Dear Money (43 page)

That little engine of possibility turned over again, but quickly stopped.

"Not a chance, Leonardo, as tempting as you are. I'm very happy. For the first time in my life I am extremely happy with what I do."

I'd said no to Cavelli, and as I did my writer's studio flashed before me. I'd held on to it all this time, still paid rent on it, though it remained unvisited, gathering dust—there just as I had left it. I said goodbye to Cavelli and shut his office door behind me and stepped into the anteroom, where I stood blinking for a moment. Hunched over a manuscript, red pen poised in her hand, sat Lily Starr. Then I saw the grade book and noticed that the "manuscript" was a stack of student papers. It was late June. Summer session, no less.

"Lily."

"India," she said, smiling and tossing her purse over the stories. "What in the world?"

"Just a visit."

"How crazy is this? I'm just here to talk to Cavelli."

"Crazy," I said. "Are you teaching?" I gestured toward the stories.

She rolled her eyes and stuffed the papers into her bag, the blue alligator handbag with the little silver feet.

"You look so good," she said.

We both stood there, her compliment of the kind one sometimes hears at reunions or funerals—an indirect, public avowal that time, gravity, entropy, the IRS, alcohol, a thick stack of student papers waiting to be read and deficiencies of character one couldn't surmount alone had all conspired to make you look as if you needed, at the very least, a long hot soak and a good airing out in high-desert sun, possibly with a feathered shaman or two to help guide you back from where the wheels had come off your caboose.

"I read in a magazine that you bought a house in Southhampton," I said, not really sure of what else to say.

"Springs," she corrected, apologetically. Her lips curled into a frown. "But we have to rent it out all the time. You know, mortgage payments." She paused. "Crazy," she said. Then, unable to resist: "New book?"

"Honestly," I said, "I'm not really sure why I'm here."

A flash of relief in her eyes. "I miss you, India. It's been so long," she said, as if trying to sort something out for herself. Why had we thrown each other away?

"We're all so busy," I said. "I'd love to catch up. Have you finished another novel?"

"A memoir. The fiction's on hold."

Cavelli opened his door with a booming welcome for Lily. "My Starr," he declared.

"Good luck to you," she said. "Call. Please."

H
OW DO YOU KNOW
the end is near? When shoeshine boys are giving you stock tips. The trouble is, the only way you really understand this is after the fact. Yesterday it was the shoeshine boy. Today it's your mother-in-law. The joke and its punch line live in the land of perspective and hindsight. But if you live moment by moment in the present, if you're a fire-breathing, hamburger-eating numbers guy, as I'd become—"India Palmer, just one of the boys"—then all one sees is numbers.

We were all about reality, and numbers were real and studly and all the rest of it. Numbers allowed you to see beyond the distracting fabric, the shifting veil of illusion that most people mistook for reality. But even if one of us were to disclose our quantitative methods to the public at large—say, blaring them with a bullhorn from the back of a truck driving down Broadway—it would be the listeners who'd die of boredom or bafflement. I wasn't a "quant," a Princeton Ph.D. in economics, not even close, but I learned to speak their language. I'd come to take it as an article of faith that 99 percent of the time I could lose no more than the bet I'd made. If the bet was $50 million, 99 percent of the time that was the most I could lose. And the numbers, like the ground beneath my feet, bore me up.

I walked as if on a mighty earthen levee and noted with satisfaction how the waters were held at bay. I noted the people, how small they were, living their lives oblivious of the levee. This was the 99 percent. It worked. It was fundamentally sound. You could believe in it the way you believed in the Army Corps of Engineers. It was convincing in its daily utility. It was durable. Its mighty engine thudded convincingly. Over time, one simply took it, like the fact that the sun would rise tomorrow, as part of the given.

But riding out across the ever-narrowing asymptote of chance, at the far periphery of thought, at the remotest end of possibility, a cold, dark number was ever so occasionally rumored to exist. This was the One Percent Chance that the levee would break, that the supercollider experiment would somehow form antimatter that would fuse everything—the air, the trees, the oceans, all of us—into a solid, ever-expanding ball of destruction. The One Percent was Kali, the destroyer goddess, riding on a theoretical comet of the apocalypse. You could not, if you wanted to maintain your credibility as a numbers guy, simply dismiss her, because, after all, she was a number. You could not truthfully say, "This is not possible." Because it
was
possible. All you could say, in truth, was that it was not probable.

