The Gods of Greenwich

by Norb Vonnegut

  “You know what happened to Eddie Lampert at ESL Investments,” Cy continued. “He was kidnapped in the parking lot outside his office.”

  “I still can’t believe he negotiated his own release.”

  “I don’t leave anything to chance, Jimmy, which is why you’ll be a great addition.”

  Cusack could feel himself yielding—Cy’s flattery and Litton’s ever-present drumbeat. “You said I’d be involved in ‘most portfolio decisions.’ What do you mean?”

  “I do all the hedging,” Cy replied. “But with time we can talk about that, too.”

  “The secret sauce,” Cusack stated, lingering on the words.

  “You think Coke’s senior guys learn the formula day one?”

  “Is this an offer?”

  “We need to talk money,” replied Leeser.

  “‘Stupid money.’”

  “There are never any complaints on bonus day. Nobody leaves LeeWell.”

  Cusack smiled crookedly but said nothing. He felt his face redden and hoped it did not show. That was the problem with adrenaline, veins, and fair Irish features. Try as he might, he could never hide his emotions. Bluffing was out of the question. At Wharton, his friends referred to him as “ATM” whenever they played poker.

  “It’s like this,” said Leeser. “Pay peanuts, and you get monkeys. I don’t want monkeys.”

  * * *

  The interview progressed. There was more discussion, more give and take. The two men finally circled the all-important topic of money.

  “I’ll pay you a salary of two hundred and fifty thousand and a minimum bonus of one million dollars. Subject to one condition.”

  Cusack considered the offer for a moment. After tax, his take-home salary would not cover mortgage payments. Everything was riding on his bonus. “How would you feel about refinancing a three point one million mortgage?” He had added $100,000 to the existing balance on his mortgage, just in case. He still faced late fees and penalties from Litton.

  “Five and three quarters.” Leeser never blinked.

  “Interest only with one annual payment?”

  “Done,” Leeser agreed. “But let’s make the first payment due in February. That’s when I pay bonuses.”

  “Speaking of which, what’s the condition?”

  “Our portfolio needs to be up ten percent,” said Leeser. “Otherwise, I don’t pay bonuses. Not to you. Not to me. Not to anybody.”

  “What if I bring in two hundred million?” objected Cusack. “That’s twenty-five percent of the portfolio. That’s great performance.”

  “Doesn’t matter. One bad year, and we’re toast. In our business, everybody is a redemption or two from shutting down.”

  “Don’t I know,” Cusack said. “Don’t I know.”

  * * *

  Forty minutes later Cusack headed out of LeeWell Capital with a job offer sketched out on the back of an envelope. Literally. The proposal was not perfect. But it might work.

  After saying good-bye to Nikki, and Amanda the receptionist, Cusack shook hands with Shannon, who stared him out the front door. He never met Victor Lee, the head trader at LeeWell Capital. It made no difference. Job offer in hand, Jimmy smiled broadly, crookedly, and from ear to ear.

  Down in the lobby Cusack headed past a chest-high sculpture of disembodied wings. The artist named the work Pegasus after the horse from Greek mythology whose father was Poseidon the god of everything underwater and whose mother was the snake-headed Medusa. Jimmy thought the lineage a fine choice for a building full of hedge funds.

  On the way home Cusack stopped at a drugstore and bought a scratch-and-win lottery ticket on principle. His luck, it seemed, had changed for the better. And now he had a decision to make.

  Sure, there was downside. Cy’s offer thrust Cusack into a career crossroads—sales versus portfolio management. Everything was riding on performance. If LeeWell Capital missed the 10 percent hurdle, Cusack would forego a bonus and default on his annual mortgage payment. The offer, however, beat the registered alternative waiting for him back at the post office.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THAT NIGHT IN NEW YORK CITY …

  Cusack burst out of the elevator and bounded down the corridor. His building, on Gansevoort Street just under Little West Twelfth, once housed brawny men in blood-soaked aprons who spent their days hacking great racks of butchered beef. Everything changed in the 1990s when developers arrived with legions of carpenters.

