Union Atlantic (22 page)

The man, a stolid, bearded fellow in white shirt and epaulets glanced wearily at Lauren, who started searching her phone for the town manager’s number.

“If you only knew what it took me to retain that young man. When I think of what I paid him. He could send his firstborn to college. I’m begging you,” she said, managing another sip of her drink. “We did invite you, didn’t we? You and your wife?”

Once Lauren had led the marshal from the room, Glenda decided that, all in all, the best thing might be to nap.

D
OWN IN THE FIELD,
a high schooler in red vest and bow tie pointed Evelyn Jones along an aisle of luxury sedans, and up against a barbed-wire fence. She applied her lipstick in the rearview mirror and then made her way through the parked cars toward a crowd of guests bottlenecked at the gate, where some kind of checkpoint had been set up.

“Glenda’s gone too far this time,” a silver-haired lady in front of her said to her husband, as security guards body-scanned each invitee with their metal-detecting wands. “Who does she think we are? Militants?”

“Believe me,” the man ahead of her said, “there are people out there planning things. This here makes a good deal of sense.” Evelyn recognized him from the newspaper: the head of State Street, lately plagued by kidnapping threats. Farther along, various bank employees and their spouses feasted their eyes on the chairman’s estate, unfazed by the precautions. She supposed she was one of the few who wondered if she’d be allowed to pass. But they did let her through and she proceeded along the path to a set of long folding tables staffed by a team of severe-looking, young blond women who wielded their pens and clipboards like guardians of an auction for qualified buyers only, ready in an instant to lose those winning, welcoming smiles and halt the riffraff in their tracks. One of them beamed an extra beam as she checked Evelyn’s name off the list and handed her a place card, her visage replete with that secret liberal pleasure of being given the chance to be kind and nondiscriminatory to a black person.

Up on the main lawn a waiter in a white jacket, sweat running down his face, offered her a glass from a tray of sparkling wines. Guests had already begun to roll up their sleeves and mop their brows with cocktail napkins. She strolled to the open end of the square formed by the back of the house and the two circus-scale tents and from there looked down the far side of the hill to a pond where several men in a rowboat were making their way toward a floating dock.

She’d known when Fanning routed her an invitation to the party not to expect barbecue in the backyard. But this was something else.

Then again, perhaps this was part of her new station. She was, after all, soon to be a vice president for operations.

Her aunt Verna had nearly fainted with joy at the news. “That’s it,” she’d said. “You go right on, you hear me? You just go right on.” Verna had always been the pragmatist in the family, the survivor. Years ago, when she was a girl, Evelyn had asked her aunt how she managed to stay so thin all these years and she could still remember her saying, “Well, Evey, I’ll tell you my little secret: there’s nothing like good, old-fashioned anger to burn those calories to the ground.”

What would Verna make of all this? Would she hesitate? Would she think it too much?

As soon as Evelyn had received the call from Fanning’s secretary last week saying he wanted to meet, she’d expected a snow job. But a doubling of her salary? A position in management? The only other black woman in the upper ranks of the company was Carolyn Greene, a light-skinned Princeton grad, whose parents had a house on the Vineyard. At Evelyn’s first minority-employee luncheon, Carolyn had asked her whose secretary she was. From the position Fanning had offered her, Evelyn could move to any bank in the country or into another line of business altogether. She could buy the house she’d long been saving
for. And about one thing at least Fanning had been right: she would be better at the job than her boss.

You dream of such things with your brother fresh in the grave?

She could hear her mother’s voice. Yes, she thought. I do.

Feeling a trickle of cooler air on her feet, she moved back along the tent’s edge and passed inside. A giant chandelier had been dropped to encircle the main pole. Floral arrangements three feet high, bursting with red and blue, rose from the center of tables still being laid by a crew of waiters.

