Moral Hazard (13 page)

Pure joy on his face. I swear. Pure trust. Within minutes, he was asleep. Unconscious. Out of the here into the nowhere. I don’t remember what I then said or did, how long I sat with him. I probably kissed him, told him how much I loved him.
This is how much I love you
. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just walked out of the room. Goodnight to the staff on duty, down the elevator into the street. The air tasted bitter, of walnuts gone black in the shell.

The phone rang as I walked through the front door to my apartment. “Your husband is not responding. You must come.” Cold, suspicious.

The medics were in his room, easing him onto a stretcher, ready to take him to the hospital I had specified. Outside were two fresh-faced policemen, caps bigger than their heads, bulky with nightsticks, walkie-talkies, guns.

“He’s in the last stages of Alzheimer’s,” I said, looking them in the eye. They hesitated a fraction before turning on their heel and trudging away down the fluorescent-bright corridor.

He was three nights and two days dying—ample time to observe my handiwork. The skin on his face stretched tight, turned opalescent. His breathing, noisy at first, quieted. When he was moved, his eyelids shot open like a doll’s. No tubes, no drips, no monitors. Propped on pillows, a cotton blanket pulled neatly under his arms. The occupant of the other bed in the room, a frail man covered in liver spots, was hooked up to all manner of machines, his family keeping an anguished vigil. Each to our own.

The first two nights, I climbed up on the bed and slept next to him, cradling him. I woke the first morning to find Gwen standing over us, horrified. Later, I asked her why, and she said she was afraid he might die in the night and I would wake to cold flesh. On the final night, his body closing down, blackening, I sat next to him, his hand in mine, sleeping fitfully.
I’m here.

When he died in the morning, it was without even a sigh. He simply ceased to breathe.

A call was placed to the funeral parlor where I had made arrangements two years earlier, as the Medicaid law required. A no-frills cremation, as he wished, the ashes delivered to me when it was done. At the time, I asked if I could stay with the body, see it to the flames, complete the journey. But I was finally too tired. In the mortician’s little van he could go the last leg alone. I went home to blistering loneliness.

His last conscious moments were happy. I have to remind myself of this. He was
so
happy, tucked into his bed, smiling, even then able to surround me with warmth.

He died peacefully. With dignity. How I have come to hate that word. Mingy, hollow, inadequate word. Synonym for “caused no trouble.” Better to go bellowing, furious at being shortchanged.

I called the doctor who gave me the pills. “He knew! He knew!” I was hysterical.

She was a plain-spoken doctor. “Nonsense,” she said. “He hasn’t known anything for a very long time.”

I talked with the head nun, who provided balm. She remarked on our devotion. “Cath, he never forgot who you were. That’s unusual.” Then she said, “It’s far better this way. This could have gone on for another ten years, him lying there.” Absolved?

I can’t believe he’s not alive. I puzzle over this lapse in comprehension, for I know he’s dead.
I do believe, that die I must / And be return’d from out my dust.
Bailey has been returned from out his dust. Yet I catch myself looking around and thinking,
You have to be here somewhere.
It’s as if I have a gap in my thinking that I can’t bridge. Tricks of the mind. Rational brain, primitive brain.

I can’t abide the sentimental scaffolding that people erect around their lives, but when I’m beset, I allow myself to talk to him, imagine what he might have said in response. He could always make me laugh at stupidity and meanness. Amateurs! he’d say, when I was upset at some piddling slight. No class! Bailey: my oracle.

Sometimes, in the spirit of Frank O’Hara, I tell him that I do not totally regret life. All the same, he asked too much of me, my darling husband.

Without the financial pressures presented by Bailey’s care, I left Wall Street. I probably should have stayed longer, fattened my perpetually anorexic bank account, but I could no longer sit in meetings and disguise amusement, impatience, sleepiness. And, to be truthful, Bart and Hanny, with Chuck studiously looking the other way, were succeeding in acing me by the simple trick of drying up my work. Turning off the tap. To jockey for assignments was beyond me.

When I went to Hanny to resign, he said, before I could accomplish my mission, “I’m a pretty good judge of a learning curve”—he inscribed a curve in the air with his index finger—“and you’re about here.” He pointed to just below the middle of the curve. “You can write, but you can’t handle complex arguments.”

