Strangers at the Feast (26 page)

Douglas was convinced there was a way for him to ride the recovering economy and make it up to her. Waking up, she’d see him flipping through pamphlets on Chilean copper mines and Dutch wind-power stations; he lifted a small voice recorder to his mouth:

Commodities, Doug, especially soybeans.

Look into foreign currency.

Doug, what can you dig up on Chinese petroleum?

Sure, people talked to themselves, but did they generally use their own names? It sounded like he’d split into two people, and one was a motivational speaker.

And the microrecorder was only one of a host of new gadgets Douglas assembled in service of his financial resurrection. His desk overflowed with MP3 and portable DVD players, a scanner pen, a TiVo machine. If it used batteries and had buttons, he had to have it. Denise came home practically every day to a box from RadioShack or Best Buy on the front stoop.

“What the hell is
this
? Enough! We can’t afford all this.”

“It’s a global positioning system. So you know where you are.”

“We’re in debt, Doug. That’s where we are. Serious fucking debt.”

“Denise, I know you’re upset,” he said. “And you have every right
to be. But please understand that I’m trying to see, hands-on, what’s going to be the trend of the next ten years. Just a handful of companies are selling these GPSs right now, and it could be a good investment. That digital music player in my office? Soros bought a seven-percent stake in Nomad.”

“You are not George Soros.”

The daily ritual of returning home to their
FOR SALE
sign, and to a mailbox stuffed with bills and mortgage statements, began to fill her with dread. She stayed late at work, lingering around the school’s abandoned corridors. One night as she wandered out into the dark parking lot, Masood was smoking by his car, sipping a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

“Come,” he said.

They drove about a mile away from the school, to a small parking lot near the old Yale & Towne Manufacturing plant on Canal Street, where weeds and grass fissured what was left of the brick.

He let the engine idle and turned on the radio.

It was late August, but unseasonably cold. Denise was wearing wool slacks and a button-down shirt under a V-neck sweater. It seemed to take forever to elbow her sweater over her head, a move that yanked off one of her earrings and lit up her hair into a halo of static. The charged strands clung to her eyes, through which she saw Masood, shirtless, watching her. He reached to unbutton her shirt and she noticed his musky smell, so different from Douglas. His chest hair was thicker. His arms were hard and muscular and seemed to flash all sorts of veins and tendons as he slowly undid the pearly white buttons of her shirt. He kissed her, his tongue tangy with coffee, his lips working aggressively over hers, lips much fuller than Douglas’s.

Good God, was she going to think of
Douglas
the whole time?

She fumbled with her belt. She undid the button at her waist, which seemed to release the slight layer of stomach flab she’d recently developed. Between her stairwell Twinkies and the long days at her desk, no amount of secret squats and buttock squeezes in the staff
elevator had stopped the extra pounds. Denise had always taken pride in her figure, and while Douglas, who’d plumped up a bit himself, generously overlooked this corporal addition, she feared it would no doubt disappoint this younger, buffer man who was breathing fiercely as he unclasped what she now realized was one of her ratty beige bras.

What underwear did she even have on?

Suddenly, she couldn’t bear to see the look on Masood’s face. What if it was disappointment? She’d only feel
less
attractive, which defeated the whole point of this tawdry escapade.

She sucked in her stomach to refasten her pants’ button. “I’m a married woman, Masood.”

“Please,” he said, pressing his warm lips to her neck.

“The cops will come.”

“No one is here.”

“We’ll get arrested for indecent exposure.”

“We are alone, Denise.”

She fastened her belt buckle and covered it with her hands, as if it might come undone of its own free will. “I have a husband.”

“Yes, I have seen your husband.”

She stumbled out of the car, looking around at the decaying red brick of the abandoned building. She lit a cigarette, with the full
almostness
of the moment congealing around her. It was seven o’clock, her bra was unhooked, her gold earring somewhere in the filthy carpeting of this man’s Mazda Miata, and she was smoking by an decrepit factory.

“What the hell did you mean, you’ve seen my husband?”

