by Jonathan Dee
Which could sometimes give rise to a sort of loneliness; but today Cynthia was just as glad to come home and find nobody else there. It was still well before five, so she called their accountant; she knew he would have taken a call from her no matter the time, but she liked to be considerate about it. She asked if he would please handle a wire transfer for her, a small one, just ten thousand, but it was important that it be done right away.
“Charles Sikes,” she said.
She heard him typing; he wore one of those phone headsets, like only receptionists used to wear. “Same account as before?”
“Same bank, different city,” she said, and dug a folded, typed letter out of her pocket and read him the number. He took it down, and then as he always did he asked after her kids, whom he’d never met but knew in his way, and then they said goodbye.
Still no one home. The winter sky outside the living room was just beginning to gray. She opened up a bottle of wine, took one cigarette out of the pack she kept hidden behind the leather-bound volume of wedding photos on the bookshelf, put her coat back on, and stood outside on the balcony that overlooked the planetarium. She spent maybe twenty minutes that way, looking down on the still planets, listening to the symphony of faint sounds that passed for silence. Then, in a spirit of beneficence, she opened up the cell phone again and called her mother.
Ruth seemed almost miffed to hear from her, though no more miffed than she was by anything that rose up unexpectedly in her day without giving her adequate time to prepare. “We are doing as well as can be expected,” she said. “ Warren ’s health is not good, as you know.”
She didn’t know; or maybe she did-in her mother’s conversations it was hard to separate fact from dire prediction. “Well, tell him I hope he feels better.”
“How are the children?”
“They’re great. So busy I hardly see them anymore. The amount of schoolwork they have is just brutal.” There was a pause, and somehow Cynthia knew what was supposed to go there. “I’m sorry we haven’t been able to get out there to visit.”
“Probably not the best time for a visit anyway,” Ruth said.
“You’re right,” Cynthia said, misunderstanding her. “It’s impossible to get away. Sometimes I wonder why they have to work so hard. But then just last week I was in this public school in East Harlem -”
“Good Lord, why?”
“This charity I work with. We were dedicating a computer lab. Anyway, you wouldn’t believe-”
“Your education was always very important to me,” Ruth said. “That came first.”
Cynthia laughed affrontedly and took another quick drag. “Are you joking?” she said, exhaling. “Dirksen? That place was like a drug bazaar. There was an English teacher there who killed herself over Christmas break. Remember that? It’s a miracle I learned a fucking thing at that place.”
Ruth closed her eyes. She was trying to get some dinner ready, even though Warren probably wouldn’t eat any of it; he was so sick he hadn’t been out of the living room chair all day except to go to the bathroom, and even for that he had to call out to her. She missed part of what Cynthia was saying because when he got a coughing jag it was so heart-wrenching that she couldn’t hear anything else. “I don’t know what you expected me to do about it,” she said. “There certainly wasn’t money for private school. It was hard enough to hold on to the house those years.”
“There are ways,” Cynthia said, tossing her cigarette over the edge of the patio railing, hearing a key turn in the front door inside. “It’s just a matter of where your priorities are.”
“Well, anyway,” Ruth said. “You certainly managed to land on your feet.”
Me: SWM, 27-Big Mets fan, good income, not afraid of adventure. Willing to think long term, or, if you prefer, NSA. You: athletic, 19-24, long hair. Not afraid to act if the moment seems right. Send photo, plz.
He left out, of course, any references to his face, specifically his nose, because while some women were into it, most, he found, were not. But that seemed fair, since he hadn’t mentioned anything about what he liked or didn’t like in a face either-those faint mustaches, for instance, which were a total dealbreaker. He hit Send and switched back to the streaming video of Kasey in her apartment in California. Maybe it was California. The windows were always covered, so she might have been in Bayside for all any of her subscribers really knew. Right now she was in the kitchen making herself some kind of smoothie. There was a laptop on the kitchen counter near the blender, as there was in every room of Kasey’s house, and so she could see, as he saw, the requests typed in by feverish guys: Take off your top. Mmm how’s that taste? It was pretty embarrassing. He’d stopped communicating with Kasey himself months ago, but he still watched her, and the meter still ran on his credit card.
Would like blowjob without paying for it is what his personal ad should have read, that is if there were any such thing as an honest personal ad. People said that there were women out there, maybe not a lot but some, who thought the way guys did, but that had to be a myth. The truth was, he had zero interest in thinking long term-that was just one of those things you had to say if you wanted to get any responses at all. He was just so on edge all the time, but that tension could, if you willed it, channel itself into the sexual and thus could be relieved. It always worked, and it never worked for long. He had a lot of stress in his life to fight off.
And as if to punish him for letting that thought into his head, the cell phone rang in his bedroom. He had three cells, actually-they were lined up on top of his dresser-but he could tell from the ring that it was the disposable.
“ Devon, what’s up,” Adam said, but it didn’t sound like a question. “So we have some Bantex, right? Financial services? Start shorting it. We can take our time, though. We have a couple of months. So go slowly. Spread it out.”
That was always his mantra: spread it out. No more than a certain number of shares in one transaction, because anything over that number supposedly tripped SEC radar.
