Moral Hazard (4 page)

Hanny was not only at his desk but waiting for an audience in order to relieve himself of opinions provoked by the morning’s newspapers. He was an enthusiastic bigot. The predictable groups got him steamed—blacks, feminists, homosexuals—but his special ire was reserved, strangely, for the disabled. Or, to be more accurate, the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was costing businesses and taxpayers “billions.”

On my first day at the job, Hanny had leaned in close—he was true to type in every respect—to impart some wisdom. “I hear you are a bohemian, a left-winger.” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You’ll become conservative working here. You wait and see. Everyone does.” Then he handed me a book he had at the ready. It was Robert Bartley’s
The Seven Fat Years.
I hadn’t known who Bartley was: the notoriously conservative editor of the
Wall Street Journal
’s op-ed page. His book was an account of the supposed munificence that had flowed from Reagan-era economics. Bartley was one of Hanny’s gods, along with Reagan, of course, and Margaret Thatcher. Lined up on the other side were Bill Clinton—“despicable”—and Ralph Nader—“an instrument of the devil.” (Democrats had yet to come to this same viewpoint about Nader, after the 2000 election.) I later learned that he gave this book to anyone under his tutelage. Eager to please, I read the book overnight and returned it, saying, “I don’t like true believers of any stripe,” a comment that whizzed right by him, a tiny meteor missing earth’s dense bulk and continuing into outer space.

Hanny’s knowledge of finance was only as deep as it needed to be and sometimes verged on the fantastic, but he produced corporate propaganda with the efficiency of a sausage machine. He was different from most hacks in that he believed what he wrote. In fact, he saw himself as the repository of the firm’s values—“touchstones”—because the apex of his career had been to give voice to them. His bromides were not only published in an expensive booklet, to be distributed to new recruits, but also engraved on brass plates attached to walls, chiseled into marble floors, pressed into Lucite paperweights. The words “respect” and “integrity” figured large.

As time went by and I became aware of the anthill of lawyers on the company payroll defending the firm against lapses in the very values that Hanny described, I stupidly wondered aloud in his company whether they really were coded into the firm’s DNA, as we so often wrote in speeches. If you have to make a fuss of moral fiber, you probably lack it, et cetera. In his rectitude, Hanny reared up. “The touchstones are
aspirational.
In any company, there are peaks and there are troughs. It’s our job to describe the peaks.”

His voice, adenoidal and Midwestern, could be obsequious one moment, vicious the next. Obsequious with his bosses—Hanny was proud of his ability to “manage up”—and vicious with his staff. After an editing session with him—he called it “tweaking” or “word-smithing”—we all left his office sniffling or red-faced. The problem was not that the speeches, letters, and other miscellany that were our province had to arrive on Hanny’s superiors’ desks on time, pitch-perfect, no typos. That went without saying. It was that they had to be exactly as he conceived them. As a result, we spent most of our time trying to get into Hanny’s head, not the happiest of places. We needn’t have bothered. He always moved the goalposts.

Hanny peppered his conversation with phrases like “rat’s ass” and “slicker than greased goose shit.” If you were late with a speech because you’d just had your leg amputated and thought that the executive would understand, Hanny might say, “He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you. All he wants is the speech on his desk.” And he was right. As for the latter, improbable as it seems, Hanny used it as a term of praise. He admired people who were slicker than greased goose shit and aspired to be that way himself.

I had quite a crew above me—up the chain—at Niedecker. Above Hanny, for example, was Bart, who feigned aggression like a barracuda, flaring his features and daring you to come any closer. He was known for appearing suddenly out of his office and yelling orders, whether anyone was there to listen or not. Every now and again, he crossed the line and was sent off to what us bottom-feeders called “charm school”—managerial training sessions. Hanny crossed the line all the time but was not as visible as Bart, who ran the press group. A flack as opposed to a hack.

