A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (19 page)

Preoccupied with his divorce, Marshall was slow to recognize the cooling in the office temperature over the next several days. Hushed whispers ricocheted off the walls. The LuQre debacle had severely shaken the company, exposing fault lines in its own governance. Contracts were canceled; lawsuits were put forward;
subpoenas were being issued!;
the losses couldn’t be fully tallied. Hudson seemed especially distracted at company meetings, restless, pained. He probably wished he could go back to putting up “Missing” posters. The CEO was compelled to fly up from Florida to declare that there wouldn’t be layoffs. “This is a company of survivors,” he declared. “And we’re in this together.”

Marshall’s 401(k) continued to shrink, dwindling even more quickly than did his company’s stock, remnants of which he discarded. He clicked through the brokerage site’s performance, account history, and trading pages and tried to catch views of his assets from every possible angle before they departed completely.

This intense scrutiny of a Web site whose every feature he thought he knew finally paid off. On Friday afternoon at the end of another losing week, he noticed a link to “Associated Accounts,” underlined in tiny red print, beneath the link to the start-up page’s “Terms and Disclosures.” He had never seen it before. Associated Accounts? More money? He moved his cursor and an outline of a hand appeared over the link, with its pointing finger extended. Or perhaps, he thought, the hand was turned the other way, with the finger slightly crooked, beckoning.

He clicked on the link and another screen opened to demand a new log-on name and password. Something clicked in his memory as well. He had been on this page before: several years ago, virtually at the dawn of the Internet, when he had set up the Web link to Joyce’s 401(k). He had shown her how it was done. He had impressed her pants off, literally. Now quivering in anticipation, his fingers typed in
letshavesex
as the log-on. A row of asterisks immediately appeared in the password field. The network server was hiding the password, but recalled it deep within its cookies.

The screen went blank for several moments before the new page came up, and in that time Marshall found himself holding his breath. He let it out when he saw that there wasn’t an error message or an admonition that he had typed in the wrong log-on. He had really accessed Joyce’s account, the page set up exactly as his was. His eyes immediately made their long-practiced flick down to the total assets figure.

$522,987.50.

Marshall was astounded. His eyes darted back over these digits, so many of them, making sure the comma and decimal point were located where he first thought they were. More than half a million dollars?

He clicked through the account’s history. Except for her employer’s weekly contribution, automatically deducted from her paycheck, the account hadn’t been touched since Marshall had established the Web link. The original investments had remained in place without a single trade. Actively uninterested in money matters, except when it came to his impoverishment, Joyce could have forgotten that she even
had
a 401(k), or didn’t even know what those three numbers, the single letter, and the set of parentheses
meant
. That would have been just like her. In all their years together, she hadn’t opened a single bank statement. She had always let him do their taxes. Her lack of interest in even the most general outlines of financial planning and
tax minimization had once driven him nuts. These days she probably just dumped her earnings statements on a desk at H&R Block.

Marshall went through her account. The stocks and funds he had chosen for her, a much more diversified brew than his own, had performed very well. Although she owned no flashy breakout stocks and had lagged behind the Dow through some of the nineties, she had hardly slipped at all in the last year. He was not only astounded, he was disgusted.

THEY WERE BOTH HOME
that weekend, requiring that every action taken and word spoken would have to be vetted. As usual. Waiting for her to say something about her settlement proposal or the impending court date, he armed himself with rejoinders to every conceivable remark, but she remained silent. He sensed smugness. He knew that she told herself with increasing persuasiveness that the whole situation was going to be over soon, and that she was going to come out of it winning big.

Meanwhile there was her 401(k) to think about. His impulse was to tell her about it, in order to shock her with his secret knowledge of her finances and also to taunt her for forgetting about the retirement account. But he held off. You couldn’t inform people they had half a million dollars they didn’t know about without giving them some kind of pleasure.

