Читать книгу Love In The Air - James C. Collins - Страница 8

For its entire history, the firm of Beeche and Company, which could trace its origins to New Amsterdam, had engaged solely in one commercial activity: trading. At no time had it cultivated or mined or manufactured any good; it acted, rather, as merchant, factor, broker, financier. At its beginnings, it imported the axes that it traded for wampum, which it traded for beaver skins, which it sold for export. Later on, it bought corn and wheat from the farms of the north and sent its ships laden with them to the Caribbean, where they exchanged their cargo for sugar, rum, molasses, and indigo, which, on the ships’ return, Beeche re-exported to the east and west; sometimes, the eastbound ships, after first calling in Britain or France, traveled down to the African coast and then sailed back across the Atlantic with cargo that was human. Beeche was among the first in New York to trade commercial and government paper, and as the years passed it added the securities of banks, then of railroads, then of manufacturers, to its repertoire. By the turn of the last century the firm had grown into a large financial enterprise with thousands of employees, branches throughout the world, and a dozen divisions. Yet its basic business remained the same: trading for its own benefit and brokering the trades of others. No Beeche had touched a plow or a hammer for centuries, nor had he employed anyone who did.

Unlike its competitors, Beeche was still owned by its founding family; no partners had been invited in, nor had shares been sold to the public. Moreover, the Beeches had passed the company down roughly according to the right of primogeniture (although there had been times when women had run it—Dorothea Beeche famously made a killing in the Panic of 1819), so the ownership had remained concentrated. Since it was a private firm, no outsider could easily judge what Beeche and Company was worth, but it typically ranked at the top as an underwriter, and it was legendary for its ability to make huge bets and refuse to fold when the markets (temporarily) turned against it, so its capital must have been very substantial.

Apart from the firm, there were, of course, other sources of Beeche wealth, and their value was even harder to determine. The Beeches, for example, had acquired land continuously, and it was said that they had never sold an acre, but the extent of their holdings was unknown, as they had long since stopped using their own name in making a purchase. Then there were the collections of antiquities, paintings, sculpture, furniture, manuscripts, tapestries, books. Always patrons of American cabinetmakers and silversmiths, the Beeches also took shopping sprees in Europe that had preceded those of other Americans by a couple of generations. One of the Beeches had made a practice of providing liquidity to embarrassed maharajahs by buying their jewels; in the 1940s and 1950s, another had accepted paintings in lieu of rent from impoverished artists living in Beeche properties in lower Manhattan. Nor was it possible to say how much money the Beeches had given away. From the earliest Spastic Hospital through settlement houses on the Lower East Side to the newest program to eliminate malaria, they had exerted themselves philanthropically, usually with the right hand kept ignorant of what the left was doing.

Yet while precision might be elusive, it could be said with confidence, in a general way, that the Beeche fortune was vast.

The incumbent Beeche was named Arthur (as most of his predecessors had been). His legacy, with all its attendant powers and duties, had come to him at the age of forty. He was now fifty-three. One wet morning in June, Arthur Beeche was being driven from his house on Fifth Avenue to Beeche and Company’s headquarters on Gold Street. He had left at his usual time, four-fifteen, and at that hour the trip took ten minutes. Rory, the chauffeur, had minded Arthur since he was a little boy and, on account of his employer’s generosity and good advice, and his own shrewdness, he had acquired his own fortune. Right now he was making a big bet on volatility, as he told Arthur on the way downtown. They arrived at the Beeche Building, an enormous new edifice. The rain had made black patches and streaks on its slate cladding. Rory opened the car door for Arthur and scampered to open the door of the building. Although he was a large man, Arthur moved in a kind of shimmer, as if an invisible force were conveying him a finger’s width above the ground. “Good morning, Mr. Beeche,” said a security guard. Arthur smiled and said, “Good morning, Ignazio.” He shimmered over to his private elevator, and Ignazio pushed the button for him; the doors opened instantly. “How’s your little boy doing?” Arthur asked. “The first-grader.”

“Oh! Good, Mr. Beeche,” said Ignazio. “Very good.”

“Did he get glasses?”

“Yes, sir. It’s a big help.”

“That’s swell,” said Arthur. “But the other children don’t tease him?”

“Oh no. Maybe a little, but not so bad.”

“I’m glad to hear such a positive report,” Arthur said, entering the elevator. “See you tomorrow, Ignazio. Take care of yourself.”

“Yes, sir. You too, sir,” said Ignazio. “Don’t fight the tape!”

Arthur laughed. This was a little joke of theirs. “I’ll try not to!” he replied.

When Arthur got off on the seventy-seventh floor, a beautifully groomed woman, Miss Harrison, was there to meet him. She carried a folder full of correspondence. As they walked toward his office, he and Miss Harrison talked quietly about how Asia had closed. They passed by some empty desks, through a well-furnished anteroom, and then into Arthur’s office proper. It was large and decorated in the expensive but reserved style of a masculine upstairs sitting room in one of Arthur’s houses. There were three large paintings and several smaller ones. Arthur changed these regularly, enjoying the chance to study his pictures during his long hours at work.

He sat at his desk, which was bare of any papers. Miss Harrison placed the folder in front of him. She brought his attention to several matters. “Thank you, Miss Harrison,” he said, and she withdrew.

Arthur Beeche was six feet three inches tall and was powerfully built. He had a large head with a flat brow; his black hair had always been rather thin and, combed straight back, enough of it now remained only to cover his skull. The most striking thing about Arthur’s appearance may have been his mouth, which was incongruously sensitive-looking for the thick superstructure of his jaw and cheekbones. Today he wore a gray suit with a thin, faint red check, cut in the English style.

Arthur was thinking about something that he had not been able to get out of his mind since he first put the suit on that morning: his tailor had died. This event saddened and preoccupied Arthur. He was, naturally, concerned about finding someone who would make his clothes as skillfully. But he wasn’t thinking about that. The news was taking an emotional toll on Arthur, for his tailor had been a particular friend.

Sam Harrison (someone at Ellis Island had given his father, a Russian Jew, the same name as Arthur’s aide, who was a Harrison of Virginia) had become a Communist in the 1930s and had remained one. The greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, to his mind, had been the Normandy invasion. By the time the Allies had finally opened the second front, Sam always insisted, even Stalin had come to think that the Soviets could defeat Hitler alone, which would have secured all of Western Europe for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The very rich men of affairs among Sam’s clients took pleasure in it when he ranted against capitalism: the irony and humor of being abused by your incredibly expensive Communist tailor was delectable. Meanwhile, the idle men of fashion who patronized Sam all more or less agreed with him.