Nearby an older couple sat facing Evelyn, having taken refuge from the drinks tent opposite. He looked familiar, the gentleman, in his rumpled gray suit, his white hair neatly parted, his hands folded in his lap, a kindly look about him. Where was it, Evelyn wondered, that she had seen him before? And then she remembered. It had been back in the spring at the payment systems conference she’d attended down in Florida. He was the man from the Federal Reserve who had given the keynote address. She remembered it because such things were usually dull as all get-out. But toward the end of his review of the progress in securing commercial payments, this man had taken a step back from the specifics to describe to the audience the importance of their work, reminding them that while the business of keeping money flowing was a technical one, it supported and allowed millions of daily acts from the purchase of food to the paying of rent or salaries or medical bills. “Politicians argue over relative distributions,” he’d said. “The market fiddles with the price of goods and labor. But all of it relies on you. You’re the invisible medium. Not the hand of the market but the conduit. You touch virtually everything you see. Most of you work for private corporations. But the trust, it’s public.”

An old-schooler, she could remember thinking at the time. A man who sounded as if he meant what he said.

His wife—could that be the wife?—caught Evelyn’s eye and smiled at her in a knowing fashion, as if they had just shared in some rarefied private joke.

Before Evelyn could say hello, the gentleman volunteered an apology if they were in her seats; she assured them that they weren’t, explaining briefly about having heard him speak.

“Ah,” he said. “I hope I didn’t bore you. I can become rather self-important at times.”

“That, at least, is the truth,” the woman observed.

“This is my sister, Charlotte.”

“How do you do?”

“All right, I suppose,” she said. “Are you a banker, too?”

“I work for Atlantic Securities.”

“Well then, you’re in good hands,” Mr. Graves said, with an open-faced smile, apparently not the least imposed upon by her approach. “This is quite a gathering,” he added.

“It sure is. Not sure I really fit in,” she said, chastising herself as soon as the words left her mouth. Why should she offer such an admission?

“For which you should count yourself lucky,” Charlotte rejoined.

After Fanning’s visit, Brenda Hilliard from compliance had phoned Evelyn back to ask what the issue was that she had wanted to discuss; Evelyn had prevaricated, saying there had been a mix-up, that the problem had been resolved. She had gone along with Fanning’s scheme. That’s what she had done.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt you both,” she said. “I just wanted to say I enjoyed your talk.”

Mr. Graves smiled again. “You’re very kind to say so. Enjoy the party.”

___________

T
HROUGH THE FRENZY
of the day’s preparations, Nate and the others had sheltered around the Hollands’ pool on the far side of the house. As usual on such idle summer afternoons, they’d gotten high and entertained themselves by playing bring-me-down, a game wherein the last things you wanted to think of while baked were hurled at you by your closest friends in an attempt to defeat your buzz. Each attack required retaliation and further bong hits, the whole disordered affair not infrequently bringing Emily to tears—of distress or drugged stupefaction one could never quite tell—while the boys more often resorted to throwing objects or shoving one another into the pool.

As surrogate families went, the four of them were tight-knit, having learned early on the value of ridicule as a means of avoiding the awkwardness of their mutual affection.

The game that day had begun with the minor stuff of yeast infections, poor hygiene, and other bodily insecurities before reaching personal matters—Emily’s retarded cousin, Hal’s inability to attract girls. And it might have ended there but for the stuff they were smoking. Having failed to graduate, Jason, on Hal’s canny advice, had thrown himself on his parents’ mercy, promised to rededicate himself to studying in the fall, and suggested that what he really needed was the chance to help others for a while. Thus it was that he’d recently returned from his week of Habitat for Humanity—in Jamaica.

What little he remembered of the experience, he recalled fondly. A nail-gun injury on the second day had put him on the sidelines of the actual construction, but he’d made the most of the company. The four jumbo tubes of Crest he’d emptied and stuffed with the finest of the local crop had sailed through customs at Logan in his toiletry bag and
made it safely back to the house. Life since had taken on a new texture. Jason had hacked around on an electric guitar for years but it was only after returning from this trip, after hours of practice in the soundproofed basement, that he’d begun to realize just how outsized a talent he might be. Others had not fared so well. Interlopers to the gang of four had come, smoked, required Xanax, and fled. The first girl Hal had courted since sophomore year had wept in terror at the sight of the Hollands’ tabby cat and demanded to be driven home. When seriously gotten into, the new stuff was an all-hands-on-deck kind of experience.

