Chapter 41
The smell of grilled meat and roasted onions hit me as I ran up the stairs. A bottle of beer in his left hand, a pair of tongs in his right, Vince was standing at the grill humming the melody of a song I was unfamiliar with.
“Hey,” he said, a bit surprised when he noticed me. “I thought you’d be coming…” He stopped. “What happened?”
“Kay and I had an argument.”
“Shit. What about?”
Before I could answer, Laurie came out of the house with a bowl of salad.
“Oh! Hey!” she called out happily. “Vince said you’d be coming over after you’d eaten.”
“I ate already.”
“Thank God,” she said, making a face. “The salad would never have been enough.”
With a loud hiss, the grill drew my attention and my gaze back to Vince. Who was looking at me. Again. Or still. Everything okay? he asked with his eyes. This time I shook my head.
“Can you take over a sec?” he asked Laurie. “The potatoes still need around ten minutes. The meat needs to come off in no more than five.”
“Of course.” She reached for the tongs. Either she hadn’t caught our silent exchange of words or was simply being sensitive.
“Tell me, what’s going on?”
“I asked Kay if she wanted to be my trainer when I move here. And”—I waved my hands—“she said no.”
“You told her?”
“Yeah. If we do this, I’m going to need a trainer.”
“But…we agreed to think it over calmly first.”
“We don’t have time. My flight’s in a week.”
“Lou…I…” The moonlight wasn’t bright enough for me to read his expression, but his voice was unquiet. “I can’t.”
“What?”
“I can’t be together with you.”
My head was working at full speed without understanding what was going on.
“I wasn’t honest with you.”
“You weren’t honest with me?” My voice was trembling.
“I told you that I…that I used to work with computers. And that’s true, but…but only partly.”
All of a sudden, having to make do with his voice alone annoyed me immensely. I wanted to drag him into the light. To see his face. And, above all, I wanted answers. Now.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Okay,” he whispered, and I could tell that this was the beginning of a story that would change everything between us.
“Back when I was still in high school, my buddy Lance and I developed a finance app. We called it Vinance. A mix of Vince, Lance, and…finance.” He sounded embarrassed.
“So, the app allowed you to bundle accounts. Bank accounts, deposits, crypto, payment accounts…everything. We were so sure of it that we went to Shark Tank with it.”
“What’s Shark Tank?”
“A show on ABC where you can make investors aware of you.”
“Ah.”
“One of the sharks believed in our app and invested. So, we founded a fintech company, got more investors, and so on…things kind of went through the roof. A year later we sold it for 2.5 million bucks.”
My eyes widened.
“We weren’t even eighteen.” He took a deep breath.
“I wanted to invest the money in a new start-up. A payment platform. I’d had the idea for a while.
” Despite the darkness, I saw him make a dismissive gesture, as if he didn’t want to go into more detail.
“Lance had other plans. He’d outgrown it.
He wanted to take a step back and go to college.
So, off he went to Harvard, and off I went to Silicon Valley.
I founded VinTech and ended up the boss of my own financial start-up at nineteen. ”
“VinTech,” I repeated, more to myself than anything else, but Vince thought I was making fun of him.
“Yeah, I’ve got something with puns.”
“What did your parents have to say?”
“They would have preferred me to go to college, like Lance. Invest my money in my education.”
“But you didn’t want to.”
“I did. I mean, kind of, yeah. But here’s the funny thing.
” He sounded reflective. “Secretly I knew it’d be smarter to go to a stupidly expensive elite university and get all the knowledge I needed to be at the forefront.
But I was so impatient. I was just so…driven.
I felt like I didn’t have any time to lose. Like it was slipping away from me.”
I swallowed audibly, and once again felt like he took my reaction the wrong way.
“I know, it sounds kinda ridiculous. A nineteen-year-old kid worrying he was going to miss the boat. But I’d had too much of the cake to put it in the freezer to eat some other day.
I wanted more.” He exhaled. “My parents had no choice but to accept it. I was an adult. And financially independent.” Once again he paused briefly.
“So, I moved out and went to Palo Alto. One moment I was in the room I’d had as a kid, the next I was Mark Zuckerberg’s neighbor. ”
I stared in his direction, spellbound. I couldn’t believe what he was telling me.
“That must’ve been heavy.”
“It was. I mean, I was nineteen, on my own for the first time, and suddenly I had people working for me. They were all so talented and highly qualified. They’d studied at the best universities in the world.
And now they were working for me. I felt like an impostor.
I felt like I hadn’t earned being there because everyone else had such impressive backgrounds and abilities. ”
“But it was your start-up.”
“Yeah, I know. And yet, I always felt like I had to prove myself anyway. To work harder than everyone else.” He paused, and I realized that everything he’d told me until now was just the tip of the iceberg.
“Overnight I was in the middle of hustle culture. I worked nonstop. Every single day. Ninety, sometimes a hundred hours a week.”
“How did you manage?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew the answer.
“When you take the right stuff, it’s not an issue,” he said bitterly. “I couldn’t really sleep all that much anyway. I had nightmares, anxiety, panic attacks. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat, and vomit repeatedly.”
“Didn’t your parents notice anything?”
“I’m sure they would have. If they’d been a part of my life.”
“You weren’t in contact?”
“Very little at that point, no. When you’re completely focused on work, on performance and success, there isn’t any room for interpersonal relationships.
It’s just a waste of time. Because there’s always something more important than texting your mom, calling your dad.
Than visiting on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
” His voice cracked. “By the time they had their boating accident, I hadn’t seen them in two years. Hadn’t spoken with them in months.”
