Fixers

by Michael M. Thomas

  Why wouldn’t I be intrigued by a great-looking woman, obviously smart and articulate, probably makes a lot of money, and knows everyone and (yes, this matters at this point) is past the child-bearing age? I searched around, and she seemed to come up empty on the emotional entanglements front. All good.

  The Lonsgtreth name itself also rang a bell, and, thanks to the miracle of Google, I found my way to Marjorie Longstreth, a formidable woman whom I recall meeting at a reception some years ago at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge. It turned out that she was the mother of Bianca and Claudio. Her husband is Thayer Longstreth, H’60, H’06 Hon., retired CEO of a trust company that got sold to Merrill Lynch in 2003.

  He’s obviously the real thing, Cabots-speak-only-to-God Boston, members in best standing of the old, true patriciate, with all its courtesies and noblesse oblige. Marjorie’s a trustee emerita at the Fogg and Wellesley; he’s served as an Overseer at Harvard. They have homes in Brookline and Maine, belong to the Somerset Club and The Country Club, hold important Back Bay trusteeships and corporate and charitable boards. One of their ancestors was surely in the first boat to row ashore from the Mayflower.

  By now, you’ve surely divined that I’m more than a bit of a snob when it comes to this sort of thing. All in all, these sound like my kind of people. A vanishing breed. March 21 can’t come to soon.

  MARCH 16, 2010

  I’ve spent far too much time over the last few days thinking about Bianca Longstreth, a woman I’ve never even met. It’s a problem I have, this romantic fantasizing, and I have to be careful. If I let it get out of control, daydreaming can get me into trouble. It has before.

  Still, I can’t help but find this woman utterly intriguing. Does she have a boyfriend? Is she a lesbian, a spinster, too busy for love? Does she hate commitment? Google doesn’t supply the answers. I suppose I could ask Artie, but I don’t want to appear too anxious too soon.

  It doesn’t help that I’m not particularly busy right now. The cultural front is quiet, although a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum is pushing me hard to find funding for an exhibition of some dress designer’s work. I’ve made clear my strongly held opinion that the best route to Parnassus isn’t Seventh Avenue, and that the sensible course of action is to work Anna Wintour and her friends for the funding of couture shows, and to come see me when Raphael or Etruscan art or something serious is on the table. It’s the same everywhere: everyone—museum, university, performance venue—wants big box office numbers, as if art were a suburban multiplex.

  STST is keeping a low profile, waiting to see whether there’s another shoe to drop in the SEC’s investigation of the Protractor deal. I’ll bet everyone upstairs and down at the firm wishes they’d never heard of Jimmy Polton, but of course, at the moment, there’s quite a lot that Wall Street wishes it had never heard of. If it were me behind Mankoff’s desk, I’d settle with the SEC now: pay a fine and be done with it. In most regulatory tiffs, first out is usually cheapest; so sayeth Scaramouche. Apart from the SEC and the Senate hearings where STST has been singled out (along with Deutsche Bank) as the bad guy in securitization, Washington has treated Wall Street with a gossamer touch, despite all the smoke and mirrors being deployed from the bully pulpit. But maybe that won’t go on forever.

  MARCH 22, 2010

  Well, not to keep you in suspense, Gentle Reader, I’ve met Bianca, and she’s incredible.

  Terrific, fantastic, sexy, smart, and beautifully spoken. Just unbelievable. Why she isn’t married to someone like George Clooney, I can’t imagine. She’s everything my imagination hoped she’d be, and more. On the basis of a hour’s acquaintanceship in a roomful of chatty people, I can’t say that I’ve fallen in love: it’s just too early, and I know I’m capable of acting impetuously. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten more cautious where big feelings are concerned. I prefer the gradual simmer to the fast boil.

  Can this turn into a relationship? Conjectural. If I’m looking for anyone, it’s probably a person I can come home to (though she’d have to have her own place) and put my feet up with, not a busy producer who’s in Copenhagen on Tuesday and Rio the day after that and committed to two weeks a month in L.A. I definitely want to see Bianca again, and she didn’t seem wholly indifferent to me, to put it politely. She told me to call her “B—everyone else does,” so that’s what I’ll call her.

