Wall Street Noir

by Peter Spiegelman

  “I’m choking on micro-gamma decay on my long-vol position, and unless they rally I’m gonna be achin’ like there’s no tomorrow—”

  “Johnny Meyer, pick up the double-donuts!”

  “I called Tommy at DB for a chinstrap in the double-Monday nasty; the bid’s gone to a bad neighborhood—”

  “I took the bid up a noogie from 10.2 to 10.25 and oh-fived a sweet-one pick-off of the crowd. Am I a hammer or what?”

  This is in my blood, the thrill and agony of trading derivative securities. There’s no Betty Ford clinic for this addiction, nor would I voluntarily twelve-step myself away from this high. Come Monday, if Ranieri succeeds in taking this world away from me, I will wish him a particularly painful strain of testicular cancer.

  I slide into the Aeron chair at my trading turret. “Morning, Terri. Any news on your mom?”

  “She’s getting much better, thanks for asking.” My assistant is Terri Aronica, a sweet-natured girl from Staten Island. Her freckled presence on the trading floor is akin to a gazelle amongst lions, so I’m highly protective of her. In return, her loyalty is beyond question. “She’s coming out of the hospital this weekend.”

  “Good. That’s great to hear.” I try to sound casual. “Hey, listen, Compliance is all over me to do my semi-annual supervisory thing. Can you pull all the personal trading records of Howard Ranieri for the last two years? And tell the back office I need it over the weekend.”

  “Sure thing.” When Terri says it’s a sure thing, I know she means it.

  To: All Equity Personnel

  From: Howard Ranieri

  It is with deep regret that we announce Mark Barston’s resignation from the firm, effective immediately. As Mark steps down as co-head of Equity to spend more time with his family and pursue other opportunities, please join us in wishing him the best and thanking him for effectively teaching me everything I know, which kindness I repaid by stabbing him in the back …

  It is six hours later, and I’m mentally composing my resignation announcement. It’s customary on Wall Street to extend the courtesy of ghostwriting the memo announcing one’s involuntary departure, but I’m finding little joy in my imaginings.

  Having escaped the offices of Fischer Brothers, I’m on the 4:36 p.m. Metro-North train out of Grand Central to Greenwich. I’m unaccustomed to the brightness that floods the filthy confines of the bar car; for over a decade, my profession has required me to keep coal miner’s hours. I’ve rarely left the office before nightfall. Still, I’m somewhat surprised that the bar car is so well-populated. Must be advertising types.

  With their game faces off, the commuters look positively miserable. They are die-hard junior execs with their eyes still on the prize, feverishly making love to their BlackBerries and Dell Inspirons and Motorola RAZRs. I make my way up to the bar.

  “Two Absoluts in a cup, straight, wedge of lime.”

  Just as I get my cocktail, the train pitches suddenly to the left, and someone collides with me, nearly upending my double shot.

  A striking blond girl in a pastel sundress murmurs an apology around a dazzling smile. “So sorry.”

  I’m taken aback. This is a radiant burst of genuine friend-liness, and I have an instant attraction to this girl—and not all of it sexual. It’s more that she seems a beacon of positive energy on a suddenly very hostile planet. She makes me think of lemon meringue pie.

  “It was my fault, actually,” I offer.

  “I suppose it doesn’t matter much either way, does it?” The girl holds my eyes for a moment while I try to place the accent. Australian, I guess, with the vanishing r’s. I’m intrigued.

  “My name’s Mark,” I say, surprised at my own cojones.

  “Fiona.”

  “Ah. Can I get you a drink, Fiona? A Coke?”

  “I’d much prefer a Foster’s, actually. With a vodka chaser.” With that, Fiona flips open her cell phone to smile-and-dial.

  When I return with the drinks, I tune in to bits of her conversation. It is peppered with an exotic slang, putting me in mind of A Clockwork Orange

  “It’s choice … That’s spot-on … Did you dip-out for a moment? What a complete saddo she turned out to be … Ah, Viv, Ranieri can be such a drongo sometimes.”

  Ranieri. Could it be?

  And now I realize I’ve seen her somewhere before—on the trading floor, maybe …? Fiona accepts the shot and the beer and slugs down four quick throatfuls—we have a party girl here.

