As an analyst for JP Morgan, Dana Vachon learned that money can buy you anything—except a life. An exclusive excerpt from his debut novel, Mergers & Acquisitions

The following excerpt appeared in the March/April issue of Radar, on newsstands now. To get a risk-free copy of the print magazine delivered to your doorstep, click here!

Frances and I met Roger Thorne and Lauren Schuyler outside of Cipriani, amid the tables that spilled out onto the sidewalk of West Broadway, all covered in white linen and teeming with long-limbed, listless models and the paunchy foreign playboys who date them. One Latin man punched a number into his Nokia. Five tables away another man's Motorola began playing the ring-tone version of Enrique Iglesias's "Escape."
   "Giacomo!" said the first man, throwing his arms into the air.
   "Simone!" replied Giacomo, rushing over to greet his long-lost friend.
   We walked inside, where Lisa Gastineau sat with two other older, attractive women at a table beyond the bar. She raised her neck to look at Thorne. Though aware of his middle-aged admirer, Thorne was apprehensive about returning her gaze. Perhaps he could feel Lauren Schuyler's disapproving eyes on his back, at once daring and forbidding him to acknowledge the would-be Mrs. Robinson.
   Thorne stared not at the aging siren, but over at the bar, where stood all five feet eight inches of Sophie Dvornik in the Dolce & Gabbana jeans that had so shocked the prep school girls during our first year in college, and fit her as though Domenico and Stefano had conceived them with only her legs and ass in mind. Just as these jeans struggled to contain Sophie's limbs, a vintage micro T-shirt fought against her formidable chest. Silk-screened on this shirt was a nude woman, and upon closer inspection it became clear that the nude woman was in fact Sophie Dvornik. Beneath the picture was a statement in Arabic that was familiar to anyone familiar with the work of Yves Grandchatte, at that point perhaps the most celebrated artist on the island of Manhattan, and undoubtedly the darling of the Pace Wildenstein Gallery, where Sophie had found work as an assistant.
   "Yves Grandchatte made the shirt for me," Sophie boasted as she approached, and joined us in walking to the table where Frances's friends were already seated. Everyone except for Frances looked at Sophie's chest with jealousy, and it wasn't only for her breasts. Just that past week, New York magazine had run a feature on Grandchatte and his myriad addictions, his black belt in karate, and his ongoing feud with Homeland Security for boarding airplanes with the words "I'll be your suicide bomber today" emblazoned across his chest in various foreign languages. The interest in Yves was writ so large that Sophie had no choice but to address the subject.
   "I work with him at Pace Wildenstein," she said, and relished in explaining. "Did you know he's French-Algerian? What a genius. I've been working on his MoMA gala, and it is going to blow everyone away. He's totally self-taught. Totally sui generis ..."
Phoebe's favorite topic of conversation was how her boyfriend had recently been given a $600,000 bonus   No one knew exactly what sui generis meant, only that they had heard the term on a few occasions, and that on those occasions they had also not known what it meant. This didn't stop the table from nodding in agreement. Frances alone seemed to know what Sophie had said and, smiling mischievously, she broke the momentary silence.
   "And, impudens leno es, at least that's what I think," she said.
   "Absolutely," said Sophie. Again everyone agreed.
   "What did you say?" I whispered to Frances amid the nodding heads.
   "That she is a shameless pimp," she replied, and burst into beautiful laughter.
   Unaware of Frances's insult and content to have established herself as a cultural arbiter of some merit, Sophie smiled confidently and worked herself into a seat. Everyone at the table chattered brightly, and Frances introduced me to her friends.
   "Tommy, this is Phoebe ..."
