Union Atlantic (19 page)

“Is this your family?”

Her gaze hardened.

“No disrespect, Mr. Fanning, but I’m getting the sense that you already know more about me than I’d care to tell.”

The offer of promotion had begun as a piece of improvisational bullshit but he was beginning to think it might not be a bad idea.

“I only ask because while I never had a brother—”

“Don’t go there,” she said. “You don’t want to go there.”

“Why not? Because we don’t know each other? I’m not offering sympathy, if that’s what you think. I just know enough to know remorse can fuck with your ambition. And you shouldn’t let it.”

“You’re one hell of a condescending asshole.”

Doug smiled at the pureness of her hostility.

“When can you start?” he asked.

He thought she might leap up and swat him across the face but instead she simply shook her head in wonder.

B
Y THE TIME
Doug headed out for his lunch meeting with Mikey, Sabrina still hadn’t been able to track down McTeague.

“Call me as soon as you hear from him,” he told her, on his way out of the office.

He walked quickly up toward the Common, where the benches were full of legislative staffers and store clerks, eating their bag lunches. The gold dome of the State House glittered in the midday sun. After Manila or Seoul or New York, Boston had always appeared quaint to Doug, an unlikely town for the business he and Holland had created. The spirit of their venture would have made more sense in boom-towns like Phoenix or Charlotte. But they had worked well with the
material at hand, letting the historical distinction of the place act as a kind of ambient reassurance, a patina of solidity worth tens of millions in advertising.

In a booth at the back of the restaurant, he found Mikey muttering into the wire that dangled from his ear. He was jotting notes along the side of his
Herald
, the far page of which had come to rest on a half-eaten plate of manicotti from which it sponged the pasta’s thin red juice.

“You’re late and you look like hell,” he said. “Have a seat.” Pushing the wire aside, he said, “I got an investigator following this orthodontist out in Weston. Guy owes a boatload of child support. Turns out all his money’s going for OxyContin. I got to say if you met the wife you’d understand the painkillers. She’s quite a human being. Third husband, fourth investigator. I’m just waiting for my guy to tell me he got the pictures of him coming out of the pharmacy.”

He didn’t have time for this, Doug thought, checking his Black-Berry only to find the Nikkei was down another hundred points.

All day from his office window he could see into the neighboring tower, where workers clicked away at their screens, filling their filing cabinets with endless records of prices and depreciations and liabilities likely to pay, until they no longer noticed the bargain struck between meaningless days and whatever private comforts they’d found to convince themselves the meaninglessness was worth it. But it was different if those workers were your muscles and tendons and by your will you directed their exertion, regulating the blood of cash. Then you weren’t an object of the machine. You were something different: an artist of the consequential world. A shaper of fact. Not the kind of author Sabrina wanted to be—some precious observer of effete emotion—but the master of conditions others merely suffered.

That’s what he didn’t like about McTeague’s freelancing like this. Doug wasn’t in control.

“So,” Mikey said, “we got this hearing with Miss Graves on Monday. You’ll be there, right?”

“What for?”

“To give the victim a face,” he said, waving the waiter over. “We don’t want her getting a sympathy vote. Old-lady-against-faceless-enemy kinda thing. Trust me, this is what you pay me for.”

“You told me it was bullshit. Now you make it sound like a tobacco trial.”

“You’ll be in and out in half an hour.”

“I caught her trespassing this morning. Should we mention that to the judge?”

“Let her tie her own noose.”

Glancing over Mikey’s shoulder, Doug saw a guy at a table by the window, early twenties, dressed in expensively faded jeans and a sweater pre-patched at the elbows. He was leafing through a magazine, the white wires of his earphones trailing down into his pocket, a laptop open beside him. He saw these people everywhere now, these aging children who had done nothing, borne no responsibility, who in their bootless, liberal refinement would judge him and all he’d done as the enemy of the good and the just, their high-minded opinions just decoration for a different pattern of consumption: the past marketed as the future to comfort the lost. And who financed it? Who loaned them the money for these lives they couldn’t quite afford with their credit cards and their student loans? Who else but the banks? And what was he reading?
GQ
or
Men’s Health?
Some article telling him how to shave his nuts or pluck his eyebrows or sculpt his tender gut? His hair was carefully unkempt, shiny with product, a deliberately stray curl hanging down over his forehead.

