Dear Money

by Martha McPhee

  Pretty's husband, Ralph Radalpieno, had been at the forefront of the mortgage bond market, instrumental in the mid-1980s in the dissemination of the collateralized mortgage obligation (CMO)—an invention that made home mortgage bonds look more like other bonds, which greatly increased their appeal, turning them into viable bank and insurance company investments. (For a long time this would mean nothing to me, but back at the beginning of it all, I tried to pretend, at the very least, that I cared.) Radalpieno made money, lots of money, and that money, as it will, translated to power, not only his own but also his wife's. Pretty was a power broker and got Win a job because she liked him, his name, his smile, his sparkling brown eyes. Win followed Radalpieno to Bond & Bond Brothers, apprenticed with him after completing a required training program meant to weed out people who really belonged elsewhere—down in the world below, where you and I live with our quaint, picayune cares—began trading mortgages after six months and within a year was raking in millions of dollars for the company. Win had brains and stamina and an unending supply of clever ideas. He could work eighteen-hour days and schmooze until dawn. He had market savvy and a knack for predicting trends and habits on the big scale and the small. He found himself launched into an Olympian milieu, and as luck would have it, he soared.

  Every now and then he would look back on it all—say, when his personal driver had somehow gotten derailed and he couldn't catch a cab uptown, a cold rain blowing sideways, and a shudder would go up his neck—how easily it could have been otherwise. But no. He was resourceful, with resources—a clip of hundred-dollar bills to feed to a pedicab driver who would wrap him in a snug blanket and wheel him uptown for all he was worth, and Win would make better time than he would have in a taxi. Clever Win. Smart Win. The little brown-eyed, pudgy boy from Akron grew into his name, embraced the bravado, bought a few too many sailboats and planes, as might anyone who received $10 million bonuses (the biplane, by the way, was only an amusing toy; for serious travel he was flown in a G-IV). He eased his way into conversations, into beautiful women, into fast cars and quick thinkers in Davos and Cupertino, and he rose—how else to put it?—to the level of kings.

  I learned these details from Win's unofficial biographer, Emma. He was with us in Maine for exactly twelve hours, and as we walked across that afternoon and night, whenever the chance arose Emma took me aside to fill me in on Win and his life, speaking with that same intense enthusiasm of hers, revealing for me a new shade of Emma, a deference I had not observed before. She hung on Win's words, smiled up to him solicitously when he spoke to her, asked him about his plans for the summer, and you could read an inner calculus, a way of measuring whether she'd planned her summer with enough savoir-faire. Later, in August, they were headed for Paris, an apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Win approved. "Rue Christine?" he asked. "Well, yes," Emma answered with a bright smile—rewarded by his approval.

  Money had that power too, and I felt a further warmth for Emma, knowing she was not immune to the consuming fire that sometimes raced through me. Her family, after all, were not New England blue bloods; they were from Indiana. Her mother, a professor of nineteenth-century English literature at Bloomington, had the annoying habit of asking me if my books sold well. The few times I'd met her it was her first question, and she'd ask, "How can you possibly make a living?" An attractive woman with striking white hair and silver eyes. For the most part, Emma's family stayed in the Midwest, leaving Emma to be absorbed by Will and all his sisters. He had five of them—lovely, opinionated women, all with serious careers, who would chide Will for how he cultivated his girls. "Gstaad," one of them once said. "The girls don't need Gstaad. That's entirely unnecessary and a waste of money. They'll have Gstaad when they grow up."

  We were taking a walk on the beach and Win strode in front of us with an annoying bounce of the heel, as if, even when it came to putting one foot in front of the other, he were somehow more ready to ambulate than we common bipeds. Theodor and Will, kicking a soccer ball, kicked it to Win. The four girls collected sand dollars at the water's edge. Each find caught them by surprise, as if each sand dollar were a sterling coin. Emma whispered, though the wind would have hidden her words: "Will says he's the best mortgage trader on the Street. He's untouchable, a seer." Watching Win run after the ball, he seemed more like a guy who never made the varsity team, but the way Emma spoke about him, the way she held him up and turned him around for me, telling me about his G-IV and his sailboat and his apartment on Park Avenue and his ski lodge in Cervinia—the care with which she told his story, it was as if she were telling the tale not of a friend but of a mythic figure.

