City on Fire (37 page)

TADELIS TURNED OUT RARELY TO BE RIGHT, but he was right about this: Keith could sell pretty much anything to pretty much anyone. The secret … Well, there were two. One came from growing up Catholic, this habit of compassion he had back then. There was a moment before any trade when you’d positioned your client right on the fulcrum between yes and no, and the slightest breath could tip him in either direction. At that moment, Keith would close his eyes and sort of send his spirit outward, as in prayer, until he was sitting right next to the client on the other end of the phone, willing the deal to be good for him.

The second secret was that it was easy for Keith to believe in what he was selling. This wasn’t to say he always understood it; in fact, he still found the mathematical ins and outs of bond yields and liquidity spreads surprisingly hard to hold in mind, like slippery fish in a basket. But in the Action Office, that Darwinian milieu of gristle and blood and genital metaphor, there’d been a certain contempt for theory anyway. It was said that each of the world’s great ideas—the wheel, Hamlet, Newtonian gravity—could fit on the back of a cocktail napkin, and Keith was a cocktail-napkin kind of guy. He would get three or four jumps out on a cost-benefit tree, a single choice having branched into eight, or sixteen, and then, partway into examining those, would throw up his hands and go with his gut. “I think you’re really going to come to feel as good about this as I do,” he might say, hopefully. You only had to be right 51 percent of the time to beat the market, and in those years, Kennedy, Johnson, it was hard to lose money. The same libidinal energy coursing through the television and the streets outside seemed to be making the money multiply.

He brought the two secrets to bear on his home life, too. Number one: love other people. The night after the first time he booked a ten-thousand-dollar trade, he burst in the front door in a golden fog of beer from all the rounds he’d bought his coworkers and lifted Regan off her feet and kissed her until her thighs parted to admit his. “Easy,” she said. “The baby.” Probably she just meant that she’d be more comfortable on her back—the doctor had assured them, periphrastically, that they could continue to enjoy the fruits of marriage. But there were gentler ways to obtain them. Once he’d carried her to the bed, he lifted her nightgown and moved down between her legs and lapped at the spiced copper there until, across the quivering swell of her belly and breasts he saw the flush leap into her throat, her hands twisting the sheets by her head.

He was wild for her in those days, in the two-bedroom newlywed apartment in the Village, and in taxicabs and Broadway theaters and the little cabin on Lake Winnipesaukee where, that third year of their married life, the kid had been conceived. Keith thought he could fill, with his body and his money and his soul, the lonely places Regan’s mother and brother and whoever else had left. And she’d let him think it, he would come to see (as if, had he realized what had been taken wasn’t replaceable, he’d have ceased to love her).

When the child was born, they called him William. Keith had always liked the name anyway, and if he understood correctly, William III was unlikely to produce an heir of his own to carry it on … even assuming he someday returned from the wilderness into which he’d vanished the night before Old Bill’s wedding. Once a Social Security card had been issued, they went down to her bank and Regan transferred into the boy’s name her entire trust fund, minus her inheritance from her mother. For his future, she said. For college. Keith, who was the trustee on the new account, asked if she was sure she wanted to do this. But she was capable of great decisiveness. And now that she’d finished signing the documents, Regan was free of the Hamilton-Sweeneys.

Or as free as you could be, living in the same town, sitting on their Board, seeing them at holidays. Christmas with the Spocks, Keith took to calling it after the advent of Star Trek, Old Bill remaining galactically remote and Felicia proving somewhat colder than she’d initially seemed. (Amory, to Keith’s great relief, would always be off doing a deal in some foreign territory, so his name rarely came up.)

Aside from these family visits, with their forcible cheer, Regan had by then given up acting. It had been clear since Will’s birth that she’d never really meant to continue, that motherhood was where her talents would go. But Keith encouraged her to keep up with her play-reading group. In fact, he’d supported her in all her Greenwich Village hobbies: meditation, book club, health food, neighborhood preservation. When she had to go offer testimony at a hearing over one of the City’s endless redevelopment plans, he took off work to watch Will. He would always remember, he thought, how he’d gripped the seat of the boy’s new bike and jogged around the park the smart money still said would be razed to make room for a highway, and how, at the end of the umpteenth circuit, Regan had arrived amid a cluster of women in skirts, the youngest and prettiest among them. How she’d blushed and raised her fists in victory. He felt just then as if his soul had swelled to fill his skin—as after scrimmages in high school, when he’d walked home tossing the ball to himself in the fast-descending night, replaying sixty-yard touchdown runs.

