She lifted her head from her chest, looked at him. ‘But I would do it again. What was my choice? I was sick, Timothy, so sick. And dying. And so scared. So maybe this isn’t so bad. Maybe it was all worth it.’ She put her head down again on his chest and hugged him tightly. ‘It only seems strange because we’re not used to it. Maybe in the future this will be common. Like waking up after anesthesia. That must have seemed frightening, when people first did it. You wake up with a scar and stitches and a leg missing, or an organ cut out from your belly.’ She stroked his abdomen, the spot above his appendix, as if tenderly drawing an invisible scar line. ‘Isn’t this the same thing? I guess we’ll all get used to it, eventually.’
‘I’m just glad you’re back. I don’t care what you look like.’
She sat up and smiled. ‘Then why didn’t you choose an old lady? Or a homeless man?’
‘I don’t want to make love to an old lady.’
‘I’m not upset. I understand why you chose her. She’s very pretty. I could get used to this quickly.’
When they rose, Tricia said she didn’t want to dress like a slut, so she searched through Katherine’s closet for something to wear. The outfits she chose – elegant silk twill blouses, pleated skirts – did not fit. Katherine was four inches taller than Tricia, and slimmer.
So Tricia put on again the clothes she had worn last night, the black sweater and tight jeans.
They agreed she would have to come to work with him. Now a Plan formed: that Timothy, devastated from the loss of his wife, would fall in love with his much-younger secretary, in a desperate and sad attempt to replace Katherine. Their burgeoning relationship would need to be visible for everyone to see. So they drove together to the University Avenue office of Osiris, and he parked in the underground lot. The parking lot attendant smiled at him, and nodded at Tricia; he had seen them both before, but never had they arrived together in the morning, in the same car.
They took the elevator to the twenty-third floor. When they reached the office it was ten-thirty, and the Kid was sitting at Tricia’s desk, looking harried, trying to work the phones. ‘Osiris,’ he said frantically, as he answered an incoming call. And then he saw Timothy and Tricia walk in together, and Tricia wearing the same clothes as the previous day, and he couldn’t help himself: he raised an eyebrow and smirked. ‘Yes,’ the Kid said, into the phone. ‘I will have him return your call.’ He scribbled something on a notepad, then tossed it aside.
‘You made it,’ he said to Tricia.
‘I made it,’ Tricia said.
The Kid rose from her chair and made a show of gesturing grandly at it with a sweep of his hand, welcoming Tricia back to her station. Tricia sat down at the front desk. She stared at the phones. She seemed uncertain.
The Kid said, ‘Timothy, I need to talk to you.’
Timothy understood Tricia’s look; she had no idea how to use the PBX. Timothy said, ‘In a second, Kid. Do me a favor. Would you please run across the street and grab me a cup of coffee?’
For a moment the Kid looked shocked, and he glanced at Tricia, as if to say, Isn’t that her job?
Timothy said quietly, his voice laden with innuendo, ‘Please. Just give us a minute.’
When put that way, as a secret man-to-man communication, the Kid understood, and he relented. He nodded, and then to Tricia said, ‘You want coffee too? Black, right?’
She smiled. ‘Little change of pace today. Cream and sugar.’ The Kid seemed surprised, but Timothy understood right away. That was exactly how Katherine ordered it. With cream and sugar.
‘Okay,’ the Kid said. ‘I’ll be back.’ As he headed to the elevator bank, he turned to Timothy over his shoulder. ‘But we need to talk when I get back. It’s important.’ He pushed open the glass door. In a moment the elevator appeared, and he was gone.
Timothy showed her how to use the phones. She sat at the front desk, and he leaned over her from behind, demonstrating which buttons to press, and describing the general fuck-you posture she would need to adopt when dealing with angry investors calling for Timothy. Standing behind her, reaching over her, he was surprised by her smell. It was Katherine’s smell, the smell of apples and honey. Tricia was wearing Katherine’s perfume.
‘I think I understand,’ she said, about the phones.
‘I love you,’ he said. He bent down and kissed the flesh on the back of her neck.
‘Oh, Mr. Van Bender,’ she said. She shivered. ‘How inappropriate.’
