In the car, driving to Harvard square, as we passed the High School, I asked Adrian how old his kids were.
"12 and 15" he said.
"So one is in high school? Here in Watertown?" I asked.
"No BBN, Buckingham, Brown and Nichols. The last bastion of Aryan homogeneity."
Adrian darts the car in front of an oncoming number 77. "Well, at least we live in a diverse neighborhood."
I laugh.
"I'm serious, there are people at BBN who are so totally like me... that... well, I know them, I went to school with them." It isn't clear whether he means this literally or figuratively, it seems not to matter— they represent types.
"The further along I get in what I'm doing the less and less diverse things get." I don't know if he means in the world of work and healthcare or in terms of raising children, he continues, "Well, actually, I guess the preschool at Harvard was pretty homogenous."
I laugh.
"You know, everybody who sends their kids there is a doctor or a lawyer. It's just unbelievable."
"What about Cambridge Rindge and Latin?" I ask.
"Thats a public school."
"Yes, but you have to test to get in, so its pretty good right? And, I mean isn't it more diverse?"
"Yes, but this whole private school thing, that's like something that's happened in the last 20 years. I mean I went to public school, Judy went to public school."
"But?" I say.
He trails off as we pull into the Watertown Savings bank.
"Get this on video," he says," The starving entrepreneur has to pay his mortgage on the last possible day because cash flow is so bad."
He darts out of the car. I wait. When he returns, I say "Congratulations."
"For what?"
"For getting in under the wire." I say.
"It's not really as bad as it sounds." He lights a cigarette and swerves past two cars with a motion that rocks the little hatchback like it's changing course on high seas. "I mean, when I was doing this, I was never so. I never."
He checks the sentence as the car stops behind another in the left hand lane, turning left. Adrian glances back, continues to inch the car into the onconming traffic in the right lane. His beeper has gone off so he is diving his right hand into his pocket and steering with the left, cigarette in lips.
"When I was like, corporate director, or consultant, I never felt the same about money. You don't have the same relation. Now, I am, I have. What I understand, and what Barry cannot understand from his position is that there isn't any way to know how much I am making, or if I am making, I sink $20,000 into the project, and then I sink another $20,000. You know, it used to be that I never understood that apocryphal story about people taking out a second mortgage on their home to start a business, but it's clear to me know, it's like an addiction."
He swerves across a wide crenellated, typically cantabrigian 'intersection' towards and elderly bicylist. He is trying to dial his cellular phone as he smokes and tells me this story.
"It's a controllable addiction though." The phone rings, he flips open the credit card-sized device, takes a drag, and says "Hi Barry, I'm on my way."
Flips shut the phone and downshifts, swerves across the opposite lane, then brakes abruptly behind a school bus. The sun-bleached dashboard begins to crumble under my white knuckles. "The only addiction that isnt controllable, I've found, is smoking. It is so addictive." He stops just outside Harvard Square, "This is where you get out."