“Sure,” Al said, squirming, trying to get comfortable. “It’s great.”
“They’re original. Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona design,” Ryan said. “Nineteen twenty-nine.” He took a cigar from a humidor on his desk. “What’s up?”
“Instructions from our auditors.”
“Such as, ‘Buy Orion Trading?’ Tell me, you did buy a bundle, didn’t you?”
Al shook his head. “Would that have been legal?”
Ryan sat down, tapped the glass top of his desk with an ornament, a gold-plated screw the size of a knockwurst. “When I faxed you the press release, the news was public. That’s when you were supposed to buy. Now the stock’s up three bucks. A goddamn mother lode— black gold.”
He sniffed his cigar. “Cuban,” he said, clipping off an end. “Hand-rolled Bolivar. Want one?”
He clipped the end of another cigar, handed it to Al. Al lit and then drew on the cigar, the smoke cool and smooth in his throat, and exhaled. “Nice. How do you get these?”
“Amaro, concierge at the Georges Cinq.”
“Where’s that?”
“Paris. Avenue Georges Cinq off the Champs-Elysées— say! Where do you get yours?”
Al crossed his legs; his rear end slid farther off the chair. “Cubans? I mean— What does one of those cost? Fifty dollars?”
Ryan opened a door behind his desk, revealing a walk-in closet. On the floor were cases of Chateau Lafite Rothchilds, Chateau Latours, and Dom Pérignon. He rummaged through shelves, then returned to his desk. “Take this.” It was an unopened box of Cuban Bolivar Royals. Al demurred but Ryan insisted.
Al said, “Indonesian banks won’t verify the source of the funds transferred by wire.”
“What’s that got to do with us?”
“We have to file Treasury Department cash-deposit reports,” Al said.
“Arthur Andersen thinks we’re paid cash in Indonesia for crude oil?” Ryan laughed. “Imagine the logistics. Japanese freighters steaming into Jakarta, their holds filled with cash to pay for the oil we ship back to Osaka. You pay these clowns by the hour to come up with these brainstorms?”
“It must be a precaution.”
“You buy that crap?” Ryan said, his voice low, guttural. “More reports? Bureaucracy is the enemy of capitalism.” Then his tone lightened. “You want a truly bitchin port?”
“I better not. It’s only two.”
Ryan opened a teak cav d’ licquor on the credenza behind his desk, removed a Lalique decanter with opaque owls cut into the crystal. He filled two matching glasses. “It cleanses your palate.” He nodded to Al and raised his glass before taking a sip.
Al sipped the wine and smiled.
“I get it from Douro, a ’48.” Ryan swirled the wine in his glass. “Do you have any idea what it’s like?”
“Douro?”
“Dealing with accountants.”
“Well, of course, in banking—”
“Those pencil necks suck up my life. I hope Hailey appreciates your banking hours.”
“That’s an unfortunate misnomer about bankers.”
“Misconception,” Ryan said.
“A what?”
“No offense, really. I know you work until five on Fridays, but putting aside my personal burdens, let me ask you this. Should I saddle my shareholders with this expense just to create more billable hours for the accountants?”
“It’s the bank’s expense.”
“It’s bank robbery. Treasury reports?” Ryan topped off Al’s glass. “Aren’t those IRS red flags?”
“Well, when you were audited last year, you got a refund.”
“Coopers used the wrong depreciation tables for our Manhattan properties,” Ryan said. “Now I have to sell the Chrysler Building.” His jaw clenched. “Depreciation recapture! Capisce?”
“No thank you,” Al said, sipping from his wineglass.
“When escrow closes next week, the liquid equity pays taxes and interest. I won’t see a dime for a year, maybe two.”
“I’m sorry,” Al said. “That’s a tough one to swallow.”
Ryan tossed his lighter to Al. “Accountants make lawyers look good,” he said.
“What can we do?” Al said.
“I can recommend competent regional CPAs,” Ryan said.
“Even if we could fire our accountants during an audit, I couldn’t make that—”
Ryan raised a hand; his eyes closed. The intercom buzzed. He unplugged the phone.
