“Well, if it’s just a test for a comparative valuation, we as a board could just turn it down outright, without putting it to a vote.”
“Really?”
“What do you mean, really?”
“I mean do you think we could determine it was a fake offer with enough certainty to bypass our obligation to put it to a membership vote?”
Charlotte thought it over.
While she did, Dana said, “It wouldn’t really do to turn the offer down as a board and see if they came back again, because if they did, we would be retroactively out of compliance.”
“Out of compliance with our co-op covenant, or with city law?”
“I’m not sure, but maybe both.”
“I’d like to know before we decide,” Charlotte said. “Maybe we can hold off on this again, poke around a little, study it a little, before we act either way.”
By now she was frowning, she could feel her face bunched. She wanted to refuse the offer so much it hurt; her guts twisted, and she could feel her temples begin to pound. But Dana was a good lawyer and a good person, and probably it was true that they had to conform to the guidelines, do everything legally, so that she didn’t accidentally give the enemy here, whoever they were, a hand up in the game. So Dana had to be listened to. “Listen, can we table this for tonight, do a little more research and then get back to it at our next meeting? Please?”
“I guess so,” Dana said. “Maybe we do need to know more before we decide. Can we talk to the people making the offer, find out what they have in mind?”
“I don’t know. Morningside won’t tell us who it is. That’s part of what I don’t like about it. I want to ask Morningside again to let us talk to the people making the offer.”
“Let’s do that, and table it for now. I move we table it.”
“Second,” Charlotte said.
They passed the motion and moved on.
So, the next morning Charlotte gritted her teeth and called her ex, Larry Jackman.
“Hey Charlotte,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Are you going to be in New York anytime soon?”
“I’m here today. What’s up?”
“I want to meet you for coffee and ask you some questions.”
This was something they had started doing a few years back, meeting from time to time for coffee, their chats usually having to do with city business, or old acquaintances in trouble who needed help, neither of them favorite topics of Larry’s, but he had always been agreeable, and after a while they had an established tradition of getting together. So after a short pause he said, “Always, sounds good. How about four twenty, at the pavilion in Central Park?”
This was one of their hangouts from the old days, so it was with a little lurch that Charlotte agreed.
Then it stuck at the bottom of her mind all day, like a burr in her sock, and yet even so she got lost in work and it was four before she noticed the time, and then she had to hurry. No way to walk twelve blocks uptown at high tide, when the first three blocks of it would be under shallow water, so she stepped onto an airboat taxi that then skidded up Fifth, over shallows, breakers, and seaweedy street, until turning and letting passengers off at the high tide slide, a floating pier now grounded in the middle of the street waiting for water. This quick if expensive run left her with just the fifteen-minute walk up into Central Park. She lumped along, wishing her hip didn’t hurt and that she had lost more weight than she had managed to. Walking was hard.
And yet she needed the walk to compose her mind. She was never quite comfortable meeting with Larry, there was too much history between them, and much of that history was bad. But on the other hand some of it, a lot of it, was good, even very good, if you could drill down to those layers of the past under the bad years. When they were young law students in love, almost all of it had been good; then came the years when they were married, and good and bad were so closely mixed that you couldn’t differentiate them, they were just the mix of those years, glorious and painful, and ultimately, in retrospect and even at the time, frustrating; for they had not been able to get along. They hadn’t seen eye to eye. No one does, but they couldn’t seem to agree on what they weren’t agreeing on. They hadn’t figured their relationship out, not even close. And then the good and bad had destranded, separated out, and suddenly they could see that there was a lot more bad than good. Or so it had seemed to Charlotte. Larry had said he was fine with a little discord, that she was being too demanding, but whether that was true or not, ultimately the whole thing had fallen apart. Neither of them had the feeling anymore, and by the time they separated, though there had been some very bitter angry moments, it seemed that mostly they both felt a sense of exhaustion and relief. That whole sorry era over; new incarnations for both of them; stay civil when they had to be in touch, which they didn’t, not having kids. After some years that had mellowed into a kind of rueful nostalgia, and later still, getting together over coffee satisfied a little itch of curiosity in Charlotte, an urge to see how Larry’s story had continued. Especially after he shifted into finance and rose in that world, and became, she assumed, both rich, while working for Adirondack, and powerful, being tapped to be chair of the Federal Reserve. At that point her curiosity outweighed her uneasiness when they got together.
Still, every time, as now, when the time came for them to meet, for him to be there in person across a table from her, she felt a qualm, a little twist of dread. How would she look to him, working as she did in the depths of a bureaucracy so marginal it had been demoted to public/private NGO status, doing the legal equivalent of social work? She didn’t like to be judged.
“You’re looking great,” he said as he sat down across from her.
“Thanks,” she said. “Your job must make you good at lying.”
“Ha ha,” he said. “Good at telling the truth. Telling the truth without people freaking out.”
“That’s what I meant. Which people, who would freak out at the truth?”
