“I’m just glad we didn’t need an ambulance,” Jeff Park said. “Although I did call for a house visit from my family doctor.”

“Cancel it,” Barry said. “I’m feeling better than ever. Just low blood sugar is all. Hey, seriously. You’re a peach of a guy. Where’s your better half?”

“Still looking for that perfect girl, I’m afraid.”

“And you decorated this place yourself?”

“Guilty as charged. Come, let me make you a Corpse Reviver.” They walked to an area flanked by a shelf of Cîroc bottles denoting general recreation. Jeff Park poured a glass of fizzy German mineral water. “You’ve got to hydrate,” he ordered. “I want to see you finish this H 2 O before you hit the hard stuff.”

Jeff Park’s Corpse Reviver was, as the name promised, a ridiculously potent blend of cognac, Calvados, and vermouth, served in a Martini glass. “Jesus,” Barry said, as he finished his drink. Some vague memories of downtown bars returned: Jeff Park could hold his own with the alcohol.

“So, what’s up, Barry?” Jeff Park said. “Just passing through? Decided to look me up?” He had brought out a bottle of twenty-year Yamazaki and was serving it straight up, quite decadent for 1:27 p.m. What the hell did Jeff Park do for a living? He had cashed out of This Side of Capital with zero.

“All of this is going to sound crazy,” Barry said.

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m on a journey. A journey by bus.” Barry knew that he would eventually have to explain his flight from This Side of Capital to people in his bracket. He knew that news of his “meltdown” would immediately form the latest bulletin in the incestuous, bloodthirsty world from which he had sprung. But he doubted that it would really surprise anyone. The people in his world could be nuts. The world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater, of Westport, Connecticut, was essentially a cult, with its own bible, ritual mind control, and feats of strength. A fellow at another fund, a quant billionaire-in-training, played piano at a third-rate bar while passing around a tip jar. Like your first ankle monitor or your fourth divorce, the occasional break with reality was an important part of any hedge-fund titan’s biography.

“The things I’ve seen,” Barry said, and he told Jeff Park a few of his adventures so far.

Jeff Park seemed interested. He poured more drinks, although he insisted that Barry chase his with water. “It sounds a little bit like you’re doing a version of ‘On the Road,’ ” Park said.

“That’s exactly right!” Barry shouted. “That’s exactly what I thought.” No wonder he had picked Jeff Park to host him—the man had literary sensibilities beyond those of his colleagues. They really did a good job of educating up at Cornell.

“I used to take the Greyhound to visit my uncle’s family in Savannah,” Jeff Park said. “Everyone there looked at us like we were freaks.”

“Everyone looks at me like I’m a freak!”

“You kind of are a freak, Barry.”

Barry took that as the highest of compliments. He was bonding with this former employee. They were going to be friends. “Are you from around here originally?”

“Yeah. I moved back down to take care of my parents.”

“Your parents are, I want to say, from China?”

“Close enough.”

“My wife is Indian.”

“Rock.”

“You ought to get married!” Barry said, completely forgetting that his own marriage was only a team of seven lawyers short of kaput, to borrow his father’s favorite word. Maybe this nice Jeff Park couldn’t find a woman to marry away from New York. He had given up on finding a partner in order to take care of his parents. Immigrants. Barry wanted to tell him that his own mother had died when he was five, but they weren’t there yet. He eyed his glass of Yamazaki as Atlanta blazed cruel beyond the tinted floor-to-ceiling windows. His instinct to help Jeff Park was overwhelming. He remembered Seema’s friend, the Asian woman from Brooklyn. Tina? Lena? “I threw away my cell phone,” Barry said.

“Now, that’s amazing,” Jeff Park said.

“Can I check something on your computer?”

A laptop was provided. The world of the Internet was so far away from who he was at this point. Still, he brought up Seema’s profile. No new posts in forever. Seema was not an avid social-media person, a thing he loved about her. “Is that your wife and kid?” Jeff Park asked.

The profile photo in the corner of the screen was of Seema with her arms almost around Shiva, behind them the neo-Georgian shell of the six-thousand-square-foot Rhinebeck house in progress. Shiva was looking away, but in a super-intelligent way, which made the whole thing look like a portrait in normalcy, maybe precocity, and, anyway, Seema’s best Bollywood smile lit up the landscape better than any sun. Her cleavage was open and ready and golden.

“What a gorgeous family you have,” Jeff Park said. “When I worked for you, I think you were just about to get married. That kid. Those eyes.”

“Yes,” Barry said, his hand frozen over the keyboard. A “Sesame Street” song started playing in his head. “C” is for cookie, that’s good enough for me. “But here’s what I wanted to show you,” he said. He scrolled through the list of Seema’s friends.

“Now, this girl is spunky,” Barry said. “She called me a tool to my face! And I think she’s pretty intellectual, like you. Oh, one night, in Brooklyn, she made these great Chinese dumplings for us. I bet your folks would love her.”

“Mina Kim,” Jeff Park read off the screen. “Not really up my alley.”

Barry was heartbroken. “But she’s Chinese!”

Jeff Park stared at him. “I’m more into the Southern-belle type,” he finally said.

“Oh.” Barry sighed.

“But thanks for looking out for me. You’re like that woman from ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ ”

Barry sort of knew what he was talking about. Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match. Jeff Park had a wide cultural reach. “Well, I’m going to make it my mission to get you married,” he said. “Nice guy like you.”

“I’m not averse to the ladies,” Jeff Park said. “I’ve designed this place with them in mind.”

“How so?”

Jeff Park took him on a tour, starting with a massive glass-topped dining table. “You see these lights?” he said, pointing out a trio of Sputnik-style globes hanging over the mirrored surface. “The average girl I date is five foot six, or an inch taller than the national average. I have a spreadsheet that lists the attributes of each girl I’ve ever dated. It’s super granular. So if I’m making her dinner, and she’s standing here, waiting for me, talking to me, maybe having a drink, the light from these lamps is directly level with her eyes. She can see better, and I can enjoy her glow.”

Barry was impressed by Park’s thoughtfulness. A spreadsheet. The rap on guys in finance was all wrong. They cared too much. He knew he did. If you looked at it a certain way, he had abandoned his family because he didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to accommodate their special needs. He examined a frigate-size couch. “This sofa is the perfect height for a five-foot-six woman,” Jeff Park said. “When she sits down, the sofa waterfalls at the back of her knees.” He invited Barry to sit down. “You see, there’s a gap of at least three inches between the back of your knee and the couch, because you’re tall. But if you were a five-foot-six woman, you’d be completely snug.”