That was probably, come to think of it, the geometric apogee of his life, because the salesman’s Second Commandment (again) was Believe What Thou Art Selling, and this proved to be a little trickier than the First, when what thou werst selling wast thyself. In 1970, for example, with Regan pregnant again and Will nearing school age, Keith started to feel he wasn’t making enough money. Each new tax bracket was a kind of elevation from which you could survey all the things you couldn’t yet afford. If Regan liked the book club that met at her friend Ruth’s house, how much more might she have liked a home she could actually entertain in? If she liked the community garden she and the other mothers had made in the vacant lot down the street, how much more might she have liked her own private yard? Or at least a balcony where she could pot her herbs?

By the time he confessed to Regan that he’d been talking to a real-estate agent, he had made up his mind. Uptown, in a Classic Six, Will and the baby would have their own rooms, and wouldn’t have to be around the hopheads and barking lunatics who had lately taken over the Village. It would mean working harder, of course, to take home more money, they both knew that, but in truth Keith had grown bored in the upper-middle echelons at Renard. He had a solid list of clients; what if another firm let him bring them over and start a named advisory business of his own? He sincerely believed, as he laid all this out for her, that this was what he wanted. The charity dinners, the harbor cruises, the corporate picnics where you plucked new business … he enjoyed them, didn’t he? He enjoyed having to turn on the charm, having had a little too much to drink. And he would be someone now, the head of his own group—Lamplighter Capital Associates. With his Brooks Brothers shirts, his fancy Swiss watch, and a driver waiting downstairs, he would finally feel he deserved her.

IT WASN’T LONG AFTERWARD that Keith began exploring the wonders of leverage. The cocktail-napkin version looked like this: if he combined two dollars borrowed cheaply from the bank with one dollar from a client’s account, then each dollar made on the three-dollar investment more or less doubled his client’s money. The particular sector he was experimenting in was military. Personally, Keith was a dove, and had written some large checks to Hubert Humphrey during the ’68 election. He’d nonetheless ridden out the bear market that followed by taking big positions in Dow Chemical, in Raytheon, in Honeywell, both for clients and for himself. And though there was some risk in maintaining them—the war couldn’t go on forever, could it?—Nixon’s expansion into Cambodia and Laos seemed to open up demand for all kinds of new product lines. If Keith was right, he was going to have leveraged himself into a nice modern house in New Canaan by the time the next correction came. Meanwhile, in the name of diversification, Keith was now long on the City itself. That is, he’d begun moving his clients into long-term New York municipal bonds.

They’d first drawn his eye toward the end of 1972, when he was certain they were undervalued. True, the later part of the war years had been punishing for the local economy. In the early ’60s, the Lower West Side in the a.m. had still been so dense with shipping pallets you could barely walk; now the loading docks were all sealed up and shrouded with graffiti. You could hear pigeons brooding there behind the corrugated steel. Tax revenues were suffering, and there was talk, if you listened to Dick Cavett or the “Dr.” Zig show, of a permanent shift to a symbolic economy, or a service economy—an economy based on anything other than measurable human production—but this struck Keith as the worst kind of eggheadery. And what about real estate? It used to be that from eight to eight the whole city was musique concrète: drills jackhammers belt-sanders electric saws and the pizzicato plink of hammer on nail. He remembered scaffolding marring the long-in-the-tooth face of every other building in Midtown, wrecking balls like slow fists clobbering the tenements. Will, at two or three, had loved to watch the cranes, and flying above the operator’s cabin or aerie the big bright American flag. Now the smug numbers of the ticker machine said real estate was depressed. It made Keith want to take the ticker machine up to the top of the Hamilton-Sweeney Building and show it the limited landmass of Manhattan. What happens when the 2 percent of American males eighteen to thirty-four currently wading through the rice paddies of Southeast Asia return to rent apartments, look for jobs, consume durable goods? The tax base comes roaring back, obviously. This isn’t Soviet Russia. This is America we’re talking about. For God’s sake, this is New York City.

