A Fatal Debt (35 page)

“Remarkable,” I replied.

U
nlike Duncan, I found it hard to write off what happened to experience, the kind of character-forming incident you recall happily in age, marveling at your innocence. I did think of staying at Episcopal. It would have been easy enough, once Jim Whitehead had extended an olive branch, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

The past means something to shrinks—we can’t dismiss it as Duncan wanted me to. I’d escaped punishment and my reputation had been restored, but I felt guilty. Harry had been my patient and I’d let him down. If I’d kept him in there for a while longer, Nora’s plan would have fallen apart. Felix had been my companion in distress, and I should have saved him. The joy had gone out of my time in New York when Harry had walked into the psych ER, and it wasn’t going to return.

The climate is different here: damper, softer, and less brazen than New York’s. It has its pleasures, though they’re subtle. I miss the pure skies, the monsoonlike storms—they have the city’s bluntness. I swapped my apartment off Gramercy Park for a house in Kew, a cottage next to the towpath, tucked near a concrete wall they’d built to stop the river from flooding. “It used to get quite damp,” an old man who’s lived here forever told me when I arrived. Sometimes at night I hear the groan of the river flowing out to the estuary.

Anna loves it, and I hope she doesn’t fall out of love. I bought her a rainproof jacket and Wellington boots as preparation for the English mud and rain, and she is sweetly enveloped in them as she strides along by the water’s edge. It was a crazy way to start a relationship, but none of them are fully rational. If they were, I’d be out of business. She’s been here twice and we are still tentative—neither of us wants to push our luck.

There’s plenty of work for a psych in London, with everyone getting in touch with the feelings they used to hide away. There is the same proportion of madness, too, although I haven’t settled at this hospital as I did at Episcopal. There are more rules; there is more drudgery. It isn’t easy to combine private practice with my day job. I hear an unspoken note of disapproval, see the raised eyebrows, at my mixing of the two.

It would be easiest simply to forget the National Health Service and devote myself to private therapy. London has the same rich pastures as New York of financiers and professionals who’ve turned their neuroses into professional success and now want to talk about it at great expense. Yet something holds me back. Perhaps it is idealism about public service, but I could talk myself out of that if I wanted. Deeper than any idealism is fear—a fear of exposing myself fully to the gravitational pull of money, of placing myself at the whims of the people who are wealthy enough to afford me.

I remember Harry’s face when I first saw him. He had lost his job and all that it meant to him—the power it gave him to control others, without even having to think about it. I wonder, if he had gone into therapy, whether I might have helped him. It was probably too late,
for his wife had her own way of coping with loss—by revenging it with blood. Nora had never believed in my profession, although she realized when she came across me that I’d have my uses. Her cure for Harry’s loss was not to sit in a chair and discuss his plight, but to take down the man who’d put him there. I think of the contempt in her voice when she talked of pills and therapy, and the curious way in which she was right. Harry really did recover when Nora killed Greene; she shocked him out of his despair.

The intensity of Harry’s devotion to her remains with me. It was a strange affirmation of marriage—that death doesn’t weaken love, it only strengthens it. It reminds me of Gabriel telling me about broken heart syndrome. Husbands and wives are linked in ways that a stranger cannot know any more than I understand Wall Street.

That’s my excuse, but I should have realized that something was wrong when I saw him on that cot, shivering with cold and despair. I made an exception for him and it was the worst mistake of my life, or so I hope it will remain. There were clues all around every day I’d worked in the Harold L. and Nora Shapiro Pavilion above FDR Drive. The Shapiros had paid for everything: York East, Twelve South, the oil painting screwed to the ER wall.

When I was useful, they bought me, too.

T
his is a work of fiction but many people helped me with it. On Wall Street: Jane Gladstone, Flavio Bartmann, Daniel Loeb, Boaz Weinstein, and others who prefer not to be named. In East Hampton: Jillian Branam, Ina and Jeff Garten, Frank Newbold, and Janine and Tomilson Hill. In Suffolk County: Jason Bassett, Bill Keahon, Sarita Kedia, Steven Wilutis, and Lieutenant Charles L’Hommedieu and the officers of the Riverhead Correctional Facility. In the world of psychiatry: Don Tavakoli, Eli Greenberg, Jason Hershberger, Michael Walton, Michael Dulchin, Paul Appelbaum, Steven Hoge, and Paul Linde. At NetJets: Richard Santulli and Mark Booth. Elsewhere: Lionel Barber, John Ridding, Nick Denton, Chrystia Freeland, Emily Gould, Ruth Rogers, Frances Gapper, Paul Gapper, Louise Gapper,
Maureen Tkacik, Dusan Knesevic, Philip Raible, Deborah Wolfe, and the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. David Kuhn and Gill Coleridge encouraged me to start and to finish, and Mark Tavani at Ballantine made the result much better. It was inconceivable without Rosie Dastgir, my wife and literary foil, and our daughters Yasmin and Rachel.

J
OHN
G
APPER
is associate editor and columnist for the
Financial Times
based in New York. He has written about banking for two decades and covered the Wall Street crisis in 2008. He is co-author with Nick Denton of
All That Glitters: The Fall of Barings
. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters. This is his first novel.