Dear Money

by Martha McPhee

  "They're in a tough place," Cavelli said, darkly, but with that sense of having information that could be of interest to the person with whom he spoke. He was reading my face. He could see intense curiosity there. He was as bad a gossip as the rest of us. "Apparently he'd been relying on stock options from his old firm, but they plummeted before they were vested. I hadn't understood that a third of those annual bonuses are stocks you can't touch. Why in the world would bankers loan money to people who have only a promise of money, who can't pay it back? None of what I read makes any sense."

  "Tulips," I said, just as Win had that night in his office, then again at dinner, celebrating my big trade, as if the word alone could explain where we stood today. I'd felt unexpectedly relieved when Win left the firm, though I admitted it to no one. I'd never imagined there'd be a "post-Win" period, but here it was, and with his departure came that relief. My own sense of being a cardboard cutout had departed. We talked occasionally, Win and I, but not much since I knew he was shorting the market. The guy who'd flown into my life on a biplane and bet a bundle on me was now actively trying to bury us all. I wanted to know about Will and Maine. In how much trouble were they? I'd heard the rumors—Paul, Smart & Smith. But after closing the hedge funds they'd assured stockholders they'd recover. Things could turn around yet for Will. This was just part of the roller coaster ride.

  "Tulips," Cavelli said, smiling, leaning forward to let me know he understood the reference and to hear more.

  I carried on for a bit about tranches and Alt-A's and no-docs and CPOs and rating agencies, about the market creating the value. Then I threw in credit-default swaps just to make things really crazy. And to make things impossible to understand I mentioned deregulation and derivatives. I tried to give Cavelli the catastrophe, because it seemed that's what he wanted to hear. In the end, of course, tulips hadn't fared so well. If the Chapmans were losing Maine, that wasn't a good sign for the market. If Will, as a former banker, had underestimated his ability to make payments, or overvalued his future earnings, what was the rest of America, those with less knowledge of finance, thinking?

  "And the characters," Cavelli said, fingers stroking his chin. "Tell me about them."

  I thought for a moment and then smiled. "Who'd inhabit this book?" I asked. He was playing a game now. He wanted me to populate the story. "Well, there's Win, swooping down in a yellow biplane to turn an art-house novelist into a billionaire banker, and a wife and her banker husband who wants to be an art-house novelist, and the CEO of B and B, who has too much time on his hands and wants his men to bleed green, and who rings a little sterling-silver bell every time he makes a sexist, racist or otherwise politically incorrect comment, and who rules from a glass tower."

  "I like it," Cavelli interjected.

  And I continued: all the contests and my win with the hamburgers and Toyotas and bacon and so many billions of dollars. As the details poured from me, of this ridiculous, absurd, glittering world, they almost made me excited. The storytelling reminded me of when I told Theodor for the first time about my defection—in the end it had been comforting and refreshing. I thought of Theodor's chalice, the world resting on a fragile limb about to topple—or not—the Texan's boisterous "You're brilliant, old boy." Theodor had let go of the sculpture, sent it into the world, his no more. This was how it was supposed to be. And I will confess here, I paused, wondered in a fleeting moment, the way so many ideas and notions can occupy your mind in a flash: I wanted to go back; I could go back; I could make it mine as it had been in the very beginning, oceanic stretches of time, an entire summer's worth, deeply immersed in a world of my own making, belonging to me alone, the way Theodor's sculpture had once belonged to him. I felt both a pang of regret and the fullness of possibility in a life lived creatively, in which all that is sacrificed is compensated for in the desire to make and think and understand. I had the urge to write a sentence, craft a paragraph. I could feel the engine trying to turn over, catching, engaging like a car left idle for a long winter.

  Cavelli's eyes concentrated on me. He was smart and literary and attentive, chin resting on palm, peering through the portal opened by me and my words. I hadn't felt this passionately in years. I could feel my skin warm, my cheeks flush. I wanted to get inside this, understand. I missed this. I could have talked with him for a long time.

  Miss Barthelme knocked and cautiously opened the door. "Your next appointment is waiting."

