A Doubter's Almanac (46 page)

From my first morning in a suit, I was placing well long of a hundred thousand orders in an hour. On my job interview, as a sixteen-year-old doctoral candidate in a scarlet-and-gray windbreaker and Birkenstocks, I’d been flattered into showing a group of men in Ferragamo loafers how Shores-Durban equations could forecast the swell and shrink of just about every type of large-market inefficiency that existed anywhere—inefficiencies that until that point had been dismissed as noise. I could tell that nobody in the room, not even the other stat-arb quants, understood exactly what I was talking about. Nonetheless, Physico took less than an hour to offer me a signing bonus that well exceeded the salary my father had earned over his entire career. I waited a few days to accept; but when I did, a limousine was dispatched to the front door of the OSU mathematics department.

Take that, Seth Kopter.

Two years into it, though, my system still wasn’t perfect. I was still programming every night after the close, still triangulating my executions until they asymptotically approached the optimums for my newly hatched breed of computational microstructure trades, which, to put it boastfully (but accurately), swarmed like piranha around the clumsy, staggering hooves of our rivals. And I have to say, I was liking it. At any hour of the day or night, I was capable of laserlike concentration, knifelike thought, and hoglike greed. Occasionally, well into morning, my mind might crystallize into something more pure: I would glance at the stapled-together dissertation notes on my shelf and imagine Isaac Newton during the plague years, leaning over a table in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, deriving his fluxional calculus. But that didn’t stop me. My Sharpe ratio was scoffing at the bulge bracket from the top of a very tall building. I could locate a microinefficiency anywhere in the world—Chicago, Hong Kong, you name it—and without even bothering with the indignity of leverage could turn a remarkably reliable profit in the nanosecond it took a cesium 133 atom to oscillate a bare handful of times between energy states. It was all fun and games.

In fact, I probably would have done it for nothing.

What really drove me was the thing I knew instinctively, every single day that I was swept up in that silent elevator to the seventieth floor of the Trump Building: that an even-more-accurate algorithm lay out there somewhere. I knew it in the way my father had once known, staring at the flats of San Francisco Bay, that he stood at the edge of absolutely the correct abyss. I would place my million trades a day, then sit at my glass-topped desk well into morning, doing and redoing every move in my mind.

Ah, recidivism. It’s the fly in the ointment.

The only obvious problem with my life—that is, the only one I was worried about at the time—was that to a numerically inclined mind like my own, the economics of normal existence were becoming untenable. How could I go for a half-hour walk in Battery Park when it meant $25,000 in income? Was a coffee at Starbucks worth the price of a Mercedes?

I’d been raised on mathematics. Now I was starting to doubt a few of its dictates.

At some ungodly hour of the night, I would at last allow myself to quit. The empty elevator whisked me back down to the lobby, where Lorenzo, my Astoria-Italian driver, would be idling at the Pine Street entrance in his Town Car, waiting to take me home to the brownstone, which was on Perry Street near the river.

In the living room of that brownstone was a Mpingo coffee table that had cost as much as Lorenzo’s Lincoln. I’d bought it with about an hour’s salary.

—

T
HE FIRST DINNER
my father and I had together in New York was at Le Pinceau. A warm, ginkgo-scented fall evening not that long after I’d started at Physico. I’d only seen him once during the whole time I was at OSU, a single weekend in the middle of my second year when I took the bus up to Michigan to talk with him about my thoughts on the Shores-Durbans. We ate every meal at the Green & White, and he gave me a couple of good ideas about the mathematics, which I have to admit might have been helpful if I’d ever gotten around to writing a dissertation.

Now, here he was in New York, looking rather well. Dapper, even. Pale linen suit and the old Borsalino. His belly was flat, and his face was aglow with the burnished sunburn that he’d started to exhibit despite the fact that he was living full-time in a woods. He moved solidly across the dining-room floor to the seat across from me. He’d flown in from Detroit, first class. Courtesy of me, of course. I’d walked down the block from the office.

