Leaving the World (11 page)

‘What makes you say that?’ I asked.

‘Stop sounding tetchy. It is just a simple
deduction
. Daddy’s in the copper business, but has jettisoned you and your mother for a new life with a string of South American
bimbas
, right?’

‘There’ve only been two—’

‘To the best of your knowledge. All men are putzes at heart – even the good ones. But you know that by now, don’t you?’

I looked at her carefully.

‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked.

‘Oh, come on, you don’t think Brad – Mr Micro-Manager – didn’t dig a little bit into your past and find out about you and the Professor?’

I looked at her, appalled.

‘When I applied for a job as a trainee, I didn’t think my past private life would be vetted.’

‘There are three of us in the company who form the vetting committee to make certain we hire someone who will fit into the Freedom Mutual culture. Do you know what we all liked about you – besides the Harvard doctorate and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and not being a snot . . . ?’

‘Enlighten me.’

‘The fact that you had a four-year thing with your thesis advisor and kept it completely out of the public view.’

‘Who told you this?’

‘Do you honestly think I’d reveal our sources? I mean,
puleeze
. But, between ourselves, Brad was also super-impressed about how you never showed your hand, never stirred the pot, and kept a dignified silence in the wake of his death. What a business, by the way. I really felt for you . . . especially with all the ambiguity surrounding—’

‘I’m leaving now,’ I heard myself saying.

‘Have I said the wrong thing?’

‘Actually you have. Just as I find it completely abhorrent that you and your colleagues have dug into my past and—’

‘We all know each other’s stuff in the office,’ she said. ‘I’m aware that Brad is cheating on his wife with a bond dealer named Samantha who has a nasty temper and frequently scratches his back during sex, causing him to wear a T-shirt in bed with his wife for a few days. Everyone knows that Brad should break it off with her, but he’s addicted to trouble. Just as Brad knows that I’ve been in a relationship with a cop named Pauline for the past two years.’

‘I see,’ I said, trying to sound nonplussed.

‘Go on, act all blasé and inclusive. Pretend you’re not shocked to discover I’m a dyke . . .’

‘It really is your own business.’

‘Not at Freedom Mutual. Brad insists on total transparency. No secrets, no hidden baggage. Everything out in the open. So . . . goon, ask me any question about myself.
Anything
. You ask, I’ll tell.’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘Loosen up.’

‘All right. Why do you talk so loud?’

‘Good question. And here’s the answer: Because I had a mother who was always screaming at everybody and complained a lot about how life had been one big let-down, and how: “If you want to be really disappointed by things, then you should definitely have children.”’

‘Charming.’

‘That she wasn’t.’

‘She’s dead?’

‘They’re all dead. My dad, my mom, my brother Phil . . .’

‘How old was he when he died?’

‘Nineteen.’

‘Had he been sick?’

‘It was suicide, so, yeah, he’d been sick.’

‘Why did he—?’

‘Hang himself in his bedroom on Christmas Eve 1979 . . . ?’

‘Oh, my word.’

‘Can’t you be American and use “fuck”?’

‘That is just horrible.’

‘Fucking horrible. I was twelve at the time and my big brother was just home from his sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a big deal in my family, the first-born –
the guy
– getting accepted into an Ivy League university, being pre-Med and all that. What my parents didn’t know is that, after a brilliant first year, near straight As, he had some kind of breakdown and suddenly got a C in Biochemistry. Now for anyone who’s pre-Med, a C in Biochemistry is a huge setback. And Mom gets his report card on December 23rd. Having nothing better to do – and being fucking Mom – she begins to do this vast big number on him, saying how he’s a huge disappointment, how she’d given up everything to raise him, and this is how he repaid her. My mom ruined everything – and everyone – she touched. And if I’m sounding like a shrink, well . . . I did do nine years of the talking cure after finding my brother hanging from the clothes rail in his closet.’

‘You found him?’

‘That’s what I said.’

She paused and downed the Martini, then put her hand up for a third one.