Above Hanny, above Bart, was Chuck. The head of our department, Chuck had been a college basketball player, an all-American golden boy. His alley-oop glory days were still discernible underneath encroaching flab and adult worries, like pentimento in a painting. He lived to please, loved to schmooze. Heads of Communications keep their positions by either knowing where the bodies are buried or jumping in the laps of executives and licking their faces. Chuck did a bit of both. Whatever might be said of him, he was expert at placating our senior executives, at whose pleasure we served. He was hard to dislike, even if he managed his department by hiring people with ingrown personalities like Hanny and Bart and letting them loose.

This, of course, was the stuff of Dilbert or
New Yorker
cartoons. But it wasn’t funny, not living it. Hanny and Bart seemed to me as sadistic as prefects at an English boarding school. As a result, the path from our group to the company psychiatrist was well trodden. Only one of us—a woman from New Jersey who cheerfully referred to herself as a Polack and who supervised the production of brochures—was immune. “What do they think I am? Chopped liver?” she’d say, laughing with her entire body and picking up the phone to resume her talkathon with her vast network of Niedecker pals. When I asked her how she remained sanguine, she said, “Hey. I’ve seen a lot of Hannys and Barts come and go.”

Our group was not unique. I had gained a whole different view of New York’s skyscrapers. I looked at them and didn’t see architecture. I saw infestations of middle managers, tortuous chains of command, stupor-inducing meetings, ever-widening gyres of e-mail. I saw people scratching up dust like chickens and calling it work. I saw the devil whooping it up.

To find my way, I asked questions. In their eyes, I questioned. I probably did that, too, but more out of naïveté and, I must admit, incredulity. In the normal course, I would have been expelled immediately for the foreign organism that I was, but I had a “connection,” so instead was labeled “high maintenance” and ignored, with the occasional attempt, in the form of team reviews and dressings-down, to re-educate me. After one review, Hanny informed me with absolute seriousness that my sense of humor was such that people thought I wasn’t taking the job seriously. Dear reader, with effort, I kept a straight face. Another time, he told me I was their diversity challenge: age, gender, nationality, lack of corporate experience. Shades of the Cultural Revolution.

In time, I settled for an anthropological approach. I was in the belly of the beast: observe, listen, learn. After all, the job was serving its purpose. There was money for the rent and to buy Cognex, the new Alzheimer’s drug. Not only that, to survive the quicksand at Niedecker, I had to give the job my full attention, leaving me less time to dwell on Bailey.

That first summer, after work, I took to wandering the aisles of Century 21, not shopping, only relieved to be where nothing was demanded of me. I was commuting, it seemed, between two forms of dementia, two circles of hell. Neither point nor meaning to Alzheimer’s, nor to corporate life, unless you counted the creation of shareholder value.

That first summer, once or twice, instead of worming my way uptown on the Number 5 subway, I splurged on a taxi home. The route was along the FDR Drive, by the shouldering waters of the East River, its bridges and their mastodonic spans, by the Lower East Side playing fields and their antiquated stadium lighting banked in uneven clusters and resembling graying dowager diamonds. If the traffic allowed, and the rattle of the straining taxi ignored, you had the illusion of swooping, soaring, above the clogged confusion of the city.

That first summer, when I came home, Bailey was always to be found sitting immediately inside the door, waiting for me, our cat in his arms, both alert to my arrival.

That first summer, after Bailey was asleep, I lay on the sofa in the living room, watching the shifting evening sky above the Carlyle Hotel and listening to musicals:
South Pacific
,
Carousel
,
Kismet
,
The King and I.
I fell in love with the voices of William Tabbert and Alfred Drake, with music that consoled in its hopefulness. Music that was as far from my circumstances as could be imagined.
Play on the cymbal, the timbale, the lyre / Play with appropriate passion, fashion / Songs of delight and delicious desire…

The anthropological approach to corporate life was Mike’s idea; I was too off-balance, too thrown by events, to think of it. Mike and I became friends on the day of Nixon’s funeral, declared a holiday on Wall Street. Hanny hadn’t taken the day off—a big speech was pressing—so neither did I. As usual, the first item on my agenda was to be Hanny’s audience. Naturally, he went into raptures about Nixon: a
great
man.

