Dear Money

by Martha McPhee

  Now I've eased up alongside Scarpetti in the burger count, and everyone cheers. They love a good race. Win announces the progress over the hoot and holler (the loudspeaker) so that people in the outer regions are updated. Somewhere Radalpieno is smiling. Miss Lane is ringing the bell. I keep stuffing the hamburgers in, giving the boys a good show. The wrappers pile up, the burgers fly. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. The entire audience watches as I masticate more. Little June Scarpetti just stuffing her mouth. This is what they want, she seems to say. Okay, then. Her pert little ponytail flopping as she crams it all in.

  I must shut her out. But I can't. I watch her, fast, formidable, efficient. She's a different breed. She's surrounded by people her age, raised to be all right with this, to look beyond this. People are chanting my name. "India, India." Lumps in my throat, I force the hamburgers down. Hearing my name drives me forward. Okay. I understand now. This is how much I want this. You all get to watch the spectacle, standing there in your pressed trousers as I stuff my mouth. Okay. I understand. Food spilling, mustard on chin, bun stuck to lips.

  Then silence as, softly, melodically, Beethoven's Für Elise comes from Snake's 18-karat white-gold Patek Philippe watch. "How many for New Chick?" By hour's end I've eaten twenty-one. Man-Eater has eaten only nineteen. The cheer is like a rifle shot in the small conference room. I have won. "Booya, Little Miss Hamburger!" someone shouts. "Fuckin' deadly," someone else says.

  Silence again, and suddenly I realize that there is no way around what I'm about to do. I feel it coming on and decide to use it, that there is only one way to punctuate this moment in a manner that is appropriate, that encapsulates it, that encompasses it, surrounds it and triumphs over it on its own terms. No way but through, the Buddha says. And so I stand up as Win enters the room, and I open my mouth as if to speak, but it's not quite a speech I give, though it is, in its own way. Out of my mouth comes an extended belch as I've heard it done a few times on the trading floor after closing, a long, virtuosic and obviously enjoyable low-down eructation, rising in a crescendo like a foulmouthed aria and tied up at the end in a crisp little flourish, eyes closed, finger pointing to the ceiling like Celine Dion hitting a high note, as if to say, You boys don't know who you're dealing with here, do you?

  The second roar of approval is different from the first. It is a firm, unguarded and deal-sealing round that rolls through the room and spills out into the office in high-fives and hand slaps and shoulder bounces, with me somewhere in their happy and satisfied midst. I have surprised and bested them (this is one for the history books, epic B&B), and what they love above all else is to be bested in this way. I have outgrossed them all. I am welcome. I am one of them.

  I can go home and tell the kids and Theodor I had a good day at work, but there is no way to tell them exactly what I have tried—and failed—to tell you just now. And the fact that I cannot tell you, that nobody can tell you—that you had to be there—is the very purpose of all such ceremony. There is no word for it in this world. You know it when you feel it. You can only point to it, in all its riotous excess, and hope someone understands. There it was, and I was now welcomed into it, and had earned something beyond reckoning. Even with all those hamburgers in my belly, I felt light. I was walking on clouds. Snake looked at me and beamed. "Congratulations," he said. "Your first big win on the Street."

  Then, so no one else could hear, June Scarpetti whispered, "That—the belch—a nice touch. This, I hate to say, could make your career."

  Thirteen

  BUT LET'S GO BACK to the beginning, the day I told Theodor. I'd still wanted to keep the secret, worried that I'd betrayed the code of the artist to stay broke (to roam the earth untethered, unsponsored, free), that I'd become a sellout like so many other of my artist friends, their dreams put on hold, "temporarily" at first, just until they caught up, paid off some debt, got things "squared away" by wandering off into commercial real estate, for instance. Time passed and you saw them at lunch, say, and they seemed to talk more about commercial real estate than you ever thought possible, or more about their children than you remembered, or about where they spent their last vacation. They'd punched the ticket by which one life gets jettisoned to make room for another, perhaps more adult, life. So the shackles fell, light as page-flutter.

