Mount Pleasant

by Don Gillmor

  After five minutes, Harry was helped onto a lounge chair, where he sat beside a woman with a sleepy grey face, wearing the same gowns as him. They chatted drunkenly. A nurse gave him a small cup of apple juice and handed him a form. On the top, written in blue ink, were the words “seven polyps (small).”

  Harry got dressed shakily, then was ushered into Dr. Nathlett’s office, where he began to focus. Dr. Nathlett had a small head, a ring of ginger hair, a freckled face that looked unhealthy, a heaviness that spread over his chair.

  “We found something,” he said.

  “Seven polyps.”

  “We took them out. They’ll get looked at.”

  “What if they’re cancerous?”

  “Well, let’s wait on that. They’re small. It’s lucky you came in when you did.”

  But seven—such a precise number. Harry wondered if there could have been eight, or nineteen. Did they find everything? What could you see in that underwater camera, that searching eye that crawled along his scourged bowel? Don’t we have sixty feet of large intestine? Or is it more? The colon was only part of the intestine, though Harry wasn’t clear on that relationship. How could you check that expanse? It would take a crew of technicians, a Cousteau expedition.

  “We should have some results in two weeks.”

  “But if the result is positive? If they are cancerous?” Harry was suddenly sure they were.

  “Well, we have options.”

  “Options.”

  “At this stage, with their size.” The doctor held his thumb and index finger a millimetre apart to indicate smallness.

  “You’ll call, then.”

  “Better that you check back in two weeks. Call my receptionist.”

  Harry left the hospital and got into a cab. He watched the east-end houses go by, modest bungalows built for returning World War II veterans. He passed the halal butchers, the impromptu mosque, the cutely named organic café, the Greek clubs with men sitting outside in the cold air, smoking and gesturing, filled with solutions. The drugs were regrettably wearing off, leaving him bereft. A group of boys spilled along the sidewalk, slapping, laughing and grabbing one another. Two weeks to wait for news. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. It was someone’s motto.

  FIFTEEN

  “YOU DON’T SEE IT. That’s the beauty. It’s invisible. It’s moving through this room right now, millions, the molecules traceless. It’s silent, and everywhere it goes it takes something. It moves like the plague. That’s how you tell it came through. You count the dead.”

  “But it gives something.”

  “Money’s a dark gift, Harry.”

  “You bought my mother’s house.”

  “I’m putting it on the market. It’s too broody for me. All those old bricks. They’re like tombs, those places. I’ve got a condo, windows on three sides. You wake up you know it’s morning. In those old places, you wake up, its 1912. You want to buy the place, Harry? It’s yours if you want it.”

  Dick Ebbetts punctuated this offer with a shrug. The considerably padded shoulders of his tight suit didn’t come back down with his shoulders but stayed up around his ears. He was framed by the pewter-coloured banquette. Above that, a million dollars’ worth of climate-controlled Burgundy. They were sitting in Crux, amid the animated lunch crowd.

  Harry considered the imbalance between himself and Ebbetts. Harry was burdened by debt and colon cancer (he was increasingly convinced), and unburdened by sex. This troll was rich, from all accounts had inventive sex with beautiful escorts and was, as far as Harry knew, disease-free. These comparisons with other people had become involuntary for him. He had invited Ebbetts to lunch in the hope of getting more information on BRG in the wake of Tommy Bladdock’s news that the Securities Commission was looking at the company.

  Harry stared at Ebbetts’ stubby manicured hands. Ebbetts the thug. So thought his mother and sister. Perhaps they were right. But Ebbetts was the only one at BRG who wasn’t tied to the company through the daisy chain of bloodlines, intermarriage, and racquet club memberships. The meeting was awkward because of his mother and her house, though Ebbetts’ purchase of it was chalked up, nominally at least, as an act of charity.

  “How did BRG come out of the subprime crash?” Harry asked.

  “We’re far enough from the killing floor that we didn’t get any blood on our shirts.”

  “But they didn’t see Lehman Brothers coming.”

  “No one saw Lehman. You figure banks are the bedrock. Then you find they’re basically the big, disruptive dummy in the back of the class who gets pushed through the system because no one wants to deal with him.”

  Ebbetts’s plump hands described tiny circles in the air. “Look, the whole thing was going to topple anyway. More people got in, they started working the margins at first. For a long time you could do pretty good just eating after the big cats were full. But this clusterfuck between the bankers and the carnies, they gave birth to that monster: a million subprime mortgages hustled to single mothers in Florida that are going up three points after year two. You take that debt and roll it up with Russian oil and student loans and the Vegas line on whether Tom Cruise is gay, and you dress it up so it looks like a bond and sell off slices in London and New York, and pretty soon even you don’t know what you’re selling. You’re the guy selling the air inside Yankee Stadium, and everyone is thinking, Well, we have to breathe.”

  Harry looked around the restaurant and made a rough calculation of the accumulated net worth of the people who were eating lunch. He came up with the unscientific figure of $314 million. But who knew what kind of debt was eating these people? A developer who was overextended, his suburban mega-mall project stalled because of skittish banks or retail saturation. A banker with a gambling problem. A lawyer on his fourth marriage. Hopefully there was some tragedy amid the caramelized sea scallops in truffle sauce ($48) and the 2008 Puligny-Montrachet ($465).

