City on Fire (38 page)

When he finally reached the big new apartment, his dinner would be in foil on the dining room table. Will might still be on the rug on his stomach in that adorably defenseless way of his, with his homework all around him. But Cate would be in her room asleep, or busy with the hamsters Regan had bought her. And Regan would be curled up in their bedroom reading plays in what he’d come to think of as her chastity sweatpants—formless cotton things. Even they couldn’t disguise that she’d lost weight, more than was probably healthy. Sometimes he had the dim intuition that he was supposed to ask her about this, but what if she told him it was nothing, and left him there extended over the abyss by himself? Or conversely: What if she told him something he didn’t want to hear? And asked him, in return, why he was avoiding the apartment? How could he make her see that it wasn’t that he didn’t love this; that in fact he loved it too much to contaminate it with the infection that was, apparently, him? Instead, he would pour his drink and put on his Scottish bagpipes LP and stand by the window, looking out over the city. He was in his own transparent hamster ball, he thought, rolling around, unable to make contact.

THE DAY THE WORD “DEFAULT” first began to percolate through the papers—the day people started to wonder if there was even any bottom to hit—he saw nothing for it but to call in sick. He took Will to the Park after school, to practice with the lacrosse stick. When Keith was a kid, “sports” had meant football, baseball, and basketball, but weren’t they paying tuition precisely so the kid could have choices? Well, that and because the public schools frightened even Keith. Besides, he had to admit he liked the resinous warmth of the wood on his palms, the ultraquick rip of the pocket through the air when he sent the little ball streaking deep over the Great Lawn—his old friend leverage, again. Will, though, as regards hand-eye coordination, was a Hamilton-Sweeney through and through. Clambering back across the green, his awkwardly long shinbones kicking up high in front of him, his shirt billowing like a sail, he resembled for a second his namesake, Regan’s vanished brother, who, Keith dimly remembered, had also played lacrosse for a semester or two. It was so striking that he almost didn’t notice the glum blankness on Will’s face when he returned.

He stood behind the boy, adjusted his grip on the stick, trying to reverse-engineer the mechanics of the trapping move he himself had mastered. (Why hadn’t he just stuck to what he was good at?) “No, like this.” The relative positions of their bodies recalled some other day, years ago, when he’d taught Will how to fly a kite, or throw a Frisbee or something, he couldn’t quite remember anymore, his senses were too full of his current son, ten years old, his hair level with Keith’s chest. When had it stopped being whitish-blond? And when had his pliant body, which once would have done almost anything to be close to his dad, grown so stiff, as though there was something unmanly about their hands meeting on a lacrosse stick? “Okay, okay, I’ve got it,” Will said, and backpedaled away. Other grown-ups and other kids floated behind him, little colored no-see-ums against the grass. “Fire it in here, Dad. No weak stuff.” Keith, who for unexamined reasons had to win any competition he found himself in, wound up and threw the ball as hard as he could. It shot past Will’s shoulder and into the field beyond, and Will cursed as he turned to chase it, as if his father, who’d never heard him use the f-word, weren’t standing right there. Keith thought again of the rumors that had been flying around Wall Street all morning. One held that New York munis were trading at half off. Another, which he was afraid to check out, was that no one was buying these pigs at all. But later, Keith would decide that this was the moment he had really given up—the moment when he’d become invisible even to his son.

HE DID PLAN TO OPEN UP TO REGAN about his mistakes—at this point, he’d begun borrowing from Will’s trust fund just to cover family expenses—but on the night they sat down together over lo mein after the kids were in bed, they talked mostly of her need for a change. She’d found herself wondering lately, she said, whether her brother hadn’t been right to get out of New York altogether, all those years ago. She’d believed in the promises of the ’60s, after all, even if she’d participated only indirectly. Hadn’t they told themselves they would not be like the generation of their parents, trapped in choices they’d made at twenty?

