For the Love of Money

by Sam Polk

  I started to think about what Peter really had. He definitely had power. Our presence and our closed mouths attested to that. The moment Peter turned his attention to someone new, that person would bloom under his gaze. Suddenly they’d smile, listen attentively, and nod. It was like watching a table full of puppets. I did the same when Peter’s attention was on me.

  But Peter’s power came from his position. It came from his wallet. I wasn’t here because I admired Peter’s character. As I watched him cut into his $50 steak, I realized how gravely I’d miscalculated. I didn’t want what Peter had. I didn’t want to be respected for the size of my wallet, or the name of the firm on my business card. I wanted to be respected for my character, for some real contribution.

  Suddenly, I saw in full clarity the structure of the fantasy I had toiled under my whole life. If I achieved enough, made enough money, then someday in the future I would no longer be afraid and would get all the love I craved. That’s what I thought a billion dollars would get me. But I had seen the fear in Eldrick’s eyes, and that night, surrounded by sycophants, Peter looked to me like the loneliest person in the world. Somewhere inside of him, I think he knew that.

  I didn’t know whether Peter was seeking the same thing I was, but I could see that he was still seeking. And that went against my whole fantasy of becoming a billionaire. I’d thought that once I became a billionaire, I could finally rest. But that hadn’t proved true for Eldrick and Peter. And that meant it wasn’t about the money.

  I had already known that, I realized; that was why the debate about whether it made sense to work for four or five months after winning the lottery to secure the next year’s bonus had seemed reasonable. Winning the lottery wasn’t going to be enough.

  In a very real sense, with over a million dollars in the bank, I had already won the lottery. At that moment it finally hit me that I already had enough to do whatever it was I wanted to do. Freedom wasn’t about the money. It was a state of mind. Yes, a million dollars in the bank helps. A lot. But there are plenty of people with much more who are prisoners in their own lives. All my life I’d felt handcuffed to a treadmill, sure that the next achievement or bonus would allow me to stop running. Now I realized the keys to the handcuffs had been in my pocket, not Peter’s, the whole time.

  After dinner, the analysts and traders milled about on the sidewalk, waiting for a cab and talking about how painful the dinner was. An analyst sidled up to me and said, “Wow, Sam, I’m impressed. You didn’t smile at one of Peter’s bad jokes.” I felt a flash of pride, but it quickly faded. When Peter’s attention was on me, I had sucked up like all the rest.

  Over the remaining few months of that year, I met Marshall for coffee a dozen times. He had taken a job running trading for a boutique investment firm that was looking to grow into a power player.

  Marshall and I would meet at a Starbucks between our two offices, and I would mostly talk about work at Pateras. When I first mentioned to Marshall that I was thinking about leaving, he was aghast.

  “Sam,” he said, “I am not sure you fully understand the position you are in.”

  I laughed. “Sure I do, Marshall,” I said. “That’s what makes this so hard.”

  “Look,” Marshall said. “You are the head distressed trader at one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. You are on the cusp of one of the great careers on Wall Street. If you keep your Pateras seat for two or three more years, investors will be calling you to start your own hedge fund.”

  I smiled. Marshall had a tendency toward the dramatic, but his pronouncement was nice to hear.

  “That’s the thing, Marshall,” I said. “It’s always two years out. Everything I’ve ever wanted has been two years out. First I wanted to be a trader, then I wanted to be a CDS trader, then I wanted to be a distressed trader, now I’m at a hedge fund, and what I want is to run my own hedge fund. And to do it, I need to work in a place I don’t much like, doing work that doesn’t bring any value to the world.”

  Marshall was waiting for his turn to speak what for him was gospel. “In a few years you can be the boss and hire whoever you want. And you can use the money to do whatever you really want to do.”

  This had been Marshall’s strategy, and it seemed a good one. He owned houses in Sun Valley and Charleston. He belonged to Winged Foot and Kiowa, two of the most prestigious country clubs in the nation. He owned two of the most popular restaurants in Charleston, and bars in Tribeca and East Hampton. He’d used his money to create the kind of world he wanted to live in, restaurants and bars where everyone knew his name.

  I wanted that, too. Over the years my younger brother Daniel had become an accomplished chef, and we often talked about starting a restaurant together. There were other things I wanted to do—start a social enterprise, build an affordable alcohol and drug rehab center—and Marshall knew that, too.

  “Whatever good things you want to do in the world will only be helped by the potentially hundreds of millions of dollars you can make,” he said.

  Marshall had just enunciated my biggest fear about leaving. I had put myself into a position that few people in the world experience. I had a real shot at attaining unimaginable wealth. I could use that money to do a lot of good. But there was something disconnected about having millions in the bank and going to work every day with the sole purpose of accumulating more. It reminded me of the way I used to drink. The way I used to eat. Making money just to give it away seemed like some form of financial bulimia.

  One day in late summer, I emerged from a subway station at Union Square and ran into an old friend from college. Tara, a glowing redhead, had dated my friend Francisco in college, and we’d all spent many nights together. I’d lost touch with her over the years.

  “How have you been?” I asked, after we had stepped to the sidewalk.

