Or as free as you could be, living in the same town, sitting on their Board, seeing them at holidays. Christmas with the Spocks, Keith took to calling it after the advent of Star Trek, Old Bill remaining galactically remote and Felicia proving somewhat colder than she’d initially seemed. (Amory, to Keith’s great relief, would always be off doing a deal in some foreign territory, so his name rarely came up.)
Aside from these family visits, with their forcible cheer, Regan had by then given up acting. It had been clear since Will’s birth that she’d never really meant to continue, that motherhood was where her talents would go. But Keith encouraged her to keep up with her play-reading group. In fact, he’d supported her in all her Greenwich Village hobbies: meditation, book club, health food, neighborhood preservation. When she had to go offer testimony at a hearing over one of the City’s endless redevelopment plans, he took off work to watch Will. He would always remember, he thought, how he’d gripped the seat of the boy’s new bike and jogged around the park the smart money still said would be razed to make room for a highway, and how, at the end of the umpteenth circuit, Regan had arrived amid a cluster of women in skirts, the youngest and prettiest among them. How she’d blushed and raised her fists in victory. He felt just then as if his soul had swelled to fill his skin—as after scrimmages in high school, when he’d walked home tossing the ball to himself in the fast-descending night, replaying sixty-yard touchdown runs.
That was probably, come to think of it, the geometric apogee of his life, because the salesman’s Second Commandment (again) was Believe What Thou Art Selling, and this proved to be a little trickier than the First, when what thou werst selling wast thyself. In 1970, for example, with Regan pregnant again and Will nearing school age, Keith started to feel he wasn’t making enough money. Each new tax bracket was a kind of elevation from which you could survey all the things you couldn’t yet afford. If Regan liked the book club that met at her friend Ruth’s house, how much more might she have liked a home she could actually entertain in? If she liked the community garden she and the other mothers had made in the vacant lot down the street, how much more might she have liked her own private yard? Or at least a balcony where she could pot her herbs?
By the time he confessed to Regan that he’d been talking to a real-estate agent, he had made up his mind. Uptown, in a Classic Six, Will and the baby would have their own rooms, and wouldn’t have to be around the hopheads and barking lunatics who had lately taken over the Village. It would mean working harder, of course, to take home more money, they both knew that, but in truth Keith had grown bored in the upper-middle echelons at Renard. He had a solid list of clients; what if another firm let him bring them over and start a named advisory business of his own? He sincerely believed, as he laid all this out for her, that this was what he wanted. The charity dinners, the harbor cruises, the corporate picnics where you plucked new business … he enjoyed them, didn’t he? He enjoyed having to turn on the charm, having had a little too much to drink. And he would be someone now, the head of his own group—Lamplighter Capital Associates. With his Brooks Brothers shirts, his fancy Swiss watch, and a driver waiting downstairs, he would finally feel he deserved her.
IT WASN’T LONG AFTERWARD that Keith began exploring the wonders of leverage. The cocktail-napkin version looked like this: if he combined two dollars borrowed cheaply from the bank with one dollar from a client’s account, then each dollar made on the three-dollar investment more or less doubled his client’s money. The particular sector he was experimenting in was military. Personally, Keith was a dove, and had written some large checks to Hubert Humphrey during the ’68 election. He’d nonetheless ridden out the bear market that followed by taking big positions in Dow Chemical, in Raytheon, in Honeywell, both for clients and for himself. And though there was some risk in maintaining them—the war couldn’t go on forever, could it?—Nixon’s expansion into Cambodia and Laos seemed to open up demand for all kinds of new product lines. If Keith was right, he was going to have leveraged himself into a nice modern house in New Canaan by the time the next correction came. Meanwhile, in the name of diversification, Keith was now long on the City itself. That is, he’d begun moving his clients into long-term New York municipal bonds.