  “Is it possible that Press is under some financial pressure, Dick?”

  “You mean personally underwater?”

  “Taken a hit somewhere.”

  Ebbetts waved his knife, a speck of blood on the serrated blade. “You want to map Press’s progress, just look at the declining value of his girlfriends. Fifteen years ago it was that former skater, did PR, I think she medalled in Sapporo. Four, five years ago, the spokesmodel what’s-her-name, back-combed, brain-dead. Now it’s a Russian, she has about eight words of English. You’re a technical analyst and you throw those girls up on a chart, you can see he’s basically 1929.”

  “Could he have been desperate enough to take Dale’s money?”

  “It’s a leap, Harry. He would have to be standing on the ledge.”

  “Do you know for sure he wasn’t?”

  “Nothing is for sure. Look, all the money is concentrated at the top. But it’s never enough. How do you make more? In another five years, brokers will go the way of travel agents. You can buy stocks on the Internet for five bucks a trade. Half the time you’ve got the same information as your broker. They’re on TV giving away their so-called expertise for free.”

  Ebbetts took a quick bite of his steak, chewed it rapidly and started talking before he’d swallowed. “The rich got rich by fucking the poor, but now the poor don’t have anything left. So the only people left to fuck are the rich. The market looks like that soccer team that crashed in the mountains. Everyone’s eating each other.” Ebbetts stared upward. “Look, Harry, there’s something you should know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well … Look, I’m not saying this is anything that happened, but the market, you know, the whole thing is held up by rumour and bullshit. So here’s the deal. There is a rumour, and I emphasize the word ‘rumour,’ but there has been talk that Dale had his hand in the till. Somehow.”

  “What?”

  “Like I said, there is not one shred of evidence. This is talk. But talk is talk, and when you’re dealing with whoever, you should have this in your poc
ket is all.”

  “If my father stole money, then why would all his money be gone?”

  “Well, the theory is that it’s one of these I-got-burned-so-how-could-I-be-the-guy-who’s-doing-it things. He takes his own money, parks it wherever, they find out he’s been ripped off, and he’s a victim rather than a suspect.”

  Harry suddenly wondered if the Securities Commission was investigating his father.

  “Press thought my father was embezzling?”

  “It came to his attention.”

  “My father knew his clients. They were friends of his. He played tennis with them. He wasn’t going to steal their money. Even if he could, he wouldn’t. Even if he had some kind of latent criminal bent, even if he had motive and opportunity, Dick, he couldn’t do it. For him, the social stigma would be unbearable. And it would last generations. It would be his legacy. He’d never have risked that.”

  “Harry, you don’t need to defend Dale to me. I’m just telling you what to expect.”

  “What to expect,” Harry repeated.

  “Maybe Sampson knows something. I mean, the guy’s on his way out. I don’t know the prognosis, but it’s weeks at this point. Maybe you can get a deathbed confession out of him.”

  Harry thought about August’s phone call. “How close are August and Press?”

  “They don’t see each other outside the office, but there’s almost fifty years there.”

  The waiter came over and stood in that attentive way that stopped conversation, and they ordered coffee.

  “Watch out for Press, Harry, I mean it,” Ebbetts said after the waiter left. “He got caught in the last downdraft. He’s on his way out and he’s full of shit, but he’s a wounded lion.”

  “And why are you leaving this wonderful game, Dick?”

  “You’re thirty years old, the market seems like the centre of the world. But from where I’m sitting, it looks like a dying planet.” Ebbetts tore into the remains of his cold steak, cutting off small pieces that he stabbed into his mouth. He reminded Harry of a heron, stabbing frogs in the shallows with its deadly bill.

  “The shareholder is god and the shareholder is an idiot,” Ebbetts said, “and we live in this splendid paradox. Generally, Harry, we’re dealing with two things: shit no one understands, and shit everyone understands.”

  Their coffee arrived and they drank it slowly, chatting aimlessly about baseball.

  When the check came, Harry made a slow-motion reach for it, but Ebbetts thankfully picked up (he was the one who had chosen Crux) and resisted Harry’s token protest. They worked their way out of the booth and shook hands as they stood outside the restaurant. Behind them were Mies van der Rohe’s stirring towers. Beauty in simplicity. A version of the buildings existed in New York and Chicago, a template for the modern world. A courier zigzagged across the busy street, weaving among BMWs.

  “Harry, you know why Deutsche Bank got screwed on those subprime bonds?” Ebbetts said. “Because they’re Germans. They believe in rules. They think there are rules. They believe the ratings agencies did their homework. But no one does any homework anymore. And there are no rules. Look, Harry, I’m sorry about this thing with your dad. I don’t know what happened there. But you should be careful. I don’t have a dog in this fight anymore. But it’s a lot meaner out there than it used to be.”