  But let’s start from the beginning. Yesterday was a mildish day for this time of year, temperature in the mid-fifties, the city pretty much dried out from the savage nor’easter that a week earlier had dumped almost six inches of rain on us. I decided to walk uptown, reckoning that my usual pace (allowing for window-perusing and assorted dawdling, perhaps a stop along the way for a shot of Dutch courage) would get me to West 9th Street around 1:45, which struck me as about right for an event beginning at 1:00 p.m.

  As I turned into the block on which stood the brownstone shared by Artie and his housemates, my watch reading 1:44 p.m., I saw him talking on the sidewalk to a tall woman in trousers and a black turtleneck. A limousine idled at the curb. She looked vaguely familiar, although from that distance, all I could make out was that she was broad-shouldered, with closely cropped dark hair. Before I got close enough to meet and greet, she embraced Artie, climbed into the waiting car and was off.

  “Who was that you were talking to?” I asked. “She reminds me of someone.”

  He smiled. “You don’t know her? Gosh, I must introduce you. That’s Marina Hochster. You know—the journalist. She’s an old friend of Bianca’s. She’s on her way to JFK to catch a plane to Frankfurt.”

  No wonder I’d thought I recognized her; I’d seen Hochster just a couple of weeks earlier on Jon Stewart.

  Artie went on with his explanation. “Bianca and Marina grew up together in Maine, at Leeward Harbor, where the Longstreths have had a place for generations. Marina’s a townie, but in those places that makes no difference—or didn’t used to. The Hochster family owned the local boatyard for about a century—until a bunch of private-equity vultures got hold of it four or five years ago and wrecked it. That’s a major reason she’s got it in for Wall Street.”

  I knew about Leeward Harbor. Anyone who knows his way around the WASP world does. If you grew up in a certain style in Manhattan, or Boston, or Philadelphia, or Baltimore, or even as far west as Lake Forest or Grosse Pointe, you’ll have known about places like Leeward Harbor, Hobe Sound and Delray, Fishers Island. The last redoubts of old money, by which I mean old money: family fortunes that date back to the Industrial Revolution. No Russians, oil despots, or private-equity types. I’d visited the place once, many years ago, when I was still at Yale and crewing on a friend’s boat.

  Artie continued with the Hochster family saga as we mounted the steps leading to his front door. “There was a whiz-kid who’d made about a jillion dollars in private equity and had built a gigantic house in Porpoise Point, which is Leeward’s fancier twin across the bay. This upstart had bought one of Hochster’s famous harbor cruisers, and he looked around and decided there was money to be made building boats for people like himself. He got his firm to put up most of the money and brought in a few rich summer types, including Bianca’s uncle Walter Hardcastle.”

  “Walter Hardcastle is your housemate Bianca’s uncle?”

  “Why—you know Hardcastle?”

  “Met him once. He’s a bombastic old shit.”

  “So I hear. He’s married to B’s mother’s sister, who I gather is sort of a ditz. Nothing like Marjorie, I can tell you. Anyway, he and some other private-equity sharks whom he brought in for the kill talked Marina’s father into selling out. Sweet-talked the old man with words like ‘synergy’ and ‘grow the business’ and promised to keep everything as it was, only bigger and better. Marina told her father not to listen to them, but he drank the Kool-Aid, especially when they promised that he could continue to run the business, but now with millions in fresh capital to draw on. So he turned a deaf ear to his daughter and went ahead and did the d
eal. Do you want to hear the rest? It’s pretty depressing.”

  I thought I probably knew what was about to come. These private-equity horror stories are all the same. But it would have been discourteous not to let Artie finish.

