Dear Money (29 page)

If anything resembling tragedy had ever struck Isabella, it was part of a past that may have occasionally returned, the way memory does, and moved her in her most quiet and private hour—which, need I add, did not include the hour that we jogged together. But for the most part such things had been neatly catalogued and packed off. So she carried on about the mirror. The men were going to have to remove it from the crate and carry it into the house and hang it immediately. "If it's ruined..." She paused, allowing the consequences to surround us as our feet thumped the ground. "It was just absurd to spend so much," she said.

"How much?" I asked.

"Oh, India!" She laughed. "You
are
direct."

But she wouldn't tell me. It was unsavory to speak of price tags. She picked up her pace as if to run away from the question, tucking loose strands of hair behind her ears. Isabella had strawberry curls, full cheeks, ribbon lips, a well-defined jaw line. She'd confessed to me on our first run that she'd been eager to know me better because she too wanted to be a writer, had set up an office on the top floor of The House, sliding glass doors leading to a terrace (landscaped by a plant sculptor) with a river view and a chaise with a blanket so that she could lie there to read even on cold days. "Like Hans Castorp," she'd said, "at his sanatorium." She was an educated woman, had been working on a Ph.D. in comparative literature when her first baby arrived—though that feat too seemed neatly shelved.

I wondered what she'd make of me if I told her I had left writing, that I was preoccupied by very different concerns these days. For example, I was certain that already I could explain to her the nuances of her mortgage, chart the arc it would follow across its lifetime. But she would not have cared. One of her primary luxuries was that she did not need to care. She did not know what kind of banking her husband did. "I won't pretend to explain," she'd said. "Something to do with bonds, but really I'm not quite sure what he does."

We ran past the Boat Basin to the pier at 72nd Street and then back to the tennis courts at 120th Street, finishing with a race up the steps out of the park. Some days she'd win; some days I'd win. Today I won. I left her in front of her house and walked briskly to my apartment, showered, dressed and primped and was out the door by 6:45, in the office by 7:10. I swiped the door with my ID badge and walked into the pit, now humming with activity.

Friday, January 16: I'd been at B&B exactly two weeks. The boys had made their bets, each of which in its own way groping for the truth about who or what I was: I was a journalist, perhaps a producer at
Dateline
or
Extra,
or a reporter from
Newsday,
here to observe and develop a story; I was a Method actress preparing for a big Hollywood role; I was an intern; I was a girlfriend to whom Win owed a big favor; I was a distant relative's daughter, an artist, a chef, a heroin addict, a sorry soul whom Win wanted to help; I was never going to be seated on a desk; I'd be seated within six months; I'd be seated in a year, two months, five months. There was real money riding on me, all told the various bets adding up to $4,500. In those first weeks I felt a bit like a gyroscope: just a tap would send me into a completely different orbit.

Win's strategy of saying nothing helped me, as I'm sure he knew it would, to learn without pressure—freed me to absorb in my own natural way, without interference, while preserving me as his to shape and design. Some days I felt like a beginner, the woman that I was, learning a whole new trade. Other days I felt like the old me, a writer, a spy in their country, noting all the ridiculousness of the place: the gargantuan telephones with glowing blue screens and forty lines, all programmed to connect, with one press of a button, to clients; the recourse to male anatomy as a qualitative descriptor—to be "hung like a horse" meant you were a stud trader, someone to be reckoned with, unless you were, sadly, "hung like a field mouse"; the use of sports and military exemplars—Vince Lombardi or George Patton, whose words became company slogans.
Pressure makes diamonds. Perpetual peace is a futile dream. No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country; he won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

Neither horse nor field mouse, I searched for a position of advantage. I liked the notion of myself as a spy, an outsider. Being a spy might give me perspective, though I had no idea how perspective would serve me or what it added up to. When I told Win that so much of what I was reading in the papers and online made no sense, he said that it didn't need to make sense. What had to make sense was valuing the bonds against the market's desire for them. His job was to think about strategy: how far to go, how deep, when to back out. "But it's interesting to me," he said, "that your primary concern is that all of this makes no sense."

I was sitting in Win's office, as I did in those early days, his door open to the trading floor. It seemed that for many days I'd been quietly nodding my head, understanding nothing but marshaling an alert, attentive look on my face. When I spoke, my own voice almost startled me.