  Now a different kind of butcher occupied the building. Lawyers and investment bankers kissed their spouses good-bye each morning. They traded the soaring ceilings, exposed brick, and designer kitchens for cubicle farms, where they spent their days slaughtering opponents from rival firms.

  In the crook of his left shoulder, Jimmy cradled lemon-colored roses. He had chosen the shade in tribute to Madame Olenska, the heroine who receives yellow roses in Edith Wharton’s classic The Age of Innocence. Cusack had always appreciated Olenska’s irreverence, the way she flouted society’s expectations during the 1870s. It made no difference that she was a fictional character.

  The bouquet was huge, petals everywhere, two dozen roses in all. Cusack rapped on the door with his right hand. He had keys but waited for his wife to answer anyway. Surprise, showmanship, a spray of long-stemmed roses—panache was everything in the romance business. Cusack checked the two-star pin on his lapel to ensure it was visible.

  Seconds later the door opened. Emi resembled so many other New England women from the wholesome tribe of L.L. Bean and the great outdoors: slim, athletic, and not much in the way of makeup. Her brown hair gleamed like brushed satin when she pulled it back in a ponytail. Her blue eyes sparkled with the light, perhaps the distortion, of a thousand sapphire prisms. Emi stood two inches shorter than Cusack in her bare feet, nudged him by a hair when wearing clogs, and completely dwarfed him in heels.

  “Hello?” Emi asked, betraying her usual control.

  It was not, “Hello. I love you. How was your day at the office, James?” Most of the time, Emi addressed Cusack as “James.” So did Caleb.

  It was not, “Hello. I’m aching for you. Let’s get naked, Bevis, and go to bed five minutes ago.”

  Cusack was not “James” all the time. When they were holding each other, Emi called him “Boris” or “Bluto” or some other phantom lover just to be provocative. She liked B’s in bed for some reason. It was her joke, Emi’s buoyant banter with her beau.

  And it was not, “Hello. Who the fuck are you?” Emi was too good-natured, far too kind to bark at anyone. But there was no “dear” included, no hint of Barclay or Blythe or even Brady. No recognition whatsoever.

  Jimmy had seen her blank look before, those confused eyes that struggled with identities. He had heard the same “hello” many times, the unmistakable hint of doubt. And he loved his wife without reservation.

  * * *

  Cusack never heard of “prosopagnosia” before Emi. He discovered the word the hard way, early during their relationship in college. They passed on the street, and she did not recognize him. Had no clue who he was. Walked right past without so much as a wink. Left him slack-jawed in the middle of a busy intersection. Made him wonder what he had done wrong. That was after several weeks together and a string of happy B’s.

  “Prosopagnosia,” Emi later explained, “is sometimes called ‘face blindness.’ We can’t distinguish the features of people we know, even friends and family.”

  “You can’t tell who I am at a dinner party?”

  “Short term, I’m okay. It’s the next day that’s a problem. I forget faces.”

  “You wouldn’t recognize Hugh Jackman?”

  “Probably not.”

  People with prosopagnosia can distinguish among eyes and noses and different kinds of chins. Assembling the pieces, however, is like distinguishing among rocks sanded smooth by weather over long stretches of time. Nearly impossible.

  Emi’s case was not severe in a clinical sense. Her struggles were
imperceptible to most everyone other than Cusack. But they were real. She sometimes failed to identify him, especially in crowds.

  Because of these recognition problems, Emi opted for a career with reptiles and worked as a herpetologist at the Bronx Zoo. She loved reptilian colors and textures. Their shapes were easy to distinguish, their markings no problem for her particular case of prosopagnosia.

  Through the years she developed many tools to identify her husband, who lacked the multicolored stripes of Gila monsters or the red-and-green webbing of Tokay Geckos. She depended on his voice. His scent. His square jaw and cockeyed smile. The faint cleft in his chin helped, but Emi used one other no-fail trick to identify her James.

  * * *

  Emi spotted the two-star pin on Cusack’s lapel, and her smile widened enough for the world to forget Mona Lisa. She hopped straight up and wrapped her long legs around Cusack’s lean torso and the two dozen roses. She squeezed with all her might, oblivious to the thorns digging into her thighs and his chest.

