Ghosts of Manhattan

by Douglas Brunt

  “Oliver, where did you go to college?” I already know the answer. Oliver somehow finds a way to let people know within five minutes of meeting him, with all the energy and unabashed praise of a proud parent except directed toward himself. Julia has just saved him the conversational maneuvering to get there.

  “New Haven.”

  Christ, here we go. This clown is right out of a Salinger novel. There’s nothing worse than people who say New Haven and Cambridge, pretending to be too modest to say Yale and Harvard when all they’re really looking to do is draw the whole thing out. The false modesty is irritating and shows a total lack of self-awareness of what an insecure snob he really is. Just say Harvard or Yale and move on. Don’t invite additional questions so you have to put on your uncomfortable act when pressed to answer the name of the school. Loser. Hasn’t Oliver accomplished anything more in life to be proud of than a high SAT score when he was seventeen?

  “New Haven?” asks Julia.

  “Yale.” Sybil steps in for Oliver with a smile and pats him on the knee, like a routine they’ve practiced for years. Could she possibly think he’s modest? “What about you, Nick? Where did you go to school?” She asks this with such a perfect smile that I can’t tell if it is a taunt or polite reciprocity.

  “Cornell.” I finish the second half of my drink with my second sip. “It’s in Ithaca.” I look at Oliver with an unconcealed sneer.

  Oliver nods. “Good school. You get a great cross section there. I applied there too. I’m encouraging our son to include some schools like that for his applications next year.” With this obvious placement of Cornell into the safety school category, he has let me know that he recognizes that we are now sparring. I’m no longer just shadowboxing. I rattle the ice in my glass, wishing the waiter would come back. “Where did you go to school, Julia?”

  “I went to Duke.”

  “Great school!” He responds with more energy than he had for Cornell. “Beautiful campus. I’ve done some recruiting trips there for Bear Stearns. The chapel and those amazing gardens. So much land.”

  “I loved my time there. It was magical.” I turn to Julia, trying to remember if I’ve ever heard her use the adjective “magical” before. “What about you, Sybil?” she quickly adds, probably also feeling odd about her word choice.

  “Oh, I went to Vassar.” Another lull. Another round completed.

  “Let’s go to the table,” I say, slapping the tops of the chair armrests harder than I mean to. It has the desired effect though, as everyone rocks forward with a start like passengers on a train that stopped short, and I carry the momentum by standing right up.

  We walk to the back dining room, which is a little dark and feels like a library in an old mansion except for odd trinkets that hang everywhere from the ceiling representing companies and mergers that have happened over the decades. I sit under an airplane with the logo of an acquired airline. Just like the pecking order in a big bank, there is a hierarchy in the dining room. The tables closest to the left wall are for the bigwigs. The farther right you go across the room, the farther you are from power. Oliver made the reservation and seems to take pride in pulling back a chair at our table one row off the tables against the left wall. This placement is probably due more to the maître d’ remembering Oliver’s father, who had been a top banker at Morgan Stanley, big enough that I remember his name in the Journal a few times years ago. Morgan is a more prestigious bank than Bear Stearns. Goldman and Morgan are the two top firms. In broad strokes, Goldman Sachs is where all the Jews work. Morgan is the white-shoe firm where all the WASPs work and act as though J.P. Morgan were still walking the halls anointing them the kings of investment banking. The fact that Oliver is at Bear Stearns, which isn’t even in the conversation, especially when it comes to investment banking, has to bother him. And the fact that his dad was a senior guy at Morgan has to be the source of a huge chip on his shoulder.

  “A lot of deals hanging from this ceiling,” says Oliver. “Represents a lot of wealth moving around. You know I’m working on a big debt restructuring for Qwest, Nick. It should close in a week and should give you sales guys a lot of product to move.”