‘Sorry.’
He turned and walked away. ‘Hold all calls, Tricia.’
‘Yes, sir, Mr. Van Bender.’
When the Kid returned, they met in Timothy’s office. The news during Timothy’s day-and-a-half-long hooky game had not been good.
The yen had continued its relentless climb, reaching a high of eighty-two during the previous day. Bear Stearns had issued a margin call and unceremoniously closed out its portion of the yen trade, resulting in another loss of seven million dollars. Further, that morning, while Timothy was making love to Tricia, the Kid had fielded a phone call from Barclays, who had issued their own margin call and explained that they would begin liquidating their yen position within hours.
The total losses for the month were now nearing forty million dollars, and there was no end in sight. Each margin call resulted in another broker placing a frantic order to buy yen for Osiris’ account, at whatever price the market was charging. This raised the price of the contracts further, as sellers smelled blood, which in turn caused further losses.
The rising yen and the margin calls were only one side of the problem, the Kid explained to Timothy. Squeezing Osiris at the other end were the investors, who were clamoring to withdraw their money. It was now more than the small matter of Pinky contacting his limited set of friends and casting doubt on Osiris. Now each investor in the fund was calling the others, and the doubt and anxiety were feeding off each other, as August statements had not yet been mailed, and Timothy Van Bender was not taking phone calls, and no one had any sense of exactly where the fund stood, or how much money had been made or lost. The thing about rich people, Timothy understood – because he was one himself – is that they do not necessarily care about searching for the absolute highest returns available, and in fact, they do not even mind a slow dribbling loss, like a leak in an inner tube. What they dread more than anything else is losing a lot of money all at once – a ‘blow-up,’ in industry parlance. Most rich people are not self-made men; they inherited their money from fathers and grandfathers past, and most are insecure and fearful that they will never be able to earn money on their own, as their ancestors have; and so the only thing they care about is to preserve the good fortune they have been handed, and not ruin it for the next generation. Now Timothy Van Bender, former star money manager, the man who had never returned to his investors less than ten percent per year and averaged more than seventeen percent, was clearly blowing up, and taking a lot of family nest eggs with him.
Even though Osiris had the legal right to hold onto investors’ money for ninety days after redemption was requested – a right enshrined in the Partnership Agreement, to prevent the very run on assets and messy liquidations that were now taking place anyway – the Kid reminded Timothy that it was only a formality now, that the redemptions would happen in ninety days, no matter what, and then whatever was left in Osiris’ coffers – and it might not be much – would be handed back to the investors, and Osiris would be left a desiccated corpse, like the shell of an insect in an old spider’s web.
And then there was one other matter, which the Kid saved for last, as if he was carefully building a legal case, block by block, trying to establish beyond all reasonable doubt the utter hopelessness of their situation. He handed Timothy a single sheet of paper, a letter typed on thick vellum, from the CFTC – the government agency responsible for regulating companies like Osiris, and responsible, Timothy knew, for prosecuting fraudulent money managers and sending them to jail.
It said:<
br />
COMMODITY FUTURES TRADING COMMISSION
DIVISION OF ENFORCEMENT
VIA FEDERAL EXPRESS
Enclosed in a subpoena ad testificandum and duces tecum of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued in connection with the above-titled private investigation being conducted pursuant to Section 6(c) and 8(a)(1) of the Commodity Exchange Act, as amended, 7 U.S.C 15 and a12(a)(1)(1994).
This subpoena calls for your testimony on October 12, 1999.
Attached to the letter was a subpoena. It instructed Osiris to gather all relevant documents for the CFTC to study. These documents included internal profit and loss estimates, emails, memos, spreadsheets, brokerage statements, and phone message logs. The CFTC believed Timothy and Osiris had committed fraud, that it was hiding losses from investors, that it was telling them comforting stories while proceeding to lose money hand over fist. Which was, more or less, true.
‘I’m named in the subpoena, too,’ the Kid said. He couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice. It was bad enough that his resume would forever bear the mark of Cain, a stint at the soon-to-be infamous Osiris LP, which people would from now on mention with a shake of the head and a whistle of disbelief. In addition Timothy had somehow gotten the Kid involved in financial fraud. It was the kind of crime that landed people in prison at worst, and barred from the financial industry at best.
