Ghosts of Manhattan (5 page)

“Better shape than last night.” There is amusement without judgment in his voice, which I appreciate. “How's Julia?”

Hearing the name in a southern accent reminds me why I don't even like the name Julia much. It feels like counting to three in French. Three syllables make the rest of the world work too hard to talk to you. There's a built-in presumptuousness. “Okay, I guess. You've probably seen her more this week than I have.”

“How's that business a hers doin'?” Julia's interior design business is about two years and three unprofitable clients old, and she's managed to turn our extra bedroom and half of the rest of our apartment upside down setting up a home office. This has had me pulling my hair out, which Charlie knows and uses to playfully press my buttons.

“It's a living,” I say, wondering in what sense that could possibly be true. “We've got a few things to work out with it. I'm not sure it's a great idea. It's adding some stress in the household.” I shake my head like the old men who sit around in barbershops and talk a lot about sports and nothing all day. “What are you going to do?”

Charlie nods his head slowly back and takes a loud, pensive breath like Yoda. I love this about him. “You know I grew up by the water, outside Charleston.” I nod. I know this. “You know how you know which way the wind's blowin'?” I nod the other way. I have no idea. “It's the seagulls.” He smiles. “You see, seagulls the world over, they always point their bodies straight into the wind. Like an arrow. So, you out on your boat in the harbor, tryin' to get your bearings, and you got to figure out the winds, you jus look over to a seagull standin' on top of a pylon and he'll let you know just exactly where the wind's comin' from.” He smiles again and gently pokes a finger into my chest. “Nick, you got to find yourself a seagull.”

Clearly Julia is the typhoon in this metaphor. “Charlie, you're my seagull. Why the hell do you think I'm always leaning against this wall talking to your ugly mug?”

Another loud inhale and a soft laugh as a taxi blares its horn on Sixth Avenue behind me. “Yeah? Things are worse than I thought.”

In less than a two-hour span, I'd had crash courses in the philosophy of Charlie and the philosophy of William. These are different schools altogether. What's the closest analogue for this contrast? Lincoln to Caligula? Socrates to Torquemada?

“Well, you South Carolinians have it pretty well figured out. Goddamn seagulls.” I find that after talking with Charlie for a while, I sometimes take on aspects of his diction. It's infectious. “Pretty well figured out” is not my usual way of talking.

“Life's a little simpler down there.”

“Can't you find a way to bring simple with you wherever you go?”

“Most places, Nick. Not here.”

I find myself agreeing in the way a person realizes they've agreed with something all their life but haven't been able to put a finger on it before. From this little Manhattan island, the rest of the country looks roughly the same. There is a difference between Manhattan and everyplace else. To make a real change, a person has to move farther into the wild, like Thoreau. Or farther from the wild, like Tarzan coming to town. Or in my terms, from New York City to anywhere else or from anywhere else to New York City. This city isn't like anything.

I've thought a lot about making that move, but there's nowhere else I can do this job. “Truer words never spoken, Charlie. It's complicated here.” I give him a jab in the arm, Jerry-style, only I mean it. Maybe Jerry does too, in his way. “On that note, my friend, I'm off to see the wife.”

I walk through the lobby and around the corner and take the elevator to the third floor. We live in a brick prewar building with only six stories. I like the low skyline in Greenwich Village. It's one of the few places in the city where you can see a big sky.

The apartment is dark, so I take a tour to every lamp and wall switch to brighten things. I see the coffee table crippled in the living room. I had gotten home late and drunk last night and taken a stumble into it. One of the legs has splintered off and the top has caved in. It looks as though Julia has swept it into a heap for me to deal with later. Julia decorated the place in a French country theme and we have lots of woods and neutral tones in the rugs and the fabrics of the furniture. She wanted to add accents of color, so the curtains and throw pillows are soft blues and red. It feels like a nice place to be.

I round back to the front door and empty my pockets of keys and phone onto the console table. I notice a voicemail from my mother and check it, telling myself whatever it is, not to let it bother me.

Nicholas, it's your mother. Doesn't your phone let you know that a person has called even if they don't leave a message? In the future, if you see that I've made a call, just assume I'd like you to call me so that I don't need to speak into these silly recorders. Good-bye.

I should have deleted without listening. I put the phone down and move to the living room. I don't feel like sitting in front of the TV, so I decide to start a book, which I'm always telling myself would be a good thing. I walk to the built-in bookcase in the living room to browse the titles. Julia's always reading new books and our shelves fill up with them. I want to find something better than
a spy novel but still entertaining. Julia always goes in for that kind and I have the thought that it would be nice if we read the same book and could talk about it.

Half-tucked behind a stack of books on the end of one shelf is an old photograph of my family. I'm about twelve years old and sitting on a stool next to my little sister, Susan. We're both in front of my parents, who are standing in front of a background of trees and sky, only it's obvious the photo was taken indoors. It's one of those corny professional photos and there must be about five hundred thousand other families that were plopped in front of that same fake background.

I focus on my mother's face, concentrating on it as though I'm trying to recognize her. It's a handsome face, but I wouldn't say beautiful. It's too strong for that, and full but with hard angles. She looks like she could have been an English queen. Not the gentle, maternal kind, but the kind that could lead her people into battle and be as tough as any king.

There are the first streaks of gray running through her black hair. This is the face of my mother that I remember when I think of her. It's the face I grew up with before I finished growing up away from home at boarding school. I remember that face the day they sent me to Hotchkiss. It wasn't long after this photograph was taken. My parents had wanted to see some show in the city and so they decided to take Susan to lunch and to see the show. On the way they dropped me at Grand Central so I could get the Metro-North train to Wassaic Station, then a taxi to the Hotchkiss campus, which I'd never seen before.

