t like to talk about it—but his friendship with Vishnu seems to have emerged from it unscathed. They still send each other holiday cards and meet, occasionally, for dinner.) The company’s client pool ranges across fields (hospitality, retail, governmental) and across continents. (Diplomatic issues are currently preventing them from doing the sort of work in Russia that Jonathan had once envisioned. He’s working on it.) She knows that Ad Age and Forbes have both run profiles of him, and she has heard how he’s often invited to speak on panels whose names too often incorporate some iteration of the phrase What’s Next? He’s told her how he doesn’t own a single item of clothing—not even a pair of shorts—that hasn’t been custom tailored. How he doesn’t have to vacation in spots like the south of France or Santorini or Fiji anymore because he can afford the places that no one’s heard of yet.
Typically, confronting unchecked privilege sends her into a rage, a downward spiral that begins with frustration over the moral wrongness of global inequality and ends with (and she knows this is bad) a sort of solipsistic meditation on all the nice things she can’t afford, but others (read: her sister) can. Or, it’s not that she can’t afford them—she’s making more money than she ever has before, so to blame her current monetary chaos on sheer lack of funds is, frankly, letting herself off easy. The real problem is that, lately, the only way she’s been able to quell this financial anxiety is through acts of flagrant consumption, these binge sessions of buying expensive dresses and handbags and (in one terrible case) a new Prius—things that she doesn’t need, or even really like, but that nonetheless temporarily fill some shapeless void; that remind her that she has the same right to entitlement as everyone else, even if it’s put her twenty thousand dollars in debt. Curiously, though, when Jonathan talks to her about his life she doesn’t resent his wealth. She suspects, sheepishly, that there are two root causes for this: (1) more often than not, he’s spending his money on her; and (2) she’s in love with him.
He smiles at her. His teeth are stained red.
You can’t call him arrogant, Alice thinks. Or, you can, but to do so wouldn’t be fair. Arrogant is a tag reserved for people who are profoundly certain and aware of how far their accomplishments set them apart from others. Jonathan, meanwhile, still has a sense of being in awe of himself, as if he’s just as surprised as the next person by what he’s actually pulled off. Watching him talk, watching his hands move, she’s reminded of Paul as a kid, before he became jaded and self-conscious, when he liked to construct elaborate forts out of sheets and pillows and unbent hangers. He’d wake her up early on Saturday mornings and pull her into the living room and point at the thing he’d built, the whole time scratching his head and laughing, bewildered by his own genius.
“Should I keep going?” Jonathan asks.
“I’m not stopping you, am I?”
He grins.
They started sleeping together last September: two years after her dad died, and six years to the day after the disaster in Mexico City. At that point, Alice was still considered a newish hire; she’d joined Think Big five months earlier, after having spent almost five years doing sales for a hospitality start-up that sold consumer insight to hotels. The jobs were similar enough (in both cases she convinced people to pay absurd amounts of money for access to information that she herself didn’t understand) and toward both of them she felt the same lukewarm ambivalence—which, she knows, is what makes her so good at what she does. Doing what you love for a living: what a terrible mistake. That was one of the many hard-earned lessons she gleaned from everything that happened in Mexico. The second you slap a paycheck onto a passion, something changes. The stakes become too high. No, Alice thought, better to get yourself involved in something comically dull, something in which you feel zero personal investment. That way, you have no qualms about taking risks, because if you end up losing everything, it was never very much at all, anyway.
She stabs at a piece of crab floundering in the green porridge. It’s too soggy, though, and slithers away from her fork.
She didn’t make the decision to sleep with him the first day on the job, though it couldn’t have come long after. Still, she likes to remind herself that he was the one who made the first move. That isn’t to say she didn’t go out of her way to lay the groundwork. But still, he was the one who reached across that line, who took things from hypothetical and phantasmic to real and messy, which is, as far as Alice is concerned, the point that actually matters. It happened on a Tuesday—or, at least that’s how she remembers it. They’d been flirting for the better part of the morning on Ding Dong, the company’s intra-office instant messaging platform (she pinged him first, she admits), with Jonathan telling her the sort of lewd and sexualized things he hadn’t had the guts to say in person. She played along, laughing and occasionally rolling her eyes, right up until the point where he told her that he wanted to fill her up with his Big Data. Then, with smug satisfaction, she said—in as matter-of-fact a way as possible—that she needed to go to the supply closet.
She knew, obviously, that he would follow her, but there was some part of her that was still surprised when she heard him sneak through the door behind her. She turned around and saw him standing there, grinning like an eight-year-old, his body framed by shelves filled with pens and staplers and red Post-its shaped like cartoon lightbulbs.
“I just came to get some paper,” she said. “The printer in the Relaxation Station ran out and the interns forgot to fill it.”
“That’s why I’m here, too.” He kept grinning. “My printer ran out of paper.”
“Don’t you have a secretary who’ll take care of that for you?”
“We call them special assistants here, Alice.” He took a step forward. “Secretary carries sexist and misogynistic undertones.”
“How … progressive of you.”
“And besides,” he said, “I can do things myself.”