  It occurs to me that in the same way a person can have a kindred spirit or soul mate that they seek out, a person can also have a nemesis that they would like to remove from their life, a person to conquer or be conquered by. I know Oliver’s been working on Qwest. He’s gotten a hero’s praise for past fees he brought in from them. “I’ve heard about it. Good luck.” These client discussions are supposed to be confidential, but in the same way that our own salary information gets around, word gets out. I know Oliver made between five and six million dollars last year in bonus. He probably knows the ballpark of my bonus as well. This kind of knowledge creates a defined pecking order.

  The thing about working in the money business is that we don’t make anything but money. The upside is that we make a lot of it. The downside is that it’s the only measurement of success. In a very defined and communicable way, Oliver is up the totem pole from me. The other thing is that the investment banker types look down their noses at sales and trading. We’re the grunts who yell into phones and move product around with the sophistication of a short-order cook. The investment bankers are the intellectuals who navigate corporate boardrooms and put deals together. They’ve convinced themselves that it isn’t just money they make but better companies.

  There’s some truth to it, but I prefer my friends to be the sales type. It’s simpler and more honest. Like Jerry, sales guys think in a linear way. The faster you go, the more ground you cover. More calls, more deals, bigger bonus. Investment bankers think in curves and exponential opportunities. They make trade-offs that have winners and casualties and they play cards close to the vest. This is a talent a person has or doesn’t have, and if he has it, it permeates everything he does including friendships and social dinners. It takes effort and a little luck to stay out of the way of a person like this.

  “Do you and Nick have offices near each other?” Julia asks.

  “No, no.” Oliver smiles and shakes his head in a grandiose, you-silly-girl kind of way. He leaves it at that though could have added that he is on an entirely different floor in a large office with a sofa and guest chairs and an assistant outside his door while I sit at a long table shared with a bunch of cretins right out of school. He didn’t add that, but he seemed to manage to make it known.

  Oliver turns back to me, ending the brief exchange with Julia. “How do you think Morgan is going to fare? Jesus, what a show.” He seems to be the type who likes to impress the girls but not actually talk to them. He also now seems settled into the top spot on the totem pole and doesn’t need to bother sparring anymore.

  “After all that publicity with Purcell, Mack seems settled in. He seems popular.” I play along.

  “Mack! Mack is a sales guy.” Just when I thought sparring was over. This overt jab is not lost on anyone. I can either make a joke about being a sales guy or let it pass. I let it pass. “Come on, Nick. What would Mack know about running the business?”

  It’s not passing. “Purcell was a management consultant. Was he any better?”

  “Fair point, but Purcell is incompetent. I’d take a consultant over a sales guy. The problem is all the boards are getting enamored with bringing in former sales guys as the CEO because they’re aggressive and charming. They promise to deliver billions in growth and in a bull market they probably can, but pretty soon it’s going to be a real mess. I mean look at Fuld. That guy’s a moron. What these shops need is to put a banker in charge. Wall Street just isn’t run by gentlemen anymore. It hasn’t been for more than a generation.”

  Jackass. He has the haughty air of an authority on the subject and is keeping the undercurrent that a sales guy like me can’t be leadership material. “They could get one of the old guard to come back in. Greenhill or that son of a bitch Fogg.” I’m trapped for the moment in this conversation.

  “No, those guy
s have moved on. Greenie has his own shop that he won’t leave and Fogg spends half the year sailing the world on his yacht these days. You could make a case Fogg deserves it. He’s the best M and A guy anywhere in half a century, but he’s a little rough around the edges. You know it was Gilbert and Fogg and the old guard that got Mack in there. Mack was so grateful, you know what he did? Nothing. Not a lunch, not a dinner. Not a bottle of wine. You’d think a sales guy would at least get that right. He won’t last. He’s charming and likable but his lack of intelligence will catch up with him. Of course he did manage to stack Morgan’s board with his boys, so God knows where it goes from here. Maybe he’s smarter than I gave him credit, of course just smart in the way that a sales guy can be.”

  Jesus, he’s relentless with the sales guy crap.

  Oliver takes a sip of his drink and his pinky is off the glass. He continues, “Fogg. They’d never go with him. He’s not part of the aristocracy.”

