Dear Money (33 page)

And he wore his pride sheepishly, but wore it nonetheless, with a boyish grin, relishing Maine, his wife's renovation, his book, his close relationship with Cavelli, the editorial process, the long, wine-filled lunches, the risk balanced by the bounty and good fortune of his life: his well-dressed, intelligent girls, his beautiful, talented wife, who, he announced, was thinking of taking a class in interior design.

To me they seemed unchanged, on the surface anyway, by their new circumstances. Somehow I expected a transformation, a touch of the rakish artist at the very least, but not so. It had not been that long; they had not been tested yet, I supposed. How different was I, after all? I was still jotting notes in the little notebook I kept in my purse, recording the details as I had always done for the inevitable project that would someday occur to me. At dinner the night before, on the porch, amid citronella candles to keep away the mosquitoes, Will had been the gracious host, happy to use all the new toys, the accoutrements (the grill with its own gas line, the bentwood rockers) of his latest success: the house, of course. A blitz of illegally procured fireworks erupted in the dark, shooting over the water, illuminating a huddle of people standing around various bonfires that polka-dotted the beach like inflamed haystacks. Will steered the conversation toward me and my joining B&B, a notion he apparently still resisted, the idea that I'd thrown writing overboard to go for the money. With the flickering candlelight randomly illuminating small sections of his face, he pressed me on what I thought about bond traders, Win, the career change.

"The energy is thrilling, you know," I said. "My whole adult life I'd worked alone at a desk, in my imagination. I didn't know what it meant to work with others."

"And the writing?"

"I don't think like a writer anymore."

"How does a writer think?"

"Oh, come now. You know. I don't read behind the face to think what the story might be. I've stopped doing that." Which wasn't really true, but I had to make it so.

"That's too good a metaphor for me to believe you," Will said.

"I think about the market instead, what it's doing."

"Is this true?" Will asked, turning to Theodor.

"I believe she believes that," he answered. "Our conversations are certainly different. I hear a lot about the market."

"And the market?"

"Crazy, exhilarating. I have nothing to compare it to," I said. I realized too that I didn't have time to think about the nuances of people, character, as I had before.

"The truth is," Will declared, "this is one story to watch, and if you stick with it, you'll have a front-row seat. The slicing and dicing and mincing of the American dream, like taking meat and grinding it into hamburger and then shipping it off to European insurance companies, Texas hedge funds, the central bank of China. These are our houses, our neighbors' houses. These exotic mortgages are going to come due and then someone will have to pay the bill. And there're not just a few of them, so imagine the ripple effect."

"I suppose you don't think much about your old life either," I teased. He was curious, wanted to have the conversation, wanted to feel out how deeply entrenched I was by this point—could I talk the talk? And I sensed in him someone yearning for that forgotten token, lost and left behind on a past shore. The banker in him was coming untethered from the artist, eager to lift off.

"I would never have imagined that mortgages would interest me," Theodor said. "But it's the scale of this world that I find amazing. Talk about a big canvas."

"But, honey, don't we have one of those resetting mortgages? What did you call it? A 2-and-28 or something like that?" Emma asked Will.

"Yes, my sweet, but we're not stupid. It's the people who don't know what they're getting themselves into who bring the house down."

I felt a little jolt, a small crack in the wall of their finances that allowed me, just barely, to peer inside. That meant that in two years he was betting he'd have a chunk of money that would allow him to rewrite the mortgage favorably. I bit my lip and held back from commenting.

"Are you really just doing this for the money?" Will asked suddenly.

"Will!" Emma's chastening tone clearly held a previous conversation, perhaps one in which she'd made him vow not to talk about my choice. But I didn't mind. We were close enough friends, and it
was
a curiosity. I knew that.

"A few years ago you didn't think money was so base," I said to Will with a wink, then swept my hand around the porch to encompass the house. Perhaps I could have gone on to explain: the crushing burden of debt in a sea of wealth, giving up on myself, my talent. Perhaps I could have spoken as Theodor had to me, about the artist's foray into commerce. But I hadn't felt the need to justify myself. If I were a man, I wanted to say, would you question my choice?