Generous of him. “Absolutely. You’re so right. Thank you for sharing that with me. My reasoning powers definitely need developing. I’ll work on it. I’ll work on it very hard,” I replied. Mike had taught me this trick. When someone says something preposterous, agree with them, even heighten the idiocy. For once, Hanny was flummoxed. Outside on the Hudson, a huge cruise ship—a skyscraper turned on its side—hove silently into sight. I handed him my resignation.

My last conversation with Horace was not in his office but in an elevator. “You know what your trouble is, Cath? You’re not corporate. But underneath this”—fingering the material of his suit jacket—“neither am I.” Nearly everyone at Niedecker claimed to be above the fray, going along with the absurdities of corporate life, while laughing up their sleeves. Yet they guarded their positions on the food chain with the single-mindedness, the savagery, of wolves.

I shrugged. The elevator whistled on its downward path. “Horace, working here, I’ve realized a fundamental truth. Something a wise journalist once said.”

“What would that be?” Cautious. Unsure where I was going with this.

“Conservatives aren’t the enemy. Liberals aren’t the enemy. Bullshit is the enemy.”

I didn’t have the last word. His faced creased with amusement. “That’s my Cath.” I creased my face to copy his. Every inch the court jester.

A few months later I read in the “Avenue of the Americas” column in the
Financial Times
that Horace was ousted by the CEO.
Princes come, princes go / An hour of pomp and show / They go…
Then—this was headline news—Niedecker Benecke was sold down the river for its good name to a large commercial bank more known for expediency and its gorilla reach than honor. Complementary synergies were invoked, but the result was a financial Pentagon: bulky, unwieldy, internecine. Niedecker could’ve stayed independent, but his people let him down, said the Big Toe, and, gunning his purple Porsche, drove into retirement with $250 million.

“A candidate for the guillotine.” Mike’s judgment on the Big Toe. We were lunching—Caesar salads, iced tea—in midtown at the bistro on the ground floor of the Lipstick Building. Entertaining, that building, the way its elliptical shape flirts with the surrounding rectangles. One of my favorites. It was the first time Mike and I’d had a meal together, talked anywhere other than the World Financial Center plaza.

We’d been gossiping about Niedecker, how almost everyone we knew had walked or been fired.

“It’s a carcass,” he said.

I agreed. “Poor buggers. They didn’t know what hit them.” We talked about the fates of ex-colleagues for a while, and then I said, “Enough of them. What are
you
going to do now?”

“Right. Yeah. Been wrestling with that one. I’ve had job offers, good ones. With some start-up boutique banks. The future
has
to lie with them. The center won’t hold at the giants. Clients will get fed up. But I can’t go back into harness. I stayed too long as it was. If anyone should’ve known that the dice were loaded, it was me. If you think about it, what the banks ideally want is the conditions in Russia. No regulatory bodies, a financial Wild West. You’d think that…”

He was off and running. I’d heard it all before. I interrupted. “Mike, what are you going to do?”

“I’m selling up, going south. To Costa Rica. I bought a dive school.”

I tried to picture Mike, all arms and legs, as a scuba diver. He must have read my thoughts. “I’m one of those people who are happier in water than on land.” Okay. Not the first to come to finance via Marx, not the last to wind up owning a dive school. Or a fishing boat. Or a bait shop. Chasing a delinquent crouton around his plate, he turned the conversation toward me. “Tell me, Cath, what did you learn in the last six years?”

“You mean, what was my ‘take-away’?” Rolling my eyes.

“If you want to put it that way, yeah.”

“We’re rather keen in this country on learning lessons, as if everything were a test and not just life happening. No pain, no gain—all that bunkum. I could do without the pain, thank you.”

“Cath…”

“I interrupted you, I know, but let me finish. Big on learning lessons, on self-improvement. Reinvention! And let’s not forget closure. Closure this, closure that. Everything tied up with a neat bow. What if you don’t learn anything? What if you just put one foot in front of the other? Sure, I’ve changed. I’m older. I’m on the other side of fifty, unable to see the point in anything, and lonely as all hell. Try tying that into a neat bow.” Gabbling. Too much information. I stopped, cleared my throat. “Actually, I did learn something. The dailiness of life—that’s what gets you through hard times. Putting on your pantyhose, eating breakfast, catching the subway. That’s what stops your heart from breaking.”

