“But this guy used to be finance,” I said. “We’ll see if he turns out to be a little more savvy. Or savage.”
“Savvy and savage, that would be the scary combination.”
“True, but we’ve had some like that before. The caravan will move on.”
“True.”
Eventually all the courses had been eaten, the drinks drunk, and as before, Jojo and I were by far the soberest in the bunch. Overhead the stars blurred and swam, but it was because of a slight mist rising off the river, not anything internal to our mentalities. For the others it could have been a Van Gogh starry night, judging by their peals of laughter.
Paid the bill. Down the riverside walk to the marina, into the bug, out onto the river. Stars reflected in the sheeting black water under us. Oh my, oh my; my face was hot, my feet cold, my fingers tingling a little. In the underlight from cockpit and cabin door, Jojo looked like Ingrid Bergman. She had experienced a major orgasm at my touch, right out here; I felt the tingle of that memory, the start of a hard-on. “Want a drink?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Actually I’m feeling kind of beat tonight, I don’t know why. Would you mind if we just took a turn and headed on home pretty soon?”
“You don’t want to just drift out here? We could drift down past Governors Island and come up the other side.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You’re shorting me!” I blurted.
She looked at me as if I had just said something very stupid. Or as if she felt sorry for me. Suddenly I realized I didn’t know her well enough to have any idea what her look meant or what she was thinking.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to joke,” I said, again without intending to say it—without reviewing it in advance.
“I know,” she said, with a little tightening at the corners of her mouth. She was watching me closely. “Well,” she said, trying for lightness, “everyone hedges, right?”
“No!” I said. “Enough of that!”
She shrugged, as if to say If that’s what you want. “And so …?”
“So …” I didn’t know what to say. I had to say something. “But I like you!”
Again she shrugged, as if to say So what. And I realized I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was really like.
I turned the bug in toward shore. The few lit buildings ahead of us made the West Village look like a mouth that had lost most of its teeth.
“No, come on,” I said, again surprising myself. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
She shrugged yet again. I thought she wasn’t going to say more, and the pit of my stomach dropped down and clutched my scrotum tight, yanked my balls up into me. Then she said, “I don’t know—I guess it’s not really working for me. I mean you’re a nice guy, but you’re kind of old school, you know? Trade trade trade, a little bit of semiaccidental spoofing, hoping for a big short … like it’s all about money.”
I thought that over. “We’re in finance,” I pointed out. “It is all about money.”
“But the money can be about something. I mean, you can do things with money.”
“We work for hedge funds,” I reminded her. “We work so that people who are rich enough to afford it can hire people who will get them a larger rate of return than the average rate of return. That’s what we do.”
“Yes, but one of the ways you can get the alpha for them is to do venture capital and invest in good things. You can make a difference in people’s lives, make them better, and still get the alpha for the customers.”
“And your bonuses.”
“Yes, of course. But it isn’t just about bonuses. It’s investing in the real economy, in real work. Making things happen.”
“Is that what you do?” I asked.
She nodded in the darkness. Every hedge fund guarded its methods, so she was sworn to secrecy here. Any competitive advantage between funds came from a proprietary mix of strategies that were usually set by the founder of the fund, as the resident genius, and then by his closest advisors. That Eldorado went in for something as uncertain and illiquid as venture capital—that they had any at all in their mix—that was something she probably shouldn’t be talking about. But she had told me, basically in order to let me know why she had gone cool on our relationship. Which idea was still chilling me like a frost. I looked at her and realized that I wanted so bad for this one to work out. It wasn’t like it had been with Amanda and most of the others. Damn! I had done the stupid thing, I had gone with a gut feeling rather than a careful analysis. Again.
“Well, that’s interesting. I’m going to think about that,” I said. “And I hope you’ll have dinner with me again, from time to time anyway. Even just in the Met,” I added desperately, when she looked away from me, across the river. “I mean you live right next door. So, like instead of eating at home, maybe.”
“That would be nice,” she said. “Really, I only mean I want to slow down here a bit. I want to talk.”
“That’s good,” I said. “I want to talk too.”
But while I’m sleeping with you! I didn’t add. Lots of talk, after and even while making love, and showering together, and sleeping in the same bed! Talking all the while!
Well, but all these things were precisely what she had put on hold. Or, more likely, politely nixed for good.
If they were going to happen, I was going to have to figure her out. Figure out what would please her. It would be hard if I wasn’t seeing her. So as I steered the bug rather clumsily up into Twenty-third toward home, lost in my worry, missing obvious wake patterns and even other boats, feeling crushed, even resentful, even angry, I was still figuring out how to get along with her, how to go on, how to get her back. Damn. Damn me for a fool.
