There is no time in the life I remember who did not include Wesley Mittman. She was still there, a flamboyant point on the map of my social world, even if she lived her life while I lived mine. We were Upper East Side Kids, born two weeks apart. We met in the summer that we were both four years old in 1985, in a nursery school camp at the 92nd Street Y. I can imagine his face then clearly: small, full, lit with wild and happy eyes and a disproportionate smile, halo with Slinky loops of dirty hair. After that, we went to primary school at high school together in Horace Mann, in Riverdale, where she became a five -foot dynamo. She studied hard, obtained sterling notes and seemed to excel in everything that put on her way. We ended up being university classmates, in Yale, and when we graduated, we had passed all of our education together. Our trips through life took place on parallel tracks, and I assumed that they would always do it.
Last Monday, a twenty-seven-year-old man who hunted from Las Vegas entered the office tower at 345 Park Avenue with an assault rifle that he had bought from his supervisor in a casino and killed five people. They included a police officer named Didarul Islam; Aland Etienne, non -armed security guard; Julia Hyman, a young Rudin Management employee; And Wesley, which was a manager of the Blackstone investment company. The fifth person he killed was himself. It was the deadliest shooting in New York in twenty-five years. A note found in the drawer’s portfolio indicated that he had undergone debilitating brain trauma to play football in high school and that he had targeted the National Football League, whose headquarters are in the same building. He wanted his brain to studied.
I had seen news from the shooting that evening, but I did not know that Wesley – who had gone under his name of bride, Lepatner – was one of the victims until the next morning, when I woke up with an SMS of an old friend. It seemed surprising that Wesley, of all the inhabitants of New York, in the wrong place at the wrong time. She wanted to do everything exactly. In high school, she was our own Tracy film: brilliant and confident and on -Coux – but not in a way that anyone wanted it, because her smile was so tall, and her voice was so hoarse and warm. And she seemed to love everyone, even if she exceeded them in the rats race at private school. Wesley accumulated achievements with a sparkling air of perfection, then walks cheerfully. There is no story to tell about her that makes sense with this end.
There are people we know who are less than friends but more than knowledge, people who exist like fixed points in the worlds that have made us. I had not seen Wesley a lot after our school years, but I can imagine it at all ages, and I can see his trajectory of forty-three years in a flash. My favorite story of Wesley is of tenth year, when our whole class was gathered for our first meeting with the school adviser of the school, Mr. Singer. Mr. Singer had a dry effect, Walter Matthau, and he started by saying: “The first thing you need to know is that none of you have to worry about college requests ….. Mast. “Everyone has already laughed, Jane Austen and Ferris Bueller.
I saw fewer Wesley at the university, partly because she met her future husband, Evan Lepatner, the first day of school, and that they were rarely separated. She graduated, of course, Summa Cum Laude. (I decided, after the high school pressure cooker, so as not to sweat on the notes, and I graduated from Nada Cum Zilch.) After school, she started working at Goldman Sachs, and she married Evan in 2006. I would see her at reunion; Once, in her twenties, she told me that they lived in the West Village, which she described as “an ideal place to live when you are young”. It struck me like something you would say that if you had a whole plan of life sketched. If our lives took place in parallel, I thought that Wesley’s as an unshakable straight line: whatever the environment it has entered, it is. I could trace my choices with their deviations, as light or large, compared to the example of Wesley. As we were in the forties, she had a job, two children and seats on various advice (the New York UJA Federation, the Metropolitan Museum). It was installed in the New York Power Center, when I had made my career as an observer, writer – not a long -term bohemian choice, but I could measure the degrees of distance.
The last time I saw Wesley was a college meeting two years ago. She said she wanted to introduce me to a classmate that she was certain I should write on, then pulled me by the wrist to meet him. It was Quintessentiel Wesley: affirmed but charming, motivated by a belief in his power to make things happen. (No, I did not write about him. But I cannot deny myself the last request from Wesley, so let me talk to you now about Brian Wallach, a lawyer who worked at the White House of Obama and then became a defender of SLA patients after his own diagnosis, and also the subject of the documentary “For love and life: no ordinary campaign”.
In the days following the shooting, I started to hear shocked classmates. The schools to which we have attended sent letters. I made die, tragically and too young, but not in a mass shot that put the whole city on the edge. Wesley was part of a news event, and his face appeared in necrologies, which described it as a beloved and executive and philanthropic mother and mentor. (Fortune Obit was written by AI, which made things even more unreal.) A friend sent photos of Wesley and I during a first year pajamas evening; I did not remember the pajama evening, but I remember the buoyancy of Wesley at the age of six. There was something primitive to lose this person who shared so much from my story, and why? Because she had left work at some point – not five minutes earlier, not five minutes later?
Last Thursday, I went to the Central Synagogue, a few pâtés from the place where Wesley was killed, to attend his funeral. Cameras teams have been written on Lexington Avenue; The temple was packed with branchies. In the aisles, I have seen faces that I had known for decades, easier to call in their forms of ten years than in their current and average age forms. We kissed, as in a dark class meeting. There was very little to say, except that Wesley seemed to be the last person that it would happen. Someone had seen her a few days earlier, when she organized an event for Audubon society, to support her daughter’s passion for animals.
The praise lasted more than two hours and they revealed aspects of Wesley’s life that I did not know. She was devoted Jewish; The suggestion of her father, she had spent the summer between high school and college studying the Talmud in an institute that allowed women to do so. As a junior analyst of Gor-Getting at Goldman Sachs, she had sent an e-mail to the highest woman of the company to present herself and had not received an answer-but like her own pink star, she wanted to supervise younger women. When she was recruited by Blackstone in 2014, she had trouble with the decision and accepted the work under the condition that she was at home to put her children in bed every night. Her husband recalled her, when they met as first -year students, as a “crazy atomic energy ball”; When he offered to help him install his computer, he was surprised to learn that she wanted to say at seven in the morning. A horrible shock has arrived halfway from memories, when a fourteen-year-old daughter who looked undoubtedly in Wesley, fourteen, stood up and spoke, in a high and trembling voice, to lose her mother.
