This time I paused to consider what was going on.
‘Well.’ I finally said, ‘quite a few things, I guess.’ Her expression didn’t change: not a single flicker of triumph in response to my changed answer.
‘For one thing I’m afraid of being made a fool of. By standing nude in front of a sexless woman just because she tells me to. Or giving away money in a silly way. I’m sure there are others.’
She stared at me a moment.
‘And what would you lose if you lost what you’re afraid of losing?’ she asked.
I frowned. Was I stuck in a dialogue with Gertrude Stein? I would lose what I lost when I lost it. What did she mean?
‘What would you lose if you were made a fool of?’ she asked, as if hearing my unspoken question.
‘Dignity … self-respect …’ I suggested. ‘Sense of being a reasonable man.’
‘Fine,’ said Kathy. ‘What would you lose if you lost your dignity?’
‘My dignity,’ I countered quickly, feeling a little annoyed.
‘How much is your dignity worth?’
Damn it! Where was this conversation going?
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean how much, in dollars,’ she explained, ‘would someone have to pay you to lose your dignity?’
‘Depends on how much of my dignity I had to lose,’ I answered, smiling.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘How much to undress and stand nude in front of me?’
I let out a deep breath, becoming aware as I did that I must be tense.
‘Oh, maybe … three hundred dollars,’ I said. ‘I’m an easy lay.’
‘Fine,’ she said and pulled out a small purse from her suit jacket pocket. Barely looking at it, she drew out three hundred-dollar bills. ‘Here’s three hundred dollars. Take off all your clothes.’
Jesus H. Christ. How had my father managed to bring me to this? Was Luke behind her, staying awake all night thinking up things to make me do the next day?
I felt my face flushing, not from embarrassment but from anger and indecision.
‘But now …’ I began tentatively, ‘I’m afraid of losing my dignity by accepting three hundred dollars for undressing.’ I hesitated a moment more and then grinned.
‘That loss of dignity is worth, oh, another three hundred dollars.’ I said in triumph.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘And so on. I assume another piece of your dignity would be at risk if you accepted three hundred dollars for accepting three hundred dollars, and so on. It appears you have something of an infinitely regressing dignity.’
‘So it appears.’ I said, feeling I’d squirmed off the hook.
‘Fine,’ she shot back. ‘Take off all your clothes.’
Here we go again.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘Here is the three hundred dollars,’ she said. ‘Take off all your clothes.’
‘But I told you. I have other dignities which also have their price.’ She looked at me neutrally.
‘Tell me, what do you gain by having dignity?’ she finally asked.
Oh, Jesus, Jesus. I felt like a guilty man in the witness stand being harassed by a clever prosecutor. I let out another big sigh.
‘I don’t have the faintest idea,’ I said.
‘Tell me, do you think I could undress and stand naked in front of you?’
I knew the answer.
‘I think you could.’
‘And, in your eyes, would I lose dignity?’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’
She stood up then and began to undress. In less than a minute she had taken off all of her clothes, placed them neatly on her chair and was standing naked in front of me. She was an attractive woman, but like most human bodies, hers had its flaws: a mole here, a little too much flab there, breasts that didn’t quite fit any of my images of perfection. Nevertheless she stood in front of me with precisely the same expression she’d had earlier. There was no doubt at all that she had as much dignity now as before, perhaps even more. Definitely more.
‘You don’t lose any dignity,’ I commented in a low voice.
‘Fine,’ she said, and turned to begin to dress. ‘Then you too might undress in such a way that it would involve not losing any dignity, right?’
‘Right.’ I felt the prosecutor, half-naked as she might now be, was closing in for the kill.
‘Then doing something foolish – as I have just done,’ she concluded, still buttoning her blouse, ‘can be an act of strength and dignity.’
‘Yes,’ I said, trying to re-establish the half-smile of superior irony.
‘Why?’
Why? I felt briefly that I must have lost the drift of the discussion.
‘Why?’ I echoed.
‘What was it about my standing nude that distinguished it from … a foolish standing nude?’ I thought about it.
‘You so obviously don’t care what anyone thinks,’ I finally answered. You expect neither approval nor disapproval and don’t care which comes. Others – the fools – would look as if they cared very much what people were thinking, and as if they were standing there against their will.’
‘Let’s assume I cast a die first to determine whether I undress and the die ordered my nakedness. Would my dignity be less?’
Now that was an interesting question.
‘No,’ I answered. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘So it can’t be simply free will,’ she suggested. ‘Then what is it?’
‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that what counts is your having confidence in what you’re doing – no! No, it’s not that. It’s almost as if there wasn’t any you there either to have confidence or not have it. You simply do things one after another but don’t seem to score points as you do so. There’s no evaluation going on.’
She nodded. I was beginning to feel now less like the defendant in a hopeless trial than like a schoolboy slowly learning from a no-nonsense teacher.
‘Uncertainty … wobbling … vacillation – usually because of fears of evaluation,’ I found myself continuing. ‘These are the hallmarks of the fool, or the seeming fool at least.’
‘Just doing what you’re doing while you’re doing it,’ she confirmed. ‘No matter how foolish or arbitrary it may be.’ She paused and smiled.
