This girl had none of that about her. And yet when she stepped out of the car, she was something out of myth—a creature so beautiful, and yet somehow, amazingly, unaware of her beauty. The important element isn’t the beauty. It’s the being unaware of it. How could she have existed in the world without knowing?
I can’t describe to you her hair. I had noticed it before, and I thought I knew what it would be like when it was down. But it transformed everything. Her face, her eyes, her body—everything changed with the hair. I thought I had such a good eye for spotting beauty, and it had been right in front of me and I hadn’t even noticed it. It humbled me. And I have to be honest, that was a new experience for me. Humble gets a bad rap. I’m here to tell you, if I could live that way, I think it’s all I’d need to be happy.
I always compliment my dates. Always. I try to find one true thing that I like. And if I can’t, I compliment the thing that I dislike the most: Gold lamé shoes. A fuzzy purse that looks like a hair ball. Orange lipstick. There is a certain admiration in my horror. So I draw on that.
But this time, I swear to you, I couldn’t say a word. So I just opened the car door and helped her in.
She didn’t even seem to notice that I didn’t say anything. When she got in the car and told me where to go, she seemed both quiet and relaxed. I don’t think I’d ever experienced quite that combination of traits—at least not in a woman. With a guy, sure. You could sit there for half an hour without saying anything, and he’d barely even notice. If that happened with a woman, you could be sure that she was either pissed at something or upset, usually both.
But she only told me how to get to the restaurant. A right and a left and we were there. The whole downtown was about the size of one New York City block. There was also the strip just outside town, off the highway, with the motel where I was staying, the McDonald’s, the Burger King, the gas station, and the Dunkin’ Donuts.
The main part of town was actually quite picturesque. It was what you imagine a small town looks like. And the restaurant looked like it was right in step with that: a green scalloped awning that said just “Mike’s” and an old-fashioned glass-and-wood door. It looked perfect for a quiet dinner—until we opened the door and walked into chaos. It was like walking into a five-year-old’s birthday party after the cake has been served and the sugar is coursing through those little five-year-old bodies. I should know: I had spent about ten minutes at my nephew’s birthday party a month before.
By this time in my life, I had come to the conclusion that I didn’t like children. It’s not a popular opinion, but I think it’s one that more people have than will admit to. What I don’t understand is how those very same people are convinced that they will like their own children. Or rather, that their children will be different. I am not so sure of either.
When we walked into the restaurant, my first thought was that this was some kind of message—she had taken me here to make it clear that she loved children and wanted some as soon as possible, and she was already picking out names for the ones she was planning we would have together. That’s what went through my head after we went through the door. It’s not exactly logical, but I have to tell you that this is the level of paranoia in the older single man going out on a first date. And it is not completely unfounded. I could tell you stories . . .
But one look at her face and I knew it was unfounded in this case. When we walked into the restaurant, she looked shocked. Appalled really.
I said, “Is this another test like the pumpkin latte?”
“It’s not usually like this,” she said. “Why don’t we—”
But it was too late. The host had spotted us and caught us at the door.
At that point I was really quite enjoying her discomfort. She seemed so composed before, but I was very happy to have her off balance. I admit, it made me more comfortable.
But then we walked across the dining room, and I swear to you every male in the place looked up and watched her. It’s not that I wasn’t used to that with the women I went out with. That was part of the pleasure of it. Half the time the women weren’t worth the bother, but the other men didn’t know that, and their envy was what I fed on. I loved having something they wanted.
But for the first time, I felt something else. She seemed so naive, and I wanted to keep it that way, but I thought all it would take would be for her to look up and notice, really see how they looked at her, and it would be gone. That innocence would disappear. And then she would be like all the other women. Something priceless would have been lost.
Maybe that’s what people love about their children. They see that pureness. That innocence. It’s irresistible. And then the kids grow up. Thinking about that, I was sure I didn’t want kids. How do you get over the heartbreak of seeing something perfect spoiled?
When we sat down at the table, I looked across at her. “You are full of surprises,” I told her.
I have always prided myself on being honest. But at that moment, I realized that I usually congratulate myself on being honest when I’m telling someone something unpleasant, something they don’t want to hear. And there is great power in that. Being honest about positive things—that lays you open. Of course, she didn’t hear it the way I meant it.
“Believe me, this was as much of a surprise to me,” she said. And she left it at that. She didn’t do the thing that women so often do when they make some mistake and then get overly apologetic.
“It’s not just the restaurant. You also had this hidden.”
I have to admit, I think I said it just to have an excuse to reach out and touch her. To feel that hair. It was as heavy and silky as it looked. Like a doll’s. “You attract a lot of attention with that hair.”
“That’s why I usually wear it up. But I think I’m pretty safe from attention here.”
“Do you?” I asked.
“In a room filled with families and screaming kids, yes.”
“A man doesn’t stop being a man when he gets married and has kids,” I told her.