“Now what do you want to eat?” Mikey said. “Pasta? Chicken Parm? What’s it gonna be.”

Last night, Nate had turned over in his sleep and nuzzled up against Doug, his arm coming to rest across his chest. For what seemed the longest time, Doug had remained still under that warm weight, wanting to shrug it off but unable to.

“I got to go,” he said, seeing McTeague’s number appear on the screen of his phone.

“What kind of a lunch is this? You just got here.”

“Call me later,” he said, heading back onto the sidewalk.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“I’m on vacation,” McTeague said. “Finally. ’Cause you know, the funny thing is, I never took any vacation, not since I got out here. And that’s the company rule—you have to take your paid vacation. Good, simple tool for risk management—make sure people take their holidays.”

“Well, your timing’s pretty shitty. Where the fuck are you?”

“Macao. You ever been? It’s like the Chinese Vegas. Casinos everywhere. Kind of butt ugly during the day but they get the fountains lit up at night. Turn on the neon, and it ain’t half bad. Some real old-time glitter. And the bird markets, you should see the bird markets. You pick one out and they’ll kill it on the spot and fry that sucker up for you.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Not really. I mean, sort of. Getting started, I guess. Or maybe I’m in the middle. They have great girls too. You should check it out when you visit. They’ll suck your cock for hours, if you want. They’re all saving up for college.”

In the background, Doug heard the screeching cheers of some Asian game show.

“Well, I’m glad you’re getting your rocks off. I spent this morning in Evelyn Jones’s office trying to explain your accounting. Is one of your hedge-fund buddies out of pocket? In which case, why didn’t you call?”

“Let me tell you, Doug. What you and me did in Osaka—that was great. That was classic. I mean, when you recognized that Japanese deputy dude—amazing. The mistress, she was kind of complicated actually. I don’t know if I ever told you. I thought she had me figured, at first. But enough booze, it doesn’t really matter what you think anymore, right? You just do what you do and it doesn’t matter what you think about it. So in the end I didn’t even have to ask her. I just mentioned the guy—this is after we’d started fucking, she’s getting another drink—and she unloads on him, goes on and on about what a creepy shit he is and then she tells me straight up. The whole story about what the government’s gonna do. You ask me, she knew exactly what she was doing—fucking him over. But what a tip? I mean Jesus. We were thirty-five percent of profits last quarter. How can you walk away from a tip that big, right?”

Doug slowed on the path back across the Common.

“What are you trying to say?”

“Listen, Doug. I swear to you. I haven’t stolen a dime. If you hadn’t respected me so much, taken me in like you did, maybe I would have, you know? But being in so close with you, a higher-up, taking me under your wing, giving me this stage to play on, ‘Don’t worry about the middlemen,’ ‘Call me direct.’ That’s what you always said.”

“So what the fuck’s the problem?”

“Doug. There are no clients. I made them up. From the beginning. All that money you’ve been funneling to cover their positions—it’s ours. And it’s still in the market.”

He came to a halt in the middle of the pavement, forcing the young couple headed toward him to part their hands as they passed.

“You’re lying,” he said.

“I was in the money. Every contract. Every position. And you wanted to pull it all back. But I kept remembering what you told me: keep your eye on the big picture, don’t let fear stop you, the models aren’t always right. It was there for the taking. And you always said the losers were the people afraid of the risk. I was in the money, Doug. It was all profit. I was getting ready to hand you a windfall bigger than you’d even imagined, wrapped up in a bow. But when the market turned I just froze. And I had to keep asking for all that cash. To post margin, to keep the positions open. And you … you kept feeding it to me.”

Doug tasted the remains of his breakfast at the back of his throat and then in his mouth and he leaned over to vomit on the grass. A shiny feathered rook looked on in perfect indifference. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You’re lying,” he said. “Tell me you’re lying.”