There were still worlds within Regan not confined to wifehood, to motherhood, he saw. But even as these glimpses thrilled him, they pained him, too, by reminding him of all he’d forgotten … and for what? He could barely remember. On his finger was a ring he’d worn now for fourteen years, nicked and scratched and lovely white gold, and when had he last really noticed it? It was as if, Keith thought, he had acquired his own Demon Brother: the depresh, the megrims, the black dog that followed you wherever you went. It was as if every American now had his own dark twin, the possibility of life lived some other way, staring back at him from store windows and medicine chests. Had his parents had this? His grandparents? He realized it was Regan staring at him.

“What?”

“If something’s on your mind, honey, you can tell me.”

But how could he tell her? How did you find your way back to the mirror, and the proper life that lay on the far side of the glass?

DEUS EX MACHINA, was how. He had signed up for a three-day conference of financiers on The Future of the City, hoping to glean some way out of the disaster he’d gotten himself into. It was false advertising; for the word “Future,” they should have substituted “Crisis,” because that was all anyone would talk about. Oil crises and demand crises, crises in confidence. Some believed that, in the age of floating currency, confidence was the only thing keeping the system from collapse. And these were the optimists! The people who, like Keith, held on to old-fashioned ideas about value as something empirically ascertainable—they tended to think everything was really fucked.

On Friday morning, having learned next to nothing, Keith stepped out of a session to get some air. The lobby was empty, and the sound of his wingtips on the polished marble struck him as somber, though perhaps this was the accumulated gloom of yet another presentation. The American city is over, the presenter had been arguing, as slides of post-riot Detroit or Pittsburgh flickered on a screen behind him. There won’t be ground broken on another major development in New York for twenty years. This very New York into which Keith was pushing—it still seemed to him impossible that it should fail. Speaking of impossible: Who should be sitting on a traffic bollard there, in a bespoke suit, but Amory Gould?

Not wanting to be rude, Keith went over to say hello. In lieu of a greeting, Amory held out a pack of cigarettes. He could have afforded Dunhills or Nat Shermans, Keith thought, but the ones on offer looked cheap, with a Spanish name: Exigente. For etiquette’s sake, he accepted. The first drag made his head swim; he hadn’t touched tobacco since the sulky week or two that had followed his football injury in college. “Thanks,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you here among the gloom-and-doomers.”

“Oh, I never miss a chance to see people trapped in a category error.”

Keith looked up. With his white hair, Amory had once seemed so much his senior as to hail from a different century, but now they could have been contemporaries. Indeed, of the two of them, Amory was probably the more vital. “You think they’re wrong in there?”

“What I think is that liquidity and vision, my boy, can still do great things. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.”

“You must know something I don’t.”

“Supposing I did. Would sharing it be to my advantage? Wouldn’t you do better to assume I was obfuscating?” Amory narrowed his eyes against the drift of his own cigarette. Keith had never realized he smoked; he did so like a man in a hurry, or one who had grown up in an extremely cold climate. As in fact, Keith remembered, he had. “I always liked you, you know, Keith.”

“I guess I do. I guess I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to imply that. No, what you’ve got you grabbed for yourself, and for that I salute you. But it doesn’t alter the fact that I’ve always felt you and I could do great things together, given world enough and time.”

Keith, a little flummoxed, suggested that Amory seemed to be getting along just fine without him. Weren’t new markets still falling open across the globe for the Hamilton-Sweeneys? Hadn’t last quarter’s year-over-year earnings, miraculously, almost doubled?

“You haven’t taken my meaning exactly. I mean I’ve taken a liking to you, Keith, you’re practically my nephew. And those I like I take an interest in. And those I take an interest in I have ways of looking out for. And now once again you need some looking out for, don’t you? Yes, there’s something you need your Uncle Amory’s help with.”

The tone struck Keith as off, but he was now beyond the place where he might have showed it. At that moment, he thought he understood why Regan didn’t like Amory. “Now how would you find out a thing like that?”

“You assume I’d need to go looking. But your face has always been an open book.”