Al’s calf muscles seized. He massaged the spasms.
Five minutes later Ryan said, “You think about the big picture?”
“Of course.”
“I wanted to be a philosopher, but my father’s dream was to have me work with him. ‘Go to Wharton, get an MBA,’ he said. It was my sister who was interested in business. But dad said women don’t have a head for figures.”
“But, but,” Al stuttered. “Antigone’s got a doctorate in evolutionary biology.”
“Go figure,” Ryan said, drumming his fingers on his glass desktop, keeping time to a tune only he could hear. “Banking wasn’t my first choice, either. Every god damned day. Meetings with morons. Instead of choking some anal retentive, I fantasize about exit strategies.”
Al shifted uneasily.
“I need a sabbatical,” Ryan said, “But with dad gone, who would run the shop?”
“Must be a terrible burden,” Al said.
“What would Dad have thought of me if I lost the business? That’s why I imagine worst-case scenarios, life being so risky.”
“When Jacob was born, we bought life insurance.”
“Exactly. And insurance would cover some of our losses if one of our tankers went down. But what if the geologists had been wrong and we hadn’t struck oil in Indonesia? I’d have lost everything except the trading company and the real estate. And let me share something with you. If my South African partners don’t keep the diamond glut under control, well, the trading company is kaput. Nothing left but my inheritance and trust funds.”
“But you—”
“Think of it this way. Where would you be without your book of business? An assistant branch manager? Unlikely. You and me, my friend, we’re already thirty, too old to start over in the business world. We’d do volunteer work.”
Al puffed his cigar, watched Ryan through the smoke.
“You following?” Ryan said. His face set, hard, resolute.
“I see your point about the accountants,” Al said, “and I want to assure you that our issues with them won’t become your problem.”
“First American?” Ryan said. “Does that name offend my overseas partners?”
“Cash-deposit reports don’t apply to wire transfers. I’ll get a legal opinion if I have to.”
Ryan said, “We’ll buy a controlling interest in the bank. What do you think of the name First Global?”
Al held on to Ryan’s desk for the leverage he needed to extract himself from the chair. “It’s ambitious,” he said, making the transition to his feet.
“You have vision,” Ryan said. “You’ll be president of the bank one day.”
President of the bank. The words echo. No, he wants to say. No, not me.
Aurora says, “Was Ryan Hunter behind the money laundering?”
He blinks twice.
There’s a knock on the door. A middle-aged man—a paunch, fringe of wiry hair, tie dangling below a color to small to button, a name tag that says, gerald klein, md, chief of neurology—and several younger men, and a woman, wearing coats and stethoscopes around their necks walk in.
“You’ll have to leave, Miss,” he says.
“You’re not Mr. Rosen’s doctor,” Aurora says.
Klein looks at his watch. “This is a teaching hospital, and I’m on a tight schedule.”
“Me too,” Aurora says. She towers over Klein, shows him her badge. “Want to have a conversation about obstruction of justice?”
The door opens and two men wearing g
ray suits and military-style haircuts walk in. One of the men stands protectively near Aurora. “Everything okay in here, Ms. Goldin?” he says.
As the doctors file out of the room, Al imagines Klein trying to persuade hospital security to confront the FBI agents who work with Aurora.
Aurora turns on a projector. She must have set it up while he’d been enveloped in memories of the day Ryan old him that Orion Trading would buy the ban. She has moved his bed so that he can see lights flicker on the wall. “Four days ago,” she says.
In the auditorium of the First Global Enterprises Building, Ryan, tanned, his blond hair, now graying at the temples, pulled into a pony tail, looking fit, stepped to a microphone. “I have a statement,” he said, “then I’ll take questions.” He looked at notes. “When the bank was placed in receivership, we didn’t know why. Now we do.”
He reads: “For the past twenty years, J. Alfred Rosen, president of the bank, ran clandestine operations, instructing our branches in Jakarta to accept more than thirty billion dollars in cash deposits. The money was wired to several of our Florida branches for deposit into accounts owned by limited partnerships in the Cayman Islands. To our surprise, Al Rosen was the general partner.”
