by Amor Towles
The face of the second Daniel reappeared on the screen, looking generally the worse for wear.
“See that smile, Sam? Isn’t it enviable? I mean, he’s just had a vision of what is important in life. I love the visual subtext of this shot because what is Daniel looking at right now? His typewriter! During all those years when he was toiling away in a kitchen, living in a walk-up, writing books that no one wanted to read, there was scarcity and rejection, but there was freedom and authenticity too.”
HT shook his head in satisfaction.
“I think we can assume that his life is about to veer in a terrific direction.”
Sam stared at the frozen image of Daniel, following his own train of thought. What could it mean that Annie had chosen this projection? At some level, Sam couldn’t help but take it personally. He, too, had gone to a competitive liberal arts college, where, as a freshman, he had studied Shakespeare and dabbled in poetry—just like everybody else. And yes, he had eventually chosen economics as his major and written his thesis on John Maynard Keynes. But did that make him some sort of sellout? Would he be more free and authentic if he were a dishwasher and they lived in a one-room apartment?
“Are you ready for the third projection?” asked HT.
“I’m ready for a second gin and tonic.”
HT, who always seemed so ready to please, hesitated. “Are you sure you want another?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Having said that a drink can be additive to the experience, Sam, we’ve found that a second drink can be a little reductive.”
“I think I can handle it.”
HT, the counselor, adopted an expression of friendly concern.
Sam, the customer, held up his glass and rattled the ice cubes.
So James was summoned in his catering clothes, and a second drink was promptly delivered.
“Are you ready now?” HT asked, a little coolly.
Sam put a finger in the air while he drank a third of the G&T. Then, putting down the glass, he said, “Let her rip.”
Projection Three
From the day that Daniel was born, everything came easy . . .
As the narrator—who was a woman again—elaborated on Daniel’s “natural finesse,” there was a montage showing the ease with which he made friends, played sports, and pursued academics.
The skeptic in Sam wanted to roll his eyes at the screen’s portrayal of the effortless Daniel. But hadn’t he encountered just this sort of person in college—like his freshman roommate, John? Raised in Wilmington and educated at St. Paul’s, John seemed to meet every new task with a knack. Sam vividly remembered the afternoon when John first tried his hand at lacrosse. Having watched some others playing on the quad, John picked up a stick and in a matter of minutes was cradling, throwing, and catching with the fluency of a varsity player—the way some young musicians can drop one instrument and pick up another without bothering to pause for instruction.
Sam was nothing like John. But our genes don’t merely express who we are. They contain all manner of talents from previous generations that we may not benefit from personally but that can be passed on to our progeny. So who was to say that he couldn’t father a son with the natural finesse of his old classmate?
As Sam was having this reassuring thought, the setting shifted from a university campus to Century Tower, where Daniel, already in his early thirties, dressed in a tailored suit, is walking down the hallway with a smile on his face and some folders under an arm. Passing a colleague of a similar age in similar attire, Daniel exchanges a high five. Then he pauses at a cubicle where another young man is transferring data from a document into a spreadsheet. When the young man looks up, Sam realizes with a touch of horror that it is the same actor who played Daniel in the first projection. The new Daniel dumps the folders on the old Daniel’s desk while making some smug remark about there being no rest for the weary.
“From the day that Daniel was born, everything came easy . . .”
Later that night (as Daniel One is presumably toiling away), Daniel Three is sitting in a fancy restaurant charming his waitress. A moment after she slips him her phone number, another attractive young woman arrives, gives Daniel a kiss, and sits. When Daniel reaches across the table to take her hand, on her finger we see the engagement ring that he has given her.
The scene shifts back to the office, where a paralegal emerges from the copy room while straightening her skirt, followed by a smiling Daniel, who is straightening his tie. When Daniel returns to his sizable office, he finds a superior waiting.
“Can I see you for a moment, Danno?”
Danno? thought Sam.
Danno is led into a conference room, where there are two other senior professionals, a man from HR, and a woman from Legal. He is invited to take a seat.
“It has been brought to our attention,” says the man from HR, “that this summer you may have been sleeping with one of the interns . . .”
“Two,” says the woman from Legal.
“Two of the interns.”
“As I remember,” Daniel replies with a wink, “we didn’t get much sleep.”
Cut to Daniel being led from his office by security with a cardboard box in his arms. As he passes between the cubicles, several of the analysts stand and applaud, including Daniel One.
The following montage is painfully easy for Sam to anticipate: Daniel having the engagement ring thrown in his face before his fiancée slams the door; Daniel applying for jobs he can’t get; Daniel ending his nights alone in a loft that seems glamorous but cold.
A year goes by, maybe two. Chastened, humbled, near defeat, Daniel is standing in a small office building reading the tenancy board until he finds the firm of McClintock & Co. Upstairs, he enters a waiting room with run-down furniture and an empty reception desk.
“Can I help you?” asks the sixty-year-old African American woman who emerges from an office.
“Yes,” says Daniel. “I’m interested in speaking with Mr. McClintock.”
“I’m Mr. McClintock,” the woman says sourly.
Daniel clears his throat.