"I don't understand why a huge pension fund would find a collection of risky mortgages a reliable investment." Did I have any idea what I was asking? Only in a graduate seminar sort of way. Not in a way that would count out there on the trading floor. A trader from currency was buying a gumball from the machine outside Win's office. Already I was coming to understand who sat where and did what. At best I possessed a knowledge of the firm's seating chart. The gumball kid's name was Jud. He looked in on us, smiled, popped the gumball in his mouth and went back to his seat. "Imagine," I continued, "if you're too leveraged, something's got to give, right?"

I was thinking of myself just then, how I'd been managing the bills for the past six months: borrowing on credit cards, elaborate schemes to buy time, ultimately leaving the bills in their stack beside the computer in our bedroom. Investors were interested in that debt of mine. I had a 0 percent credit card with $10,000 on it. If I kept up with the minimum payment, I wouldn't be charged interest for eighteen months. There was no balance transfer fee. As long as I paid it off on time, the credit card would make nothing on that loan. Even so, that debt had a lot of value to investors, because they assumed I'd make a mistake, miss a payment, that in the end I wouldn't be able to pay it off and the rates would rise drastically. But I intended to stay one step ahead of them, get another 0 percent loan from a different bank with no balance transfer fee and transfer the debt again. Sooner or later, they were betting, I'd get stuck. Hot potato. Something would happen, some life-changing force, and there I'd be exposed. The music would stop and I'd be left holding the potato. They were betting on the actuarial likelihood that misfortune happened to all of us, that I'd be blindsided by some unexpected event that made me unable to pay. But was I any different from a bank? Why couldn't it be a bank that suddenly found itself without cash? Not just one bank but many banks, banks in the same boat as all those sad, wretched debtor people?

"You're right," Win said. "It's a guessing game and an assessing game and like any game it can get out of hand. It always does. And that's my job, to forecast when the game will get out of hand, and to be ready for it with a plan, but to take advantage in the meantime."

"Can I tell you what I see as we go along?"

"You better. Remember, you're the storyteller. But as you begin to trade you're going to become very specialized. You'll think micro instead of macro, deep instead of wide."

The day had sailed by already. The winter evening came on at 4
P.M.
From the windows in Win's office I could see the city begin to light up like candles at a table, reminding me that I had to leave early to go to Williamsburg. Sullivan was coming for dinner to see the chalice.

"You're seeing Will and Emma tonight," Win said, more of a declaration, that way he had of wanting you to know he knew much, if not everything.

"That's right," I said. We'd invited them along with Sullivan's wife for dinner, a celebration of the chalice. I hadn't seen the Chapmans since the fundraiser at the Met. Then a chill shivered through me. "Have you told Will?" I asked sharply. I imagined him making fun of me tonight in front of Theodor.

Win gave me a quizzical look, studying me. "What are you worried about?"

"Am I worried?"

"You tell me." He paused, then said, "Ah-ha!"

I didn't say anything.

He persisted. "You haven't told the husband." This Win said with a devilish flourish. He loved every moment of this. He spoke as if referring to that other sort of scandal, referring to Theodor as "the husband," never by name. "I've committed to you," he whispered. "I need you," he said, letting that phrase develop its own heft, "to commit to me." He smiled. This was his way. I'd become familiar with it: rakish when he was disappointed. He didn't get upset. He simply told you what needed to be done, directing you so that he elicited the best from you. Knowing he'd made his point, he added, "Have you heard Will's good news?" I looked at him, again taken aback. For some reason Isabella's mirror popped into my mind. I hoped getting it through the door and illuminated had been a success.

"I'm looking forward to hearing all about it tonight," I said, revealing nothing, for this was a test too. I could feel his eyes on me as I left, making my way to the elevator. I walked up Park to 57th, over to Fifth, into Bergdorf's, took the elevator to the seventh floor to buy napkins for the dinner party. Theodor had made napkin rings, gold wire entwined with elephants—their eyes jet beads. Will's news could be only one thing, and I was not yet immune to the writer's competitive, desperate nature—the sense that someone else's gain was necessarily your loss.