While Arthur’s fellow plutocrats treated Sam with amused, condescending patience, Arthur talked with him frankly and seriously. He didn’t relish the incongruity of paying someone to make his suits who, theoretically, would just as soon have seen him guillotined; his mind didn’t work that way. He disagreed with Sam and said so forthrightly, taking Sam’s opinions at face value, and Sam treated Arthur’s with the same respect, and as a result, as they argued over the years, they became better and better friends. What especially bound them together, though, were their discussions on a topic that was dearer to Sam even than politics: his wife, Miriam. He had married when he was twenty and his bride was seventeen, and he thought then, as he thought now, that Miriam was the most beautiful woman in the world (and he was not deluded in this). He had three sons and two daughters and many grandchildren and even a couple of great-grandchildren: he had loved them all and they had all made him proud (well, one of his daughters had married that pisher, but they got rid of him). But most of all, there was Miriam, a tall woman with long auburn hair and a sweet voice and even sweeter disposition. Sam loved her.

Now, Arthur had also loved his wife. They had fallen in love when he was twenty and she was seventeen, but, unlike the Harrisons, they were not married until several years later (and for that occasion, Sam had made Arthur a new morning coat for free). Without question, that had been the happiest day of Arthur’s life. As he said his vows, his voice cracked and he wept. He and Maria (pronounced with a long “i”) had been married for sixteen years, and he loved her throughout all that time and he loved her now. But she had died of cancer at age forty (at her most beautiful, Arthur and others believed). As he had been purely happy on his wedding day, so he was in pure despair on the day that Maria died. If the sun had burnt out and the seas dried up, Arthur might have been mildly troubled. Maria’s death made him distraught.

The person who best understood what had happened to Arthur was Sam Harrison. “It’s a tough break, kid,” Sam had said. Arthur had trembled.

“You know, Sam,” he had said hoarsely, “I have to travel a lot. The worst thing about it was always leaving her. But it was almost worth it because of how wonderful it was to see her again.” Arthur had been unable to speak for a moment. “Now I won’t see her again.” He had looked at Sam and saw the loose skin under his chin quiver and his eyes, each studded with a mole at the lower lid, begin to water. Sam held Arthur’s arm. “Yeetgadal v’yeetkadash sh’mey rabbah,” he had whispered. “B’olmo d’vero keerutey.” Arthur had not understood the words, nor had he fully grasped the significance of an atheistic Marxist’s uttering a prayer, but he appreciated the sentiment.

Sam and Arthur had always talked about Miriam and Maria, and they continued to long after Maria’s death. Years later, Arthur would ask Sam about Miriam, and Sam would grin and say, “Well, the other day …” But he would pause and look at Arthur, who would look back at him in the three-way mirror. Then Sam would say, “You’re still thinking about her.” And Arthur would say yes, and he would tell Sam some memory he had recently had about Maria—the soup in Madrid, her salamander brooch.

Maria was dead. They had had no children; Arthur himself had been an only child. His father was dead and now old Sam Harrison was dead. Arthur rose and looked out the window. The rising sun gave the rain clouds a dull glow. More cars had appeared. In a typical office building, even on a floor at this height, you could hear traffic, especially the slithering sound of tires on wet asphalt; typically, on a stormy day on a floor this high, the wind created spooky sonic reverberations and the building actually swayed. Arthur’s office was different. He heard no traffic or wuthering wind, and he felt no swaying. In his office, all was quiet, still. From his vantage he could see a dozen other buildings, and he thought about all the people who would soon be arriving for work. They constituted a lot of energy, activity money. A lot of life. Arthur did not wonder what it was all for. It seemed obvious to him what it was all for. His own life was busy and full. He had good friends; his mother was still alive and he was close to her. But he felt heavyhearted and alone.

A few hours later on that same June morning, a meeting was taking place on the fifty-ninth floor of the Beeche Building. It was in the small conference room, the one with no windows. One of the participants in the meeting, indeed its central figure, was a young man named Peter Russell. Peter was thirty-two years old; he had been working for Beeche and Company since his graduation from college, and he had advanced nicely. Despite the doubts he sometimes entertained about the value of his work, he had enjoyed it, he had enjoyed his success, and he had enjoyed his high pay.

On this morning, though, Peter was quite unhappy. In fact, he was at this moment the unhappiest he had ever been during his entire time at Beeche. The meeting, which he had gone into with enthusiasm, had become a savage, grotesque spectacle in which he was the victim. His tormentors had poured hot lead down his throat, cut off his private parts and stuck them in his mouth, and now, while he was still alive, they were tying each of his limbs to four different horses before sending the horses galloping off in four directions. Peter had fixed his face with an interested, wry expression while he listened to his colleagues, but he knew he was blushing bright red and that he was fooling no one. He felt sweat trickling down from his armpits.

It had all come about like this. A few weeks earlier, after a couple of his patrons had been shifted to different offices around the world, Peter had found himself working for a boss whom he didn’t know well. The things he’d heard about Gregg Thropp were not encouraging. Thropp was a short, stocky fellow, and he displayed all the Napoleonic traits so common among those of his physical type. He was driven, ambitious, self-important. When he walked, he moved his stubby legs so fast that even the long-legged had to work to keep up. Peter could see for himself that Thropp was insulting and rude to those below him. Others had warned him that Thropp was a devious, lying, backstabbing worm.

Yet toward Peter, Thropp hadn’t acted badly at all. To the contrary! Thropp had treated Peter with courtesy. He’d shown Peter respect in meetings. He’d given Peter credit when it was due him and encouraged and praised him, calling him “Champ.” Oh, sure, sometimes he could be pretty blunt, but it was hard to see what was so bad about Gregg Thropp. Peter had come to trust Thropp so much that he even went into Thropp’s office one day to show him something that had made Peter especially proud. He had played an important part in a couple of notably profitable transactions that had come to fruition when he was working for Thropp but that had been initiated previously. On this day Peter had discovered a small square envelope in his interoffice mail; inside, there was a handwritten note from Arthur Beeche himself! The note read as follows:

Dear Mr. Russell,

Please accept my congratulations on your fine work in the reinsurance and Italian bond matters. Well done!