  “What about Mack? He’s as blue-collar as can be for a CEO.”

  “Exactly the point. Mack accepts it, but Fogg is doing everything he can to join the aristocracy. If they put him in at CEO, it’s an admission that he’s made it in. With Mack, they can put him in and it still looks like he’s a blue-collar puppet and everyone knows it.”

  He sips again, and again with the pinky. “See, you have to understand something.” This could be the most irritating phrase in the language. He pauses to let it sink in and then regales us. “Someone like Fogg can do great on Wall Street, but you can always tell by his clubs where he really stands. He can get into National Golf Links, that’s fine. But they’ll let even Bloomberg in there. Bloomberg’s as bad a new-money as there is, and he’s Jewish. But he’s got billions and he’s working as our mayor for free. So Fogg can get in there and it’s a great club and even the best also belong. But something like Seminole? That’s aristocracy only. No Foggs allowed. Now you’re in Dinny Phipps territory. The last chief at Morgan who was also aristocracy was Parker Gilbert and I don’t think there will ever be another. It will never be Fogg anyway. He’s from goddamn Ohio.”

  I doubt Oliver or his dad belongs to Seminole Golf Club either, but I won’t risk asking.

  “You boys certainly enjoy talking about work,” says Sybil. I get the sense she knows I’m not enjoying it at all and is throwing me a lifeline.

  I don’t grab it fast enough and Oliver continues, “No one likes what we actually do for work. We just like the trappings that come with what we do. Influence with companies and huge amounts of money, fancy dinners on expense accounts, first-class travel. The nightlife can be a draw if you’re young and into women and drugs.”

  I wonder if he already knows Julia and I have friction in this area or if he just assumes.

  “You’re also paid very well. That doesn’t hurt,” says Julia.

  “It does and it doesn’t,” he says. “We’re paid excessively. It takes strong character to deal with excess of anything. A girl that’s too pretty, a guy that’s too handsome or smart. It can wreck a person because he doesn’t have to strive for anything. And money’s the worst. Look at these young kids trading bonds who are suddenly making millions for a bonus. They end up going bananas on the town. Once you cross a threshold of having your basic needs met, there’s actually a negative correlation between more money and more happiness. Many people just aren’t strong enough to deal with a lot of money.”

  I’m so prepared to dislike Oliver that I can’t give him credit for making sense. Julia is agreeing with him with her whole body, which is also pissing me off. It makes me feel small even to think this, but I hate to see her agree with other men. It plays into all my insecurities that I’m on the wrong track. Julia’s never been one to want the biggest house or fancy things. She’d be happy with a normal life in a normal town on a normal salary. I say, “Easy for you to say, making five million bucks a year.”

  “Well, not being so excessively handsome as you, it was the only way for me to get firsthand knowledge of the issue,” Oliver says.

  “Why don’t you give a few million to charity every year. That should solve your problem.”

  “I can’t. My character isn’t strong enough.” He laughs and the girls laugh too. Damn.

  “Are you boys please going to talk about anything other than work and money?” Sybil breaks in with a laugh that shows she understands work talk is part of the deal and her role is to make sure we don’t spend more than fifty percent of our time on it. I also sense that she’s trying a second toss of a lifeline, which I appreciate.

  “Of course not.” This time I seize the opportunity to get away from Oliver’s domain. “Sybil, what school did you pick for your kids on the Upper East Side?” Like starting a ball down a steep hill, I’m rewarded with easy listening all the way to the arrival of our entrées.

  The way a person with a stutter can be timid in groups, I can feel that I don’t want the conversation to come back around to me. “Sure, Kent and St. George’s are also good boarding schools,” I hear my voice with detachment like a pilot watching the instruments adjust by autopilot. I’m pretty sure my comment is relevant and at the appropriate time.

