Villiers Touch (16 page)

“No—the subway's much faster, and I
have
to try to sneak in before they get up. I've got to run, darling—kiss me?”

He gave her a long, lingering kiss that left her pulse pounding visibly in her throat when she backed away, snatched up her handbag, and ran out.

Steve heard the door slam. He walked slowly into the bathroom and grinned at himself in the mirror.

10. Russell Hastings

Wide awake, Russ Hastings lay on his side with his legs scissored like a running man's, listening with dismal resignation to the racket of trucks that thundered up from the street below his window.
Oh, God, of all the stupid, asinine hang-ups
. He kept having the feeling Carol was just behind him and all he needed to do was look around into her smiling eyes, reach for her hand, and pull her close, hearing her low laugh, feeling her soft warmth. Whore bitch. Garbage trucks, unspeakably ear-splitting, squatted at the curb with their machinery grinding, gears whining, steel cans clanking. The modern urban sound barrage was enough to induce premature hearing loss and sufficient emotional stress to cause ulcers, heart attacks, mental aberrations—a public-health doctor had said so the other day in the
Times
. Hastings had spent an hour, sometime between two and six, composing in his mind a furiously worded indignant letter to the mayor concerning noise pollution; but as his fantasies folded and blended and blurred, the letter became a plaintive
cri de coeur
, a compound of sticky sentimentality and desperate outrage, addressed sometimes to Carol and sometimes to Diane.

He rolled over, cursed, flung himself upright, and batted into the bathroom to slam the door and drown out the racket under the shower. When he came out again, with a trace of shaving lather still drying by his ear, the jackhammers had started at the construction job half a block away across the street. His face closed down; he tried to ignore it, pawed through his drawers, and finally ripped open a string-tied bundle of ironed laundry that had sat untouched on the dresser for a week—he had been here for months but had yet to develop a bachelor's efficient tidiness; he still all but lived out of suitcases. It had taken three weeks before he had been able to unpack at all: the divorce had stunned him; for a long time his mind had jumped the orderly straight track of his thinking and wandered through a melancholy mist in which decisions, even small ones, paralyzed him. He had had trouble deciding what dish to select from restaurant menus, choosing which sock to put on first, remembering how to spell familiar simple words. In time he had drawn himself up, got a grip on himself; but it was still uphill, like slogging through molasses—decisions still came hard.

He put a pot of water on to boil and swept the room with a bleak glance. It was undistinguished—convertible couch, dreary coffee table, an old TV, a chair with a ruffled slipcover, anonymous gimcracks on the walls. It revealed no personality, not even that of the fat landlord who had rented the place to him, furnished, for three times its value. Russ Hastings had matured with a highborn indifference to tangible possessions and rarely paid attention to his surroundings. It was a trait Diane had rarely understood—except once, he recalled. Early on in the marriage she had said with her lovely laugh, “Fashions and styles—I know it's all superficial sham, Russ, but I can't help it, I like it.” Sometimes she would come home exhausted after a lustful fury of shopping and insist he pay attention while she paraded before him her new clothes or antiques or paintings. Even when he feigned enthusiasm, his want of real interest had always incensed her.

He poured his instant coffee and sat down with it, feeling wrung out and angry because he was still going back over it, beating the dead horse, unable to dismiss her. So much of it kept flooding back every time she came to mind.

He had been so sure of himself. He had stalked her patiently for months, bemused by her determined private ambitions, confident they represented only a stage, convinced she would get tired of it, discard it, submit in the end to his masculine domination. With hindsight it was bitterly easy to see how he had deceived himself every step of the way. The time of decision had been the day she had opened her first art gallery. She had a compulsion, which excluded him, to succeed on her own; it had taken him a long time to realize that much, and still longer to know that only in a bad marriage did one's success mean the other's failure. The more Nuart grew, the more she regarded his accomplishments with weary boredom. She had begun to patronize, then to avoid, until the competitiveness between them became transparent and they separated into their distinct worlds. When they did meet it was with a cool sense of withering estrangement that made them overpolite with each other, hearty with forced cheer in public, straining for hurried smiles, a pair of actors speaking memorized set-piece speeches to outsiders and speaking to each other hardly at all.

