Through the Heart (13 page)

“Don’t be silly,” she said.

I am not used to people accusing me of being silly. I didn’t like it.

Then she looked over, saw what I saw, and her face changed.

“Is there something I should know about?” I asked.

“No. Nothing.”

I also don’t like it when people lie to me.

“The wife doesn’t think it’s nothing.”

“I’m sure it has nothing to do with me,” she said.

I looked at her, trying to figure out how deep the lie went. Had I been wrong about everything? I didn’t think so. I wasn’t given to romanticizing about women, and I had known a lot of them.

I considered for a moment, then I just asked her, “Is this false modesty? Or is this real? I have to admit I can’t tell.”

“It’s not modesty, false or otherwise. It’s reality,” she said.

Then the guy who had been sitting there glaring at me charged over and demanded to know what she was doing. She answered him calmly. She said, “Dan, I’m having dinner. Do you mind?” He seemed to take the question literally. “Yes, I do mind. Do you even know who this guy is?”

I could feel the possessiveness radiating off him in waves. But from the way she was talking to him, I could see that she didn’t feel the same. He hung on stubbornly for a little while, and finally he gave up and left. And then I accused her of lying to me. And when she told me she hadn’t, I pretended not to believe her.

But that wasn’t the truth.

The truth is, I got scared. Not easy to admit, but there it is. I didn’t think she was lying. I wasn’t an idiot; I knew she hadn’t just been born. She had a past. Okay, so it wasn’t all the time that the past charged your table on your first date, but I thought she handled it better than I could have imagined. And her composure just scared me more. I suddenly had the sense that this girl I found in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, was the real thing.

And I realized I wanted nothing to do with it. You can’t play with something like that. It’s like playing hopscotch near the third rail. And once I touched that rail, nothing would be the same. In the moment I realized that, I was gone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a part of me—okay, all of me—waiting the next morning at work. I was waiting for him to walk in again. He’d done it once. Why not again?

Well, I don’t know why not, but he didn’t. Instead Tammy stormed in at around eleven.

I was behind the counter, and Neil was sitting at one of the tables with his laptop, doing the ordering.

“Hey, Tammy,” Neil said when Tammy burst through the door.

Tammy ignored him and marched up to the counter, glaring at me the whole way.

“I thought we were friends,” she said furiously.

I blinked. “Yeah, well, I didn’t want to tell you, but I’ve actually just been pretending for the last twenty years or so.”

“You suck,” Tammy said, trying desperately to hold on to her anger and not quite managing it.

I knew she must have heard something about my date. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I said.

“I had to hear it from Jeanette down at the Box last night.”

Tammy was a bartender at a local bar, the Box, during the week and at a strip club, prosaically named Pussy’s, on weekends.

Tammy went on, “What was even worse is that Jeanette assumed I knew all about it. I had to pretend I knew what she was talking about. Thankfully, I think she was drunk enough that I might have pulled it off, but talk about embarrassing.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “It was very wrong of me.” I made my best effort at exaggerated remorse.

“Shut up. Just shut up.” She scowled at me. Then she said, “Is it true you stole Jeanette’s fiancé right from under her nose? Some guy named Timothy, from out of town?”

I burst out laughing.

“Okay, I guess that’s a no.” Tammy leveled a finger at me. “But you are going to tell me everything later. Come by after work.”

That meant I was going to have to talk about it, and I didn’t want to. I felt like if I talked about it now, it would mean this was the end of the story. I didn’t want to think about the fact that it almost certainly was the end of the story.

But Tammy wasn’t asking, so there wasn’t a chance to say no. She spun around on her heel and marched out again.

I glanced over at Neil. He had his glasses up on his head, had stopped doing the accounts, and was staring at me.

“What?” I demanded.

“Nothing,” he said, putting his glasses back down and going back to his laptop.

The rest of the day was impossibly long. Time stretches when you’re waiting for something—especially something that doesn’t come.

I went to Tammy’s that night and told her the whole story. I had to go all the way back to Saturday night and the run-in with Dan. I also had to stop a few times for cursing breaks—Tammy’s, of course. She’s always hated Dan. And I have to say, it didn’t look like she was shaping up to like Timothy much either.

“Just give him a chance,” I pleaded.

She gave me a look, and I caught myself. “I mean, if he comes back,” I added quickly.

“Nora, I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

I don’t know what my face looked like, but it must have showed something of what my stomach did when she said that because she shook her head and said, “Oh, baby. Take my advice. Get off that train, and now.”

“Did you see something?” I asked her. “Do you know he won’t be coming back?”

“You know I only see things when I’m holding your hand.”

So I made her do it, but she couldn’t see anything.

I left feeling worse than before I arrived. Sometimes talking doesn’t help. You just get caught in the loop of wondering and worrying and wanting.

