“You hungry?” she said. Madison shrugged, and Lily waved a spoon back toward the table.
“Sit down, I’ll bring it to you.”
“I’m fine.”
“Proper meals are important,” Lily replied, hating herself even before she’d spoken. “Even when things are messed up. Especially then. Come on. Do me a favor.”
These children had never been confused about her, living in their house, cooking their meals. It was something she was proud of, actually. That she managed to live between the two states of being that rendered the quasi-familial roles of so many others in her position so miserable and awkward. They never saw her as a relative or a friend; their father paid her salary, and as a result she was owed a certain respect. Lily saw the behavior of other children—bright-colored smoothies spilled intentionally on silken upholstery, food thrown at walls coated with paint as expensive as a weekend at a Manhattan hotel. All to punish the people their parents paid to teach them right from wrong. Not these kids. But it was now, asking this girl to “do me a favor,” that Lily felt, radiating from Madison, an unfiltered hatred so strong it seemed to take its seat with them at the table. Madison sat down and looked up in a mockery of expectation. Her silence picked at Lily’s skin.
“All right,” Lily said. “Starve yourself. See if I care.”
Madison turned to the boys.
“It’s all right, Lou.” She began to ruffle his hair, catching it between her fingers and pulling it straight up in the air, which he loved. “What’s new in here?”
Lily leaned against the counter and watched the boys open themselves to their sister, uncurling legs that had been folded up beneath them, leaning forward as if to crawl across the table. They looked so small, their bones fit together like twigs and their bodies humming at quicker speeds beneath their near-translucent skin. But Lily knew this was her fear playing tricks on her.
SHE PUT THEM TO BED TOGETHER, in Matteo’s bed, their foreheads touching. Madison was somewhere else in the house; she’d barricaded herself in her room for the night, most likely.
Lily went downstairs and clicked off the kitchen lights. She stood for a moment at the window, looking out toward the side gate beyond the garage, where she could just see the headlights of the black sedan that had been parked down the hill for the entire week. There was another one a few feet past the main gate, and another just before you made the turn onto the main road.
When she’d considered this for a few moments, she left the house and walked down through the yard, to her own house beyond the pool, the place Bob D’Amico had given her to live.
TEN
Will the United States as we know it collapse this week? It may sound like so much alarmist hand-wringing, but it’s not an unreasonable question.
Does acknowledging that you sound like a fretful alarmist really let you off the hook? Madison thought. Isn’t that even worse than being unaware, to know you’re doing it and not care that you sound crazy?
It had taken Jake Levins only one week, after the news broke, to write a column about her father. Now she sat on the floor of her closet, one hand twisting up behind her to hold the doorknob, the Monday Times spread on the floor before her.
She couldn’t think of many other situations in which it would be necessary to have a lock on a closet door, but right now she could have used the privacy. Who doesn’t give a teenager a lock on her bathroom door? Isabel and Bob D’Amico, that’s who.
Weiss and its ilk—which of course includes the late, not-so-great Bear Stearns—are nondepository institutions. Their new way of doing things, in theory, does a better job of minimizing risk. Or maybe it just does a better job of ignoring risk. Because now, post-housing bust, you have to wonder if they assumed that hidden risk would be the same thing as managed risk. Did they think their investors wouldn’t notice what was going on?
Well, they didn’t. We didn’t.
How could people stand to read this? And people who, unlike her, had no personal warmth for Jake, no memories to fight back as they read his column. Madison could hear it read aloud in his own voice, the voice that had taught her curse words in Yiddish and Italian and German, that had asked her that very summer if she was enjoying Anna Karenina and let her unspool her entire tirade against it before telling her she was wrong. But what about the people reading this who didn’t know him? How could they stomach the showmanship, the smug disdain?