Nothing as intimate as sex could remain unaffected by the drying up of their emotional wells. Gradually Diane had discovered a growing fear and distaste for lovemaking. She had suffered it, more and more, with trembling limbs and clenched teeth. She had tried—he had to give her that credit—she had tried with increasing desperation. But finally she had stopped trying. One night she had stood by the bed and slipped out of her robe, looking away, not at him. Without speaking, she settled down on her back and spread her legs out neatly, not disturbing the sheets, looking mindlessly at the ceiling and waiting with a flat, lifeless expression that promised she would resign herself to doing her sweaty functional duty but she could no longer pretend to like any part of it.

Filled with sudden revulsion, he had put his clothes on and walked to the door. Looking back, seeing the pain in her eyes, he had felt viciously glad: it showed, at least, that it was still in his power to hurt her.

Force of habit was stronger than love; they had kept up the outward pretense of marriage for a time. But one day he had stepped into the elevator, and it had hit him, unmistakable, the scent of her perfume. She must have just gone up to the apartment. He had left the elevator at the third floor and walked down the fire stairs to the lobby, gone to a hotel, and telephoned her. That was how it had ended.

He shrugged into a seersucker jacket and glanced in the mirror; he looked, he thought, like a burned-out reporter, a young-old man with deep creases bracketing his mouth, hair starting to gray, eyes puffy and bloodshot. On his way down to the sidewalk he was thinking of Carol McCloud.
My trouble is, I'm just horny, that's all
. But he couldn't shake her image. He went along Thirty-fourth Street and had a meager breakfast at a lunch counter; stopped afterward to paw through a sidewalk bin of old books. He found nothing but a layer of dirt on his fingers. Suddenly he turned into the street between two parked cars and hailed a downtown-bound taxi, got in, and gave the driver Saul Cohen's address.

Saul Cohen's office was in a small brown old building of almost colonial vintage that squatted cringing next to one of the tall Wall Street slabs checkered with glass, steel, and concrete—a nondescript new structure of the kind he had once heard Elliot Judd scorn: “I don't intend to be put in a box like that until I'm dead. This city complains of
vandals
and they're tearing down historic buildings to make room for
that!
” The new buildings weren't even ugly; they were only boring, as inhuman as digital computers, and as cold.

But Saul Cohen inhabited the overshadowed little building next door. It was a dark, pleasant place, carved and ornamented, with aged woodwork and a brass-cage elevator that took him slowly but comfortably to the third floor. The office was small but homey and elegant—there was an elaborate Tabriz carpet swirling with vivid birds and animals, an Etruscan figurine on a wooden pedestal, and beyond a walnut rail fence with a swinging gate in it, an old man sitting at a huge antique desk in the corner.

Saul was the room's only occupant; the secretary's desk was unoccupied. There were tickers and a Quotron; phone wires were tangled on the old man's cluttered desk.

Saul got up from his chair spryly. “Russ, my boy.” When the old man grinned, his eyes wrinkled up until they were almost shut. He walked forward to the rail, held the swing gate open, and shook hands. “How are you? Come and sit—come and sit.”

“I was hoping I'd catch you here this early. But if I'm taking up work time—”

“Nonsense. For you I make all the time you want. Sit.”

Saul Cohen was a crickety, bookish, gentle little man with a harsh simian face, tangled eyebrows, prominent nose, gray hair cropped close to the little round skull. His voice was rapid, scratchy, impatient. His expression, painted on indelibly, was that of a man who smelled something distasteful; it made his face seem a repository for the anguish of the ages. Hastings had never been able to look at that suffering face without seeing the old man as torment personified.

He took the proffered chair. “I need some wisdom.”

“That I don't sell. Only stocks and bonds. I made a couple of good trades last week in your account and your father's. Do you need cash? Is that why you come to me with such a long face? To ask me to sell your investments for cash?”

