Dear Money

by Martha McPhee

  Was I happy? The question lingered above like a bubble in a cartoon. Yes. Yes. I was happy, calm, tired in a luxurious, sensual, freed way. I was free. And it felt as if it would never end. I was happy that it would never end.

  Dinner with the bosses at Bon Soir to celebrate: Radalpieno was there, telling the story of my first meeting with him, describing me as feisty and flirty, wearing an outfit that was a writer's idea of corporate, the black velvet suit that he'd have liked to take off of me, Win ringing the bell all the time. Lots of laughter. Oh, yes, that bell. Martin and Snake and Win and several others were there. "The diversity bell," Martin offered. Radalpieno continued with my appearance. I'd made quite the impression, nails a little messy, shoes and an old handbag. "A real Eliza Doolittle in need of a good washing." "The what?" I asked Martin, still caught on the diversity bell. I'd forgotten about it. "To keep the boys in line, watch our tongues. When you're guilty of a slur, you get rung. A hundred dollars goes to a charity of your choice every time it rings. There's a direct-deposit form you fill out. Miss Lane keeps a tab, which we pay every month." Plenty of wine and endless courses. And Martin with his colorful suspenders repeating for the tenth time his conversation with his driver over shirts, his wonderment at my stupidity or my balls. "Where's the bell?" I asked. "If I had the bell on my desk it would be ringing like a fire alarm."

  "The bell's yours," Radalpieno said. "I'm bringing it down first thing in the morning. Hand-delivering it myself." And on they spoke until enough was drunk and enough was eaten, until one by one they left, Radalpieno asking me several times if I was happy, satisfied, telling me I was his now. And they were all gone and I was alone with Win. Just the two of us at the big table, his brown eyes illuminated by the candle flames.

  "Everyone loves you," he said.

  "For today," I said.

  "You're not wrong about that," he said after a pause. Waiters busied about. The restaurant emptied. Win refilled our glasses.

  "Today," I said. "Isn't it always all about today, anyway?" I was giddy with my success. On top of the world. Mistress of the Universe.

  "You've got to keep an eye on tomorrow too. The trick," he said.

  "There're always tricks. You can't ever let anything go."

  "Not if you want to stay in the present."

  "Hmm. A riddle. Keep your eye on tomorrow to savor today."

  "To make today last," he corrected.

  "Always a sage." I took a sip of wine. "Wise one," I said, "read the future now."

  "You want to play that game?"

  "It's fun."

  "Yours or the market's?"

  "Both."

  "The market is easy. We have a year to gradually reduce our exposure to some of the absolute crap out there, subprime and all of that. Scarpetti's finished."

  "Really?" I said incredulously. A few months before, a year before, I would not have been surprised, but something had changed in me. I'd gone deep, and so I couldn't see wide and long. I didn't want to anymore. There was no fun in that in the realm of what I did. I'd gone inside Plato's proverbial cave, and in there you can't see reality directly. Instead you see reality's shadow dancing around in the figures on the computer screen—that's as close as the trader wants to get to what's real. All the trader needs to know about are the trades at hand, how to price them, manage exposure. "Subprime's so hot," I added.

  Win spoke evenly in that way of his. "Everyone's got his head in the sand. Not a smart place to be. Even a deal like yours wouldn't happen six months from now."

  "We'll short swaps," I said, half question, half statement. There was always a way out of everything. Instruments and products and systems and techniques and models had been created to get everyone out of everything. Riskless risk.

  "Short. Exactly."

  This was the payoff, the conversation, at this level Win completely trusting me. I had entered The Inside.

  "We're being too serious." I raised my glass to him and he poured more into it. I was feeling the buoyant effects of the drink. He'd grown on me over the years, his looks. There was something tender in the shine of his cheeks. Life at this level of play was fantastically sweet, and I had just been celebrated by some of its main players. The meal was enormously expensive. The head of B&B came to dinner for me, was hand-delivering a silver bell to me in the morning. I'd ring it the moment he gave it to me, because he'd certainly give me reason to, and he'd laugh and say something more inappropriate, and the floor would take note of this exchange. I could see myself rising in the hierarchy and I liked how it felt. I was ambitious for more. I understood how people came to love power, needed it to thrive. Once you get a taste of how delicious it is, it would be impossible, I imagined, to suddenly start a diet.

  "And now, my future?" I said boldly.

  "Give me your palm."