  “The new owners started by paying themselves a huge dividend with money borrowed against the boatyard assets. Business dropped off a cliff in 2008, and they defaulted and the creditors closed the yard the next year. It was like cutting the heart out of Leeward, a century’s worth of skill and goodwill thrown away just like that. And as you can well imagine, Hochster’s was the largest employer in that part of the island. The machinery got sold to some people in Taiwan; Hardcastle and his cronies bought the physical site out of bankruptcy and are planning to put up a bunch of luxury condominium townhouses, quote unquote. And that’s not the worst part.”

  “Which is?”

  “It’s that people in Leeward have blamed Marina as much as her father and treated her so badly that she’s sworn never to set foot in her hometown again. Which means that she and Bianca can only connect off-island. Pretty pigheaded of Marina, if you ask me, but you know how these Down East types can be. Captains Courageous and all that. Well, here we are. Follow me.”

  It’s a tall house, five floors with a small elevator. Artie’s partner Hal Norden is one of the city’s top decorators, and his operation takes up most of the ground floor, as well as the parlor floor: drafting tables, metal shelves filled with swatch books and the like, pinboards on the walls devoted to projects-in-progress, a small office for the accountant. The third floor is almost equally divided between the large room where the party was gathering and, in the rear, a loftlike, open-plan dining area-cum-kitchen.

  Arthur and Hal share the next floor up, and Bianca’s quarters take up on the entire top floor. It’s a deep building, so we’re talking close to 2,000 square feet. Bianca’s living space consists of a combined bedroom-sitting room, a bathroom that would satisfy Cleopatra (along with a formidable array of walk-in closets), and, at the rear, looking over a small, not especially well-kept garden, a home office that looks like it could give NASA a run in the technology department. I wanted to dilly-dally and give myself a chance to examine her photographs and books, but Arthur hustled me right along. “Duty calls,” he said. “Let’s go down and find Her Majesty.”

  There were about twenty people in the drawing room. It was magnificent. Old New York, right out of Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells. Dark wood, bookshelves to the ceilings, rich velvet, the furniture of a pleasing amplitude and comfort.

  “Come say hello to Hal.” Arthur took me by the arm and led me toward his partner. “Hal, you should meet Chauncey Suydam. I’ve told you about him. He also consults for your good client Mr. Rosenweis’s firm.”

  Hal looked just like the photos I’d seen on his website. He has a smile that had me reaching for the Ray-Bans, and is in tremendous physical shape; it took my right hand a full ten seconds to recover from shaking his.

  I moved away—Artie had hustled off to chat up a new arrival—and accepted a glass of something sparkling from a tray proffered by a pretty girl in a black bow tie, then stood off to one side, trying my best to case the joint before actually starting to work the room.

  I saw a few faces I recognized—a couple of guests I knew I could latch on to, people I didn’t know well, but at least I knew who they were. They, too, would know who I am, which gave a base from which to branch out.

  I was deciding on my first move when I felt a tap on my shoulder. “You must be Chauncey Suydam.”

  I turned around, and there she was, looking just the way Google had promised. Gentle Reader, have you ever seen South Pacific? If you have, you’ll recall one moment that has the entire theater clutch its heart. It’s when the plantation owner Emil de Becque sees Nellie Forbush for the first time and literally bursts into song, “Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger; you may see a stranger across a crowded room.” My old man had the original cast album, and he used to play that bit over and over.

  Well, when I first saw Bianca, that’s how I felt.

  How shall I count the ways? Let’s start with her looks. Her hair and eyes are deep umber, almost black; her features are finely, sharply cut, with an edge of perpetual amusement at the corners of the mouth; she’s what I’ve always pictured the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets to look like. She’s slim with a prominent high bosom. There’s not an atom of “common” about her. She reminds me of an English actress named Emily Mortimer. She was turned out the way I was raised to think a woman should dress when receiving friends at home on a Sunday: a simple blouse under a cardigan, tailored trousers, very simple jewelry, rimless reading glasses on a silver chain.

  “That’s me,” I said. “Happy at last now that I’ve finally met you.”