Yours very truly,

Arthur Beeche

P.S. I hope you will join us soon for one of our entertainments.

Well, as one might imagine, Peter had been bowled over. A personal note from Arthur Beeche! What was more, it looked as if Peter was in line to receive an invitation to dinner at Beeche’s house. Arthur entertained often, and his dinners were legendary for the quality of the food and drink and for the glamour of the guests. A few people from the firm were usually included, and to receive your first invitation was an important honor. You were supposed to act nonchalant about it, but Peter had been so amazed and pleased that he’d taken the note into Thropp’s office and showed it to him.

“Well, well, well!” Thropp had said. “The Champ scores!” He had stood up and begun to lift and lower his arms in front of him, an absurd-looking motion for one so short. “Come on! The wave! The wave!” Thropp did this a few times before he started laughing too hard to continue. When he had recovered, he had looked at Peter earnestly.

“I’m proud of you, Peter,” Thropp had said. “I really am. One thing you can sure say about Arthur Beeche is that he has his eye out for talent. You’ve done good work and you deserve to be noticed. Congratulations.”

Thropp had held out his hand and Peter shook it.

“When I’m working for you,” Thropp had continued, “and it looks like that’ll be any day now, you won’t screw me, will you?”

They had both laughed.

Thropp wasn’t such a bad guy!

A few days later, Thropp had wandered into Peter’s office, looking thoughtful. “Say, Peter,” he had said, “you know your idea about securitizing home equity? I’d like to have a meeting on it.”

“Really?” said Peter. “But, God, it’s such a big thing, and it was just something I was fooling around with. I don’t think it’s anywhere near ready for a meeting.”

“Oh, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Just Huang, Kelly, Matt, you know, people like that.”

“But—”

“I’ve been thinking about it. There are a lot of possibilities. Let’s kick it around. Be a good thing for the team. Get some juices going.”

So it had been agreed that in a few days a meeting would be held at which Peter would give a presentation on his idea. This was the aforementioned meeting, which had descended into a bloodthirsty dance of death.

Peter had gotten a jolt as soon as he had entered the conference room. First of all, the place was already full, which was suspicious. Then he noticed that he didn’t see Huang, Kelly, Matt, or any of his other friends. Where was T.J.? T.J. should have been there! Peter barely knew some of the attendees. More troubling still, a man and woman from Upstairs were sitting in a corner of the room, away from the table. The man, a trim, fortyish black guy, was wearing his jacket even though everyone else was in shirtsleeves. The woman, in her fifties, sat there with an imperious, pre-bored expression. Peter had never met them, but he knew who they must be. He set up his computer and its connections; he noticed that his hands were shaking.

Thropp had begun the meeting. “Welcome, everyone.” He nodded toward the man and woman. “Rich, Andrea, thanks for taking the time to come down.” He rubbed his hands together. “Well, now, we’re all here to listen to Peter tell us about his new idea. Peter has been quite mysterious about it, playing it close to the vest, so I can’t tell you much about what he’s cooked up. He tells me it has the potential to be something very big. I’d usually want to spend some time going over a presentation like this myself, but Peter was so insistent on having a meeting that I said okay just to get him off my back!” Mild chuckles.

Thropp turned to Peter with a smile and gestured to him. “Go ahead, Peter,” he said. “It’s your meeting.”

This isn’t right, Peter thought. His heart began to pound. “Thank you, Gregg,” he said with a quaver.

What he had to say was very preliminary, he explained, and he had only a few slides to show. Then he had gone through it all: What is the greatest source of wealth in the country? The equity people have in their houses. Over the past twenty years, the debt on people’s houses had been securitized, providing a great benefit to borrowers and investors—and the firms in the middle. In Peter’s view, the mortgage market looked shaky. Would there be a way of securitizing home equity? Say a homeowner could sell some of the equity in his house. There could be individual transactions (after all, each mortgage is individual), and you could bundle up those equity stakes just as in the mortgage-backed market. Think of the advantages: home buyers would have an alternative to debt; homeowners could pay down debt and benefit from a rise in prices without selling their houses or borrowing more; they could diversify, buying equity in houses in different markets from their own. With the home equity securities would come hedging opportunities: people could short their own houses if they were in a bubble, and there would be any number of derivative plays. It would spread risk around, make the market more efficient. Then imagine the money you could make if you were the first to come up with such a product.

Peter liked his idea even though it was at only the fantasy stage, and as he spoke he couldn’t help but become more enthusiastic about it; this excitement combined with his anxiety made for a great agitation within him, as he allowed himself to think that he might possibly have carried others along.

He hadn’t. After he finished, saying, “Well, that’s about it. As I mentioned, it’s all very preliminary,” there was silence. A cough. A rustle of papers. Some taps of a pencil. Another cough.

Thropp spread out his hands. “Reactions? Rajandran?”

Rajandran was one of Thropp’s liege men, and Peter didn’t know him well; he spoke with great precision, polishing every phoneme. “Well, I am sure we all agree that Peter has some interesting ideas.” He smiled. It was amazing how white his teeth were. “But it seems to me that he’s missed the boat on this one.” Rajandran rattled on for several minutes, enumerating all the reasons everything Peter had said was absurd. The basic premise was nonsensical. The problems with execution would be horrendous. Peter completely misunderstood the market, the simplest model would show that. And on and on. Someone—some mysterious person—had obviously briefed Rajandran on what Peter was going to say and then instructed him to prepare an informed rebuttal. Peter glanced at Thropp, who was rocking in his chair and trying to suppress a smirk. Peter thought he could hear him humming.

As soon as Rajandran finished, before Peter could even begin to respond, someone else piped up. “You know, of course, Peter, that a futures market for housing prices was tried in London and was a complete disaster.” Another case of advance research!

“Yes,” Peter said, “but, really, there was a marketing problem—”

“Marketing problem!” his antagonist said sarcastically. “You want the firm to spend billions of dollars to redo the economics of housing—and you think a few ads will make the difference?” A snicker traveled the room.

A third henchman joined in. “What about the owner’s balance sheet?”

And then each member of the trio simply began to fire away: “Look at the piss-poor reaction to the Chicago Merc product.” “Wouldn’t insurance make more sense?” “Is it stochastic?”

