Piper recognized three.
The first was an actor, Italian, sixty-ish, who had acted in a few classic movies Piper had enjoyed. Piper remembered meeting him at a movie premiere years prior.
The actor nodded once at him across the table, not unfriendly but not friendly, exactly, the way you nodded at someone whose name you could not remember and whose face you remembered fucking. Piper remembered his touch, his smell and his rhythm.
The other man was Preston Atwood, whom Piper had just been fucked by, and only remembered him as a lazy, entitled lay.
Preston shook Piper’s hand and told him, quietly, that he was excited for the night to come.
Another man in a navy blazer whose face Piper had seen on a Forbes cover. A private equity jerk off from the East Coast. A name and face Piper could not remember.
The others he didn’t know, all of them in the same price range of suit, all of them with the same haircut, all of them looking, collectively, like a board of directors that had decided to have dinner without the minutes.He figured that they were other tech and finance moguls in Jayson’s circle.
Piper did the math in his head. He had done it before, though never at a table. Between the nine of them, across all the companies they had founded and the companies they held, they controlled more market capitalization than the gross domestic product of many countries on earth.
***
The first course arrived at the table.
Piper waited for someone to speak to him, but nobody did.
The man to his right, gray-haired, mid-sixties, said something across Piper to the man on his other side about a property in Lake Como. The second man responded without looking at Piper. The conversation continued, and went over him in the way a draft went over a piece of furniture.
Jayson was talking to the actor at the other end of the table.
“He had a strong first half,” Jayson was saying. “Though the division is harder this year than last.”
Piper looked up. Jayson was talking about him like he was not at the table. The actor nodded and said something in return about an old friend in Denver who was a season-ticket holder. Jayson smiled and said yes, the team in Denver was interesting this year.
The conversation moved. Piper was not addressed. He had not expected to be. He was, nevertheless, surprised by how clean the not-addressing was. He knew he was not there forintellectual conversation, but as an object to pass around post dessert.
“So boys, when is our next trip to Destiny’s Grove?” One of the men asked from the other end of the table.
“How about in the spring, it’s beautiful that time of year, and we have a lot to discuss there among the chosen,” Jayson replied with a smirk.
Piper had heard about Destiny’s Grove before but was never invited because he was toldthe help was never invited.
The media had conveniently never covered the private retreat for the uber rich because many of the members owned the media.
The man across from Piper, sometime during the second course, met his eyes for what he thought was a long enough moment that a sentence could be in store. He said, pleasantly, “The fish is very good.”It was a thing to say I guess,Piper thought.The man smiled at him like he was an animal in a petting zoo and returned to his conversation with the man on the other side of him. He was whispering this time. All the men were whispering now, ever since the conversation shifted to Destiny’s Grove, they all whispered.
Piper sat between the whispers. He sat alone among important men, and the only engagement he got was glances at his body in the suit that was perfectly tailored for these men’s enjoyment.
The actor turned toward the head of the table and asked Jayson, casually, whether Piper would be in Sun Valley for the charity event in July. The question came across the table. Piper opened his mouth to answer knowing it was already on his calendar.
“He will,” Jayson said.
The actor nodded and turned back.
Piper closed his mouth.
He looked down at his plate.
He drank his Chardonnay, knowing full well he should not be drinking before the final games of the season. But he knew he would need some kind of liquid impairment to get through the night. He would rather it be Chardonnay than a party drug one of Jayson’s friends used to drop in his drink to get him to forget what was happening.
He looked up and Preston was laughing at something the private equity man had said, and at the head of the table Jayson was signaling for something with two fingers, and a member of the staff moved toward him with a bottle of 1989 Château Pétrus.
It was not that they were being rude, Piper thought, because rudeness would have required recognition.