And so it came to pass that in the late stages of this particular session, at the point where someone usually threw in the towel and began agitating for food, reprisals instead intensified. Nate, coming to Emily’s defense in response to the hit on her defective relative, went straight at Mrs. Holland’s alcoholism.

“Oh, that’s a good one,” Jason said, sitting with bare, rounded back at the end of the diving board. “That’s a real good one. It reminds me, I’ve been meaning to ask you, Nate, how’s the widow? Your mother, I mean. The one who’s sitting at home right now. The one who’s going to watch the fireworks alone tonight. Ever think maybe you should spend a little more time with her?”

The question stung but the line of attack had been used before, hardening him to the sharpness of it.

“Whatever,” Nate said, lying back in his deck chair. “You haven’t been able to ejaculate since you started those anti-depressants.”

Jason leapt to his feet and came around the pool to stand over Nate, his face flushed and shiny with bakeage. “You’re a liar. At least I haven’t been spending my nights on my knees sucking some stranger’s cock.”

“Jason!” Emily shouted, leaping up from her chair. “Shut the fuck up!”

In this game, surprise was the only trump and Jason had played it. Nate had thought it would be safe to share his secret with Emily, but he’d been wrong.

“Interesting,” Hal observed, crossing his legs and lighting another cigarette with which to enjoy this final round.

“I mean I knew you were queer,” Jason said, “but senior citizens? Is that some kind of fetish thing? You like Daddy?”

“You are such a royal asshole,” Emily said.

“Come on, tell us. What does the old man taste like?”

“Fuck you,” Nate said, picking up his book and towel and heading back into the house. Just inside the door of the Hollands’ solarium, he paused, listening to the whir of the engines powering the Jacuzzi and the sauna and the air conditioner, the THC in his blood still burning down the cells of his brain.

He could go home if he wanted. But things were too real there, too slow. And what use would it be heading over to Doug’s? Six nights in a row now he’d gone to the mansion at ten or ten thirty and, finding the lights out and no car in the driveway, waited by the side of the garage until eleven thirty or later. Most nights the sky had been clear, the trees on top of the hill by Ms. Graves’s house visible in black profile against a dome of pinhead stars. Sitting on the cool grass, he’d wondered what his father would have thought of him, waiting there in the dark for this man. Or what he would have thought about the things Nate had done with Doug already. It was a habit of late, this guessing at his father’s judgment of the things he did or said. Yet no matter how often he tried it, the result was always the same: it didn’t matter. Nate wanted it to, but it didn’t. Imagining his father’s reactions was just an
end run against his being gone, his having chosen to go. As if an endless hypothetical could keep him alive. The fact was, if Nate wanted to sleep in Doug’s bed, no one but Doug could stop him. He was already that free.

With no idea where to go, Nate stepped into the back hall of the house. From the kitchen, a procession of waiters in black trousers and white smock shirts appeared, sliding past him, trays of wine balanced at their shoulders. One of them, a narrow-faced redhead with thyroidal eyes, spread his bulbous glance down Nate’s bare chest like a cat stalking a bird, a lubricious grin playing across his lips as he sped by, leaving Nate feeling as alone as he ever had.

I
GNORING THE PARKING
minders trying to wave him in, Doug sped past the entrance to the field and turned right at the intersection, and then right again, winding his way around to the far side of the property. He’d attended plenty of the Hollands’ parties over the years and was in no mood for one this evening, but his business with Jeffrey couldn’t wait any longer.

All weekend, he’d camped out in a conference room with the door locked and McTeague on speakerphone, as they worked through each fabricated transaction until by Sunday night he’d assembled the full picture: Atlantic Securities, and not its supposed clients, held thousands of futures contracts obliging it to purchase Nikkei tracking shares at a price hundreds of points higher than where the Japanese index now traded. As they presently stood, McTeague’s positions represented a loss of more than five billion dollars. With each further drop of the Nikkei, the loss grew exponentially.