‘Don’t worry, Kid,’ Timothy said. ‘When things are going bad, everything looks worse than it is. When things are going well, everything looks better than it is.’ It was a useful old saw, one that had gotten Timothy through many a depressing day. But of course none of those depressing days had ever started with a subpoena from the federal government.
‘I’m giving notice,’ the Kid said. ‘I resign effective two weeks from today.’
It occurred to Timothy at that instant that, when the Kid testified to the CFTC, he would hang Timothy out to dry. He would describe how his boss had instructed him to commit fraud, how he had been told to mislead investors. The Kid was going to hand them Timothy on a platter to save his own skin. But at least he was giving two weeks’ notice. Nice kid.
‘You need anything else?’ the Kid asked. And then he added meanly: ‘More coffee, maybe?’
‘No, Kid,’ Timothy said, holding up his cup. ‘My coffee’s fine.’ Yes, the Kid was going to hang him out to dry.
Despite the fact that he was facing a twenty-million-dollar lawsuit against his personal assets, and despite the fact that the federal government was investigating him for suspected fraud, and despite the fact that he had lost over forty million dollars in less than a month and his career as a hedge fund operator was ending in ruin – despite all this, Timothy was happy.
Katherine was back. She was inside Tricia, that was true, but even that fact – at first so queer and frightening – had advantages. The things he disliked about Tricia – her stupidity and shallowness – had been washed away in her technological baptism. Instead, Katherine – his wife of twenty years, the woman he loved – had replaced her. Somehow, thanks to the advances of Dr. Ho and Amber Corp., the woman that slept beside Timothy was now twenty-three years old, in perfect health, beautiful – and, most important – was really his wife.
There was of course the matter of sex. Those next few days they made love every night, and most mornings too. It was still the same Katherine – still unadventurous, never initiating, always face-forward-and-underneath. But even the quiet sex was better with her now, and – whereas two months earlier it had been ambitious to make love once a week – now he would push her to the bed and climb on top of her at any excuse. Her new body – the full breasts that rolled down over her rib cage when she lay on her back, the taut buttocks, the smooth thighs, which he explored when he raised her ankles into the air, her neck as soft as satin – was an adventure for him, and he could not get enough of it, of the novelty, the excitement, this new woman in his house.
On Sunday morning, after they’d had sex, the doorbell rang.
‘Don’t answer it,’ Tricia said.
‘Maybe it’s important,’ he said, thinking that the black woman with the cornrows had returned to deliver another summons. He rose and put on his bathrobe.
But it was not important. It was Ann Beatty, Katherine’s friend from down the street, bearing a paper bag that smelled like hot garlic and dough.
‘Good morning,’ she chirped. ‘I brought you some bagels. I hope I’m not too early.’
‘No, of course not,’ Timothy said, even though she was in fact too early. ‘Come in. I was just going to eat.’
He took the bagels from her and led her to the kitchen. She sat at the table in front of the patio doors. Behind her, sunshine filled the backyard, and the ornamental grasses along the patio swayed in the morning breeze.
‘I thought maybe you could use some company,’ Ann said. ‘I know when Mark and I divorced, weekends were the hardest. So lonely, without anything to fill your day.’
‘Would you like some coffee?’ Timothy asked.
‘If you’re having.’
Timothy banged around the cupboards, looking for the coffee beans. Where had she put them? Ann continued: ‘I can only imagine what you’re going through. I know it’s only been a few weeks. Things are still raw.’ She touched her fingers to her short black hair, obviously dyed, and stroked the back of her head thoughtfully. ‘Katherine was a wonderful woman.’
‘Yes,’ Timothy said, into the cupboard. Then he heard slippered footsteps approach the kitchen. He turned to see Tricia standing in the doorway in a skimpy T-shirt, her nipples bulging beneath the cotton, and a pair of boxer shorts.
‘Hello,’ Tricia said.
‘Oh—’ Ann looked mortified. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you had … company.’