The oil shock a few months later made him feel prescient. The Dow Jones took a bath, but the ratings agencies had returned city debt to AAA status, and Keith had already put $4 million into thirty-year munis and even picked up a $100,000 bond for himself. And when, in early ’74, those same munis dipped down to 20 percent below face value, he went back to the well with another $4 million. This time, he bought the bonds on margin, matching each dollar of equity with a dollar of debt. If he didn’t seek his clients’ explicit permission, it was only because it was so clear leverage was what they would want. His personal accounts were even less liquid, but he managed to scrape together enough cash to buy another five bonds on margin for himself.

By the fall, he had $6 million of other people’s money, $300,000 of his own, and $2.2 million of the bank’s in a tax-free and virtually riskless instrument. A strange thing had happened, though. Not only did the global market remain slumped, but nothing in New York seemed to be performing: not private housing or public housing, not urban renewal, not office space. Occupancy rates at the newly built Trade Center hovered around 30 percent. Even Radio City now was on the auction block. It shouldn’t have been a surprise; the last time Keith had been there, the five thousand seats had been so empty you could hear not only a cough but the rustle of a cough drop being unwrapped. It was a Thursday matinee of Herbie Rides Again, but he’d needed a couple of hours away from reality. Because, amid talk of the federal government having to backstop the city budget, his $8.5 million muni spree was now worth not the $10 million it should have been, conservatively, but $6.4 million. A margin call from the bank would force him to realize losses close to 50 percent; here in the corporeal world, leverage, depressingly, turned out to be just a synonym for amplification. And in any case, if his clients woke up to what he was doing behind their backs—on their behalf!—he could lose his business.

Thank God, then, that his military-industrial speculations continued to thrive, tossing off their soporific dividend checks. At the 1974/75 Hamilton-Sweeney New Year’s gala, men in tuxedoes, their faces barely recognizable, queued three and four deep to shake his hand. They had no idea about the great, sucking hole in his balance sheet.

Neither did Regan. “It’s like you’re a celebrity or something,” she said afterward, perched on the edge of the bed, leaning forward to roll down her hose. She had always gone to these parties grudgingly; he had the feeling she’d rather have stayed home and watched The Brady Bunch with the kids, but there was a new thing in her voice as she sat up to watch him struggle with the knot of his tie. “I’m proud of you, you know.”

They’d both had several glasses of champagne, but he wanted to believe that if they made love that night, for the first time in—had it really been a month?—it wouldn’t just be the alcohol. They lay on their sides with the lights off, barely moving, trying not to wake the kids, and as part of him slipped into Regan, inching down the path to freedom, another part of him thought, So this is what it really feels like to be a man. Not the fullback carrying home the golden cup, but the compromised, muddled, and not entirely forthcoming creature now trying to pretend to his wife that he’s as lost in the moment as she herself is.

OR IS PRETENDING TO BE. For Regan seemed to have struggles of her own. Cate had been a difficult pregnancy, leaving her housebound for long stretches. And Regan would have been an uneasy transplant to the East Sixties regardless; she’d been happier in the rockier soil downtown. Now that her various personal pursuits—and the larger pursuit of the right pursuit—had lapsed, much of her time not occupied with Board matters was lavished on one kid or the other. It wasn’t that Keith was jealous, exactly, but the way all their conversations became about the kids worried him. Then again, he could hardly ask her about it, because it was just as likely his fault. He’d long since lost track of who’d started hiding first.

He began avoiding home, staying late at the office after everyone had left or going to the Y to swim laps until his eyes were bleary with chlorine, or jogging down along the FDR as shadows stretched over the city, devouring the blown-out tires and heavy shopping bags and encrustations of guano that lined the pedestrian path until it was just auto fumes blasting into and out of his lungs and ghostly horns and the disembodied taillights moving at a sluggish jogger’s pace along the drive.