“The market.”
“The market is people?”
“Of course. And Congress too. Congress is people, and they freak out.”
“But they do that always, right? So if you’re always freaked out, I don’t know where you go from there.”
“They find ways. They have hyper-freak-outs. Sometimes they go around the bend and get completely calm. That’s what I’m always hoping for. And sometimes it happens. There are some good people in both chambers, on both sides of the aisle. It takes some time to figure out who is which.”
“What about the president?”
“She’s good. Pretty calm all the time. Smart. Has assembled a good team.”
“By definition, right?”
“Ha ha. Always good to get together with you and get cut down to size a little.”
“That’s just what I was thinking.”
“Are you still a nonfat latte person?”
“Yes, I never change.”
“Not what I was implying.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Okay, I guess I feel like your coffee habits are pretty fixed, maybe I’m wrong.”
“These days I like half-and-half in an American coffee with a shot of espresso in it.”
“Whoa!”
“New theories, new stomach lining.”
“Surgery?”
“Yeah, I had that band put in? Not really. No, I’m feeling okay there now, I’m not sure what happened. Maybe the meditation is kicking in.”
“Medication?”
“Meditation. I told you last time, or the time before.”
“I forgot, sorry. What do you do?”
“It’s a kind of mindfulness meditation. I lie there in the tower’s farm and look at Brooklyn, and think about how many things there are that I can’t do anything about. After a while that becomes like the whole universe, and then I feel calmer.”
“I think I would fall asleep.”
“Usually I do, but that’s good too.”
/> “Still insomniac?”
“Now I think of it as spreading my sleep around. Sleep, meditation, wakefulness, it’s all getting to be the same for me.”
“Really?”
“No.”
He laughed politely. They sipped, looked around the park. It was the last part of autumn in New York, the leaves had all turned and many had fallen, but some oaks, sycamores, and tweaked elms planted a few decades before were paying off now with their last great globes of red or yellow. It was, as everyone said, one of the handsomest times of year in the city, the time of shortened afternoons and sudden chill, and a clear quality to the low light that made Manhattan like a dream city, stuffed with significance and drama. The only place to be. They had sat across from each other like this, here in various parts of Central Park, and elsewhere in the city, for almost thirty years now. Like giants plunged through the years, yes, and even though she was a bureaucrat and he was the head of the Fed, she knew all of a sudden that he considered them equals.
“So is the president really calm, do you think?”
“I think so. I think she’s in the strong line, you know. And as progressive as an American president can be.”
“Which isn’t very much.”
“No, but it matters when they are. I think she’s in the line of FDR and Johnson, and Eisenhower.”
“Those are all twentieth-century presidents. You might as well add Lincoln.”
“Well, I would, maybe, if it ever came up. If some kind of push came to shove. She wants that kind of opportunity, I think.”
“A civil war over slavery?”
“Well, whatever the current equivalent would be. I mean we do have some giant problems, as you know. And inequality is one of them, as you also know. So yeah, I think she would love to do something big.”
“Interesting.” Charlotte thought that over. “I guess if you were going to do something so stupid as to be president, you would want to go for something big.”
“I think so. The temptation is there. I mean, you wouldn’t do it thinking, Hey, now that I’m president I’ll play it safe, hope nothing happens. Would you?”
“I don’t know,” Charlotte confessed. “It’s way outside my thought zone.”
“You never meditate by thinking, What would I do as president?”
“No. Definitely not. But you’re working for her. You have to think about that. A lot of us think the head of the Fed is one of the crucial jobs.”
He looked surprised. “I’m glad to think you might be one of them.”
“How could I not? You know me.”
“Well, yes. Sort of.”
“I think you do. Say we were concerned with justice, when we were young. I think that was true of us, don’t you?”
He nodded, watching her with a small smile. His idealistic ex, still at it. He sipped his coffee. “But then I got into finance.”
“But that was moving toward power, right? Toward economics, which is toward political economy, which is toward power, which is still ultimately working on justice. Or can be.”
“That’s what I was thinking at the time, I guess.”
“And I always saw that. I always gave you credit for that.”
He smiled again. “Thank you.”
“People get into finance for different reasons. Some of them do it just to make money, I’m sure, but you were never like that.”
“No, maybe not.”
“I mean now you’re a federal employee. So you’re making peanuts compared to what you could be.”
“True. But I don’t have to worry about money anymore either. So I’m not sure if I get any credit for that. You could say that at a certain point, power is more interesting than money. Once you’ve got enough money. You see that all the time.”
“I know. But whatever, here you are, chair of the Fed, it’s big.”
“It’s interesting, I’ll admit that. It’s maybe too big. I feel like I should be able to do more than I find I can actually do. It’s like the Fed kind of runs itself, or the market runs it, or the world, and I sit there thinking, Do something, Larry, change something, but what, or how—it isn’t obvious, that’s for sure. For one thing, the rest of the board and the regional boards have a lot of clout. It’s not a strongly executive system.”