   Phoebe had eyes like costume jewels, shiny and unconvincing. Her father was a senator from a flyover state, and you did not need to look very deeply into her intricately highlighted hair to see her Midwestern roots. One afternoon that summer, when we were laying in her bed at the beach, Frances had told me that Phoebe had been the sweetest girl at Choate. During those years her father was only a state attorney general. Frances had said that Phoebe changed with her father's ascension to national politics. Indeed, the exfoliated, overly tanned woman seated before me had little in common with the ponytailed girl I'd seen in pictures. Phoebe leaned in for hello kisses, a kiss on the left cheek, another on the right. She had done a year abroad, studying in Florence, before landing a job as an editorial assistant at Seventeen magazine upon her return, and she demonstrated both her worldliness and world-weariness by kissing everyone twice. She introduced me to her boyfriend, who gave further testimony to her worldliness. He looked like a kinder, gentler Uday Hussein, and moved a green Lehman Brothers duffle bag from his lap before offering a lazy handshake.
   "I'm Biglari," he said, before settling back down from his semi-standing position.
   "Big Larry?" I was puzzled.
   According to Frances, one of Phoebe's favorite topics of conversation was how her boyfriend had recently been given a $600,000 bonus. That is a lot of money, it's true, but did it really entitle him to call himself Big Larry? To go from Larry to Lawrence for a bit of added prestige would be considered acceptable, but adding an adjective like Big was crass even by the most vulgar standards.
   Phoebe giggled and rolled her head. "No. His name is Biglari! He's Purrrrsian."
   "Biglari," he said again, emphasizing the first syllable this time, to make the point. "I work at Lehman Brothers."
   I soon learned that Big Larry's family had been part of the exodus of wealthy Iranians who'd fled the country before the Ayatollah toppled the Shah in the late '70s. He seemed none the worse for wear. Way down in his Lehman Brothers duffle bag, Larry's Lehman Brothers Blackberry vibrated with Larry's Lehman Brothers e-mail. He was a Lehman Brothers bond trader, and he had no choice but to bend down and dig around for it. Soon he was happily punching away, oblivious to anything beyond the high-resolution screen of his little device, which he spoke of only to praise.
   "Lehman gives us these," he boasted, admiring the device and his own fingernails. "They are not Blackberries, but Blueberries. The new Blueberries, with color and Internet. Lehman is always at the cutting edge, always the very best.
"Tommy. Roger. Tell me. Does J.S. Spenser's M&A group give you a Blueberry?"
   Roger and I were silent, and taking this silence as a no, Biglari went back to typing.
   Staring disinterestedly around the table from her seat next to Phoebe was CeCe, another friend of Frances's from Choate. With a head of blond hair and a naturally golden complexion, CeCe looked as Phoebe wanted to look, and seemed to know it. A girl with 1,500 ways to say "fuck you," she worked as a publicist for Carolina Herrera, but carried herself as if she guarded the Holy Grail. Frances had told me that CeCe's father had gone to jail for illegal funding schemes, joking that so far as anyone could tell the experience had only made him a more cunning and successful financial criminal when he emerged from prison in the '90s. CeCe seemed just right as the daughter of such a figure. From the start she gave me the impression that all of Manhattan was a large soiree, and she was in charge of the guest list. Even Frances seemed a bit nervous when she introduced me as her new boyfriend, and relieved when CeCe nodded to her that I passed muster, but perhaps only barely. She certainly didn't bother getting up for a formal hello, but it was really just as well. I'd been lucky to guess Phoebe's ritual kissing greeting correctly, and could not be assured repeated success. Half of the young women in New York think themselves European and kiss on both cheeks when you meet them, while the other half live content in their American identities and kiss only on one cheek, if at all. So you never know where you are going to get kissed, or how many times. I've anticipated second kisses that never came, and found myself with puckered lips staring at some poor terrified girl. Other times I've shifted my face after the first kiss, only to receive a second awkwardly on the lips.