  And in all the excitement of la vita nuova, with its seductive strangeness, I too seemed to have shed the old life. But for me there was no buyer's remorse. I'd somehow jumped the track from the hard-pressed life of the artist to its opposite number, the blessed class amassing wealth, and I discovered that everything I'd ever thought about the world of finance was of a fantastically low order of caricature. The new life was wilder, more potent and more bizarre than anything I could have imagined. I found nothing wanting. As the über-boys in my department put it, I was good with that.

  At least until the time approached, as it would, when I had to tell Theodor the truth. It would be like telling him I was having an affair. That I was leaving him for another man. Another man who made lots of money. And though I was not having an affair, and I loved him more than anything—and he would know this—he'd look at me and what I'd become and say the truth, which happened to be the worst thing anyone could say to someone who had built her life around the written word, which was that I'd become a living, breathing cliché. And he was very much not good with that. So I thought about telling Theodor a partial truth, that I'd taken Win up on the offer because I'd decided it might make a good short story, a novel even. The thought of lying, though, had made the guilt multiply, and now it seemed easier to say nothing, to find ways to justify myself, which I did by believing I was only trying this on, that I could always turn back, that it would be better to know for myself if this was what I really wanted before confessing to Theodor. Mostly, I simply tried not to think about it.

  The day started at 5 A.M. with a jog in Riverside Park. Very cold. A thick layer of ice blanketed the Hudson, chopped and cracked into brilliant fissures and floes, the new sun casting sharp light into a quiet hour in which, as a lone runner approached from the other direction, it was hard not to at least nod in recognition of the brief, chummy solidarity of witnessing the world as it was just then—forever lost to all those who had yet to press the snooze button on their alarms.

  My running partner, Isabella Power, was another mother from the girls' school, a stay-at-home mom with four children who claimed her only free time was early in the morning. My Ruby was in the same class with her second child. Isabella had once seen me in jogging shorts at the school and had been pursuing me as a running partner ever since. You couldn't run in Riverside Park without a partner at this time of day, even though, with the city's resurgence, crime was down and the parks were cleaned up. When we'd first moved into the neighborhood, the park's paths were strewn with syringes and used condoms and crack vials, but that was long before Isabella's time. She was one of the younger mothers, just turned thirty-two; she'd had her first child when she was twenty-five. Her newest was five months old, at home, asleep, with the live-in nanny awaiting his wake-up cry. Isabella had heard the stories of what the neighborhood was like, and she wouldn't set foot in the park without a chaperone, so when I started running again as part of my training for the new life, I took her up on her long-standing offer.

  I loved the city at this hour, hearing only the sounds of our feet thumping the pavement, our breath a cloud of vapor, the world still dark in the west, the in-between of the light. There was nothing finer than this moment, but it all seemed lost to Isabella, who loved to chat. She'd just bought a mansion on Riverside Drive, a former school that had wanted to take advantage of the soaring real estate values and the wealthiest New Yorkers' need for more square footage. When she didn't talk about The House, she talked about The School or The Money they'd donated, or she complained about The Tuition—having four children, sending three of them to private schools in New York, was a unique way of driving a point home, it seemed. As were the dinner parties and fundraisers and art
openings, the attendant guest lists—a Who's Who of The School's society. It was all here, the ease with which the moneyed class ascended to an unstated yet higher empyrean of parental citizenship. Other mothers regarded Isabella deferentially, made playdates for their children, their laughter echoing across the city's playgrounds. Isabella's husband, a banker, was not the lingering type at school or anywhere else. He shook hands and generally made quick work of the rituals involving the children—the morning drop-off, attendance at various performances—nodding to fellow dads as if addressing a phalanx of junior officers.

