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smart, and clearly interested in you. You are lucky.” I didn’t read anything into the brevity of Sanjay’s verdict, and I was vastly relieved at the time that he hadn’t felt compelled to point out any of her flaws.
    At first Emilie didn’t fully understand my friendship with Sanjay. She was perfectly cordial in a disinterested sort of way—in the way, I suppose, that lots of women are not terribly interested in their boyfriend’s male friends. But once she started spending frequent nights at my place, and realized that I spoke to Sanjay almost every day and saw him at least once a week, she could not hide her annoyance.
    “What does he give you that I can’t?” she once asked. And, after too many glasses of an old and expensive Armagnac, she made a statement she never would have made sober: “ I want to be your soul mate.”
    After we had been a couple for a couple of years, Emilie and I reached an accommodation on the Sanjay issue. She and he became friends, and she adopted a role of motherly concern for a not very practical child, mocking his idealism and occasional spectacular lack of understanding of the ways in which human beings usually relate to one another. She simply chose to ignore the irritating fact that Sanjay’s continuing role in my life was a symptom of something missing from our own relationship.

    T HE YEAR 2005 was a good one. I graduated near the top of my class from law school, started a job in the best law firm on Wall Street, and acquired an attractive and successful girlfriend. I did not take these things for granted. Nothing in my background—even four years at one of the country’s most elite universities—had prepared me for my life in New York City during the boom period that preceded the financial crisis in 2008. I made $125,000 my first year as a lawyer—more than the salary that my hardworking father was making after thirty years at his job. The Wall Street that I entered was not the Wall Street that became so reviled following the 2008 financial crisis, with its lethal brew of myopic focus on short-term profits and faith in financial alchemy. At the firm, I found a truly diverse group of men and women, from across the country and the world, who had risen to the top of their law school classes through extraordinary academic performance and were attracted to the firm by its culture of quality and integrity. And it really was a meritocracy. No one who started in my class of lawyers at the firm had obtained their positions through family or connections.
    There were, of course, rewards. In addition to the salary, we got first-class training and great work. We also ate with clients in the city’s best restaurants, learned not to feel guilty when drinking hundred-dollar bottles of wine, rode around town in radio-dispatched “black cars,” and—when entertained by RCD&S partners at their penthouse apartments and perfect country houses—received a glimpse of the life that we too might have. Despite the suddenness of our immersion in this world, within a few months it seemed entirely natural and completely deserved that we now sat near the top of the vast pyramid that was New York City.
    The quid pro quo for our provisional access to this rarefied world was total dedication to the firm. The first rule was that the clients were to be treated like gods. Their phone calls and e-mails were to be answered promptly. Their requests and deadlines, no matter how unreasonable, were to be met—and met with perfection. The firm was obsessive about quality. We aspired for our work product to be perfect. In doing legal research, no stone was left unturned. Every possible solution to the client’s problem was explored and analyzed. I quickly came to have pride in the firm, while at the same time doubting constantly that I was really up to the job. For a young lawyer, the sources of stress were manifold. I was often exhausted from lack of sleep. Worse was the uncertainty. You made plans but