He crushed the notes. “The cash was dirty, proceeds of narcotic sales. Questions?”
Hands raised. Ryan pointed to a man in the back of the room. “Kermit?”
Kermit Ross, his closely cropped hair and mustache gone gray, stood and said, “Al Rosen would no sooner be mixed up in drugs than you or I.”
“I trusted him with my father’s legacy,” Ryan says.
“We don’t know Al’s side of the story.”
“I didn’t believe it either until I read his plea agreement signed and under oath, how he did it, his Swiss bank accounts— excuse me.” Ryan looked away.
“That so? There’s got to be more to it,” Kermit said. “I don’t know what.” Chairs scraped, people fidgeted, throats cleared. “The bank’s stock is three cents,” Kermit said. “Wipes out our 401(k)s. Our salaries are cut twenty percent, health insurance canceled. Dolores has breast cancer—”
“I didn’t know,” Ryan said.
“Now, I’m askin’—”
“Coach!” Ryan said, holding up a hand.
“Ryan,” Kermit said, raising his voice. “I’m talking to you.”
“Sorry. I can’t do anything about the receiver. She’s getting rich mismanaging the bank. I’ve set up a fund with two hundred fifty thousand dollars to help bank employees with special circumstances.”
“What will two-hundred-thousand dollars do for eight-hundred employees?”
“I wish I could do more. I can’t. Carolyn has tied up our assets in court.”
Ryan pauses; the room is silent.
“Sorry to hear about your troubles, but the stock of the parent company is flying high—”
“Coach, I’m going to call you,” Ryan said. “FGE’s vice president for human resources, Ted Court, will take further questions.”
Aurora sits beside Al. He sees her take his hand. “Even if he loses the bank and Carolyn gets everything she’s asking for in the divorce, Ryan Hunter will still be a billionaire and Kermit and Dolores Ross will have nothing after a lifetime of work: no retirement, no health insurance, no dignity.”
Veins bulge on his forehead, his eyelids twitch, pain burns behind his eyes. He closes them.
He was thirteen, holding his mother’s hand at his father’s funeral. Across the lake the carousel ponies turned around and around.
Andy’s mother – her sweet face gaunt, ravaged by the chemotherapy she can no longer afford – says, “If we could seize Ryan Hunter’s money . . .”
He slogs through a marsh surrounding the lake, walks on firmer ground past the carousel to a corral, a stable, a stallion.
He opens his eyes.
He blinks once, saying yes, an affirmation of faith transcending complexities beyond his comprehension.
Aurora’s eyes glisten.
He closes his eyes.
He trots the stallion around the corral, brings him to a canter, jumps a fence and gallops toward a shallow sea galloping toward singing mermaids riding seaward on the waves becoming one with the steed galloping in the sizzling South Florida heat sssst
A Friend of the Devil
My psychiatrist says that my memory was psychically impaired when I learned that my husband Al had suffered a brainstem stroke. But in no way have my memories been diminished. They are, in fact, vivid, distinct, reliable.
My psychiatrist insists, however, that what I describe isn’t memory but paramnesia. What she fails to understand is that surreal doesn’t mean unreal.
Al’s doctors say that his ability to think, to remember, is intact. He’d been athletic, handsome, but now he’s a man trapped in a body in atrophy with a face frozen in a visage of horror, a Dorian Gray transformation, a Kafkaesque portrayal of mind-body duality.
What is he feeling? Heartbreak? Fear? Panic? What is he thinking? Of loss? Of the past or what’s happening in the present? Of what his life could have been?
For twenty years we were lovers, best friends, my husband and I. We were so close I believed I knew his thoughts and feelings. But now I can only imagine; I can wish; I can guess.
I must have been with him when it happened. Probably because the trauma of shock, fright, the only thing I don’t remember is the last few hours of that night. My last memory of that day is seeing my father, dead just six months, standing in our home on the cantilevered landing above the foyer, standing next to Al.