“Denise, you are being childish. Get back in the car.”

“Oh, I’ll get in, I’ll get in so you can drive me back. And for God sakes, please don’t roll through the stop signs this time, and try using a turn signal. You shouldn’t even have a driver’s license!”

At home, Denise tried to still her anger and confusion by preparing an elaborate meal: halibut with sun-dried tomatoes and shiitake
mushrooms. She tossed a beet, walnut, and goat cheese salad with cider vinaigrette. She baked an apple pie.

Douglas came in, set his briefcase down, and said, “Oooh, fancy!”

Without pausing from her work, she said, “Doug, I didn’t sign on to this marriage to slave away for the goddamned school board. You need to fix this.”

DOUGLAS

Eminent domain. Two words changed his life.

Douglas’s father had wanted him to learn a skill. He said a man should be able to make things with his hands. So one summer, Douglas laid foundations and set wall posts and hammered rafters around Fairfield County for J&J Construction, coming home with sawdust on his face, dirty hands, dramatically swinging his utility belt onto the dinner table, hoping for some small word of approval from his father.

When the construction crew wasn’t discussing the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue, or which cars had the fastest pickup, they’d talk about F. D. Rich. Anyone who ever lifted a hammer in the state of Connecticut had heard of F. D. Rich.

Rich was a turn-of-the-century Italian immigrant who’d worked in the sandstone quarries of Pennsylvania before setting up shop as a stonemason in Stamford, Connecticut. He built fireplaces, walls, foundations. But after World War I, he set his sights higher. Within decades, the F. D. Rich Company of general contracting had built hotels, libraries, schools, and hospitals across the country.

The company motto was “From Alaska to the Caribbean.”

Douglas’s ragtag crew had its own motto: “From the front door to the shit can.”

In 1960, the Rich Company seized on a major local opportunity. Since Yale & Towne Manufacturing had left Stamford, the city had been crippled by unemployment, poverty, and crime. Collapsing
houses and abandoned storefronts were everywhere. The F. D. Rich Company became the city’s sole redeveloper, and with federal subsidies it razed more than one hundred acres of downtown slums, then built office towers, shopping malls, and high-rise apartments. Within a decade a dying post-Industrial town had become a midsize metropolis, a city that would eventually lure UBS International from Manhattan, Xerox, GE Capital, and Pitney Bowes.

Signs read:
THE CITY THAT WORKS
.

Stamford eventually boasted one of the country’s highest educated populations: nine out of ten residents were high school graduates, half held bachelor’s degrees. It also ranked as one of the safest cities in the country.

So in 2003, after Douglas had managed to flip his second house, when commercial real estate started picking up steam, he recalled F. D. Rich and began thinking about commercial real estate in Stamford. Douglas wasn’t going anywhere at Ardor and he disliked commuting. He’d watched his father get stuck at the same company his whole life, spending most of his evenings on a train. Laura had just turned one, the twins five; Douglas wanted to be home for dinner with his children. And after his tech-bubble losses, he wanted his money in old-fashioned brick and mortar.

Douglas phoned his old boss at J&J, who facilitated some introductions. Soon Douglas joined Obervell Construction, a small outfit bidding on downtown Stamford revitalization projects. A lot of people were sniffing around the city then to see what the Rich Company had left undone, what viable lots were left for the taking. The city was offering big loans to anyone with a feasible proposal. Miranda Construction had won a bid on the Canal Street lot for new residential condos. Sanders & Son snatched up the last chunks of Pacific Street for an arts center. Three other developers had their eyes on the waterfront, where the old piano and bicycle factories stood empty.

Douglas wanted in on the action, wanted to carve out a place for himself at Obervell. He remembered the South End from when he
was a kid. It was part of town where you’d drive ten minutes out of your way to make sure you didn’t ride down the wrong street. But in 1996, the city had razed Southfield Village, the worst of the housing projects, and the neighborhood had been improving. Douglas figured they could assemble a full-block lot there for a bargain, and that its proximity to the interstate and the train station would make it attractive to corporate tenants. He wanted to build an office tower.