Just then we saw an eruption of spectacular red, white and blue fireworks, one after the next, and I remembered being a little girl, sitting on my father's lap during our town's annual July Fourth display, the point at which he'd always say, "The grand finale." I loved hearing him say those words, how he savored them, how they seemed like knowledge and wisdom, elevating the last moments, the fantastic repetition of shooting and bursting, to some higher truth. The beautiful, illegal and amateur display had the same effect now.

When it was finished, it was Theodor's turn to change the subject, asking Emma about her spring, and did she think she could live up here year-round: "Never." Emma told stories about the locals, about lopped-off thumbs and lobster thieves and rumrunners and the harrowing tale of a woman torn to shreds by a motorboat—the stories she loved best, of the people she adored collecting.

"No wonder you love it here," Theodor said.

On the beach the next day, the sun warming me, the spray of the sea, I thought of the yellow plane swooping down from the sky. A light wind rippled across the water and an enormous fish jumped, then another, taut and silver. The girls ran over to us, clamoring about the seals they'd seen, twenty lazing in the sun on the rocks of Fox Island. Ruby's fists were filled with sand dollars and Gwyneth told Ruby they weren't really dollars, causing her to whine and complain. Elisabeth and Catherine kissed their mother and ran to the water, diving easily into the cold Gulf of Maine. My girls followed, diving too.

They loved it here. They were free to roam and explore. Not far from the girls a giant tree trunk rolled in the waves. The tide would bring it to shore, and Emma would rally all of us and some neighbors to haul it to the dunes, where it would become part of the gate she was building, an elaborate stand in driftwood that marked the entrance to her house. She'd told me it was a futile effort, one they'd need to repeat the following year because the winter storms would wash it away. But she loved the exercise—it would become an annual ritual, the repetition that would define the beginning of summer, that seemingly never-ending span of time across weeks and months and years.

"After you win your bet," Emma asked, "do you think you'll stay on at B and B?"

"Who says I'll win?"

"Oh, you'll win."

"I haven't been tested yet," I said. I thought back to last night's dinner and the talk of exotic mortgages, and I looked at Emma now, wondering if I could see a fissure there, knowing that as with marriages, we never know the truth of people's financial lives no matter what they try to project. Watching her, trying to read beneath the surface of her, I felt a kinship to all the people who had studied me before when I was an artist, trying to make sense of Theodor and me, of how we afforded our lives.

"Do you miss writing?" Emma asked. She knew she was repeating the conversation of last night, pushing deeper. This wasn't about the writing, though, or about me. There was something sweet and naive in her that I hadn't noticed before.

"Honestly, I don't have time to miss it. I love that—that there isn't enough time anymore for all the worries I could drum up."

Emma looked at me quizzically, a look that indicated that Will didn't fill his writing time with worry—or, if he did, he didn't share much of it with her. The look also seemed to indicate a new understanding of me, a sympathy, another layer revealed, that she hadn't realized how comprehensively unglamorous the "writing life" was. Perhaps I had seemed composed to her, perhaps it had seemed that my system had worked—the mechanics that had made an artistic life possible. But in this light, like shantung silk, the hue exposed another hidden shade.

"Did you go to Win because you were concerned ... about money?" she asked.

I tried to laugh the question off, but she persisted, with her eyes on me. For the first time in our relationship I saw worry's fragile lines appear softly on her face. Or did I? Emma always seemed to have exactly what she wanted, even with her husband's huge career change. Behind her stood her regal Victorian cottage, a backdrop against which her petite figure, curled in her terry beach robe, reigned. House of cards or not, exotic mortgage or not, it was hers. She'd spent a springtime making this home into what she wanted it to be. I could see it then, as I would see it clearly later, that she was the sort of person, even in loss and challenge, who would come out ahead, with dignity—the knowledge that she was always doing right by herself and her family.

"I liked the challenge," I answered. Radalpieno came to mind, his interview, his demand that I state how much I wanted—how much I loved—money.

"I think you were incredibly brave. I can imagine the pressure you were under," she said. Then suddenly and matter-of-factly, "I spent too much redoing the cottage. Will was furious, in his way, for a few days. But it will work out. It always seems to." Then she pointed to the island floating just offshore, leaving me no space to comment on what she just offered. She said that back in the 1960s, the island had been for sale for $3,000. The land had a beach at low tide and a tall stand of spruce that protected it from the ocean. It was going for $2 million now.