Peter tried to answer (“… preliminary, something that would need to be looked at, I can’t be sure, um, uh …”). And then he just sat there listening, trying to look unfazed despite his red face and the sweat trickling down from his armpits. Finally, the bloodlust of his tormentors seemed to have been sated.

“Anyone else?” Thropp asked. When no one spoke, he turned to Peter. “Well, Champ, I guess you’re a few bricks shy of a load.”

The man and woman from Upstairs had whispered to each other and gotten out of their seats and were now leaving. They gave a nod to Thropp, who said, “Rich, Andrea, we’ll try to give you a better show next time.”

Peter’s head throbbed. He felt rage and shame. He knew that he was putrefying before everyone’s eyes. A nauseous odor was beginning to arise from him, the putrescent stench of failure. From this moment on, people would slip by him quickly in the halls; they would respond to his phone messages and e-mails in the most perfunctory way; they would edge toward the walls when they found themselves in the same room with him. Even if some of them knew that Peter had been set up, they would treat him as one infected with the plague; it was enough that somebody very senior had wanted to lay a trap for him and that he had fallen into it.

“Okay, everybody,” Thropp was saying. “That’s it.” Then he turned to Peter with hooded, menacing eyes. “My office. Five minutes.”

When Peter presented himself at Thropp’s office, he found Thropp rocking in his chair with his folded hands on his stomach; he wore gold cuff links the size of quarters.

“Ah, Russell, come in,” he said.

Peter stood in front of the desk. Thropp didn’t invite him to sit.

“Quite an interesting meeting,” Thropp said.

Peter nodded.

“Yes, quite interesting,” Thropp said. “Tell me, Russell, do you like walnuts?”

There was a large bowl of walnuts sitting on Thropp’s desk, but this non sequitur bewildered Peter. He shrugged.

“Go ahead and pick out a couple,” said Thropp.

Indifferently, Peter picked up two walnuts.

“Take a look at them.”

Peter did so.

“Now give them to me,” Thropp said.

Peter handed the walnuts to Thropp, who looked at them for a moment while rolling them around in his right hand.

“Do you know what these are?” Thropp asked.

Peter shook his head.

“These are your nuts, Russell,” Thropp brayed. Still holding the walnuts in his right hand, he squeezed them so hard that his fingers turned white. “And I’ve got ’em, right here!” Then he leaned back and laughed. “Oh, it was wonderful!” he said, laughing even harder. “‘Home equity securities!’” He could hardly speak. “’Home equity securities!’” Stretching out his thumb and pinkie, he held his hand up to his head like a phone and put on a deep voice. “‘Hello, I’d like to buy one hundred shares of 487 Maple Drive.’” Thropp was laughing so hard now that tears came to his eyes. “And the look on your face when Raj got going! Oh God! Beautiful!” He laughed and laughed and wiped his eyes. “Oh, it was wonderful,” he said finally, as his laughter subsided in a sigh.

“I’m happy to have been able to give you so much pleasure,” said Peter. “But I wonder if I could ask why you’ve done this?”

“Why? Why?” Thropp’s eyes narrowed and his face went black with malice. “I’ll tell you why: I despise you.” He snorted and began to grind his teeth. “Peter Russell, so bright and attractive, everybody says. Such a hard worker, such nice guy. Top decile. Everything going for him. It makes me want to puke. Before I’m through, nobody will think you’re worth your weight in cockroach dung!” Thropp cackled. “But, oh, did you ever fall for it when I came on all lovey-dovey! Think of it, you come in here”—now he put on an effeminate voice—“‘Oh, Greggy, yoo-hoo! Look-see, I’ve got a note from Arthur Beeche!’” He fluttered his eyelashes and flapped his hands with loose wrists; then his voice became vicious again. “I’m going to destroy you, Russell.” He laughed with depraved glee. “I’m going to destroy you!”

Peter waited a moment before speaking.

“Okay, Gregg,” he said patiently. “What I’m hearing is that you despise me. Is that right?”

“Yep.”

“I’m also hearing, Gregg, that you hope to destroy me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I see, I see.” Peter said. He furrowed his brow and thought for a moment. “Gregg, I wonder if the real issue isn’t that my skill set may not be the one you’re looking for. Under the circumstances, I’m wondering—and I’m just throwing this out—I’m wondering if it would make sense for me to transition to another spot. I’m thinking about the team, here.”

“You aren’t going anywhere. I’ve been looking forward to this too much.”

“I think, Gregg, that there might be others in the firm who—”

“Nobody’s going to save your ass, Russell. Furlanetto—you’ve crawled up her sphincter, right? Well, she’s in Switzerland for the next two years. And Mulvahey? He’s jumped ship.”

This news startled Peter.

“You didn’t know that, did you? Yeah. It’ll be out in a day or two. So when you try to run to Mommy or Daddy, there ain’t gonna be no Mommy or Daddy.”

Peter looked glum.

“Poor little Peter Russell,” Thropp said. “His ass is grass, and I’m the cow.” This didn’t sound quite the way Thropp had wanted, and he paused quizzically before continuing.

“Now, Russell, here’s the situation. I can’t get rid of you right away because I do have to cover my rear, and anyway the damn lawyers will say I’ve gotta have cause. So I need to make you look so bad, like such an idiot, that the only question people will ask is why I let you last so long. It’ll take some time, but the nice thing is that I’ll get to watch you suffer.” Thropp allowed for a dramatic pause. “I’ve come up with a little plan that, if I do say so myself, is brilliant. I’m going to give you a new assignment.” He paused again, smiling malevolently. “I’m sending you off to work for Mac McClernand.” Enjoying himself, he watched as this news sank in.

Mac McClernand. Oh no, not Mac McClernand.

McClernand was a burnt-out case whose continued employment at Beeche and Company was a mystery. Working for him was career death: you would either be lost in one of his labyrinthine schemes, never to reappear, or the association would so damage your reputation that you would be forced to leave.

Peter began to speak, but Thropp raised his hand.

“Nothing to say about it, my friend. Sent the memo already. Mac’s expecting you to report for duty today. He’s tickled pink about it. That’s exactly what he said, ‘I’m tickled pink.’” Thropp chortled. “Oh, this is going to be fun!”