CeCe nursed a pink-orange Bellini and cooed to her date, who waved and introduced himself as John. A happy man with a broad smile, he seemed the only person there who was genuinely happy to meet me. I also noted that he had strangely small shoulders, and a remarkably large head.

   "We miss you, Franny! Where've you been hiding?" CeCe asked, sloshing her Bellini about its flute and playing with her hair.

   Frances's legs bounced beneath the table as she stared up at the big picture of Dizzy Gillespie hanging on the wall across from her. "Here and there. Reading a lot, studying ..."

   "Well you should come out more! We have all kinds of fun ..."

   CeCe then commenced to astonish me with a demonstration of a memory that, if not perfectly photographic, was frighteningly close:

   "Ungaro's party for his new thongs on the third! Cavalli's party for his new store on the sixth! Then the Met party at the Temple of Dendur on the 21st, and then the screening of John's new movie last night! And it's gonna be at Cannes!"
   "Cannes is fabulous," said Sophie knowingly.

   "Totally, babe," said Thorne, admiring Sophie's legs and access to the entertainment world.

   "Yeah! Cannes!" Phoebe exclaimed.

   Big Larry looked up from his Blueberry. "Cannes?" he said, suddenly interested in the table conversation.

   CeCe beamed and put her arm around John's little shoulders as she said it again, not only to make sure everyone knew, but also because she loved saying it. The word got her excited.

   "Cannes!"

   Feeling left out, Lauren Schuyler provided the final chorus of the Cannes choir in an attempt to keep pace with Thorne and Sophie.

   "Cannes ..."

   Some sociologists believe that call and response is not a feature of modern societies, but they are wrong. Like fading verses of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," the echoes of Cannes rippled across the table. You could film 90 minutes of rhesus monkeys playing Nerf football, and as long as you got the damn thing screened at Cannes people would want to know you for having done it. John basked in the attention of the Cannes-obsessed table for several minutes before excusing himself to go to the bathroom. He pushed back his chair and hopped down to the floor, where he buttoned his tiny blazer and straightened his tiny khakis. And under the many bright lights of Cipriani's tremendous crystal chandelier, I realized all at once why his head had seemed so big, and his shoulders so small. He was a midget.

   Frances's jaw dropped as she joined me in the revelation, but John, straining to place his napkin back on his plate, didn't seem to notice. Pushing his chair back in, he turned his back and marched off to the bathroom like Frodo Baggins off to defeat Sauron. The only sound at the table was Big Larry, who was back to clicking away on his Lehman-issued Blueberry. The rest of us sat silently, watching the top of John's big midget head bob and weave its way through the tables and chairs of the restaurant. Poor, beautiful, brilliant CeCe, who wanted only to date a star, no matter how small. She watched like a proud mother as he bobbed and weaved among the legs of waiters and carts of dishes, and breathed a sigh of relief when finally he had made it.

   "Robert Redford is really short too, you know," said CeCe, sounding more apologetic than defensive.

   Yet CeCe wasn't sleeping with Robert Redford. She was sleeping with a midget. She was not a Robert Redford fucker. She was something else, something unplaceable. But what?

   "Midgetfucker."

A girl with 1,500 ways to say "fuck you," CeCe worked as a publicist for Carolina Herrera, but carried herself as if she guarded the Holy Grail   Yes, that was it. The word hopped out of Frances's mouth just as it came into mine, truthful and precise. Later that night, she would tell me that the moment she said it, she appreciated what a harsh place the world must be for Tourette's sufferers. CeCe looked confused, then craned her neck in my direction. For the moment it seemed as though Sophie and I alone had heard the outburst. I watched CeCe's face to see if she would decipher the word from the garbled tape of memory. In a few seconds she had forgotten what had confused her in the first place, and went back to thinking of herself as dating a petite Redford.

   John returned from the bathroom, climbed awkwardly onto his chair, and grabbed CeCe's thigh, which caused her to giggle. John may have been a small man but he seemed to be in possession of a giant libido. Still oblivious to being in the presence of a midget, Big Larry dropped an antacid tablet into his already sparkling water and took a big swig as he loosened his Armani tie. Phoebe reached into her purse, tossed a pill into her mouth, and washed it down with a gulp of Big Larry's antacid water.

   With that, a waiter in a white tuxedo danced over to take our order. Phoebe rushed to go first.

   "I can't have any sugar or carbohydrates so I'm going to have the chef's salad without potatoes or croutons," she said, with the matter-of-fact urgency of a woman accustomed to the indulgence of her culinary whims.

   "The croutons and the potatoes. They are together in the salad," the waiter replied helplessly, turning his palms up. Then he adjusted his piqué bow tie and made a proclamation graver than anything uttered by an Italian since Mussolini. "We no can take them apart!"

   Undeterred, Phoebe slurringly attempted to compose a meal entirely bereft of at least two major nutritional building blocks.

   "So then I'm gonna have the clam soup? Does the clam soup have carbs?"

   She was saddened to hear that the clam soup was filled with as much pasta as clam.

   "Does all pasta have carbs?" she asked the table.

   "Any pasta is going to have carbs, Pheebs," CeCe informed her sternly.

   CeCe stared at Phoebe. Phoebe stared at CeCe. They had been through this pantomime before, and in a single voice placed their order.