I was scared half to death and I remember standing on the platform with my bags on the ground under my hands, staring at the three of them, when tears started to fill to the brim of my eyelids, enough that my mother could notice. She looked disappointed
and a little rushed to get to her show. She put her hands on her hips and leaned forward and said, “Stop playing the victim, Nicholas. Not attractive.” My tears drained back inside like someone pulling the stopper on a sink of water.

My dad stepped forward and shook my hand. “Good luck, son.”

I looked at Susan, who was crying, and that made me feel better. I kept looking at only her. I was afraid to look back at my mother or I might start to cry again. Finally my dad took Susan's hand and the three of them left.

I hear Julia's keys in the apartment door and I put back the photo and walk away without a book.

November 15, 2005

JULIA WALKS IN STILL WEARING HER WORKOUT
clothes from the gym. She had been a high jumper for the Duke track team and her body is even better now fourteen years later. No kids and the fact that she deals with stress and insecurity by scheduling more personal training sessions at the gym have kept her toned.

“Hiya, babe.”

“Hi, Nick. Didn't expect you this early.” It's 8 p.m. I can't tell if there's an edge to this. It's a neutral tone. We haven't spoken all day so she wouldn't know whether to expect me early or late, but I know my drunken collapse into bed last night and the wrecked coffee table have her angry. She doesn't eat later than 8 p.m. for fear that the meal turns to fat overnight, so I know she's already taken care of her dinner. This is the norm for weekdays. The default is that we're on our own unless specifically stated otherwise.

“Just took the guys out for a bite and a couple drinks, then wanted to get home.” I lean over and plant a kiss on her cheek. It's salty from her exercise.

“How are they?” There doesn't seem to be much interest behind this question as she moves into the kitchen to get a bottle of water from the refrigerator. Last night must have been worse than I thought. I'm sure I didn't piss the bed, though. I ruffle her hair to try to break through. This is a thoughtless and desperate reflex as I know she hates when I do that, and I jerk my hand back awkwardly.

“Fred Cook called again,” she says.

“Did he leave a message?”

“No, he just said to call him. He's very rude.”

“He's not rude, he just doesn't have any social graces. He doesn't know anything but math and software programming. Not a lot of gals. Even on the phone with a woman, he gets the way a little kid who's never had a pet will get around a dog. He doesn't know what to do, so everything gets tight.”

“Well, why does he keep calling you at home?”

“He's a conspiracy theorist. His job is to analyze the overall risk of the firm and he thinks what we're doing is too risky. He thinks he's Deep Throat.”

“Why does he want to talk to you?”

“I think he wants to speak with someone in trading. We're the ones making the risky bets. Plus I've known him for years.”

“Can you get in trouble for talking to him?”

“No, the company pays him for this.”

“Then why does he have to call you at home?”

Good question. “I don't know. He's just paranoid, I guess.”

“Paranoid about what?”

“Freddie thinks we're taking on too much leverage, making bets with cash we don't actually have.” Julia has an aptitude for numbers and she seems genuinely interested. Maybe she thinks the more she knows about my career, the better she'll be able to convince me
to leave it. “It's like you want to buy a house for a million dollars. You put down two hundred thousand and the bank loans you eight hundred thousand. You pay the bank eight percent on the loan.”

She nods. Along with the rest of America, she understands this much already. I go on. “So the bank holds that loan as an asset making eight percent. We're trading in products called derivatives, sort of like insurance, that basically allow us to sell that asset over again. Maybe we sell it four more times, so now it's the equivalent of five people paying that eight percent for a total of a forty percent return. All of this with just the initial two hundred thousand you put down. That's the leverage.” She nods again, allowing that five times eight is forty. “As long as the economy is good and people are making their payments, it works. If the payments are missed, then everything fails, not just the original eight-hundred-thousand-dollar loan, but all five million.”

It feels good to be having an actual conversation, even if it is work crap. Her mood feels like it's lightening and we're getting past last night. I'm thankful we're in the kitchen and not by the coffee table. “And what's the chance that happens?”

“Freddie's point is that it will happen. It's just a matter of time.”

“What do you think?”

“There are always cycles. Eventually it'll cycle down. I don't know if it'll be the apocalypse for Bear that he's talking about. But Freddie's a brilliant guy. He went to Harvard and has a PhD in math from Princeton.”

“What's he doing at Bear?”

“Most of the big firms poach these quant guys to do market risk analysis of the firm's positions. Bear pays better than academia. Not every CEO wants to listen to it, but they all have this kind of department in place now. These guys don't fit into the culture very well, though. They're treated like internal affairs.”

“That's why he's acting like it's a big secret?”

“We're a public company. If he publishes this report, even internally, it's on the record and someone has to do something about it or they're on the record as ignoring it. Right now nobody wants to hear about it because we're making too much money. Nobody wants to be on the record for something that might bite them in the ass later, but they don't want to change what they're doing either. Freddie's forcing the issue. People might have to choose.”

She nods again and seems finished with this, like she's closing a book and putting it down. She turns her head then. “We should call Oliver and Sybil Bennett and set our dinner date.”

Crap. We had been seated next to Oliver and Sybil at a wedding in Long Island a couple weeks earlier and managed to have a civil conversation. Oliver's an investment banker at Bear and I know him in passing. He's a blue-blood little snob, someone I'd expect to be a natural son to my mother. He also reminds me of Julia's father. “Babe, I don't want to go to dinner with those two.” I can feel the whine in my voice.

“They seem like nice people. He's one of the few people we've met lately who doesn't have to talk about himself the entire time and spent some percentage of the time, greater than zero, asking questions of me and listening.”

“I don't think they seem like nice people at all.”