The Executor by Jesse Kellerman Page A

This is not the right place for you. It never has been. I appreciate your commitment to your principles. But other people need the resources you’re taking up. Just the other day I sat here with a student from Brown—with publications—looking to transfer here. What am I supposed to tell him? ‘Sorry, no can do, we’re saving that spot for someone.
    No, hasn’t produced anything of value in six years. But Sam thought he was the Next Big Thing !’ I mean, honestly. When does it end?”
    The mortification had gone on long enough. I stood up.
    “My door is always open,” she said, right before it swung closed.

6
    A ll this carnage had one upside, and that was Yasmina.
    By my penultimate year in grad school I’d run out of philosophy classes to take and had started picking my way through the rest of the course catalog, reasoning that I was doing myself a favor by broadening my horizons. I went first to our pet subjects, math and quantum physics. Nobody looked askance when I took an artificial-intelligence seminar. Nor did they take notice when I signed up for Greek. Film theory raised some eyebrows; but it was after I wangled a spot in an undergraduate photography studio that my so-called advisor not-so-politely suggested that I’d veered off course.
    Chastened, I next semester enrolled in a political theory class given jointly with the law school. While meandering through the law library stacks I came across a pretty woman in a black cashmere coat, her brow furrowed in the unmistakable distress of a first-year. I asked what the problem was, and she showed me: the call numbers had switched mid-shelf. Having become something of an expert on the Harvard system, I escorted her to the right place, and she repaid me with a date.
    We were halfway through dessert before she realized I wasn’t a law student at all.
    No, I wasn’t.
    “That’s good. Lawyers are assholes.”
    I pointed out that in three years’ time, she would be a lawyer.
    “Then I’ll be an asshole,” she said.
    She picked up the check.
    At first blush, we made an odd couple. Yasmina came from Los Angeles, where her family was prominent in the Persian Jewish community. Back in Tehran, they had owned several carpet and furniture factories, amassing a minor fortune before the Islamic Revolution forced them to flee. Servants, a chauffeur, two vacation homes—this was a life known to Yasmina only in pictures, as she had been born in Rome, where her parents lived while awaiting U.S. visas.
    Once in California, her father tried to stick to what he knew, opening a furniture store with borrowed money. But he’d learned his trade on the streets and in the souk, and Americans found his aggressive brand of salesmanship off-putting. The store floundered, and the family suffered through moves every three months, each apartment crummier than the last. Despondent, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, he had a sign printed up that read GOING OUT OF BUSINESS—EVERYTHING MUST GO! He stuck it in the window and the inventory cleared within a week.
    Now there were seven such stores, with seven such signs, scattered across the greater L.A. area, all of them going out of business continuously for the last twenty years. The Eshaghians once again lived in a big house, drove big cars, and lacked for nothing. Yet the fear of losing everything, instantaneously, clawed at them day and night. No place felt safe, no matter how democratic its elections or how free its markets. They obsessed over money: talking about it, equating it with moral worth, pestering their children to marry into it. They drove Yasmina bananas. In a sense, I owe them thanks, as it was their needling that drove her into the arms of a penniless Gentile philosopher.
    But that’s not giving either of us enough credit, because in fact we had more in common than met the eye. Both of us admitted to feeling like outsiders at Harvard. Having snuck past the bouncer, though, we both wanted to make the most of our