   "We'll just have the endive and avocado salad."

   "I'll have the salmon with white wine and leeks," Big Larry said, looking up from his Blueberry again.

   Frances asked for more bread and ordered risotto.

   The waiter scribbled down the order, and Big Larry seized upon the ensuing silence to discuss himself.

   "I just worked on a very big financing for a group of Vietnamese fish farms over at Lehman. These guys raise salmon in buildings! Can you imagine a salmon living in a building? Great deal, though. The bonds traded up all afternoon, and I won't say how much, but ..."

   Sophie looked sadistically at Phoebe before ordering a large plate of spaghetti and one-upping Big Larry.

   "My father is doing a movie in Vietnam with Russell Crowe right now," she said, lazily slurping on her third drink. "It's going to be like Apocalypse Now, only more apocalyptic, and with more of the now ..."

   "Really?" said Thorne excitedly.

   "Really," Sophie coldly replied.

   "Does he need any more young dudes to play soldiers?" asked Thorne, who had always believed that if given the chance he could be a movie star.

   "I think he's got all the young dudes he needs," said Sophie.

   "Maybe he could use, like, a young associate producer?" suggested Thorne, hopefully.

   "No, he's all set," said Sophie, a bit surprised.

   "Well then, do you think he could just use someone with serious muscles?" said Roger, flexing a bit. Sophie broke out laughing.

   "Why would you want to leave Wall Street?" she asked a few moments later, after sipping her newly delivered Bellini. "You're the quin­tessential J. S. Spenser banker. It's perfect for you."

   Thorne nodded in knowing agreement, but looked bleak and bare as he leaned over to Sophie and unburdened his soul.

   "It's true, babe," he said. "But sometimes I don't know. Deep down, I just feel like I need to be out there, you know, interacting with celebrities."

   Sophie looked into Thorne's eyes for some sign that he was joking. Roger took her stare as a sign of true connection, and began to pitch her on the project that he knew could make him a star.

   "I've got this idea for a movie called Jugsaw, about the ghost of this chainsaw killer who comes back from the dead, and cuts off babes' jugs. I mean, I think it could be a real franchise. T-shirts, coffee mugs, babes. Dig?"
   Sophie flashed a mischievous smile and told Thorne that she thought she could help him. The two then disappeared into one another the way people do over dinner. Sophie didn't even notice when John the midget took her Bellini and drained it in a single gulp. I looked around the table to see that we had three bottles of sauvignon blanc and at least 15 empty Bellini glasses. Even with my diminished mathematical abilities I realized that if none of the girls offered to pay, and they probably wouldn't, I would soon be out several hundred dollars. The worst part was that there was nothing to be done about it.

