Dear Money (20 page)

"We'll get back to you," Will said. "This is exciting news." He used his most professional deal-making voice to temper his enthusiasm. He thought. He went into the library and drew the doors, told Emma to give him some time. "But can we? Is this prudent?" And again he asked her for just a little time.

He sat at the desk with a pad of paper and a pen before him. He felt as if he were back at work. He liked the feel of strategy, the taut tendons of the deal's structure. He missed that most in his new life, the physical feel of the deal. He thought some more. He could juggle things. His accounts were solid. His credit was impeccable. They owned the Tribeca loft. They'd bought low and real estate now soared. Their equity had accrued, as it does. Real estate never goes down—not in the long term. Given his new circumstances, the budget was tighter, but that house couldn't be worth much. It sat on a quarter of an acre. To Emma, back in the kitchen, he said, "What unbelievable luck." This was his first mistake.

Research revealed that in this market the property (you really couldn't say the house, because it was not the house they were buying, but the view) would sell for a lot. An offer the Hovs couldn't refuse was $1 million, at a minimum, but even that was not a guarantee. "A million?" Emma asked, astonished, her blue eyes actually becoming a prettier shade with fear. A million was out of their reach, certainly, given that Will did not have a job, given that they could use the house only four months of the year at best—it was not winterized and could never be, unless it was knocked down and rebuilt, which they would never do.

She studied her husband as he pondered this, his beautiful jaw, his green eyes and thick dark hair. He was so familiar to her, his looks no longer had that searing appeal. In studying him she hoped to understand whether this plan of theirs was viable or foolish. Instead, he made the call to the Hovs, proposing $1 million. The offer was contemplated. Several days of anticipation, nail biting, hair twirling, pacing, fantasizing, lying in bed late into the night and drawing pictures with their words of all they would do to their house. Emma lay in her silk nightgown, promising the stars that she would never take fortune for granted again. Will, on his side, worried, of course, but he was a banker, after all. If he couldn't swing this deal, then what had all those years taught him? He knew how to borrow from Peter to pay Paul and make a killing in the process. That's what credit markets were for, and paper was cheap these days.

Finally the Hovs accepted. The Victorian shack would belong to the Chapmans, and in turn the Hovs would officially be millionaires. Real estate had done what it was intended to do.

Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul was an easy task. With interest rates at historic lows, Will refinanced the Tribeca loft. Bought for $1.3 million in 1998, it was now worth $2.1 million. He took equity out to use as a down payment, and while he was at it, to shore up his ability to pay the girls' tuition and the family's expenses for the next several years. As a banker they'd lived on 45 a month—that is, $45,000, after taxes. The marquee loan of this year, 2003, was the interest-only loan. This would allow Will to make lower monthly payments for the first few years, thus ensuring their ability to keep up with the payments while they adjusted to the new circumstances.

For the house in Maine he used a different mortgage structure. Instead of putting down 20 percent, he put down 0 percent and took out a 2/28 mortgage—that is, a mortgage with an initial two-year teaser rate of 3.5 percent, which would (he was well aware) be adjusted in two years to a market-dependent rate, usually higher. In this way, he'd have more time to figure out his new financial picture.

Given the market, the Maine house and the Tribeca apartment would continue to rise in value. He could refinance or, worst-case scenario, he'd have to sell Maine. But he knew enough to know that you had to take risks in order to win, and he had both money and wits to risk, and the horizon looked clear and long. In fact, his greatest concern involved storms wreaking havoc with the house. But even that bothered him little. Insurance, though expensive, would take care of it. The house had been there since the 1880s and nothing had knocked it down yet, and if it came down, they'd be free to rebuild.

Maine was theirs.

When I saw Emma again at the Met, in her red velvet gown, her black hair pulled back in a French knot, she was bursting with excitement. The evening well lit with votive candles, drenched in champagne, Emma took my hands, kissing me on the cheek, and flooded me with news of her new house. "You'll have to come stay with us, continue that novel of yours..." Smiling her nuthatch smile.

"The plot has just made a turn," I said.

"Indeed," she said.

"How did you kill them?" I asked. I couldn't help myself. She looked at me, confused, a smile quivering on her lips as if it could rise and fly away. But she wouldn't let it. The smile turned to laughter, bubbles bursting forth as she recalled the reference.

