The Subprimes (4 page)

Gemma cringed. She did not want to run into anyone she knew, anyone from her old life with Arthur.

She turned to see Trudi Katz, a brunette who'd had so many plastic surgeries the only way to figure out her true age would be to carbon-date her. She was on her third husband, a private equity partner at The Carlyle Group.

Considering the recent news, Trudi would never have risked speaking to Gemma in public. But under cover of darkness she felt perfectly safe.

“Oh my God, isn't this something?” Trudi said, shining her light at Gemma instead of at the whales.

“It is.”

“What are they going to do? They can't leave them here,” Trudi said. “This side of the channel is private beach.”

Gemma nodded, waiting for the inevitable turn in the conversation. Which came now.

“So sorry to hear about Arthur,” Trudi said. “That was a surprise. To all of us.”

“It certainly was,” Gemma said. “Nobody was more surprised than me.”

“Of course, dear. What are you going to do?”

“Nothing.”

“But you can't just stay—”

Gemma pulled the girls away, mumbling that it was late. They had a long, full day tomorrow.

As they were walking up the beach, they heard panicked shouts, more screaming.

Another whale was beaching itself.

GEMMA CAUGHT HERSELF THINKING, “WELL,
I've been through worse.” But no, she would stop herself, she hadn't. This was the worst. This was the most difficult. Two daughters, two private school tuitions, the mortgage on the house in the Hamptons, the rent on the brownstone, and now, a husband going to prison.

The facts of the prosecutor's case for securities fraud, grand larceny, scheming to defraud, and forgery were starkly laid out, making it clear that Arthur had cheated their friends, colleagues, acquaintances, their doctor, mechanic, and even—really, Arthur?—their nanny and
their daughters' classmates' parents
. He had been portrayed in the
Post
as a uniquely sleazy scoundrel—“Arthur Ponzerelli”—and in the
FT
and
Wall Street Journal
as a particularly incompetent and unsophisticated financial amateur
who had evaded detection as long as he had because he scammed his closest friends.

In the days after his arrest, the rest of his miserable subterfuge had come into focus, the mistresses, the apartments he kept for them, his managing to swindle even his mistresses and
their
parents. Gemma shuddered as she thought about her own mother and how close she had been to taking out a mortgage on the house in Santa Monica and investing her life savings with Arthur.

She refused to visit him at Rikers. And had to explain to Ginny, their oldest, when she came back from first grade asking “What does ‘slammer' mean?” that it meant prison, but that her father was not in prison but away on an extended business trip.

If Arthur had spirited many millions into offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands or Hong Kong, he was denying it. When investigators found only a paltry few million, a fraction of what had been lost by Arthur's investors, they concluded he had not only been running a scheme, but that he himself had been suckered by schemers only marginally more legal in their operations than he had been. This made perfect sense to Gemma: Arthur was feckless and inept in every area of life. The idea that he was a criminal mastermind was as preposterous as the notion that he could be a financial wizard. How their friends had fallen for it, Gemma had never understood. But Arthur talked a good game, with his professed expertise in carbon credits and emissions certificates and the various financial instruments that allowed global companies to pollute and belch forth the noxious fog that gave New York's skyline—every skyline—its perpetually gray tint. Arthur, or so he claimed, was the middleman, buying up the polluter rights of small companies and selling them for a
handsome profit to Indian, Chinese, and Brazilian corporations. He would then sell hedges to these same companies so that the credits themselves would not devalue before they were used, and then sell these hedges to investors who were looking to go long in the carbon credit market without actually owning the underlying carbon credits, and then allowing those investors looking to hedge their long positions to issue yet more instruments, the so-called C3DS3s—Carbon Credit Credit Default Swap Swap Swaps.

Eventually he was buying and holding instruments the workings of which he had absolutely no understanding. Gemma felt a twinge of guilt for not asking more questions about Arthur's business, for wanting to believe that her simpleton of a husband was an idiot savant of energies and commodities trading when she knew full well it could take him a good ninety seconds to calculate twenty-two percent of a restaurant check. She had enjoyed the perks, the real estate, the sense that the planet was turning to shit but that their family would be among the lucky ones with money enough, someday, for a sanctuary homestead on a private, hydro-rich island, an option all their wealthy friends were planning.