New York is less a place than an idea or a neurosis.
said Peter Conrad
The scale of New York scorns the indulgences of personal sentiment.
said Stephen Brook
b) Charlotte
The day had arrived when the Met’s board was going to decide what to do about the offer to buy the building. Charlotte didn’t want to discuss it in a general meeting of all the co-op members, which she knew was wrong of her, but she didn’t. If it came to a general vote and the members voted to sell, her head would explode. She could feel the pressure and she didn’t like it. She would scream heavy abuse at them and then feel worse than ever. “People urge me to trust people, but I don’t,” she said to her colleague at work, Ramona, who nodded sympathetically.
“Why trust people?” Ramona said. “What does it get you?”
“Oh be quiet,” Charlotte said. Ramona liked to tweak her, and mostly she liked it too, but this was too scary. “I wonder if I could declare myself dictator of the building. Isn’t that how it worked back in the Greek city-states? A crisis from outside would come, things might fall apart, so someone would declare themself dictator and everyone would agree to let them guide the polis through the crisis.”
“Good idea!”
“Quit it.”
Then the day’s first appointment, a family from Baton Rouge, stood before her, and she got to work with them on their case. Americans were supposed to have citizens’ rights that made them impervious to the kind of discrimination that foreigners faced when moving into the city, but in practice this could fail. Lots of people were simply without papers or any cloud documentation; it was hard to believe until you met them by the hundreds and eventually the thousands, day after day for years. The cloud’s Very Bad Day in the aftermath of the Second Pulse had wiped out millions of people’s records, and no country had completely recovered from that, except for Iceland, which had not believed in the cloud and kept paper records of everything.
Today there was also going to be an influx of new refugees from New Amsterdam, the Dutch township. This floating city was one of the oldest of the townships, and like the rest of them it floated slowly around the world, a detached piece of the Netherlands, which had been so flooded by the Second Pulse that New Amsterda
m equaled something like five percent of the home country’s remaining actual land. Like all the townships it was essentially a floating island, mainly self-sufficient, and directed by Holland’s government to wander the Earth helping intertidal peoples in whatever way possible, including relocating them to higher ground. Charlotte enjoyed visiting it when it jellyfished by New York, eddying outside the Verrazano Narrows in the big counterclockwise current that curled off the Gulf Stream. Townships couldn’t come too close to the Narrows because there was a danger of getting sucked in on an incoming tide and crashing into one shore or the other, or crashing into both and getting corked, but a flight out to them in a small plane often took less than half an hour in the air. So she took one of the flights from the Turtle Bay aircraft carrier and enjoyed the sudden view from the air: the city, the Narrows and its bridge, the open ocean. On the left as they headed out to sea she could see the drowned shallows of Coney Island, lined on its seaward edge by the barges that were dredging the sand of the old beach and moving it north to the new shoreline. Then over the blue plate of the ocean, and soon they descended to the startling green island floating ahead of them—a big island, big enough that its airport’s landing strips could land jets, not that there were many jets left. The city plane descended and rolled to a taxiing speed in about a third of the length of the runway.
Once out of the plane and then the airport, they could have been on Long Island. There was no feeling of floating, no movement of any kind. This always amazed Charlotte. Around her the neat little buildings made it look like a Dutch town.
Despite the elegant look of the buildings and streets, it was not hard to see the uneasiness in the eyes of the people housed in the township’s refugee dorms. It was a look Charlotte knew well, the look of her clients, here again staring at her. Needy looks, always trying to hook her into their stories, so that they were looks she had gotten good at deflecting. She couldn’t feel their desperation too directly or it would drive her mad, she had to keep a professional distance. And she could, but it took an effort; it was the thing that made her tired at the end of a day, or even an hour. Bone tired, and at some deep level, angry. Not at her clients, but at the system that made them so needy and so numerous.
So New Amsterdam was now ferrying a contingent from Kingston, Jamaica. None of them had papers, and they looked Hispanic, not Jamaican, and spoke in Spanish among themselves, but Kingston was where New Amsterdam had picked them up. The Caribbean was like that. Charlotte sat down at a table with them and listened to their stories one by one, creating primary refugee documentation. That would insinuate them into the records, and eventually would serve adequately for them, even if they had no originary paper. It was as if she were plucking them out of the sea itself. “Don’t forget to join the Householders’ Union,” she kept telling them. “That could be a big help.”