  Kia ora, baby” she says. She snaps the cell phone shut and turns to me. “That was my mate Vivica. She’s my cozziebro. I trust her with my deepest secrets.” Fiona hoists her beer in a toast. “Thanks for your kindness. I’m not used to that, especially in New York.”

  “It’s nothing really. Are you from Australia?”

  “Australia? How insulting.”

  “I didn’t mean any offense—”

  “No worries. I’m from New Zealand originally. But for the last year, I’ve lived in Greenwich.”

  “I live in Greenwich also.” I struggle to sound casual. “I couldn’t help hearing the name Ranieri. Would that happen to be Howard Ranieri?”

  “Yes,” she says in amazement. “I live with Mr. Ranieri.”

  “You what?”

  She choke-laughs, and a geyser of imported beer spews forth, making her laugh even harder. “That came out completely wrong. His family, I should say, I live with his family. I’m an au pair. The Ranieris are my host family in America.”

  Ranieri’s au pair! This makes perfect sense—the trophy nanny to go with the trophy wife. It was all Ranieri.

  “And you just dropped his children off in the city.”

  “Right,” she says.

  “At Fischer Brothers. For the family vacation in Spain.”

  “Which got canceled, thank you very much, and screws up all our plans. Wait a minute—how did you know that …?” Her voice trails off as she tries to decide whether I’m a clairvoyant or a stalker.

  “So happens I work with Howard Ranieri.”

  “Bloody hell!” With a mock-naughty face, she hides the beer behind her back and giggles. “Don’t tell him you bought me a beer. He’ll flip out.”

  “Deal,” I say conspiratorially. “That is, if you tell me what you meant when you called Ranieri a drongo.”

  Fiona draws in a sharp breath. “Ah, yes. A drongo. Well, the American equivalent, I guess, would be dickhead.”

  I double over in laughter. Things are definitely looking up

  So, for the next forty minutes I’m treated to a private performance of Fiona Hensleigh’s one-woman off-Broadway show that might well be titled The Greenwich Nanny

  She riffs animatedly about her adventures since being plucked from Christschurch, New Zealand and plunked down in Greenwich, Connecticut, U.S.A., the very vortex of history’s most excessive bull market. And she dissects the archetypes of the Connecticut Gold Coast in deliciously bitchy detail: the beauty-shop-addicted, Prada-obsessed prima donnas, whose sense of entitlement is without limitation; the insecure, cigar-smoking Master-of-the-Universe wannabes, whose self-worth is measured by the girth of their Range Rovers; and their worshipped, fretted-over, unlovely offspring, spoiled beyond belief and taught at the youngest age that viral disrespect for authority is a virtue.

  As Fiona speaks, I’m picturing the Ranieri household, and it’s a fascinating insight into my rival’s secret world. Mrs. Ranieri, apparently, is something of a bitch on ice. And Ranieri himself is no candidate for sainthood, prone to moodiness and shouting matches with his better half. I bide my time, awaiting an angle, a vulnerability to use against my blood enemy. Fiona tantalizes me with the possibility that she has some juicy tidbits about Ranieri that she wants to share, but she doesn’t trust me enough to give up the goods. Smart girl.

  Now, I cannot say this with absolute certainty (for I am admittedly out of practice in such things), but I think this Fiona Hensleigh finds me attractive. There is a certain tilt of her face, a certain w
ay she lets the gleaming wisps of her blond hair tumble over her eye. Then, in an instant of startling clarity, I suddenly realize how the distance between our bodies has shrunk. A chill prickles my skin with each incidental contact between Unless this is purely my imagination—and I’m willing to concede it might be—there is an unmistakable electricity between me and Ranieri’s nanny.

  Fiona is telling me how much she misses some dreadful-sounding Kiwi delicacies—Minties, Jaffas, Moro bars, Wattie’s tomato sauce, and Vegemite—when the Old Greenwich train station rolls into view.

  “My station,” I say, and feel a genuine pang of regret that this encounter is coming to an end.

  “Well, it was very nice talking with you, Mark.”

  “Likewise, Fiona.” I offer my hand and the New Zealander’s equivalent of aloha. “Kia ora.”

  She glances at my wedding band, then locks up my eyes with hers. “And what about tonight?”

  Flustered, I manage: “Tonight? What about it?”