  Cusack carried his wife into the condominium. He lurched this way and that, padding through their foyer on the Oriental rugs from Turkey. Her clogs dropped to the floor as he struggled to keep his balance. She had morphed into a giant octopus, all arms and eight-foot legs, suction cups everywhere. She gripped and groped, consuming her husband from all directions at once.

  “What’s this all about?” asked Cusack, surprised by her fervor.

  Emi smothered the words as her husband spoke. She kissed him once, twice, the second time sloppier than the first, and pulled back. She inspected his face, gently caressing his cheeks and chin with the deft touch of a lover who had been there before. She finally relaxed her thighs and slid to the floor.

  “Yikes,” he teased, “let me know when the coast is clear.”

  “The roses are beautiful.” Emi took them from Cusack, and the two walked into their kitchen appointed with granite counters, imported tiles, and the other accoutrements of a bloated mortgage. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Who said they’re for you?” Cusack asked with an impish smile. Then he added, “I have some news.”

  “Me, too,” Emi replied. She glowed. Her blue eyes twinkled, more breathtaking than all the stars of New England.

  In that instant Cusack decided Emi’s ivory-snow complexion had never looked so pure. There were no worry lines on her forehead or subtle crow’s-feet extending from the corners of her eyes. None of the body’s evil tricks that surface in the thirties, gain momentum in the forties, and raise all-out hell during the fifties. Even as Emi arranged the roses in a vase, cutting here and fluffing there, she radiated the unusual blend of peace and energy.

  “You first,” Cusack said, parentheses framing the corners of his mouth. He grabbed an Australian cabernet from their sleek galley kitchen, poured one glass, and started to pour the second.

  “None for me,” Emi interrupted. No more than an ounce of the Wolf Blass had splashed into her glass.

  Cusack’s brown eyebrows arched with surprise. Emi never drank to excess. Nor did she go without. She always nursed a glass of wine when they unwound together in the evenings. “So what’s your news, Em?”

  “I just told you.”

  “Boy gawd, girl,” he teased in the Somerville dialect of his youth. “You don’t make it easy.”

  Emi said nothing. She burrowed into his eyes with her sapphires. She sparkled from ear to ear, happy and cryptic all at once. “I just told you.”

  Cusack blinked once, then again. He sipped his cabernet and studied the second wineglass, mostly empty. All of a sudden, he got it.

  “Hah,” Cusack cheered. “You’re pregnant.”

  Emi nodded yes, her face as soft and serene as a mountain lake on a still summer night.

  “How long?” he asked, placing his glass on the counter and hugging Emi again.

  “Six weeks. Seven tops.”

  Cusack kissed her on the lips. She tasted like a cross between red lipstick and something sweet. He tasted like cabernet.

  “Did you win the lottery?” she asked.

  “No. And what makes you think I bought a ticket?”

  “There’s scratch-off goop under your fingernails from one of those games.” Emi cocked her left eyebrow and tilted her head slightly to the right. She saved her Sherlock Holmes face just for these occasions.

  Emi Cusack saw everything—errant eyebrows, stained cuffs, nervous tics—everything except faces and bills. The invoices that originally went to the office now landed in a PO box. Her powers of observation, Jimmy decided, compensated for the prosopagnosia.

  “Next time I’ll use a quarter to scratch,” Cusack confessed to Emi. “And no, I didn’t win the lottery. It’s better.”

  “Okay?”

  “LeeWell Capital offered me a job.”

  “Hah,” she whooped, echoing Cusack from before. “Are you taking it? I want to hear everything! How come you didn’t call from the car?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  Cusack had deliberated about his career and mortgage woes all the way home from Greenwich. His misgivings about sales, however, no longer mattered. Emi, beautiful and slightly broken, was six or seven weeks pregnant. He was a dad.

  LeeWell offered Jimmy Cusack a fresh start, a chance to ring the cash register. He could make big bucks at LeeWell. More money than three blocks of Somerville plumbers, carpenters, and bus drivers earned in aggregate. More money in one year than Cusack’s father earned his entire career.

  “I want you focused on one thing,” Leeser explained earlier that day. “More money and more growth for LeeWell. I want you thinking about our company in the shower, not your mortgage payments.”