“And Laurie?”
“My job hadn’t just become the center of my world, Lou. It was my world.”
“Did you ever think of getting help? Going into therapy?”
“To do that I would have had to realize something wasn’t right.”
“But you were suffering from insomnia! Anxiety!” My voice grew louder. “Panic attacks!”
“Yeah. Like everyone else around me,” he said, undisguisedly disillusioned. “Going over your physical and mental boundaries was just part of the lifestyle. And you can’t forget how young I was.” Then added in a whisper, “And alone.”
A part of me wanted to walk over and hug him, while another part of me was busy reproving him for having done it to himself.
“When my mom and dad died, I was forced to take a little time off. I had to fly home, deal with the funeral, all the paperwork, the house. Laurie. She was doing pretty bad.”
I bit my cheeks at the thought of losing both my parents at once. That would simply be unbearable.
“I tried to be there for her, but it was tough. At the beginning, at least. There was like…some kind of gulf between us. We’d grown apart.
And I realized that that was on me. I alone was to blame for the fact that I was like a stranger to my sister.
That I couldn’t help her mourn. That did something to me.
” His voice grew brittle. “When I got back to Palo Alto, I looked for a therapist. After the first couple of sessions, I realized that my job wasn’t simply eating into my time and my energy, but my identity.
That I wasn’t living the life I wanted to be living.
That I wasn’t around the people I wanted to be around.
” He paused. “I sold VinTech and stuck all of my money in an endowment. The Tim and Luciana Greenfield Foundation. It supports projects within the field of improving mental health.”
A deafening silence set in.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” I asked.
“It’s not exactly something you go into over a plate of shrimp.”
“Things between us have changed a bit between that plate of shrimp and today, no?”
“Yeah. And that made it even harder for me.”
“Why?”
I could hear him sigh. “Because you don’t really want to come off so weak in front of someone you’re trying to impress. Especially not someone like you.”
“Someone like me?”
“You radiate pure strength, Lou.”
I looked down at myself. “This is just a body. The result of training hard.”
“It’s not. You’re strong inside and out. I mean, you’ve got a really shitty year behind you. You didn’t know whether you’d ever play at your old level again. And yet, you never gave up. You never stopped believing in yourself.”
I began to say something, but he stopped me.
“That’s fucking impressive, Lou. But pretty fucking intimidating too.”
I had to fight not to sound too annoyed. “You’re intimidated by me?”
“The mirror you hold out to me.”
“I’m not holding any mirror out to you!”
“Yes, you are. Just…just by being you.”
I felt attacked and grew defensive. “Well, maybe you should have steered clear of me then.”
“You’re right. And I wanted to. At the beginning, anyway. When I found out who you were and…what you do, I decided to stay far away.”
“What I do?” I snorted.
He ignored my comment.
“It wasn’t so much your connection to Kay that freaked me out. It was the fact that you were coming from a world I never wanted to step foot in again. A world where performance is all that counts. And success. Where pressure isn’t a bad thing, but a privilege.”
I flinched, and he noticed. Pressure is a privilege is what’s written on a bronze plate at Arthur Ashe Stadium, home of the US Open. The full quote is Pressure is a privilege—it only comes to those who earn it.
“Yeah, I know that it’s from Billie Jean King. I used to have a poster of that in my office. Used to look at it every day. For years. But I only learned she was a tennis player a little while ago.”
“She’s a legend,” I whispered.
“I disagree with her all the same. Pressure shouldn’t be something you work for or earn. And you definitely shouldn’t be proud to feel it.”
“But that’s not what she means! She’s just trying to emphasize the positive side of pressure.”
“There is no positive side.”
“Of course there is. If you know how to work with it, it can drive you to perform at the top.”
“Yeah, but very few know how to do that. Most fall apart.” He added quietly, “Like me.”
“But you didn’t fall apart. You pulled the ripcord at the right moment, and now you’re here and…living the life you want to live. And that’s fantastic!”
“It is,” he said, but his voice had a sadness to it that concerned me. “And that’s why I have to protect it. Protect myself.”
“From what?”
“From you, Lou. Above all, what you stand for.”
I froze.
“I almost died in that world where all that matters is performance and success. And I never want to go back.”
“But you don’t have to.”
“You live in that world. Being together with you would mean becoming a part of it again.”
Suddenly it was like the scales fell from my eyes. That’s what this was all about. This was why he’d opened the door to his past for me.
“But you don’t have to be a part of it. You don’t have to accompany me to my matches or sit in my box. You don’t have to do anything.” I took a deep breath and almost choked, thanks to taking too much air in too quickly. “We don’t have to talk about tennis. We can…”
“Lou,” he said softly. “You said yourself that your goal was being number one in the world. And that you will do everything to reach that goal. You need someone on your side who will support you in that.”
“I have enough people on my side who support me. That doesn’t have to be your job.”
“But what’s left? Your entire life revolves around tennis. The sport tells you when to wake up, what to eat, where to go, how long to stay, where to sleep…”
“You knew that beforehand. Before last night. Why didn’t you say anything? When we talked about it… Why…?”
“I told you that we didn’t have any future.”
“Yeah, because you don’t like long-distance relationships. Not because you detest the way I live.”
“I don’t detest it.”
“But you judge it.”
“No!” He ran a tired hand through his hair. “I’m not judging your life, Lou. I just can’t be a part of it.”
His words and their finality clawed their way into my heart with a thousand barbs. My heart, which had long since realized that it was not what he wanted to have. Or hold.