Chapter Twenty-Eight Los Angeles to Atherton
Piper was standing in the kitchen when the call came through. Protein shake in one hand, phone face-up on the counter. It was Jayson and he answered on the third ring.
“Be at the airport at four. I need you to fly to Atherton.”
“I have practice.”
“That’s been handled. I have some people I would like you to meet.”
Piper set the shake down.
“I’m starting a game on Sunday.”
“Yes. That has also been handled.”
Jayson paused. “The car will be at your house at two-thirty.” He hung up without saying goodbye.
Piper opened his text thread with his head coach. The most recent message was from the coach, sent ten minutes prior. Take Monday. See you Wednesday. Travel safe.
Piper headed upstairs and packed. He knew the league did whatever Jayson told them. He was an investor and it was all about making the shareholders happy.
The car was a black Suburban with tinted windows; he didn’t recognize the driver.
Piper climbed into the back and the car was already moving before his seatbelt clicked and he watched the valley slide past in the kind of gold afternoon light that looked expensive even when it wasn’t.
He looked past his phone. He knew what he would find there: nothing, because nobody who needed to find him in the next six hours was going to, and anyone who might have tried had already been told, except Noah who had already flown back to Seattle.
***
The jet was bigger than the usual one Jayson would put Piper on.
Two flight attendants in identical gray, indicated the stairs without speaking, and Piper climbed them slowly to avoid any unneeded pain from his sore ribs.
When he got to the door, he saw Jayson sitting in the first row waiting for his arrival.
He had a glass of scotch in front of him and nothing else. Just Jayson, waiting.
“Sit,” he said.
Piper sat as one of the attendants closed the cabin door. Piper felt the pressure change in his ears.
“Your phone.”
Piper reached into his pocket.
“No,” Jayson said. “Give it to the flight attendant.”
The attendant was already standing beside him with a silver Christofle tray. Piper placed the phone on it, and she walked to the attendant station and placed it in a drawer that she locked. Piper knew there was an issue when his phone privileges were taken away.
He watched Jayson, who was watching him.
Jayson slid a folder across the table.
“Read it.”
“What is it?”
“Read it. You have been avoiding it for weeks.”
Piper opened the folder.
The document was similar to the contract he’d signed every year, but now with amended pages.
He read the new clause. Then he read it again.
He felt nothing. Jayson had told him about the Noah clause but he could not sign something he had broken several times already.
The clause was clean without conditional language, just to the point.
It said that in the event Piper Ashton were to enter into a domestic or romantic partnership with Mr. Noah Reyes of Seattle, WA, the annual payment of ten million dollars would be forfeited in its entirety, effective the first day of the month following such event, and that all prior payments would be characterized retroactively as compensation for services rendered rather than as gifts, for tax and other purposes.
Piper read the paragraph again to make sure he had it right. He calculated the tax bill in his head, north of $40 million, money he didn't have laying around.
Jayson was watching him. He hadn’t moved, not even to lift his glass of scotch to his mouth.
“This is a fucking threat,” Piper said.
“No. It’s the price,” Jayson replied as he sipped his 40 year old Macallan.
Piper closed the folder the way you close a menu when you have decided nothing looked good at the restaurant.
“You put it in writing.”
“I put it in writing,” Jayson replied.
“Why?”
Jayson deliberately paused, his fingers tightened on the glass of scotch.
Jayson lifted the glass and took a small sip.
“Because I do not negotiate things I have not written down.”
Piper waited for the rest of it, but there was no rest of it.
He knew he had no choice but to sign, but not yet.
The plane began to taxi.
Piper had expected Jayson to force him to sign, but the document sat on the table, and Jayson didn’t push it toward him or even give him a pen. There was no indication, with any word or gesture, that Piper was expected to do anything with it now. It was simply there.
To Jayson he was invincible and nothing needed to be signed to actually be enforced by him.
Piper watched the valley fall away beneath the window.
Over time, he had learned to read the architecture of Jayson’s silences. This one was not pressure. Jayson was watching him process, while Piper said nothing.