"Actually, I think the Hovs killed us," she said, standing before me regally with all the confidence of someone who can frame financial ruin in a joke.

Money could always be had, more made. It would not run out. This room in a grand museum, filling as it was, was a testament to that. And I wondered too if she had more news, news of the sale of Will's book. Failure was not in the Chapmans' vocabulary. He'd sell the book for a million, part one of a series. It was clear to me after having finished the book (he'd also given me part two) that it would be published in two volumes—a woman's life as it spans the twentieth century, Laura Ingalls Wilder for the new world, written by a man, a banker turned novelist, riches to "rags." Perhaps it was already sold, his marketing scheme the icing on the deal. Of course Emma did not explain the fancy mortgages, the subtleties of Will's financial prowess. I'm not certain she knew the details or understood the risks, what it meant to be completely leveraged. And if she had tried to explain these complexities to me (which she never would have, because she knew that it smelled a bit too much like a scheme, a way for someone with not enough to afford more, like those o percent credit card loans I was so fond of), I would not have understood much. The house in Maine belonged to them—it was that simple from my point of view—not to the bank, not to a complicated compilation of fancy mortgages. I congratulated her.

Theodor, handsome in his tuxedo, appeared at my side with Sally and Darwin Deals. Sally wore a cream lace dress that hugged her neck yet hung loosely everywhere else, trying (unsuccessfully) to hide the bulk of her body. Deals wore a tuxedo that was too big, the way he seemed to like his suits, as if the larger size were a promise of what he could become. Introductions all around, hellos and kisses on the cheek. Will too joined the cluster. He wore a red plaid bow tie with a matching cummerbund. He kissed me and thanked me for the call and e-mail about his novel. "It's terrific," I said. I could have been jealous, but the truth of Will's talent took the sting out.

"You think it will sell, then?"

"No question," I said.

"So you're no longer mad at me for leaving Wall Street?"

"I still think you're a fool."

"I'm glad you're consistent."

"He's written a fantastic novel," I said boisterously to Sally and Deals, and then explained how crazy he'd been, leaving his job. I was a little giddy and overly familiar with Will because of the champagne. Just looking at Deals I thought about the fiasco with China and the coffee contract, but Deals didn't dare mention it, or corn or soy or any other commodity. He carried on about the bond market and mortgages, engaging Will in the topic, with Sally chiming in here and there. Coffee had tanked, of course, because luck does not fall from the sky, and corn was just a maneuver to make the loss of coffee more palatable.

Canapés all around, and the music began. Emma's news burst forth again—smiles and toasts—and then the conversation divided and subdivided, like a large group of birds into separate flocks, soaring and darting and weaving together, then splitting—private schools, public schools, doormen, supers, plays opening, plays closing, the cost of babysitting, neighborhood bakeries, the virtues of having a mini-tractor in the country. When you are part of the repartee it is impossible to see that your voice—the flight of your conversation, the particular direction you take, the strange dives and offbeat vectors you deploy to assert your point of view—is still governed and sustained in some measure by the air through which you move—together. You are part of a group of birds—pigeons, say—each one flying separately but together. In the end, the whole dazzling lot is swirling around an apartment building. Real estate, again. Special subcategory: Manhattan, a market universally acknowledged to be unique, a story unto itself, a story that could logically go in only one direction, up.

Just so: one found oneself saying "$2.2 million" or "$3.5 million," the asking price for apartments no bigger than our own rental, and one found oneself at realtors' open houses, walking through buildings in Harlem, with other earnest buyers strolling the place, inspecting the stoves and the views, and one found oneself deploying a calculus under one's breath by which one could arrive at a smaller monthly figure, which would be the hypothetical maintenance fee, and one saw that this number was not insurmountably higher than the going rate for rental apartments (never mind that Theodor and I paid a quarter of the market rate for rentals). And of course there were the stories of people getting in a little earlier, say ten years ago, people who bought apartments for what seemed at the time a preposterous price, $800,000, which were now worth more than $2.5 million.