They’d first drawn his eye toward the end of 1972, when he was certain they were undervalued. True, the later part of the war years had been punishing for the local economy. In the early ’60s, the Lower West Side in the a.m. had still been so dense with shipping pallets you could barely walk; now the loading docks were all sealed up and shrouded with graffiti. You could hear pigeons brooding there behind the corrugated steel. Tax revenues were suffering, and there was talk, if you listened to Dick Cavett or the “Dr.” Zig show, of a permanent shift to a symbolic economy, or a service economy—an economy based on anything other than measurable human production—but this struck Keith as the worst kind of eggheadery. And what about real estate? It used to be that from eight to eight the whole city was musique concrète: drills jackhammers belt-sanders electric saws and the pizzicato plink of hammer on nail. He remembered scaffolding marring the long-in-the-tooth face of every other building in Midtown, wrecking balls like slow fists clobbering the tenements. Will, at two or three, had loved to watch the cranes, and flying above the operator’s cabin or aerie the big bright American flag. Now the smug numbers of the ticker machine said real estate was depressed. It made Keith want to take the ticker machine up to the top of the Hamilton-Sweeney Building and show it the limited landmass of Manhattan. What happens when the 2 percent of American males eighteen to thirty-four currently wading through the rice paddies of Southeast Asia return to rent apartments, look for jobs, consume durable goods? The tax base comes roaring back, obviously. This isn’t Soviet Russia. This is America we’re talking about. For God’s sake, this is New York City.
The oil shock a few months later made him feel prescient. The Dow Jones took a bath, but the ratings agencies had returned city debt to AAA status, and Keith had already put $4 million into thirty-year munis and even picked up a $100,000 bond for himself. And when, in early ’74, those same munis dipped down to 20 percent below face value, he went back to the well with another $4 million. This time, he bought the bonds on margin, matching each dollar of equity with a dollar of debt. If he didn’t seek his clients’ explicit permission, it was only because it was so clear leverage was what they would want. His personal accounts were even less liquid, but he managed to scrape together enough cash to buy another five bonds on margin for himself.
By the fall, he had $6 million of other people’s money, $300,000 of his own, and $2.2 million of the bank’s in a tax-free and virtually riskless instrument. A strange thing had happened, though. Not only did the global market remain slumped, but nothing in New York seemed to be performing: not private housing or public housing, not urban renewal, not office space. Occupancy rates at the newly built Trade Center hovered around 30 percent. Even Radio City now was on the auction block. It shouldn’t have been a surprise; the last time Keith had been there, the five thousand seats had been so empty you could hear not only a cough but the rustle of a cough drop being unwrapped. It was a Thursday matinee of Herbie Rides Again, but he’d needed a couple of hours away from reality. Because, amid talk of the federal government having to backstop the city budget, his $8.5 million muni spree was now worth not the $10 million it should have been, conservatively, but $6.4 million. A margin call from the bank would force him to realize losses close to 50 percent; here in the corporeal world, leverage, depressingly, turned out to be just a synonym for amplification. And in any case, if his clients woke up to what he was doing behind their backs—on their behalf!—he could lose his business.
Thank God, then, that his military-industrial speculations continued to thrive, tossing off their soporific dividend checks. At the 1974/75 Hamilton-Sweeney New Year’s gala, men in tuxedoes, their faces barely recognizable, queued three and four deep to shake his hand. They had no idea about the great, sucking h
ole in his balance sheet.
Neither did Regan. “It’s like you’re a celebrity or something,” she said afterward, perched on the edge of the bed, leaning forward to roll down her hose. She had always gone to these parties grudgingly; he had the feeling she’d rather have stayed home and watched The Brady Bunch with the kids, but there was a new thing in her voice as she sat up to watch him struggle with the knot of his tie. “I’m proud of you, you know.”