  She told me about graduate school, a romance that had blossomed into marriage, about buying a house.

  “And you?” she asked.

  I stood looking at her while I searched for words. The last few years of my life had been an epic struggle, a knight’s quest. But Tara didn’t know Wall Street. She wouldn’t understand what it meant to be the head distressed trader at Pateras. I could tell her I was up hundreds of millions of dollars, by far my best year ever, but that seemed a little gauche. I realized that all the drama in my life over the past eight years could be reduced to a single word.

  “Work,” I said.

  I looked up at Tara and found her looking at me quizzically.

  “Sorry,” I said, and laughed. “I was having a moment.”

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

  “Were you thinking about Sloane?” she asked.

  I looked at her, surprised. It had been months since I thought about Sloane Taylor.

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Tara. “I thought you might be. I have been wondering how you were taking the news.”

  “What news?” I asked.

  “Sloane is getting married,” Tara said.

  CHAPTER 34

  Peter Luger’s

  ¤

  Sloane Taylor is getting married. My muscles tensed, my stomach clenched. I waited for the inevitable wave of heartache to return.

  Nothing happened.

  I didn’t feel anything. I took a cautious breath. Then another. The pain I had so long imagined did not appear. It’d been years since I last saw Sloane and months since I even thought about her. Sloane had been dating an up-and-­coming Hollywood producer, and now she was marrying him. I thought I’d be envious, but I wasn’t.

  I’d carried around the fantasy of Sloane, the perfect woman, the woman who would make me whole. But I didn’t want to chase fantasies anymore. I wanted something real. Someone imperfect who I truly loved, who would love me—the real me, the messy, insecure, damaged, transcendent, sober man
I’d become—in return. If Sloane wasn’t interested in me—and by now, I thought with a chuckle, it’s pretty clear she wasn’t—then I didn’t want to be with her, either.

  My relationship with women had already changed. It had been almost two years since I stopped looking at porn. Several months after I quit, I started having an easier time with women than I ever had before. I’m not sure if it was because they sensed I was no longer trying to steal from them, or whether I just gave off a healthier energy. Or because I was a little older and a little richer. Whatever it was, I became attractive to women in the way I’d always wanted. For the first time in my life, lots of women were interested in me. I dated women at work, friends of friends, my yoga teacher, a woman I met on the street. I had a string of short, casual relationships with women I liked but did not love.

  I’d always thought that dating and sleeping with tons of women would make me happy. When I finally experienced that, it was the same as all the other fantasies: the reality wasn’t nearly as satisfying as what I’d imagined. I’d meet a woman and thrill at taking her home, but when it was over I was left with a woman in my bed whom I wasn’t sure I wanted there. As soon as the sex was over, I often just wanted to be alone.

  I liked sex, and I liked sex with different women, but in the end it left me more lonely and disconnected than before. I decided to stop.

  Several months passed, and for the first time in my life I wasn’t focused on luring in women. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a relationship—I did. But now I was willing to wait patiently until I found a woman I cared about.

  I didn’t have to wait long.

  I’d moved to a modest attic apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and Ben came to stay with me for the summer. It was 2009, and he had just graduated from Harvard’s Kennedy School, where he’d been elected student body president, and was about to start Harvard Law School. Instead of returning to consulting or going into corporate law, he planned to do poverty law, providing legal services to those who couldn’t afford it. Toward the end of summer, he hosted a brunch at my apartment. He invited some college friends over and cooked coconut pancakes.

  I’d been out all morning and arrived late. I pushed the door to my apartment open and froze. It was as if all the lights in the room were off except the ones around the woman standing in the middle of the room. She was tall, with long brown hair, the brightest smile I had ever seen, and deep blue eyes.

  It was Kirsten Thompson, the girl I’d made out with when I’d gone to visit Ben at Cornell thirteen years earlier. I hadn’t seen her since.

  Her face looked the same, but her hair was now long and straight, and curled at the ends. She carried herself with confidence, grace. She was smiling without flirting. Warm without being effusive. She was stunning. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  I walked up to her and introduced myself, and she remembered me. I tried to think of interesting things to say so she would keep talking to me. I asked her about her life since we last saw each other, and she told me her story.

  After Cornell she’d come to New York to work for J.P. Morgan. The office was a block from the World Trade Center, and her first day on Wall Street had been September 11, 2001. She was in the lobby when the first tower went down, and when smoke and debris exploded past the window she was standing next to, she ran for her life. As she ran, she saw a portly middle-aged man running alongside her, clutching his briefcase. She noticed how tightly he held onto it. I don’t want that to be me, she thought.

  She quit her job at J.P. Morgan. Lots of people said she was crazy to leave such a lucrative career. But she had seen what she had seen and didn’t want a life dedicated to the security of money. She didn’t want to be running for her life, clutching her briefcase.

  She went back to school to become a doctor. For two years she worked full-time in a medical lab and took premed courses, waking at 5:00 a.m. to study for three hours before work. Then she applied to medical school and was accepted. Now, she was about to graduate. She was going to be a surgeon.

  There were a few moments where we stopped talking and just looked at each other awkwardly, and then both started laughing.