Peter indulged Thropp’s laughing for a moment or two, then spoke. “Congratulations, Gregg. It’s a plan of such diabolical genius that only you could have devised it. The world has never known such villainy! Yes, Gregg, it’s a clever plan, very clever. Unfortunately, it contains one fatal flaw.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

“I actually haven’t figured it out yet, but it’ll come to me.”

Thropp laughed with still greater hysterics.

“Is that all?” Peter asked.

“Not quite. Have you seen this?” Thropp held the walnuts, one between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, displaying them to Peter like a magician. He put the nuts on the desk, rubbed his hands, then picked one up, interlaced his fingers, and worked the nut so that it was between the heels of both his palms. He squeezed, cracking the shell, and then burst out laughing again.

“How do you like that?” Thropp greedily picked some meat out of the walnut and ate it. Slivers of shell stuck to his chin.

Peter turned and began to leave.

“Hold on! Got to do the other one!” Thropp called after him. The sound of his laughter followed Peter far down the corridor.

It was a long walk back to Peter’s office. His mind raged with emotion and competing impulses. He would go above Thropp. But to whom? He would annihilate the bastard. But how? He would quit. But he had an employment contract; and besides, Beeche was the only place he wanted to work. And in two weeks, he was getting married.

Peter reached his office. Various numbers blinked on his big screen as indexes and rates changed around the world. On his computer monitor, he saw that he had a dozen e-mails. He pushed a button and they all came up, tiled one under the other. Then he noticed the large black diamond on the display of his phone: he had messages. He looked at the clock and saw that it was nearing ten o’clock. At exactly two minutes to ten, it was crucial that he be on the line to Frankfurt.

The phone rang; he could tell by the ID that it was his fiancée, Charlotte Montague.

He picked up the phone and said, “Hi there.”

“Hi, Peter!” said Charlotte. “How are you?”

“Oh … uh … I’m okay.” Peter didn’t feel like talking about his presentation, and he could already tell that Charlotte must be preoccupied with a wedding crisis, so this wasn’t the moment anyway. “How are you doing?”

“Well,” said Charlotte, “I’m fine. But the reason I called was that Mother is being completely unreasonable about the cheese. The French people just won’t understand about serving it before dinner.”

Oh. The cheese. This was serious. Peter didn’t mind, really. He knew what was expected of him in his role as bridegroom: listen patiently, show your interest, respond with sympathy, say “yes.” With the wedding only two weeks away, Charlotte’s nerves were frayed, naturally, as were her mother’s. Charlotte kept talking, and Peter had to admit that his mind had begun to wander, as he remembered the meeting and his encounter with Thropp, as he watched the lines skitter on the screen before him, and as he, inevitably, imagined what it would be like to be marrying the woman he really wished he were marrying.

Charlotte talked on. “Scalloping … Bartók.” Bartók? Then Peter could tell from her tone that she was bringing her own remarks to a close and that he would have to comment. Experience had taught him that in these situations, it was best to leave a few brain cells behind to listen, even as the rest of his mind withdrew.

These scouts gave their report, and Peter said, “God, Charlotte, of course you’re completely right about the cheese. I mean, I wouldn’t know, but I’d trust you on that more than your mother! Anyway … oh, I think that scalloping, you know, might be kind of fussy? And I really like the plan for the music, so I agree with you, we should stick with what we have. I mean, I’m sure it’s a beautiful piece—”

“Oh, good,” said Charlotte, “I knew that you’d feel that way.”

By carefully calibrating his responses, Peter hoped to show that he had given each issue due consideration and was not simply agreeing with Charlotte in order to humor her. The Bartók had raised a genuine concern: Charlotte was impressionable, and if one of her interesting musical friends suggested Bartók for the church, as seemed to have happened, there was a chance that it would be Bartók.

“Well,” Charlotte was saying now, “I’d better run. I’m sorry I won’t be able to join you tonight.”

“Me too.”

“Duty calls.”

“I know! Don’t worry about it. We all understand.”

“I’ll be sorry to miss Jonathan’s reading.” Peter’s best friend, Jonathan Speedwell, was a writer, and he was giving a reading that night from his new book of stories. Peter and Charlotte had planned to go to it and have dinner with Jonathan and his wife afterward. But Charlotte had to go to an event for her work. Charlotte liked Jonathan a lot and flirted with him in a girlish, free-spirited manner with which she did nothing else. “Did you see the review today in the paper?”

As if Peter had time to read book reviews. “No,” he said. “Was there one?”

“Oh, yes! I’ve got it right here. Let me read it to you—”

“Charlotte—” Charlotte, I’ve got to make a call, Peter was about to say. The flashing numbers. Frankfurt. But he was too late.

“Let’s see,” Charlotte said. “Oh, here we are. ‘With Intaglio, his new collection of short stories, Jonathan Speedwell once again demonstrates triumphantly that he is among our most potent younger voices writing today. In luminous silverpoint prose, he deftly renders the struggle of men and women desperate to maintain their purchase on life …’”

Deftly, Peter thought. With Jonathan it was always “deftly.”

“‘… But if there is one quality that truly marks Mr. Speedwell as a writer of distinction,’” Charlotte continued, “‘it is his deep compassion for his characters.’”

Christ. Again, the compassion-for-his-characters thing. Peter could not understand why it was such a big deal for a writer to have compassion for his characters, as opposed to, say, real people.

“‘In perhaps his most finely wrought tale, “The Copse …”’ Well, I won’t read you the whole thing. But isn’t it terrific?”

“Yes.”

“He must be very pleased. Will you congratulate him for me?”

“Of course.” Charlotte was an earnest person whose demeanor generally was almost grave. Peter imagined what she would be like as she congratulated Jonathan—winsome, crinkling her eyes and grinning.

“He’s still pleased about being best man, isn’t he?”

“Sure. I told you, the only problem is, he wants to give me away.”

“Oh.” Charlotte’s mind snagged momentarily on the word “problem.” Then she got it. “Oh! Yes. You said that. How funny.”

“Charlotte—”

“Uh-oh, that’s my other line. Sorry, I’d better take that. Thanks for your help. Have fun tonight. Call me.”

“Sure, right, okay. Bye.”

