Read The Year That Follows Online
Authors: Scott Lasser
The Year That Follows (2 page)
Cat waited a moment, then leaned forward. “I can tell you that a child changes your life completely. You might as well call it a different life. I also know that very soon, with every breath that little boy takes, he’ll be wanting to know who his father is. I think you need to call this Siobhan woman and work something out.”
Kyle had come to this conclusion, but it was still good to hear it from his sister.
“Promise me you’ll call this woman,” Cat said. Something in her voice made Kyle sit up.
“I promise. What’s up with you?”
“I just need to know you’re really going to do it. Men often don’t follow through on things.”
“Consider it done. I’ll call her at work tomorrow.”
“Where does she work?”
“Right across the street from me, in the Trade Center.”
“Call her.”
Kyle watched as Cat sipped what was left of her wine, which she’d been carefully nursing the whole meal. He spied her hand on the glass, noticed that she
was still biting her nails. She glanced to the side, her lips pursed. Something was eating at his sister, something other than money.
“Connor with his dad?” he asked, to break the silence.
“Yep. I keep telling myself it’s a good thing. I know it’s important that he spend time with his father, but I still see it as four days of learning bad habits.”
“How’s the little guy doing?”
“He’s good. Really good.”
“I want to come and visit him,” Kyle said.
“Listen to you.”
“I mean it. I’m going to make some changes.”
S
howered and dressed, Kyle makes his way to the usual corner where he’ll catch a cab downtown with some of the other Wall Street stiffs. They’ll all read the
Journal
, a morning ritual Kyle has dispensed with. Having been on the trading floor the day before, he knows what’s going to be in the
Journal
. For a while he tried the
Post
or the
Daily News
, but felt everyone reading over his shoulder, so now he takes the
Times
, and he’s left alone.
What a glorious day, he thinks, looking up past the building tops to the sky, a rich and deep blue. He can feel the air on his face, the skin raw from having just shaved, the air for once not humid, but dry and refreshing. God, he thinks, I’ve got to start spending more time outside.
There were five glorious years for the stock market,
but that is over now, and as a bond guy Kyle feels he’s in a pretty good place. Money is already flowing to bonds, the stock market feels weak, and early October, that season of intermittent panic, is only three weeks away. He decides to count the Octobers. Maybe he’ll do four more, hang around for the bonus paid in February—he’ll be forty-five by then—and call it a career. Go outside more, get serious about one girl at one time. Or, maybe, he’ll be with Siobhan. Have a son. Sleep six hours a night. Visit his father. All the stuff the markets don’t allow for.
In his office—“You ever gonna put anything on your walls?” Caputo asked him last week—he grabs a cup of coffee, checks the LIBOR fixings and the treasury market, then thinks about calling Siobhan. No, he should wait till the market closes and get her at five-thirty and see if she’ll have dinner with him tomorrow at the little Middle Eastern place she likes on Thirteenth. He can have Cat come by later to meet her. Instead, he calls Maclean in London. Maclean is American, an Annapolis grad, the kind of thing that would be important to Kyle’s father and, oddly, is to Kyle. There’s a connection, as if here is a man Kyle understands. They talk every day. A couple of times a year Maclean comes to the States and he and Kyle go out for drinks, but something is always off. Sitting next to Maclean isn’t the same as talking to him.
Maclean has a story of how one of their salesmen took out a NatWest portfolio manager, who got so drunk that the salesman, a rugby player, carried the manager into his flat, where the salesman couldn’t help but notice all the furniture had been removed save one
ratty old chair, on which was a note from the manager’s wife, explaining why she’d left with the kids. “Infidelity, alcohol, absence,” says Maclean. “The trifecta.” The salesman left the manager passed out in the chair but took his keys, in order to return the next morning to help him shave, shower, and get to work. The salesman told Maclean, “The firm spent over two hundred quid on the bugger. The least he could do was go to work and sling a few bonds around.”
“He’ll go far,” Kyle says, meaning the salesman.
“If his liver holds out,” Maclean answers.
“Anything happening?”
“Naw. Nervous but quiet. Stocks trade like shit, you ask me.”