Here’s another quaint term for you: “bank run.” You might think of this as a term for another century, when angry mobs of despairing depositors pounded on the closed doors of a huge marble bank building. But this revolution won’t be televised; it will happen with the click of a mouse, with an executive excusing himself to check his phone during an off-site at the Four Seasons or The Mark. It will be quieter, sure, but the effects will be the same.
Mentioning those hotels, that was amateur hour. It made him sound like he’d never actually met anyone who worked at a bank. These people had no idea how her father spent his day, they just wanted to feel like they knew.
She had never thought of Jake or Lori as “these people,” but it wasn’t really her fault that she thought this now, was it? Based on this column, it was clearly how Jake wanted to be seen.
And now we’ve arrived at my main concern this morning: Weiss & Partners. Weiss banked, in the end, on being too big to fail. But Treasury refused to put any more public funds on the line for Bob D’Amico.
It could be worse, Madison thought. It had taken Jake until the tenth paragraph to mention her father’s name.
She’d read enough elsewhere, too, to know that Jake might have leaned a lot harder on the question of whether anything illegal had happened. On her father’s public statements all year, and whether they could possibly have been truthful. On what really lay behind her father’s decision to fire Erica, to fire Jim.
Some of the other bloggers, most of whom were probably half her father’s age and had accomplished approximately one ninety-eighth what he had, seemed to be stuck on her father’s childhood, which as far as she knew no one had ever cared about before. He’d never been that kind of famous. But now, apparently, it mattered.
How could a man from such a rough background, they wondered, be so out of touch with what life was like for the majority of Americans? Because he spent his days, whether on the Gold Coast or in Manhattan, surrounded by his underlings or their equivalents. Protected from reality by an army of sycophants. (This is a dark day for Greenwich, Madison thought, all these men and their wives learning via some journalism school graduate who couldn’t get a job at the Times that they’re technically just underlings of my father’s.)
Her mother was often mentioned, too. Bob and his blond, pedigreed wife were the figureheads, the dolls atop the cake for a firm at which morality and loyalty were so cherished. One firm—the place where everyone was still married to his first wife. Or so they’d always claimed. But that loyalty extended only to the front door; D’Amico’s loyalty, in the end, was always to his own guys.
Isn’t that what the word loyalty actually meant, though? Who would talk about being loyal to strangers?
We’ve got a car rolling slowly toward a cliff. Some guy shows up and, shrugging his shoulders, gives it the final push over the edge. Do we blame that guy? Or do we blame the guys who drove the car to the cliff’s edge in the first place?
She tried to read it without taking it in, her eyes glancing off each word like a stone skipping along the surface of a lake. But of course she could guess, without reading the next paragraph in detail, whom Jake would decide to blame.
Bob D’Amico and his erstwhile buddy, Jim McGinniss. Erica Leary, the CFO they hired and fired within the same year. The Big Three. But the only one who should have been in the driver’s seat was Bob D’Amico. He’s Wall Street’s longest-running CEO; whether he likes it or not, his name is synonymous with the name Weiss & Partners. And as an article in the Times put it, Weiss is now the Roach Motel—its investors checked in, but t
hey can’t check out. This will spread to the hedge funds, even if they’re not suffering yet. They’re going to have some bank runs of their own, and they’ll have to raise cash with fire sales of their assets. And what of D’Amico himself, the King of the Cockroaches? Did he scramble his way out of that car before it went over that cliff? Or will he have to answer, in court, for his crimes?
Where did the term “fire sale” come from, she wondered. Was the idea that there had been a fire, and you were capitalizing on it to sell things to the people who had suffered? Who was the injured party, during a fire sale?
But something about thinking that way, about her idle wondering, began to pour itself into the contours of what she’d read in Jake’s column in an unpleasant way. Thinking in those terms: blame, indictment, exploitation, exposure. She swallowed hard and crossed her legs. The newsprint had rubbed off on her elbows and fingertips. Her laptop had disappeared without comment from her bedroom last week, and Lily had said nothing since. The only other way to get online in the house—and Madison’s tongue went dry at the thought of someone seeing her reading any of this in the computer lab at school—was the family computer in the den, which was far too exposed during the regular flow and shuffle of breakfast time. But she needed to read in the morning; she needed to know what everyone at school would have seen on their breakfast table. And so she’d woken early, just as she had the day before, to swipe the newspaper from the foyer before Lily had time to hide it.