Douglas studied the map, driving up and down every street in the South End, an area where mostly blacks and some Latinos lived. The streets were spotted with delis and barbershops and shoe repair stores. A few low-rise condos had been put up since Southfield Village came down. Douglas wanted to find old places that might sell on the cheap. Finally, he homed in on Freedom Avenue. On the block between Hancock Street and Wilson Street stood a Dairy Queen, a U-Haul franchise, a liquor store, a parking lot, and ten row houses from the 1930s.

He brought the idea to Dean Obervell, who gave him the green light. Douglas contracted with a local architect and they wrote up the proposal for an $80 million forty-story office tower with ground-floor retail space. The city redevelopment commission agreed to loan half the capital, offering an additional two-year tax abatement. An urban revitalization grant for one million dollars was issued by the state.

The project proceeded magically. Within weeks, Douglas raised another $30 million—hedge funds were throwing money into real estate; Cooper Realty Loans handed them $10 million. A feverish excitement surrounded the tower; unsolicited investors were calling to get in on the action. Douglas’s Obervell colleagues, awed by how swiftly the capital was raised, wanted in. After all those years reading about visionary investors and fearless businessmen, Douglas, too, recognized the chance.

He understood that he had made mistakes before, but those had been with stocks, inherently risky. The tower was a physical asset.
And as soon as the land parcels were combined, the real estate alone would triple in value, not to mention the eventual revenue from the tower. He would never have another opportunity like this, to get in at the start. Douglas took out a second mortgage and pitched in $2 million.

Obervell bought the U-Haul and Dairy Queen quickly. Then the parking lot and liquor store. Six of the row house owners handed over their deeds the same day. But four families held out—parcels 3, 5, 6, and 9a—which Douglas had expected. Surely some of the homeowners would think to angle for a better deal, so Obervell offered another ten thousand dollars.

They said no.

Douglas returned a week later and threw another five thousand into the deal.

At which point one of the homeowners smiled. “That’s extremely generous,” she said, and handed him an envelope. Douglas, assuming it was a deed, opened it with great excitement.

Dear Mr. Olson,

It is not a question of money for our homes. We have all lived here many years and our children have grown up in these houses and we are intending for them to have these houses themselves one day. Thank you for your offer.

Sincerely,

The families of Freedom Avenue

Douglas panicked. He couldn’t build a tower with four houses still standing there. He couldn’t get the money back for the land parcels he’d already bought. And he couldn’t walk away from the project. This was his big break. Obervell wanted the tower, the city needed the tower. It would provide jobs, tax revenue.

After a few days at his computer, a pot of coffee burning beside him, Douglas dug up a ruling from 1954,
Berman v. Parker,
in which
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the District of Columbia could lower the wrecking ball on a department store that happened to be sitting smack in the middle of a seventy-six-acre slum that developers wanted to refashion.

Even if a building wasn’t a threat to public safety or health, the court said, it could be “an ugly eyesore, a blight on the community, which robs it of charm, which makes it a place from which men turn.”

God, those row houses were charmless!

Douglas took Harold Whitehead of the Urban Redevelopment Commission to lunch at the top of the Hilton Stamford, a restaurant that spun slowly so patrons could view the entire city. Douglas spoke passionately about Stamford’s rebirth, how it had been pulled from the post-Industrial rubble to become a thriving metropolis. Forty years earlier, he said, Frank Rich razed acres of cheap housing to save Stamford from becoming a slum. Progress took vision, and Obervell was offering to sweep up, pro bono, one of the last messy corners of downtown. Then Douglas pulled out photographs of the Freedom Avenue houses. “This is the Stamford of another era,” Douglas said. “And as far as eyesores go, we’re talking glaucoma.”

He sent the commission cases of scotch, and got Glenn Mirsky to make off-the-record promises about 50 percent discounts on the residential condos Obervell was going to be building on the waterfront.

It would take some paperwork, some time, but the commission said it could condemn the properties and buy them on behalf of Obervell.