Closing Costs

by Seth Margolis

  William shrugged and refocused on his food. A shadow of gloomy hostility clung to him lately. Lily had tried to feel him out, but after alluding that one time to being teased by other kids, he’d clammed up. Lily couldn’t tell if he was experiencing typical adolescent angst or reacting to having a father who was a fugitive from justice. Whenever she brought up the subject of Barnett, he’d say, “I’m over it, okay?”

  “You gotta find your bliss and shit,” Paco said, proffering a nod for each guest as he glanced around the table. “Like, if you’re not happening with what you’re doing, you won’t do it good, anyway, am I right? Like, I hate when—”

  “That is such bullshit,” William said. “Where do you pick that crap up?”

  “William!” Peggy said, looking directly at Lily. “Your language.”

  “You didn’t say anything when Paco said shit.”

  “He did not say…that word.”

  “His exact words were ‘find your bliss and shit.’ You don’t forget poetry like that.”

  Paco couldn’t suppress a satisfied grin.

  “Let’s change the subject,” Lily said, and had an unwelcome flashback to countless nights at the Temple of Dendur and other party sites, when she could always be counted on to divert the conversation from uncomfortable topics. “I was thinking we could use a vacation at Christmas.”

  “Vacation?” Peggy said. “Miss Moneybags all of a sudden.”

  “See, that’s why kids pick on you,” Sophie said, addressing William. “You have this attitude.”

  “What attitude?”

  “Like you’re too good for the world.”

  “Too good for your world, maybe. Who isn’t?”

  “Stop it!” Lily said.

  “Anyone want to talk about nuts and candy?” Larry asked.

  “See, you go around acting like you got attitude,” Paco said to William, who was looking resolutely in the opposite direction. “I tell guys, That’s my girl’s brother, keep your paws off him, you know? We’re, like, related or something, almost.”

  “When hell freezes over.”

  “And they’re, like, that girl you been—” He came to an abrupt halt on a hard consonant that Lily thought might have been a b or, more ominously, an f. “That girl you been goin’ out with, that dickhead’s sister? Man, you gotta get your head examined. She may be a piece a ass, they say, but her brother—”

  “Okay, Paco, we get the picture,” Sophie said.

  A tense but welcome silence fell on the table, broken by Peggy.

  “What are you looking at?” Peggy was glaring directly at Nanny.

  “Me? Just trying to finish me dinner, that’s all,” Nanny said. As if to demonstrate the depth of concentration that task required, she daintily speared a piece of white meat, then a section of roasted potato, and finally a green bean and directed the entire shish kebab into her mouth.

  “Some of the hotels in the Bahamas are quite reasonable in December,” Lily ventured. “You can’t count on good weather in December, but that’s why it’s affordable.”

  “I’ve never understood why the British eat like that,” Peggy said. “Cramming a bit of everything on the fork at once. It’s barbaric.”

  “I’m barbaric? I’m not the one with grandchildren who…”

  “Grandchildren who what?”

  “They had lovely manners when we lived across town.”

  “That’s enough, Nanny,” Lily said with recidivistic hauteur. “Let’s have a toast to Sophie.” Glasses of water and soda and white wine were raised all around. “Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

  Glasses were clinked and sipped from and set down.

  “You ever consider franchising?” Monroe said to Larry. All eyes turned to him in wonderment at this first sign of cognizant life in what seemed like ages.

  “Franchising the store?”

  “The smart money is saying that franchising is the next big opportunity.”

  “Monroe, since when has the smart money been talking to you?” Peggy turned to Larry. “He doesn’t even watch television anymore.”

  “Actually, we watch CNBC together,” Nanny said. “Market Watch at eleven, then the closing wrap-up at four. Don’t we, Mr. G.?”

  Peggy regarded her with the speechless incredulity of a woman encountering her husband’s mistress for the first time.

  “Market Watch…” she managed to wheeze. “The closing wrap-up…”

  “I’ve thought about opening a second location,” Larry said, “but it’s hard enough managing one.”

  “But that’s the beauty of franchising,” Monroe said. “People pay you for the privilege of opening a new location. Then they run it. Once you have critical mass, you can take the company public.”

  “That’s nuts, Monroe,” Peggy said, causing an outburst of giggles from Paco and Sophie. “It’s a candy store.” She glanced sharply at Nanny, who was gazing fondly at Monroe, as if he were one of her young charges.

  “I think Daddy makes a lot of sense,” Lily said. It was nice hearing her father utter something other than It’s time for my pill. “How about it, Larry? Broadway Nut Shoppies from Maine to Texas.”

  “We could call the company That’s Nuts.” Larry raised his wineglass. “To franchising!”

  Monroe sat up straight and managed to raise his water glass without spilling any.

  “I know a chap at E. F. Hutton who can get you the capital you need.”

  Peggy rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake, Monroe, there is no E. F. Hutton anymore, they—”

  Lily whacked her mother’s side, silencing her. She looked at Larry, then at her father, men from her past with, it seemed, new claims on her future.

  “To the future,” she said, and drank her wine.

  “What the hell happened to Hutton?” Monroe asked, glancing plaintively around the table.

  “Stay.”