  “We were planning to have a piss-up at Chez Ranieri, but now it looks like it’s moving to the beach. You ought to pop on by.”

  “A piss-up?” I stand immobilized as other commuters pour around us to the platform. Pressed up against me, her breath is warm on my cheek, and sweet with the tang of lager. One Night Only—The Nanny’s Ball—Live at Greenwich Point Beach. The thought of me in the midst of a gaggle of out-of-control drunken au pairs? Tempting, but a tad self-destructive. “That’s not in the cards, Fiona. I’ve got a dinner party I’m obligated to attend.”

  She rolls her eyes in a deliciously feminine way. “Oh, I’m that will be loads more fun than our ten-kegger.”

  “Ten-kegger, huh?”

  “Anyway, you change your mind, come by the beach?”

  “Yeah. I’ll keep it in mind.” I walk off the train backwards, nearly stumbling into a heap on the platform. They say crack cocaine is instantly addictive. I totally get the concept.

  Okay, I know this is sick, but I’m in tell-all mode, so here goes: My BlackBerry has been programmed to tally up the number of days Susan and I have gone without having sex.

  It tells me we’re at seventy-eight days and counting.

  Wait, there’s more: Just recently, I have discovered that my wife is also surreptitiously keeping track of this ignoble hitless streak. She pencils tick marks into the kitchen calendar, and by her count, we’ve been on the sex wagon for seventy-seven days straight.

  I own up to it: The demise of our relationship is mostly my fault. My struggle with Ranieri over the last months has turned me into someone other than the person she wed in sickness and health so many years ago. And her infertility problems have weighed heavily on us for even longer. In our calibrated attempts to conceive, we’ve followed to the letter the clinical manner in which teams of doctors have instructed us to copulate, and have spent the last thirty-six months not so much making love, as conducting laboratory experiments.

  It’s taken its toll.

  To wit, I’m convinced that Susan no longer loves me. I suspect she is in love with at least one, if not two others in the Greenwich vicinity, and I often lay awake nights going over likely candidates. Is it Adam, the wacky New Age martial arts expert at her yoga center on the Post Road, the kid with bad teeth who teaches her Tae Bo and promises to launch her on a spiritual journey to discover her inner self? Is it Dr. Lauren, the collagen-lipped lesbian physician who wears no undergarments when she prescribes migraine treatments at Norwalk Hospital? It could be both, I suppose, or neither. Maybe we’ve just encountered one of those rough patches that couples therapists are always going on about. One of those things we’re supposed to traverse together, before the next phase of our lifelong partnership.

  The appearance of Peter I. Tortola’s name in my check-book register suggests otherwise.

  This Friday night, I find my wife in the small childless bedroom designated as the Quiet Room. My wife is strikingly pretty, even as the chiseled angles of her face are softening with time, but just now she’s an unsettling sight in the darkened room. Susan has an ice pack swirled over her forehead and eyes. On the bureau next to the trundle bed, a spent Epi-Pen and bottles of migraine medication are arranged in a neat row. Susan—God help her—is in full-blown aura mode with bursts of colors. With her head tilted back and her arms along the armrests of the recliner, she appears to be clamped in an electric chair.

  “Susan, you all right?”

  “Migraine,” she murmurs tonelessly.

  “Need anything?”

  “Solitude.”

  Though she can’t see me, I nod in the darkness. I realize how my Friday night will play out, and it ain’t a pretty picture. But I can’t hold myself back.

  “Susan?” My tone is the most delicate I can manage.

  “Mm?”

  “We need to talk about something—but only when you’re up for it.”

  “What is it?”

  “It can wait.”

  “If it can wait, why bring it up? Just tell me, Mark.”

  I sigh. “A canceled check came in from Citibank. Made out to Peter Tortola.”

  Susan has no immediate response to this.

  I push. “We need to talk about your intentions, Susan. I need to know what that check means.”

  All is silence. I’m aware of my own labored breathing. Peter I. Tortola? He’s Greenwich’s most obnoxious pit bull, a vulture, a shark, the lowest of snakes—a high-powered divorce attorney who specializes in going after Wall Street husbands, with the tenacity and teeth of a moray eel. His quarter-page ad is a weekly fixture in the otherwise-good-news pages of the Greenwich Time community newspaper. IT HAPPENS TO THE BEST OF US: D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

  “Susan, we can talk about this later if—”

  “You heartless bastard!” Her voice soars to a blood-chilling volume, and I am transfixed by the fury. “You sadistic son of a bitch. Why would you torture me when I’m in this condition? What’s the matter with you? Get the hell away from me!”