Throughout this conversation, Peter’s other phone lines had quietly burbled again and again. The black diamond seemed to become denser and denser and heavier and heavier with the weight of added messages. Staring at his screens, he saw more e-mails arrive and numbers blip and charts jitter. As usual, the clock in the upper right-hand corner barely seemed to change when he was staring at it, but then when he looked away and checked it again, he was shocked to see how far it had advanced. Still, Peter didn’t begrudge Charlotte this expenditure of his time at a pressing moment of his day. Those were the phone calls that brides made two weeks before the wedding, and they were ones a decent bridegroom would tolerate. It was part of life. And, he supposed, it was part of life to be screwed over in your job once in a while. It was part of life to see your best friend have undeserved success. It was part of life, also, not to get the girl.

Just in time, he reached Frankfurt.

Why was Peter marrying Charlotte? Why was Charlotte marrying Peter? Charlotte worked in the New York office of L’Alliance Générale et Spécifique des Pays Francophones. The AGSPF fostered economic and cultural exchange among the French-speaking peoples of the world and tried to promote the French language and Francophone civilization in all places sadly suffering from their lack. Dogged and intelligent, Charlotte had mastered the politics of Chad (Djamous, the finance minister, was on the rise, though not supported by the Quay d’Orsay) and the diplomacy of Laos. She was, it seemed, always writing a report on intra-Francophone trade. There were lots of tables. In addition to this intellectual work, Charlotte also participated in the AGSPF’s busy social life: no minor Algerian poet could pass through New York without a reception. That’s what was happening tonight. Charlotte had to attend a dinner for a Belgian economist, who had appeared in town unexpectedly.

For a time, Charlotte’s father had worked in the Paris office of a New York law firm and the family had moved there when Charlotte was seven. With this credential, she could legitimately make France her thing, which she proceeded to do. After her parents divorced, when she was sixteen, Charlotte’s father and her stepmother bought a small property in the countryside, where they went every summer and where Charlotte would visit. Charlotte majored in French and she spent two years in Paris after college.

There she had had the requisite love affair with a Frenchman, with lots of tears. Maximilien-François-Marie-Isidore had been thirty-seven, an incredibly ancient and sophisticated age for Charlotte, then twenty-two. He was always lurking in the background, supposedly poised to swoop in and carry Charlotte back to Paris forever. That never seemed to happen, but on a regular basis, heavy-smoking, black-whiskered French friends—Héli, Valéry, Claude, Hilaire-Germain, Alexandre-César-Léopold, Gilles—would pass through New York. They would take Charlotte and Peter to obscure rock clubs and talk endlessly about American bands and films and writers whom Peter had never heard of. Of course, they all spoke English perfectly, and from time to time one or the other would engage Peter in conversation, while making it evident that he was merely doing so out of politeness.

One requirement for Charlotte’s job was that she speak the language well, and she did, using all sorts of slang. Nevertheless, whenever she spoke it with a Frenchman, there was always the air that she was performing, an amateur-hour talent, rather than simply talking to someone. Whenever they went to a French restaurant, she engaged the staff in long conversations, and they were delighted. Peter—who had taken AP French!—sat there smiling uncomprehendingly for the most part. Eventually his existence would edge into the consciousness of the captain, and he would turn to Peter with an expectant smile.

“Er …” Peter would say. “Pour commencer, je voudrais prendre aussi les moules” As soon as he heard Peters accent, the captains smile would disappear and he would adopt a manner of cold courtesy while Peter, losing his way grammatically, would give the rest of his order.

“Very good, monsieur, and for the wine, shall I give you a moment to decide?” Okay, so he answered in English. Big deal. In fact, that suited Peter just fine, for somewhere deep in his Celtic-Anglo-Saxon bones, he believed that it was improper for any real man to speak French.

Another requirement of Charlotte’s job was that she dress well despite her low pay. Charlotte did dress well, if by “well” one meant fairly expensively. Her clothes were fashionable and of good quality. Yet she did not dress well, really. There always seemed to be too many flaps or folds or layers or lappets or something. She always seemed to be reaching for an effect, an effect that was neither achieved nor worth achieving and one that, even if those conditions were met, would not show Charlotte off to her best advantage. When Peter thought about Charlotte’s clothes, her stepmother, Julia, always came to mind. She was ten years older than Charlotte and was naturally chic, but as far as Peter could tell she mostly wore a skirt, cardigan, and pearls. Charlotte had always cast Julia in the role of her guide in the ways of the world. Why not simply copy Julia’s clothes? But Charlotte, with no intuitive sense of these things, was blind to the example her mentor set for her.

As with Charlotte’s clothes, so with her grooming. It was always, somehow, just a bit off. The haircut was either too severe or too full, and, in either case, had a life of its own, regardless of how determinedly brushed; the lipstick was one shade too fauvist; the nails were ragged (Julia wore clear polish on her nails and kept them shaped liked torpedoes). These superficial flaws bothered Peter much more than he thought they should. For reasons that are mysterious, some people—men and women—are always able to look well put together, stylish, suitable, whereas others, to a greater or lesser degree, fail in this. Well, so what? Some people can wiggle their ears, and other people can’t. If someone has a good heart, how can that sort of thing possibly matter? Irksomely, it did seem to matter. In a way that was more than irksome, so did Charlotte’s looks. It wasn’t a question of whether she was good-looking: she was. She had a long, rather concave face, large eyes, and a prominent nose and chin; indeed, it would not be inaccurate, and it would not be at all displeasing to Charlotte, to say that her face was “Pre-Raphaelite.” She was pretty.

And yet. When they were at her apartment for the evening and had been reading for a while, and Peter raised his eyes from his laptop and looked at her, that action did not release the spring of delight that he hoped for. He could look at certain paintings over and over again, or certain views or buildings or other people or children, and he would always feel an aesthetic and emotional shiver. Looking at Charlotte after a half hour of reading, he had a rather dull reaction. He had known women who, strictly speaking, were less good-looking than she but whose faces charmed him. The nose might be wrong, but there was some alluring interplay between the eyes and the lips; or everything was too small, but taken together with that big smile that came out of nowhere, it made you swoon. He did not swoon when he looked at Charlotte.

In truth he never had. They had met two years earlier at a party given by married friends, the kind who see matches everywhere. It was more or less a setup. They talked about how terrible the Dutch side of St. Martin was, especially as compared with the French side. They talked, inevitably, about France. They talked about their friends. They got along pretty well. Charlotte liked him, Peter could tell. He liked her, and as he got to know her better, something about her moved him. She had a good heart, and beneath her determination lay a touching vulnerability.