When our sixteen-year-old son, Jacob, and his best friend, Pierre, one of my honors English students, came home late that night, they found Al paralyzed on the landing. I was asleep and don’t remember waking up, the paramedics, the hospital.
Since the stroke, I’ve felt guilty. What if the paramedics had arrived earlier? Maybe after Al collapsed I blithely stepped over him, drew a bath, and took a sleeping pill. Maybe, as Rose Kennedy is rumored to have done, I watched my husband suffer a stroke and then went out to play nine holes of golf.
There are so many possibilities, but no one blames me: not the doctors, not Jacob, not Al.
Nothing – not mood elevators or stabilizers, soporifics or stimulants, booze or pot, or even selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors – has helped.
Tomorrow, I’m going back to work, back to my students, back to my classroom, stepping back into the world where it all began, a world where I don’t know what I’ll do or to whom I’ll do it.
The day of Al’s stroke, my students were discussing The Great Gatsby while I was thinking about redecorating the classroom, replace the posters of Hemingway and Fitzgerald with posters of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein.
My attention returned to the classroom discussion when Pierre said, “Except for Wilson, every character in Gatsby was a liar.”
“What about Nick Carraway?” I said.
I didn’t hear his answer because the next moment I was twenty-eight again, with my best friends, Phoebe and Aurora, in Miami Beach, window shopping for a wedding ring for Al, deciding which one to purchase before I proposed to him.
Aurora, black curls clipped behind her ear, said, “If you marry Al it will ruin your life.”
I looked to Phoebe for support, but she just played with her innocent blonde pigtails.
One of my students said, “Nick Carraway didn’t lie.”
Although I’d never experienced the present momentarily becoming the past, I didn’t feel caught between alternate realities. Reliving one of Aurora’s fierce admonitions of twenty years ago was disturbing but understandable. After all, what is consciousness if not a dialog between the past, the present, and the future? What are memories and dreams if not an expression of the speed of life?
Across the quad, beyond the four-tier Mediterranean fountain, birds of paradise, roses, and bottlebrush bordering the science building bloomed in a palette of colors. Below the beveled cornice of its art deco
façade was the classroom where my father had taught for thirty-eight years.
He was lecturing – “Using light emitted from solids and gases will help you understand the quantizing of the energy in atoms”; coaching baseball – “Step forward with your front foot when you swing the bat”; tutoring Hebrew – “The vowels are a crutch; we’re throwing them away.”
Then I was on a Key Largo beach watching children building a sand castle. Swimming into the ocean, a powerful undercurrent drew me underwater toward the ocean floor. I struggled, inhaled seawater, felt certain I would drown. My father lifted me to the surface. From far away, as if in a dream, I heard an echo: “Nick Carraway was in love with Jordan Baker.”
Victor, one of my students, diligent but unattuned to the nuances of truth, was arguing with Pierre. “Carraway was not in love with Jordan Baker,” Victor said, flipping through the book. “Here, right here on page 57: ‘I wasn’t actually in love with her.’”
Pierre said, “Actually?”
Victor said, “Why would he lie?”
Gesturing with power and precision, like the athlete he was, like the surgeon he hoped to become, Pierre said, “He can admit he was attracted to Jordan Baker’s hard, jaunty body, but he can’t admit he was in love with a liar and a cheat in a story he’s telling about the consequences of adultery.”
“You’re delusional,” Victor said, the veins of his neck bulging. “That’s why you cut your wrists.” He jabbed a page with his forefinger. “Carraway says, ‘I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known!’”
“There you have it,” Pierre said, his hands in his lap. “According to Gertrude—”
“Who is Gertrude?” I said.
“Hamlet’s mother,” Pierre said. “Nick Carraway protests too much.”
In the parking lot, where I thought I’d left the Buick, I was astonished to see my Triumph— a 1962 British racing-green TR3b, a gift from my father, who’d bought it new. I rarely drove it before he died and hadn’t driven it since, though I loved its baroque grace and detested the boxy designs of the later models: Bauhaus tributes to conformity, counterstatements to free love.
The Speed of Life Page 25