Escaping, I went down to the front of the World Financial Center, where pink granite benches face a marina. One of these achieved notoriety when a trader sat down and calmly shot himself on a sunny day, people promenading, seagulls perching, boats plowing. Mike arrived shortly after I did and settled on the same bench.

“Hello,” I said. Forward of me. Though we’d met a couple of times, I didn’t expect him to remember me. After all, he was executive management, and I a dime-a-dozen vice president.

“Hi.” He slid a little closer. “If I remember, you’re Cath. The derivatives speech. How’d it go?”

“It went fine.”

Mike was a smoker and so was I. Mike, I found out, had never bothered to give it up. I had stopped years ago, but with Bailey’s illness, resumed, telling myself, whatever gets you through the night. I took painkillers, for migraines, and too many of them, no doubt. I was probably ripe for an intervention. The idea of anyone willingly intervening in my life made me laugh out loud, and still does. Husband with Alzheimer’s? He’s all yours, gal.

We lit up, sipped coffee. Mike broke the silence. “ ‘The Day Lady Died.’ That’s my favorite O’Hara poem.” This was not out of the blue. Marvelously, some lines of Frank O’Hara wind along the wrought-iron fence that fronts the marina:

Walt Whitman is there, too:

So Mike knew his O’Hara. And that is how our friendship began. A New York friendship, given it was restricted to the bench and the conversations we had there; like a Greek drama, all the action was off-stage. A friendship larded with the cultural allusions and references common to people of our age, background, education.

“Not taking the day off?” I ventured, unsure where to go with O’Hara.

“For Nixon? No. Definitely no.” His turn to take the conversation in another direction. “How long have you worked for Niedecker?”

“A year.”

“Before that?”

“I was a freelancer. Magazines. Travel stories, profiles, some essays, that kind of stuff. Never worked in finance. Totally new to it.” I told him about Bailey.

“So sorry.” A few more slow drags. It was a cool, windy day, with streaky clouds. Because of the wind, Mike was smoking like James Dean, his cigarette hooded by his hand. Anyone less like James Dean than Mike—large head, bony body that he occupied as if it were rented—I couldn’t imagine. “What do you make of it, then?” coughing as he asked and gesturing at the towers behind us, at Niedecker.

“The finance part is falling into place. It’s like a foreign language. Immerse yourself and it begins to make sense. But the corporate side. Jeepers. That’s much harder. And the guys I work for—holy cow. I’m realizing I’ve led a sheltered life.” Mike laughed.

Several days before, I was directed to talk to Bart about a group of Chinese sponsored by Niedecker to visit the United States to study the financial markets. He had done more than warm to his subject. Apoplectic, he’d barked, “Goddamn communists! I don’t know why we’re helping them.” I related this and moved on to Hanny and his tirades. If Mike knew his O’Hara and wasn’t enthralled with Nixon, I figured I was on safe ground.

“Poorly socialized,” he said. “But at least you know where you stand with them.”

“True. But…” Agitated. His observation hadn’t seemed sufficient. I was about to say something to that effect when Mike interrupted.

“Can I give you some advice?”

“Okay.” Feeling small.

“That’s not going to change.” Gesturing behind us, again. “And those guys aren’t going to change. If you keep throwing yourself against Niedecker, against them, you’ll break into a million pieces. Round off your sharp edges. Turn yourself into an anthropologist.”

“A naturalist with an ant colony.”

“That’s the spirit. You know, Wall Street isn’t as bad as it seems. Sure, it gets its share of bigots and silver-spoon types. That’s the downside. But it also tolerates eccentrics who wouldn’t find employment anywhere else. You’d be surprised. At one time, having a short attention span was the
only
qualification you needed to work down here.” His peculiar nasal laugh. “It’s not quite that way now. The dead hand of Human Resources homogenizing everything.” He broke off to light another cigarette. “I know one guy, a trader, who’s an anarchist and proud of it. But nobody cares because he’s good at his job. And then there’re people like you and me.”

“You?” Offhand. As if I weren’t dying to know.