A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (18 page)

Marshall smiled, still a bit distracted. “What’s up?”

“Something on the wire,” Hudson confided, speaking softly. “It’s just speculation, totally unconfirmed, but…You haven’t heard anything? It has to do with LuQre.”

Marshall showed polite interest. “Oh really? What kind of speculation?”

“That they’re filing for Chapter 11,” said Hudson, wincing. “That’s the report.”

“No-o-o-o-o-o!” Marshall made a low moaning sound that strove to express disbelief and distress. His eyes went wide. He brought his hand to his face. Their company maintained a complicated web of financial dealings with LuQre, including joint assets and debts, most of them threaded through Marshall’s department. He wished he could reattempt the moan, if only out of respect for Hudson.

“By end of business today,” Hudson added.

Marshall let his mouth fall open and he shook his head as if it had just been splashed with cold water. “Are you sure?”

Hudson shrugged helplessly. “I called. No answer. I think they’ve closed their switchboard. Can you believe it?”

Compensating for his weak theatrics, Marshall declared, “I’m not surprised.”

“You’re not?” Now it was Hudson’s turn to show shock, honest shock. His face folded into a wondering squint. Marshall realized that he had incriminated himself, falsely, since he
was
surprised. The announcement’s import was still percolating through various strata of preoccupation. Now Hudson said, “You’re not surprised?”

“Well, I
am
surprised,” Marshall insisted, pausing as he forged his response. Although he didn’t wish to suggest that he had withheld information, he didn’t want to appear ignorant or inattentive either, when in fact, to be honest with himself as Thorpe had counseled, he had been completely ignorant and inattentive. He tried to put together a few stray facts. He began, “I mean, not that I knew anything, but you know, you didn’t get the impression they were the best-managed company in America.” He peered at Hudson, hoping that this would be enough, especially with the shift to the second person. But the troubled cast in Hudson’s eye remained fixed as he waited for further explanation. Marshall went on, tentatively: “It’s not like we didn’t know they had huge accounts receivable with Enron. And now that I think of it, they were in pretty deep with both WorldCom and Qwest; there was some kind of joint venture in Argentina. Didn’t you know? And of course they took a beating from energy deregulation in California. I
must
have sent you a memo about last quarter’s earnings. Their accountant is Arthur Andersen by the way.”

Hudson’s gaze fell to his shoes. He was quiet for a minute. He had once been a handsome man, but the march of the last several months had left their tread on his face. With the company struggling to recover from its 9/11 losses, human and financial, he had refused to take any vacation beyond the company retreats that he organized and led. He looked exhausted. “I guess the speculation is correct then,” he said blandly.

Marshall was thinking. “We should call Legal right away, to
see where we stand, what obligations we’re stuck with. And we have to make a list of clients who are going to be impacted…” He started compiling the list in his head, electrifying neurons that had been on standby for months. It would be a long, costly list. “Wow, we’re going to take a hit and a half.”

Hudson sighed, gripped the tops of his thighs, and lifted himself to his feet with difficulty, as if fighting another planet’s gravity. His face had gone slack. “That’s all right. It’s okay,” he murmured, and shuffled back to his office.

Marshall watched him go. Then, swiveling back to his computer, he saw that he had neglected to shift windows when Hudson arrived. His individual retirement account was still displayed, an increasingly recurrent indiscretion. He had begun tracking his positions daily ever since the market went into reverse two years ago. This summer, however, as the market slide became an avalanche, the Dow Jones plunging past 10,000, 9,000, and 8,000 to sweep aside picturesque alpine villages inhabited by small and large investors alike, he had tended to keep the account up all day, while rigorously hunting in other browser windows the most clairvoyant market forecasts and the least damaging prospective investments. Hudson must have seen that it wasn’t company business on his screen this morning. Well, at least it wasn’t porn.

MARSHALL CLICKED
his browser’s Refresh button, keeping his eye on his total assets number. It shifted downward. He did the math on the scratch pad he kept next to his computer. In the time it had taken Hudson to tell him about LuQre’s filthy collapse, Marshall had lost $8.47. Damn, the market was shooting itself in the head again. The past hour had cost him $45, real money. If he had cashed out an hour ago, he could have missed Hudson’s visit, bought himself a New York strip steak and a glass of wine at Michael Jordan’s, reinvested the remaining
funds when he returned, and found himself in the exact same place. Except of course, Mr. Big Shot Investor and Eater of Steaks, all he had left in the market was his 401(k), the money locked in until his retirement.

