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by Matthew Klein

  He said, ‘Really?’

  ‘Well,’ she said to the newspaper, ‘I am your wife. It’s just a matter of formalizing for the rest of the world what we already know.’

  ‘But, Tricia,’ he said, stressing the name, dripping it with honeyed sarcasm, because it always felt good and strange to call her that. ‘We’ve only been dating for a week.’

  She looked up at him. ‘We probably had an affair before your wife died.’ She paused and then added: ‘That’s what everyone will think, anyway.’

  ‘But I didn’t,’ Timothy said evenly.

  ‘If you say so.’ She went back to her crossword and jotted an answer into the boxes. Thinking the conversation was over, he returned to the golf game on television.

  ‘The point is,’ Tricia said, ‘it won’t seem strange to anyone if we get married. We really should. Not just for outward appearances, but for us. I mean, I love you.’

  She rubbed her foot against his crotch, and there it was again, an erection. Timothy was now at an age when he counted his erections, noted them the way a meteorologist might scan the horizon and note nimbus clouds. In the last week he had experienced more erections than he had the entire six months before. God, she turned him on.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ he said. ‘I love you, too, Katherine.’

  She dropped the newspaper and pencil to the floor, and the pencil rolled under the couch. She scrambled toward him over the cushions. ‘I thought we agreed,’ she said, her breath hot and wet in his ear, ‘that you wouldn’t call me that anymore.’

  ‘Okay, Tricia.’

  She kissed his ear gently. ‘If you marry me,’ she said, ‘I’ll make it worth your while.’

  ‘How will you do that?’

  ‘Watch,’ she said. She slid her face down his chest, unbuttoning his shirt as she went. She kissed his chest, licking his hair. She worked her way down to his pants buckle. She unfastened it, expertly, and kissed his soft doughy abdomen. She lifted the elastic band of his briefs, and tongued the skin beneath.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I guess I really should propose.’

  ‘You really should,’ she agreed.

  32

  The next week, Tricia quit working at Osiris without saying goodbye to the Kid. One day she simply did not appear at work, and Timothy off-handedly told him that Tricia had decided to ‘move on.’ From the look on his face, it seemed the Kid knew exactly where Tricia had moved on to – specifically, Timothy’s house and bedroom.

  Timothy called a temp agency and asked for a replacement secretary, who appeared the same day: an overweight Russian woman who smelled like cigarette smoke and cheese blintzes.

  Meanwhile activity at Osiris ground to a halt. After Barclays liquidated the yen position, Citigroup did the same the following day. Now the entire yen trade had been closed out at a staggering loss of fifty million dollars. Over half of Osiris’ capital had vaporized in less than a month.

  All that was left at this point was to wind down the firm, to calculate the final losses, send the last financial results to investors, and return their remaining money. There was the small issue of the CFTC subpoena, and of Pinky Dewer’s lawsuit. Throwing in the towel, Timothy sent a check to Pinky for a bit less than half the amount Pinky had originally invested, lamely enclosing a handwritten note that apologized for the delay and for ‘the unexpected loss of capital.’ It was the best he could do. He hoped for a miracle, that Pinky would then drop the lawsuit against him personally, but – not surprisingly – the lawsuit remained and Pinky refused to take his calls. The loss of sixteen million dollars, Timothy understood, tends to make people prickly.

  There remained thirty-four million dollars of cash in Osiris’ various brokerage accounts. But soon, Timothy knew, that money would be returned to investors, and he would be left with nothing, except an expensive three-year lease on prime Palo Alto real estate, at least one lawsuit – possibly more – and a potential indictment on conspiracy and fraud charges.

  And yet Timothy felt unburdened.