“I’ll pay for my own dinner” was the first thing he said.

“No need. Really.”

He looked around, smirking. “Not many mathematics professors in here, I see.”

“Not many Fields winners, anyway.”

This softened him. Undoing his coat, he glanced at the menu. “They serve decent scotch. I think I’ll try the Laphroaig first. What about you?”

“Nothing for me, Dad.”

He raised his eyebrows, then smiled from one corner of his mouth.

By the time our appetizers arrived, he’d tried the GlenDronach, too; and by the time the endive salad was rolled to the table and dressed with ground peppercorns and a twenty-five-year-old Modena balsamic, he’d offered opinions on the St. Magdalene and the Glenfarcias, each of which he’d dispatched in a single appreciative slit-eyed swallow that looked a little bit like a snake putting the final touches on a mouse. For the main course, he ordered a bison steak and a mound of shoestring potatoes, then sat back for another GlenDronach.

At a table a few feet from us that night was a young woman dining alone. Not a derivatives trader. Not even in the financial business, I could see from her wardrobe, whose warp and brownish palette brought to mind sheep rather than tiger. I’d noticed her while waiting for Dad. She was pretty. She was sitting behind me, though, and a little off to the side, so that I’d been reduced to angling my water glass against the dining-room mirrors to get an occasional view of her features. When my father ordered the first GlenDronach, I noticed in my reflector that she glanced up with hardly more than an eyebrow. Still. She was older than I was—who wasn’t?—but nonetheless a little young to be dining alone in a place like this, even in New York City: somewhere in her mid- to late twenties was my guess. I straightened my tie, which was a dark Hermès picked out by one of my secretaries, then nodded gravely over Dad’s shoulder, signaling for the waiter. I was spending a lot of time in those days trying to look older.

“I didn’t think she’d do it,” my father grumbled, starting right in as we waited for our food. Of course, he was talking about Mom. That year, she’d finally contacted a divorce lawyer.

“She has her own future to think of, Dad.”

“She used to think of mine, as well.”

“Yeah—and then you left her.”

He sniffed. “Well, fuck you, Son.”

“Well, fuck you, Dad.”

In my reflector, the girl raised her eyebrows again. I smiled into my water glass to make it clear that Dad and I were joking.

“Well, her future should be fine, either way,” he said. “I’m sure the judge is going to take care of her in style.”

“And she deserves it.”

“Oh, so you’re one of
those.
”

“One of
whats
?”

“One of the apologists.” He boomed the words, gesturing for another scotch. “Just like the two of them.”

I didn’t get a break from this kind of banter until after dessert, which he didn’t touch. But at last he rose from the table to use the men’s room. By then, I was pretty much beaten. I looked into my water glass and found the girl watching me. I smiled.

When the waiter arrived with another GlenDronach and set it at Dad’s spot, I reached across and downed it.

A moment later, I heard, “That was a fast one.”

I checked the glass: she was standing right behind me. “Oh,” I said. “He won’t even remember. I was actually doing him a favor.”

“I was just on my way to the ladies’ room.”

I pointed. “It’s over there.”

“Thank you, yes.”

Her voice was surprisingly southern and surprisingly lovely—though also surprisingly firm, like a magnolia trunk. (I could tell even then.) Her blouse was buttoned all the way to the neck, where a turn of white silk had been folded. And now I noticed that her nose contained a single, breathtaking bend, about halfway down. She pointed to the empty glass. “I hope you didn’t actually need that.”

“Well, I did.”

“Just to speak to me?”

“You weren’t here at the time.”

“Technically not.” She looked at me rather sharply. “That’s your father, isn’t it?” She nodded toward the far side of the room, where I saw now that he’d taken a seat at the bar. Another shot was being poured for him.

“Well, yes,” I said. “It appears to be.”

“Then if I were you,” she said, turning to make her way, “I’d be a little more careful.”

—

“Y
OU SEEM TO
be far from an apologist, by the way,” she said.

“You were eavesdropping.”

“You were spying.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Could you tell?”