  He turned and kicked the ball to me, a little too hard to be just play, and I, who did make the varsity team, sent it whistling past his ear, which got him racing with Gwen down the beach, her hands clutching sand dollars. The stiff shore breeze caught the ball and carried it very far, and soon everyone was running to save the ball.

  "Where's Casanova's girlfriend?" I asked.

  "Which one?" Emma said.

  "Oh, right. Of course," I said.

  They were all showered in the late-afternoon light that painters love so well, racing along the water, splashing it up around their ankles. Win had the easy manner of one who wanted for nothing. Will made plenty, sure, but he was not pursuing his dream in order to keep Emma's wants at bay. He wanted to be a writer; already he had written hundreds of pages in the wee hours of the morning. She wanted a house, and I wondered if she would continue to want it had she all the money in the world. But Win was something else again. Win had the heel bounce. He was doing exactly as he pleased.

  I had no idea what a mortgage trader did or what a mortgage bond was or why and how so much money could be made off of other people's puny debts, if indeed that was the case. For a while yet I would not understand that these puny debts were packaged and put together and compiled, which in turn created not just a revenue stream of batched, bundled and tranched mortgage payments but a colossal revenue river—a Mississippi, an Orinoco megaflow. I had no idea that homeowners as a consolidated group of borrowers accounted for $8 trillion of debt, exceeding by a long shot the combined United States stock markets as the largest capital market in the world. I did not appreciate, because I had not contemplated before, that these traders moved massive quantities of this debt between borrowers and investors and back again with the press of a button, with all the ease of a gambler rolling a pair of dice at a Las Vegas casino—luck mixed with savvy and not a little appreciation for the sentiment of the market.

  I knew nothing of that. I was ignorant in a very basic way, because the subject had never meant a thing to me. My world, down here among the masses, had never collided with the intricacies of high finance. I didn't own my own home, so a mortgage was an abstraction, something that other people had. More adult people. Not artists, for instance. Owning a home was something I longed for. A home mortgage was the vehicle by which one lifted oneself by the bootstraps into the realm of adulthood, into commerce, into seriousness, into the general franchise. But debt, so assembled and gathered as I would come to see it, was a bracing chasm. Across it we walked even if we had no idea of the depths of this dream, how it was becoming the blood of our economy. So, naturally, I knew nothing then about CMOs and Fannie Maes and the LIBOR rate and tranches and thrifts and prepayments and interest rate swaps and amortization and negative convexity. I did not appreciate or understand the influence of a change in interest rates, the ups and downs of consumer spending, company forecasts, the price of oil and natural gas, fluctuations in currencies, the weather (mudslides and hurricanes and tornadoes and extreme heat waves and blizzards) and personality types (the ability to herd people like sheep) on the value of debt. Subprime loans and ARM loans and hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages and balloons and Alt-A's and prepay penalties meant nothing to me either.

  But I did know that Win made money, lots of it, so very, very much of it. The kind of money he made had nothing to do with the kind of money Will m
ade, that was clear. I hadn't understood that there was a hierarchy on Wall Street, that hedge fund guys and traders ranked at the top, that people like Will, who brokered financial deals for enormous corporations and who made more money, by a long shot, in a month than we made in a good year, were lower on the totem pole. Making little, in comparison, had made me curious about a person's ability to earn so very much. Who were they and what were they and where were they and how did they think and what drove them? There was something of the romance of the cowboy, of John Wayne, out there riding the range alone. The fearlessness, the cool confidence, needed to risk so much. Most of all the idea of pooling people, of trying to understand how they operated psychologically (all the yous and all the mes with our various styles of spending and saving, our susceptibility to trends, our ridiculous hopes that place all our bets on tomorrow, thus making us so foolish today) as a collective lot, reading them and translating their likely actions into the amassing of money on a colossal scale, a scale bigger than the entire combined U.S. stock markets—this was better than the plot of any story I'd read in a while. This was a story line on an Olympian scale. This was imagination at work, imagination with consequences—nothing less.