Phoebe and CeCe talked about their years at Choate with Frances as Big Larry read e-mail and Lauren Schuyler tried in vain to listen to Thorne's conversation with Sophie over the din of the packed restaurant. Though Frances kept her hand on my thigh, the midget and I were the only ones not actively engaged, and this proved grounds for an (appropriately) small friendship. John pointed at his empty Bellini glass and looked up to see if I would join in his drink reorder.
   "Maybe something a bit less peachy?" I suggested, eyebrows raised.
   "Fuck, yeah!" he replied, and roared with laughter at the sound of his own profanity.
   "Johnny want a Johnnie Walker Black Label! Make it a double!" he barked to the waiter.
   "Grey Goose on the rocks," I followed, not to be outdone by this little man and his little liver.
   When our drinks arrived, Big Larry from Lehman offered a story about the time he made $50,000 in a single afternoon. Soon he was recalling his recent move from London to New York.
   "I kicked ass in London, now I'm gonna kick ass in New York," he said, to blank stares all around.
   John and I drank long and deep to all the ass that Big Larry had kicked in London and the many asses awaiting his kicking in New York. Soon John was really opening up to me, and he began talking about the early days of his career.
   "When I first started out I didn't know what sort of roles I would get ..."
He was as sloppy as Phoebe, his consonants and vowels thick and rolling.
   "I was thinking Willow. You know, Willow?"
You could film 90 minutes of rhesus monkeys playing Nerf football, and as long as you got the damn thing screened at Cannes people would want to know you for having done it   I did know Willow. In fact, I loved Willow, and told him so, albeit at a volume that apparently seemed much louder to everyone else than it did to me. Several diners turned their heads. Big Larry, the ass-kicking bond king of Lehman Brothers, stopped in mid-conversation to shoot a disgusted look from across the table. Frances's heel hit my shin. But there was no going back. John scrambled on his chair to get up on his knees, and stretched a hand over the basket of Cipriani bread sticks for a high-five.
   "Well, Willow sucks, man! So I played Puck!"
   The midget was quite plastered. Big Larry lost his audience entirely as the girls turned to look at the more animated goings-on at the far end of the table. I had taken a drama course at Georgetown and knew of another midget who had once played Shakespeare's Puck.
   "Didn't Webster once play Puck?" I asked.
   "Emmanuel Lewis in the house!" he boomed, and I got a big red boozy smile and another high-five from my new friend John the midget before asking something I had always wondered.
   "Is Webster a midget, too?" I asked.
   There, it was out. I said the m word. No more pretending. John and I had grown close, but this tested our bond. He paused for a brief, awkward moment, concluded that my inquiry was sincere, and gave an honest answer.
   "No, not at all," said John, expertly. "He's just really short."
   This observed difference between extreme shortness and actual midgetry set Frances into spasms of laughter, which caused me and John to recognize its innate truth and absurdity, and begin laughing, too. And when we were done laughing at the difference between midgetry and shortness, we continued to laugh at just the sight of each other laughing. John tried to calm himself down with a long drink of whiskey, but somewhere deep in his big head he found a new load of comedy and exploded anew, spraying the entire table with a mist of equal parts aged whiskey and saliva. He had just enough self-control to aim the spray, and it goes without saying that Big Larry got the worst of it. Mortified, CeCe flashed the waiter the international sign for more Bellinis, pointing in a circular motion at the empty glasses on the table.
   Frances leaned over and whispered confusedly in my ear. I felt the pear-shaped diamond of her mother's engagement ring sharp against my palm, and we held hands as CeCe rattled away about planning parties, doing seating arrangements, and answering phones. Soon the waiter brought our food. As John and I each confronted a large cut of meat, I wondered about the size of his internal organs. CeCe and Phoebe rearranged their salads while Frances ate her risotto, and poor Lauren Schuyler excused herself for a cigarette. Thorne didn't even acknowledge her exit and gestured excitedly as he explained to Sophie Dvornik the surprise ending he had planned for Jugsaw III: The Re-Awakening. Big Larry gingerly forked his salmon while describing to CeCe the wonders of this summer's timeshare in Bridgehampton in such vivid detail that no one noticed as Phoebe draped her tongue about the inner rim of her flute to get at the final drops of her fourth Bellini, smiled across the room in a big droopy arc, and then suddenly passed out into her endive and avocado salad with a plate-rattling thud.
   The impact sent silverware skittering to the floor and left avocado pasted in slick patches to her over-dyed thicket of hair. In day spas across town she might have paid in excess of $300 for such an experience and referred to it as a treatment. She remained unconscious for a few seconds, until the painkiller-and-Bellini bloodstream interactions that had knocked her out were undone, and she came to as if stirring from a long nap.
   "That babe just totally peaced out," observed Thorne to Sophie, as Phoebe raked the lettuce from her tresses with long manicured nails that were almost too perfectly suited to the task.
   Big Larry rubbed her back. CeCe gave her water. Frances offered risotto, which was declined with a weak hand for reasons already made clear. John struggled to maintain his composure at first, and then distracted himself with a forced swig from his third double whiskey. But when Phoebe pulled an overlooked sprig of rosemary from her eyelashes the little man lost it and sprayed down the table for the second time, like a very tiny Old Faithful. Thorne and Sophie alone escaped the deluge, but the rest of us were soaked. Big Larry was rip-shit and CeCe was devastated. Phoebe was beside herself, and Lauren Schuyler embarrassed beyond belief. We sat at the whiskey-stained, avocado-strewn table, drying ourselves with napkins, waiting for the check.
   "Did I tell you guys we hung out with Lauren Conrad at Bungalow last week?" asked CeCe, and Phoebe nodded that it was true, and the night was over.

Reprinted from Mergers & Acquisitions by Dana Vachon with permission of Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright 2007 by Dana Vachon. Available in bookstores April 5, 2007.