In Bergdorf's I wavered for a moment, caught between the old and the new life. I was firm in the knowledge that everything here was priced preposterously, but knew that here I would find something special for Theodor's dinner. I knew too that I'd never hear the end of it from him. Indeed, he'd get years of mileage out of the extravagance that I was about to perpetrate, but he and I both also knew that that was part of the gift, an acknowledgment of his first and original snap assessment of me so many years ago at our first meeting. "You're a rich girl," he'd said. He wasn't right then, but he wasn't exactly wrong either, and I was about to help him make his own case. I'd not yet received my first paycheck, but I would soon enough. So the truth was, I was still broke. The first of many big checks, twice the size of my university check, had yet to arrive.

Here among the preposterous things—they used to be called "notions"—lingering, pausing briefly to let fabrics fall between my fingers, I found myself in dinnerware. A woman approached me. I want to say she was middle-aged, but aren't we all? What I mean is, she managed to have assembled, "put together," out of the wreckage that life brings, a valiant sense of order, and one found it among the patterns of plates, whose names read like a catalogue of ships. She asked a few discreet questions, and I answered as if speaking in a confessional. She understood a few things about how the world works and guided me, gently but firmly, to a display table arrayed with napkins. She was a sensible woman. She would not let me wander off course into cookware or appliances or bedding and become dispirited. The napkin table was where I belonged, at least for now. She understood. She would hold my little secret. I felt moved by her discretion.

I chose what I liked best, what might look most appropriate rolled as tight as a fat Cuban cigar inside a golden wire, beneath the elephants of Theodor's opulent and clever design. A cream linen with the thinnest border of silk organza—so pretty and delicate they should have been in a lingerie drawer among the sachets. They were $60 each. I'd like to say I thought nothing of buying six of them, but I can't. The old life was still fresh within me. I felt the desire for them and the rapid beat of my heart. "Aren't these sumptuous?" the saleslady whispered, taking the napkins from me and counting them gently, as though she were performing an arcane Japanese ceremony. "Is six all you need?"

"Yes, thank you," I croaked, and reached into my purse to pull out the old wallet into which Theodor had long ago stitched, in fine silk thread,
ANARCHY.
From my anarchy wallet I extracted a credit card. "That will be it for today." I smiled and she took my card.

"India." I heard my name. "Is that you, India?"

Behind me, with her fingers wrapped around a sterling silver fork with carved grapes tumbling down the shaft, was a newer, improved Lily Starr. I hadn't seen her since the fundraiser, and she looked even more becoming now in well-fitting jeans tucked into brown suede boots and a cashmere turtleneck, her hair short. From her wrist dangled a cerulean-blue alligator purse. I wasn't yet learned enough to know the designer. It was beautiful, though. Little silver feet glimmered from the corners of the bag's base. Money had been good to Lily, and she was not hesitating to flaunt the effect. A leather bomber jacket draped her other arm.

"You're in a suit," she gasped, chic girl giving my corporate get-up the once-over. "Why in the world?"

"Fancy running into you here," I said.

"A wedding present," she said, almost apologetically. "My niece has registered for this pattern." She held up the fork with the intricate grapes. "Can you believe this place? Nine-eighty a setting. She's marrying a banker," she added for explanation.

"Smart niece," I said.

"Right! What were
we
thinking?" she said, taking me in with her big infectious smile, knitting us together in camaraderie. I remembered her once saying, after her husband got his first teaching job following a prolonged stint of unemployment, that a salary made her want to have sex with him again. "Note to self," Lily Starr said with a wink into an imaginary tape recorder, "next time around, let him be a banker."

Lordy, she was trying to realign herself with me, with what she thought I still was, perhaps here with what she thought
she
still was, with what she had been before the best-selling publication of her book and the $5,000 invitations to give readings at colleges all over the country. ("I've no time left to write," she confessed.) The past: when there was nothing to lose, when all was driven by the white heat of the page, "the sexy theater of 8% x 11," as one writer had called it, "the only game in town that ever matters," another had said, the place where one lived and died to make one's audacious mark on the world. Now she was the proud owner of a million-dollar bungalow in the Hamptons, I remembered. Then Lily noticed the suit again, and I could see it jar the nostalgic tableau.