  I uncrossed my legs, ready to be dismissed.

  "It will be a minute," he said. She left, closing the door quietly behind her.

  "And they thought they could take you, just anyone, and graft you into this world?"

  "You know," I said, crossing my legs again and sitting back, "they did. And in the beginning it felt dirty, like a raunchy affair, illicit, exciting. But that was just me, it turned out, indulging my own prejudices. I discovered it was a much more complex world, of smart, educated people, children some of them, readers too." He smiled, sharing the inside joke of those outside finance—that we all believe them to be illiterate. "And so I surrendered to it all." I could imagine the story. I was writing it in my mind. I looked at his office door. Outside someone was waiting. I was making someone wait. I wanted that person to wait forever so I could remain in here, in this sweet memory.

  "Don't you feel that defines a fatal flaw?"

  "Surrendering?" I asked.

  "To money," he said.

  That snapped me back from my reverie, sharpened my sense of clarity. "Isn't that what's happened to so many of us? We all wanted the money, believed so invincibly in ourselves that we mortgaged our futures for the Mercedes today, the new kitchen, the addition, the trip to Europe. Isn't that what America has done?" But it was more than that. I understood what it was just then, for me. I felt as if I belonged now, that I wasn't scheming anymore, trying to get away with something in order to afford my life. I belonged now, to the school, in a house, at the movies with my kids even, in stores, at my daughters' doctors, to this world that made me.

  "A fatal flaw," he repeated.

  "I suppose it could be," I said. "I got caught up in the frenzy in my own special way." I thought of Will and Emma and their house in Maine.

  Our conversation continued for a good twenty minutes, veering back to the mess that he apparently found my role an emblem of. He was convinced this would be a nuclear financial explosion and suggested that I was particularly well positioned to tell the tale, one with my own intriguing backstory.

  "And how will it end?" he asked.

  "The bankers, they'll all be obliterated. No one will be able to look at them. Tarred and feathered," I said. He gave me a pleased smirk. "Of course, it will end with the bankers just where they were in the beginning, creating new products that do the same thing—that bundle and pool potential, slice it and dice it and ship it off around the world, and the frenzy will start all over again. It won't be houses but something else. College tuition plans, life insurance—they'll be gambling with your life. They'll never lose." I smiled at him. "The rich live differently," I said.

  "Who do you think would be interested in writing this?" he asked with a half-cocked smile.

  "Don't you think there will be many?" I asked. "Financial wizards will have proposals by the thousands, no?"

  "Not that kind of book," he said. "I'm talking about a book of witness."

  "Written by a bystander," I said.

  "India," he said, standing up at last and stepping around his desk to give me a hug. "Think about it, won't you?"

  That little engine of possibility turned over again, but quickly stopped.

  "Not a chance, Leonardo, as tempting as you are. I'm very happy. For the first time in my life I am extremely happy with what I do."

  I'd said no to Cavelli, and as I did my writer's studio flashed before me. I'd held on to it all this time, still paid rent on it, though it remained unvisited, gathering dust—there just as I had left it. I said goodbye to Cavelli and shut his office door be
hind me and stepped into the anteroom, where I stood blinking for a moment. Hunched over a manuscript, red pen poised in her hand, sat Lily Starr. Then I saw the grade book and noticed that the "manuscript" was a stack of student papers. It was late June. Summer session, no less.

  "Lily."

  "India," she said, smiling and tossing her purse over the stories. "What in the world?"

  "Just a visit."

  "How crazy is this? I'm just here to talk to Cavelli."

  "Crazy," I said. "Are you teaching?" I gestured toward the stories.

  She rolled her eyes and stuffed the papers into her bag, the blue alligator handbag with the little silver feet.

  "You look so good," she said.

  We both stood there, her compliment of the kind one sometimes hears at reunions or funerals—an indirect, public avowal that time, gravity, entropy, the IRS, alcohol, a thick stack of student papers waiting to be read and deficiencies of character one couldn't surmount alone had all conspired to make you look as if you needed, at the very least, a long hot soak and a good airing out in high-desert sun, possibly with a feathered shaman or two to help guide you back from where the wheels had come off your caboose.

