Outerbridge Reach (6 page)

“You're a rat, Ron.” She was playing at playing games. “Aren't you going to come and hold my hand?”

“Pamela, doll, what do you want from me?”

“I want someone to hold my hand,” she said.

No doubt she does, he thought. Her eyes were vacant. She looked mournful and lost and, indeed, vulnerable, everybody's little sister Sue. It was that time of day.

“Gimme a break,” he said to her.

B
ROWNE
spent his Sunday afternoon at the shop, reading amid the comfortable clutter of his office. He was the local brokerage division's second-senior man and its chief literary figure. Everything the office required in the way of prose composition, from advertising brochures to dunning letters, was written by Browne. He wrote the text of promotional videos and, being particularly presentable, appeared in them. He also represented the company at expositions and boat shows around the country. He was paid a higher salary than his associates in brokerage because he made much less in commissions. Nevertheless, Browne worried. Sometimes he imagined that his work would one day appear superfluous to higher management.

The book he read was a 1920s edition of
To the Source of the Oxus
by Captain John Wood, originally published in London in 1875. He got altogether lost in it.

Early the next morning, a working day, his car was first in the parking lot. The Altan offices and showroom stood in an industrial park a short distance from the Sound. In the showroom's window, a sixty-foot powerboat with burnished brightwork was on display. Browne opened the place and went to his office.

Ross, the branch manager, was due back at noon and Browne had to take over his portfolio until then. Quite early on, he found himself running interference between the owner and the prospective buyer of a fifty-foot yawl. About eleven o'clock the calls stopped. His messages were not returned. Then the owner called to lower his price by twenty thousand.

“Why?” Browne asked. “You've already come down twenty. You don't have to go lower. I'm sure they'll pay at this stage.”

“I guess you don't understand,” the man said. His voice had a strange gaiety, a note of whimsy. “Well, you don't have to understand. Just move the fucking boat, O.K.?”

Browne was offended. It was profanity as an exercise in vulgar machismo, yet another yuppie playing pirate in the salty world of big boats. It disgusted him. When he called the buyer's office, the switchboard was busy and it stayed that way right through lunchtime. At one o'clock Ross telephoned to ask if Browne would keep an appointment he had made with the buyer at City Island. Browne agreed to do so. He took some notes over the phone, pulled the necessary paper and prepared to drive down. As he was putting his jacket on, it occurred to him that something might have gone wrong in the market. Friday's comeback had been so reassuring. He had chosen not to worry about it as a matter of discipline.

He put in a call to his stockbroker. The switchboard there was busy as well. Wandering the corridor, he met Dave Jernigan, one of the younger salesmen, coming from the assembly room. Jernigan's wife was a trader; Browne had once met her. He and Anne had gone to dinner with the Jernigans, and Edie Jernigan had introduced their four-year-old son. He was a nice little boy with a lisp and a staccato giggle, and Edie had asked the Brownes helplessly, “What do you do for a kid with a terrible laugh?”

The Brownes had gone home joking about laughing lessons, laughing academies, French laughing masters. But Browne was truly horrified.

“Sums up the spirit of the age,” he had said to Anne.

“Heard anything about the market?” he asked the young man.

“Funny you should ask,” Jernigan said. He was blond and round-faced; his reaction to every stimulus was an embarrassed smile. “It's been an interesting morning.”

“Down?”

“Definitely. The tape's behind.”

“That's unusual.”

Jernigan's smile increased its dimensions. He looked pale and our of breath. Words seemed to fail him for a moment.

“Yes,” he told Browne. “It's unusual.”

At the City Island marina, Ross's customer was nowhere in sight. It was a mild, sunny winter day. A pair of soiled swans floated among the mooring buoys. He paced the deck in front of the clubhouse for an hour before giving up. Finally, he bought a hot dog from a vendor in front of the projects and drove back to the office. On the way up he listened to WQXR. The hourly news broadcast reported a drop of fifty points in the Dow, with the tapes still behind.