“Huh,” Devon said. “How about that. I was just reading that they were doing really well.”
A silence.
“I know, I know,” Devon said. “The less I know, the better.” Adam sounded like he was in a taxi. “So what shall we talk about, then? How’s the family?”
Adam laughed, not unkindly. “They’re good, thanks. Listen, you know we shouldn’t stay on any longer than we have to. I’m sure a single guy like you has got plans, anyway.”
“Mos def. I have a date.”
“My man,” Adam said. “Enjoy.” He hung up. He was so fucking cool all the time. In one way it would have made Devon feel better to hear, even just once, a little panic in his voice, but in other ways it would have made him feel infinitely worse. It was like high school all over again with that guy. He was one of those alphas, master of every situation, receiver of every gift, one of those guys you made merciless fun of until the day he actually brought you inside the circle and then you turned into a simpering little bitch. They saw each other very rarely-maybe three or four times in the last year-but in the aftermath Devon always felt humiliated by how slavishly he had said yes to everything.
He put the phone down on the dresser and went back to the screen, but Kasey was in the bathroom; there were cameras in there too, of course, but he scowled and went to the kitchen to see if there was anything to eat. Some people were into some perverse shit.
They’d brought in a couple of other people-they’d had to, to keep things sufficiently spread out-friends of his from the old boiler-room days on Long Island who now worked at more legit houses. They’d set up accounts for one another’s aunts, cousins, whatever they could get documentation for, and siphoned the trades through there. To most of these guys Devon himself was the ringleader, the mastermind, though without a tip to act on, of course, they were all nothing but a group of enlisted men with a willingness to get ahead. His stomach felt like shit again. Maybe because he hadn’t eaten anything, but that, he was
reminded as he opened and closed the freezer a couple more times, was only because there was fuck all to eat around here. He took the bottle of pear vodka out of the freezer instead, and in the cabinet it turned out there was still half a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Presto. Dinner.
He poured himself some vodka and sat down in front of the computer. Kasey was sitting at the kitchen table writing something-paying bills, maybe?-but at least she had her pants off now, which was promising. His own apartment had a pretty Spartan look to it, which was to say that it had a couch and a flat-screen TV that were both huge and expensive, and a rug that was huge and not expensive, and that was it. Nothing on the walls. He’d bought some kind of print of the Golden Gate Bridge and hung it on the wall over the couch, but he just felt stupid and pretentious looking at it-like, do I actually give a fuck about the Golden Gate Bridge?-and he took it down. In the bedroom was a bed and a dresser and a closet, and underneath a ceiling panel in the closet was a gym bag with about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars in it. This, Devon felt, was the true source of his stomach problems, though he also wondered if that was just dramatic nonsense, if his stomach would quiet down if he ate the occasional well-balanced meal and generally just took a little better care of himself.
He went back to the kitchen to throw out the chip bag and returned with the pear-vodka bottle. The stuff tasted like Jolly Ranchers after a while. Why did he have to get stuck with all the grunt work? The money was pretty much its own answer, even though the more he made, the harder it got to figure out how to spend it, or even where to put it, without attracting attention. Jesus, just one good blowjob would go such a long way right now, he thought. There was an outcall service just a few blocks away; he had it on speed dial. He called them up and asked if Teresa was available tonight, just so he could clear his mind of the whole thing. Fuck Bantex, until tomorrow anyway. It was all that paranoia about being watched that was making him feel sick all the time. He bet the rest of them felt sick too. But no one is watching, he thought as he logged off of Kasey and put the bottle back in the freezer and picked some laundry up off the floor. He was the one doing all the watching. That’s what you paid for. I see you, but you don’t see me.
Titles were considered unimportant at Perini but a natural hierarchy evolved and was respected. Sanford’s reliance on Adam made him the de facto number two; he spent more of his time out of the office now wooing investors in the fund, drinking with them, charming them, impressing them, seducing them into confidence even after the rare misstep or during the always-brief lean times. Precisely the kind of thing Sanford himself used to do all day long-and still did, though he had less of a taste for it now, and also seemed to recognize that youth itself was part of the package that investors wanted to be sold. Sanford himself didn’t really look any older, just more dissolute, a little puffier and less put together.
No one else there begrudged Adam the boss’s favor; it was a measure of their comfort with it that they made jokes about San-ford’s obvious late-stage conversion to homosexuality at every opportunity. Every job but Adam’s and Bill Brennan’s had turned over at least once since Adam had arrived there; Parker had finally been belittled into quitting almost three years ago, and since he’d stopped coming to basketball, Adam had no idea what had become of him. The office’s basic fraternal atmosphere was unchanged. Most of them were younger than Adam now, but he could still outrun them and outlift them and outdrink them and while they honored his status as their superior, in every important way he fit right in. Still, there was of course something momentous about his very presence in that office that none of them even suspected, and their not knowing sharpened the borderline Adam prized between his own character and theirs.