Mike looked embarrassed. “I didn’t mean your personal life. I meant Wall Street. What’s your opinion of that now?”

“Oh. Okay.” I regained my composure. “Did you see the cartoon last week in the
Financial Times
? A banker is saying to one of those determined spinster types—hair in a bun, handbag in her lap—‘You’re a shrewd woman, Miss Jones. I’ll put my hands up now and admit we merchant bankers are, in fact, in it for the money.’ ” He laughed. “And you, Mike, what’s your take-away? What did you learn?”

He didn’t hestitate. “Pierpont Morgan said—at least I think he said it—that the only thing you can be certain about on Wall Street is that stocks will go up, stocks will go down. So that’s it, I guess. The markets will continue as always, stocks going up and down. Yield curves steepening or flattening. Spreads narrowing or widening.” He slowly let out an indrawn breath. “But you can be certain of something else. Someone, somewhere, sooner rather than later, will take on absurdly high levels of leverage and make a bad bet based on a model created by fallible human beings. And then fingers will be pointed, heads roll. A firm will disappear or a government fall.” He shrugged. “Or not.”

I chimed in. “And corporations like Niedecker will do good. And bad. Jargon will be used, process engineered. Middle managers—the Chucks, Hannys, Barts—will flatter and elbow, multiply and prosper, as they always have. Golf will be played, bonuses given. And you know what? I don’t really care. I wish I cared more, but I don’t.”

“Chuck is not middle management.”

“You get my gist. Strange thing, though. I hated every moment while I was there, but I’m not sorry for the experience.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“We’re a sanguine pair, aren’t we?”

The waiter stopped by to ask if we wanted dessert. We shook our heads.

Mike caught my gaze, held it. “Cath, you talked to Horace, didn’t you? You told him what I knew about the hedge fund. Implied that I wasn’t doing anything about it.”

“I did. I’m deeply sorry.”

“It’s okay. ‘Name me someone that’s not a parasite / And I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.’ Bob Dylan.”

“‘Visions of Johanna.’”

“They would have fired me, anyway.”

“It would seem that way, given what happened to other risk managers.” I clambered back to safer ground. “Quoting Bob Dylan now? What’s happening? Changing your allegiance from Leonard to Bobby?”

“Nah. Leonard will always have first place in my heart. My main man.”

Mike took the bill when it came. I protested, he insisted. “Well, thank you. That was delightful,” I said. “And thanks for your company over these last years. Our chats—they meant a lot to me. To be honest, at the beginning—and I’m sure you knew this—I could barely tell a stock from a bond. Balancing my checkbook was beyond me, much less understanding option pricing trees. You were very patient. For me, it was like having the dark side of the moon illuminated.”

Mike closed the plastic folder on the Amex receipt, put his pen away in his inside pocket. “My pleasure. On both counts,” he said.

“Still can’t balance my checkbook,” I said.

Out on the pavement, we said our good-byes. Pecks on both cheeks, followed by a quick, small hug. Mike was heading downtown to Grand Central, I uptown. I had gone a few paces when I turned to watch his progress. Mike walked as if pushing into the future: his upper body angled forward, eyes on the ground. He felt in his pocket for something. Probably gum. He mentioned he was giving up smoking.

I remember once watching Bailey unobserved. We were over near Barney’s and had parted company, I to shop, he to an appointment at a Fifty-seventh Street art gallery. He always said that every block in New York was a movie, and that’s how he behaved, eyes busy, happily curious, soaking it all up, oblivious to his portfolio slapping at his leg. There was always something of the small boy about Bailey. Eager, transparent, unafraid. A bursting boy. Look, Ma, the
world.

For readers unfamiliar with finance and wanting to know more about the subject than a short novel can bear, I recommend Martin Mayer’s
The Bankers
and
The Fed
, James Buchan’s
Frozen Desire,
Roger Lowenstein’s
When Genius Failed
, and Nicholas Dunbar’s
Inventing Money.
Of course, the views expressed in
Moral Hazard
are those of my characters.

EVERYBODY KNOWS