It was his turn that Saturday to take the kids for haircuts. Joyce alternately took them to a fifty-bucks-a-pop children’s styling salon, but his place was considerably less expensive, located several steps beneath Atlantic Avenue, its fathomless realms overseen by a jowly, depressed, scissors-sceptered Poseidon named Dominic. Dominic was a man of very few words, apparently unimpressed by the costly remains of the kids’ previous haircuts. After Viola’s bangs were summarily straightened
and he stuck a lollipop in her face, he put Victor in the chair. With Dominic you never had to have a styling conversation, but this time Marshall said, “What do you think, Dom? Can you give him a fade in the back, at the base of the hairline?”

Dominic didn’t look up—couldn’t, in fact. He had some sort of back problem that kept him in a perpetual stoop. He intoned gravely, “I can do that.”

“Yeah? And, you know, what is it that I see around town, on black kids, fade cuts with the insignias shaved in the back? Is that a possibility? Could you carve in, say, a dollar sign?”

“I can do that,” Dominic repeated.

“Daddy!” Viola protested, the lollipop still in her mouth. “Are you crazy? Doesn’t Mommy hate you enough already?”

Of course she did. Marshall was nevertheless shaken every time it was confirmed—and even more so now that it was confirmed by Viola. All along he had believed, with Joyce, that the children remained oblivious to the situation and would accept the eventual divorce as a normal occurrence in an adult world composed of enigma and surprise. That was the plan, anyway. “Never mind,” he said, and, feeling unsettled, brought them home.

Further unsettlement awaited their arrival. A new odor lingered in the apartment: his nostrils flared, his ear muscles tensed. The kids detected something too, sniffing. He stepped tentatively into the kitchen, where he discovered that their automatic-drip coffeemaker was missing. It had been replaced, as if in a puff of caffeinated smoke, by a gleaming, retro-futuristic apparatus, a piston-driven espresso machine. It was an elaborate thing, constructed around a brass water tank, to which were attached polished wood levers and knobs, plus a steam wand and a glass cylinder half filled with water. He could see his own astonished reflection in the dome. The machine’s presence—anything new in the apartment—was like a slap in the face. The kids oohed.

Joyce was at the kitchen café table, sipping from a demitasse, one of a hand-painted set they had purchased in Italy and deployed only for guests, but they hadn’t had guests in three years. Joyce was uncharacteristically relaxed, taking her pleasure from the coffee as if she occupied a table in the Piazza Navona. Before Marshall could speak she declared, without the least suggestion of defensiveness: “I was sick of Mr. Coffee.”

Pending the divorce, major purchases for the home were supposed to be cleared through the lawyers. The espresso maker must have cost more than $700. By law every goddamned piece of chattel was still marital property. Joyce could have bought this thing only with the surpassing confidence that she was going to roll him over. She must have known for sure what he had always known in his gut: that she would get the apartment.

“Fine,” Marshall said, nearly choking. “Just fine. I hope you have room for it in your next place.”

“Can I do it?” cried Viola. “Can I? Can I make you coffee, Daddy?”

“No, not fair! I want to!” said Victor.

Marshall mumbled, “No, thanks, it’ll keep me up.”

He was so eager to get into work Monday that in the sprint up and down subway station stairs and across platforms he made earlier-than-usual connections and reached the office just as it was opening. A surprised colleague said good morning uncertainly. Marshall at once called up Joyce’s account—
letshavesex,
he pounded into the keyboard—and all those hundreds of thousands of dollars came up again onto his screen, into his hands. He punched through her funds and stocks, selling every one of them. The dialogue box asked him each time, with rising incredulity,
Are you sure? Click OK to confirm.
Yes, yes, he muttered, and went to the purchase page, looking for those funds and stocks that were famous for being losers: the written-off, the faded, the infirm, the SEC-investigated, the collapsed,
a mutual fund that unerringly chose hopeless IPOs. He bought them.

Then he sat back and looked at his handiwork, which had occupied most of the morning. What a mess. The larcenous thrill of it had left him famished and his armpits soaked. The prices had been so low that Joyce now owned thousands more shares, all of them crap. He resisted the urge of prudence to buy back the old investments.

