Ghosts of Manhattan (13 page)

He's about my height, which seems too tall for an actor, with a thick beard that can't be completely shaved away and seems to stain his skin dark. His features are broad and friendly with strong bones but nothing too angular.

“I know you don't work too hard, so you've either been drinking too hard or it's something with Julia.”

“I've been drinking too hard and it's something with Julia, both.”

“I guess that would follow.”

I make an uh-huh noise and the girl is still watching us.

“I thought by now you two would have settled into a routine that you've both accepted and made work.”

“I think she's been accepting a routine for a while now and is reaching her limit.”

“How bad?”

“I don't know, but we're getting older, and the routine has to change somehow. It isn't just her. I want it too.”

“What does she want?”

“For me to quit my job, maybe leave New York. Things I can't really even put on the table.”

He nods. I notice the girl again but I don't think Matt has. He's a better listener than I am.

“Anyway, the trouble is once you make your mind up that a thing makes you unhappy, you can't stop thinking about it. So now I sit at work obsessing about what a load of crap it is. I just try to get through it and take it day to day.” Day to day like a soldier deployed to war, I want to say, but I don't want to sound like an ass.

Now I'm self-conscious about looking at the girl, so I drink my beer and order another round for us.

I ask Matt about his career and he tells me about some auditions for Broadway productions and a pilot he did in L.A. that he hopes gets picked up and some actresses in their twenties that he's dated or slept with. He tells it in a way that shows he's happy with it. He's not trying to convince himself that it's more than it is, nor does he dress it up in a way that is trying to prove something to me. He has a quality that is selfish and uncompromising but is not about harming anyone.

I think about mentioning Oliver Bennett or that I met Rebecca
James but decide not to. He doesn't know them and they shouldn't matter to me.

The conversation comes back around to my work because my misery is like a third person sitting with us whom we've been ignoring and whom we can't ignore any longer.

“What specifically is it about your job that's so bad?” Matt blurts this out without any connection to the conversation, which shows it has still been on his mind the whole time.

I think for a moment, trying to identify the one main thing at the heart of it. The word comes to me and I hate it and so I know that it's right. “The hypocrisy.”

Matt seems not to want to press until he knows what I mean. He's listening.

“The difference between what people think about a person like me and what a person like me is really like is bigger than in any other job. People think I have a sharp mind for economics, and the reality is that I'm a sales guy who doesn't know much about economics and I don't really even read financial statements. People think we make a pretty good wage, and the reality is we have twenty-eight-year-old traders making so much they have running jokes about chump CEOs slaving away for one-fifth the salary we make. People think we're sharp-dressed bankers working long hours, and the reality is we're eight to five and the rest of the time the suit is draped over the back of some ratty chair while we get an X-rated massage.” I'm reveling in self-loathing, which I also find repulsive.

“Sounds like a dream come true. You don't have to know anything, you get paid enormous money, and you get to screw off most of the time.”

“Exactly. You can't blame anyone for doing it. When we have young kids out of college start up in trading, they're shocked. For
the first few years they can't believe they get to do this for money. The trouble starts later when that's how you live your life and you're not shocked anymore.”

“God, you're miserable, Nick. No wonder Julia's sick of your job.”

“I know. I'm spiraling down, and I'm taking her with me. I was one of those kids, and she was duped more than anyone because she couldn't understand the hypocrisy until long after I did.”

“Do you want it to work with Julia? Is that important to you?”

“Of course.”

“Then get out. Of the job. You obviously hate it. Make a commitment to something else. You must have some money saved up after these years.”

With every January bonus I calculate how far we could stretch our savings. “We have some. We've had some lifestyle creep over the years too, but we could cut back. We have savings and a house in Sag Harbor we could sell and try to make the money last. Not long enough, though. I need more years in.”

