The Book of Jonah Read Online Free

was to be spoiled. But even so—how friendly could you be to someone openly hoping to steal your girlfriend?
    â€œThings are great,” Jonah lied. “Things are going great.”
    â€œWe should all have dinner sometime,” Patrick said. “She’s a rock star, she should be working with my old team at Goldman. Definitely tell her to shoot me an email.”
    â€œI definitely will,” Jonah lied again. It occurred to him that maybe Patrick deserved to be ditched. “Anyway, I should go downstairs and find Philip.”
    â€œI saw you in the West Village the other day,” Patrick answered—apparently well accustomed to continuing conversations his interlocutors wanted to end.
    â€œOh, yeah?” Jonah said, glancing down from the catwalk, searching the crowd for the shaved black pate of Philip Orengo.
    â€œYou were in Corner Bistro with some girl.”
    Jonah’s heart immediately launched into sharp, agitated thumping—each beat seeming to clang across his mind with the words, Think of a lie, think of a lie, think of a lie. Unfortunately, this mental activity did not bring him any closer to actually thinking of a lie, and the most he could manage was, “Uh, when?” Fixing on a lie was made still more difficult by the fact that he didn’t know whether Patrick attached any significance to what he’d seen: whether he was just making conversation by whatever means necessary or, more ominously, whether he understood there was a connection between the girl he’d seen Jonah with and his own prospects with Sylvia. Who could tell how clueless or calculating Patrick was outside the world of currency derivatives and whateverthefuck?
    â€œMaybe two weeks ago?” Patrick went on, twirling his empty, fingerprint-smudged champagne glass at the stem.
    â€œOh, yeah, right,” Jonah said, as blithely as he could manage. “I was out with some work friends.”
    â€œThe girl I saw you with was cute.” Jonah was tearing through his brain, trying to remember if he’d been stupid (read: drunk) enough to have done any public canoodling that night. “Is she single?”
    Was Zoey Rosen single—that, at least, he could answer honestly. “Sorry, man. She has a boyfriend.”
    Patrick threw back his head in a show of exaggerated disappointment. Then he asked, “Who’s she dating? Somebody at your firm?” And again, was he asking because he knew he had Jonah on the hook, knew he was now in a position to get him to acquiesce to any number of dinners, trips to the Hamptons, nights at the club? Or was he—ironically more benignly—just hoping to move in on Zoey now, too? This was what Jonah got for indulging his liberalism.
    But he got some sense of deliverance from Patrick’s next comment: “Anyway, if they ever break up, give me her number.” Still more deliverance came a moment later when Aaron Seyler—six foot four, corn-husk blond, former captain of the Princeton swim team, Rhodes Scholar, MBA, and the person Jonah would have judged most likely to solve (if any one person could solve) the education crisis, or the energy crisis, or whatever crisis caught his attention—stepped to the microphone on the stage. From the catwalk, Jonah could see the ripples of awareness of Aaron’s presence spread across the room, as conversations ceased and people adjusted where they stood to get a better view of the stage. Not that Jonah blamed anyone: Aaron stood before the microphone with all the self-assurance and faith in collective approval of an actor who’d just won his third Oscar of the night. But Jonah didn’t begrudge Aaron his poise, his charm, his magnetism—he admired it more than he was taken in by it, but he didn’t begrudge it. He had the sense that if someone had to be Aaron Seyler, Aaron Seyler was the right man for the job.
    â€œDon’t worry, this won’t take long,”