  What was happening in his professional life was unpleasant but manageable. He could walk away from his career as a hedge fund manager. He never really enjoyed it anyway. For years, he had been able to make money, but he knew, secretly, that he was intellectually outgunned, in over his head – just lucky. When he’d started twenty years earlier, finance was a business about connections, about whom you knew, and who your friends were. To be successful required only that you had rich acquaintances and a pleasant manner, that you could call a Yale classmate on the phone, reminisce about the old days for a few minutes, and then ask for a five-million-dollar check. But, recently, the world had changed. The finance industry had opened its doors. Talent and intellect mattered. There were Indians now, people with strange exotic names, Chinese men who had never attended the Ivy League, and it wasn’t uncommon to brush shoulders with men from Bangalore who held PhDs from schools Timothy had never heard of. The old world – of investing with your gut, of relying on the word of people you trusted, of cashing in on inside knowledge, of doing deals on a handshake – was being replaced by a world of spreadsheets and Monte Carlo simulations and black boxes and quants. It was time for men like Timothy to move on.

  It didn’t matter, anyway. Timothy’s net worth was still tens of millions of dollars. His house in Palo Alto was worth three million dollars. He never needed to work again. Frank Arnheim was confident that Pinky Dewer’s lawsuit was beatable, or at least could be quickly settled. Even the CFTC charges could be defeated, since the blow-up at Osiris was caused more by incompetence than by fraud – or at least that was the case that could legitimately be made, if only the Kid agreed to stay quiet.

  So Timothy regarded his travails with equanimity. He thought of them as the price he was paying for getting Katherine back – a kind of Conservation of Happiness principle. For every happiness in life there is an equal and opposite unhappiness. He had magically been given one more chance with Katherine. Ergo: his professional life would be destroyed. But it seemed like a fair price to pay for the woman he loved.

  There was only one problem: the Kid.

  He could make or break Timothy. If he said the right thing when he testified at the CFTC in Chicago, if he explained that Timothy had in fact followed all the rules, but had simply guessed wrong on the direction of the yen – an occupational hazard, after all – then Timothy would walk away unscathed. If, instead, he told the Commission that Timothy had ordered him to lie to investors and withhold financial statements, that he had issued blasé pronouncements about the state of Osiris while aware that it was losing money, he would seal Timothy’s doom.

  In the evening, after the Kid had left for the day, and after Natasha, the fat Russian receptionist, had departed, Timothy returned to his office. He removed the corporate check ledger from his desk drawer and wrote a check for fifty thousand dollars, payable to the Kid.

  For Timothy, it was more than simply paying him off. He felt sorry for him. Jay Strauss had gotten a bad break, getting hooked up with Osiris. And despite the Kid’s anger at having his career derailed, and despite his disgust with Timothy for sleeping with the young secretary (whom he himself had desired), the Kid was, in the end, a gentleman. He did, after all, agree to stick around after giving notice, and to help Timothy wind down Osiris gracefully. So Timothy owed the Kid something. If he happened to remember Timothy’s generosity when testifying in Chicago, well, that would be all right, too.

  Besides, this kind of generosity was easy. The fifty-thousand-dollar expense would come out of his investors’ hides. It was always easy to be generous with OPM – other people’s money.

  Timothy decided to drive over to the Kid’s house and give him the check. It would be a sign of respect to personally hand it to him rather than to mail it, to meet him on his own ground.

  He looked up the Kid’s address in his Rolodex. He lived in Menlo Park, a few minutes away.

  The Kid lived in a leafy residential neighborhood behind the Safeway. It was a mix of
small houses and low-density apartments – duplexes and quad-plexes – but the houses were primarily rented by Stanford students and professors.

  Timothy pulled into a gravel driveway and stopped at the Kid’s house. You can tell when a house is a rental: the grass is never mowed or properly watered. It was the same at the Kid’s – brown grass, too long in places, and an old hose and sprinkle snaking around the front yard, looking like it hadn’t moved in a while.

  Timothy rang the doorbell. He heard the sound of music, unfamiliar rock music that had mercifully skipped his generation. The music went mute, and the Kid opened the front door. He was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans.

  ‘Timothy,’ he said. The Kid seemed surprised.

  ‘Sorry to drop by unannounced,’ Timothy said. ‘I thought I’d surprise you. I have something for you.’ He removed the check from his pocket. It was still folded neatly in half. He held it out between his middle and index finger.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A beautiful fruit plate. Can’t you tell?’ Then: ‘Let’s just say it’s a Thank You, and an I’m Sorry.’