They’d both had several glasses of champagne, but he wanted to believe that if they made love that night, for the first time in—had it really been a month?—it wouldn’t just be the alcohol. They lay on their sides with the lights off, barely moving, trying not to wake the kids, and as part of him slipped into Regan, inching down the path to freedom, another part of him thought, So this is what it really feels like to be a man. Not the fullback carrying home the golden cup, but the compromised, muddled, and not entirely forthcoming creature now trying to pretend to his wife that he’s as lost in the moment as she herself is.
OR IS PRETENDING TO BE. For Regan seemed to have struggles of her own. Cate had been a difficult pregnancy, leaving her housebound for long stretches. And Regan would have been an uneasy transplant to the East Sixties regardless; she’d been happier in the rockier soil downtown. Now that her various personal pursuits—and the larger pursuit of the right pursuit—had lapsed, much of her time not occupied with Board matters was lavished on one kid or the other. It wasn’t that Keith was jealous, exactly, but the way all their conversations became about the kids worried him. Then again, he could hardly ask her about it, because it was just as likely his fault. He’d long since lost track of who’d started hiding first.
He began avoiding home, staying late at the office after everyone had left or going to the Y to swim laps until his eyes were bleary with chlorine, or jogging down along the FDR as shadows stretched over the city, devouring the blown-out tires and heavy shopping bags and encrustations of guano that lined the pedestrian path until it was just auto fumes blasting into and out of his lungs and ghostly horns and the disembodied taillights moving at a sluggish jogger’s pace along the drive.
When he finally reached the big new apartment, his dinner would be in foil on the dining room table. Will might still be on the rug on his stomach in that adorably defenseless way of his, with his homework all around him. But Cate would be in her room asleep, or busy with the hamsters Regan had bought her. And Regan would be curled up in their bedroom reading plays in what he’d come to think of as her chastity sweatpants—formless cotton things. Even they couldn’t disguise that she’d lost weight, more than was probably healthy. Sometimes he had the dim intuition that he was supposed to ask her about this, but what if she told him it was nothing, and left him there extended over the abyss by himself? Or conversely: What if she told him something he didn’t want to hear? And asked him, in return, why he was avoiding the apartment? How could he make her see that it wasn’t that he didn’t love this; that in fact he loved it too much to contaminate it with the infection that was, apparently, him? Instead, he would pour his drink and put on his Scottish bagpipes LP and stand by the window, looking out over the city. He was in his own transparent hamster ball, he thought, rolling around, unable to make contact.
THE DAY THE WORD “DEFAULT” first began to percolate through the papers—the day people started to wonder if there was even any bottom to hit—he saw nothing for it but to call in sick. He took Will to the Park after school, to practice with the lacrosse stick. When Keith was a kid, “sports” had meant football, baseball, and basketball, but weren’t they paying tuition precisely so the kid could have choices? Well, that and because the public schools frightened even Keith. Besides, he had to admit he liked the resinous warmth of the wood on his palms, the ultraquick rip of the pocket through the air when he sent the little ball streaking deep over the Great Lawn—his old friend leverage, again. Will, though, as regards hand-eye coordination, was a Hamilton-Sweeney through and through. Clambering back across the green, his awkwardly long shinbones kicking up high in front of him, his shirt billowing like a sail, he resembled for a second his namesake, Regan’s vanished brother, who, Keith dimly remembered, had also played lacrosse for a semester or two. It was so striking that he almost didn’t notice the glum blankness on Will’s face when he returned.
