Three Score & Ten

“Have you ever considered getting an MBA?” he asks. He has taken you to a steakhouse off Seventh Avenue, a smoky place favoured by Times reporters and other heavy drinkers. He is dropping ashes on his steak, which lies cold and untouched. Already he has informed you that it is impossible to get a good steak anymore. Beef isn’t what it used to be; they force feed the cattle and inject them with hormones. He is on his third vodka martini. You are trying to stretch your second.

“I’m not saying necessarily go into business. But write about it. That’s the subject now. The guys who understand business are going to write the new literature. Wally Stevens said money is a kind of poetry, but he didn’t follow his own advice.” He tells you there was a golden age of Papa and Fitzgerald and Faulkner, then a silver age in which he played a modest role. He thinks we’re now in a bronze age, and that fiction has nowhere to go. It can’t run but it can hide. The new writing will be about technology, the global economy, the electronic ebb and flow of wealth. “You’re a smart boy,” he says. “Don’t be seduced by all the craps about garrets and art.”

He flags down two more martinis, even though your second has yet to run dry.

“I envy you,” he says. “What are you – twenty-one?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Twenty-four. Your whole life ahead of you. You’re single, right?”

First you say no, and then yes. “Yes. Single.”

“You got it made,” he says, although he has just informed you that the world you are going to inherit will have neither good beef nor good writing. “My liver’s shot,” he adds. “My liver’s gone to hell and I’ve got emphysema.”

 Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City

If Edward could put up sufficient money to serve as a kind of insurance against accident she was ready to like Edward for a time that would be covered, as it were, by the policy. She was getting fifty thousand dollars a year from her Grand Duke; Edward would have to pay a premium of two years’ hire for a month of her society. There would not be much risk of the Grand Duke’s finding it out and it was not certain that he would give her the keys of the street if he did find out. But there was the risk – a twenty percent risk, as she figured it out. She talked to Edward as if she had been a solicitor with an estate to sell – perfectly well and perfectly coldly without any inflections in her voice. She did not want to be unkind to him; but she could see no reason for being kind to him. She was a virtuous business woman with a mother and two sisters and her own old age to be provided comfortably for. She did not expect more than a five years’ further run. She was twenty-four and, as she said: ‘We Spanish women are horrors at thirty.’

Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier