Dear Money (42 page)

As soon as I sat down, Cavelli's door opened and there he stood, a little hunched, a little older, but graceful still, in a linen suit, his dark, peppered hair slicked back, his brow furrowed into a confident smile. "India," he intoned, long and full and sweeping me across time and continents. "India. So good of you to come."

He kissed me on both cheeks and we entered his crowded office. On his desk sat a 1940s-style black telephone, reminding me of the one Radalpieno had on his desk. Yet I was certain that Radalpieno's was a retro model and Cavelli's the genuine artifact, which had been ringing on this desk since Piccadilly opened its doors.

He sat down in his leather chair across the desk from me, moved some books aside and shuffled some papers. The enormous water tower outside his window seemed comically proximate, like some sort of artist's statement about the importance of drinking water in our modern world. It partially blocked the windows of another office building, in which I could make out a few people meandering about their business—dressmakers or makers of curtains. Large swaths of fabric held up and measured and studied. Bolts leaned against the walls. But the water tower obscured a better understanding of their endeavors. For all I knew, they could have been making confetti for the party everyone was going to have when the world came to an end. On the floor above, a man approached a window and stared out of it. Light squeezed between the two buildings, splaying itself frugally.

I remembered coming to Piccadilly for the first time, feeling a sense of arrival in the hunkered, dimly lit but official hive and manufacturing hub of American literary stardom, feeling buoyed up by it, chosen, rescued.

Cavelli regarded me for a moment, smiling. "How's Theodor?"

"Terrific," I said, showing off a pair of earrings he'd made me.

"Very nice," he said. "Patel says Larson Designs has arrived." Patel was Aruna Patel, his Indian success story and wife. He always referred to her by her last name. I took note of the fact that he and his wife had discussed us. I warmed to that fact.

"He's pretty busy," I said. "But tell her I can get her a good deal."

"Hmmm," he answered.

"He's testing the commercial waters too," I said.

"Isn't success lovely? In the beginning, artists always underrate money. How many times I've seen that scenario play out."

I could have spent an afternoon listening to Cavelli enumerate every last writer of that description, if only to feel the pleasure of their company, but I asked instead, "And your boys?"

"Splendid. Rambunctious. Testosterone, you know."

I can't say I felt nothing, sitting there. The words of the best writers in the world rested on his desk, in the bookshelves lining his office walls. But it was Cavelli's business acumen that I appreciated most—how he turned his imprint into the brand authors sought, so much so that when a recent Nobel laureate asked for too big an advance, Cavelli responded with a simple "Fuck you," knowing full well that his author would dine out on that story for the rest of his life. "And your girls?" I was touched that he'd remembered their gender.

"They're well, but I don't see much of them these days."

"Is it worth it?" he asked, suddenly and sharply. I was taken aback.

"Is it worth it for you?"

"Touché," he answered.

"I haven't had time to ask if it is," I conceded. "I'm just trying to keep up, stay over my skis, you know."

"The story is that you knew nothing about Wall Street, that this escapade was a lark between two bankers with too much time and money on their hands."

"That about sums it up."

"Was writing that bad?"

"Don't get me started."

"Your mentor in all of this, Johns—he won the bet?"

"That's right too. But from my point of view the bet is history, water under the bridge. I mean, yes, I suppose they can call it to mind if they want to, or if it serves a purpose. Then I'm a story that burnishes their image, which is important in that world. At that level, money as a marker of distinction has almost no value. There's just so much. But, I guess, as a story to trade on, it's going to be hard to top what they did with me."

"I don't suppose you had anything to do with that."

I noticed that Cavelli's head had developed a bit of a palsied wobble. He raised his chin to me and smiled serenely. I shifted in my seat and, out of nowhere, felt a strong desire to light up a cigarette. "Leonardo, why am I here?"

"Let me ask you something. Is Johns a good man?"

"He's a smart man. He's left B and B. He believed we were going to hell. And yes, he's good."

"Are you—good?"

"Am I good? Are you kidding? I'm as good as I can be, considering." My BlackBerry was vibrating away like a dark little gremlin in my purse. "Win would recommend cash positions for investments."

"It's that bad?"

Cavelli's phone rang. He picked it up and said his name, then said no and put the receiver back in the cradle and looked at me. "You know why you're here."

"Do I?"

"Of course you do."

"The bubble is bursting," I said.

"They've burst before. How will this time be different? What's the story?"

"Do you want optimistic or catastrophic?"

"I suppose catastrophe makes for the better tale. Doesn't it? When you're writing a story, where's the fun in optimism? Everyone getting along and having a jolly grand time? Of course, you need a touch of that at the end."

He seemed to have all the time in the world for me. I could feel my BlackBerry vibrating again. With anyone else I would have responded to the messages. But maybe this was the last time I'd ever be here, talking with this man.

"You know our mutual friend Will Chapman?"

"How's Will?" I asked.

"Writing as well as ever, but he's having a little mortgage trouble. Seems he got in too thick with the place in Maine and needs to sell."

"You don't say?" This was news. I thought of Emma. I thought of how much she loved Maine, remembered her telling me that Will had been furious with her for spending so much on the renovation. I remembered the exotic loan. It had come due. I felt a jolt of fear for them and then relief for myself that this was not my concern. But I'll confess, I also felt an instantaneous justification in my own belief that you couldn't want such things and also want to be a writer.

"They're in a tough place," Cavelli said, darkly, but with that sense of having information that could be of interest to the person with whom he spoke. He was reading my face. He could see intense curiosity there. He was as bad a gossip as the rest of us. "Apparently he'd been relying on stock options from his old firm, but they plummeted before they were vested. I hadn't understood that a third of those annual bonuses are stocks you can't touch. Why in the world would bankers loan money to people who have only a promise of money, who can't pay it back? None of what I read makes any sense."

"Tulips," I said, just as Win had that night in his office, then again at dinner, celebrating my big trade, as if the word alone could explain where we stood today. I'd felt unexpectedly relieved when Win left the firm, though I admitted it to no one. I'd never imagined there'd be a "post-Win" period, but here it was, and with his departure came that relief. My own sense of being a cardboard cutout had departed. We talked occasionally, Win and I, but not much since I knew he was shorting the market. The guy who'd flown into my life on a biplane and bet a bundle on me was now actively trying to bury us all. I wanted to know about Will and Maine. In how much trouble were they? I'd heard the rumors—Paul, Smart & Smith. But after closing the hedge funds they'd assured stockholders they'd recover. Things could turn around yet for Will. This was just part of the roller coaster ride.

"Tulips," Cavelli said, smiling, leaning forward to let me know he understood the reference and to hear more.

I carried on for a bit about tranches and Alt-A's and no-docs and CPOs and rating agencies, about the market creating the value. Then I threw in credit-default swaps just to make things really crazy. And to make things impossible to understand I mentioned deregulation and derivatives. I tried to give Cavelli the catastrophe, because it seemed that's what he wanted to hear. In the end, of course, tulips hadn't fared so well. If the Chapmans were losing Maine, that wasn't a good sign for the market. If Will, as a former banker, had underestimated his ability to make payments, or overvalued his future earnings, what was the rest of America, those with less knowledge of finance, thinking?

"And the characters," Cavelli said, fingers stroking his chin. "Tell me about them."

I thought for a moment and then smiled. "Who'd inhabit this book?" I asked. He was playing a game now. He wanted me to populate the story. "Well, there's Win, swooping down in a yellow biplane to turn an art-house novelist into a billionaire banker, and a wife and her banker husband who wants to be an art-house novelist, and the CEO of B and B, who has too much time on his hands and wants his men to bleed green, and who rings a little sterling-silver bell every time he makes a sexist, racist or otherwise politically incorrect comment, and who rules from a glass tower."

"I like it," Cavelli interjected.

