Seven Types of Ambiguity

by Elliot Perlman

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, two of them played as a team. Only one actually played. The other was there to gather the data they needed. Both had tiny computers fitted into their shoes. The computers were programmed to calculate the final position of the ball given its initial position, its initial velocity, and the initial velocity of the wheel. The guy observing fed these initial values into his computer by pushing buttons with his toes. He fed in the initial velocity of the wheel, for instance, by pushing a button on each of two successive pass-bys of the zero. His computer calculated the final position of the ball and radioed it to the computer in the shoe of the guy playing. His computer then tapped his toe a number of times to tell him what position to bet on, all while the wheel was still spinning.”

  “Remarkable!”

  “What attracted me so much to this was that they weren’t gambling.

  That’s the part that hooked me, being smarter than the others and drastically reducing the odds until the bet was almost a certainty.”

  “Is that your game, roulette?”

  “No. I played a little of most things when I first started. Not roulette or slot machines or lotteries, they’re mathematically rigged against the player.”

  “Aren’t they all?”

  “No, there is one game in which it’s possible for a player to gain an advantage over the house: blackjack.”

  “Is that the same as twenty-one?”

  “Very good, Alex.”

  “Is this the game that has . . . that is the manifestation of your gambling problem?”

  “I don’t think I have a gambling problem.”

  “Didn’t you say . . . ? One of the first things you said to me was the gambling had gotten you into trouble. Do you remember saying something like that?”

  “Alex, you really don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “I only know what you’ve told me.”

  “Aren’t you in touch with her at all anymore? Oh yes, I forgot. I apologize. You can’t answer that. It’s too personal. She’s part of your private life, and you’re not going to give anything away about your private life.”

  “Do you think she’s implicated in your unhappiness?”

  “You said I was depressed; now you say unhappy.”

  “I said I thought you might be depressed, but you won’t argue with the description of yourself as unhappy?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Dennis, what happened after you stopped working as a dealer in the money market?”

  “Well, as I said, I wasn’t actually doing that badly at the time. But I could see the writing on the wall. I knew I wasn’t really a salesman, and I thought I’d better do something preemptive before everybody else realized it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I made an appointment to see the only director I thought had a sense of me. I told him I didn’t think I was cut out to be a top dealer and that I could serve the firm better if I were transferred to another department, one I knew was having problems.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He seemed a little taken aback. First, no one had ever gone to him and volunteered their comparative shortcomings as a dealer or as anything else. Second, I was absolutely right-on about the problems they were having in their unit trust department. In fact, the board had discussed the very matter the day before and apparently had passed the sort of resolution that gets passed when a board is looking to hide the fact that it has no immediate solution to a particular problem.

  “He said he could probably swing a transfer with the board but he warned me, somewhat ruefully, that a culture of excel or get out prevailed in the firm and that my admission of incompetence as a dealer, and even my very candor, would you believe, would be held against me at the annual performance review.

  “His response rattled me. He hadn’t told me anything I didn’t know and it shouldn’t have, but it did. They had this ‘rank and yank’ policy of regularly terminating fifteen percent of their employees after each annual performance review. Desperate to convince him of my value to the firm, I told him I had a Ph.D. I had never told anyone there that. I didn’t want them thinking Iwas . . .”

  “You didn’t want them thinking you were what?”

  “I don’t know . . . too educated for my job. Although I knew how little the market valued education and science, they could still have thought I had wasted my . . . human capital.”

  “Dennis . . . Dennis, why do you think you’re crying now?”

  “I don’t . . . don’t really know.”

  “What are you feeling when you recall these things to me?”

  “I don’t know . . . frustration, anger.”

  “Tell me what happened next.”

  “Well, when I told him about my doctorate, his ears seemed to prick up. I think he liked me. ‘So we can assume you’re pretty comfortable with numbers, a lot more than most?’ he asked. I told him that was a fair assumption, and he told me to give him a couple of days and he would get back to me.”

  “Get back to you with what?”

  “He got back to me with what he seemed to regard as a Solomonic compromise. Implicit in it was the acknowledgment that I was effectively finished there. He had called in a favor owed to him and got me a job as an analyst at a brokerage house.”

  “A brokerage house—is that like a stockbrokerage firm?”

  “Yes.”

  “And an analyst?”

  “An analyst researches the market and provides the recommendations upon which the dealers base their hype.”

  “Is he like an actuary?”

  “Not at all.”

  “But do you need some facility with numbers?”

  “It helps a little, but you sure as hell don’t need to be a mathematician of any kind. What you really need is a facility for impersonating someone with the facility to sell ill-founded corporate speculation, hunches, to trigger-happy dealers, gorillas disguised as men.”

  “I don’t think you like dealers.”

  “The dealers make the really big money off the backs of the analysts.”

  “Well, that’s reason enough.”

  “Joe Geraghty was a dealer I worked with.”

  “Joe Geraghty, why did you mention him . . . that name, in particular?”

  “He was the dealer I worked with to promote managed care. If you think I’m evil—”

  “Dennis, I don’t think you’re evil. Just because I’m opposed to managed care doesn’t mean—”

  “He’s certainly a lot stupider than me. You misunderstood me before to have said something about not being here but for gambling. I wouldn’t be here but for Joe Geraghty. He’s an ordinary man, and I don’t mean that in a way that would appeal to someone like you.”

  “What do you mean, someone like me?”

  “Someone with your . . . socialist leanings.”

  “Dennis—and I say this not because it’s important to me but because it might be important to you—I’m not a socialist. Remember, I’ve seen firsthand what socialism really means, one form of it, anyway. But what does this have to do with this Joe Geraghty?”

  “He’s not a man of simple tastes; he’s not ordinary in that sense. He’s ordinary in the sense that he’d be easier for someone like you to understand than I am.”

  “There you go again with that ‘someone like you’ business. Are you saying that a psychiatrist would find you hard to understand?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I’m reminded of the Latin Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum.”

  “I’m impressed as hell yet again. What does it mean?”

  “ ‘I am human; I consider nothing human strange to me.’ ”

  “Give me a chance, Alex. I’m just warming up. You think you have a handle on me, some understanding of me: middle-aged, depressed, you say, screwed up, unable to attract women without paying for it—”

  “Dennis, they are all your words. You know, being angry with me will provide you with only temporary r
elief. You’re too quick to have me jumping to diagnostic conclusions. I wish it were that easy.”

  “I’m the first one in my family to go to university as well as being the first one to go to a psychiatrist.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. Are you linking the two? Are you equating the two? Is that it?”

  “No one had ever littered a conversation with either of my parents with a little advertisement for themselves in Latin.”

  “Oh, Dennis, I’m sure they had, often. At least once a week, probably on Sundays. What happened, Dennis? You took the job as an analyst. What happened?”

  “Before I started I was interviewed by the head of the brokerage house, an immaculate survivor, a veteran, a well-connected broker called Gorman. I don’t know exactly what they told him about me but, even though I needed the job, I had a wife and child to support, I didn’t want him thinking I had any experience as an analyst. I made sure he knew that, but he didn’t seem to care. The salary I would be starting at was low, but it would rise if I could prove myself.

  “Gorman was a no-nonsense sort of guy who nevertheless treated me with a certain deference. I thought he might have been told about my Ph.D.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t really know. Something he said, maybe. But perhaps he was like that with everyone. You know the type—so high up the food chain that he can afford to be courteous even to someone at my level.”

  “Look at your reasoning, Dennis. Someone above you is respectful toward you and you discount it and attribute it to your relative unimportance. Perhaps he was a decent man who had been told good things about you.”

  “He’s not a decent man. He was doing someone a favor. You’ll hear. He’s not a decent man. I would appreciate it if, in your sessions with me, you manage to refrain from giving people the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Even you?”

  “You can’t help yourself, can you?”

  “Please, go on.”

  “I had a week off between leaving and starting with Gorman. Patricia was by then working part-time as a receptionist at a gym. I thought I’d take my son to Mildura. See my parents. It was an unexpected bonus for them.”

  “The new job?”

  “No, the week with their grandson. I’d told them about the job, but one of my jobs was like another to them. Once I had gotten into university, my parents stopped trying to understand what it was I was doing. I think my father was actually a little disappointed that I didn’t make something someone could hold, something people needed, but he always acted proud at my graduations. I think as long as I had a job and a family, they were satisfied. As long as he had a grandson he could take out fishing.”

  “Do you fish?”

  “A little. Not as much as my father, living on the Murray. He was delighted to have the unexpected opportunity to take his son and his grandson out fishing. It was really quite sweet to see, but he wasn’t very good at hiding his disappointment when it rained.”

  “It rained in Mildura?”

  “Yeah, we got rained out. What are the chances of that? We came home a day early. Patricia wasn’t home, and the house was a mess. There were a number of message pads around the telephone with times and dates scribbled on them. I took my bag into the bedroom, which was also a complete mess, like a bomb had hit it. The bedclothes were on the floor. There was a bottle of cognac out and a glass on each of the bedside tables. I felt like a weight had been dropped on my chest, because I knew what it meant. A short time later I heard Patricia pull up outside. She would have seen my car. I was putting the cognac away when she came in. The first thing she said was, ‘You’re a day early.’ That was a Friday. I was starting the new job on Monday.

  “Patricia had been seeing one of the clients from the gym. It didn’t matter what his name was or how long she’d been seeing him. I had to understand that. What mattered, she said, was that she had never been happier. I should be happy for her. I asked what she wanted to do, and she said that my discovering the relationship was a good thing. It had forced her hand. I remember she was making the bed when she said, ‘I’m going.’ And she did. She packed a couple of suitcases and left. She walked out on my son and me.”