In the office only Jernigan remained. He was talking on the phone. When he hung up, he wandered into Browne's office. “Your wife called.”

“Any message?” Browne asked him.

Jernigan shook his head.

“Everybody's gone home. We've closed the switchboard.”

“Right,” Browne said. “The lessons of eighty-seven. Fear itself.”

When he called his broker again the line was still busy.

That evening, Browne had been commanded to attend a seminar called “All About Sales and Product Liability,” which was scheduled for six at a motel off I-95. He went straight from work to find the first lecture canceled. Browne and a bearded young man from Scotland were the only people who had appeared. The two of them went to the motel coffee shop.

The man's name was Ogilvie and he worked for Pepsico, who had brought him out for some Stateside conditioning. Young Ogilvie's face was flushed with an anger that seemed to transcend falling markets and canceled seminars.

“It's all spec-ulation,” he complained as they sat at the Formica counter drinking decaffeinated coffee. His voice broke around the word as though it were some non-Covenanting heresy. “And absolutely unproductive.”

The confusion and excitement of the day had inclined Browne to a slight pointless elation. He was amused by Ogilvie's sour Scottish oratory.

“Maybe,” he suggested to the young man, “the heroic age of the bourgeoisie is over.”

This notion further darkened the Scot's countenance.

“Socialist are you?”

“No,” Browne said, “just joking.”

Ogilvie looked at him critically.

“Right bastards they are,” he told Browne. “They don't want to work and they don't want to see you work. They despise the productive classes.”

“I couldn't agree with you more,” Browne said. “I'm a salesman after all.”

“I'm an engineer myself by training,” Ogilvie said.

Browne considered a reply but made none. He went away feeling slighted. Driving home, he found himself thinking more about his brief unsatisfactory conversation than about the terrors of the market. The heroic age of the bourgeoisie
was
over, he thought, and socialism was finished for that reason.

When he got home, his wife and daughter were watching
The Nightly Business Report.

“Anything new?” he asked them.

When Anne turned to him he saw that she was upset. She shrugged, disinclined to speak in front of Maggie.

“The market's in bad shape,” she said. “They haven't even got the figures yet.”

“Really,” Maggie added excitedly. “Everybody's stock is totally worthless.”

He laughed and then remembered that he and Maggie were formally estranged.

“You go finish your assignment,” Anne ordered her daughter. “You're getting an early train tomorrow.”

For dinner, he made himself a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. Making it reminded him of his daughter as a small girl, when she had proudly cooked such a sandwich for him from her kiddie cookbook and announced it as
croque-monsieur.
As he was eating it at the kitchen table, Anne came in and leaned against the counter.

“Maggie's on my case,” he said.

“Of course,” Anne said. “She's that age. You loom large in her life.”

“I hope she'll apologize before she goes,” he said wearily.

“She's written you a note,” Anne told him. “She hates to fight with you.”

“Our Maggie,” he said as he cleared the table, “she's larger than life.”

When the dishes were in the washer, Browne turned to see his wife tight-lipped, leaning in the same spot, twisting her wedding ring.

“You don't look happy, Annie.”

She flashed a false smile, raised her hands and let them fall to her sides.

“It's only money, right?”

“Right,” he said.

“Tomorrow we'll get the calls.”

She had been buying stock on margin through her brother for several years, profiting where others failed. Browne thought of her as clever at business. He had stopped keeping up with the numbers.

“We've learned a few things since Black Monday,” he said. “It may pass.”

After a moment she said, “I'm not going to take Maggie out of school. I'll go to my father if I have to.”

“Surely,” he said, “it won't come to that.”

“Think not?”

“The crisis passed in eighty-seven,” he said. “We'd all have done better not to panic. Wait and see.”

She went into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine.

“Are you going to say ‘I told you so'?” she asked him.

“I'm not going to say anything,” Browne said. “Not a word.”