  She smiled at this. “Arthur thinks you and I might do well together. You must call me B, everyone does.” She slid her spectacles onto her nose, placed her hands on my shoulders, and studied me. “Yes indeed,” she said, “you may very well suit. Provided certain adjustments are made. I’m not sure about that necktie, for one. Come on—let’s get some lunch.”

  We helped ourselves from the buffet and found a couple of seats. She continued to study me, which didn’t bother me. Goes with the territory, I figured; casting is her business.

  “You remind me of old photographs of my father,” she told me. “When he was in his prime.”

  “I’m flattered. Our breed quivers on the cusp of extinction. I like to think that I carry it on.”

  “As do I,” she replied, “as do I. Now, tell me everything.”

  I gave her the short-form version of my life story, with only one or two minor embellishments. She seemed interested. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Artie looking over at us. He gave me a discreet thumbs-up.

  We talked for a good forty minutes. She’s first-rate company, a good talker, a great listener. What she chooses to talk about, she knows about. Finally, she stood up.

  “I don’t want to run but life leaves me no choice. I have to catch a plane to L.A. Something’s come up on a project we have going at Sony, and my brother and I have to meet with them first thing tomorrow.”

  “I understand. Will I see you again? I’d like to.”

  “Of course. I need someone in my life, and I think you’re far and away the most appropriate candidate who’s come along in a very long time. Provided I can get over your connection to the TARPworm, quote unquote. Arthur tells me you consult to them.” Her grin was naughty.

  “Only in a very limited way. Leon Mankoff, their CEO, is an old friend and mentor. He helped put me in business.”

  “I know that. You have to understand: I have rather strong feelings about that firm. Do you know a perfectly awful man named Walter Hardcastle?”

  “Only in passing. He’s on the board. And he is dreadful, based on very brief acquaintance. He’s your uncle, I gather.”

  “By marriage. He’s the husband of my mother’s idiot sister Molly, although his one true love is money. If my brother and I ever do A Christmas Carol I intend to cast Uncle Wally in the lead. When shall we see each other again?”

  “How about lunch? When you get back from the Coast?”

  She thought about that, then shook her head. “I think dinner would be preferable. That way, if it really works out, we can go to your or my apartment afterward.”

  I smiled. “You’ll get no argument from me.”

  “Fine. Pick a place and e-mail me some dates. I do hope you’re not planning to take me to one of those trendy restaurants that make you wait an hour for indifferent food.”

  “I wouldn’t dare.”

  “Fine—shall we make a date now?” She looked at her cell phone calendar. “How’s April 21? That’s a Wednesday.”

  “Exactly a month from today,” I observed. “Very An Affair to Remember.”

  She laughed. “We shall see, shan’t we?”

  “How about the Veau d’Or? 7:30. Do you k
now it?”

  “I know of it. Mother and Daddy used go there went they came to New York. They said it was very Parisian. I can’t believe it’s still going.”

  “Stronger than ever.”

  She tapped the info into her phone, then got up.

  “I’ll be off now,” she said, and without my making a move, she lowered her lips to mine and kissed me. “Mmmm,” she murmured, “how pleasant.”

  “My sentiments exactly,” I said, and raised my face for another go. She had already turned away and was on her way out of the room.

  On my way home, I stopped at the Barnes & Noble on 8th Street and hunted up a DVD of An Affair to Remember.

  Can April 21 come soon enough?

  APRIL 1, 2010

  After work, I wandered over to San Calisto—just in time, as it turned out, for a celebration. The old boys were gathered around the dining-room table, watching Scaramouche wrestle the cork out of a magnum of vintage Pol Roger. A glass was brought for me, the wine was poured, and then Scaramouche raised his glass and declared solemnly, “Gentlemen, I give you the health of Mr. Benjamin Bernanke.”

  I guess I looked puzzled, because the Ancient Mariner hastened to set me straight. “What we’re drinking to, Chauncey my lad, is the Federal Reserve’s apparent desire to enrich those of us with capital and credit without regard to whosoever else it costs or where the money could be most helpful.”