The Book of Jonah Read Online Free Page B

Patrick and their deeply uncomfortable conversation. He’d spotted Philip almost directly below him, standing with other members of the QUEST board. During the speech Jonah noticed that Philip divided his attention between Aaron and the face and figure of a bare-shouldered brunette in a green dress, directly at his two o’clock. As Aaron entered his peroration, Jonah started down the catwalk steps to join Philip, and by the time the applause diminished and the mingling and music resumed, they were greeting each other with a back-pounding hug. “How goes the fight against corporate legal liability?” Philip asked in his lilting Kenyan accent.
    â€œBetter than the mayor’s plan to turn all of Broadway into a giant bike lane,” Jonah answered. Philip was an aide to the mayor, could frequently be seen (“as an advertisement of his honor’s diverse administration,” as Philip put it) standing back and to the left at press conferences. “Was that your idea?”
    Both without drinks, they reflexively started moving toward the bar. “Your attendance tonight is a pleasant surprise,” Philip told him. He’d been educated in British boarding schools, and as a consequence tended to speak in these grandiloquent, contractionless sentences.
    â€œWe finalized a settlement today, so I got to leave before midnight.”
    â€œCongratulations on both counts.” As they made their way through the crowd, Philip stopped every so often to shake a hand. Watching him—dressed nattily in a powder-blue suit, smiling with consistent gladness into every face he recognized—Jonah could easily imagine Philip in the role he openly aspired to: mayor of the city. It wasn’t impossible, either: He had the intelligence, the résumé, the politician’s instinctive cunning (he always won when he and Jonah played chess); he networked relentlessly (though not as effortlessly as Aaron); and, as he often pointed out, there was now a Kenyan in the White House and a bachelor in the mayor’s office. The political era redounded favorably on his prospects.
    When they reached the bar, Philip ordered a vodka tonic, Jonah a Scotch. As they waited for their drinks, Philip eyed the same brunette in green whom he’d been all-but-ogling during Aaron’s speech, now a few feet up the bar from them. “I have observed a strong correlation between QUEST donors and Pilates classes,” Philip murmured.
    â€œQuant analysis at work,” Jonah laughed. “You going to ask her if she wants to do a quick abs session after this?”
    â€œUnfortunately,” Philip sighed melodramatically, “by rule I am no longer permitted to make such invitations. Aaron sent a rather strongly worded email regarding proper conduct at QUEST events. Evidently there is concern that certain members of the board do not display the appropriate motives in attending these gatherings.”
    â€œI wonder what that could refer to?” Jonah said.
    Philip sighed again. “If I am not for my cock, who am I for?” As their drinks arrived, he added, “I may resign in protest.”
    â€œBut then what about New York City’s schools, right?” Jonah said, and Philip laughed.
    This laughter was not surprising—but Jonah had not entirely been joking. He understood that Philip’s membership in QUEST was mostly gamesmanship—part of a rivalry that went back to the days when Philip and Aaron were both charismatic freshmen on the same floor at Princeton. Yes, it helped Aaron to have a black mayoral aide on his board, but it also gave Philip access to all of Aaron’s contacts; and he could always vent his frustration at being hierarchically beneath Aaron in the organization by trying to sleep with as many of these contacts as he could (though it seemed Aaron had put a stop to that tactic within their “friendship”). But either as a lingering effect of his conversation