Arthur had quite a run, and whenever Gemma caught a clip of him on the news, going to or from the lower Manhattan courts, he always appeared defiant and dapper. His attorneys were couching his defense in terms of Arthur running afoul of environmental extremists and their overzealous regulations, which were causing legitimate businessmen like Arthur Mack—a job creator!—to have to defend themselves in court for the simple crime of wanting to help American businesses grow. Arthur was a good capitalist who should be celebrated rather than incarcerated, one of his attorneys told a CNBC anchor, who nodded seriously before asking, “But why the witch hunt?”

“Arthur Mack loves America,” said his blue-suited attorney
with the clerical fringe of hair around his shiny dome. “Arthur Mack was investing in America, in job creating, in energy independence, in gas and oil and our carbon fuel future. He is being punished for not being green. This is pure eco-Nazi monkey-wrenching.”

It was a surprising strategy, grandstanding in lieu of a reasoned legal defense, but it seemed to be confusing the usual media outlets. None of the reporters had the will or inclination to actually try to understand the exact nature of Arthur's alleged fraud, and so they were resorting to bogus, balanced coverage, mentioning in every story both the indictments and fraud charges
and
the brazenly ridiculous defense. The New York media were caught in a bipolar frenzy: “What do the whales want? And is Arthur Mack the victim of an environmentalist conspiracy?”

AS GEMMA PACKED UP THE
kids' rooms, their plush toys and Legos and pop-up books divided into “keep,” “put into storage,” or “trash”—she had explained that they couldn't bring it all back to the city because they would be sharing a room in the new apartment, farther east, much farther, on First Avenue, in fact—she felt guilty for what the girls were losing in the here and now, and in the future. They would be regular people. And, Gemma had to admit, considering what the world had become, regular had come to seem horrible.

When they woke up the next morning, the girls wanted to go online to see about the whales. A half-dozen had washed up so far. The story was leading the TV news, and in daylight aerial-drone shots, the huge gray whales looked like giant bloated worms on the sand. A marine biologist on CNN was talking about how the powerful low-frequency sonar pings used by the
U.S. Navy, the loudest sounds ever made underwater, could cause severe hemorrhaging in the animals, making them sick and driving them ashore.

“They are killing themselves?” the anchor asked.

“They are asking for help,” the marine biologist responded.

On another network was a Texas preacher, Pastor Roger, who declared that the whales were a sign from God that the government was overregulating the offshore drilling industry. “He is sending us a message: Drill, baby, drill.”

Gemma urged the girls to eat breakfast and get to work sorting their stuff. She wanted to be on the road back to the city by this evening and she did not want the girls catching an image of their father in the event the network needed to fill time with additional coverage of his case. Gemma had learned to avoid all their friends, all her daughters' friends' parents, virtually everyone they knew, but what was hardest to control was the media's hounding, their staking-out of their apartment building and the girls' school. They moved to a hotel downtown for a few days until the original coverage ebbed.

Gemma had always prided herself on being street-smart. She made her way from Santa Monica High School to the music department at ICM—okay, she handled Contemporary Classical, not exactly a profit center for the agency, but still, very impressive for a girl who had never gone to college. Her weakness was always Continental men, and since her arrival in Manhattan at twenty-three, she had gone through a succession of Jean-Claudes and Antonios and Juan-Carloses until she met Arthur, a dude's dude. He, too, had come east, from Newport Beach to Manhattan, where he claimed to be an energies trader at Merrill Lynch, though it turned out he was a retail broker at a local Merrill branch. He had blond hair, a dozen or so freckles on each cheek, thin lips (perpetually grinning, it seemed),
and gapped teeth. He had a knack, Gemma noticed shortly after their first meeting at a friend's summer share, of fitting in with any crowd. No, that wasn't it, he didn't fit in so much as come forward as such a winning example of a type, the unflappable banker bro with surfer's diction and a knack for the winning anecdote, the funny riff, the back-slapping, shit-eating-grinned delight he took in just being able to say a word like “tranche,” which he would repeat over and over again to himself, a symptom, Gemma now believed, of a kind of mild autism.