So they got along, there was some kind of emotional connection, and, also, they made sense together. In this day and age, when marriages were no longer arranged and no father would dare forbid his daughter to marry anyone, the notion of suitable matches was supposedly archaic. Yet even when there were no overt social conventions to keep lovers apart (and to inspire novels), it struck Peter how often people still married within a fairly narrow social range. Within that range, there were further delimitations; the mates tended to come out with the same overall score on a gender-adjusted index of talent, money, expectations, polish, personality, intellect. The process of weighting and calculation was far less cynical than that employed by mothers during the London Season of the nineteenth century, but it seemed to Peter that it bore a resemblance. There were still rules, and lots of people still married the people they were supposed to marry, despite all this talk of marrying for love that one has heard for the last several hundred years or so.

Peter was an attractive fellow with a good job and a suitable background. He was presentable. Charlotte, meanwhile, was also attractive. She had the kind of job that the kind of woman whom Peter would marry would have. She had the kind of parents and friends that a woman whom Peter would marry would have. They got along. They were good, decent people. The numbers went into their supercomputers time and again, and time and again the results came out: marriage. He knew he was not in love with Charlotte, and he accepted that. But this was not because he was indifferent to love. Indeed, the opposite was the case. The reason he accepted his lack of passionate love for Charlotte was not that he did not feel love strongly but rather that he felt love much too strongly. He was capable of being deeply, passionately, heartbreakingly, searingly in love with someone. Indeed, at this very moment he was deeply, passionately, heartbreakingly, searingly in love with someone. That person just didn’t happen to be Charlotte. And that person was unavailable to him. So he had given up on love altogether.

It had taken him some time to come to that position. Peter happened to be in love with Jonathan’s wife. Before Jonathan and she were married, Peter watched intently, looking for any break. Yet day by day, month by month, year by year, they moved steadily closer. Had there ever been a sign of trouble? Had Jonathan failed to call? But Jonathan had never been the type who failed to call, and his wife had never been the type to be upset if he had. Had Jonathan offended her family? No. Had the magic simply disappeared? No.

Jonathan’s wife was very pretty, she was kind, she was smart, she was funny, and she was much too good for Jonathan, who was a fairly despicable character. She and Peter particularly liked each other. That had been true before she married Jonathan, but there were rules about how you conduct yourself around your best friend’s protowife. If they broke up and a decent interval passed, you could then make an approach. But the honorable friend would do nothing to drive the two apart. Really, honor alone had not inhibited him. So had the fear of rejection, and he considered the odds of rejection high. Whatever affection Jonathan’s wife may have felt for him back then, and felt for him now, he knew that, romantically, it meant nothing—to the contrary. They had established the kind of fraternal relationship, perhaps a bit closer than the typical one, that often arises between a man’s girlfriend or wife and his best friend. She took an interest in Peter and in his love life in the way married women, or virtually married women, do with the single friends of their mates, the ones they like. Their “intimacy” had been possible for the very reason that it had no sexual or romantic overtones. If Peter tried to convert intimacy of this type into sexual currency, he knew, he would be met with shock, disgust, pity, laughter, and derision. He would lose his friend, his friendship with his friend’s wife, and his pride. He would have to kill himself.

Peter had been the best man at the wedding, and after that he had given up on ever marrying someone with whom he was deeply, passionately, heartbreakingly, searingly in love. Then he met Charlotte. They got along. Over time he became attached to her. She moved him. Charlotte was attractive to him, periodically. Charlotte was the kind of person a person like him married, and she wanted to marry him. Love—come on. How many people are really in love when they get married? And if they are at that moment, how many remain so two years later?

Having allowed matters to proceed as far as he had, Peter would have found it very difficult to break things off. Charlotte had something in her, that fearful look in her eye, that made it hard, very hard, for Peter to hurt her. True, her panic about getting married may have been premature, but in her circle, there seemed to be an unstated agreement that if you let your early thirties go by without settling on someone, then it was a very fast shoot to forty, when you really would be desperate. Peter did not think so well of himself or so little of Charlotte to assume that if he didn’t marry her, she would never be able to find any happiness. Still, she was counting on him. Charlotte had wanted to get married so badly. Steadily applying herself and moving at a pace that was faster than what was natural, she had begun to treat him more and more like a presumptive husband, taking him to events with her family or friends or related to her work to which one would take only one’s fiancé or spouse or the person one had been living with for ages. She would ask him to perform spousal tasks, like picking her mother up at the airport. She used the first-person plural pronoun. Soon enough, Peter found himself in a different country without the right papers to get back over the border. Then, too, like all young people nowadays, they had had a conversation initiated by the woman about whether their relationship was moving forward; they had been seeing each other for about a year at that point, and they’d agreed that it was.

Over and over and over, Peter asked himself if it was really fair for him to marry Charlotte if he wasn’t truly in love with her. An advice columnist would say it was not, without question, and he sometimes wished he could agree. But this was the real world. Of course the chances of Charlotte’s being happy were better if Peter married her. Or maybe this argument was just a rationalization for his cowardice. But no, it was surely the more loving thing to marry Charlotte. And as for Peter himself? Married to Charlotte or not, he was out of luck. He was due to marry, and he and Charlotte had a pretty good chance of being pretty happy. It would be fine.

And Charlotte, why did she want to marry Peter? She liked to present herself as being very worldly, always collecting interesting people, scoffing at the bourgeoisie, but she was, in fact, deeply cautious and conventional. Although she would never have admitted it, she was terrified of being either unmarried or married to someone who was odd or ugly or impoverished or who required her parents and grandmothers to make an uncomfortable social stretch. Peter saved her from those fates. Also, she did love him. She liked the feel of his arms around her. He had a comforting, dry smell, like cork. He was kind, and her father, though charming and well dressed, had never been. Once when she was thirteen, she was going to a dance in what was really her first grown-up dress, and she ran into the living room to show it to him and her mother. “Ah,” he had said, drink in hand, “voici la coquette!” She felt as if he had slapped her, but she couldn’t explain precisely why. When she got older, she learned enough from her therapists and her friends and her friends’ therapists to understand that there was a danger that, replicating the relationship with her father, she would marry someone cruel. She had tried to avoid that. Maybe—maybe she had to force it a little bit; maybe she wasn’t “in love” in love with Peter and had to fashion a notion that she was. This she managed to do. In any case, she had already filled in the Passionate, Crisis-Filled, Tempestuous Love bubble on her answer sheet of life. Deep down, she suspected that, probably, Peter was not “in love” in love with her either, but this was a condition she could live with. The marriage problem would be solved, and she knew she could trust him and that he would treat her with kindness.