Such, Kyle thinks, is the nature of stocks. They make you nervous. Even two years ago, when they were rocketing upward during the five best years for stocks in the history of the universe, there’d been a feeling of unease. At least, Kyle had felt it. Companies that didn’t make money were naming professional football stadiums. Ah, he thinks, the madness of crowds. These nervous times suit him better. Never a rah-rah guy, Kyle dislikes rah-rah markets. He was always a better range trader than a momentum guy, making money in small bits, winning slowly, over the long haul.
K
yle feels Caputo before he hears him ask, “You ready?” It’s easy to feel Caputo, all that nervous energy and hyperalertness, a squirrel always looking for the hawk.
“It’s not even eight-thirty,” Kyle says.
“Let’s walk outside; it’s a beautiful day.”
An interesting comment from Caputo. It’s possible to reach the Trade Center without going out, but Kyle hates the rabbit-warren passages and tunnels. He and Caputo walk out to Vesey, cross the West Side Highway, then climb the steps that lead to the courtyard. There’s something different about Caputo here, with the sun shining on his black curls, the light on his face. Kyle realizes he’s worked with Caputo for four years and has never seen him in natural daylight.
“What do you think of these buildings?” Kyle asks.
“Big.”
“Fucking ugly, you ask me.”
Caputo stops, looks up. “Just buildings,” he says. “Rentable space.”
This, Kyle thinks, might be an admirable quality, the ability only to think about money. It’s why Kyle has brought Caputo along, to drill down to the money. They are meeting McHugh and his boss, who have an electronic trading platform. Caputo’s idea is that the firm should get it for free in exchange for moving bonds through it, ignoring that the business plan for the product must have included a charge for the service. “Let ’em charge the other guys,” Caputo said in the strategy meeting. Kyle couldn’t argue. Besides, these Web guys seemed to like giving things away.
Kyle wishes his job had more meaning for him, but at this point it’s only money, which he remembers liking more when he had less of it. There must be something
he could do that would feel important. Of course, nothing would pay more, and if capitalism puts such a high price on what he does, he must be missing its import. He and Caputo switch elevators and he thinks of Siobhan. Maybe after breakfast he’ll go back with McHugh and visit her floor, maybe ask her to dinner. At the very least he’ll get a look at her. He always liked doing that.
Right here they should be passing her floor. There’s a slight shimmy in the elevator, or maybe he’s feeling his life shift. He knows he shouldn’t wait any longer; he should make his move now. He could form a business with his sister. Cat was once a star student, a tall, beautiful, popular girl. Kyle remembers how he quietly looked up to her and envied her success. He’d like to do that again. Reconnect with his own flesh and blood. And go see about Siobhan and that little boy.
In the end, he knows this: Cat is the one person he trusts.
It’s very quiet in the elevator, just a slight sway and whirr as they rise, and Kyle can feel Caputo, who abhors quiet as nature abhors a vacuum, pushing against the silence. “Hey,” Caputo finally says. “What time you got?”
Kyle looks at his watch, a Piaget, impossibly thin, like so many expensive things. “A quarter to,” he says. “Plenty of time.”
I
I
’m dead, Sam thinks. Simple as that.
For months they’d been warned of kamikaze attacks and, initially, nothing happened. Then one day he ran down from the bridge, heard the batteries open fire and the whine of an approaching plane. He saw it, recognized the charcoal silhouette against the milky sky. A Zero. It came in low, its wings toggling through the antiaircraft blasts till it veered and disappeared behind the starboard railing.
He wakes and looks about, at the bare walls of his bedroom, then grabs a fistful of sheet and takes a moment to get his bearings. A dream.
The
dream. The same damn dream these fifty-seven years, the memory burned so deep that most nights his mind can’t avoid it. Always he wakes terrified, but comforted, too. There’s the terror, but it’s the same terror.
Sam sits up, playing out the history, a memory now, a waking dream and just as real. He came to on a hospital ship. He learned that the Japanese pilot missed his destroyer but crashed into the sea close enough to shake the ship like a bath toy. Twelve men went overboard;
five were rescued. Sam stayed on deck, but cracked two vertebrae. For eleven weeks he lay paralyzed. I’m dead, he thought again. Back home, in a VA hospital in Detroit, the doctors fused the two vertebrae together, and most of the rest. Six days after the operation, he regained feeling. In that moment, when he realized that the world would come back to him, he felt dizzy, weightless, not a person at all. Life now seemed a surprise, an unopened gift. Soon he could walk, but with limitations; his back was rigid as a two-by-four, his neck so stiff that he could only look straight ahead. For this the navy would send him a small monthly disability check. How odd, Sam thought. One moment you’re dead, the next you have income for life.
