Ruined

“I didn’t,” I reply. “Everything was expensive.”

He picks up the menu. “What do you like to eat?”

“I’m okay. I don’t—”

“What do you like to eat?” he repeats.

“I’ll try just about anything once.”

He scans the menu. “You like scallops.”

I nod. He picks up the phone and orders a mixed green salad, the scallops over linguini, a crème brûlée with Chantilly and blackberries, and a bottle of Château Latour.

After hanging up, he sits down on the sofa an arm’s length away. He leans back and studies me. “What are you going to study at Berkeley?”

“I don’t know yet. I was thinking of taking some sociology classes, maybe some education classes.”

“Sociology? You can’t make a lot of money in that field.”

“Not everyone goes to college to get rich.”

“College is an investment, supposedly. There’s an expected ROI.”

“ROI?”

“Return on Investment.”

“But it doesn’t have to be measured in dollars.”

“How else would you measure it?”

“Well, there’s value to society, to individuals. And personal fulfillment. You can’t put dollar amounts on stuff like that.”

“Actually, economists do.”

“Is that why you went to college? To get rich?”

He curls a corner of his mouth. “I was rich before I went to college.”

“To become even richer then?”

He shakes his head. “I was just satisfying expectations.”

“Where did you go to college?”

“PSL. Paris Sciences et Lettres.”

“What did you study?”

“Business and economics.”

“Did you like it?”

He thinks for a moment. “It was okay.”

“It must come in handy with what you do now.”

“My brother wants that to be the case, but the family business is more his interest than mine.”