  "I read in a magazine that you bought a house in Southhampton," I said, not really sure of what else to say.

  "Springs," she corrected, apologetically. Her lips curled into a frown. "But we have to rent it out all the time. You know, mortgage payments." She paused. "Crazy," she said. Then, unable to resist: "New book?"

  "Honestly," I said, "I'm not really sure why I'm here."

  A flash of relief in her eyes. "I miss you, India. It's been so long," she said, as if trying to sort something out for herself. Why had we thrown each other away?

  "We're all so busy," I said. "I'd love to catch up. Have you finished another novel?"

  "A memoir. The fiction's on hold."

  Cavelli opened his door with a booming welcome for Lily. "My Starr," he declared.

  "Good luck to you," she said. "Call. Please."

  Twenty

  HOW DO YOU KNOW the end is near? When shoeshine boys are giving you stock tips. The trouble is, the only way you really understand this is after the fact. Yesterday it was the shoeshine boy. Today it's your mother-in-law. The joke and its punch line live in the land of perspective and hindsight. But if you live moment by moment in the present, if you're a fire-breathing, hamburger-eating numbers guy, as I'd become—"India Palmer, just one of the boys"—then all one sees is numbers.

  We were all about reality, and numbers were real and studly and all the rest of it. Numbers allowed you to see beyond the distracting fabric, the shifting veil of illusion that most people mistook for reality. But even if one of us were to disclose our quantitative methods to the public at large—say, blaring them with a bullhorn from the back of a truck driving down Broadway—it would be the listeners who'd die of boredom or bafflement. I wasn't a "quant," a Princeton Ph.D. in economics, not even close, but I learned to speak their language. I'd come to take it as an article of faith that 99 percent of the time I could lose no more than the bet I'd made. If the bet was $50 million, 99 percent of the time that was the most I could lose. And the numbers, like the ground beneath my feet, bore me up.

  I walked as if on a mighty earthen levee and noted with satisfaction how the waters were held at bay. I noted the people, how small they were, living their lives oblivious of the levee. This was the 99 percent. It worked. It was fundamentally sound. You could believe in it the way you believed in the Army Corps of Engineers. It was convincing in its daily utility. It was durable. Its mighty engine thudded convincingly. Over time, one simply took it, like the fact that the sun would rise tomorrow, as part of the given.

  But riding out across the ever-narrowing asymptote of chance, at the far periphery of thought, at the remotest end of possibility, a cold, dark number was ever so occasionally rumored to exist. This was the One Percent Chance that the levee would break, that the supercollider experiment would somehow form antimatter that would fuse everything—the air, the trees, the oceans, all of us—into a solid, ever-expanding ball of destruction. The One Percent was Kali, the destroyer goddess, riding on a theoretical comet of the apocalypse. You could not, if you wanted to maintain your credibility as a numbers guy, simply dismiss her, because, after all, she was a number. You could not truthfully say, "This is not possible." Because it was possible. All you could say, in truth, was that it was not probable.

  The One Percent was where the dragons lived. The people who forswore the pallet-loads of money that everyone else was making and stuffing into their own accounts, not because it was right or prudent but because they could—the antinomians who kept their eyes on the realm of the dragons, who thought about what terrible, wholesale destruction the dragons could do—these people collectively would not have filled a small elevator. Nobody invited them to the party. They were cranks of catastrophe. They were out of step with the times. And who among us wants to say goodbye to a good time?

  The only way you understand is after the fact. Unless you're Win Johns. When Win lit out for the territory, wild rumors circulated: he'd racked up some heavy losses; he'd been caught money-laundering for the Man in the Moon; he was a kingpin of the white slave market in Romania—such outrageous stories swirled in the wake of his departure from Bond & Bond. To where? To short the market, of course. But to all of us it may as well have been to Fiji, to Oz, to the bottom of the Aleutian Trench.