And I continued: all the contests and my win with the hamburgers and Toyotas and bacon and so many billions of dollars. As the details poured from me, of this ridiculous, absurd, glittering world, they almost made me excited. The storytelling reminded me of when I told Theodor for the first time about my defection—in the end it had been comforting and refreshing. I thought of Theodor's chalice, the world resting on a fragile limb about to topple—or not—the Texan's boisterous "You're brilliant, old boy." Theodor had let go of the sculpture, sent it into the world, his no more. This was how it was supposed to be. And I will confess here, I paused, wondered in a fleeting moment, the way so many ideas and notions can occupy your mind in a flash: I wanted to go back; I could go back; I could make it mine as it had been in the very beginning, oceanic stretches of time, an entire summer's worth, deeply immersed in a world of my own making, belonging to me alone, the way Theodor's sculpture had once belonged to him. I felt both a pang of regret and the fullness of possibility in a life lived creatively, in which all that is sacrificed is compensated for in the desire to make and think and understand. I had the urge to write a sentence, craft a paragraph. I could feel the engine trying to turn over, catching, engaging like a car left idle for a long winter.

Cavelli's eyes concentrated on me. He was smart and literary and attentive, chin resting on palm, peering through the portal opened by me and my words. I hadn't felt this passionately in years. I could feel my skin warm, my cheeks flush. I wanted to get inside this, understand. I missed this. I could have talked with him for a long time.

Miss Barthelme knocked and cautiously opened the door. "Your next appointment is waiting."

I uncrossed my legs, ready to be dismissed.

"It will be a minute," he said. She left, closing the door quietly behind her.

"And they thought they could take you, just anyone, and graft you into this world?"

"You know," I said, crossing my legs again and sitting back, "they did. And in the beginning it felt dirty, like a raunchy affair, illicit, exciting. But that was just me, it turned out, indulging my own prejudices. I discovered it was a much more complex world, of smart, educated people, children some of them, readers too." He smiled, sharing the inside joke of those outside finance—that we all believe them to be illiterate. "And so I surrendered to it all." I
could
imagine the story. I was writing it in my mind. I looked at his office door. Outside someone was waiting. I was making someone wait. I wanted that person to wait forever so I could remain in here, in this sweet memory.

"Don't you feel that defines a fatal flaw?"

"Surrendering?" I asked.

"To money," he said.

That snapped me back from my reverie, sharpened my sense of clarity. "Isn't that what's happened to so many of us? We all wanted the money, believed so invincibly in ourselves that we mortgaged our futures for the Mercedes today, the new kitchen, the addition, the trip to Europe. Isn't that what America has done?" But it was more than that. I understood what it was just then, for me. I felt as if I belonged now, that I wasn't scheming anymore, trying to get away with something in order to afford my life. I belonged now, to the school, in a house, at the movies with my kids even, in stores, at my daughters' doctors, to this world that made me.

"A fatal flaw," he repeated.

"I suppose it could be," I said. "I got caught up in the frenzy in my own special way." I thought of Will and Emma and their house in Maine.

Our conversation continued for a good twenty minutes, veering back to the mess that he apparently found my role an emblem of. He was convinced this would be a nuclear financial explosion and suggested that I was particularly well positioned to tell the tale, one with my own intriguing backstory.

"And how will it end?" he asked.

"The bankers, they'll all be obliterated. No one will be able to look at them. Tarred and feathered," I said. He gave me a pleased smirk. "Of course, it will end with the bankers just where they were in the beginning, creating new products that do the same thing—that bundle and pool potential, slice it and dice it and ship it off around the world, and the frenzy will start all over again. It won't be houses but something else. College tuition plans, life insurance—they'll be gambling with your life. They'll never lose." I smiled at him. "The rich live differently," I said.

"Who do you think would be interested in writing this?" he asked with a half-cocked smile.

"Don't you think there will be many?" I asked. "Financial wizards will have proposals by the thousands, no?"

"Not that kind of book," he said. "I'm talking about a book of witness."

"Written by a bystander," I said.

"India," he said, standing up at last and stepping around his desk to give me a hug. "Think about it, won't you?"