He stood behind the boy, adjusted his grip on the stick, trying to reverse-engineer the mechanics of the trapping move he himself had mastered. (Why hadn’t he just stuck to what he was good at?) “No, like this.” The relative positions of their bodies recalled some other day, years ago, when he’d taught Will how to fly a kite, or throw a Frisbee or something, he couldn’t quite remember anymore, his senses were too full of his current son, ten years old, his hair level with Keith’s chest. When had it stopped being whitish-blond? And when had his pliant body, which once would have done almost anything to be close to his dad, grown so stiff, as though there was something unmanly about their hands meeting on a lacrosse stick? “Okay, okay, I’ve got it,” Will said, and backpedaled away. Other grown-ups and other kids floated behind him, little colored no-see-ums against the grass. “Fire it in here, Dad. No weak stuff.” Keith, who for unexamined reasons had to win any competition he found himself in, wound up and threw the ball as hard as he could. It shot past Will’s shoulder and into the field beyond, and Will cursed as he turned to chase it, as if his father, who’d never heard him use the f-word, weren’t standing right there. Keith thought again of the rumors that had been flying around Wall Street all morning. One held that New York munis were trading at half off. Another, which he was afraid to check out, was that no one was buying these pigs at all. But later, Keith would decide that this was the moment he had really given up—the moment when he’d become invisible even to his son.
HE DID PLAN TO OPEN UP TO REGAN about his mistakes—at this point, he’d begun borrowing from Will’s trust fund just to cover family expenses—but on the night they sat down together over lo mein after the kids were in bed, they talked mostly of her need for a change. She’d found herself wondering lately, she said, whether her brother hadn’t been right to get out of New York altogether, all those years ago. She’d believed in the promises of the ’60s, after all, even if she’d participated only indirectly. Hadn’t they told themselves they would not be like the generation of their parents, trapped in choices they’d made at twenty?
There were still worlds within Regan not confined to wifehood, to motherhood, he saw. But even as these glimpses thrilled him, they pained him, too, by reminding him of all he’d forgotten … and for what? He could barely remember. On his finger was a ring he’d worn now for fourteen years, nicked and scratched and lovely white gold, and when had he last really noticed it? It was as if, Keith thought, he had acquired his own Demon Brother: the depresh, the megrims, the black dog that followed you wherever you went. It was as if every American now had his own dark twin, the possibility of life lived some other way, staring back at him from store windows and medicine chests. Had his parents had this? His grandparents? He realized it was Regan staring at him.
“What?”
“If something’s on your mind, honey, you can tell me.”
But how could he tell her? How did you find your way back to the mirror, and the proper life that lay on the far side of the glass?
DEUS EX MACHINA, was how. He had signed up for a three-day conference of financiers on The Future of the City, hoping to glean some way out of the disaster he’d gotten himself into. It was false advertising; for the word “Future,” they should have substituted “Crisis,” because that was all anyone would talk about. Oil crises and demand crises, crises in confidence. Some believed that, in the age of floating currency, confidence was the only thing keeping the system from collapse. And these were the optimists! The people who, like Keith, held on to old-fashioned ideas about value as something empirically ascertainable—they tended to think everything was really fucked.
On Friday morning, having
learned next to nothing, Keith stepped out of a session to get some air. The lobby was empty, and the sound of his wingtips on the polished marble struck him as somber, though perhaps this was the accumulated gloom of yet another presentation. The American city is over, the presenter had been arguing, as slides of post-riot Detroit or Pittsburgh flickered on a screen behind him. There won’t be ground broken on another major development in New York for twenty years. This very New York into which Keith was pushing—it still seemed to him impossible that it should fail. Speaking of impossible: Who should be sitting on a traffic bollard there, in a bespoke suit, but Amory Gould?
Not wanting to be rude, Keith went over to say hello. In lieu of a greeting, Amory held out a pack of cigarettes. He could have afforded Dunhills or Nat Shermans, Keith thought, but the ones on offer looked cheap, with a Spanish name: Exigente. For etiquette’s sake, he accepted. The first drag made his head swim; he hadn’t touched tobacco since the sulky week or two that had followed his football injury in college. “Thanks,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you here among the gloom-and-doomers.”
“Oh, I never miss a chance to see people trapped in a category error.”
Keith looked up. With his white hair, Amory had once seemed so much his senior as to hail from a different century, but now they could have been contemporaries. Indeed, of the two of them, Amory was probably the more vital. “You think they’re wrong in there?”
“What I think is that liquidity and vision, my boy, can still do great things. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.”
City on Fire Page 30