The Heart of Henry Quantum (12 page)

“Can you blame him?” she said. “Can you blame him?”

The trouble really started when Arthur got his hands on the inheritance. It wasn't all that much, just a little nest egg, so paltry Mother actually apologized for it on her deathbed. “Your father didn't leave all that much, really, in spite of what you think, and then, well, I needed it,” she wheezed.

But small as it was, it was more than enough to get Arthur into trouble.

Margaret had urged him to invest it.

“I
am
investing,” he declared.

She was thrilled. “So who's going to manage it for you? Fidelity? Schwab?”

“The best in the business!”

For some years, Arthur, explained, he'd been enthralled by an infomercial that had been appearing on one of the shopping channels. “It's like, foolproof. We should go in on it together.”

“You're kidding,” she said. “An infomercial?”

“It's called Investomatic! Check out their website. Investomatic! With an exclamation mark at the end.”

She immediately brought it up on her screen and read: Created by the world's most successful investors! Automatically trade stocks like a professional! Just five minutes of your time a day! Earn 10, 15, even 20 percent a month! Take our FREE introductory course and make your financial dreams come true—today!

“It's really easy,” he said. “I took the course.”

And indeed, after taking the free introductory course, the Investomatic! system required almost nothing of him. Aside from coughing up fifteen hundred for the DVDs, booklets, online briefings, 24-7 chat line, daily “for your eyes only” e-mail tips, and the “proprietary” Investomatic! trading software, all he had to do was go to their site every morning and look at a bunch of green and red arrows. A massive amount of greens? Buy! Too many reds? Sell!

“Arthur, that's day-trading. It's the worst thing you can do. Nobody makes money day-trading. You have to constantly be on top of it. You have to really know what you're doing.”

“No, these guys have got everything. You should see their charts! Really, really cool. The moving averages. The stochastics. The indicators. The volume.”

“Do you even know what those things are?”

“Of course I do. They teach you all that stuff.”

“You really went to classes?”

“More like a video.”

For the next few weeks Arthur was the main topic at Henry and Margaret's house, breakfast, dinner, and bedtime.

Finally he said, “Margaret, just do something about it.”

“He's a grown man, Bones, what can I do? Anyway, I don't know why I'm so worried. He's so smart.”

“I know. He's a fucking genius.”

“Why do you always have such a negative take on him?”

“Me? You're the one going on and on.”

“It's his inheritance. The money my father slaved for.”

“Here we go with your father again.”

“You just hate Arthur.”

“Honestly, I don't. But I do hate the drinking.”

“He's under pressure.”

“He's out of control.”

“Well then, talk to him.”

“Me? What could I tell him that you haven't told him?”

“You're a man. He'll listen to you.”

“Right.”

“He will.”

Henry sighed. He was always sighing.

“If he ends up coming here to live,” Margaret told him, “you'll have no one to blame but yourself.”

In the end, though, Margaret didn't trust Henry to say the right thing. So once again she was forced to fix things. Thank God she still had power of attorney over the inheritance, even Arthur's half. Mother had seen to that. When reason didn't work with Arthur—when did it ever?—she just went ahead and stopped the bleeding. Arthur was livid, and this pained her, but she felt she was doing exactly what her father would have done, and he was rarely wrong.

In retrospect, she saw that this was when Arthur went into his hole. She had to ask herself if she had done wrong by him. She looked at it from every angle, and in the end decided she was right to hold firm. Otherwise she would have been letting him down as Mother had.

Now as she was driving down 101, rounding the curve at the Rodeo Avenue exit, she wanted to know why she never got mad at Arthur, never yelled, never told him he was a fool—because that thought never crossed her mind. As the MINI descended toward Mill Valley, and the wild hills and the bay gave way to shopping centers and low-rise apartments, she asked herself, Why did she forgive him everything? And why could she not forgive Henry anything?

Her shrink told her it most likely had to do with her father.

“I don't think so,” Margaret had said.

“You don't think your father—”

“Haven't we already talked about my father? It seems like we've talked and talked about him.”

“Is that how it feels to you?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you like to talk about him now?”

“I don't know where to start,” she'd said.

“How about the first thing that comes into your mind?”

But the first thing that came into her mind was that she almost missed her exit, coming as it does so soon after you come down the hill. And why was she worrying about all this old stuff when she was on her way toward the new, the bright, and the wonderfully beautiful?

As she approached Tam Junction (right to Mill Valley, left to Mount Tamalpais—hurray!) the phone rang again. She knew by the ring it was the office—Matt Hoffman, the chief investment officer at Regency Development. He was also the main bean counter. What now? she thought. She'd called in sick but foolishly told them she would be working at home. You always say you'll be working at home. Nobody believes you. But Matt was a big muckety-muck at Regency and she was just a vice president in residential development. Even as recently as two months ago she wasn't sure it would work out. Yet here she was, a breath away from full partner. She had to laugh, remembering her first days in real estate. She was selling $500,000 homes way out in the Avenues to mostly Asians and Latinos. It didn't take long for her to realize she could make a hell of lot more money selling houses in the Marina District to young up-and-comers or in Pacific Heights to the already well-heeled. She finagled an interview at Hill and Co., got a job, and soon was a top producer. She knew why, too. There was more to selling than being a salesman, more even than arranging the financing and navigating escrow. It was all about allaying fears; and the way to do that was to befriend your clients. To make it fun. To let them understand they weren't in it alone. But more than that, you had to
know
your client—and this was her specialty. When she was working in the Marina, she understood the echo-boomer. Nowadays she'd made herself an expert on millennials. She studied them, analyzed them, hung with them, catered to them—which is why she drove a MINI and not a Mercedes like every other fucking agent in the world.