  We were seated at the picnic table, alone on the deck, Win and I. He was before me, not one bit handsome but attractive all the same. Between us flamed a candle casting shadows on his face, highlighting his thin hair. He had shaved for dinner, and the illuminated portions of his face shined like the surface of fine china. He made no concessions to L. L. Bean. He wore a pink shirt with silver cuff links that splashed the candle's light whenever he raised his hands to gesticulate about one thing or another. The others were inside: Theodor putting the girls to bed, Will steaming lobsters, Emma preparing drinks.

  From the kitchen we could hear lids banging against pots. Will was in charge of the dinner and had forbidden Emma and me from helping. He wanted none of our fancy recipes. The clams and lobsters would be steamed simply in sea water, with the seaweed he'd collected from the ocean, carrying the big pot to the water's edge wearing his flip-flops and khakis. Studying him as he went, I understood that simplicity was a vacation for him, a connection to what he quested for: the plain expanses that described the life of a writer. If he only knew.

  Emma had instructed Win and me to watch for the moon, which was to rise, full, in a few minutes from behind the northernmost of the small islands. It was low tide and you could see the sandbars reaching to the islands floating just offshore. The sun had set and it was getting dark, but paths of fuchsia spilled across the sky. Lobster boats puttered toward the harbor and a few sailboats drifted on the horizon. The house might be nothing much, but Emma sure had the view right. It was gorgeous, and Win agreed and started talking about how the present owners would probably have to sell someday soon.

  "That little girl—what was her name? Sacagawea? Really?" Win shook his head and smiled. "That little girl with the ridiculous name's parents will inherit the house from the childless Hovs, but little Sacagawea's parents have three other children and no money. But they love the place and will want to try to scheme and hang on." A nice sum dangled before them, he explained, would certainly outweigh sentimentality if dangled at the right time. "The trick for Emma," Win said, "will be the timing of her offer. Too soon, and she'll alienate them; too late, and she'll lose it to someone else. If she can gauge just when they'll be desperate enough but without taking umbrage at an offer, she could do very well."

  "The Hovs aren't dead yet," I remarked.

  "Details," he answered, and I thought of my agent, the Fox. "I'm simply telling the story." I was at first touched that he cared enough about Emma's dream to figure it out for her, but realized it was the game that engaged him here, the sheer sport of picking off what you wanted from life. How could someone be so smug about other people's fortunes?

  Emma appeared through the screen door to offer us champagne. Her hair was wet and flat, severe and beautiful; she had Cleopatra's hair. She smiled at us as she pushed the flutes into our hands. (She'd brought the flutes from New York because she could not bear to drink champagne from anything else.) "I'm going to help Theo put the girls down. He's so wonderful, India, so delightful with the girls. But I fear they'll do more giggling than sleeping if I don't oversee a bit."

  Theodor never went by Theo, only with Emma. In the beginning I had tried correcting her, but she'd persisted, out of fondness, and so we indulged her. She turned to head back inside, glanced over her shoulder at us and said to Win, "Watch out for all of India's questions. She's a thief. Anything you say could end up in one of her novels." Her expression held a knowing smirk, one that possessed me entirely for the benefit of Win. "She's already working on one about me. What is it again? Pond Point: The Emma Chapman Story?" She threw back her head and laughed.

  "Just keep talking, Emma," I said.

  "See, Win? I'm warning you." The screen door slammed. She and Will were always teasing me for taking notes, doing research. They were certain that in one form or another they'd appear in my next book. I thought perhaps she'd make a good character, maybe not as a lead but in a lesser role, the supportive wife of a man who gives up everything to write a novel. "Will you still love her if you appear in a book?" Theodor had asked Emma once. She had looked at him incredulously and said, "How could I ever stop loving India?"