These were people you knew, parents of the friends of your children, sober, responsible, welcome dinner guests, people who were in charge of large corporations, who knew firsthand the ways of the world and who looked you in the eye when asked what they thought about the asking price of a townhouse in Harlem: "One-point-nine is a steal for that part of town." Real estate in Manhattan was the exception to every law in the universe. That was the way it was, and only a bumpkin thought otherwise.

Emma held forth with her plans for renovating Pond Point, modernizing the appliances, retiling, re-laying the pine floors. How many kitchens were there across America in stainless and chrome—the deep wells of Wolf and Viking and Sub-Zero. Five, ten thousand dollars a pop. Chump change! Others offer their views of the Viking: the oven and burners run too hot but they're fabulous; the gorgeous Wolf, with the red knobs, just too expensive. Deep into the granular specifics of kitchen appointments, Emma and her new friend Sally bonded over their too hot but wonderful high-performance kitchen stoves (which they never used). Sally was the sort of woman who latches on at a party because she's too shy to circulate. She had Emma's ear and interest and she would not let it go, and Emma, who was well cultivated in the skills of circulation, delighted by this conversation about Viking stoves there by the Temple of Dendur.

All of us soaked up in a private evening at the Metropolitan, in the heart of New York. Nile lilies, bread stacked in pyramids in the center of the cloth-covered tables, the female wait staff with Cleopatra wigs and kohl-encircled eyes offering Egyptian delights: canapés of goat cheese and barberries, and saffron-infused chicken with pine nuts, and platters of dill to be dipped in hummus, and walnuts glazed with honey. Sally and Emma were absorbed in the specifics of how best to vent the Viking range. And I, on the periphery, stood with a novelist's eye and a pauper's purse, dazzled before the spectacle of it all.

"Have you seen Win?" Emma asked. "He was to have brought his new girl, Beatrix, but she's sick." I flinched, a prick of jealousy. Beatrix, what an unlikely name. I pictured the woman behind the name; somehow it didn't add up to Win. "Apparently she's a knockout, but his girls always are." And she drifted off to something else. Of course he'd have a girl. Hadn't Emma described him as a notorious Casanova? I looked around the room but didn't see him.

The room thickened with arriving guests. Photographers snapped pictures, a flurry of lights—famous personages here to celebrate and preserve the arts. Amid the swirl of party chaos, Kathy Park, in a black lace gown and a strand of South Sea pearls, took me in her arms. "How wonderful to see you," she said. A kiss and a pat on the arm and the crowd absorbed Kathy, spitting out a mother from Ruby's class, Mila Ferragamo (no relation), the one who took me to Sarah Jessica Parker's reflexologist and who bought the $250 mummy-dust-enhanced face cream with its ancient recipe for preservation. "I saw your book, darling. Sexy cover." Her big black eyes flashed with mischief, and she went on to talk about herself: her husband had a job offer in Singapore, "and we're thinking seriously about taking it. Singapore's the new Upper East Side. No different, really. All the women dress the same."

Our constellation was still active, a dividing cell. Theodor discussed his chalice commission with Deals. Will swooped away to greet friends and soon came back, holding court with his old colleagues. More flashes, a sudden frenzy of them that drew all eyes to the entrance, cameras madly working. The subject: Carlyle P. Smedes, with his Prada clothes, looking charming—all the accoutrements of his style and position adding to his already significant height. A warm smile on his contented face. On his arm was the Dashing Cavelli (ascot at his neck, offering a stream of comments to the eager press). He'd been my publisher once. I thought wistfully of what could have been. Then I had to look twice, clear my eyes and look again. Lily Starr entered, ravishing and slender (though she had not been a slender girl a few months before) in a sage gown, a single but significant diamond around her neck—how sudden and complete the transformation from no one to someone can be! The triad, Cavelli with his two successes, both authors on the bestseller list, literary rock stars. The goddess Sakhmet, four repetitions of her in stone, served as their backdrop—goddess of war, violent storms and pestilence—as they briefly posed for the paparazzi, triumphing, it seemed, if we were to read the visual cues, over Sakhmet. How easily Lily wore fame, walking, slowing, smiling, aloof. Trailing behind her in black velvet, star of her own show, was Lily's new agent, agent to Smedes too, the fair-skinned and lightly freckled auburn beauty Sig Blankman. Lithe and swan-like she drifted into the room.