  The Kid opened the check and looked at the amount. He raised an eyebrow. ‘This is unexpected.’

  ‘It’s my pleasure.’

  ‘Well, thank you.’

  ‘Really,’ Timothy said pointedly, ‘my pleasure.’

  Suddenly Timothy felt strange and uncomfortable. Why was the Kid blocking his entrance to the house? Why wasn’t he inviting him in?

  ‘This is nice of you,’ the Kid said. ‘I would normally invite you in, but …’ His voice trailed off.

  In the background, from the house, came the sound of a footstep and a floorboard creaking.

  Then Timothy understood. ‘Oh,’ he said. The Kid had a guest. Probably a female guest. It was something Timothy had never considered. He felt like a dolt. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s just, uh …’ The Kid looked over his shoulder, nervously.

  ‘Okay,’ Timothy said. ‘Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to give you that. To thank you.’

  ‘I appreciate it,’ the Kid said. He kept his arm across the doorway, blocking the entrance.

  ‘All right, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘All right. Thanks.’

  Before Timothy could say another word, the Kid nodded and closed the door.

  When he arrived home, Tricia was in the kitchen, sautéing sliced onions in a skillet, cooking dinner.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ she said. ‘Busy day at work?’ It was a running joke, now that Osiris was winding down, and Timothy did even less work than usual – practically nothing.

  He kissed her. ‘The usual bullshit. Too many martinis at lunch.’

  ‘How is Natasha, your new secretary? Are you going to replace me with her?’

  ‘I already did.’

  ‘I mean in the bedroom.’

  ‘That’s what I meant.’

  ‘You’re terrible.’

  ‘She smells like blintzes. How is that possible?’ He took off his suit jacket and folded it over the chair at the table.

  ‘You’re not going to leave that there, are you?’ It was the same question Katherine had always asked, since they moved into the house years ago. In the week since she had returned to him, he had gradually grown used to her being there, in the body of Tricia – so much that it started to seem natural. But then she would say something, an off-hand remark, like the comment about his jacket on the chair, or a complaint about uncapped toothpaste – and it would so obviously be Katherine’s familiar words coming from Tricia’s body – that it was like lightning over a strange volcanic landscape, a sudden flash in a previously dark sky, revealing the utter weirdness of it, the gray ash and charred tree stumps, the unearthliness, which until then had been hidden.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. He took his jacket from his chair, was about to leave the room. He noticed something. ‘What’s that?’

  She looked up. ‘What?’

  He pointed to her neck. ‘That.’

  Under her blouse, he could barely see it. Tricia was wearing the necklace he had given his wife at Big Sur, the fifteen-thousand-dollar diamond and sapphire pendant.

  She touched it, pulled it out of her shirt for him to see. ‘It’s my anniversary present,’ she said. ‘You gave it to me.’

  ‘Where’d you find it?’

  ‘Where I left it. In my underwear drawer.’ Then: ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing.’ Another flash of lightning on that weird volcanic scenery. ‘Sometimes it’s strange. I know it’s you, but it’s not you.’

  ‘But,’ Tricia said, ‘it is me.’

  On Saturday afternoon they decided to go to the Menlo Circus Club, to play tennis and have drinks.

  He managed to finish a single set before his knee started to ache. ‘Come on, Gimpy,’ Tricia said to him, as they met at mid-court. ‘Your war wound acting up?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Too bad you’re so old.’

  ‘No kidding.’

  ‘One more set? I feel great.’

  So he played one more set, to entertain his young girlfriend and former wife.

  Afterward, soundly beaten, he trudged off to the men’s locker room to shower. They agreed to meet on the veranda for drinks in twenty minutes.

  In the locker, Timothy limped into the shower, then dried and walked naked into the wash room. He stood in front of the mirrors above the sink basins, and began to comb his hair. When he looked up he saw Michael Stanton, ex-CEO of the medical device company, currently under indictment by the federal government – but still a member in good standing at the Circus Club – looking at Timothy’s reflection.

