Critical (13 page)

"Oh," Rodger said. He leaned back in his chair. "How can I help you?"

"I know you are aware of our upcoming IPO," Angela began. "Its scheduled closing is just a little more than two weeks away, so we are in the quiet period, meaning I cannot divulge any specifics. Let me just say that we have been assured the IPO will be successful."

"I'm happy for you," Rodger said. "An underwriting guarantee! Wow!"

"Congratulations may be a little premature. The short-term problem which prompted our need for a bridge loan a month ago has cost considerably more to fix than we had predicted. We need another bridge loan, but only for three weeks. The interest doesn't matter, and we can pay it up front."

Rodger leaned forward. His chair squeaked. He rubbed his forehead and breathed out through puffed-up cheeks. Then he looked across at Angela. He suddenly looked tired, and even a little sad. "What kind of money are you talking about?"

"Two hundred thousand is what we'd like, but we'll settle for what you could arrange."

"You are asking for the impossible," Rodger said. He took a deep breath. "When I said your company's loans were nearing the margin, I was not completely forthright. They are at the margin. I'm afraid you are fully drawn down on facility."

"Can't you make an exception?" Angela asked. She hated to plead but had no other choice. "You have been working with us for almost five years. You understand current medical economics. You know how well we are positioned. We will be the first specialty hospital company to go public after the senatorial moratorium was lifted this past October. You know that we will be tapping into an almost limitless amount of guaranteed revenue because of the way healthcare reimbursement favors procedures. You also know Angels Healthcare is going to mushroom into a very big company and you know Manhattan Bank and Trust will continue to be our bankers, with you as our relationship manager. I give my word. I'll even put it in writing."

"What about your personal assets?" Rodger asked. "I can get you a home equity loan. I'll facilitate it myself. I can have the money for you --"

"That will not work," Angela said, interrupting. "I've already maxed out the equity in all my personal assets, including my jewelry. Everything!"

For a few minutes, silence reigned in Rodger's office. The only sound was a ticking Tiffany desk clock. A narrow beam of sunlight streamed into the room. A million motes of dust danced silently in its glare.

Rodger sat back and spread his hands in the air. He shook his head. "I'm sorry. I cannot authorize a loan with no collateral. It's not that I don't want to: It's just not in my power to do so. I'm sorry, Angela. I admire you greatly as a doctor, a businesswoman, and a fine human being. I just can't do it."

"What about someone higher in the bank's hierarchy? Surely someone can authorize such a loan, especially considering the money the bank has made in the short run and will be made over the long haul."

"I'll try," Rodger said, without a lot of enthusiasm. "I'll send the request up the ladder to my superiors."

"Will you recommend it?" Angela asked.

"I will recommend they consider it," Rodger said, skirting the question.

"Thank you," Angela said. She stood, managed a half-smile, and shook hands with Rodger across his immaculate desk. It was then that she noticed the sole framed photograph on the desk was of a young girl. There was no family shot, nor a wife.

"I should tell you that even if the powers that be were to approve the loan, it would surely take several weeks to go through the process. I'm sorry, Angela. Please don't take it personally. If it were my prerogative, I would do it in a second."

Angela headed for the door. Five minutes later, she was on the street trying to hail a cab to ride downtown. Even though the outcome of the meeting was as she had anticipated, it still depressed her. Of the two meetings she'd scheduled that morning, the one she'd just had with Rodger had at least been cordial. The next one with her ex-husband, Michael Calabrese, probably wouldn't be; they almost never were. Although Angela truly loved and treasured her daughter, often she was regretful that the child tied her inexorably to continued and sustained contact with a man she wished she'd never met, much less married. Of course, she'd made the situation worse by allowing him, against her better judgment, to act as her fledgling company's placement agent back when she was initially founding Angels Healthcare.

The collaboration did not happen by forethought. Sharing custody required continual contact, and Michael had used the opportunity to quiz Angela about her experiences getting her MBA. Although Michael had been in the securities business with Morgan Stanley since graduating from Columbia, where he'd first met Angela, he never got a graduate degree. His curiosity about Angela's MBA experience had been a combination of genuine interest and also a kind of jealousy. Like her father, Michael had been challenged by Angela's medical degree, especially when his friends would tease him that she was the brains and he was the brawn. Even though they were divorced, Angela's getting an advanced degree in business, the arena he claimed as his area of expertise, had reawakened the negative feelings of insecurity that her scholarship engendered. Discussions would invariably turn into mutual irritation until the day Angela described a business plan she was creating as an exercise for one of her courses. When she finished the description, Michael had been so impressed that he'd encouraged her to actually do it as a real company. He told her he could get seed capital from what he called his "unique" clients. He never explained what he had meant by "unique clients," but Angela had reason to believe he was not merely bragging. Michael, by that time, had left Morgan Stanley to form his own boutique placement firm. In that capacity, he often worked with his former employer, Morgan Stanley, on IPOs, and was doing very well for himself.

Encouraged by Michael's urging, Angela had gone to several of her professors, who were also intrigued by her business plan, and she used their contacts to found Angels Healthcare. True to his word, Michael raised a portion of the seed capital from his clients, and even found the eventual "angel investor" as a syndicate of the same clients, which ultimately committed fifteen million plus a recent bridge loan convertible into stock at their discretion. However, the true success came from Angela's efforts, which raised the rest of the seed capital. During her MBA, she had moonlighted at University Hospital and, like a born saleswoman, had culled a group of eager university physician investors, who interested a number of colleagues, who interested more doctors from other institutions in a rapidly self-fulfilling process. Not only did all these physician investors contribute money, but once the hospitals were built, they also brought in the patients in droves, which was in essence the critical factor in the business plan and the source of the company's success.