"When you make your gobs I want you to buy that island," Emma said. "I want our houses to face each other. I want our girls to paddle canoes back and forth." The jump in value—of the island that would be mine so that we could be here together—was her way of explaining how it would all work: the undeniable fact that, renovated now, her house would be worth more.

I could picture the dream, our houses facing each other. A seal bobbed his head not far from shore, a fish leaped. The deep sapphire of the sea shimmered and foamed, the waves rolling in, crashing over the girls, who laughed and raced with buckets of sand to shore up their castles, startling in that clear afternoon light.

T
HE MORTGAGE UNIVERSE
is divided into three areas: Agencies, Securitized and Unsecuritized. Mortgages are part of Fixed Income, which, with Equities and Prime Services, make up the division of Capital Markets. My area was Agency MBS, the most basic kinds of mortgage bonds, all agency-securitized mortgages, backed by pools of home loans acquired by regular, hard-working people. Nothing exceptional, nothing too risky.

These were not the mortgages that bought the fancy New York apartments and the million-dollar summer cottages in Maine. These mortgages had limits. In 2004, they couldn't go higher than $417,000. My desk of six traders dealt in fifteen-year and thirty-year fixed-rate Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie Mae bonds. On my desk we were both market makers and proprietary traders, but our first function was as market makers, to provide liquidity to the firm's institutional client base. But there was also a certain amount of balance sheet and risk capital committed to my business, with which I tried to make money in my sector and with the products I used to hedge (Treasuries, futures, swaps, options, Fed fund futures, Eurodollars). Among the six of us in three books, we made anywhere from three hundred to eight hundred trades a day.

Starting out, I traded things with less "lossability" so I could get the feel of things. Even so, you could lose a lot by making a simple mistake or, worse, by hurting a customer relationship. To have a basic sense of all this took about six months. I learned the language, and mostly I observed. Eventually I'd come to understand that none of the most important parts of the business could be learned. Just as great writing can't be taught. It was more elusive than, say, learning to be a bookkeeper. So much had to do with subtlety, with understanding what people were willing to pay for bonds at a range of interest rates, synthesizing recent transactions in order to establish value, feeling the dynamics of the market and, of course, getting to know the players, developing relationships. Relationships took longer.

In Win's scheme, through his connections and the fast brain he was betting I had, what he wanted to see was a remarkable ramp. He wanted me to go from $150,000 to $1 million a year. He knew I'd have some obstacles: first the learning curve, then the people who would be against me because I was an anomaly. I didn't belong there. I hadn't worked my way up the ladder for it. I was the novelist, the game, the ultimate bet, and perhaps not everyone wanted to see Win win. The challenge was to turn me into a solid trader in eighteen months. What I hadn't understood was that the bet would keep on going; he'd continue to up the ante if I performed as he predicted in the first year.

By eight months, I was just where he wanted me to be, on the desk, above the analyst but the lowest of the associates, and he was well on his way to winning the bet. I was stepping in when things got crazy, pricing and trading, working my way ever higher on the trading scale. To begin with, my trading limit was modest, but by October I'd reached the $250,000 mark, meaning I could handle trades with that much lossability. Even for an institution that could write down billions and have just as much in profits, $250,000 would be a significant loss.

In order for me to fit in, in the beginning Win instructed me to "play young." He didn't want me carrying on about the daughters or the husband, no pictures of the family on my desk, no chat of the weekend soccer games and lacrosse tailgates, ballet lessons, report cards, nanny woes. So at home April was instructed to take over. She already ran our life, but now it was official, along with a raise. She was in charge of all lessons, playdates, homework, food shopping, doctors' appointments, etc., etc. I was generous with her, one of the new perks of the job that I thoroughly enjoyed. "I prayed for you," April told me, happy with the changes. "Every night I prayed, and I taught your daughters to pray too." It is astonishing how fast we can adapt. I had thought I'd miss the girls and that it would be unbearable to spend so much time away from them. But my absence allowed for Theodor's presence, and we all settled into our new circumstances.