“No?”
“Not as much as I’d like. I feel more advisory than anything else.”
Charlotte thought about that. “But advisory to the president, and to Congress.”
“True.”
“And if push came to shove, you know, like in a financial crisis, then sometimes your advice is what everyone is going to do.”
He laughed. “Guess I’ll just have to hope for a crisis!”
Charlotte laughed too. Suddenly they were having a little fun. “Those seem to come along every decade or so, so you have to be ready.”
“I guess.”
They talked about other things, such as old friends and acquaintances they had enjoyed in the years when they were a couple; each had kept in touch with one or two, and they shared their news.
That led naturally to Henry Vinson.
Actually not. It would never be quite natural for Charlotte to ask Larry about any of his acquaintances in finance, as she had never taken any interest in them, nor had Larry been inclined to share details of his interactions with them. Most of that part of his life had happened after they broke up. So she had had to consider how best to bring it up, but now she saw the way, which was to make it about him and his possible conflicts of interest, because then he would assume that she was just tweaking him with problems arising from his success. That would fit their usual pattern.
“Do you ever end up regulating your old partners?” she asked.
He did frown a little at this, it was so outside her usual realm of interest; but then he winced a little, as if becoming aware she was needling him again, as she had hoped he would conclude.
“I’m not head of the SEC,” he pointed out, by way of a parry.
“I know that, but the Fed sets the rates, and that determines a lot of everything else, right? So some of your old partners will be helped and others hurt by any decisions you make.”
“Of course,” he said. “It’s the nature of the job. Basically, everyone I ever worked with is going to be impacted.”
“So, Henry Vinson too? Didn’t you guys have a kind of rocky breakup?”
“Not really.”
Now he was regarding her with some suspicion. He had left Adirondack after Vinson had been made CEO by its board of directors. It had been in the nature of a contest or competition, he had once admitted to her, in that the board of directors could have chosen either of them to be the next CEO, but they chose Vinson. Larry had still been the CFO, but there was not really room for the loser of such a selection process to stay in the company, especially since Larry didn’t like many of the things Vinson was doing; he had therefore left and started his own hedge fund, done well, and then been appointed head of the Fed by their old law school classmate, now president. Vinson had also done well at Adirondack, and then with his own fund, Alban Albany, after he too had gone out on his own. So it could be regarded as a case of no harm no foul, or two winners. Just one of those things. As Larry was explaining again now.
“Still, it must be fun to tell him what to do?”
Larry laughed. “Actually he tells me what to do.”
“Really?”
“But of course. Repeatedly, all the time. He wants rates this way, he wants them that way.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“He can talk to me, anyone can. He’s free to talk to me and I’m free to ignore him.”
“So nothing’s changed.”
He laughed again. “True.”
“So is that how it works, with you now in government regulating them?”
“It’s just me in a different job. I don’t stay in touch, but no one ever does.”
“So it’s not the fox guarding the henhouse?”
<
br /> “No, I hope not.” He frowned at this idea. “I think what everyone likes is for the Fed and Treasury to be staffed by people who know the ropes and speak the language. It helps just in being able to communicate.”
“But it’s not just a language, it’s a worldview.”
“I suppose.”
“So you don’t automatically support the banks over the people, if push ever comes to shove?”
“I hope not. I support the Federal Reserve.”
Charlotte nodded, trying to look like she believed it. Or that he hadn’t just answered her question by saying he would support the banks.
The late-afternoon light was bronzing the air of the park, giving all the autumn leaves and the air itself a yellowy luster. The ground was now in shadow. It was crisp but not cold.
“Want to walk around a bit?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, and got up. She would be able to show that she had become a stronger walker. Assuming he had ever noticed she had been having trouble with that, as probably he hadn’t. She pondered how to bring up Vinson again. Once they got up and going, headed north up the west side, she said, “It’s an odd little thing, but a cousin of Henry Vinson’s was living in my building as a temporary guest, and then he went missing. We have the police looking into it, and they were the ones who found this relationship to Vinson.”
“Cousin?”
“Family relationship? Child of a parent’s sibling?”
He tried to shove her and she dodged it. “It’s just one of the things they’ve been finding out,” she added.
“That is odd. I don’t know what to say.”
“I only mention it because we were talking about the old days, and that made me think of Vinson, and how I had heard about him in this other connection.”
“I see.”
Larry being Larry, he managed to make that sound like he saw more than Charlotte would like. They had fought a lot, back in the day; she was remembering that now. That stuff had happened; that was why they had divorced. The good times before that were hard to remember, but not that hard. As they walked around the park paths, she found their past was very present to her mind, all of it. She often imagined the past as an archaeological dig, with later events overlying and crushing the earlier ones, but in fact it wasn’t like that; really every moment of her past was present to her all at once, as in the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. So the good times stood right next to the bad times, alternating panel by panel, room by room, making for a garbled queasy stew of feelings. The past.