  ‘Timothy!’ Michael Stanton said. ‘Good to see you out and about. Play some tennis?’

  Timothy felt silly, combing his hair, buck naked. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who with?’

  Like you don’t know, Timothy thought. ‘I have a new girlfriend, Michael,’ Timothy said gamely.

  ‘Good for you. I think I saw her walking around. A great-looking lady. Quite a bit younger.’

  ‘Is she? I hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Ha! Good for you. Say, why don’t we get some drinks together on the veranda – you, me, your girlfriend, my wife.’

  Timothy thought, Yes, Wife #2. But of course he could not remember her name.

  ‘Susan,’ Michael continued, as if reading Timothy’s mind.

  ‘That sounds terrific,’ Timothy said, even though it did not sound terrific.

  ‘All right,’ Michael Stanton said. ‘See you there in about ten.’ Then, looking at the reflection of Timothy’s penis in the mirror, he said: ‘And don’t forget to put on some pants.’

  They sat on the veranda in the late afternoon sun, drinking daiquiris. Wife #2 pulled her chair close to Michael Stanton. The thing that surprised Timothy, as he looked at her, was that she was older than he remembered. Two months ago, before Katherine’s death, she seemed scandalously young – the Stantons had been the cause célèbre at the Circus Club, not because of Michael’s SEC indictment, his insider trading and possible ten-year jail term, but because of the unceremonious way he had dumped his older wife and traded down to a much younger model.

  But now Timothy was shocked to see that Susan was in fact older than Tricia, that the new Mrs. Stanton had the faintest trace of dark circles under her eyes, that lines were beginning to form at the corners of her mouth. And he realized, proudly, that it was official: he was sitting on the veranda with the most desirable woman that had ever stepped onto Circus Club grounds.

  ‘So tell us, Timothy,’ Wife #2 said. ‘How did you both meet?’

  Timothy was about to answer, to say something vague about Tricia being a business associate, but Tricia spoke first. ‘We met at work.’ She leaned over the table and said, in a stage whisper, ‘I was his secretary.’

  Wife #2 laughed. ‘Isn’t that funny? Us too. Well, actually, I was Michael’s Investor Relations hack. But same thing.�
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  Timothy looked over the heads of the Stantons to the other club members sitting on the veranda. He noticed that they were whispering, looking with sidelong glances at Wife #2 and Tricia.

  ‘The way we fell in love,’ Michael Stanton said, ‘is that I was on Cavuto, you know, on CNBC? And they had me waiting for about an hour under the hot lights before my segment. And I must have been melting, I’ll tell you. I mean, sweating like you have never seen sweat before. So they were about to go live and Susan here—’

  Oh yes, Timothy thought. Susan. I must remember that.

  ‘—Susan said: ‘You are not putting him on national TV looking like a wet noodle. Either you dry him off or we walk.’’ Michael laughed and turned to Susan. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  ‘You’re my wet noodle,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you, sweetheart.’

  ‘What a great story,’ Timothy said.

  ‘Tell you the truth,’ Michael Stanton said, ‘I’m glad to see you two together. I felt like a bit of a letch at first, coming here with Susan, since she’s so much younger than me. But now it looks like I have some company.’

  ‘Timothy and I plan to come here all the time,’ Tricia said.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ Susan said. ‘Isn’t it unbelievable? Sometimes I just wake up and I have to pinch myself. I can’t believe my good luck.’ Timothy wasn’t certain what she was referring to: the splendid club grounds? Michael Stanton’s six-bedroom house in Atherton? His eight-figure bank account?

  Tricia said, ‘I’m glad to meet someone my age.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Susan said, flattered.

  ‘Ladies,’ Michael Stanton said, ‘please. You’re practically burying me and Timothy. We’re still alive and kicking.’ And then he said: ‘I’d like to propose a toast.’ He raised his daiquiri glass. ‘To second chances.’

  ‘To second chances,’ Tricia said.

  ‘Hear hear,’ Timothy said.

  They drank.