It never made sense to me that this fact always seems to surprise women—that they somehow think a man will get married and then never notice a beautiful woman again, that he’ll never desire anyone other than his wife. How can you ever have a true relationship without understanding that instinct doesn’t get snuffed out by two words in a ceremony?
And, unfortunately, it looked like her opinions were the same as the others’. She frowned at me, but then I saw her glance at my hand, and I realized she wasn’t frowning at the general concept; she was thinking that I was talking about myself.
“My brother is married and has two kids. That’s how I know,” I said. But then I added, “And, just so you know, I think every man in here watched you as you crossed the room.”
I looked around at the men, and then I noticed him. I couldn’t believe my radar hadn’t picked up on him before. A big guy. Blond. You could tell that he’d been good-looking at one point, but he was starting to lose it, as men often do when they settle into career and family, start eating too much from the boredom of it all, and then compound that by watching too much television as a way of trying to escape the trap of “have to’s” and checklists their life has become.
This guy was sitting there, glaring at me like he wanted to strangle me, and I knew the girl I had sitting across from me wasn’t as free as she claimed to be. There was a man in this room to whom she belonged. I could see it in that glare. It was unmistakable.
I said, “And there’s one over there to your right who is looking at me like he wants to kill me.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said.
I am not used to people accusing me of being silly. I didn’t like it.
Then she looked over, saw what I saw, and her face changed.
“Is there something I should know about?” I asked.
“No. Nothing.”
I also don’t like it when people lie to me.
“The wife doesn’t think it’s nothing.”
“I’m sure it has nothing to do with me,” she said.
I looked at her, trying to figure out how deep the lie went. Had I been wrong about everything? I didn’t think so. I wasn’t given to romanticizing about women, and I had known a lot of them.
I considered for a moment, then I just asked her, “Is this false modesty? Or is this real? I have to admit I can’t tell.”
“It’s not modesty, false or otherwise. It’s reality,” she said.
Then the guy who had been sitting there glaring at me charged over and demanded to know what she was doing. She answered him calmly. She said, “Dan, I’m having dinner. Do you mind?” He seemed to take the question literally. “Yes, I do mind. Do you even know who this guy is?”
I could feel the possessiveness radiating off him in waves. But from the way she was talking to him, I could see that she didn’t feel the same. He hung on stubbornly for a little while, and finally he gave up and left. And then I accused her of lying to me. And when she told me she hadn’t, I pretended not to believe her.
But that wasn’t the truth.
The truth is, I got scared. Not easy to admit, but there it is. I didn’t think she was lying. I wasn’t an idiot; I knew she hadn’t just been born. She had a past. Okay, so it wasn’t all the time that the past charged your table on your first date, but I thought she handled it better than I could have imagined. And her composure just scared me more. I suddenly had the sense that this girl I found in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, was the real thing.
And I realized I wanted nothing to do with it. You can’t play with something like that. It’s like playing hopscotch near the third rail. And once I touched that rail, nothing would be the same. In the moment I realized that, I was gone.
Nora
The Day After the Date
There was a part of me—okay, all of me—waiting the next morning at work. I was waiting for him to walk in again. He’d done it once. Why not again?
Well, I don’t know why not, but he didn’t. Instead Tammy stormed in at around eleven.
I was behind the counter, and Neil was sitting at one of the tables with his laptop, doing the ordering.
“Hey, Tammy,” Neil said when Tammy burst through the door.
Tammy ignored him and marched up to the counter, glaring at me the whole way.
“I thought we were friends,” she said furiously.
I blinked. “Yeah, well, I didn’t want to tell you, but I’ve actually just been pretending for the last twenty years or so.”
“You suck,” Tammy said, trying desperately to hold on to her anger and not quite managing it.
I knew she must have heard something about my date. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I said.
“I had to hear it from Jeanette down at the Box last night.”
Tammy was a bartender at a local bar, the Box, during the week and at a strip club, prosaically named Pussy’s, on weekends.
Tammy went on, “What was even worse is that Jeanette assumed I knew all about it. I had to pretend I knew what she was talking about. Thankfully, I think she was drunk enough that I might have pulled it off, but talk about embarrassing.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “It was very wrong of me.” I made my best effort at exaggerated remorse.
“Shut up. Just shut up.” She scowled at me. Then she said, “Is it true you stole Jeanette’s fiancé right from under her nose? Some guy named Timothy, from out of town?”
I burst out laughing.
“Okay, I guess that’s a no.” Tammy leveled a finger at me. “But you are going to tell me everything later. Come by after work.”
That meant I was going to have to talk about it, and I didn’t want to. I felt like if I talked about it now, it would mean this was the end of the story. I didn’t want to think about the fact that it almost certainly was the end of the story.
But Tammy wasn’t asking, so there wasn’t a chance to say no. She spun around on her heel and marched out again.
I glanced over at Neil. He had his glasses up on his head, had stopped doing the accounts, and was staring at me.
“What?” I demanded.