What about the fact that Jake knew Bob D’Amico personally? Shouldn’t he have been compelled to say, I despise this man and always have, read on with a grain of salt at hand? Why were her father’s flaws the only ones worthy of examination?
She opened the newspaper and read the column again.
MONDAY SLUICED PAST HER, just as each day had in the previous week. She woke up an hour before her alarm, snatched the newspaper, sat with her brothers at breakfast. She avoided Lily’s eye in the car. She went to class; she hid when she glimpsed Amanda at the other end of a clogged hallway. She came home, stole a few minutes at the computer whenever she could read what the Internet had to say about her father.
Other than brief glimpses upstairs, she had not seen her mother at all. It had still only been one week.
SHE WOKE UP IN HER BEDROOM, its familiar dark shapes all around her. It clearly wasn’t Tuesday morning yet, but she didn’t move to consult the clock on her bedside table, an ornate, gold-leafed behemoth her father had brought home on a red-eye from Milan. Isabel’s first reaction had been that the clock was “a bit much,” but Madison loved it, its bedside authority, its curlicues unfurling like the wings of a golden owl.
From across the room, she could see her phone’s shrill red blink. Most likely that was another mealymouthed text apology from Wyatt Welsh, meant to cover the most recent time he’d insulted her father while she stood within earshot. Today, it had been in the cafeteria, while she paid for her paper carton of tomatoes and lettuce drizzled in vinegar. Someone from school must have mentioned it to a parent, who would have called Wyatt’s house to chide his mother in a velvety whisper, because the two apology texts she’d received from him already were so clearly dictated to him that Suzanne might as well have sent them from her own phone. Which was worse, derision or the deflection of selfish fear? At least Wyatt made his thoughts known, with little remorse other than what was foisted on him by his mother. But Suzanne was so desperate for her condescension not to occur in the daylight, where others could see. She wanted permission to brag about the son she envisioned, wanted to wipe any evidence of a lesser, crueler person from the record. It was almost charming, in its way, so naive. You had to pity Suzanne, really. The woman didn’t even know where her own weak spots were.
Madison sat up, straining to hear whether someone was in the kitchen. Her bedroom was separated from the other parts of the second story by a hallway of its own, and noise floated up via odd channels, the house’s unexpected currents. On the nights when the kitchen became headquarters for a real party, an actual event that required the French doors be thrown open so that guests could overflow out to the lawn, Madison might track the course of the evening without leaving her bed. She would hear mostly the afterthoughts, all the accoutrements of the evening. The chimes of empty champagne glasses assembled on a tray, the suck and whoosh of four industrial ovens swallowing and then ejecting croquettes or risotto cups or, finally, the miniature chocolate passion fruit soufflés that Bob insisted on serving no matter what the meal’s theme. The smells, too, seeped up through the carpeting and filled her mouth with their oiliness, even though the food would surely smell amazing once it passed out into the party.
And the servers, she heard them, too, the grad students who covered their tattoo sleeves with tuxedo jackets, then sneaked out to the tiny enclosed courtyard off the kitchen for their pre-dessert-course cigarettes behind the hedge. Their wheezing laughter, their rasping whispers edgy but still timid. She couldn’t hear their words, just their boredom, their lip-biting frustrations.
Madison heard it, smelled it, all of it. When something happened down in the kitchen, it felt like she could decipher its import. She told herself that it was for this reason that she slid from bed, her feet sinking into the mossy carpet, and opened her door.
But then she was not downstairs, she was darting up to her parents’ wing of the house. She didn’t think about it any further. She didn’t care what was said, even, so long as someone—her mother—said it to her, said something out loud.