  Amazing how the pace of the market made Win's former place in it a distant memory. Nobody cared. There were non-disclosure agreements and contractual clauses and noncompete provisos guaranteeing that Win would remain, in terms of his relevance, on Pluto. And as if from that recently decommissioned planet, he could look back on the tiny speck floating in the darkness that was us, our busy brew, but he could do nothing or say nothing that would be heard against the feverish pitch of the galaxy, which moved and would always move, as we all knew, despite the occasional disquieting glitches, in one direction only. One didn't bet against the galaxy. And what mattered in the galaxy we'd created—the substance of our dreams, our deals, and the fabulously spinning noncorrelated assets we'd invented, those curious cycles and epicycles derived from dreams—was something that had always mattered. It was something beyond logic or reckoning. Something firm beneath our feet. Something that kept us warm at night and the rain from falling on our heads. Something to look out upon, some landscape to survey and assess and regard. Something real. Real estate.

  There was no bidding war between Emma and me, as Win had predicted. I bought the house because they needed to sell and because I could buy. They'd made mistakes with mortgages, as so many others had. I bought the house because I could. And, because I could, I planned to tear it down and build it back again as it had been, the same design but better, sounder, more polished, more comfortable, each room a bit more commodious, the bathrooms large enough for tubs and showers, insulation for winter visits, a fireplace that didn't hog the views. I wanted not to mess too much with history, to keep the integrity of the house's original design but modernize it, so you couldn't tell, if you'd known the house across the years, whether anything much had changed.

  But there was something else at work inside me. Maybe I would make two turrets instead of one, for balance, each with a door onto second-floor balconies. I would make the attic and basement livable. "To the unknowing eye, it will appear that the house has had no more than an excellent paint job," said Sims, a New York architect who had done some work in the Hamptons and was known for his stone-and-glass façades and for being mindful of the carbon footprint. "It will look as though now someone cares for it just a bit more." I did not mention that to Emma.

  To one so new to having money, to its power to transform, to its—how shall I say—enchanting melody, the plans to merely restore and remodel the house at Pond Point slowly began to seem slightly, peevishly foreshortened. For weeks I looked over Sims's shoulder as he drafted. Everything was at my disposa
l. I could reposition the house. I could open it up to admit the eastern sun. I could extend a deck into the sea grass, add a Jacuzzi. Because he was young and hungry, and because he had read me well—seen that I too, in my own way, was hungry—Sims introduced more radical plans for an entirely new sort of house, a rara avis sort of house, an eco-friendly, sustainable assemblage of cubes and parallelograms and solar panels, a polyhedral cathedral, like some ship heading out into the Gulf of Maine and built to outlast the ravages of time and tide. It would ruffle feathers from Sebasco Cove to Gilbert Head. Yachtsmen would use it to mark their position off the coast. Passing lobstermen would pause in wonderment—or call it blasphemy.

  I did the numbers, and the numbers sang their enchanting song. My accounts were a mountain. This was a foothill. It was more than just doable. It was done. I could spend a winter on Wall Street amassing—I loved the word— another mountain, and by spring I could move into Shangri-la. It was heady stuff. So we worked on it, Sims and I, a step forward, away from my original intention (the same but improved) and toward his (an Ozymandian assertion): advance, retreat, until temptation won and I had a pile of blueprints to tell the story.

  The sale of the house was matter-of-fact. It had been Emma's idea, mentioned first on my family's annual visit. "Why don't you buy it?" she'd offered, as if to a co-conspirator, our feet pushing into the sand, books in our laps that we weren't bothering to read. "Better you than a stranger." The girls ran around on the beach. Theodor and Will were on a jog. I'd imagined this moment for Emma, had envisioned a rupture of some sort, but I hadn't imagined she'd have been this placid. "We can't afford to keep it, alas. Ah, the compromises one makes for art! Who would have thought?"

  "I'm so sorry," I said.

  "Don't be sorry," she said. "It's just a house." All the sounds washed over us, the waves and the gulls and the P-3 Orions, turboprop planes lumbering overhead on their practice sorties from the new naval base—big, hulking, ominous, like circling sharks. Round and round they cruised. "If you buy it, it'll still be in the family. I mean, you'll invite us up."