“It won't be the last paycheck you get. Go do something else. Joe Kennedy said he wanted to give his kids enough that they could choose a career based on what they wanted to do, not what they needed to do. You have that much money. Look, there are plenty of people who came out of college and took a job in a ski town or teaching at their high school thinking it would be for only two or three years, and a decade later they're still there. This isn't much different. Part of the problem is you guys on Wall Street are the only people who make two million dollars a year and don't think you're rich.”

He's right but only because we're surrounded by other Wall Street guys making ten million or twenty million a year and living lives we can never afford. The bartender steps in front of us. “The
lady at the end of the bar bought you a drink.” He puts a single beer in front of Matt. Matt shrugs and tips his glass to the girl and says to the bartender, “In a minute please get her another of what she's having.”

I think she must go in for the artistic-looking type or maybe just the not-miserable-looking type. Anyway, she seems to have decided we're not gay and I guess that's something.

I have a sense of how uncomplicated his life is and I'm envious. It could be just that the grass is greener but I don't think so. “If you got married at twenty-two, do you think you'd still be married?”

“I don't think I'm the best test for that. I've never even been close to getting married.” He seems to be weighing this for a moment, so I know I'll get a real answer and not a snap response. “Probably not. I'm such a different person than I was at twenty-two and I'm motivated by different things than I was then. Big changes that were unpredictable. The chances that the right person back then could change in a compatible way and still be the right person now have to be less than fifty percent.” He pauses the way a person will before walking into a strange house. “Are you thinking about having an affair?”

“No.” I say this right away and I have the image of Rebecca James walking into Starbucks. “No,” I say again, as though the first time wasn't real and I was just trying it on for size. “I'm not.”

“Good. People go through unhappy periods and they recover. There are always ups and downs, with everything. You and Julia have a good thing.”

December 8, 2005

JULIA ROLLS ON HER SIDE WITH HER BACK TO ME
, though I know her eyes are open and staring. Before ten minutes ago, we hadn't had sex in more than a week. This is our canary in a coal mine. It is the first thing to die when there is something poisonous in the air.

I was home when Julia returned from tennis, and I maintain that no one has yet created the outfit for strippers that is as sexy as the tiny white pleated tennis skirt. It was enough to bring us together, like a beacon through lethal clouds. But the sex was flat. It wasn't savored or varied the way that in a good meal the food is interrupted by wine to make the taste, the pace, and the experience even better. This was medicinal and businesslike. We now lie in the uncomfortable effect of a failed physical connection and the unspoken acknowledgment that comes with it.

“I'm sorry I've been working so much lately.” I feel I need to say something. I like happy silences but not uncomfortable ones. I'm a child that way.

“What are you talking about? This is the same way you've
worked for six years.” Her eyes are still straight ahead away from me.

“Well, there've just been some late nights.” Before she can respond that this is also the same way it has been for six years, I add, “And I've missed you.”

She still doesn't flinch but I know that this time it is because her mind is working to process my comment.

“You look beautiful, Julia. You're even more beautiful today than the day we met.”

This prompts her to roll over and face me, and I'm startled to see that her look is angry. Not a hurt form of angry but an indignant look that says, How dare you? “You wouldn't have it any other way. Nick, you have a phobia of fat people. It's very hard to live with.”

I can see this feels good for her to say. But like a slow leak of a great volume of pressure, a tiny leak cannot give real relief. Relief would have to come in another form. “And if you miss me so much, try coming home. Sober. You can send some other drinking buddy to your boondoggles.”

The anger rises and the indifference wanes. Her eyebrows knit down farther under the weight of the creases in her brow, and her upper lip rises on one side in the beginnings of a snarl. More anger has lurked in her than I realized.

“It's like you're caught up in the bad crowd of an eighth-grade class. Some of the people you run around with at least actually are almost adolescent. You're thirty-five, Nick. Thirty-five!” She's screaming now. This feels out of nowhere and I wonder what cue I've missed. She takes a breath and hesitates. “You were a better man when we met than you are today. How do you like that? You think I've gotten more beautiful? I think you've gotten more ridiculous.”