‘Get undressed,’ she said.
27
After his chastening session with Kathy that Monday morning, Larry wandered out of the orientation building a little dazed and a little proud: he had managed to lose his dignity. He had stood naked in front of Kathy and not flushed. He’d given her back the three hundred dollars and not felt a fool – or rather felt like a fool but also felt like a fool for feeling a fool. He found himself looking to see if Rick had yet returned his car, but saw no sign of it. Then, with a sudden rush of anxiety, he realized the markets were open and were racing off in every direction without him. He had to phone Jeff.
With the cellular phone in his car not an option, he’d have to use the pay phone in the orientation lobby, which annoyed him considerably since it had very little privacy. He hurried back in and soon huddled himself in a corner, with his back to the room, and called Jeff.
He was still a little distracted by the session with Kathy so it took a little while before some of the things Jeff was telling him finally sunk in.
‘What the fuck are you talking about!?’ Larry said after Jeff had presented his new recommendations and Larry had finally grasped them. ‘We can’t go short that much oil!!’
‘The price is way overvalued,’ Jeff insisted. He was also hunkered down – in his cubicle at BB&P peering out at the other brokers and traders as if each one was a foreign spy. Sweat was pouring from all the usual pores and several that hadn’t been used since adolescence. He had just received a new inside tip from X, the biggest ever, but couldn’t tell Larry. ‘The market’s way overbought. I figure the President is bound to do something after the election that he’s been hiding before the election. That’s the political process. Almost any news t
hat doesn’t make it look like war for certain is bound to lead to a sell-off.’
Then how come none of the other traders has figured this out,’ Larry barked into the phone, trying to shout into the corner so that his voice would be muffled for the half-dozen others milling in the room behind him. He was wondering what had gotten into Jeff this time. Until two months ago. Jeff had never had a risky idea in his life, or if he had, he’d kept it carefully to himself. ‘All our indicators are still on buy signals.’ Larry continued. ‘How can we justify suddenly selling?’
‘The market is overbought,’ said Jeff desperately.
‘So what!? It can stay overbought for weeks. Let it sell off and trigger some sell signals, then we can talk about going short.’
‘But you used to like to sell overbought markets!’ Jeff persisted.
‘That was before I’d taken several baths because the overbought markets kept going up and up and up.’ hissed Larry, shuffling back and forth in the corner as far as the phone’s short cord would permit and feeling caged.
Jeff cradled his phone closer to his cheek and crouched down even lower in his chair. He’d already gotten Larry to agree to cover shorts in the stock market and to go short a few gold contracts, but the key to it all was oil, going short oil. After they’d exchanged code words X had told him that a few days after the election the President was going to announce a new peace initiative, one that would have a credibility that would at least for a moment make people think that war would be avoided. If this happened, the price of oil, inflated by war scares, might fall 20 or 30 per cent in a day! Fortunes would be made! It was a futures trader’s wet dream! Larry simply didn’t understand that the Gods didn’t like people who thought that the future was going to remain like the past. The Gods liked gamblers who believed only in luck and the Gods and cheating.
‘Look,’ Jeff finally said, lowering his voice. ‘I’ve got a friend in the State Department.’
Larry, who had been staring out unseeing into the room and nervously scratching his back against the phone box, now froze in that position.
‘You’ve got a friend in the Slate Department,’ he said evenly.
‘A fraternity brother,’ said Jeff, deciding that if cheating was all right, lying must be too. ‘I was at a party with him over the weekend. After he’d had a lot to drink, he let out that … well, something that next week – after the election – will make the price of oil fall.’
For Larry, who didn’t yet share Jeff’s insight into why insider trading was moral, had to think about this. Strictly speaking, acting on information about some change of government policy that had not yet been announced did not constitute insider trading. For one thing there was normally no dear or necessary market play based on some vague government policy change. State Department leaks were not part of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s mandate, the SEC figuring that such leaks were so common, and spread so widely, that ‘insiders’ constituted half of the investment community. Also, thought Larry, a drunken rumour was good luck, not insider trading. Even he would trade on some unpremeditated, gratuitous, but reliable bit of drunken insider information. It was paying for information, or trading such inside information in an unauthorized way, that was clearly wrong.
‘May I ask what that something is that’s going to make the price of oil fall?’ Larry finally asked.
‘A peace initiative,’ Jeff mumbled.
Well, yes, that would do it.
‘I see.’
‘If my friend’s right,’ said Jeff, ‘the profits will be enormous.’
‘I would say so,’ said Larry. ‘Did your hunch about the T-Bonds come from this same guy?’ he suddenly asked.
Jeff’s body began running in all directions at once, which meant his teeth gritted, eyes bulged, face twitched, hands quivered and sweat glands, all two million of them, put in overtime.
‘No, no,’ he answered. ‘This guy is State Department. He doesn’t know beans about economics or bonds. He put all his money in condominiums.’
This last statement was a masterstroke, the sort of seemingly trivial detail that makes the liar’s story ring absolutely true. On Wall Street in the early 1990s anyone who had put all their money into condominiums was clearly a complete ass – as opposed to the partial asses that everyone else was – except me and thee.