It wasn’t better when I got home. My mother still wasn’t talking to me, but that was almost a relief. It was too early to even try to get her to forgive me, so I just went up to my room and spent the rest of the night there, in the narrow twin bed that had been mine since I was a child. It was more like a hammock, with the sag in the middle of the mattress. I should probably have bought another, but I never wanted to think about how long I might be there. At some point I heard my mother come up to bed, and I don’t know how long it was after that, but eventually I fell asleep.

I got up the next morning. I worked. I waited. I wondered.

What was he doing? And, more importantly, was he thinking of me?

 

 

 

 

 

 

I left, and I didn’t think about her.

My ability to do that was almost frightening. I just got busy and got on with life. I met with Warren. I flew back to New York. Then my mother called in a panic because while I was away the market had been cresting and troughing like a ship in a hurricane, and she was worried I hadn’t been playing close enough attention.

I hadn’t been paying attention at all.

But it turned out that was the best thing I could have done. The market has its own intelligence. I trusted that. Other people choose to trust family and institutions like marriage and church. Those things I don’t trust at all—but the market I trust, not necessarily to go up and up and up without ever a down: that doesn’t make sense. No, I trust it to find its own equilibrium, despite the idiocy of many of the people who trade it.

I was back in the office by Wednesday afternoon, and I spent the whole afternoon on the phone. In case you were wondering what people do on Wall Street, most of them just talk. They spend twelve hours a day on the phone, talking. They are paid spectacular salaries to gossip. Other people crunch the numbers—the researchers, the quant guys—but the ones who do the things that might be recognizable as work aren’t the ones who get paid.

I have to admit that I loved the drama of the so-called economic crisis. Every day brought some new development. The jobless data, the housing foreclosures, the details of the bailout—they were like snapshots of a situation that was still developing. And from those snapshots everyone was trying to predict the future. There were all sorts of doomsday predictions, like the whole globe going into a recession, or another Great Depression, or that the financial system was on the verge of collapse.

But it turned out that our portfolio was positioned just right, and we made back almost all we had lost. When I thought the gains were almost maxed out, I changed tactics and took a more conservative stance. The wild swings were far from over, and though there was money to be made in this market, there was as much, or more, to be lost. And if you looked at it like gambling (which it was), then I wanted to be the casino. Casinos very carefully fix the odds so they win at least 51 percent of the time. That 1 percent is small, but the amount of money that flows through adds up to millions in profit. That’s the position I wanted. I didn’t want to be the reckless gambler who is in for a quick, easy fortune and ends up losing everything.

All in, it was a very good week. It’s a sad truth that the taste of success is much sweeter when you know that so many around you are sitting down to a very bitter meal of failure.

I told myself that my road trip into Kansas had really been about getting away from work—about giving the portfolio the space to work rather than following the hourly fluctuations too closely and ruining the strategy I’d crafted. Beyond that, there was nothing to it. It was just a jaunt where I’d met a pretty girl who I’d made up a whole story about. I told myself that the wide-open spaces of the West must have gotten to my brain, and I slipped quickly back into my old routines.

Friday came around, and I went to meet my trader and best friend, Marcus, at Cipriani Wall Street, just like I did every Friday. It was a ridiculous place to go and have beer. A Budweiser cost more than ten dollars when you factored in the tip. But that was sort of the point.

Marcus was already there when I got there. Who am I kidding? Marcus was always there first. That means he always got his beer before I did. Once I tried to get him to order me one so it would be waiting when I got there. He just laughed and said he wouldn’t want my beer to get warm. That was the closest he ever came to complaining about the way I was always late, but he wasn’t a sucker. He wasn’t about to have a beer waiting for me when I arrived. Wait, I forgot. Once he did have a beer waiting for me. I started drinking it, and it didn’t taste right. He’d gotten me an O’Doul’s—alcohol free. I didn’t ask him again.

That day I wasn’t too late, and I was able to catch the bartender just as Marcus’s beer was arriving.

“A Stella, please,” I said.

Then I turned to Marcus. He had ordered a Peroni. “Who orders Italian beer?” I demanded.

“I think you stayed too long in the Midwest,” he replied.

“That’s very geographically prejudiced of you. I think the trading floor might be rubbing off on you.”

Marcus was a trader at Goldman Sachs. I think everyone has heard the stories of the macho trading floor, the cursing, the hamburgers for breakfast, the pornographic e-mails that make the rounds of nearly every computer. Traders take pride in being incredibly politically incorrect.

Marcus was an exception. He had organic granola for breakfast every morning. He never cursed. He was the only man I’ve ever known who didn’t admit to watching porn (though I’m not sure I believed him). If it sounds like Marcus was a bit of a prig, you would be right. But he was a prig against the grain. No amount of teasing about his granola and the perfectly pressed dress pants he wore to work every day ever seemed to ruffle him. He probably got more porn in his in-box every day than the rest of the trading floor combined, from people who were trying to yank his chain. But he just deleted it without a word. I had never seen Marcus upset. Come to think of it, in some ways Marcus reminded me of me—which is probably the reason I liked him.