The fluffy sea-foam comforter on their bed was pulled so tight that small wrinkles stretched across its rounded surface, a voluptuous woman squeezed into a silk gown just a few sizes too small. Tiers of pillows in pearly shades bubbled up at the headboard, undisturbed. Madison knew that her mother hadn’t let anyone into this room for several days; no one was cleaning up. She just wasn’t sleeping in her bed.
There was a low hum, an energy, in the room that Madison took for the sound of her own blood in her veins. But of course it was only the bathtub, the steady rising fall of water cascading from the faucet. Her mother was drawing a bath.
It wasn’t really snooping; she passed the bedside table on her way to the bathroom door. It was easy to imagine that the bottle, glowing burnt orange with its own secrets, had caught her eye from across the room. It was a bigger bottle, not the smaller one her mother’s Ambien was usually kept in, and it was lying on its side, the cap next to it, as though her mother had torn it open in a hurry and then cast it away from her. It was Mina’s name, on the bottle. The drug’s name was an unfamiliar one, and Madison both read it and did not. She filed it away between the same folds of her brain that had swallowed every word Jake Levins had written about her family that week.
She looked again at the bed, at the myriad pillows piled up for no one, but this time she could see the slight impression where her mother had curled her body, night after night, without disturbing the sheets.
It was possible that the bottle was lying there because Isabel had decided not to take anything. It was absolutely possible, and if her mother had chosen not to take these pills, that meant that she was coming out of it, recovering. That she would be not only prepared to talk to Madison, but probably wanted to. She might even have made noise downstairs on purpose. She must be hoping for just this moment, for Madison’s knuckles against the white paneled bathroom door, tucked discreetly into the bedroom wall.
The water didn’t shut off after her first knock, but she could have sworn that she heard her mother’s motions cease—whatever she’d been doing, whatever lotions or salt rubs she’d applied to her own body before lowering it into the hot water, stopped. Madison could hear her mother trying not to be heard. She knocked again. The water shut off.
“Who is it? Lily?”
“No, it’s—it’s me. I just wanted to make sure everything was okay. I heard a noise from the kitchen.”
“Jesus, you scared me. Did I wake you?”
“I just wanted to m
ake sure everything was okay,” Madison repeated. She heard a gentle sound, the displaced water lapping against the edge of the tub. Her mother had climbed the steps that led up to the sunken Jacuzzi tub, and now she was in. Which could, technically, be an invitation. It definitely wasn’t the usual deflection.
“I don’t want to bother you.”
“Well, Madison, I’m not going to beg you to come in.”
Her mother almost never invited her into this room. They were both, it often felt, still treating it as the violated sanctum it had been when Madison was eight years old and Isabel had found her perched on the vanity, tubes of lipstick scattered at her feet, her hands pressed to the mirrored cabinet and her bare toes curled over the edge of the sink. Isabel had plucked her from the mirror like an errant ball of lint caught in the sleeve of her Barbour jacket.
Every surface in the room was reminiscent of a pearl: opal-toned marble, gauzy mint green curtains, pale pink towels, and numerous iridescent bottles and tubes and pots of velvety lotions.
To the right, a door led to her father’s bathroom. In there it was different, everything dark wood, her father’s effort to transport himself to the house in Sun Valley for his daily lather and shave. When she was smaller, he’d regularly let her curl up in the empty bathtub to watch him while he shaved, and even in summers she’d close her eyes and pretend it was snowing outside, that they’d been snowed in together. That he wasn’t leaving. That there was no one else on earth who needed his time any more than she did, no one else to whom he’d made any real promises.
Isabel was lying with her head cradled against the far corner of the tub, the rest of her submerged completely beneath the bubbles. Her eyes were closed.
“Come sit with me for a bit,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
Madison leaned back against the wall.
“How has school been?” her mother said.
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