‘OK,’ said Larry. ‘We go short two hundred December oil contracts – gradually, today and Wednesday, assuming the President will wait a decent day or two before telling the public what he wouldn’t tell them during the election campaign. Put the stop … about fifty cents above the market. Let’s see if we can make more off drunks than we can from ten years of experience and education.’
Jeff dared to smile.
‘That’s exactly it.’ he said. ‘I think we can.’
28
After talking to Jeff I felt oddly dislocated. Wandering away from the orientation building I looked around and found myself surrounded by huge mountains of pine trees with open meadows spread below, instead of huge mountains of concrete with layers of macadam below. As I walked along I felt myself moving back into the world of Lukedom where people were different and unpredictable and unique compared to the button-down world of Wall Street and Blair, Battle and Pike, where they were all crazy in the same ways. And the trades and figures Jeff and I had bandied about, which seemed to have such body and meaning in New York, seemed flimsy and artificial here in the mountains. Everything about Lukedom made money seem sort of silly while everything in Wall Street made it seem like the only serious reality in the world. I knew Wall Street was right, and worried that if I stayed too long in Lukedom I might lose that compulsive calculating nature that had made me the hotshot I was.
And things didn’t get better when I went back to the orientation centre after the break. I found that I was expected to let a die choose which of three ‘chores’ I’d do during the lunch hour: cook, serve table or mop up. The die chose the mop and, after I’d eaten a mediocre lunch, I had to clean up both the kitchen and dining area of the small orientation centre restaurant. So for the first time in my life I discovered the joys of mopping a kitchen floor.
In the afternoon I had to continue to endure my ‘training’, some with Kathy but most with the big English trainer Michael Way. and I hated it. While Kathy had made me feel like an inhibited prude. Way soon had me feeling like a philosophical pygmy.
Even the other people in the classes or on the street or in the restaurants began to depress me. No one seemed to care who I was. No one seemed to care I was a brilliant graduate of Wharton Business School earning close to two hundred thousand dollars a year, that the expensive clothes I wore were really mine and not some duds I’d borrowed from Lukedom’s huge collection of clothing and costumes. It was depressing to be telling someone at the bar at the Do Die Inn how I’d made an incredible coup on the Japanese yen that had made BB&P millions, and then realize that the two men listening to me assumed it was all simply a bullshit role the dice had told me to play. And when a woman told me a really moving story about losing her only child to leukaemia I’d wanted to comfort her until she took out a die, flipped it across the bar and, in an entirely different tone of voice, told me I had a cute butt.
I realized I was feeling a consistent low level of anxiety. I’d often enough had anxiety caused by worrying about other people disapproving of who I was or what I did, but this was the first time I’d experienced a low level dread of not being sure who I was. Of course I knew who I was, but somehow the fact that no one else acknowledged or cared about who I thought I was was profoundly unsettling.
I felt such waves of loneliness I phoned Jeff two more times than I really had to, pretending I was worried about all the oil contracts. I also tried to phone Honoria at her office, wanting to apologize and redeclare my undying devotion to our union, but was told she was in a meeting.
Was it a real meeting? Was she talking to me? Were we no longer engaged? Had she really discovered that the magnificent
two-carat diamond I’d given her had a minor flaw?
I became so depressed I even longed to meet my father again, just to have someone who would recognize me as Larry Rhinehart. Never had I realized how important it was to have people who were always around reminding you of who you are. Maybe Honoria was right: the place was designed to drive people crazy.
In mid-afternoon, after I’d been at last released from more intense one-on-one training which was giving me an inferiority complex, I was given a chance to choose six ‘occupations for the day’ from a list of over twenty. The list varied from bank manager to farmhand to housewife to babysitter to hardware store clerk and so on. Only one leapt out at me: administrative clerk; maybe I’d have a chance to browse through some other file cabinets. So I listed it as one of the six and then added five more: bank manager (why not start at the top?); babysitter (I’d have free time to follow the markets on CNBC-FNN); hardware store clerk (maybe True Value would have a special on effective skeleton keys); telephone operator (maybe I’d overhear a phone call that would give me a lead); psychotherapist (I knew I’d enjoy playing god to some poor wimp the way Dr Bickers did to me); and sheriff’s deputy (maybe I could find out how I could stop Rick from always taking off with my car).
I then cast a die. A ‘three’ babysitter.
The babysitting was a disaster. I’d assumed I would sit around reading the Wall Street Journal and catching up on the Monday markets on CNBC-FNN on television while the three children played with blocks on the living-room floor. It didn’t work out that way.
I was given a hint of the trouble to come when the babysitter for the morning shift, a middle-aged woman named Dolores, looked rather frazzled as she passed over responsibility for the three young children, varying in age from two to seven. She practically ran from the house as soon as I took over.
Things got off to a bad start immediately. First of all the house had neither cable television (and thus a financial network) nor a telephone (and thus access to Jeff back in New York). Secondly, the children claimed they hadn’t been fed since mid-morning snack and were circling the icebox and cupboards like a wolfpack closing in on a kill. Thirdly, I made the mistake of asking them what they wanted for lunch.