‘Not for me,’ I said when she tried to order two.

‘You’re having one – like it or not. Because if there’s one thing I know about life, it’s the fact that everyone needs to get drunk from time to time – even you, Miss Propriety.’

‘Your parents must have been devastated after—’

‘Dad died about six months after Phil. Throat cancer – the payback for forty years of non-stop cigarettes. He was only fifty-six and I’m pretty damn sure that everything started metastasizing after Phil killed himself.’

Trish said she never wavered in dealing with her mother after that. When her mother tried to make phone contact Trish changed her number. When she had an uncle and a second cousin show up at her office to make entreaties, she refused to see them.

‘“Surely you’ll feel terrible if she suddenly dies on you,” they all told me on the phone, to which I could only say: “No, I won’t feel a single iota of guilt.”’

‘And when it finally happened . . . ?’ I asked.

‘That was around three years after my dad went. Mom was driving to the mall near our house in Morristown and had a mild coronary. The car went out of control and crossed over into the oncoming lane, and there was this motherfucker of a truck barreling down the highway – and
splat
. I was an orphan.’

She downed the dregs of the Martini. Like anyone who was staring down into the bottom of a third Martini, she was seriously smashed. So, for that matter, was I. The difference between us was that, when I spoke, I wasn’t shouting at the top of my lungs.

‘You want to know if I felt guilt afterwards?’ she asked, sounding like she was talking through a megaphone. ‘Of course I felt fucking guilt. The cunt was my fucking mother and even if she was a total scumbag who drove my poor screwed-up brother to lynch himself with a fucking Boy Scout’s belt . . .’

That’s when a guy in a tux showed up at our table, informed us that he was the hotel’s duty manager, and that we were to settle the check and leave the premises immediately.

‘Listen, asshole, you’re gonna have to get every fucking Mick in the Boston PD to get me out of here,’ Trish said.

‘Please do not force my hand,’ the duty manager said.

I stood up and threw a considerable amount of money on the table.

‘We’re going,’ I told him.

‘No, we are fucking not,’ Trish said.

‘I’m getting you home.’

‘You are not my cunt of a maiden aunt.’

‘That’s it,’ the duty manager said and stormed off.

Trish sank deeper into the armchair and smiled.

‘See, I won.’

‘If he calls the cops you’ll be arrested. And if you’re arrested—’

‘I’ll give the arresting cop a hummer on the way to the station – and I’ll be let go with a thank-you.’

I could tell that every eye in the Four Seasons bar was now upon us. Just as I also knew that I had to act fast. So I hoisted Trish up by the scruff of her jacket and before she had a chance to protest too much, I yanked her left arm behind her in half-nelson style.

‘You say a word,’ I hissed in her ear, ‘and I’ll break your fucking arm.’

I frogmarched her out of the bar and into one of the cabs lined up in front of the Four Seasons, the duty manager acknowledging my avoidance of a police incident with a curt nod as we walked out. Trish once tried to struggle against my grip – letting out a torrent of invective until I yanked her arm up higher, to the point where I knew she was in real pain. She shut up then – and said nothing until we were inside the taxi.

‘Give the man your address,’ I told her.

She did so. The cab pulled away from the hotel. Falling to one side of the seat, she suddenly began to weep. But this was no ordinary booze-fuelled crying jag. Rather, this was a full-scale lament – loud, primal, agonized. Up front the driver – a Sikh – kept glancing at us in his rear-view mirror, his eyes widening. Like me, he was thrown by the desperate sorrow that was emerging from some point deep within her psyche. When I tried to reach out and steady her, she batted me away. So I simply sat there, watching helplessly as this woman fell apart.

Trish lived in that corner of the city, near South Station, which had been gentrified into a quarter for the monied classes. The cab pulled up in front of a renovated warehouse. As soon as she saw the front door, she brought herself under momentary control.

‘Do you want me to come up with you?’ I asked.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ she said, then threw open the door and staggered inside.