The One Percent was where the dragons lived. The people who forswore the pallet-loads of money that everyone else was making and stuffing into their own accounts, not because it was right or prudent but because they could—the antinomians who kept their eyes on the realm of the dragons, who thought about what terrible, wholesale destruction the dragons could do—these people collectively would not have filled a small elevator. Nobody invited them to the party. They were cranks of catastrophe. They were out of step with the times. And who among us wants to say goodbye to a good time?

The only way you understand is after the fact. Unless you're Win Johns. When Win lit out for the territory, wild rumors circulated: he'd racked up some heavy losses; he'd been caught money-laundering for the Man in the Moon; he was a kingpin of the white slave market in Romania—such outrageous stories swirled in the wake of his departure from Bond & Bond. To where? To short the market, of course. But to all of us it may as well have been to Fiji, to Oz, to the bottom of the Aleutian Trench.

Amazing how the pace of the market made Win's former place in it a distant memory. Nobody cared. There were non-disclosure agreements and contractual clauses and noncompete provisos guaranteeing that Win would remain, in terms of his relevance, on Pluto. And as if from that recently decommissioned planet, he could look back on the tiny speck floating in the darkness that was us, our busy brew, but he could do nothing or say nothing that would be heard against the feverish pitch of the galaxy, which moved and would always move, as we all knew, despite the occasional disquieting glitches, in one direction only. One didn't bet against the galaxy. And what mattered in the galaxy we'd created—the substance of our dreams, our deals, and the fabulously spinning noncorrelated assets we'd invented, those curious cycles and epicycles derived from dreams—was something that had always mattered. It was something beyond logic or reckoning. Something firm beneath our feet. Something that kept us warm at night and the rain from falling on our heads. Something to look out upon, some landscape to survey and assess and regard. Something real. Real estate.

There was no bidding war between Emma and me, as Win had predicted. I bought the house because they needed to sell and because I could buy. They'd made mistakes with mortgages, as so many others had. I bought the house because I could. And, because I could, I planned to tear it down and build it back again as it had been, the same design but better, sounder, more polished, more comfortable, each room a bit more commodious, the bathrooms large enough for tubs and showers, insulation for winter visits, a fireplace that didn't hog the views. I wanted not to mess too much with history, to keep the integrity of the house's original design but modernize it, so you couldn't tell, if you'd known the house across the years, whether anything much had changed.

But there was something else at work inside me. Maybe I would make two turrets instead of one, for balance, each with a door onto second-floor balconies. I would make the attic and basement livable. "To the unknowing eye, it will appear that the house has had no more than an excellent paint job," said Sims, a New York architect who had done some work in the Hamptons and was known for his stone-and-glass façades and for being mindful of the carbon footprint. "It will look as though now someone cares for it just a bit more." I did not mention that to Emma.

To one so new to having money, to its power to transform, to its—how shall I say—enchanting melody, the plans to merely restore and remodel the house at Pond Point slowly began to seem slightly, peevishly foreshortened. For weeks I looked over Sims's shoulder as he drafted. Everything was at my disposal. I could reposition the house. I could open it up to admit the eastern sun. I could extend a deck into the sea grass, add a Jacuzzi. Because he was young and hungry, and because he had read me well—seen that I too, in my own way, was hungry—Sims introduced more radical plans for an entirely new sort of house, a
rara avis
sort of house, an eco-friendly, sustainable assemblage of cubes and parallelograms and solar panels, a polyhedral cathedral, like some ship heading out into the Gulf of Maine and built to outlast the ravages of time and tide. It would ruffle feathers from Sebasco Cove to Gilbert Head. Yachtsmen would use it to mark their position off the coast. Passing lobstermen would pause in wonderment—or call it blasphemy.

I did the numbers, and the numbers sang their enchanting song. My accounts were a mountain. This was a foothill. It was more than just doable. It was done. I could spend a winter on Wall Street amassing—I loved the word—
another mountain,
and by spring I could move into Shangri-la. It was heady stuff. So we worked on it, Sims and I, a step forward, away from my original intention (the same but improved) and toward his (an Ozymandian assertion): advance, retreat, until temptation won and I had a pile of blueprints to tell the story.