  Larry grasped her shoulder and gently pulled her back onto the bed.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m still a married woman. I can’t just walk into the apartment tomorrow morning wearing the same clothes as the night before.”

  “You’re still obeying rules that no one else cares about.”

  “It just seems wrong. I leave our apartment to ‘walk you home’ and don’t come back until the morning?

  “The Lily Gimmel I knew twenty-five years ago didn’t give a rat’s ass about what anyone else thought. What happened to her?”

  “She’s long gone.”

  He looked at her sadly, and when she couldn’t take it any longer, she hugged him, thinking how nice it would be to wake up next to him, make lazy, morning love. Even the prospect of curtains on the windows and a real mattress seemed fraught with sybaritic possibility.

  “Were you serious about franchising the store?” she asked.

  “Would you stay if I said yes? Wait, don’t answer. No, of course I wasn’t serious.” He studied her a beat. “Disappointed?”

  She shook her head. “But it was nice to see my father back in the game.” She wriggled out from his embrace and started to get dressed. “Maybe we could go away for a few days, just you and me.”

  “How about next weekend? We could leave Thursday night. There’s an inn in northwestern Connecticut I know, you could introduce me to the joys of bird watching. Lily?”

  “Oh, right, bird watching.”

  “What just happened? Where’d you go? You look like you got horrible news.”

  “Good news, actually. Talking about going away on Thursday…” She pulled her blouse over her head. “I was so focused on the dates…” She hiked up her trousers and fastened them. “I never paid attention to the day of the week.” She stepped into her shoes. “Do you know what this means?”

  “What what means?”

  “Barnett really was innocent.”

  “Him again.”

  “Not him, me. If he’s innocent…”

  “Right, if Barnett is innocent, you’re rich again. The fact that he ran away, leav
ing you and the kids with nothing…a minor detail.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. She leaned over the bed to kiss him but he rolled away.

  “Good luck getting your life back,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, at least this time I get an apology before being dumped.”

  “Nobody’s dumping you.”

  “I hope everything works out for you. The front door locks automatically when you shut it.”

  Twenty-nine

  “I am thinking this will be our last week together,” Mohammed said, pulling on a Marlboro. Lily’s X-acto knife made an unintentional detour through the corner of a twenty, rendering it worthless (well, truly worthless). “It does not pay to get greedy in this business. We have made enough money.”

  Lily smiled despite looming disappointment—who would have guessed that counterfeiting was so rich in wordplay?

  “I don’t agree.”

  “You have made many thousands of dollars in a few months’ time. There are not many professions that pay as well. I have inwested wisely in the securities markets. Now it is time to cash in my chips and send for my family.”

  A feeling of dread, laced perhaps with panic, fell over her. True, for the past months she’d been making money faster than she could spend it. She’d rented a series of ever larger safe-deposit boxes at a bank branch on Broadway, to which she repaired twice a week carrying an overnight bag plump with packets of twenties. It had occurred to her that amassing so much fake currency was not a good idea. Mohammed had urged her to “get it into circulation,” as if her cash horde were a lonely widow in need of a social life. She’d given half of her production to Mohammed to invest through his broker, whose firm, she suspected, was called Ask No Questions Financial Services. When she inquired as to the status of her investments, he’d only say, “Doing wery well, wery, wery well.”

  Only that morning, emboldened by her revelation the night before, she’d told her mother, who was recounting the horrors of living in tight quarters with “that phony English servant you brought with you,” that they would be moving out soon. Nanny, who must have been “lurking” in the hallway, as Peggy invariably referred to her movements around the apartment, had looked stricken when the three women met a moment later in the tiny foyer. Even if her theory about the missing money was correct, it could be years before she got it back. She’d been counting on her regular production of twenties to tide them over in their own place.

  “What will you do?”

  “I will continue to drive my taxi until the family comes. Then I will inwest full time while we establish ourselves here. And you, Lily?”

  He’d never spoken her name before, and it sounded lovely to her ears, with a gentle glissando on the second syllable.

  “I think I’ve figured out who stole the money from my husband’s firm.”

  “So you will be rich again.”

  “I suppose so.”

  He smiled broadly. “Excellent. And will you inwite your husband back into your home?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The candy man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He frowned. Having finished the day’s quota of twenties, she turned off the scanner and computer and began to soak the bills in batches of five in the tub of mysterious elixir that Mohammed had earlier prepared.

  “You need a plan.”

  “Did you always have a plan, Mohammed?”

  “I have always had this plan, since I can remember.”

  “This is the first time in my life that I don’t have a plan. And it feels okay, which is a bit of a surprise, actually. My entire life has been one long to-do list. Go to college. Marry well. Buy drop-dead gorgeous apartment. Have two children. Get noticed by the right people. Maintain body. It all seems completely pointless now. How is it possible that I could have been completely happy back then but not miss one aspect of my old life today?” She sighed. “Although it would be nice to have my own bathroom again.”

  “Perhaps you weren’t as happy as you think you were.”

  “No, I was happy. I loved my life. I really did. It was an ideal life in many ways. I just don’t miss it.”