  Win watched Emma go with a look of admiration—her determination to sip champagne only from flutes, to desire this house, to possess me. "She'll get this house if she wants," he said. I felt unaccountably annoyed. Not because I wanted the house too, but because Win would guide her toward the winning of it and thus the completion of her dreams. And she had that ability always to have just what she wanted. She never languished too long between want and have. And I felt, as if by cosmic design or simply by my choice of profession, I would always want.

  "Would you buy this house?" I asked.

  "Wouldn't you?" Win said.

  "Why, no," I said. That was the truth, but I hadn't meant to say it. I had meant to agree with him. He was a man who could buy himself any view, anywhere. I had not expected him to respond positively.

  "You don't like the fleas?" he asked with a teasing smile.

  "Is that what they are?"

  "Emma even loves the fleas. Bless her," Win said.

  "Is she immune to their bite?"

  "You will want this house," he said. "If you stay here for more than a few days, you'll want it just as Emma does."

  "Is this the seer speaking?" I asked. "Emma says you're a seer." His silver cuff links caught the flame.

  "Well, I did happen to bring my crystal ball," he said, pulling an imaginary orb from his pocket and polishing it with his shirtsleeve. "I see you fighting for the house, a bidding war between you and Emma."

  "She'd win," I said. "No competition there. Remember, I'm a writer." I didn't often announce my lack of money, but there was something about Win that made me feel I had to say whatever was on my mind. I wouldn't be able to hide. I had to be honest, and for a moment that was refreshing, not at all scary. I assumed that quality served him as a trader—he had the effect of making people honest, and thus they were easy to read.

  "Tell me about you. Are you really a thief?" he asked.

  "My brain is a tape recorder," I said.

  "So is mine."

  "But you're not a writer."

  "I can use what you say all the same."

  "Mysterious."

  "I've heard quite a lot from Emma today about you. I'd like to see how her version compares to your own," Win said.

  I wondered how Emma had the time to tell us each so much about the other, imagined her busy as a bee pollinating so many flowers. This was another trait of hers that I admired: she loved people, loved their quirks and idiosyncrasies, wanted her friends to all get on, find in each other that which she treasured in them.

  "What did she say?" I asked.

  "That you're the winner of such-and-such fellowship and several other impressive
prizes. The Monogram. The Washington—good Lord, girl, you've been busy." He paused and looked at me with a twinkle. "And Emma no doubt has been saying all sorts of rubbish about me, I'm sure."

  I nodded. "Good reviews."

  He laughed, and the conversation turned to Generation of Fire, the promise of which still hung out in the ether. I told him the story in a nutshell—two sisters marry the same man. The novel had been my attempt to write a book that might appeal to a larger audience, though I didn't generally share that ambition. Rather, I always felt I had to qualify the story line by saying that what I was really looking at was the depth of love and loyalty in the face of excruciating betrayal. How far will a sister go (or not) for another? And I did so now with Win so that he didn't think the book trite.

  "How far does she go?" he asked, holding my eyes. They were bright, intelligent eyes, and I understood just then that they alone lent him his magnetism. I did not want to look away, though it was hard to hold his eyes.

  "You'll have to read the book," I said. I wanted him to read my novel and wanted him to love it and admire me the way I admired him, for doing and saying anything he liked.

  "With your royalties you'll buy the house," he said.

  I laughed and rolled my eyes. "I'll be lucky if I earn out my advance. If I don't manage that, I'll be finished as a novelist." The moment I completed the sentence, I regretted having uttered the words, like a drunk, in vino veritas. I took a sip of champagne and noticed the moon, big and full and red, rising just as Emma had declared, just as big. "The moon," I said, hoping its arrival would change the subject. I could hear a window being shut upstairs and imagined my girls curled around Theodor as he read them to sleep. A perfect image that still somehow was imperfect to me because we could not quite afford it—the two children, the nanny, the private school, the relaxed father putting them to bed. From the kitchen came sounds of Will clanking away with the cumbersome pots. I imagined the lobsters plunging into the steam. The foghorn on one of the islands sounded regularly and rhythmically even though there was no fog. I took another sip of champagne and Win stood up to get the bottle and poured us both a little more.