Nantucket (6 page)

“If we were sisters and brothers,” said Joe, “we wouldn't be allowed to fuck.”

“What a pity that would be,” said Sally, giving Andrew a sly look. We have a secret, her smile said. Secrets are sexy. And we don't
really
know where things are going. It occurred to Andrew that if he were the sort of man a lot of his business partners were, “intimacy without sex” would have a short half-life.

“So Cathy,” said Joe, “how did you and Andrew meet?” Alarm bells went off in Andrew's head. Would Sally be able to make a history up for the two of them?

“We met in 1983,” said Sally, which thankfully was correct.

“You sound like Philip Larkin,” said Rosemary.

Andrew knew the reference but the rest of the table looked blank. “‘Sexual intercourse began,'” he quoted, “‘in 1963.'”

“‘Which was rather late for me,'” Rosemary continued.

“‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban,'” said Andrew.

“‘And the Beatles' first LP,'” said Rosemary.

“That's actually a poem?” said Cynthia.

“Alleged to be,” said Shiva. “I think it lacks grace and is more like a limerick.”

“That's the point,” said Rosemary.

“The point of what?” said Cynthia.

“I believe,” said Shiva, “– correct me if I'm wrong, Rosemary – the grittiness of sex was one of Larkin's themes.”

“Well, it began for me in Point Pleasant, on the Jersey shore, and I thought it was marvellous.”

That was generous of Sally. Helpful, in fact. It never hurt to have a client think you were a stud. Andrew hadn't
felt
like a stud in quite a while, actually, but that wasn't the point. The point was what your clients believed – or even better, assumed without really thinking about it.

“I thought it was marvellous too,” said Andrew. “My parents had a house at the shore. Cathy was working as a nanny, a few blocks away.”

“He was pointed out to me,” Sally continued. “He'd just graduated from Harvard. He was taking a few weeks of vacation before starting work at some super-prestigious firm on Wall Street. I was nineteen and about to be a sophomore at Smith. I wanted to meet him so I walked into him on the beach carrying three ice-cream cones.”

“And offered to lick him off,” said Rosemary.

“Not in so many words,” said Sally.

“I asked her when she went off duty,” said Andrew, which was true. Sally had said Cathy told her “everything,” and perhaps she had. “We went to a movie.”

“And afterwards we walked on the beach in the moonlight,” said Sally. “The sand was still warm.”

“I was unprepared,” said Andrew.

“I said I didn't care. I was nineteen. I thought it was time I became a woman.”

“A commendable attitude,” said Shiva.

“We got married in August,” said Sally, “and moved into a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. I never went back to Smith.”

“And I've been working my ass off ever since,” said Andrew, and was suddenly embarrassed. Telling billionaires how hard you've worked could sound like whining. For a moment no one said anything.

“So your daughter was conceived under the stars,” said Shiva. “Does she know how beautiful that is?”

“I fear not,” said Sally.

“Perhaps she'll come to see that as she gets older,” said Shiva. “She's how old now?”

“Twenty.”

“So you're what, Andrew? I assume you worked for a couple of years before business school.”

“Forty-two,” said Andrew. “I didn't go to business school. I went straight to work after college. I was in something called the ‘analyst program' – a form of slave labour. If you did well enough, they made you an associate after three years.” He felt like he was being interviewed for a job or considered for membership in a club.

“And partner nine years after that,” said Joe, who as always had done his homework.

“Right,” said Andrew, “except that the firm went public in the nineties, so we aren't really partners, even though we use the word.”

“You look younger than forty-two,” said Rosemary.

“Thank you – I guess,” said Andrew.

“Were you a partner when the firm went public?” said Joe.

“Yes,” said Andrew.

“So you made some money,” said Joe.

“I was a pretty junior partner,” said Andrew. “But yes.”

“And all you've done since leaving college is crunch numbers and have ideas?” said Shiva.

“Pretty good ideas,” said Joe.

“Not a bad life,” said Shiva.