  “I have never for a single instant doubted my plan. Doubts are like drops of water from the floor above. Small things, but if you don’t stop them right away, the entire ceiling will come down on top of you.”

  “But the other day you said—”

  “I said I worried that my sons and my wife had doubts. But not me.”

  “Maybe before all this happened I couldn’t admit any doubt or the entire world I’d constructed would collapse on top of me.”

  “It is better to keep your focus on your goals than your misgivings.”

  “Unless they’re the wrong goals,” she said. “Are we really going to just close this down? I’ll miss it.”

  She waited for a reciprocal expression of regret but it never came. Still, she thought she saw a veil of…well, not quite sadness, but perhaps wistfulness, briefly dim his eyes.

  As Kristin Liu of Goldman Sachs crossed Guy’s office, he saw her glance at the tank, as visitors always did. But she looked less admiring this time than pitying, as if the fate of the fish, and perhaps Guy’s own lot, were in serious question. It was going to be a difficult meeting. In fact it was going to suck.

  Kristin sat on the sofa, Guy in an armchair opposite her. With her long, glossy black hair fanning out across her shoulders like an elaborate headdress, and her groovy eyewear—a tortoiseshell riff on the cardboard glasses once distributed at 3D movies—and her black dress tight as a cowl against her thin body, and her stern, tiny mouth and narrow, impenetrable eyes, she had the aura of a priestess—one who presided over human sacrifices, perhaps. It was going to suck big time.

  “It’s about the loan,” Guy preempted her.

  “Exactly,” she said, slurring the “ex” into an “ess,” a reassuring flaw. She extracted a sheet of ivory Goldman Sachs letterhead from a burgundy leather portfolio. A death warrant? “Last summer you borrowed two-point-two million dollars against your shares in Positano Software. Those shares have now lost 96.6 percent of their value. As a result, we will need additional collateral to keep from triggering default.”

  “How much additional collateral?”

  “Ninety-six-point-six percent of two-point-two million dollars is…well, it’s over two million.”

  “I think you know that I don’t have anything near that amount.”

  “You still have three millions shares of Positano stock.”

  Positano had closed the day before at three cents over a buck. One dollar was the dreaded Rubicon for public companies; cross it and you got a delisting notice from the NASDAQ, thereby entering a bleak purgatory of near-dead companies and technology has-beens. Few ever made it out.

  “I’d have to put up two-thirds of my shares.”

  “Essactly. However, if the price slips below one dollar, we might have to take alternative action.”

  “I’m guessing that wouldn’t be good.”

  “Our policy is to secure private loans with hard assets when the collateralized share price no longer—”

  “Hard assets? We’re a software company. We don’t have inventory or factories. What are you going to do, cart away our desks and computers?” He stole a quick glance at the tank, whose inhabitants floated obliviously through the preternaturally clear, temperature-controlled salt water.

  “Guy, this is a very difficult situation for us.”

  “My heart is breaking for you.”

  “There is an alternative, perhaps. There’s talk on the street about a takeover of Positano by Aquinas.”

  “I’ve rejected the offer.” Guy had not spoken to any of the directors since the last board meeting. An ominous silence had fallen over Positano, but he suspected a squadron of frenzied lawyers and bankers was maneuvering behind the scenes to put the Aquinas deal together, with Sumner Freedman, who hadn’t spoken to Guy since t
he deal was presented to him, as their mole inside the company.

  “Would Goldman be interested in putting together a management buyout of Positano?”

  “Take the company private? I haven’t studied your numbers lately, your corporate numbers. But my initial reaction is that you’re not a candidate for an LBO.”

  “We have a number of contracts out for bid now—six, in fact. If just three of them—”

  “There is no way Goldman Sachs will invest in the enterprise software market at this time. No one is looking to enter this market, Guy.”

  “Aquinas is.”

  “Essactly. But that’s a roll-up.”

  As if Positano were an old rug to be shipped off to Goodwill.

  “Now, about your personal situation. If the Aquinas takeover comes through, and assuming it’s an all-stock deal, we might be more inclined to accept Aquinas stock as collateral. Assuming they offer a reasonable premium over your current stock price.”

  “There won’t be a deal.”

  “Then we’ll have to take Positano stock, assuming it holds above one dollar. We generally frown upon collateralized shares below one dollar. There are legal implications for us if they’re delisted.”

  Six months ago Goldman had thrown money at him. The two-million-dollar loan for the apartment had been pocket change beneath the bulging wad that was his net worth. Guy still couldn’t believe it had all vanished, or 96.6 percent of it. There hadn’t been one horribly bad day or even one disastrous week for Positano’s stock, just an endless, lurching string of small declines. Where did all that wealth go? Rosemary had asked him recently. It can’t just disappear, can it? Someone must have it, right? She dealt in the world of hard assets, so he found an analogy that worked for her: It’s like dropping an uninsured Tiffany lamp, he’d told her. The value isn’t transferred. It just vanishes.

  “So it’s either Positano shares or Aquinas’s?”

  “Essactly. You’ll have to work into the merger docs the fact that a portion of your Aquinas shares will be pledged to us. We can help you with the verbiage.”

  “I’m sure you can. Are you making a lot of these visits lately?”