  This morning, on our jog together, Isabella was carrying on about an enormous gilded mirror surrounded by crystal that was being delivered in the afternoon. The crate wouldn't fit through the front door. "Can you believe that?" she said, affronted. "They're going to have to uncrate it on the street. It's going to take three big men, and the mirror simply can't touch the ground. The crystal is antique Baccarat, mouth-blown. It cannot touch the ground."

  I enjoyed listening to these concerns; they were peaceful in a way, guileless. There was nothing sad or woeful about what preoccupied her. It was like flipping through a decorating magazine—safe and filled with the stories of all the small complications one needed to attend to in the world of home interiors. The other day she told me about a pair of oil portraits that an East Side friend of hers had had commissioned—a portrait of herself and her husband in evening attire to hang in their library, Isabella's friend in a black dress with a plunging neckline. "Very Madame X," she'd whispered, not daring to say it out loud even though we were running. The portraitist was the renowned Sasha McDermott, grandson of a well-known Scottish cubist I'd never heard of but assumed I should have. "McDermott has paintings in all the major museums around the world." Indeed, his services had been auctioned off that November evening at the Met, I recalled. "Husband-wife portraits are the rage."

  If anything resembling tragedy had ever struck Isabella, it was part of a past that may have occasionally returned, the way memory does, and moved her in her most quiet and private hour—which, need I add, did not include the hour that we jogged together. But for the most part such things had been neatly catalogued and packed off. So she carried on about the mirror. The men were going to have to remove it from the crate and carry it into the house and hang it immediately. "If it's ruined..." She paused, allowing the consequences to surround us as our feet thumped the ground. "It was just absurd to spend so much," she said.

  "How much?" I asked.

  "Oh, India!" She laughed. "You are direct."

  But she wouldn't tell me. It was unsavory to speak of price tags. She picked up her pace as if to run away from the question, tucking loose strands of hair behind her ears. Isabella had strawberry curls, full cheeks, ribbon lips, a well-defined jaw line. She'd confessed to me on our first run that she'd been eager to know me better because she too wanted to be a writer, had set up an office on the top floor of The House, sliding glass doors leading to a terrace (landscaped by a plant sculptor) with a river view and a chaise with a blanket so that she could lie there to read even on cold days. "Like Hans Castorp," she'd said, "at his sanatorium." She was an educated woman, had been working on a Ph.D. in comparative literature when her first baby arrived—though that feat too seemed neatly shelved.

  I wondered what she'd make of me if I told her I had left writing, that I was preoccupied by very different concerns these days. For example, I was certain that already I could explain to her the nuances of her mortgage, chart the arc it would follow across its lifetime. But she would not have cared. One of her primary luxuries was that she did not need to care. She did not know what kind of banking her husband did. "I won't pretend to explain," she'd said. "Something to do with bonds, but really I'm not quite sure what he does."

  We ran past the Boat Basin to the pier at 72nd Street and then back to the tennis courts at 120th Street, finishing with a race up the steps out of the park. Some days she'd win; some days I'd win. Today I won. I left her in front of her house and walked briskly to my apartment, showered, dressed and primped and was out the door by 6:45, in the office by 7:10. I swiped the door with my ID badge and walked into the pit, now humming with activity.

  Friday, January 16: I'd been at B&B exactly two weeks. The boys had made their bets, each of which in its own way groping for the truth about who or what I was: I was a journalist, perhaps a producer at Dateline or Extra, or a reporter from Newsday, here to observe and develop a story; I was a Method actress preparing for a big Hollywood role; I was an intern; I was a girlfriend to whom Win owed a big favor; I was a distant relative's daughter, an artist, a chef, a heroin addict, a sorry soul whom Win wanted to help; I was never going to be seated on a desk; I'd be seated within six months; I'd be seated in a year, two months, five months. There was real money riding on me, all told the various bets adding up to $4,500. In those first weeks I felt a bit like a gyroscope: just a tap would send me into a completely different orbit.