It would have been the moment for one of Andrew's guests to share some personal history, but the phone rang. “Probably a wrong number,” said Andrew as he stood up and went into the kitchen. His heart was pounding.

It wasn't Cathy, or for that matter Eleanor. It was a man's voice. It was one of the infuriating men who ran the firm, newly named as head of investment banking and therefore theoretically Andrew's boss. “I've just been told you're not coming to the client outing tomorrow,” said the man. “And what area code is this? I found the number on the phone list but it doesn't say. And your mobile phone must be turned off.”

“Nantucket,” said Andrew, “and no, I'm not.” He realised he'd left his mobile upstairs.

“Could I ask why not?”

“I'm entertaining clients here.”

“Well, it's very dislocating of you. I will have to rearrange the tennis. I wanted you and Cathy – that's your wife's name, right? – I wanted you to partner with the Ellises. We're trying to get his next equity offering – and damn it, what clients are you entertaining?”

Andrew named the men in the next room as quietly as he could.

“Can't hear you,” said his new boss.

Andrew tried again.

“Right. But I wouldn't have called them
clients
. Do you even have a fee letter from either of them? That Indian has never signed a fee letter in his life, as I understand it.”

“I need to get back to my guests,” said Andrew evenly. And I need to figure out who is undermining me at work, he said to himself. There was always a price to pay for ignoring the politics.

“Oh, all right. But come see me Monday morning. I want to understand how you're spending your time. We have several things to talk about, as a matter of fact. We need to start running this place like a business.”

“I won't be back in Manhattan until lunch time.”

“Well, call my office and book a time then.” He hung up.

Andrew took a few deep breaths and went back to the table, wrestling with the thought that the weekend would probably come to nothing. In the merger business,
most
good ideas died.

“Who was that, sweetie?” said Sally cheerfully, as if any news had to be good. She sounded like Cathy had ten years earlier.

“Fellow at the office,” said Andrew. “Needed my advice on something.”

“Did he really need it at nine on a Friday night?” said Rosemary. Her tone was both impatient and sympathetic.

“Evidently so,” said Andrew.

“I think it's very nice that your partners want your help,” said Shiva, which fortunately seemed to close the subject.

There was some clearing of plates and then the famous cheese course, as Cathy would have called it, which further confronted Andrew with the reality that his guests lived on Olympus and he was just a working stiff.

Sally brought in a wooden chopping board on which she had laid out the cheese, and a pile of crackers and lightly buttered toast points. She'd tied the shop's signature dark red ribbons around the board as a reminder of the luxury they were
about to enjoy. “This is very spoiling,” she said to Rosemary as she set it down.

“How did you manage, by the way?” said Cynthia. “I thought you said you'd just arrived from London. That was your Gulfstream we saw, right?”

“You flew from London to New York and then took the puddle-jumper back to Nantucket?” said Sally in amazement.

“Andrew told us he had tickets on the puddle-jumper,” said Shiva grandly, “so we reported to the puddle-jumper. If that is the official way to come to your magical island, that is the way I wanted to do it.”

“Like approaching a temple barefoot,” said Cynthia.

“Precisely,” said Shiva.

Andrew had always thought it quite grand to be able to give his guests tickets on the little plane from Manhattan. In the middle of the summer they were hard to come by, especially for the primo time slots like Friday evening. It had taken some wrangling with the airline, years ago, to convince them to issue blank tickets, and further argument, in the wake of 9-11, to get them to keep doing so.

“In answer to your question, Cynthia,” Shiva continued, “Rosemary had the butler bring the cheese to the airport.”

“You keep servants in New York,” said Joe, “even though you live in London? I mean, I know you probably have an apartment here…”

“There's no point in having a flat if you don't have anyone looking after it,” said Shiva. “I dislike the smell of a flat that no one is living in. You unlock the front door and stale air pours over you.”

“And we travel at short notice sometimes,” said Rosemary, as if that explained matters.