  I dutifully comply. There is little doubt, after this exchange, that we will be more than a little unfashionably late to the Honeywells’ dinner party.

  Wealth whispers.

  For generations past, this was an unspoken code in Greenwich, the humility of old money. After all, darling, living in this town, how shall we say? Res ipsa loquitur. But the relentless tsunami of urban barbarians descending upon the Connecticut Gold Coast with fat Wall Street bonuses has killed off any vestige of subtlety here. Now Greenwich is just another brand name to accumulate.

  The McMansions roll past as Susan and I wind our way along treelined Round Hill Road. It’s nearly 8:30 and we have not said a word to each other since our chat in the Quiet Room. I now believe that our conversations are inexorably headed for the same fate as our sex life.

  My Aston Martin approaches the Honeywells’ seven-bedroom mansion on Larkspur Lane. Rich Honeywell is yet another Greenwich hedge fund asshole, one of those Wall Street guys with marginal talent and a nine-figure chunk of someone else’s family money behind him. A once-in-a-life-time fluke—a federal deregulation of pension plans—has made him obscenely wealthy in his own right, and kept an endless convoy of Brinks trucks dumping mountains of money on the doorstep of his Steamboat Road office.

  Rich’s house is an eat-your-heart-out monument to his new wealth, a dramatic custard-yellow contemporary with Hudson Valley stone veneer set on five acres of what was once a fertile onion farm. And it’s equipped with all the usual accoutrements: four-car garage, tennis court, THX-certified home theater, mahogany wine cellar, and an Olympic-sized pool. There are two backhoes in the front yard, suggesting further expansion is imminent.

  The Honeywells’ Belgian-bricked drive is jammed with probably $3 million worth of luxury automobiles, and I wedge my convertible into a space between a Porsche Cayenne and a yellow Hummer with personalized plates: 183 IQ. I turn off the car, and the ensuing silence is deafening. I crave a talk before we go in, a clearing of the air. Perhaps it�
�s naïve, but I still hope that we can turn this around before we pass the point of no return and head down the path of mutually assured destruction. As a prelude, I clear my throat—and get no further.

  “I want out, Mark. I’m done with this.” Susan delivers this statement in a flat, lifeless tone, as she might say, Looks like rain. She opens the vanity mirror to check her makeup. “I want sixty percent of everything, and the house as well. You keep the cars and the retirement accounts. I’d like to file the papers next week.”

  She snaps the mirror closed and exits the convertible. And just like that, it’s official: My marriage has begun its slow-motion spiral to the first circle of hell.

  We approach the front door wordlessly, trying to assemble a convincing facsimile of a happy and centered Greenwich couple. Rich Honeywell opens the door with a flourish. He’s dressed in a pair of black Ted Baker slacks, a charcoal Armani shirt, and Donald Pliner loafers.

  “Hey, it’s the Barstons!” Honeywell says theatrically, as he hugs Susan (a bit too warmly for my comfort). “Word up, Barston? You get lost on the way or something?” This offhand dig is a passive-aggressive notice that we are the last to arrive, but it’s the unintended irony that makes me blink. Yeah, I got lost on the way, all right

  “Jennifer’s been asking all night, ‘Where’re the Barstons, where’re the Barstons?’ She’ll be psyched you’re finally here.” Rich says this breezily as he shepherds us through the palatial, antiseptic interior of his McMansion-in-progress. Like the homes of most of our friends, the design has a predictable look and feel. The furnishings bear the fingerprints of a particular interior designer who specializes in a bland, WASPy décor that appeals to new money clients with absolutely no sense of style of their own. She’s booked up for six months in advance. “Jen, come say hello to the Barstons.”

  Jennifer Honeywell curtails her lecture to the waiter on how to serve the platter of jumbo Gulf shrimp, and wheels around with exaggerated delight. “It’s the Barstons!” she squeals like a teenager, and I remember something I’d heard about her trying out a new antidepressant.