Chapter 12

As Henry climbed the narrow back staircase of Charlotte’s house on the last Friday in June, and set his bag down in the room where he had spent his boyhood summers, he realized his mistake: here nothing changed. Not the ancient lumpy mattress, not the frayed satin lampshade, not the linen square on the water-stained bedside table. At the inn in town, where Betsy had always insisted they stay during their annual visit, out there in the light of day, at a restaurant or coffee shop, his sister’s predicament could be broken down, its components approached diplomatically, each of them discussed and resolved. But here? Here, Charlotte’s circularities drew energy from the very decrepitude of the place. The house
was
her argument, its density of association imperative to preserve. It may have belonged to others once, to his ancestors or his parents, but it was all hers now, the physical form her opinion of the world had come to take. How could he ever change her mind while living inside of it like this?

Indeed, the initial signs were not positive. The entire first afternoon, during which he’d thought they might take a walk and ease into things, Charlotte spent conducting some half-cocked tutoring session with a sunken-eyed youth, who listened in rapt attention to a lecture that jumped from William Jennings Bryan and the gold crisis to Father Coughlin and the paranoid style in American politics. Sitting in the front room trying to keep up with the day’s blizzard of e-mail, Henry marveled that a woman who’d retained this much history could nonetheless be so far gone when it came to ordering her own life.

“I didn’t know you were still taking students,” he said once the boy had left.

“I imagine,” she said, “that he doesn’t have many books in his own house. It’s so easy to assume people do. But then many don’t. And he’s lively. I thought he was one of the usual dullards at first. But he’s got promise. The world—the actual state of things—it’s broken in on him. Which is moving. You have no idea what it was like at the school toward the end. How the content remained the same while the meaning of the exercise changed so entirely. From enlightenment to the grooming of pets.”

Here was his sister’s familiar recipe: well-meaning condescension leavened by faith in meritocracy and finished off with a dose of liberal apocalypse. She was the classic mid-century Democratic idealist, who’d lived long enough to see hope’s repeated death. Raised on Adlai Stevenson, Richard Hofstadter, and redemption through rigor. It would have been easier for Henry if he hadn’t agreed with her about so much. If their father hadn’t stamped them at such an early age with a patriotism for process and an aesthetic revulsion at display of whatever kind.

Also, if he hadn’t loved her. Ineluctably. Love tinged by an envy he’d never understood.

Practicality had been their dividing line. By choice or circumstance
or fate—the lines between these seemed less discreet to him the older he got—he had been the practical one, devoted to practical functions. Not a judge of acts, not even a creator of much, but a watchman, guarding the largely unseen. She had read, studied, and taught, loved a doomed man once, and through all of it somehow retained the energy for a more or less permanent outrage at the failure of the shabby world to live up to its stated principles. She followed politics assiduously, rejecting all the while its premise of compromise. If she hadn’t been so well versed in the checkered moral record of most actual martyrs, she might have allowed herself to become one, finding her single cause. As it was, she’d served and done battle with the school of a wealthy town, and apparently considered much of her effort wasted.

Henry’s plan had been to evaluate the gravity of the situation for the first day or two, allaying his sister’s usual fear that he’d jumped to conclusions, and then raise the subject of her moving on Saturday evening, think it through with her on Sunday, and, if all went well, perhaps even look at a few places early in the week, before the Fourth of July party at the Hollands’.

Instead, at breakfast on Saturday—which consisted of Orangina and stale bread—she blindsided him with the news that she had sued the town without the aid of a lawyer, claiming that Finden had violated their grandfather’s bequest of the land.

Slipping into the backyard, Henry phoned Cott Jr. to find out what in hell was going on. The man’s father had been the lawyer for the small Graves family foundation that gave to local causes, and he had inherited the job.

“I assumed you knew,” Cott Jr. said. “Norberton over at the hall told me she’d filed
pro se
. Quite a piece of rhetoric apparently. But she managed to use a few of the necessary phrases so they couldn’t toss it out.”