Dear Money (28 page)

"Ooooooh!" The tables shake and the silverware clatters. More people gather around, attracted by the ruckus. "No way," I say. "I'm out. No bid. Sold to you." But it's no use.

By the time I get to work the next day, there are already a few thousand dollars riding on the bet. There's an enthusiasm to see me that I've not experienced before at B&B. It makes me hungry, makes me want to take on the challenge, makes me game, brings out the scrappy side of me I'd forgotten I'd had, lost somewhere back in high school. "Put your money on me, I'm your man," I say. All afternoon I watch these kids, looking over at me, joshing with Scarpetti, who then pops her head into my row: "You know, fuck these guys, right? Talk about a bunch of cases of arrested development, right? So listen. Just ignore them. They're so ADD, most of them have forgotten about it already."

"You're wrong there, June."

All afternoon I watched these kids. In a different decade they would have become doctors, lawyers, history professors, journalists. I felt an affinity with them. I was no different, just late. I spent the afternoon telling everyone "I'm the man."

On the big day, I take the morning off to prepare. I tell them I'm going to be late for work, a doctor's appointment. (I never use the kids as an excuse.) No problem. They let me. The night before, I eat pasta for dinner, run six miles in the morning, make myself strong and hungry. I go to the office around noon and am met by Scarpetti, who tells me she's taken the morning off too. She's wearing sweat pants and jacket and looks real comfy. I hadn't thought of that. I'm in a suit.

"Ready?" she asks, her blue eyes confident, noting my suit. In the exercise clothes, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looks impossibly young. I smile. "Set," I say. "Been exercising?" she asks. She's moving from foot to foot like a tennis player getting ready to receive a serve. "In fact" is all I say.

There's lots of commotion. We're both led to a conference room. I think of the Australian flanker, exiled to Dallas because he didn't like the onions. The hamburgers start to arrive, all neatly wrapped like little presents, oozing with onions and pickles. A bottle of ketchup stands before me and Scarpetti. We're seated at a huge oval table facing each other, each with her own stack of hamburgers. Scarpetti is dwarfed by the chair—tiny pert young Man-Eater. Everyone stands around the table, thirty or forty people, mostly male, squeezing themselves into the room, spilling out the doorway. Only one thing matters now, and that's the hamburgers. Snake takes off his watch and places it in the center of the table, identifying himself as the official timekeeper. I shut him out, set my focus on the stack of burgers. "Ready, set"—Snake speaks with a loud, authoritative voice, one that could be commanding a much more deserving event—"go!"

And we're off. The first few are surprisingly delicious. I'm eating one while unwrapping the next, like a teenage date fumbling for a bra strap. I keep count, keep on task. Scarpetti is somewhere in the middle distance, her cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie's, stuffed with masticated burger meat. My kids flash across my mind. What would they think of their mother? I shut them out. Five, six, seven, eight. The count rises, and I realize I've fallen behind the Man-Eater. The score is constantly being announced. I slug a big burger bolus down my throat and try to play catch-up. Nine, ten, eleven. The spectators carry the latest updates to those at their desks. There's clapping. Ketchup is dripping down my chin, down my suit. I keep squirting it on the burgers to lubricate their journey. I could almost tear off the suit. Who gives a shit? This is primal. The burger primeval. Man-Eater is a punk. I've given birth. I know what a body is capable of, and this little shit from Canarsie with her fancy wardrobe is going to have her burger-swallowing butt stomped.

Now I've eased up alongside Scarpetti in the burger count, and everyone cheers. They love a good race. Win announces the progress over the hoot and holler (the loudspeaker) so that people in the outer regions are updated. Somewhere Radalpieno is smiling. Miss Lane is ringing the bell. I keep stuffing the hamburgers in, giving the boys a good show. The wrappers pile up, the burgers fly. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. The entire audience watches as I masticate more. Little June Scarpetti just stuffing her mouth. This is what they want, she seems to say. Okay, then. Her pert little ponytail flopping as she crams it all in.