  At noon everyone started to leave, and Ben called me over to help him wash dishes. When I looked up, I saw Kirsten about to walk out the door. She was all the way across the room, so when she smiled and waved at me, I just waved back.

  After she left, I asked Ben about calling her. He had been friends with Kirsten since college, and even though he wasn’t romantically interested in her, I knew that after what he and I had been through, I needed to talk to him before asking one of his close friends out on a date. We’d worked through our issues about Emma Ramsdale, but there was still some soreness. That conversation brought up some old issues, which we talked through, and then Ben gave me his blessing.

  Kirsten agreed to meet me for coffee on a Sunday afternoon. That day I was meeting Marshall and a few Wall Street guys at Peter Luger’s Steak House in Williamsburg for lunch, so I planned to eat and then walk three miles to a coffee shop in Park Slope to meet Kirsten.

  Peter Luger’s was my favorite restaurant in the world. It was old school: wooden tables, no tablecloths, career ­waiters. The clientele varied, from Wall Street traders to lower-­middle-class families from the Bronx, from slick Italian guys taking their girlfriends out for dates to old couples from Coney Island celebrating their anniversaries.

  The food was incredible. The meal started with thick sliced onions and tomatoes with heavy homemade blue-cheese dressing. Then, salty slabs of bacon that you needed a knife to cut. Next, sizzling, redolent lamb chops with au jus spooned over them. For dinner, huge porterhouses on family-size plates so hot that if you wanted your steak cooked a little more, you slapped it on the side of the plate with a snap and a sizzle, and a minute later it was browned. There were bowls of heavy-creamed spinach and German-spiced potatoes. I covered everything in Peter Luger’s heavy, sweet steak sauce. It was the only restaurant in the world where I wouldn’t eat the bread; the rolls were delicious, but everything else was so much better.

  The best part of the meal was dessert, which at Peter Luger’s was a two-course affair. First, the waiter would drop off a large bowl of “Schlag”—heavy, sweet, freshly whipped cream. He’d toss dozens of gold-foil-covered chocolate coins on the table. While you perused the dessert menu, you’d use the chocolate coins to scoop Schlag into your mouth. The dessert menu was all-American: hot-fudge sundaes, thick slabs of apple pie. I always ordered the pecan pie—easily the best I’d ever had. It was so sweet it made your teeth chatter.

  But Peter Luger’s wasn’t my favorite place in the world because of the food. It was my favorite place in the world because I ate there with Marshall. He’d been eating at Peter Luger’s at least once a month for twenty years—he no longer needed a reservation. He started bringing me when I was a junior trader. I was a little surprised when he invited me. Marshall had so many friends that the faces at the table were almost always new; Marshall could assemble a dozen or more people at Peter Luger’s for a late Sunday lunch with a few phone calls and an hour’s notice. His crowd was hard drinking and loud, and I was sober and shy. But Marshall invited me anyway.

  Marshall treated me like I wished my father had. He never let me pay for anything. He seemed happy I was there, even when I didn’t say a word. And I trusted him. I knew unequivocally that Marshall was on my side, even though we were different in many respects. Marshall liked nothing more than a boozy dinner and a late night at a bar; I liked quiet dinners and nights alone. People would sometimes ask me how it was that Marshall and I were so close, even though our social lives were so different. “I don’t know,” I’d say. All I knew was that Marshall loved me unconditionally.

  I talked to Marshall about leaving Wall Street more than anyone, and sometimes he would really get it. He would lean in toward me, listening intently, while I talked about how I no longer believed being rich
would make me happy or that making money was a sufficient purpose for my life. He would say things like, “By God, Sam, you really don’t compromise, do you?” and “Your work with Linda seems to have given you a much deeper way of looking at the world.” But then he’d start talking about how things would be different for him when the next trading desk became a market leader, despite the fact that he had already run three different number one trading desks.

  He’d been in the game too long to agree with me. Marshall was forty-five and had worked harder than anyone I knew. He spent his life on trading floors, in Michelin-starred restaurants and old New York bars like P. J. Clarke’s, and usually returned home alone, or, if he was lucky, with a stranger he’d met at the bar. He had the biggest heart of any man I ever knew, but he had never married. My surrogate father might never become a real father. He had committed his life to the fulfillment of a fantasy I was now calling false.

  I loved Marshall. I wasn’t angry or disappointed with him—just the opposite. I planned to spend the rest of my life honoring him for what he’d done for me. That day, at Peter Luger’s, Marshall had a new date with him, an attractive blond woman, ten or fifteen years younger, with the glazed-eye look of a woman three drinks into numbing herself to endure a night with a man she is with for reasons other than love. As usual, Marshall was in the midst of telling a story, and the whole table was captivated. Instead of listening, I watched his face. I looked at the red, puffy skin drooping exhaustedly from his cheeks, the visible consequence of five thousand consecutive restaurant dinners. And I looked at his eyes, already glazed from too much food and drink, and knew that on this next step of my life I couldn’t look to Marshall for guidance. Navigating Wall Street, Marshall was my guy; leaving Wall Street, I was on my own.