“Nothing,” he said, putting his glasses back down and going back to his laptop.
The rest of the day was impossibly long. Time stretches when you’re waiting for something—especially something that doesn’t come.
I went to Tammy’s that night and told her the whole story. I had to go all the way back to Saturday night and the run-in with Dan. I also had to stop a few times for cursing breaks—Tammy’s, of course. She’s always hated Dan. And I have to say, it didn’t look like she was shaping up to like Timothy much either.
“Just give him a chance,” I pleaded.
She gave me a look, and I caught myself. “I mean, if he comes back,” I added quickly.
“Nora, I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”
I don’t know what my face looked like, but it must have showed something of what my stomach did when she said that because she shook her head and said, “Oh, baby. Take my advice. Get off that train, and now.”
“Did you see something?” I asked her. “Do you know he won’t be coming back?”
“You know I only see things when I’m holding your hand.”
So I made her do it, but she couldn’t see anything.
I left feeling worse than before I arrived. Sometimes talking doesn’t help. You just get caught in the loop of wondering and worrying and wanting.
It wasn’t better when I got home. My mother still wasn’t talking to me, but that was almost a relief. It was too early to even try to get her to forgive me, so I just went up to my room and spent the rest of the night there, in the narrow twin bed that had been mine since I was a child. It was more like a hammock, with the sag in the middle of the mattress. I should probably have bought another, but I never wanted to think about how long I might be there. At some point I heard my mother come up to bed, and I don’t know how long it was after that, but eventually I fell asleep.
I got up the next morning. I worked. I waited. I wondered.
What was he doing? And, more importantly, was he thinking of me?
Timothy
What Timothy Did After He Left Kansas
I left, and I didn’t think about her.
My ability to do that was almost frightening. I just got busy and got on with life. I met with Warren. I flew back to New York. Then my mother called in a panic because while I was away the market had been cresting and troughing like a ship in a hurricane, and she was worried I hadn’t been playing close enough attention.
I hadn’t been paying attention at all.
But it turned out that was the best thing I could have done. The market has its own intelligence. I trusted that. Other people choose to trust family and institutions like marriage and church. Those things I don’t trust at all—but the market I trust, not necessarily to go up and up and up without ever a down: that doesn’t make sense. No, I trust it to find its own equilibrium, despite the idiocy of many of the people who trade it.
I was back in the office by Wednesday afternoon, and I spent the whole afternoon on the phone. In case you were wondering what people do on Wall Street, most of them just talk. They spend twelve hours a day on the phone, talking. They are paid spectacular salaries to gossip. Other people crunch the numbers—the researchers, the quant guys—but the ones who do the things that might be recognizable as work aren’t the ones who get paid.
I have to admit that I loved the drama of the so-called economic crisis. Every day brought some new development. The jobless data, the housing foreclosures, the details of the bailout—they were like snapshots of a situation that was still developing. And from those snapshots everyone was trying to predict the future. There were all sorts of doomsday predictions, like the whole globe going into a recession, or another Great Depression, or that the financial system was on the verge of collapse.
But it turned out that our portfolio was positioned just right,
and we made back almost all we had lost. When I thought the gains were almost maxed out, I changed tactics and took a more conservative stance. The wild swings were far from over, and though there was money to be made in this market, there was as much, or more, to be lost. And if you looked at it like gambling (which it was), then I wanted to be the casino. Casinos very carefully fix the odds so they win at least 51 percent of the time. That 1 percent is small, but the amount of money that flows through adds up to millions in profit. That’s the position I wanted. I didn’t want to be the reckless gambler who is in for a quick, easy fortune and ends up losing everything.
All in, it was a very good week. It’s a sad truth that the taste of success is much sweeter when you know that so many around you are sitting down to a very bitter meal of failure.
I told myself that my road trip into Kansas had really been about getting away from work—about giving the portfolio the space to work rather than following the hourly fluctuations too closely and ruining the strategy I’d crafted. Beyond that, there was nothing to it. It was just a jaunt where I’d met a pretty girl who I’d made up a whole story about. I told myself that the wide-open spaces of the West must have gotten to my brain, and I slipped quickly back into my old routines.
Friday came around, and I went to meet my trader and best friend, Marcus, at Cipriani Wall Street, just like I did every Friday. It was a ridiculous place to go and have beer. A Budweiser cost more than ten dollars when you factored in the tip. But that was sort of the point.
Marcus was already there when I got there. Who am I kidding? Marcus was always there first. That means he always got his beer before I did. Once I tried to get him to order me one so it would be waiting when I got there. He just laughed and said he wouldn’t want my beer to get warm. That was the closest he ever came to complaining about the way I was always late, but he wasn’t a sucker. He wasn’t about to have a beer waiting for me when I arrived. Wait, I forgot. Once he did have a beer waiting for me. I started drinking it, and it didn’t taste right. He’d gotten me an O’Doul’s—alcohol free. I didn’t ask him again.
Through the Heart Page 9