“Excuse me, Ms. McClintock. I have almost a decade of experience in the field, and I was hoping you might have an opening . . .”
“The only opening we’ve got,” she says, pointing at the reception desk, “is the one right there.”
“I’ll take it,” says Daniel.
“All right, all right!” Sam called out. “I get it! Enough already!”
As Harry froze the projection and brought up the lights, HT turned to Sam in surprise.
“Don’t you want to see what happens next? It’s the best part!”
“Oh, I can just imagine,” said Sam. “At the foot of his wise new mentor, Daniel learns to be a better man.”
“Exactly,” said HT. “Terrific, right?”
“But why does he have to be such an asshole to become a good person?”
“It’s a classic second act, Sam. In the beginning—”
“Let me stop you right there, HT. What is it with all this classic second act business? We’re not talking about a Hollywood movie.”
“Of course we’re not talking about a Hollywood movie, Sam. We’re talking about your son’s life. But where do you think the three-act structure comes from? And why does it consistently speak to audiences? Because it’s an archetype. A universal pattern that recurs one generation after another. It’s not a coincidence that when the Sphinx poses her riddle to Oedipus, the answer is the three phases of man.”
“Oedipus! You do know that he slept with his mother and killed his father.”
“Okay,” said HT, putting up his hands. “Maybe not the best example. It goes without saying that our lives are intricate and multifaceted. But they also tend to have a larger arc that takes us from a position of youthful self-assurance through a period of setbacks, leading to a third phase in which, if we’re lucky, we’ve confronted our limitations and become deeper people ready to lead richer lives.”
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br /> “And because Daniel is someone for whom things came easy, he ends up being an asshole?”
“Not ‘ends up,’ Sam. He’s an asshole to begin with. But by the time he confronts the callousness of his own personality, he still has years—maybe half a century—in which to put his talents to more meaningful use. What a terrific third act! Are you kidding me? I would have happily been an asshole for thirty years in order to be wise for another fifty.”
Sam wasn’t sure where he should go with that admission. In the end, he just shook his head in exasperation. “I think your whole premise is crazy. Not all lives play out like that. It’s not like I’ve had to spend the last fifteen years drunk or philandering in order to prepare for my third act.”
HT, who was listening intently, opened his mouth as if to comment, then uncharacteristically kept his counsel.
“What?” asked Sam.
“Nothing.”
“Come on! What?”
HT shrugged. “You’re sort of mixing apples and oranges. That’s all.”
“Why?”
“Because for the last fifteen years, you’ve been in your third act.”
“Excuse me?”
“What can I tell you? We have your genetic makeup and your personality profile. We have your upbringing, your education, your career history, and we’ve mapped all that against our database of human outcomes. It seems very clear to us that your second act was back in college.”
“College!”
“Sometimes that’s when it happens, Sam. It’s like you told our interviewers. You had an idyllic childhood in a nice house in the suburbs and summers by the sea. But then your father quit his corporate engineering job, bought the copper mine, moved the family to Utah, and that’s when the troubles began. Wait. How did you describe him?” HT opened the green file and flipped quickly to somewhere in the middle. “No promise was ever quite kept; no bill ever quite paid; no dream ever quite realized.”
“I know what it says.”
Sensing from Sam’s tone that he had gone a step too far, HT resumed in a more sympathetic manner. “You went through an extraordinary series of experiences in your college years, Sam. While others were focused on getting drunk and getting laid, you were helping your father renegotiate with vendors, lay off employees, plead with banks, and navigate bankruptcy. And in so doing, you had to come to terms with the fact that the man you had idolized your whole life was not exactly whom you had imagined him to be. In the aftermath of that experience, you made a promise that you would never put your family in the same position. You achieved in school, advanced in a competitive field, steered clear of higher-risk opportunities, and ensured that when you had children, they would be raised on a foundation of financial stability. That this is your third act is nothing to be ashamed of, Sam. You should be incredibly proud of where you are.”
And Sam might even have felt some of that pride if HT hadn’t referenced his steering clear of higher-risk opportunities. Unlike so many of his colleagues, Sam had never attempted to shift to the buy side—to a private equity firm or hedge fund—where the analysts lived and died by their recommendations but had the opportunity to accumulate real money. He hadn’t even attempted a lateral move within the firm to a faster-growing sector like tech or telecom, wary of their rapidly changing competitive landscapes. Utilities may be regulated and slow-growing, as Sam liked to say to his clients, but they were also predictable and paid dividends.
But if HT’s mention of these unpursued opportunities stung, it stung nothing like Sam’s realization that he had never referenced them in any of his interviews with Vitek. If they were in that file, they must have come from Annie, presumably as examples of her husband’s lack of ambition or grit.
Sam shook his head.
“Some of what you’ve said may be true,” he admitted finally. “But I think Annie and I have another act ahead of us.”
“Oh,” replied HT. “I didn’t say it was Annie’s third act. We’re fairly certain that she’s still in her second.”
We Were Just Talking about You
Sam slammed the door of his new car. Or rather, he tried to slam it. But the door, like the motor, had been engineered to operate smoothly and quietly. So when he tugged the door shut, it advanced, paused, and closed itself with an unobtrusive click.