  It isn’t that I’m shy or that I can’t deliver on pretty words, it’s just that I have no content to offer. I can start off a topic but I’m too out of practice to maintain anything. If I were an architect, I could talk about Renaissance versus modernist styles and the Guggenheim renovations and have a civilized dinner conversation. If I were anything other than what I am, I could talk about ordinary current events in a way that people could relate to me. My problem is that my career has consumed my lifestyle. I need to unlearn and relearn human interaction. I could touch on the topics of my last few work dinners. Maybe discuss William’s theories on fidelity or that the coke dealer everyone uses just got arrested and where is everyone going to get their blow now? Sybil’s jaw would drop in her soup. At this table, I’m like a rifle with no ammunition.

  Even worse would be for the conversation to come back around to the earlier type of work talk that doesn’t include strippers and hookers and cocaine but is about the actual work, where Oliver has already established the high ground. Like two silverbacks, I can feel that we have had our tussle and I lost and he is now the leader of our table of four. I look across at his pretty features that show no signs of ever forming whiskers, as though made of a smoothed putty, and I curse myself for choosing the type of career where Oliver can be a king. There’s a new kind of Darwinism and Oliver has been selected.

  “Nick, you play squash, don’t you?” Oliver asks this in a louder voice and directly at me the way a teacher would with a liked but wayward student who isn’t paying attention in class.

  “Sure, I still play sometimes.”

  “Nicky used to be ranked in the country when he was a teenager.” Julia gives me a wink and a push against my shoulder.

  “Not too many people played squash in the country back then. Getting ranked wasn’t so hard. Just had to play enough tournaments.” This is a little bit modest but mostly just true.

  “That’s great, Nick. Do you keep it up? What rating are you now?”

  “I have no idea. I haven’t played since I was a kid.”

  “I’m a B. I’d say a high B. Haven’t played much lately, but last week I beat a guy who’s a solid B.”

  I imagine an era ten thousand years ago when, draped in animal skins, I could leap from my chair and club Oliver to death across the skull, then enjoy my victory by eating the food from the table with my bare hands, making loud grunting noises, and dragging off the women for sex.

  But not in this century. Not in the 21 Club. Here survival of the fittest is based on a new set of traits and in my industry Oliver has them in spades.

  Humans aren’t just a few steps out of the jungle. Humans never left the jungle. The jungle just changed around us. There are those who are selected not to survive, but the selection process is no longer so immediately fatal.

  Oliver is waitin
g for some response, but I have no idea what skill is required to be a B player.

  Oliver continues, “Anyway, this guy who’s a B used to play in high school and is getting back into the game. Grew up playing hardball and needs to get up to speed on softball. Nobody plays hardball anymore. I try to play a few times a week when it’s not so busy. I picked the game up about twelve years ago and got addicted to it. Never played in high school. We should play sometime.”

  “What sports did you play in high school?”

  “None. I wasn’t that into sports then,” he says.

  “Maybe that’s why you’re so into them now.” Julia gives me a sharp look that is meant only for me, but she’s angry and everyone notices.

  She recovers quickly. “Have you been getting squash lessons for the kids?”

  “Oh, yes,” says Sybil.

  I let the talk move away from me like releasing a feather from two fingers and I listen to it swirl around from squash to schools to vacations to nannies and maids until it drifts too far away. I hear voices but not the conversation and it feels remote as if they are sitting at another table, and I continue with my dinner and gin.

  From this perspective I can see the conversation move in physical form like colorful tubes of fluid transfer, moving from person to person and getting redirected back and forth across the table. Julia looks radiant, glowing brighter than the rest. She is strikingly beautiful in a complex way so that you can get lost in her all over again. It is one thing to have a beauty that gets attention, and quite another to have a beauty that holds it.

  There is something distinctive about her presence that I can see without really looking, see with only a casual glance across a room or at a long distance when she is just the slight movement of a tiny shape among a group of other shapes. I can know it is her the way a parent would know their child playing with other children far across a field. But this hasn’t taken years of a mother’s care and learned watchful eye. I felt this force within Julia the moment we met. To be up close next to her can still fill me up, as though I’m standing inches from a painting I had before only seen reproduced in books. I still love her.