Oh, but he had always been a fine-looking man, with his pleasingly thick dirty-blond hair, rectangular head, wide forehead, thick brows, prominent cheekbones, and the self-confidence of having been a terrific three-sport athlete (volleyball, tennis, and surfing) in high school. Women took one look at him and never questioned why Gemma was with him.

But she knew, she had known all along: he was a total idiot. Gemma cursed her own superficiality for ever having fallen for the whole package. She poured herself a glass of 2005 Domaine Armand Rousseau—the cellar was going to be sold or seized anyway, so she might as well drink its best bottles.

She sipped her wine and listened to her daughters upstairs. She hated Arthur precisely for the fact that she was now joined for life with him, because of the girls. Now, as Gemma considered the hurried packing they had to do, the emptying of the house before it could be leased, so that the mortgage could be serviced lest the bank foreclosed, she felt a kind of fatigue and exhaustion at the work ahead of her. She stood up, wineglass in one hand, and with her other swept a dozen books from an open-sided built-in bookcase onto the floor, where they fell with a slapping sound.

“Mom? What was that?”

“Nothing. Books.”

The girls, she had to keep her shit together for the girls.

We wanna see the whales. We wanna see the whales.
Gemma had been listening to this chorus from her daughters for three days. The best technology that reality television, network journalism, and the marine mammal rescue industry could afford had been unable to return the half-dozen gray whales to the Atlantic. The good news was their ascendance as media stars gradually drove her husband's mug shot off the news. Now it was all about
Whale Watch
, as the entertainment industrial complex converged on East Hampton with anchormen and reality television environmentalists—craggy-faced, bearded, in slickers and ponchos, studying tidal programs on their laptops and barking into handheld radios—why did they even need radios? Cell coverage out here was excellent. A half-dozen beached whales, which should have diverted the nation's attentions from the usual television frivolities to refocus on something real, were instead becoming fuel for
more
frivolity as shows sprang up on every network and cable news station with titles like
Long Island Aquacalypse
,
The Whalocaust
, and
Real Whales of East Hampton
. The Coast Guard's solution to getting the whales back into the ocean had been to let the private sector work its magic by auctioning the media rights and allowing the debeaching to become a reality program. It was brilliant: let the free market free the whales. Fox had won the bidding, paying millions to the Coast Guard and the township of East Hampton and immediately installing construction barriers around the precious telegenic mammals to block competing networks and paying the FAA to close the airspace above the beach to rival news drones. The oceanographers, aquatic veterinarians, and marine animal rescue team members who were working on freeing the whales were required to sign release forms. If they resisted, they were offered $500 a day. If they further resisted, they were ordered off the beach and
replaced with willing, screened oceanographers and veterinarians who were better-looking anyway, more racially diverse, and had already disclosed in casting meetings their various personal, and potentially dramatic, problems, ranging from sex addiction to alcoholism to bipolar disorder.

The whales, meanwhile, were dying. A beached whale could survive seventy-two hours in the best of circumstances, its lungs slowly crushed by gravity. Even with hoses spraying salt water, steady applications by increasingly intoxicated marine rescue team members of a saline and kelp blend, and krill fired into their perpetually grinning mouths, the whales seemed to be worsening. For the half hour a day that Fox opened the airspace to rival news drones—it was viewed as good promotion—the crews were ordered to operate with apparent professionalism, though more than one anchorman wondered why the digging of the channels from the high tide to the whales was taking so long. And the day that a bulldozer's plow gouged a two-yard chunk of flesh from a stranded whale's tail stock there was no media access at all as the veterinarians sought to stanch the blood and fight off the hordes of seagulls that descended to feast on the exposed meat.