  “How old was your son?”

  “Almost eight.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “How do you think I felt? I felt as though all the air had been forced out of my chest.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “I thought I did.”

  “So now you’re not so sure?”

  “No, I’m quite sure it was love. I just don’t know who it was for. It was probably just a kind of love with the idea of being in love. I needed to be in love.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because even then I didn’t really know her. I didn’t know what made her tick. She was pregnant when we bought the house. It was a new neighborhood. I thought that under the circumstances she should find a doctor she liked, a GP. To be our family doctor, someone she could trust. She chose someone. I even saw him myself a couple of times.”

  “What was wrong with you?”

  “Nothing really. Nothing then. I was working hard, and though I was always tired at night I had a lot of trouble sleeping. He gave me some pills and told me I was working too hard. She was going down on him.”

  “What?”

  “She was having an affair or a fling with him, with the GP. She told me about this much later, said it wasn’t serious, that it didn’t last long. She said they didn’t even have proper sex. They used to meet in the middle of the day. She described how she did it for him. I had made her pregnant, I had married her, but I had no idea who she was.”

  “So she left the weekend before you started the new job?”

  “Yes. I had to keep it all together, learn the job, get my son ready for school in the mornings, take him there and arrange to have him brought home by a neighbor with a boy at the same school. I was numb. I just wanted my boy to be okay. And he wasn’t. He cried a lot, asked where she was. Time went slowly for him but for me the weeks just tumbled over each other, trying to get away from me as fast as they could. I tiptoed around at work unknowing and unfeeling. I was exhausted at the end of each day. Impersonating someone with self-esteem can be very enervating.

  “About six weeks later my wife came around to the house in tears. The man

  she had left us for was married. His wife had only been overseas on holiday. Patricia hadn’t known he was married.”

  “You took her back?”

  “I thought I loved her. She said it had been a mistake and that I had contributed to it by neglecting her, working too many hours. Look, of course it sounds like bullshit now, but I didn’t know then all that I know now. My son was crying every night. I had just started this job, an unfamiliar job. She was still his mother.”

  “I’m not criticizing you. I’m just trying to learn about you.”

  “Interestingly, a few weeks after that, I read in the paper that one of the directors of the merchant bank I’d left, the one who’d helped me, had resigned. It was rumored he’d been pushed out.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “No, I don’t. None of the other members of the board were prepared to comment. They stick together, those guys, maybe even more than you guys do.”

  “What makes you think Czech psychiatrists stick together?”

  5. “Essentially—for the last God knows how many years it’s been now—my job has been to go out and see people from various companies, officers of corporations, managing directors, people whose task it was to tell market analysts like me what their companies wanted the market to think about their operations or about their share price. I would see people, talk on the phone, read the press, the industry reports, financial reports, formulate questions and try to get them answered. I would attempt to sift out the deliberate ambiguities and unequivocal lies and then I’d make recommendations to the dealers. It might be to buy, to sell, or simply to hold.
There’s no commission for the dealers when a client holds. Dealers need turnover. People should remember that. It’s a matter of simple logic that there exists an ongoing necessary conflict of interest between the dealer and the client.”

  “And between the dealer and the analyst, I suppose.”

  “Oh, I’ll get to that, don’t worry. Dealers are the interface between the reality of the market and the man in the street who sees it as an almost magical machine for the rapid creation of life-changing wealth. The man in the street hears the news or reads the paper, the stock reports they’re pumping into his consciousness twenty-four hours a day, every day. He hears names, mostly unfamiliar names, attached to companies that trade in things he often either doesn’t know or understand. And those names are in turn attached to dollar values, which the man hears are going up, way up. He’s heard of other men who got on to all this before he did and they don’t worry anymore. They breathe easier. They’ve paid off their mortgages. They’ve bought new houses, new cars. These other guys have left our man for dead.

  “Breathless, the man in the street, who usually doesn’t know these other men, not just now, he never knew them and he never will, picks up the receiver of his phone and he dials a brokerage house. And no matter the words he chooses, no matter how he starts the conversation, no matter how polite he is, what he’s trying to say, what he is screaming, is, ‘Let me in!’

  “And who does he get? Who is on the other end of the line when the man in the street wants out of the street and into some barely imagined stratosphere? He thinks he’s getting an economist, a financial expert of some description, a calm and considered man, top of his class, with quick reflexes who speaks the impenetrable language of the market, a man who can simultaneously read it, translate it, and, most important, who can predict where it’s going. Is this what the man in the street gets when he calls a brokerage house? No, it isn’t. Not at all. What he gets is a man like Joe Geraghty. Have I mentioned Joe Geraghty to you before?”

  “You’ve mentioned him.”

  “Joe Geraghty is the reason I’m seeing you. Forget gambling, forget my wife.”