“A butler, a maid and a cook is all,” said Shiva.

“We get such nice invitations,” said Rosemary, smiling at Andrew.

4

Andrew came downstairs in the dark. He couldn't sleep. He'd had too much wine. He was terrified. He thought he should figure out how to call Cathy, even though she'd told him not to. Then again, he didn't much
want
to. That was probably why he'd left his mobile upstairs the previous evening. At some level, he wanted to run away as much as Cathy. He couldn't help feeling that was what she'd done.

He was angry about the call he'd gotten from his new boss. He didn't need to be
managed
. He certainly didn't need to be told he was wasting his time. His role, admittedly self-assigned, was to originate big “creative” deals – the sort that added to the firm's prestige as well as its bottom line. He decided what to work on. He didn't chew up a lot of associate resources, as some of his colleagues did, insisting on hundred-page presentations that said nothing new. His approach had paid off often enough so that he was entitled to patience and encouragement.

The weekend had started well, actually. His guests seemed to be enjoying themselves. They probably thought they were slumming and were letting themselves relax. Cynthia and Rosemary were never going to be friends, but they didn't have
to be. Joe and Shiva were enjoying how different they were from each other. You could see it in the way they looked at each other.

Joe was
not
getting along with Cynthia, but that wasn't a crisis. Sally had explained the problem to him: Cynthia hadn't gotten used to not being the centre of attention, the way she was in her job. She hadn't been married to someone as rich as Joe before, or as single-minded. Come to think of it, she might not have been married before at all. Anyway, Cathy – correction, Sally – was going to buddy up with her the next day.

All that really needed to happen was for Joe and Shiva to have time to talk without any distractions. If a deal makes sense, Andrew often told himself, it will find a way to happen. He just
needed
this one to happen, that was all.

It was his own fault, of course. No one had insisted he chase big improbable deals. It was a choice he'd made – to live by his wits, as he put it to Cathy, rather than his elbows. He hadn't wanted to compete with his partners for ownership of the clients who rang the cash register on a regular basis – public utilities who issued debt every six months or conglomerates who shuffled prosaic subsidiaries with shameless frequency. There was a price to be paid for that cowardice: the randomness of success, and permanent anxiety. But if he couldn't deal with that, he didn't belong on Wall Street.

Andrew didn't turn on the kitchen lights because he knew about visual purple and he wanted to preserve his night vision. He did that on the mornings when he came downstairs before dawn and made a mug of coffee by feel and went out onto the porch to wait for the sky to lighten. “Beginning of morning nautical twilight,” it was called: the point when you first could tell that sunrise was coming though it hadn't happened yet.

Some colleague who had served in the Navy had given him that phrase years ago. Andrew liked the way it suggested charts and remote places and the nineteenth century. He often wished he'd been in the Navy. His father would probably have liked that.

Sometimes he took his mug all the way to the beach, through the bushes and down the wooden stairway it had taken some persistence to be permitted to construct. There was rarely anyone on the beach at dawn, and he was occasionally tempted to set his mug down on the sand, take off his sandals, shorts and tee shirt and go into the water, but he knew better than to swim alone. The ocean is full of monsters, his father had taught him when he was four. At some level, he still believed that.

Presumably his father had seen it as a form of drown-proofing, a way of making an inquisitive toddler cautious during a vacation on the Jersey shore. His father had been a methodical and cautious man, who knew something about monsters, actually, but parents have no way of knowing which random comments their children will take to heart, what ideas will take root in their young imaginations. Andrew's younger daughter, Florence, for example, it had recently emerged, was studying architecture because he had once remarked that law school would be boring.

“You know, I would have made a pretty good lawyer,” she'd said recently.

“Did you ever think about it?” he'd asked.

“You told me not to,” she'd said.

Which wasn't what he'd meant at all. He'd never even gone to law school. How would he know? He'd meant that in his
observation
, lawyers needed an appetite for hard work, and that law school probably tested a person on that capacity.