“Nothing like that.”

“I'm happy, then. But wisdom?
The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise
. Ecclesiasticus, thirty-eight: twenty-four. What can I tell you? I'm a businessman all my life. I'm seventy-six years of age, and I'm still working, only because what else do I know how to do? I never learned the wisdom of spending money, all I can do is play the game here. I own a seat that's fifty years old, I bought it for a few thousand, and now it's worth a small fortune—what can I tell you?”

“You can give me the impossible, Saul. A Wall Street education in one lesson.”

The old man smiled gently. He was a Wall Street gadfly, a keen-eyed gnome with a clever mind salted away behind his indulgent cracker-barrel philosophizing. He said, “Instant knowledge. What everybody wants nowadays. Ah, my young friend, you'll never get that outright. But what you can get, if you've got the right brain, is two here and two there, to put together with the two you've already got, to make six. You've gone to work for the Securities and Exchange since I've seen you last.”

“That's right. Word gets around, doesn't it?”

“As I said, I keep in touch. Besides, I've known you since you were so young you'd be embarrassed to be reminded. I actually did bounce you on my knee. Naturally I'd be interested to follow your career.”

“Such as it is,” Hastings said, smiling. “My problem's an odd one. I've picked up vague hints that something may be going on out of sight in the market. But I'm too new to this business to be sure of myself. The problem is—”

The old man held up a hand, palm out, and grinned, full of mischief. “We will wait to hear what the exact problem is. You come to me as a neophyte, and the opportunity to lecture is too great for me to pass up. I will tell you about this Street, and then you will ask your questions.” He settled back, steepling his fingers, with a deep breath and a manner that instantly identified him as an in-training long-distance talker. Hastings smiled fondly. Watching Hastings from the pained depths of his eyes, Saul Cohen said, “Do you read Freud? No? You should. Freud observed that Galileo removed the earth from the center of the universe; Darwin removed man's uniqueness, and made him but a link in a chain; and Freud himself removed the illusion that a man is his own master. But most of us still cherish that illusion—and you see evidence of it here in Wall Street. Everybody thinks he can control his own destiny by working out a logical investment policy and making himself a millionaire overnight. They make a mistake, of course—they should read Freud. There's no such thing as a logical man, there's no such thing as a logical investment policy. The market isn't any more logical than the men who make it. It operates out of greed, fear, rumors, hints, intuitions—and for your first lesson I can tell you that selecting investments by throwing darts at a list of stocks is the best method of beating the market. You see?”

Hastings began to smile, but Cohen shook a knobby finger at him. “I meant it seriously, young man—it's quite true. It is a plain bare fact, beyond argument, that more people lose than win in the stock market. If you buy one share of every share listed, across the board, you'll end up losing. To be specific, you'll lose about seven and a half percent on your investment. Because in the end all we do in Wall Street is shift piles of manure from one corner of the barn to another, and we brokers charge a commission for the service of shifting it back and forth.”

“But facts like that don't matter to the public. They see a stock start to shoot up, and they don't own it, so they get greedy and they buy. Profit fever—they start to think of themselves as manly cannibals in this meat market. The fact is, they're jackasses, following carrots on sticks. All you've got to do is keep them supplied with carrots.”

The old man's face crinkled in an anguished smile, and he spread his hands in an ancient old-world gesture. “Guilt. In the old days society was work-oriented and success was a measure of denial, self-sacrifice, thrift, hard work, all virtues. Big money used to be the symbol of that kind of achievement—remember Horatio Alger? Wealth was a reward for courage and clean living and hard work. Now wealth is only a symbol of your ability in choosing an accountant smart enough to allow you to dodge taxes. Today money is a prize, not a reward. People play the market because they've learned you don't need to work—you only need luck. They're out to get something for nothing. They're gamblers—and they feel guilty because deep down they know they ought to be leaning over a hot sledgehammer to justify all the money they're trying to make. They're hagridden with anxieties and guilt—and we're back to Freud.”