  “There are a few details,” Cusack replied to Emi, “we still need to work out.” He tried to sound nonchalant. Force of habit from finance. “It’s more of a sales job than what I’ve done in the past. But LeeWell Capital is a small shop, and I think my role will grow over the long term.”

  “You’ll be great,” she said, sensing hesitation. “Dad says you can sell ice cubes to Eskimos.”

  “Door-to-door at the igloos if Caleb has his way.”

  “Oh, stop it,” Emi scolded playfully. “Grab your wine, Barney, and tell me everything,” she ordered, leading him to the bedroom.

  “You want a purple dinosaur?” he teased. “I’ll show you a purple dinosaur.”

  “Let’s go with Buster.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THAT NIGHT IN GREENWICH …

  Cy Leeser cruised the rolling hills of Greenwich in his cream-colored Bentley, top down. Past the stone border walls that never end. Through the area known as “Mid-Country,” where newer mansions abut the roads and stately 1920 homes hide at the rear of the properties. He glanced at Judge Judy’s sprawling summer estate on the south side of Round Hill Road and shook his head.

  The New York Post dubbed her manor “Judyville.” The 24,000-square-foot residence resembled a transplant from Normandy, but without the fine patina of wear and tear that makes the French countryside so charming. The Post was unfair, Leeser decided. Sure, the house included ten hand-carved marble fireplaces and ceilings that soared two stories high. But there were only thirteen bathrooms.

  Judyville was nothing compared to Valery Kogan’s proposal. The Russian billionaire intended to erect a 27,000-square-foot super-mansion, complete with twenty-six bathrooms and enough flushing power to drain the Atlantic. Kogan’s architectural plans included a Turkish bath, Finnish bath, and even a dog-grooming salon. Now, that was a Greenwich theme park.

  Give the judge a break, Leeser thought.

  Judyville required only five hundred lightbulbs. Paul Tudor Jones, the hedge fund billionaire, put up fifteen thousand Christmas lights every year and synchronized their flashes to a four-minute loop on FM 90.5. His holiday display required a small army equipped with scaffolding and extension ladders just to hang everything. He was the one who needed the arrow at his front gate. The sign pointed left so visitors would n
ot mistake his fiefdom for the Belle Haven Club next door. Judge Judy was not the one with a problem.

  The reality: Leeser never deliberated whether any Greenwich estate was excessive. He regarded each as a logical conclusion. He understood Judge Judy, Valery Kogan, and Paul Tudor Jones. He understood why the founder of SAC Capital owned a Munch and built an ice rink in his backyard. The New York Post, by lampooning members of the Greenwich über-rich, missed the point.

  With its mix of Russian oligarchs, old-line fortunes, and hedge fund money, Greenwich was a living, breathing philosophy debate. These neighborhoods, in Cy’s opinion, were not the happy endings of too much money. They posed a twist on the classic question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

  Greenwich raised the same issue about wealth: “If no one sees your money, do you have any?”

  * * *

  Bianca Santiago Leeser stared out the kitchen window, waiting for her husband and wondering if they could make it through the night without an argument. With dark Brazilian hair and latte-cream skin, she wore white jeans and a Tory Burch top. Bianca was one of nature’s anomalies, slender but big breasted, short but statuesque. Stunning at forty-seven.

  She stood five foot two in stocking feet, with legs sculpted better than any slab of marble inside the Louvre. When Bianca wore stilettos to the charity circuit dinners, men forgot she was tiny. They forgot their rubber chicken meals, and they gawked. Even Cy could not help but stare.

  The sixteen-year marriage had been good at the start. Bianca cranked out romance novels in their West Village condo, and Leeser cabbed downtown to Merrill Lynch. In those days they met for lunch all the time. Sometimes, the couple’s stolen nooners found their way onto the steamy pages of her novels. And romance fans everywhere agreed that Bianca Santiago set the bar when it came to passion.

  Now Bianca wondered what had gone wrong. Why their marriage had soured. She wasn’t bitter about putting her career on hold. At least she didn’t think so. She was the one who opted to stop writing, take care of the girls, and support Cy’s career all the way.