Angela climbed out of the cab in front of a large marble-and-glass office building not too far from Ground Zero. Michael shared office space with a number of other independent financial wheeler-dealers. Each had their own private offices but shared common areas and secretarial services. It was a convenient relationship for all, since they got better quarters and services than they would if they were on their own.

Michael's office had an impressive view of the Hudson, with the Statue of Liberty standing midriver on her postage stamp-sized island. Across the river loomed apartment buildings in New Jersey.

Michael's door was ajar, and since the shared secretary was at a considerable distance, Angela merely walked in. Her ex was on the phone, leaning back in his chair with legs crossed and his feet perched on the corner of the desk. His jacket was hung over the back of his chair, his tie was loosened, and the top button of his shirt was undone. He was the picture of casual ease. Without interrupting his conversation, he motioned for Angela to sit on the couch.

Angela took off her coat, laid it across the arm of the couch, stashed her briefcase on the floor, and sat down. On the coffee table directly in front of her were the usual masculine appurtenances, including a decanter filed with an amber fluid, several cut-crystal old-fashioned glasses, and a polished mahogany humidor with a flush, inset humidity gauge. On the wall was a flat-screen TV with stock prices trailing along the lower part of the screen and silent talking heads above.

Just seeing her former spouse made her heart speed up but certainly not due to attraction, although she had to admit he was darkly handsome. His features were angular and rugged, and his anthracite-colored hair was slicked back. One hand held the phone; the other gestured wildly in the air as his conversation progressed. He was obviously trying to convince someone of something.

Angela had met him when she was a junior and he a senior at Columbia University, and he had swept her off her feet. She thought he was exactly what she was looking for. He was undeniably masculine, a good student, somewhat of a rebel, outspoken, seemingly honest, popular with and patriotic to his buddies new and old, passionate and outspoken about his attraction to her, romantic with little gestures like special-occasion flowers, and, particularly importantly to her, not afraid of showing emotion. In short, he was the opposite of her father, a personality profile Angela demanded in anyone she might consider for a long-term relationship. She even appreciated his blue-collar background and his confirmed allegiance to his high-school friends, few of whom had gone to college. It suggested he had good values. The only chink in the picture was that one night Michael had admitted that his domineering father had not spared the belt in his maniacal goal that his sons attend an Ivy League university. Since the modus operandi had worked for Michael, although not for Michael's older brother, Angela didn't pay heed to the old proverb "the ends do not justify the means," although she should have. In a big, ugly way, it would prove to be prophetic.

"All right, all right!" Michael said finally, while waving his free hand in the air as if batting away a pesky insect. "Get back to me!"

He positioned the phone receiver several inches over its cradle and let it drop. "God, some people are such assholes." Angela wisely held her tongue.

"So," Michael said, rising up to his full six-foot-three stature. "What's up?" He came around the desk, grabbed a side chair, swung it over to the coffee table, and mounted it backward. With his arms crossed and resting on the chair's back, he regarded Angela with a wry, challenging smile that unfortunately evoked enough unpleasant memories that Angela scrapped her initial plan of restricting the conversation to her company's desperate need for cash and then leaving. Instead, she said, "First, let's clear the air about some minor issues."

"Okay. What's your idea of minor issues?"

"Why on earth would you give permission to our ten-year-old daughter to get her belly button pierced before talking to me about it?"

"The kid wants it. Why not?"

"And that's enough of a reason for her to do it?" Angela asked with uncamouflaged disbelief. "Just because she wants it?"

"She told me all her friends have them."

"And you believed her?"

"Why shouldn't I? It's kinda a fad."

Angela instinctively knew it was a waste of everyone's time to continue the conversation. Michael had never been much of a parent -- nor much of a husband. Only after they had gotten married did Angela learn that Michael had a "very blue-collar" idea of matrimonial duties. In his mind, his role was to come home from work, sit in front of the TV, and keep the family updated on current events, particularly in the sports world. And that was on those nights when he didn't have to meet his friends, supposedly for work-related dinners in lower Manhattan. Gone were the romantic gestures and compliments. Angela became pregnant and put up with their failing relationship, vainly hoping the birth of the supposedly longed-for child would turn Michael back into the person he'd been during the courtship. But Michelle's arrival only made Angela's life more difficult, as she desperately tried to balance graduate medical training in internal medicine with the rigors of parenting a newborn. Michael had refused to help except in very superficial ways. He even openly prided himself for never having changed a diaper. Such duties were simply below the dignity of a young, hotshot, rapidly rising investment banker.

"Listen," Angela said, trying to keep herself as calm as possible, "let's not argue, but I assure you all her friends do not have them. And there's always the risk of infection."

"They can have problems with infection?"

"Yes, indeed! But the point is that when something like this comes up and you think there is any chance I might feel strongly about it, talk to me before making a decision."

"Fine," Michael said, with a roll of his eyes. "Okay, you made your point about the piercing issue. What else? You implied there was more."

"Yes, there is," Angela said, trying to think of the right words. "I want to let you know under no uncertain terms that your telling Michelle that it is my fault you and I are divorced is unacceptable. Trying to get Michelle to take sides in a problem that is between you and me is not okay. You have to stop."

"Hey, I didn't file for divorce, you did," Michael said. "I didn't want to get divorced."

"Who files for divorce has nothing to do with cause," Angela snapped. "It was your behavior that got us divorced."

"So I got drunk and hit you. I said I was sorry. What are you, perfect?"