Her life really changed when she got the call from Charlie Oates. He was an old-timer, an independent who liked to buy and sell and occasionally do a rehab. He was deep into a loft conversion on Townsend and didn't know how to appeal to young people. He'd heard about her, he'd said. “Yeah, well I haven't heard of you,” she'd said. When he told her about the project she realized the whole concept was shit, and she told him so. The apartments were too big. No place for bicycles. No amenities like top-drawer kitchens. He begged her to come work for him. “Why the hell should I do that?” she said. “Because if we close this thing out, you will be very, very richly rewarded.” The
promote
, Charlie called it. The payoff. One year later, every unit in that building was sold and she was, indeed, considerably richer.

And this was in 2009, the worst part of the Great Recession. Now everyone knew who Margaret Quantum was. They did an article about her in the
Chronicle
.

It was after Charlie's second conversion—an old icehouse on Delancey Street that she topped out in six weeks (six weeks! thirty-six units! 1.1 million for a lousy 700-square-foot one-bedroom)—that she got the call from Regency.

Now she was dealing not in the millions but hundreds of millions. At Regency they created entire neighborhoods, built huge office complexes. There was a unit that dealt only with medical buildings. Another that focused on retail. She was currently in residential and mixed-use, but she made sure she was part of the Market Street renaissance that was now going on between Fifth and Ninth Streets. What with Twitter, Spotify, Yelp, and a bunch of other youth-oriented companies moving their offices there, she reasoned, those overpaid millennials would need a place to live, wouldn't they? She had in her mind a new kind of apartment building. It would be totally wired for every possible online application, down to regulating the air-conditioning, turning on your lights, locking your door and, if possible, tucking you in at night; it would be 100 percent green, 50 percent solar, totally water-conserving, recycling eco-masterpiece. In fact, it would be built of largely recycled materials (that number eventually went down to 10 percent, but whatever); it would be super friendly, with easy sharing of whatever you wanted to share, because that's what millennials were all about. Furnishings? Incredibly hip. Italian kitchens, Japanese soak tubs, in-apartment bike storage, undercounter wine coolers—even retro-looking appliances if you wanted. Not to mention the rooftop pool and outdoor party space with retractable roof, and, somewhere nearer the ground floor, the communal kitchen and wet bar and a couple of faux-rustic dining rooms with those long farmhouse tables for dinner parties too big for your apartment. She practically wanted to live there herself, and if she weren't married, and maybe five years younger, she would have.

Even so, she presented her ideas to the development committee in a very restrained and rational manner, her voice, as always, contained and precise, letting the numbers she had so assiduously researched and vetted speak for themselves. She delineated the construction cost, pretty much to the penny (not that anyone could hold her to that), and did an analysis of the market that was so detailed half the people fell asleep. She was unhappy about that because she'd spent so much time putting together the animated graphs, the interviews with potential buyers, the lifestyle montage, all set to a contemporary playlist. But when she got to her projections for return on investment, everyone was awake again and smiling.

It was a thing of beauty.

And when she got the go-ahead, she knew if she pulled it off she'd get partner. Executive VP, for sure, or even higher. Director of Residential Development, for instance. This is what happens, she told herself, when you're a man of action.

And if you're a man of action, you answer your phone, especially if it's your superior calling. The annoyance was that she'd failed to put on her Bluetooth, which meant she'd have to pull over, which meant being even later for Peter, but what could she do? Luckily there was a little shopping center just before the junction. She pulled in and found a spot.

“Hey, hi!' she began in her most enthusiastic voice.

“Sorry you're not feeling well,” Matt said.

“Yeah,” she replied, deciding not to cough.

“There are just a few things I need to go over today. I'm really sorry.”

He wasn't sorry in the least. And honestly, she understood. Just like Matt, she was at the office ten, twelve hours a day, and you have to get done what you have to get done. She definitely would call someone who's sick. Or on vacation, why not? The worst thing she could imagine was not performing. You just don't do that. If your work doesn't shine every single moment, what value are you?

“I'm not
that
sick,” she said to Matt. “What's up?”

There was a problem. It had to do with a series of cost projections that had changed in the months since her presentation, and it was really annoying because the guys she'd entrusted this to were fucking around with various scenarios that only confused things, plus they kept adding contingencies.

“Here's the thing,” he said. “You want to make the units smaller so you can have more of them, right?”

“Millennials
want
small units. It's not me. It's them.”

“But that means more walls. Walls cost money. And if there's more density because there are more units, you have the whole higher level of fire-code enhancements. Which means the cost per square foot goes up by—well, your guys have given me four different sets of numbers. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Wow, Matt,” she said, “thank you for bringing this to my attention.” By which she meant, Jesus fucking Christ, why does this always happen with you money guys? I'm going to get my extra units no matter what you say, so chill the fuck out. “You know,” she went on brightly, “I thought something like this might happen. No biggie. You'll have revised figures by tomorrow.”

“Great,” he said.

“But I have to ask, Matt—are you completely happy with that engineering team they assigned me? I know they've done stuff for us in the past—”

“Why?”

“I mean, have you ever worked with them before? These multiple projections are not professional. I mean, they're good guys, but jeez. What do you suggest? You know what? I'll have a talk with them. Get them back on the right track.”

“Okay. Whatever you think.”

Matt had a laundry list of other items he wanted to cover, too, and droned on for an eternity. She actually did listen, because one had to be on top of everything, but she didn't bother to take notes. Didn't have to. She knew what he was going to say before he said it. Which meant she could continually stare at her watch, tap her feet on the floorboard, and roll her eyes.

When he was finally done, she said, “Got it. Not to worry,” and he said, “Thanks, Madge. Now go back to sleep. And don't forget the chicken soup and ginger ale!”