I must shut her out. But I can't. I watch her, fast, formidable, efficient. She's a different breed. She's surrounded by people her age, raised to be all right with this, to look beyond this. People are chanting my name. "India, India." Lumps in my throat, I force the hamburgers down. Hearing my name drives me forward. Okay. I understand now. This is how much I want this. You all get to watch the spectacle, standing there in your pressed trousers as I stuff my mouth. Okay. I understand. Food spilling, mustard on chin, bun stuck to lips.

Then silence as, softly, melodically, Beethoven's
Für Elise
comes from Snake's 18-karat white-gold Patek Philippe watch. "How many for New Chick?" By hour's end I've eaten twenty-one. Man-Eater has eaten only nineteen. The cheer is like a rifle shot in the small conference room. I have won. "Booya, Little Miss Hamburger!" someone shouts. "Fuckin' deadly," someone else says.

Silence again, and suddenly I realize that there is no way around what I'm about to do. I feel it coming on and decide to use it, that there is only one way to punctuate this moment in a manner that is appropriate, that encapsulates it, that encompasses it, surrounds it and triumphs over it on its own terms. No way but through, the Buddha says. And so I stand up as Win enters the room, and I open my mouth as if to speak, but it's not quite a speech I give, though it is, in its own way. Out of my mouth comes an extended belch as I've heard it done a few times on the trading floor after closing, a long, virtuosic and obviously enjoyable low-down eructation, rising in a crescendo like a foulmouthed aria and tied up at the end in a crisp little flourish, eyes closed, finger pointing to the ceiling like Celine Dion hitting a high note, as if to say, You boys don't know who you're dealing with here, do you?

The second roar of approval is different from the first. It is a firm, unguarded and deal-sealing round that rolls through the room and spills out into the office in high-fives and hand slaps and shoulder bounces, with me somewhere in their happy and satisfied midst. I have surprised and bested them (this is one for the history books, epic B&B), and what they love above all else is to be bested in this way. I have outgrossed them all. I am welcome. I am one of them.

I can go home and tell the kids and Theodor I had a good day at work, but there is no way to tell them exactly what I have tried—and failed—to tell you just now. And the fact that I cannot tell you, that nobody can tell you—that you had to be there—is the very purpose of all such ceremony. There is no word for it in this world. You know it when you feel it. You can only point to it, in all its riotous excess, and hope someone understands. There it was, and I was now welcomed into it, and had earned something beyond reckoning. Even with all those hamburgers in my belly, I felt light. I was walking on clouds. Snake looked at me and beamed. "Congratulations," he said. "Your first big win on the Street."

Then, so no one else could hear, June Scarpetti whispered, "That—the belch—a nice touch. This, I hate to say, could make your career."

B
UT LET'S GO BACK
to the beginning, the day I told Theodor. I'd still wanted to keep the secret, worried that I'd betrayed the code of the artist to stay broke (to roam the earth untethered, unsponsored, free), that I'd become a sellout like so many other of my artist friends, their dreams put on hold, "temporarily" at first, just until they caught up, paid off some debt, got things "squared away" by wandering off into commercial real estate, for instance. Time passed and you saw them at lunch, say, and they seemed to talk more about commercial real estate than you ever thought possible, or more about their children than you remembered, or about where they spent their last vacation. They'd punched the ticket by which one life gets jettisoned to make room for another, perhaps more adult, life. So the shackles fell, light as page-flutter.

And in all the excitement of
la vita nuova,
with its seductive strangeness, I too seemed to have shed the old life. But for me there was no buyer's remorse. I'd somehow jumped the track from the hard-pressed life of the artist to its opposite number, the blessed class amassing wealth, and I discovered that everything I'd ever thought about the world of finance was of a fantastically low order of caricature. The new life was wilder, more potent and more bizarre than anything I could have imagined. I found nothing wanting. As the
über-boys
in my department put it, I was good with that.