They were grateful for anything, and this too showed in their faces, and this too had to be ignored, as it was just another facet of their desperation. People didn’t like to feel grateful, because they didn’t like the need to feel grateful. So it was not a good feeling no matter which end of it you were on. One did good for others not for the others’ sake, nor for oneself, which would be a little sanctimonious, at best. This seemed to suggest that there was no reason at all to do good, and yet it did feel like an imperative. She did it for some kind of abstract notion, perhaps, an idea that this was part of making their time the early days of a better world. Something like that. Some crazy notion. She was crazy, she knew it; she was compensating probably for some lack or loss; she was finding a way to occupy her busy brain. It seemed like a right way to behave. It passed the time in a way more interesting than most ways she had tried. Something like that. But at the end of the day, even a day at sea, in the cool salt breeze and the sound of gulls crying, she was ready to pack it in.
But she couldn’t, not at the end of this day; she needed to fly back and get out of her office and get home. No time to walk, she would need to get on the vapo or even take a water taxi. Flying back in over the Brooklyn shallows to the Turtle Bay aircraft carrier anchored next to the UN building, Charlotte sat at the left-side window and marveled at the city in the late-afternoon light. Sun blazed off canals and made the rank-and-file forest of buildings look like rows of standing stones in some half-sunk Avalon. Black pillars drowned to the knees; it was a surreal sight, there was no coming to terms with it, it never ceased to look bizarre, even though she had lived in it all her life. What a fate. A somewhat glorious fate, and despite all, she stared down at the city with a little sense of wonder, even pride.
Down on the aircraft carrier. Walk down the ramp onto the dock and shift in the mass of people, taking little steps, onto a crowded vaporetto headed into the canals of the city. Grumble from dock to dock, reading reports while the crowds surged off and on, off and on. She got off at the dock next to her office and went in, thinking she should have just gone home.
Ramona and a group from the district’s Democratic Party office met her as she was leaving and asked to walk her out. Charlotte shrugged, almost saying I gave at the office, but biting back the words; she didn’t get why they were there. Out on the dock outside they asked her if she would run for Congress, for the Twelfth District seat, which covered the drowned parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn and had been a controversial seat because of that, for many years representing more clams than people, and the people a bunch of squatters, communists, et cetera.
“No way!” Charlotte said, shocked. “What about the mayor’s candidate?”
Galina Estaban had anointed her assistant Tanganyika John to succeed the longtime congressman for the Twelfth, who was finally retiring. No one was very happy with this selection, but the party was a hierarchy; you started at the bottom and moved up one step at a time—school board, city council, state assembly—and then if you had demonstrated lockstep team loyalty, the powers at the top would give you the party endorsement and its aid, and you were good to go. Had been that way for centuries. Outsiders did pop up to express various dissatisfactions, and occasionally some of them even overthrew the order of things and got elected, but then they were ostracized forever by the party and could get nothing done. They just wasted their time and whatever little money could be dredged up to support such quixotic tilts.
So, but these people asking her to run were from the party office, in fact they were its central committee, which made it a little different. Maybe a lot different. Estaban herself had come in as an outsider, which probably explained it. Come in as a star and disrupt the hierarchy, then become a power and anoint your own assistant to an unrelated post that was even more not yours to call than your own: not right. And Tanganyika John was a tool and a fool. Still, running against her would be a lost cause and a horrid waste of time.
Charlotte indicated this as quickly and politely as she could, then jumped on the vaporetto that mercifully gurgled into the dock headed down Park, just as Charlotte’s interlocutors were waxing eloquent with desperate pleadings.
“Think about it!” Ramona and the others begged loudly as the vapo surged off to its next stop, wringing their hands like starving mendicants.
“I will!” Charlotte lied cheerfully. It was annoying, but it pleased her too, just to think that here was something dumb she would not have to do, something that could be avoided with a simple No fucking way.
The vapo took a left at Twenty-third and deposited her at the dock in front of the Flatiron, and from there she took the elevator up to the skywalk level and walked west to Chopstick One, cursing it ritually as she crossed it from skybridge in to skybridge out, and then hurried over Twenty-third to home. She got to her room with just enough time to change shoes, chomp down an apple, wash her face, and get downstairs. She walked in as the board meeting was beginning.
She sat down feeling a little unsteady, as if she were still at sea, or in the air. The other board members regarded her curiously, so it must have shown, but she said nothing, explained nothing, just started
the meeting with a quick, “Okay, let’s go.”
Item three came quick enough: “Okay, this offer on the building. What are we going to do?”
She stared at the others, and Dana, also a lawyer, said, “We’re obliged to answer them, legally, and just as a matter of doing due diligence.”
“I know.” Charlotte hated the phrase doing due diligence, but this was not the time to mention that. I do do-do on your dumb due diligence. No.
“So,” Dana continued, “the covenant requires we put any ownership question to a vote of the membership.”
Charlotte said, “I know. But I’m wondering if this is an ownership question.”
“What do you mean? They’re offering to buy us out.”
“What I’m saying is, is it a real offer? Or is it some kind of stalking horse that is being used to find out our valuation, or something like that.”
“How would that matter?”