The anger reaches its peak and is focused right on me like I'm looking up the barrel of a gun. Just as quickly it vanishes and she seems to recognize the transformation of her own features and is ashamed of them and sweeps them away. Julia gets up and walks to the bathroom. I hear the sink run and water splashing. In a moment she walks back into our bedroom, her bathrobe pulled tightly around her. She sits sidesaddle on the edge of the bed to face me. Her expression is wiped clean of emotion.

“I'm so unhappy, Nick.” Her tone is flat, as though she is just stating the obvious facts or reading the instructions of a baking recipe. Two eggs, one cup of flour, and I'm very unhappy. “I have been unhappy. For a long time now.”

“I know.” Those two words are my first real acknowledgment of our condition. An acceptance of responsibility on my part that I need to address. For a moment it feels like it could be the beginning of a way back, of a plan for us. But my words are left hanging in the air like a coin flicked over a well. Julia looks at me, waiting for more. Hoping for more. When nothing comes, my words fall empty. They sound hopeless and resigned. I know I'm closed off, but I can't cure it yet.

“Nick, the way things have become, I feel more like a stranger to you every day. Like we're locking ourselves deeper in separate prisons and I resent you for it. It makes me want to be cruel to you. And I resent that even more.”

Her eyes fill with tears but don't actually form one. All I can think to say is I'm sorry, and I don't want to say it because it feels like an insult to her.

“Nick, I love you. I have always loved you. From the very first moment I saw you.” She smiles remembering, and I remember too. We were at a birthday party in New York of someone neither of us knew directly. Along with every other man and woman at
the party, I noticed her the moment she walked in. She had on a black tank top and perfectly fitting jeans and her hair was long and straight and simple. The first time our eyes met, they locked. First curious and unafraid, then laughing and interested, the head making slight movements and the mouth stretching to a smile, but always the eyes holding the gaze while we came together. By the time we touched and spoke, we already knew.

I wonder how it even happened then. Love at first sight seems like a romantic, silly notion and I know it to be true only because I lived it. Now if a friend had just told me it happened, I would believe he was being dishonest with me, or maybe just not honest with himself. Because I no longer feel any capacity for it.

“I love you too.” I hear my own words as sounding weak and merely reciprocating. Julia doesn't seem to mind. She needs to tell me something.

“You're smart and funny and beautiful. You're your own man. That's what I noticed about you first and what I love and respect the most.” She pauses and looks more intently at me, the way a person would look through a small porthole, as though her look could physically take hold of me, and I do sit up in bed. “I love the way you handle my father. He's a pompous big shot who's intimidated everyone I've ever known, including me. But he knows he can't intimidate you because you don't need anything back from him and it makes him uncomfortable around you.”

“He is an ass.” I'm not joking or serious. I'm just glad we're on the same side for a moment and I want it to continue.

“You don't care what other people think about you. That makes you immune to people like my father, and your immunity drives people like my father crazy. Your indifference fills up the room and it's Kryptonite to him.” She tightens a grip on my hand and her smile beams, celebrating a triumph of mine. “You're so
good for me. In some ways I'm my father's daughter, but you're not Kryptonite for me. He's too far gone, but I can be saved and you save me.”

Her memory seems to progress through our years together and I watch the beam in her eyes fade. “Twelve years ago when you were first at your job, that lifestyle seemed okay. You were right out of college and living in the city on your own for the first time, going to bars and staying out late. That you could do it for work and on an expense account even seemed exciting. When we met, I loved you and I thought that part of you was coming to an end. I don't know why I didn't object then and talk to you about it. You'd come home drunk in the middle of the night from a dinner and a strip club, where you were talking about God knows what with your trader friends from the office. But now is worse because I don't have any reserves left. I don't want more reserves to keep this going either. I want it to be different.”