Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 19 The Harvard Roommate

We couldn’t stay at anchor through the night. The Great Salt Pond is protected from direct assault by the ocean in almost every direction, and even on the windiest days, hurricanes aside, there’s rarely more than a foot of chop. The exception is fifteen degrees west of magnetic north, the bearing of the cut through the dunes. Only once every couple of years does the wind blow hard from that way, but when it does, the waves slide in through the channel and build up like the liver of a force-fed goose. Then, although Elmore Leonard says never use this exact phrase, all hell breaks loose. In four-foot seas, every boat in the harbor is at risk, either of being smashed against the docks or other boats it’s tied up against, or of swinging into others swinging crazily, or of breaking free from its anchor entirely, whereupon it would become a fast-moving multi-ton trash maker.

Captain Nicole had been keeping her eye on the radar and her ear to the National Weather Service radio, hoping that the complex of storm systems from the northeast and the southwest wouldn’t combine to produce the dangerous north-northwest gale. At three in the morning, though, she decided that with so many boats, and so much drunkenness and unpreparedness, she needed to protect her ship and get out to the safety of the open sea. She woke the crew and they weighed anchor. They did it so stealthily that none of us on board would even have been aware of it, but Jenk was up anyway, walking his deck for no reason other than something he couldn’t fathom was keeping sleep at arm’s length. And Vladik and Jay were still going at it, continuing a conversation begun in Pittsfield more than twenty years earlier, one they had no plans to ever end. And the bucking of the boat as she left the channel and the tolling of the gong on red “2” woke me, and that led me to the bar on mid-deck.

When I joined my boss and his friend, Vladik had just then agreed to help out with Orrigen for the summer, but insisted that after those few months he’d only take a seat on the company’s board. I had been conscripted for the project and assigned to be Vladik’s assistant, but I wasn’t quite sure what that meant. Vladik would explain someday.

“Vladik, Lakshmi,” Jay said, “there’s something I have to tell you both.” Jay knew something we didn't. Orrigen was on a collision course with an old friend of his, and he thought if we were to come out all right after the battle, we’d better know something about that friend before we went in.

When Jay was a student at Harvard, he had shared a freshman dorm with a boy named Max Frood. “According to close readers of the facebook,”—and, Fair Reader, we had this conversation before Facebook—“by the accounts of most of the girls I knew, Max was the best-looking freshman boy in the Yard.” On high cheekbones, his skin was pale, pink-tinted and silky smooth, his lips rosy and plump. His brown-black hair flowed back in an impressive mane that received and required no maintenance. No jock, he didn’t have about him the characteristic airs of the high-testosterone crowd. He had a feminine beauty to him, very youthful, and with no beard potential, as if he were only fifteen.

 “He kept a picture of him and his mother on his desk. He was probably thirteen in it. The two of them were on the beach somewhere, Marco Island I think he said, both beaming. I never once saw Max as happy at Harvard. There was no mistaking the fact that he was her son. She was a …”

Jay paused, the pursed lips of an ‘m’ frozen in place, as if he was about to use that revolting four letter word, MILF. Did he see me about to judge him? I don’t know, but then his lips relaxed and he said, “a beaut, too, and a very young mother.”

“Max told me,” Jay continued, “he’d taken a lot of shit for his good looks. Even in his senior year of high school, someone would mistake him for a girl, maybe innocently, maybe to provoke him, the South being the South. He got ribbed at Harvard because he looked exactly like a Roman bust of Hera or Aphrodite, I can’t remember, in the Sackler Museum. There was no end to that after someone draped one of his red knit shirts over it. But the girls dug his looks. They wanted to mother him. If he’d had an easy personality to match, he’d have been getting laid by sophomores!” Jay laughed big, guffawing chest-shaking laughter, and Vladik was swept up in it. My own was more nervous. I had just finished being a sophomore.