  They shook hands again and Harry walked to his car. The downtown air was percussive. Noises came from every direction. City life was disguised as harmony, but it was warfare. People wanted what you wanted. They bid against you for houses, got up earlier than you to enroll their children in enviable summer camps, took the last daycare spot. Criminals were easier to deal with. They took what you had. They broke into your house and stole your stereo and shit on your Persian carpet. Harry wasn’t sure he wanted what he had. But other people—almost everyone, it seemed—wanted what he wanted.

  SIXTEEN

  HARRY SHOWERED THEN SHAVED, first with the grain, then against it. He rinsed with warm water, then cold, and applied some of Gladys’s expensive moisturizer, then gave his cheeks a nostalgic slap, as men had done in the age of aftershave, the sting of alcohol and violence before going out to threaten the world. He put on jeans and a black polo shirt that flattered his torso.

  He had $119 in his savings account. His Visa bill was comfortably into five figures, gently testing the $20,000 threshold, his maxed-out line of credit holding steady. The dull buzz of his debt sounded like a cheap air conditioner, rattling and wheezing, though at the moment safely in the background. He smiled carefully at the mirror and went downstairs.

  Gladys was sitting at the table, drinking coffee. When he’d told her about his colonoscopy, he added a few polyps to bring the number to eleven, and said they were large, hoping to make an impression. Neither of these tactics had the desired effect, and so he added that the doctor “didn’t like the look of them.” He used the word “biopsy.” She remained maddeningly pragmatic, saying there was no use in worrying until the results came back.

  Harry made himself an espresso and sat down. “Ebbetts says my father may have embezzled from the firm,” he said.

  “Really? Why on earth would he say a thing like that?”

  “He thought I should know so I wouldn’t be blindsided if it came out in an investigation. Apparently, Securities is looking at BRG.”

  “I can’t imagine Dale taking money,” Gladys said. “Especially near the end. He was in no shape to do anything clever. Maybe someone is using him as a scapegoat. Blame the dead.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe it was Dick Ebbetts himself. Isn’t he leaving the business?”

  “I’m hoping Tommy Bladdock can shed some light. He wants to meet this morning.”

  “Tick tock,” Gladys said.

  Harry wasn’t, in fact, meeting Tommy Bladdock. His true mission filled him with shame, and he especially didn’t want Gladys to know he was going to a financial seminar that had been advertised in the paper, especially one with the slightly squishy title, “Personal Profit, Personal Loss: Finding Balance.” It was offered under the auspices of a financial think tank that dealt with global oversight, but the main attraction was Peter T. Horst, a television personality whose appearances veered toward the evangelical.

  Gladys would have sensibly suggested going to one of the free seminars offered by the bank. But the bank seminars had prosaic titles (“You and Your Savings”) that Harry felt were simply shills for the bank’s own investment vehicles. The decision to go to the seminar had been made at a moment when the sound of Harry’s debt had filled his ears like metal shearing off a defective jet engine and pierced the natural cynicism he had always held for this kind of Dale Carnegie self-actualizing whatever.

  He had felt that he needed to do something out of character, but now that he was on his way, he felt he should have obeyed his natural distrust of all mankind. He felt depressed and leery of his mental health.

  It was an overcast Saturday, the wind coming hard from the west. He walked briskly across the park. The splendid, unifying park filled with wealthy socialists, professional dog-walkers, lesbian soccer players and teenagers in search of calamity. In front of him, a woman loped uncomfortably behind her Bernese mountain dog. November was a dismal month, a palette of greys and bitter winds.

  Harry took the subway. There was a surprising number of people on it, given that it wasn’t a weekday. He examined the women around him. As adolescents, Harry and his friends used to manufacture their dream creatures: Elizabeth Taylor’s high-heeled, tipsy, feminine menace combined with Anne Bancroft’s legs and lascivious smile. He glanced carefully at the women on the train and mixed and matched.

  The seminar was in a venerable, still mostly grand hotel. Harry took a seat in the large meeting room, among three hundred or so people who were drinking coffee and finding their place in the rows of metal chairs draped with bunting. He was neither encouraged nor discouraged by his fellow seminar-goers, people who had also paid $275 for three h
ours of Peter T. Horst’s time. He hoped, though, that he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew.

  Horst was introduced by an attractive woman in impressive red heels who described him as “an investment luminary” and a man who “has integrated the personal with the financial” and who had “helped people just like you” in seventeen countries. Harry wondered if the woman travelled with Horst, and if this was her only duty.

  Horst was of medium height, with carefully combed, gleaming black hair. He wore a blue suit and a large watch that was visible when he solemnly grasped the edges of the podium. He had a sleek headset on, and stared out at his crowd.

  “You have lost something,” he stated right off the top, pausing for effect. “You’ve lost money. Perhaps you’ve lost your way. You don’t know where to turn. How will you live? This is the central question. I’ll repeat it: How will you live? The answer is: You will live the way you choose to live.”

  Horst left the podium and paced the front of the room. “When you woke up this morning,” he asked, “did you think about what you were going to do? Did you make a list that said: ‘Open my eyes. Get out of bed. Brush teeth. Get dressed. Make coffee. Read paper.’ No, you didn’t. You did the same thing you do every morning: you got up, got dressed, brushed your teeth, made coffee and read the paper.