“Fuck you,” said Sam to the door.
He pushed the ignition and the car stirred to life with the slightest tremble. As if in harmony, the phone in Sam’s pocket began to vibrate with an incoming call—presumably from Annie or the office. Ignoring it, Sam initiated the GPS.
Where would you like to go? it asked.
“Two hundred and ten East Eighty-Fifth Street.”
Proceed to the highlighted route. Take a right onto Local Access Road, then continue eight miles to the expressway entrance.
At Vitek’s exit, Sam came to a stop despite the fact there was no oncoming traffic. The GPS calculated that he would arrive back at the apartment at 7:34, in plenty of time for dinner. But Sam felt a sudden desire to turn left and follow the access road all the way to Orient Point—in order to visit that little house by the sea, the one that his parents had rented before his father quit his job, uprooted the family, and dragged them all out west.
Someone behind Sam honked.
Without signaling, Sam turned right and headed toward the city as it began to rain.
The access road, which ran parallel to the expressway, was lined with telephone poles that may or may not have been carrying telephone calls anymore. At one time, this road had presumably been the main artery extending from the city to the tip of the peninsula, but the expressway had turned it into a secondary route spotted with secondary businesses. Case in point, Sam was passing a motor lodge from the 1950s with a parking area that was three times bigger than it now needed to be.
Up ahead Sam saw another remnant of the access road’s heyday: a bar advertising itself as The Glass Half Full, complete with an oversize neon sign of a tipped martini that loomed over an old-school phone booth at the side of the road. As Sam drove by, he noticed that at the bottom of the martini glass was a neon olive that was no longer lit.
Sam pulled over onto the shoulder. After letting two cars pass, he did a three-point turn and headed back.
The GPS chimed to indicate its recalculation of the route home.
Take a left onto Maple Street, then proceed one-eighth of a mile and take a left onto Church Street.
Instead, Sam took a left into the parking lot of The Glass Half Full. It was also three times larger than it needed to be, accommodating a handful of pickup trucks and older American sedans. Sam got out of his car and walked quickly toward the door as the rain began to fall in earnest.
Inside, the ambience was defined by back-lit beer signs hanging on the walls and billiard balls clacking somewhere out of sight. On Sam’s right was a row of booths being used by parties of two or three while on his left was a bar lined with men in work clothes sitting on stools. A few of the men turned and looked in a manner suggesting they were used to recognizing whoever came into the bar. When they saw it was Sam, they went back to their beers.
After letting his eyes adjust, Sam walked farther into the bar in search of a quiet place to sit. But as he proceeded, he was surprised to discover HT sitting in the fourth booth talking to a brunette. Sam didn’t imagine The Glass Half Full was HT’s sort of place. Maybe he’d just found that having a drink right after work was additive to his experience. Sam took a step toward him with every intention of making a wry remark to this effect, and that was when he realized that the brunette in the booth was Annie.
Sam stopped in confusion. He and Annie were planning to talk about their “options” over dinner later that night. Had she driven out to get a reading from HT on Sam’s impressions in advance? But even as he was asking himself this question, Sam realized that resting on the table between two glasses of red wine were HT’s and Annie’s fingers interlinked.
Looking up, HT let go of Ann
ie’s hand.
“Sam!” he said in his upbeat way. “What perfect timing! We were just talking about you.”
HT slid out of the booth and stood in order to shake Sam’s hand.
Which was just as well, since it made it so much easier for Sam to punch him in the face. Sam had never hit another person. So with all the sharpness of a brand-new experience, he could feel the bone in HT’s nose breaking and he could see HT’s head snapping back as he slumped into the booth.
There was a rap on the glass.
“Hey! You okay in there, buddy?”
Sam looked out the passenger side window to find someone peering into the car. It was an ill-shaven man in his late fifties holding a newspaper over his head to fend off the rain. Sam lowered the window.
“You okay?” the man asked again.
“Yeah,” said Sam. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
“All righty,” the man said before limping toward the bar.
Sam sat for a minute watching the windshield wipers sweep back and forth, his spirits lifted by the punch he hadn’t thrown. Then he followed the stranger inside.
The Glass Half Full was almost as he had imagined it. Though there was a pool table in the back, there were no balls in play; and though there was a bar on the left and booths on the right, there were also a few tables for four in between; and though there were, in fact, a number of men in work clothes seated on the stools, none of them bothered to look up when Sam came through the door.
Sam sat at the near corner of the bar, a few stools away from the man who had rapped on his window. A Motown song was playing on the jukebox in the corner, something by the Temptations or the Four Tops. Sam could never remember which was which.
“A gin and tonic,” he said to the bartender while setting his phone facedown on the bar. “Or, on second thought, make that a martini.”
“You have a preference for gin?”
“Whatever you’ve got on the top shelf.”
Another Motown song began playing, and Sam drummed on the bar, pleased with his ability to remember, or anticipate, the song’s infectious rhythms. But when the bartender returned with a martini served on the rocks in a whiskey glass, Sam couldn’t help but feel disappointed.