Friday afternoons at work tended to devolve into a head start on the younger employees’ bachelor weekends, with beer and foosball tournaments and a general disengagement from their adrenalized professional selves; usually the last hour of work was turned over to discussions of why the bar they went to last Friday sucked and which one they should try tonight instead, but on one particular spring afternoon they managed to talk Adam into coming with them to some catered event they knew about that was taking place inside the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. A fund-raiser for something or other. Brennan had tickets and they all wanted Adam’s company so badly that they even offered to pay for him. “I cannot get too hammered,” Adam said. “Tomorrow’s my son’s birthday.” Something else to drink to. They took over one of the round tables on the bare stage and there they met their waitress, whose name was Gretchen. Gretchen was provocatively tattooed and reluctantly conceded that she was an actress and would not tell them her age, which led to a general consensus that she was no more than twenty-two.
“God, I love me some of that hipster pussy,” Brennan said.
“Because they hate you. That’s why.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Because she hates me. That is precisely why.”
They kept ordering more drinks so that Gretchen would have to return to their table, and each time she stopped there they did a clumsier job of chatting her up. They thought their own artlessness was hilarious. Gretchen knew better than to flirt back, but she was enough of a pro, Adam saw, not to let her contempt for these guys show either. The tips were becoming outrageous.
Somehow a serious betting pool took shape around the question of whether Gretchen’s tongue was pierced. She came back with a round of Maker’s for everyone but Adam. It impressed him that she wasn’t a little frightened of them by now. “Gretchen,” Brennan said earnestly, “I don’t want this to come out wrong, but if you open wide and say Aaah, you will make me a rich man.”
“You gentlemen have a good night,” Gretchen said, smiling. She cleared the last of their glasses and walked away. A few minutes later Adam stood up to go home, prompting a wave of questions about the staunchness of his heterosexuality. Instead of heading out the theater gate, though, he turned and went underneath the grandstand, where the kitchen and bar setups were, and when he found her, she rolled her eyes and smiled.
“Pay no attention to me,” he said. “I’m counting your tattoos.”
“Well, you won’t get an accurate count,” she said.
“I’m a very busy man. I have to get back to the table soon because I’m in charge of the centerpieces. We’re planting them in the Sheep Meadow. So I just need your phone number and I’ll be on my way.”
She turned and looked at him, her head at an inquisitive angle, and he could tell she was amused not by anything he’d said but by something else about him. “How drunk are you?” she said.
“Not at all. I just have to see you again. I don’t want to live in a world where women like you are never seen again.”
She stared at him as the bartender loaded up her tray. “Oh, this,” he said, grabbing his ring finger, “this comes right off.”
She laughed. “Leave it on,” she said. “I like married guys. Keeps things on a basic level. You’re happily married, am I right?”
“Extremely,” he said.
She pulled his hand toward her and wrote a phone number on it. “Wow,” Adam said. “What a world.”
The sun set in front of him as he walked west out of the park, the long shadows behind him gradually merging into nothing. He took his time; it was probably one of the five most beautiful nights of the year. In the rare moments when he stepped back and thought about it at all, it was vital to Adam’s conception of his professional life that he wasn’t stealing from anybody. There was nothing zero-sum about the world of capital investment: you created wealth where there was no wealth before, and if you did it well enough there was no end to it. What Adam did was just an initiative based on that idea, an unusually bold manifestation of it. Why should he be restricted-or, worse, restrict himself-from finding a way to act on what he was enterprising enough to know and to synthesize? It took leadership skills as well, because you couldn’t pull off something like this by yourself even if you wanted to. In order to mi
nimize the risk he had to command the total trust and loyalty of Devon and the handful of his friends he’d brought in on it from brokerages around the city. And that he had done. Devon had turned out to be a young man prone to anxiety but whenever he seemed close to the point of bailing, five minutes together was enough for Adam to reassure him they still had the whole thing safely in hand.
It wasn’t even his chief source of income, at least not anymore. His compensation at Perini had soared, and deservedly so. This was more in the nature of a self-administered bonus. In the course of his work he learned some things about a given company, things not of a public nature; based on this information he gave Devon an instruction on the buying or the selling of that company’s stock, spread out through about thirty small accounts with dummy names managed by Devon and the others; each account transferred its profits to different offshore banks, all of which then sent the money, in slow increments, to the Royal National Bank of Anguilla, where oversight policies were business-friendly. Adam’s share in the last year was less than half a million. It was a nice margin to have, certainly, and every little bit added to the range of possibilities in his family’s lives. But they didn’t depend on it. He could have ended the whole scheme at any time and, in terms of their daily lives, they very likely wouldn’t feel the money’s absence at all.
But it wasn’t just about the money, in any case. More than the money, which had to be spent with some care, it was about exercising that ability to repurpose information those around him were too timid or shortsighted to know what to do with: the night two weeks ago, for instance, when he and Brennan had sat there in the office having a Scotch after working late and had shared a laugh about Brennan’s former frat brother who worked at Bantex, who had just called him up scared shitless because his entire office had just been served with grand jury subpoenas. That was what kept the whole scheme fresh at this point, that was its engine and its reward: the sense of living in two realms at once, one that was visible to others and one that was not. Every day he looked right into Sanford ’s face and confirmed with wonder that the old man was so blinded by affection that he didn’t even see him.