“You are quiet,” Jayson said.
“I’m thinking.”
“Yes. I can see it in your shoulders.”
Piper looked at him.
“It is a habit of yours. When you are deciding something, your shoulders tense up.”
“Why are you making me go to Atherton this late in the season when there is so much on the line?” Piper asked.
“Because there are people I would like you to meet. They are very excited to meet you, so at least act excited to meet them,” Jayson replied as Piper sank into his seat.
“I will try.”
Piper looked down at the folder on the table.
Ten million dollars a year. It had paid for the house in Beverly Hills, the house in Jackson Hole, his mother’s Ferrari and her second home.
Jayson was still watching him.
“You understand it,” Jayson said.
“I understand it.”
“Good.”
Piper looked out the window. The Pacific rolled below them.
He knew he would eat whatever Jayson wanted him to eat, sleep wherever Jayson wanted him to sleep, and he would be up all night, with a hurt rib, with men who treated him like a high priced sex doll.
Nine years of this structure and he had been paid sweetly for this gilded cage that was now showing its age.
***
The jet touched down at San Carlos Airport, just outside of Atherton. The driver was waiting for them upon arrival.
Jayson was already standing, and reaching for a jacket, halfway out of the cabin before Piper had unbuckled his seatbelt, because he was in no hurry for what was to come.
Piper followed him down the stairs before they got into the waiting black SUV.
They went directly to a friend of Jayson’s house that sat on a stretch of road lined with gates. High walls. Cameras mounted everywhere.
A gate opened before the car reached it. The drive curved through landscaped oak trees, cross-lit from above and below.
They pulled up to a door that opened before the car stopped.
Two men in dark suits stood just inside, not large, not visibly armed. Neither of them looked at Jayson first. Both of them looked at Piper. One of them said, “Mr. Ashton,” before Jayson had introduced him.
Piper had been famous for a long time. He was used to being recognized. This was not that. This was something more commoditized.
The floors in the house were pale stone. The ceilings were high in the cavernous mansion. A woman in a cream-colored dress took his bag. Piper turned and she was gone.
“Your room is upstairs,” Jayson said. “Dinner is at nine sharp.”
“I’m staying here? Why not your place?” Piper asked as Jayson gave a look that answered his question immediately.
It was ten past eight. Jayson walked off down a corridor. One of the men at the door indicated the staircase and Piper went up to his room to change.
A wall of windows faced the valley. His bag was already on a low bench at the foot of the bed, unzipped, folded back, the clothes he had packed neatly arranged inside as though someone had inspected them and approved.
A suit he didn’t own was hanging in the closet.
A charcoal Tom Ford, cut narrow through the shoulders.
A crisp white shirt hung underneath it. Jayson had Piper’s measurements on file for a night like this.
He stood in the middle of the room.
Then he stripped off his travel clothes, showered, and slipped into the suit, which fit perfectly. The suit hugged every part of his body that would get a rise out of these men.
He looked at himself in the mirror.
Ok Joan, showtime.
***
Dinner was on a terrace that opened off the back of the house and looked out to an abyss of backyard.
A long table, nine men already seated when Piper arrived, all of them stopped the conversation they were in to look Piper up and down like he was the main course.
A staff member, silent, guided Piper to his chair.
His seat was second from the end. Jayson sat on the opposite side of the table. The ten of them were now all at their seats. Piper counted them the way he counted a defense. All men, all older, all rich as fuck.
Piper recognized three.
The first was an actor, Italian, sixty-ish, who had acted in a few classic movies Piper had enjoyed. Piper remembered meeting him at a movie premiere years prior.
The actor nodded once at him across the table, not unfriendly but not friendly, exactly, the way you nodded at someone whose name you could not remember and whose face you remembered fucking. Piper remembered his touch, his smell and his rhythm.
The other man was Preston Atwood, whom Piper had just been fucked by, and only remembered him as a lazy, entitled lay.
