Never Enough Read Online Free PDF Page A

craftiest, luckiest traders wore the crisp white uniforms adorned with epaulets and scanned the horizons from the top deck. The distressed-debt boys worked the engine room, out of sight. This was where Rob discovered his true talent: he could plow through thousands of pages of red ink and spot the single spark of life. He could find—among the halt and the lame, the sick and the dying—those few companies worth a bet. The work was more tedious than glamorous, the hours it demanded not merely unreasonable but grotesque. “I laugh when I think about forty-hour weeks,” Rob would say. “I’m putting in forty-hour days.” But he got results. He got such good results that he didn’t even notice that he’d begun to cross over: he was becoming an investment banker, not a mere man.
    The only reason people become investment bankers is to get rich. Not only do they have no problem worshipping Mammon to the exclusion of all else in life, they also lose the ability to understand people who don’t. They tend to believe that the only reason other people don’t become investment bankers is either because they’re not smart enough or they’re afraid of hard work.
    It’s a unique perspective.
    In his splendid novel A Ship Made of Paper , Scott Spencer describes the breed. He writes that in lieu of happiness they experience “the grim, burnt comfort of thriving in a world that is, for the most part, brutal and uninhabitable.” The investment banker, Spencer writes, “spends the best part of nearly every day surrounded by people who make money, not houses, or soup, not steel, not songs, only money, and who quite openly will do anything for financial gain…. He has made an alliance with these squandered souls, these are his people, his teammates, and among them he feels the pride of the damned. His friends are the guys who will fly halfway around the world to convince someone to take a quarter of a point less on a deal. Everyone else is a civilian, all those fruits and dreamers who do not live and die by that ceaseless stream of fractions and deals that is the secret life of the world.”
    This was now Rob’s world. He’d been drawn to it by the promise of outrageous wealth, but his years at Lazard added a twist: no longer was it enough to earn millions per year, or even to earn more millions this year than last. The only way to really succeed was to earn more millions each year than anyone else.
    “What good does it do me to make ten million a year,” he would ask friends rhetorically, “when the guy down the hall is making twenty?”

    Rob had been at Lazard for three years when he and Nancy had their first child. They named her Isabel. Her birth meant they had to find a bigger apartment. Nancy spent months looking for the right place. She found her dream flat in the mid-Manhattan district called Chelsea.
    Then Bill entered the picture. He came across the river to inspect. He walked up and down the street in front of the apartment. Trash blew across his path. Glass from broken bottles crunched beneath his feet. He saw winos, panhandlers, and people who looked like drug addicts. He saw women who must have been whores. With even more distaste, he found himself gazing upon people of indeterminate gender.
    “It’s a slum,” he told Nancy. “It’s a filthy slum filled with perverts. How could you think I’d let my grandchild be raised in that kind of squalor? I won’t permit you to live in that apartment.” Nancy asked Rob to try to talk some sense into his father.
    “Are you kidding? Find someplace else,” Rob said.
    Eventually, they moved to Mercer Street in Greenwich Village. Isabel’s room was in a basement down the stairs. The only outside light came through barred, street-level windows the size of manila envelopes. They needed an intercom to hear Isabel cry. Nancy liked it because the upstairs rooms were large and bright. She said Isabel would be fine. Rob was spending a hundred hours a week at the office, so