There was a moment of shocked silence in the cab – the driver and myself trying to absorb all that had happened here over the past ten minutes.

‘Do you think she’ll be all right?’ he asked.

‘I have no idea,’ I said and then gave him my address in Somerville.

When I awoke early the next morning, I was pretty damn sure that, as soon as I walked into Freedom Mutual, I’d be told to vamoose – as Trish would have to get me fired to hide the events of the previous night.

Another thought also hit me: I’d left all my assorted shopping bags at the Four Seasons and no doubt the duty manager had ordered them to be thrown out, as payback for creating a scene in the bar.

But when I entered the office that morning, all the shopping bags were piled behind the reception desk. I grabbed them and entered the trading room – where Trish and eight of her colleagues were shouting into phones – and dumped them on my desk. There was an envelope on my chair, with my name written on the front. I opened it. Inside were two $100 bills and a note:

I put the money back in a new envelope and grabbed a sheet of paper and wrote:

Then I walked over and dropped the envelope on Trish’s desk. She didn’t even look up to acknowledge me. I returned to my desk, picked up several of the shopping bags, disappeared into the ladies for a few minutes and changed. When I turned to face myself in the mirror, the individual staring back surprised me. You put on a simple but beautifully cut black suit with a simple black silk blouse and stylish shoes, and you suddenly think:
There’s a grown-up in the mirror
. As I had so rarely dressed up for anything, the transformation surprised me. Clothes have a language, reflecting your sense of self, your class and education, your aspirations and the image you wish to present to the world. Maybe Trish was right: I always saw myself as something of an eternal student in hiking boots and chunky sweaters. But now, having changed into that suit, I appeared to be someone with responsibility and money. Much to my surprise, I liked the way I looked . . . even if I knew I had neither the responsibility nor the salary that the suit signified.

I returned to the desk at the far end of the trading floor. An hour passed, in which I sat there wondering what happened next. When the first hour of being ignored morphed into a second one, I stood up and crossed the floor, approaching Trish at her workstation. She was screaming into the headset at someone. After ending the call with ‘and fuck you too’ (what I came to know as a Trish Term of Endearment), she looked up at me with undistilled contempt.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘I’d like to go to work.’

‘That’s the smartest thing you’ve said all day.’

I could have pointed out that this was the first thing I had said to her since walking in this morning, but thought that such pedantry mightn’t play well. She pointed to the empty chair next to hers and said: ‘Sit down, shut up and try to learn something.’

M
ONEY.
I
STARTED
to make it. And – best of all – I discovered I was good at making it.

Hedge fund managers claim that they operate according to a very simple principle: they invest in stocks and hedge their position in such a way that they cannot but make money.

Rule number one of hedge fund management: position your trade to cover your downside, and always take advantage of a company’s inefficiencies when trading its stock. By this I mean: if you buy a stock always buy, at the same time, an option on selling a stock short. How do you learn such a craft? Practice – and a gambler’s instinct when it comes to working out how to cover your downside. If you play the game shrewdly, the only loss you will accrue is the cost of buying the option. As soon as the stock goes up, you gain. Big time.

Other stuff you need to know: hedge fund companies are always investing in all sorts of publicly traded securities: stocks and commodities and foreign currencies. And managers are always talking strategies, along the lines of:
There’s a British info-tech company that’s about to do an IPO in three months. Market indices show a strengthening pound – but not until the next quarter. So let’s put an option on sterling and clean up when it moves three cents upwards come September
.

‘Two basic caveats,’ Trish told me on that first day as her trainee. ‘Number one is: always have a nose for the next big opportunity, and number two: always work out strategies to lessen risk and maximize profit.’

A company like Freedom Mutual had, I learned, investment capital of over $1 billion to play with. Brad might have been something of a loose (or, perhaps,
louche
) cannon in private, but he certainly knew how to make big-time investors want to do business with him. The cool billion consisted of such diverse investors as Harvard University ($120 million), Wellesley College ($25 million), a consortium of German and Swedish venture capitalists ($165 million), and . . .