Armies of pigeons, rustling, plummeted down a building face across the street. Then, just when it seemed they were about to hit the pavement, they surged back upward to roost again in high windows. They repeated their performance several times, rendering it inexplicable. Why these windows? Why leave them? It was as if the birds were caught in the repetition of some primal trauma, stuck between what they had and what they wanted. There was no point trying to hide things from Amory. Keith found himself explaining about the bonds on his books, now far below junk, the losses that were about to become insolvency. The nicotine must have gone to his head. Still, it was a relief just to tell someone. Even this someone. “I’ve turned out to be quite a disappointment.”

“Not at all.” Amory lit another cigarette. Reflected. “Let me tell you something, Keith. When I was a younger man, people dressed up to go on airplanes. The seats on the subway were made of wicker, and a gentleman always yielded his seat to a lady. Everything had place and proportion, and a man like you … well, you would have simply thrived. Now things are different, naturally. It is harder to find people you can trust. But what once was true remains so. There is still money lying all over the streets.” His voice sounded as if it were coming from much farther away than it really was, crossing tundras and seas, rather than merely the square of sidewalk between them, on which Keith, when he looked down, half-expected to see loose currency. “Not everyone is bold enough to collect it. People are waiting for someone else to go bring down the buffalo, are you following me? Now I’ve watched you from afar all these years, you’ve been a comer. You have earned. There is a vulgar term for this, I remember. You have shown yourself, Keith, to be capable. It is a fact of this world that a capable earner can fall on hard times. But then who will feed the tribe? Where will that leave them? We can’t let that happen—not for our own sake, but for theirs.” He paused. Leaned forward. “Eighty-nine cents on the dollar. Would that be enough? Because that’s what your father-in-law would be prepared to offer.”

Keith, stunned, found it hard—or harder—to calculate. With that kind of money, he would be able to pay back the bank and get his clients back to neutral, though he’d still be somewhat in the red personally, after patching the holes in the kids’ trust funds.

“You’d take a commission, of course,” Amory continued. “Let’s call it thirty-five.”

“Thirty-five thousand?”

“Everything aboveboard. Which doesn’t mean we couldn’t keep this to ourselves.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say nothing. Go forth and sin no more.”

“Jesus,” he said. “Thank you. You have no idea what a favor you’re doing me.” And took Amory’s hand in his own, before Amory could take back these too-generous terms.

“We are no longer in the world of favors, Keith. Think of it as a trade.”

“Then what do I owe you?”

Amory tamped out his cigarette decorously on the bottom of his shoe and then smiled a placid smile. “Oh, I’ll be sure to let you know, when the time comes.”

THE HOLE PLUGGED, his balance sheet rebalanced, and summer stretching out before him like a shoreline, Keith should have felt like a new man. He wanted to reach home on time, or even a little early, to take them all out for pizza to celebrate. But when he did reach home, he found a note saying they were already out for pizza. And even if they hadn’t been, what if they should ask, Why this munificence all of a sudden? It was then that Keith understood that his mistake wouldn’t be escaped so easily—that he was living in a post-mistake world. The parasite may have gone, but it had left him hollowed out, a man apart.

Though maybe that was just the knowledge that the Demon Brother was not through with him. For long after the sale had been executed, transferring the bonds from his accounts to Regan’s father’s—after Felix Rohatyn had stepped in and arranged for the rescue of the city budget, netting the Hamilton-Sweeney Company a neat $900,000 on a strategy that had been Keith’s; after Regan had taken a job of her own (albeit at her family’s company)—Amory would reach him at the office. His voice, normally so distant-sounding, receded even further, as if the connection was bad. He had an errand, he said, that he wondered if Keith might run?

IN GENERAL, IT WENT LIKE THIS: On a Thursday or Friday, late in the day but not yet at close of business, Keith would pick up his briefcase. Inside would be a manila envelope, which would have arrived by courier in a larger envelope in the morning. Making some excuse for leaving early, he’d pass Veronica and the secretarial pool and board the elevator to the street below. His destination was a derelict townhouse east of the Bowery, the kind of place that sent a little bit of itself with you whenever you left it, in the form of dust on your shoes, on your cuffs, fine gray film on the pads of your fingers where you had rung the dusty buzzer. Keith never rang the buzzer, though; Amory had said nothing about hand delivery. Easier, instead, to use the mailslot.