Nothing happened to the account right away. The new stocks were dead in the water. After lunch Marshall had to leave his computer several times, repeatedly distracted by demands from the firm’s Crisis Management Team, which was attempting to triage the LuQre situation. Some company honcho called from Florida to question him in detail, treating him with somewhat less delicacy than that to which he had become accustomed since 9/11. This was followed by a grim whole-office meeting in the conference center. In the recent past these events had been catered. Today there weren’t even donuts. By the time he got back to his desk, after the close of trading, Marshall saw that Joyce’s account had nudged down about $300.

Now he had something to be smug about as the court date approached. He studied her at home for signs that she knew what he had done to her 401(k). She remained stone-faced, an expression that, given her obliviousness to her own financial situation, now bordered on the fatuous.

But by Wednesday Joyce’s account had done a small turnaround, actually advancing on where it had been when Marshall sold off her original investments. Marshall wondered if he had made a mistake buying stocks and funds that had nowhere to go but up. He Googled now for firms valued more highly on more precarious assumptions. While he worked, one of Joyce’s new penny-stock companies announced that it had perfected a device that scanned for explosives hidden in running shoes. As its share price multiplied exponentially, Marshall rushed to
dump the stock, but not before Joyce’s account had earned several tens of thousands of dollars.

While Marshall’s own assets continued to slide, not even taking part in the modest across-the-board rally at the end of the week, Joyce remained unaware of her good fortune, which would have been a consolation if her mood hadn’t seemed to improve anyway. She was still unyielding with him, but her day-to-day maneuvering around the apartment became more light-footed, accomplished with more confidence, even grace. And the kids were suddenly pliable in her hands. Yes, Mommy, of course, with pleasure. When he arrived home one evening she was at the hall mirror, trying on shoes with what looked like a new skirt. He couldn’t help noticing the shoes were recently bought too, with high, sharp heels. She promptly went into the bathroom to use the mirror there. Thorpe called to ask if
he
wanted to propose a last-minute settlement. “Won’t that be taken as a sign of weakness?” Marshall whispered into the phone. “Sure,” Thorpe agreed. Marshall heard her in the bathroom softly humming.

He sold off the previous week’s stocks and bought expensive, go-go-years stocks, companies with storied histories and far-flung operations but no conceivable futures. Steel mills, a railroad. He bought into funds managed by twenty-six-year-old cokeheads and stocks issued by companies that owned huge pieces of Russian automobile factories. He bought free-falling shares of his own company. He thought he had done his research well—until the
Journal
reported that Dick Cheney had emerged from hiding to play a round of golf with the railroad’s directors.

Marshall made more trades, his decisions based on his marketing forecasting tools and intelligence from online news sources and paid-subscription investor tip sheets, but Joyce’s account only improved. He sold off her investments again and started purchasing stocks at random: first, poking his finger at
the newspaper’s stock tables with his eyes closed, and then, after these stocks advanced, replacing them with shares of firms whose New York Stock Exchange symbols were IHA, TEJ, and YCE. Some of these did better than others, but they all performed well, quickly. Joyce’s total assets passed $800,000. Marshall recognized that he was living in a moment in which the market had fluctuated out of its characteristic disorder, apparently in resonance with some factor hidden within his decision making, or within his state of being. He was doing what was not normally permitted by classical mechanics: diminishing the entropic value of a closed system, effectively removing a measure of randomness from the cold, conscienceless, ignorantly expanding universe. Even his sell-offs were timely: the company with the shoe-explosive detector now announced that the device didn’t work.

One evening at home Marshall was on the floor wrestling Victor’s inexplicably wet sneakers onto his feet so that he could take the kids for pizza. Joyce passed them on her way out, her heels clicking like a desktop mouse. Marshall stopped to look up, Victor’s foot still in his hands. She was in the new skirt, brown suede wrapped tightly around the tops of her legs, which was as far as it went. She wore a loose open blouse and must have lost at least ten pounds. She had done something with her hair too. He couldn’t remember what it had been like before, or ever, but this was cute, brief, and razor-cut.