At least until the time approached, as it would, when I had to tell Theodor the truth. It would be like telling him I was having an affair. That I was leaving him for another man. Another man who made lots of money. And though I was not having an affair, and I loved him more than anything—and he would know this—he'd look at me and what I'd become and say the truth, which happened to be the worst thing anyone could say to someone who had built her life around the written word, which was that I'd become a living, breathing cliché. And he was very much
not
good with that. So I thought about telling Theodor a partial truth, that I'd taken Win up on the offer because I'd decided it might make a good short story, a novel even. The thought of lying, though, had made the guilt multiply, and now it seemed easier to say nothing, to find ways to justify myself, which I did by believing I was only trying this on, that I could always turn back, that it would be better to know for myself if this was what I really wanted before confessing to Theodor. Mostly, I simply tried not to think about it.

The day started at 5
A.M.
with a jog in Riverside Park. Very cold. A thick layer of ice blanketed the Hudson, chopped and cracked into brilliant fissures and floes, the new sun casting sharp light into a quiet hour in which, as a lone runner approached from the other direction, it was hard not to at least nod in recognition of the brief, chummy solidarity of witnessing the world as it was just then—forever lost to all those who had yet to press the snooze button on their alarms.

My running partner, Isabella Power, was another mother from the girls' school, a stay-at-home mom with four children who claimed her only free time was early in the morning. My Ruby was in the same class with her second child. Isabella had once seen me in jogging shorts at the school and had been pursuing me as a running partner ever since. You couldn't run in Riverside Park without a partner at this time of day, even though, with the city's resurgence, crime was down and the parks were cleaned up. When we'd first moved into the neighborhood, the park's paths were strewn with syringes and used condoms and crack vials, but that was long before Isabella's time. She was one of the younger mothers, just turned thirty-two; she'd had her first child when she was twenty-five. Her newest was five months old, at home, asleep, with the live-in nanny awaiting his wake-up cry. Isabella had heard the stories of what the neighborhood was like, and she wouldn't set foot in the park without a chaperone, so when I started running again as part of my training for the new life, I took her up on her long-standing offer.

I loved the city at this hour, hearing only the sounds of our feet thumping the pavement, our breath a cloud of vapor, the world still dark in the west, the in-between of the light. There was nothing finer than this moment, but it all seemed lost to Isabella, who loved to chat. She'd just bought a mansion on Riverside Drive, a former school that had wanted to take advantage of the soaring real estate values and the wealthiest New Yorkers' need for more square footage. When she didn't talk about The House, she talked about The School or The Money they'd donated, or she complained about The Tuition—having four children, sending three of them to private schools in New York, was a unique way of driving a point home, it seemed. As were the dinner parties and fundraisers and art openings, the attendant guest lists—a Who's Who of The School's society. It was all here, the ease with which the moneyed class ascended to an unstated yet higher empyrean of parental citizenship. Other mothers regarded Isabella deferentially, made playdates for their children, their laughter echoing across the city's playgrounds. Isabella's husband, a banker, was not the lingering type at school or anywhere else. He shook hands and generally made quick work of the rituals involving the children—the morning drop-off, attendance at various performances—nodding to fellow dads as if addressing a phalanx of junior officers.

This morning, on our jog together, Isabella was carrying on about an enormous gilded mirror surrounded by crystal that was being delivered in the afternoon. The crate wouldn't fit through the front door. "Can you believe that?" she said, affronted. "They're going to have to uncrate it on the street. It's going to take three big men, and the mirror simply can't touch the ground. The crystal is antique Baccarat, mouth-blown. It cannot touch the ground."

I enjoyed listening to these concerns; they were peaceful in a way, guileless. There was nothing sad or woeful about what preoccupied her. It was like flipping through a decorating magazine—safe and filled with the stories of all the small complications one needed to attend to in the world of home interiors. The other day she told me about a pair of oil portraits that an East Side friend of hers had had commissioned—a portrait of herself and her husband in evening attire to hang in their library, Isabella's friend in a black dress with a plunging neckline. "Very
Madame X,
" she'd whispered, not daring to say it out loud even though we were running. The portraitist was the renowned Sasha McDermott, grandson of a well-known Scottish cubist I'd never heard of but assumed I should have. "McDermott has paintings in all the major museums around the world." Indeed, his services had been auctioned off that November evening at the Met, I recalled. "Husband-wife portraits are the rage."