“Dad's going to say it.”

“Let him say what he likes. Tell him it was my idea. He can't think any worse of me than he does already.”

“He doesn't think all that badly of you. He said you were a good provider.”

“Frankly, Annie, I don't give a shit what he said.”

Anne's face was flushed with the wine. She leaned in the kitchen doorway with her forehead against the jamb. He went over and put a hand against her cheek, bidding her to look at him. She turned to face him and closed her eyes.

“I'm so ashamed,” she said. “I feel so stupid.”

“We agreed, didn't we? That it was only money?”

Browne was surprised at his own indifference. For some reason he could not bring to bear the emotions appropriate to disappointed speculation.

“We may lose,” she said, “in a somewhat major way. We're going to have to hustle to pay it back. We're going to have to borrow and we're going to have to cut down.”

“Let's tote it up in the morning,” he said. “I've had enough of today.”

“Never again,” Anne said. “I swear.”

“Forget it, Anne. It's over with. We'll proceed from here.”

He went into the kitchen to get the wine. He refilled her glass and poured a small measure for himself. Ordinarily, he never drank alcohol. He touched her glass with his own.

“
Slainte
, Annie Aroon. Don't feel bad.”

As he drank, she burst into tears. He touched her on the shoulder. Then it occurred to him that she might want to be alone. He put the glass down and went out of the dining room.

On the night table in their bedroom, he found a comic friendship card of the sort available from stationers, together with a smile button and a red rose. The face of the card showed a cartoon drawing of two cute anthropomorphic little animals driving a jalopy toward the sunset. “Friends to the End” said the motto inside. Maggie had signed it, “With love and apologies to Dad.”

A shade impersonal, he thought, but it was as far as she could go. He went to her room and knocked on the door. A Megadeth tape was in the machine and he heard her turn it off.

“Hardly anybody sends me flowers anymore,” he told Maggie when she opened the door.

She came out to him blushing, avoiding his eye, a wise guy no more.

“So we're friends again, are we?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. Teasing a little, he pursued eye contact. She kept looking away, at the point of tears. When he hugged her, she tensed into a statue of iron. King Midas's daughter, he thought, ungilded.

“When you're back next month,” he told her, “we'll have a trip. Would that be good?”

She nodded, all confusion.

“Anyway,” he said, “I'll see you in the morning.”

In the master bedroom he watched television for a while, a documentary on public television about Cuba. In the film, Cuba's idea of itself seemed very appealing. The ideal Cuba was a place in which the ape of ego was not worshiped. People could live their lives on behalf of something more than just themselves. The ideal Cuba seemed to honor poverty and obedience with all the fervor of a Catholic boarding school.

He was still watching it when Anne came upstairs.

“Aren't things bad enough?” she asked him. “Do I have to look at Castro on top of it?”

“I'm considering life in Cuba, Annie. If our losses are too severe. Of course you wouldn't be able to play the market.”

“It's not funny,” she told him. “I was trying to help out. So I fucked it up. Please don't make fun of me.”

“Sorry,” Browne said. “I've been dealing with customers all day. I'm in a disorderly state.”

He pressed the remote button and turned off the set. She sat down on the side of the bed, looking at herself in the mirror.

“What do they say? The customers.”

He smiled without good humor.

“My customers are luxury consumers. They could use a little grace under pressure.”

“Boy, me too,” Anne said.

“Did I tell you that Buzz Ward was retiring?”

“No.”

“He is. He's going to become a preacher in his old age.”

“He'll be good at it,” she said. “He'll look wonderful.”

Again, Browne was unable to sleep and passed the early morning hours sitting up beside his sleeping wife. He thought it might have been the wine.
To the Source of the Oxus
lay open on his lap but his thoughts, for some reason, stayed on the Cuban documentary. A car went slowly by outside, cruising. With it came the sound of a rap tape played at full volume as though one of its windows were open.