There had been other funds once, brokerage accounts established for capital improvements and the children’s education, as well as a rainy-day fund, back, back, back in the Age of Progress. In those years, the nineties, Marshall had hardly ever checked his portfolio, content to let it grow out of sight, like mushrooms. Every eighteen months, according to a well-known computing principle, microchip speed had been doubling, the Internet itself doubled in size every
month,
and this was concomitant with exponential growth in consumer appliances—cell phones, DVD players, digital cameras, Palm Pilots, all of which contributed, even if they were made in China, to America’s world-beating, in-your-face, proof-that-we-were-right-about-everything productivity. Wal-Mart opened in-store espresso bars. High-end fusion restaurants replaced cheap ethnic ones. Snuffles’ dog-walkers showed up in Manolo Blahniks. New York became safer than ever, muggings no longer as profitable as mutual funds. You didn’t need to check your account. You could see your affluence reflected in the world around you.

Now everything was burning. His 401(k), which had once promised a lush, softly golden, seraphim-packed golf course retirement, had been diminished to $34,000, despite his weekly payroll contributions, frequent divestitures and reinvestments, his intense research, and the investment therapy sessions he had attended this past spring. As for the other accounts, almost everything that hadn’t been consumed by the bear market had fallen into Thorpe’s gaping maw. Time was money: the losses were like a journey into the past, shedding years of investment patience. A year ago his assets had declined to their value at Victor’s birth in 1999. Now they had reached their value at the year of Viola’s. He had already plotted the
graph that foresaw, given current trends, when his holdings would be equivalent to what they had been on the day he married Joyce. That date might yet coincide with the day his divorce was finalized.

Had he sufficiently enjoyed the nineties bull market? At the time everyone had known that the run of market advances was extraordinary—yet this triumph was mitigated by the suspicion that growth was a normal function of economic activity, nothing to celebrate. It was recession, inflation, stagflation, and despair that flowed against the current of history. Unexceptional common sense had demanded that New York slums would be gentrified and that free markets would establish themselves around the world—dissent required a kind of neurotic, life-denying pessimism. It was expected that within a few years a 10,000 Dow would seem as puny and as antiquated as a microprocessor running at 20 megahertz, installed in a PC with a 1-megabyte hard drive. Knowing that the nineties market expansion was extraordinary had been like knowing that your simple human existence was extraordinary—while not walking around being thrilled by it. You took it (market growth, life) for granted, while feeling ashamed of taking it for granted. You even expected retribution for taking it for granted. Yet you couldn’t operate in the quotidian world without taking it for granted.

Now that the nineties were being erased, he was unsure what to do with his dwindled assets. He trolled the Web looking for a break: the one stock about to be launched into the stratosphere by some reversal of market conditions, or some technological advance, or some government agency’s action or inaction, innocent or not. At the same time he sourly contemplated that in the last year his portfolio had been outperformed by Viola’s passbook savings account, opened for her by Joyce’s parents in their village’s independent, slumberous, ATM-less, one-bank bank. She had beat Merrill Lynch too. He considered
a wholesale shift to bonds or even CDs. But Marshall possessed a morbid fear of being locked in, of knowing precisely how much an investment would be worth at a certain date. Thirty-four thousand dollars invested in a 4.5 percent thirty-year CD would return $130,821.73 in 2032—and he would be sixty-six years old. A fixed instrument served to recall that your own passage through time was fixed: that you were being run at a steady rate down an inflexible rail.

