The Doorman: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

But these days many so-called liberals assumed not only that everyone was liberal, but that everyone agreed on what exactly that meant, on every issue, with no acceptable variance. To Emily this looked like the opposite of liberal. This seemed a lot more like fascism than democracy.

Sometimes the whole setup didn’t look like financial aid so much as financial entrapment. A system that existed mainly to create loans to generate interest and defaults and fees. Maybe college was just another way to trick poor people into a lifetime of consumer debt. To redistribute income upward.

The drawers had little windows and neat labels that had all been hand-redrawn by the old super. Tommy O’Sullivan often had a half-pint of rye in his back pocket and he was borderline illiterate but his handwriting was like a wedding invitation. Say what you want about those old Catholic schools but nobody has penmanship like that anymore.

You have no idea, when you’re young, what it’s going to be like when you’re not.

Most mistakes boiled down to the same thing: trusting the wrong person.