Read Online The Subprimes by Karl Taro Greenfeld - Free Book Online Page A

radiating from her narrow, almost Asian-shaped blue eyes.
    Anya is still in her yoga togs: tight leggings, sports bra. When we met we were the same height, but while I have spent the last fifteen years slouching, she has been stretching, for yoga, for Pilates, for bar method, for capoeira, for parkour, for yoga-Pilates,for bar-yoga, for parkoeira. The women in her family are all long and slender, and Anya accentuates that with her predisposition to a bland, tasteless diet of high-fiber cereals and breads and high-antioxidant fruits and vegetables. Whenever a new food is found to have wondrous antiaging or anticancer benefits, it will turn out that Anya has been eating it by the bushel her whole life.
    I like to eat steak.
    If when we met it was plausible that a woman like her might entertain a man like me—she was better-looking, a model actually, but in my prime I had a certain rogueish, Keanu Reeves charm. Now we would be walking proof that men and women don’t always marry commensurately attractive partners.
    â€œDid you pinch a girl’s butt?” Anya asks Ronin. “Without her asking?”
    â€œWho asks ‘Will you pinch my butt?’? God, this is so embarrassing.”
    â€œWho is she? Let’s talk to her parents,” Anya suggests.
    Ronin runs to his room. “NO!”
    â€œWe can’t talk to her parents. We’re not even supposed to know who it is. He has to do some special classes, some after-school thing where they talk about sexuality.”
    â€œBecause of this?”
    I nod.
    Anya says, “Ronin shouldn’t be singled out because of this incident. That’s wrong.”
    There is so much going wrong I’m not sure this is where we should be taking a stand.
    As I’m driving back down to my house, Rajiv calls me from Bloomberg.
    â€œIt’s awfully late to still be at your terminal,” I say.
    â€œArthur Mack,” he says.
    Are we playing this game again?
    â€œEvan Spiegel,” I say.
    â€œNo, I mean can you do Arthur Mack? He’s already indicted. Richie, not even you can get sued by a guilty man. Here, wait.”
    A moment of silence as he attends to something.
    â€œI just sent you Ms. Mack’s mother’s address. That’s where she’s staying. In Santa Monica, near you.”
    Back home, I light up a Strawberry Cough spliff and Google photos of Gemma Mack. Gemma and Arthur at a museum fundraiser, Gemma and Arthur at a party in the Hamptons, Gemma and Arthur at a hospital benefit. She never smiles; instead, she stares blankly at the camera as if she just wants the shot to be over. Arthur grins widely, as though he has just been told a hilarious joke; he is never looking at the camera. There is something hyena-like about his expression, as if he is gloating through the computer screen about his exploits in capitalism and cuckoldry.
    There is something familiar about Gemma, and not because she’s been in the news lately. That stern expression, the pretty freckled features, the blond highlights—she’s the coyote woman!
    I still feel her sting.
    I send a note to Gemma Mack, reintroducing myself, explaining who I am and what I am working on. Can we meet, I ask, this time unarmed?
    IT WAS HARD NOW TO ascertain what the developer’s vision might have been. Sargam doubted he had any aesthetic vision at all, but what he did have was an appetite. There had been at least six hundred houses with fifty-foot frontages on each, in three styles—the largest five bedrooms and 3,600 square feet, the smallest three bedrooms and 2,800 square feet—with corresponding price points. Yet with this sprawling ambition, he,or she, had not bothered to imagine the need for a store, a park, a library, a bench, a gas station, a school, or a tree. Who would live here?
    There were a few takers, lured by unkept promises of trees and schools, but sold because of complicated and usurious financing that was ultimately judged to be