The sale of the house was matter-of-fact. It had been Emma's idea, mentioned first on my family's annual visit. "Why don't you buy it?" she'd offered, as if to a co-conspirator, our feet pushing into the sand, books in our laps that we weren't bothering to read. "Better you than a stranger." The girls ran around on the beach. Theodor and Will were on a jog. I'd imagined this moment for Emma, had envisioned a rupture of some sort, but I hadn't imagined she'd have been this placid. "We can't afford to keep it, alas. Ah, the compromises one makes for art! Who would have thought?"

"I'm so sorry," I said.

"Don't be sorry," she said. "It's just a house." All the sounds washed over us, the waves and the gulls and the P-3 Orions, turboprop planes lumbering overhead on their practice sorties from the new naval base—big, hulking, ominous, like circling sharks. Round and round they cruised. "If you buy it, it'll still be in the family. I mean, you'll invite us up."

"You'd have your own room," I said, imagining the picture along with her. I meant it, in a way.

"I had thought Pond Point would never change," Emma said contemplatively. I noticed a few strands of gray in her dark hair, caught by the sun, a revelation of another sort. "Each summer we'd return, and the place was just as it had been the year before, nothing changed." Emma was staring out at the horizon, her voice like a guitar tuned up an octave. "The arms of sand would stretch to the islands at low tide; the dunes would always rise as dunes are meant to do; the beach would be wide and the rivers would run their course; the tides would always be low in the afternoon. The moon red in the evenings above the little island there." She pointed to the island where ornithologists had erected tents from which to study the piping plover. White-capped waves rolled toward us from the island, rhythmically, calmly.

"But of course it wasn't that way," Emma continued. "Every summer there would be a new surprise, something different—less sand here, more sand there; the spit to Wood Island completely submerged at low tide so you had to wade out to it, pulling the girls, when they were young, on rafts; the small river cutting across the other spit to Fox. The place was alive, growing, changing, dying, regenerating. My girls changed. The only thing that seemed to remain the same was the house. It had been there forever in the same spot, through storms and coastal blizzards, nothing shaking it. Other houses had come and gone, but not our house. There were dramatic stories of houses being swept out to sea. But not our house. Several generations had summered here. Where are they? They're all gone. Even we'll be gone. But not the house."

I thought then she might break. But she didn't. She never broke. We agreed to buy the house and she did not break. What did I want? Did I want to watch, from the comfortable perspective of the person I'd become, Emma making the kind of sacrifices that I'd once had to make? Perhaps a part of me did, but I pretended that wasn't so. I held her by the shoulders in an attempt to comfort her as we sat in silence, looking out onto the waters, but she didn't need the comfort. She'd accepted the loss, moved on.

Quietly, in the house, Emma packed up the belongings she wanted and shipped them to New York, eventually transferring the title of her dream to me. Her dream was for the simplicity of the eternal summer, preserving her children, keeping them forever small. It was sentimental and quaint, and when they had money the ramshackle house seemed to provide (I understood now) a counterpoint to the luxury of their lives. I understood, too, what I couldn't have then—that I didn't need or want a counterpoint to luxury. I wanted money to do exactly what money could do. For that reason I'd been carried aloft by Sims and all his blueprints. Through local gossip, Will had learned my plans, and when his e-mails and phone calls with his inevitable pleas began, I couldn't return them. But events propelled me to the final act, a day I was mildly dreading, when Will would see firsthand all that I was about to do, or undo. It was hard to miss; it had made the
Sagadahoc Bugle.

The girls were back in school, caught up in their busy lives, and Theodor was in Italy for an exhibition of his work. I came to Maine alone to handle the closing with Will and then to prepare the house for demolition. It was Friday, September 21, 2007, the first day of fall, though it still felt like summer, with a strong offshore breeze. A few people played on the beach, hanging on to summer, here for the weekend. Kites dipped and dived. Our small driveway was cluttered with machinery: a bulldozer, a hydraulic excavator, a crew milling about, hammering enormous bolts to the legs of the old Victorian house. (I hadn't realized that a house could have legs; pilings, I guess.) The bolts had hooks that would hold cables that, once bound around the house, would, with some heavy pulling, take the house down.