Market risk made you liquid within time; it gave you freedom to travel within the temporal continuum, leaping ahead twenty or thirty or a hundred years of typical investment growth and seizing the payout, without having to live and age through those years. You just had to be smart. For the past several months, Marshall had been practicing the use of sophisticated and esoteric market forecasting tools. These tools acknowledged that the market as a whole made no more sense than a screen of television static or a godless universe—yet if you examined the history of a single stock, fund, or index’s price fluctuations, it was sometimes possible to discern certain patterns within them. These recurred often and distinctively enough to have been given names based on the silhouettes they showed when they were plotted on a graph, such as “Symmetrical Triangle” and “Flags & Pennants.” Marshall delved deeply into their fanciful and poetic typology, learning to distinguish segments of indexes that, when plotted against volume and other factors, exhibited the classic “Heads & Shoulders” profile or “Inverted Heads & Shoulders,” the “Parabolic Curve” or “Wedges Formation,” or “Osama’s Beard” or “Saddam’s Mustache” or “Saddam’s Mustache Ascending.” If, through careful study of a certain stock or index, you discovered one of these known patterns in progress, you would gain the ability to predict what would occur next, according to the established pattern, and bet on it. Profit lay behind the static.

His eyes watering, Marshall abruptly pulled away from the
screen. He rose to stretch his legs and survey the office: his colleagues doing their jobs or checking their own brokerage accounts, similarly staring at computers and punching in numbers that added to the data already in the globally vast market stir. The problem was that the market was nearly omniscient and nearly perfectly rational and would compensate for nearly every advantage in knowledge or understanding that you acquired, nearly always. Billions were made only in the
nearly,
the momentary opening of the demon-guarded door to aberrations and lapses. You had to be there and ready to rush in.

Forget it. His true wish represented the most ordinary of desires: that God would whisper a company or fund name in his ear and so end his humiliating calculations and recalculations. The wish was desperate, but Marshall believed that there wasn’t an investor alive who didn’t pray in the privacy of his cubicle.

Marshall didn’t want billions of dollars. Millions would do. He needed only enough to escape his marriage, only enough so that Joyce could have the apartment, whatever support she wanted,
more
than she wanted in fact. He’d buy her a fur coat, anything. All he required was a single stock. All he required was for its three-or four-letter New York Stock Exchange symbol to appear in a dream or fantasy. Sometimes he’d lie awake at night and try to force the vision, to summon the correct letters onto the velvety screen of his bedroom’s lightlessness. Come, come you bastards, come, but the only characters that ever appeared in the murk were shimmering glyphs and runes from languages long lost, dead, or privately held.

THEY TOLD JOYCE
to stick her proposal up her ass, and there, apparently, it remained. Weeks passed without a response from her lawyer and—this was most maddening—Marshall saw no
indication that Joyce was walking around with anything more up her ass than usual. She made no reference to her settlement proposal and never spoke about the divorce. She and Marshall maintained their independent, tight-lipped domestic regime, more faithful to it than to any other routine in their previous life together, accepting it as normal nearly as much as the children did, though unlike the children, they dragged themselves through their daily lives muffled beneath blankets of suffocating pain. At Viola’s day-care graduation they were stationed at opposite ends of the tiny playroom, as were all the divorced and divorcing parents, with the estranged husbands on one side and the wives on the other, just as their families had been seated at their weddings. Wearing a chiffon blouse and jeans tucked into high boots, Miss Naomi beamed at her charges and smiled shyly at a few parents, Marshall included—especially Marshall, he thought.

According to the precise, stringent, tacitly observed rules, Marshall and Joyce were prohibited from looking at each other directly, or from even recognizing the other’s presence, even at home. When they were forced to speak, they modestly averted their gaze and adopted a conspicuously flat tone. They spoke with elegant concision, unless of course they were screaming. From the limited intelligence available and a few stolen glances, Marshall couldn’t determine whether his refusal to negotiate her settlement proposal worried her, angered her, or amused her—or anything. He began to wonder if her lawyer had even communicated his refusal to her.

And another court date was approaching, perhaps with decisive force, and it occurred to Marshall that Joyce’s silence reflected confidence in her legal position. Her settlement offer might not have been a feint—very possibly, given her utterly contrary interpretation of every fact that had ever come into their joint possession, she thought its terms were fair, even generous. She could believe that otherwise he would be defeated
entirely and she had offered it to him as a sop to her conscience. Under intense questioning over the phone, Thorpe told him in good cheer how badly the case could go against him. Once Marshall put the phone back in its cradle he sensed that, beyond its other indignities, the call had somehow established that he had been the one to insist that they refuse Joyce’s proposal, over Thorpe’s objections.