Preston shook Piper’s hand and told him, quietly, that he was excited for the night to come.
Another man in a navy blazer whose face Piper had seen on a Forbes cover. A private equity jerk off from the East Coast. A name and face Piper could not remember.
The others he didn’t know, all of them in the same price range of suit, all of them with the same haircut, all of them looking, collectively, like a board of directors that had decided to have dinner without the minutes. He figured that they were other tech and finance moguls in Jayson’s circle.
Piper did the math in his head. He had done it before, though never at a table. Between the nine of them, across all the companies they had founded and the companies they held, they controlled more market capitalization than the gross domestic product of many countries on earth.
***
The first course arrived at the table.
Piper waited for someone to speak to him, but nobody did.
The man to his right, gray-haired, mid-sixties, said something across Piper to the man on his other side about a property in Lake Como. The second man responded without looking at Piper. The conversation continued, and went over him in the way a draft went over a piece of furniture.
Jayson was talking to the actor at the other end of the table.
“He had a strong first half,” Jayson was saying. “Though the division is harder this year than last.”
Piper looked up. Jayson was talking about him like he was not at the table. The actor nodded and said something in return about an old friend in Denver who was a season-ticket holder. Jayson smiled and said yes, the team in Denver was interesting this year.
The conversation moved. Piper was not addressed. He had not expected to be. He was, nevertheless, surprised by how clean the not-addressing was. He knew he was not there for intellectual conversation, but as an object to pass around post dessert.
“So boys, when is our next trip to Destiny’s Grove?” One of the men asked from the other end of the table.
“How about in the spring, it’s beautiful that time of year, and we have a lot to discuss there among the chosen,” Jayson replied with a smirk.
Piper had heard about Destiny’s Grove before but was never invited because he was told the help was never invited.
The media had conveniently never covered the private retreat for the uber rich because many of the members owned the media.
The man across from Piper, sometime during the second course, met his eyes for what he thought was a long enough moment that a sentence could be in store.
He said, pleasantly, “The fish is very good.” It was a thing to say I guess, Piper thought.
The man smiled at him like he was an animal in a petting zoo and returned to his conversation with the man on the other side of him.
He was whispering this time. All the men were whispering now, ever since the conversation shifted to Destiny’s Grove, they all whispered.
Piper sat between the whispers. He sat alone among important men, and the only engagement he got was glances at his body in the suit that was perfectly tailored for these men’s enjoyment.
The actor turned toward the head of the table and asked Jayson, casually, whether Piper would be in Sun Valley for the charity event in July. The question came across the table. Piper opened his mouth to answer knowing it was already on his calendar.
“He will,” Jayson said.
The actor nodded and turned back.
Piper closed his mouth.
He looked down at his plate.
He drank his Chardonnay, knowing full well he should not be drinking before the final games of the season.
But he knew he would need some kind of liquid impairment to get through the night.
He would rather it be Chardonnay than a party drug one of Jayson’s friends used to drop in his drink to get him to forget what was happening.
He looked up and Preston was laughing at something the private equity man had said, and at the head of the table Jayson was signaling for something with two fingers, and a member of the staff moved toward him with a bottle of 1989 Chateau Pétrus.
It was not that they were being rude, Piper thought, because rudeness would have required recognition.
Rudeness would have been at least some recognition that Piper was a human. He was not a guest that night, he was the furniture.
Houses, watches, cars, jewelry, and tables at Michelin starred restaurants he hadn’t chosen.
Tailors he hadn’t selected measured him for suits he hadn’t ordered.
Flights he hadn’t booked, landing in cities he hadn’t asked to see.
The contract his parents had signed when he was twenty-one.
Rooms full of people who had known his name before he entered and who stopped knowing it the moment they stopped needing to.
The dinner was not new for Piper, this was his life.
Piper picked up his Chardonnay again.
His hand was steady and he focused on it. That was a thing he could still do, watch his own hand be steady in a room full of people who were talking about him and past him and through him. He was, at a minimum, still good at that.