It was more than money, he thought now, feeling more and more uncomfortable as the landscape changed inexorably and they were not only out of Philadelphia, but nearly out of Pennsylvania. Tony used to harp on this point all the time, because he was extremely worried about it. Too many of the people at the bank—too many of the people at all the banks, and in Congress, and on the boards of all the institutions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Red Cross—lived in a kind of parallel universe that rarely intersected with what most Americans would call normal life. They wore ties and blazers to school as early as first grade. They spent first Friday afternoons, then Friday evenings, then Saturday evenings at the formal “dancing classes” that taught them not how to dance but how to behave. They spent their summers in Martha’s Vineyard or Greece. They went to the opera instead of the movies and to museums instead of the mall. They played lacrosse and squash instead of football and basketball. They went to coming-out parties and expected to have to wear a dinner jacket at least four times a week between Thanksgiving and Easter every single year.
“The reason the men who create great business empires always seem to come up from the bottom,” Tony used to say, “is because those are the people who know what most Americans want to buy. The reason the business empires fail when those men die is that they’re taken over by people like us, who know nothing of the kind. No prep-school boy could have created Wal-Mart. No prep-school boy could even have conceived it. And it works the same way in art. Steven Spielberg makes the movies he wanted to see when he was growing up in a subdivision in southern California. Stephen King writes the books he wanted to read when he was growing up poor in rural Maine. And don’t kid yourself thinking that there’s something called Great Art going on in all those books we read that sell two thousand copies and that they’ll be rescued from obscurity after their authors are dead. One or two might be, but most of them will just disappear. In the meantime, this culture, the culture of the whole world, is determined by the very people you and I have nothing to do with most of the time and probably wouldn’t like very much if we had. The only thing I can’t figure out is if this is a flaw in capitalism or a virtue. Maybe that’s the way it is to ensure that nothing like a real and stable aristocracy will ever exist again.”
Dozens of Price Heaven papers were spread out across the seat next to him. The window between the passenger compartment and the driver’s compartment was firmly shut. Maybe Tony had been right all along, and he was constitutionally incapable of solving the Price Heaven mess, because he didn’t understand enough about what the business needed to run, or to appeal to people. Maybe he should have done what Tony had urged him to do months ago and tried to live “normally” for a month or two, rent an apartment, put himself on a budget, shop at the very places Price Heaven’s customers liked to shop. Now it was too late. He was too aware of the fact that Price Heaven was his test. If he solved it, he would go on at the bank, or at another bank. He would have the career he had been trained to have. If he did not solve it, he would be shunted off to the sidelines. They wouldn’t fire him right away. It would look bad, and give the regulators ideas about who should be investigated in the Price Heaven collapse. Still, they’d fire him eventually, and when he found himself out on the street with his pockets out, he’d also find himself without an open sesame to other banks or to brokerages or to any of those places where someone like him expected to work. He was fitted to do nothing else but what he did. His accent would disqualify him for a job in any but about two-dozen firms. His taste in clothes would make him conspicuous in any retail operation.
He looked out the windows again and saw that they were going through country now. Great rocky outcrops rose up on either side of the road. On this part of the interstate, it was as if America were largely uninhabited. Everything was country. Everything was pristine. He didn’t know what he was worried about. It was true that the very idea of living the kind of life Tony had suggested he sample made him break out in a cold sweat. He didn’t want to eat at McDonald’s or buy the kind of clothes that could be bought at Price Heaven. He didn’t want to see movies about aliens from outer space or Hob-bits or vigilante heroes who machine-gunned the landscape to save the damsel in distress. He didn’t want an SUV with a Britney Spears CD in the CD player. He didn’t want “entertaining” to mean a big Thanksgiving dinner with a thousand relatives in attendance and all the women in the kitchen afterward, cleaning up. He didn’t want to set his table with Martha Stewart Everyday dishes and glassware bought in big cardboard boxed sets at the local warehouse store. He didn’t want … to know any of those people, who were impossible to talk to, and who seemed to care about nothing he understood.