H
e will see the rabbi in two hours, so he shaves, a two-part process, first with the cream and blade, then, once his face has had a chance to dry, with the electric razor, which makes that odd hum when it finds a patch of whiskers he missed with the blade. He’s seen old men who shave themselves badly, leaving sloppy patches of gray stubble, signs of incompetence or—even worse—apathy. It’s the little things that matter now, the small acts of defiance that bring dignity in the face of all the deterioration. He has decided that if there’s any meaning to life, it’s to be found in the daily struggles.
Two squirrels are bickering outside his window, making a racket that could be mistaken for birds. Daily struggles. They know it, too.
He dresses in a dark suit, funereal as fits the occasion, and slips his dog tags into his pants pocket. He likes the feeling of them there, like loose change; if he ever drops over dead, they’ll know exactly who he is.
His son soon will have been dead for one year, and Sam wants to recognize this, as per the Jewish tradition. He has no others. That Kyle has been taken from him, that he simply disappeared—this is something that no father should endure. He understands now the look his own father gave him when Sam shipped off to war, and also why he looked away when Sam came back, paralyzed, weighing 126 pounds. The suffering of a child is horrible; of one’s own it is unthinkable. And so Sam has turned to his faith, though he doubts he has ever truly believed, even when he lay in that hospital bed and didn’t know if he would move again, or again almost fifty years later when they cut his chest open. Faith has always eluded him. The rituals of faith, though, may still prove useful.
H
e drives to the temple, navigating his Lincoln down the bright streets, at one point catching a glimpse of the denim-colored Pacific. Midweek there are but a few cars in the temple’s lot, just the old sedans and econo-boxes of those who work in religion—at least the Jewish religion. Inside, the air is still, the lighting dim. There are pictures on the wall of an old temple in Brooklyn, displaced here to California, like the Dodgers. Down the hall he sees light and heads for it.
The rabbi is a tall man with coarse black hair, thick dark eyebrows, glasses to match. Gauss. “Like the mathematician,” Sam said on the phone, to which the rabbi replied, “Exactly.” Sam took it as a good sign. The real Gauss was perhaps the most brilliant man of his time, maybe of all time, and Sam respects anyone who has heard his name, unusual now in this era of good-looks idolatry and the worship of anyone who can shout into a microphone and call it music. Sam sits before Rabbi Gauss’s heavy wooden desk, looking at his bookshelves and photos. He is struck with the same thought he had the last time he met a rabbi: how is it that such a learned man can have faith? It’s a mystery to Sam, and yet here he is.
“So, Mr. Miller,” says Rabbi Gauss. “You want to recognize your son’s
yahrzeit
.”
“Exactly.”
“Have you been to our temple before?”
“No.”
“How long have you lived in Santa Barbara?”
“About fifteen years,” Sam says.
“Have you been to any temple, or, should I say, when was the last time?”
Sam thinks about this. “Nixon was president.”
The rabbi, bless him, is amused. “Nixon? So at least thirty years,” he says.
“My mother died back then, of heart failure. My father, too.” Sam’s eye catches a shaft of light coming in the window, dust dancing in its beam.
“So now you have lost a son, and you are back.”
“Guilty as charged, Rabbi. You know, I look at your books and think, I could love Judaism, were it not for the religion. I’ll be honest, I never feel less Jewish than when I’m in a temple. The Hebrew prayers, the responsive reading, even the idea of God. I struggle with it all. My father, who really only spoke Yiddish well, he used to take me to temple on Yom Kippur, when I was a boy, this was in the twenties, and when he’d had enough of the service, we’d go up the street to a coffee shop and have ham and cheese sandwiches. Ham and cheese: he thought this was one of the great things about America.”
It occurs to Sam that his story might be offensive to a rabbi. This one doesn’t look offended; there’s something to be said for the young. “The point is,” Sam says, “he still went to temple. He found something of value there.”