“Either that or you found the water in your glass extremely interesting.”

“In fact, I
did.
” I smiled. “The randomness of molecular behavior is overestimated. Brownian motion. It bears on my field.”

She smiled back, not as though she understood the thought but as though she understood why I might have had it. “And besides,” she said. “I wasn’t eavesdropping. Your father’s voice carries.”

“He’s a professor.”

“Of math?”

“That’s right.” I felt a twinge. “Of
mathematics.
Or at least, he
was.
How’d you know?”

“The same way I knew you weren’t an apologist.”

We were on our first date. Every evening of that week, I’d left the Trump Building early and dined alone at Le Pinceau. I’d become transfixed. Transfixed and suddenly lonely—a strange turn for a man who’d never thought much about companionship. How did you find a person you’d spoken to only once in a city the size of New York? Actually, it was the type of mathematical problem for which my training had perfectly prepared me. An intersection of probabilities, each one small. After my sixth night at the same table—my sixth pepper steak, my sixth gratinéed potato, my sixth dully bubbling glass of mineral water—I was reaching for the door handle at the exit to head back up to Physico for my sixth round of late-night brainstorming, when the door opened ahead of my hand.
“Quod erat demonstrandum,”
I said, under my breath.

“You look as though you were expecting me.”

Within moments, she’d agreed to dinner. (Sometimes, like my father, I could talk.) The waiter said nothing as he brought me my second pepper steak of the evening.

Texas. Small town. Alone in New York now, employed in book publishing. These were the facts, which she related to me while sitting straight, like a dancer, across the white-linened table. She kept her head tilted just slightly up, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off that tiny bend
^*
in her nose.

“Women’s prison,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Book publishing.”

I pointed out the window, where, from up the block, 40 Wall Street was casting its stony stare at the sidewalk. “Then I suppose I’m in men’s prison.”

“Here’s to the inmates.”

When we set down our glasses of mineral water, I said, “I’m just wondering—how does a girl in book publishing manage to eat at Le Pinceau?”

“Carefully,” she answered. “And occasionally. And using a little secret.”

“Which is what?”

But she only smiled. She took another look around and asked if I minded going for a walk.

Minded?

I called Lorenzo (discreet nod of approval as he shut the door behind her) and had him bring us up to Central Park, where, sitting on a rough stone archway alongside the apple-scented horse trails, eating an oversalted pretzel from a cart, she told me about: (1) the collapse of her engagement (older man, a professor at her college); (2) her Hill Country childhood (rattlesnakes, imaginary friends); (3) her current dreams (children, a literary salon); (4) her family (brother, older, drying out for the third time).

She asked me about: (1) my own childhood (not much that I wished to recount); (2) my parents (the mulberry tree, the Art Institute, the cabin in the woods); (3) my sister (MIT, now Caltech, on faculty); (4) my work (the Shores-Durbans); and (5) my dreams (I’d never actually come up with any).

Like my father, I didn’t want to talk about my life. Like my father, I fell in love with the first girl who asked me about it.

—

U
NLIKE MY FATHER,
however, I married her.

*
For those who care for an approximation of the tilt and bend: for
y
 = 0…180,
x
 = 170
e
^{−.00016(y − 23)
2}
− 9.4
e
^{−.0025(y − 47)
2}
.

Non-Brownian Gray

D
AD SHOWED UP
in New York City one more time, a couple of months before the wedding. Audra thought I should have dinner with him alone, but she offered to join us for dessert. Le Pinceau again—his choice. The same five whiskeys with the same appetizers and the same main course. Then another couple of Laphroaigs as we waited for her to arrive. I’d seen him in his cups before, on plenty of occasions, but now he seemed to be pushing himself up one last, terrible hill.

By the time she joined us, the dessert plates were on the table. At that point Dad had finished off an Irish coffee, too. Not five minutes later, as he was telling her about his early years at Princeton, he knocked a newly arrived GlenDronach onto the floor, lunging for it and nearly going over himself. The waiter was there in a moment, but he didn’t bring another.