Tricia walked to Ann, held out her hand. ‘Tricia Fountain,’ she said.
Ann seemed uncertain. She didn’t know where to look: at the young girl’s face? At her breasts? Her exposed thighs? She looked past Tricia to Timothy. She took Tricia’s offered hand, shook it perfunctorily, and said, ‘Ann Beatty.’
‘Timothy has told me a lot about you.’
Now Anne regarded her carefully. Of course it was preposterous that Timothy would tell this young girl, twenty years younger than Katherine, all about his dead wife’s friend, the old neighbor down the street.
‘Maybe I should be going,’ Ann said. ‘I’m so sorry to intrude.’ She started to rise.
‘Please,’ Tricia said. ‘Stay.’
Timothy did not want Ann to stay. In fact, after seeing Tricia appear, with her nipples showing under her T-shirt, in the same room as Ann Beatty, the icy old nun, he was turned on. He felt an erection under his bathrobe. What he wanted was that Ann should leave, so that he could make love to Tricia again, right there in the kitchen. Maybe even on the oak table.
‘Yes,’ Timothy said, ‘stay.’
Another moment of hesitation as Ann hovered at the table, neither fully standing nor sitting.
‘You brought bagels?’ Tricia said, spotting the bag. ‘Have breakfast with us.’
Ann hesitated. ‘All right,’ she said finally, relieved that this young girl, despite the intrusion, was friendly after all. She folded back into her chair.
Seeing Timothy standing beside the coffee machine, helpless, Tricia said: ‘Let me help you with that. You couldn’t operate that machine if your life depended on it.’
‘That’s true,’ Ann said. She smiled knowingly. ‘That’s exactly what—’ She stopped herself.
‘What?’ Tricia asked.
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.
Timothy finished Ann’s sentence. ‘That’s exactly what my wife used to say. Ann has been here for many a breakfast and has observed my incompetence first hand.’
Ann said, ‘I’m sorry. That was thoughtless.’
‘No,’ Tricia said. She pretended to make a pained smile. Or maybe, Timothy thought, it really was a pained smile. Katherine was wily, after all.
‘It’s okay. I understand.’
Tricia turned and began to make the coffee. Timothy sat down at the table across from Ann. There was nothing else to say, so they watched Tricia fit the paper filter into the machine and start measuring the beans.
Finally, Timothy said softly to Ann: ‘I know this must seem a little strange.’ He stared at the back of Tricia’s soft thin white neck. ‘But sometimes love appears in the damnedest places, at the damnedest times.’
Ann nodded.
Now Timothy was glad Ann was here, that he could begin the process of creating the story, of integrating Tricia into his life. He knew that once Ann left his house, the phone calls would begin, to other neighbors first, and then to mutual friends, old girlfriends of Katherine, tennis partners, church members, Palo Alto grandees. The headline would circulate: Timothy Van Bender Sleeps with Young Girl Just Weeks After Wife’s Suicide.
Timothy said: ‘I met Tricia at work. She’s my secretary.’
Correction. This just in: Timothy Van Bender Sleeps With Young Secretary Weeks After Wife’s Suicide.
‘Really?’ Ann said, but it sounded as if she did not want to hear too much more.
‘Yes,’ Timothy said. ‘Funny how life works. One door closes and another opens.’
‘I suppose,’ Ann said.
Tricia joined them at the table with the plate of bagels. ‘Let me get some cream cheese.’ She laid the bagels on the table, and disappeared into the refrigerator.
‘She seems to know her way around,’ Ann said. It was equally a compliment and an accusation.
‘We’ve spent a lot of time together,’ Timothy said. ‘Things are really good.’ He smiled at Ann, who – although it clearly pained her – smiled back.
Later that afternoon Tricia said, ‘I think we should get married.’
They were in the living room, lying on opposite sides of the couch. He was watching golf on television, drinking a beer. She sat facing him, her legs in his lap, as she worked on the Sunday crossword puzzle.
He looked up at her when she said it. Her face was down, buried in the crossword. She had folded the paper in half to make a surface, and held a pencil in the air, ready to jab the point into the pulp.
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