  Win's strategy of saying nothing helped me, as I'm sure he knew it would, to learn without pressure—freed me to absorb in my own natural way, without interference, while preserving me as his to shape and design. Some days I felt like a beginner, the woman that I was, learning a whole new trade. Other days I felt like the old me, a writer, a spy in their country, noting all the ridiculousness of the place: the gargantuan telephones with glowing blue screens and forty lines, all programmed to connect, with one press of a button, to clients; the recourse to male anatomy as a qualitative descriptor—to be "hung like a horse" meant you were a stud trader, someone to be reckoned with, unless you were, sadly, "hung like a field mouse"; the use of sports and military exemplars—Vince Lombardi or George Patton, whose words became company slogans. Pressure makes diamonds. Perpetual peace is a futile dream. No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country; he won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

  Neither horse nor field mouse, I searched for a position of advantage. I liked the notion of myself as a spy, an outsider. Being a spy might give me perspective, though I had no idea how perspective would serve me or what it added up to. When I told Win that so much of what I was reading in the papers and online made no sense, he said that it didn't need to make sense. What had to make sense was valuing the bonds against the market's desire for them. His job was to think about strategy: how far to go, how deep, when to back out. "But it's interesting to me," he said, "that your primary concern is that all of this makes no sense."

  I was sitting in Win's office, as I did in those early days, his door open to the trading floor. It seemed that for many days I'd been quietly nodding my head, understanding nothing but marshaling an alert, attentive look on my face. When I spoke, my own voice almost startled me.

  "I don't understand why a huge pension fund would find a collection of risky mortgages a reliable investment." Did I have any idea what I was asking? Only in a graduate seminar sort of way. Not in a way that would count out there on the trading floor. A trader from currency was buying a gumball from the machine outside Win's office. Already I was coming to understand who sat where and did what. At best I possessed a knowledge of the firm's seating chart. The gumball kid's name was Jud. He looked in on us, smiled, popped the gumball in his mouth and went back to his seat. "Imagine," I continued, "if you're too leveraged, something's got to give, right?"

  I was thinking of myself just then, how I'd been managing the bills for the past six months: borrowing on credit cards, elaborate schemes to buy time, ultimately leaving the bills in their stack beside the computer in our bedroom. Investors were interested in that debt of mine. I had a 0 percent credit card with $10,000 on it. If I kept up with the minimum payment, I wouldn't be charged interest for eighteen months. There was no balance transfer fee. As long as I paid it off on time, the credit card would make nothing on that loan. Even so, that debt had a lot of value to investors, because they assumed I'd make a mistake, miss a payment, that in the end I wouldn't be able to pay it off and
the rates would rise drastically. But I intended to stay one step ahead of them, get another 0 percent loan from a different bank with no balance transfer fee and transfer the debt again. Sooner or later, they were betting, I'd get stuck. Hot potato. Something would happen, some life-changing force, and there I'd be exposed. The music would stop and I'd be left holding the potato. They were betting on the actuarial likelihood that misfortune happened to all of us, that I'd be blindsided by some unexpected event that made me unable to pay. But was I any different from a bank? Why couldn't it be a bank that suddenly found itself without cash? Not just one bank but many banks, banks in the same boat as all those sad, wretched debtor people?

  "You're right," Win said. "It's a guessing game and an assessing game and like any game it can get out of hand. It always does. And that's my job, to forecast when the game will get out of hand, and to be ready for it with a plan, but to take advantage in the meantime."

  "Can I tell you what I see as we go along?"

  "You better. Remember, you're the storyteller. But as you begin to trade you're going to become very specialized. You'll think micro instead of macro, deep instead of wide."

  The day had sailed by already. The winter evening came on at 4 P.M. From the windows in Win's office I could see the city begin to light up like candles at a table, reminding me that I had to leave early to go to Williamsburg. Sullivan was coming for dinner to see the chalice.