So it had come to be that, on an evening in early spring, Peter had arrived at Charlotte’s door with the intention of asking her to marry him. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a brownstone on a handsome block uptown between Park and Madison avenues. Peter had come from work and, leaving the subway, he had passed a Korean market, where it had occurred to him to buy some flowers. He decided on daisies; they seemed winningly simple. The daisies smelled of earth and grass; water had dripped from their green stalks onto Peter’s hand when he took them out of their bucket. Daylight saving time had just returned, and the light at that hour, still so surprising, made Charlotte’s street look as if a lid had been lifted from it. The brownstone seemed softer, and the air, a little warm now, seemed to buoy him up gently.

No young man carrying flowers on an evening in early spring down a handsome street with the intention of asking a woman to marry him can be entirely immune to the romance of the occasion. And indeed Peter did feel romantic, nervous and eager. His jacket pocket held a small velvet box that contained a diamond ring whose stone was not ostentatious but still sizable.

He greeted Charlotte. She was wearing lighter clothes than she had worn in recent days. She had had her hair cut that day and looked especially young. She had known telepathically that something was up and greeted him with a longer and more than usually tender kiss. “How pretty. Let me put these in water,” she said, taking the flowers from him. “Lots of chances for me to play ‘He loves me, he loves me not.”’

They sat down on the love seat and chatted awhile. For the thousandth time, Peter looked at the framed engravings taken from an eighteenth-century French instruction book on dancing, at the painting above the fireplace that had been a gift from her father and her stepmother when Charlotte turned twenty-one.

Peter decided to be gay, as the occasion warranted. “Let’s have a glass of champagne,” he said. Charlotte usually kept a bottle in her tiny refrigerator. She looked at him, and their eyes met for a second. “Champagne? What are we celebrating?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Daylight saving time? Your haircut?” She gave a little hmm and went to the kitchen. As she walked away from him, she seemed self-conscious, as if she were thinking that he was looking at her, which he was, and he was reminded, with a trickle of lust, that the back of her neck was a good feature. She returned with the bottle and two wineglasses (champagne flutes were something you got as a wedding present). “Here,” she said, “you know how to do it.”

It was a little joke between them how her father had once pedantically demonstrated to Peter the best way to open a bottle of champagne. He gently prodded the cork with his thumbs while turning the bottle, as he had been taught, and the cork fell out, rather than rocketing, with a faint, hollow report and a wisp of smoke. The ceremony complete, he filled their glasses halfway; the bubbles tossed up their tiny hats.

Charlotte and Peter talked a little bit more.

“We have Moroccan agriculture people coming next week,” Charlotte said. “They’re going to meet with these Quebecois researchers who have done some interesting work on barley, which is about three percent of Morocco’s exports.” Charlotte’s expression became quizzical. “It’s odd that the Moroccans have asked for so much information about golf courses in the area. I don’t think that anyone is coming from the tourism ministry”

A breeze entered through the window, bringing a tarry smell from the street. There was a pause in the conversation. Peter refilled their glasses. As he did so, the image of Jonathan’s wife came into his mind, and he felt as if a trapdoor had opened under him. He tried to keep his hand steady as he poured. There she was. Well, never mind. What was not to be was not to be. He glanced over at Charlotte. Her eyes were pretty. The silence lasted a few seconds longer than a normal conversational gap. Peter sipped his champagne and looked over his glass at Charlotte. She looked away. She was nervous, and that made Peter feel warmly toward her.

“Charlotte.” Peter’s voice had an unusual resonance as he took her hands in his. “I have something I want to say, or to ask, actually. Um …” He swallowed. “You know, we’ve been talking about this. And so I was wondering … I mean I’d like to ask … I wanted to ask …” Here Peter paused. “Will you marry me?”

Charlotte had never received a marriage proposal before, not from her French lover and not even during free-play time at nursery school. In this instance, the man making the proposal was one whom Charlotte would quite like to marry. So she immediately began to cry and let out a large sob. She was reacting out of joy, and also from a release of tension, tension that it seemed had been building in her from the time of her birth.

“I know this is all rather sudden,” Peter said.

Charlotte laughed and gulped air. “Yes, why … sorry … just a second.” She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and tried to catch her breath. When she finished she looked at Peter and in her gray eyes there was the glow of love, an effect enhanced by their moistness.

“Well.” She cleared her throat. “Well, the answer to your question is yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Yes. Completely, totally yes.”

They embraced. The kiss lasted a long time. Peter’s first emotion was faint irritation with the way Charlotte kissed. She didn’t push her lips out enough, or something. Then he immediately began to think that he had made a tremendous mistake, and he wanted desperately to take back the words he had said a few moments before. Then he thought: It’ll be okay. It’ll be fine. I do love Charlotte, really. He felt the back of her hand press against the back of his neck, which produced a stirring of affection and desire within him. And then—and then he thought about Jonathan’s wife, Mrs. Speedwell. Since the wedding, he often addressed her that way. “Hello, Mrs. Speedwell.” “By all means, Mrs. Speedwell.” The bottom fell out of his stomach. And then, again, he recovered and thought: It’ll be fine. Charlotte will be happy enough and I will be happy enough. Parallel to his fundamental disappointment, he also felt a thrill. He had just made a marriage proposal, and he had held this woman unclothed in his arms countless times. He knew the flaws in her body, her bony hips. This accumulation of intimacy had its effect. Smiling, Peter pulled back from their embrace.

“Hey, wait a minute,” he said, reaching into his pocket, “there’s something that goes along with this.”

Peter finished his conversation with Frankfurt. Already, the departing tide of his day had taken him far from his betrothed and any thoughts of her. As usual, though, from time to time throughout the day’s voyage he saw in the distance the most beautiful mermaid, sunning herself on a rock, plashing into the sea and rising up again. Against the sun her smoothed head looked like a paper silhouette. It must be said that the creature did not resemble Charlotte, nor, however, was she mythical in her appearance. Even at a distance, Peter recognized her. He would be seeing her that evening, along with his despicable best friend, the writer Jonathan Speedwell.