  I gave it to him. A waiter came over but we ignored him. We were the only diners left in the restaurant. We owned it for the rest of the night, having just dropped so much money. We could stay as long as we wanted. It was after midnight. Win held my hand, turned it over, palm up, brought a candle closer to it. His hand was warm and soft and moved me to come in closer to him. Our shoulders touched. His eyes zeroed in on the trident of lines, their tributaries. "Well?" I said.

  "Are you scared?" he asked.

  "Of course not, Mr. All-Knowing Seer." We turned to look at each other and our faces were quite close. He studied me for a while and I could see the cloud of seriousness wash over him again, blocking out the bright and splendid sun. At the time, I was impatient with him. We were celebrating, after all. You know those moments: there is only one direction, and its end is the rainbow with its promised pot of gold—nothing less, nothing more. But now, looking back on all of this, I can see Win there at our table, see his beautiful eyes reflecting the candle flame. He had made me, and like a parent who suddenly realizes how vulnerable his child is, his mood switched. For he himself had been where I was, swimming in the heady pool of success, believing in his invincibility. Oh, surely I knew that such moments don't last. I would have said so myself, had I been asked. But I hadn't been.

  "I'm proud of you," he said. If I was on the inside—that is, if I'd gone deep inside the cave—he was not. He was on the outside. He had the ability to always stay outside, so that he could see long. He had warned me of this. It was his singular talent always to know the long view. And this was why he continually won.

  "The palm," I persisted.

  "Do you know what you pulled off?" It was a game of dare now, a match with our eyes, who'd do what or turn away first.

  "I do," I said. I didn't blink. "The palm, is it scaring you?"

  "Isn't it more fun to not know?"

  "You're afraid," I said. He seemed to be, as if he wanted something he didn't know how to ask for. "Of that crystal ball of yours? I've never seen you afraid." I can remember him now, the warmth of his hand holding mine, the very serious nature of his composure—the game over, the desire to speak clearly and be heard. But what teenager listens to her parents? It was on that night that he began to see through me. He had created me, but I was no longer his and there was little he could do to protect me.

  By then Win already had his plans to leave B&B, I would understand later. He was reading in my palm whether or not he wanted me to come along. He was weighing things: my raise, my rapport with Radalpieno and the others, if I would say yes, if I'd take the risk, if he'd want me. He was joining a hedge fund, had a nifty plan to go short on all the nonsense, do the research, figure it out and be positioned when the whole operation went down. He'd be quoted later as saying that he hadn't understood the fine points, the entire structure, the complexity, but he'd had the gut feel that Wall Street, the financial world, had created a doomsday machine—a machine that people around the globe were oblivious of because they believed we knew what we were doing over here.

  "Things change fast" was all he said, pulling back, deciding: he would not ask me to come along.

  "Do you think I don't k
now that?"

  "You haven't seen it." A waiter hovered, poured us some water. "Do you ever think about tulips?" he asked. "I think about tulips all the time. My mind is filled with tulips, the colors and variations." Another waiter blew out the candles on surrounding tables.

  I yawned. I was tired but wasn't ready to go home. I wanted to stay there all night. "I don't think about tulips," I said. We sat there a bit longer, looking into each other's eyes, an unnerving sensation that requires no small amount of trust. The game of dare was over. Now it was simply a reckoning. In the end, I had enjoyed the notion of being caught up in a Pygmalion story. I had not minded being the rough stone for another's design and love. But under the microscope of his penetrating gaze, as hard as I tried not to become uneasy, I became so. I was no longer India Palmer, novelist, nor India Palmer, trader. I had mutated into a less flattering creation as I became for Win a metaphor. I tried to regain my composure. "The party's ended," I said and gently slid my hand from his, but he would not immediately let it go, as though he too were trying to stay tethered to the present.

  Eighteen

  The February 2007 issue of Woman:

  Walking the Wire:

  Novelist turned trader India Palmer travels the

  distance from high art to high finance

  by Simone de Savoy

  You know the story line—successful banker turns photographer; hedge-fund manager cashes out and heads to Vermont to milk goats and make cheese; CEO turns tail to help the starving in Darfur—these "change of life" stories all work in one direction: tassel-toed capitalist chucks it all to do good. It's almost a cliché.

  Leave it to India Palmer, occasional boldface name and author of the critically acclaimed The Way We Do Things Here and most recently Generation of Fire, to turn that cliché on its head and surprise the publishing world by giving up on books altogether to become (wait for it) a bond trader. Trend alert: Zadie Smith is now heading the arbitrage desk at Credit Suisse. Richard Serra is appearing tonight on Fast Money.

  I'm kidding! Sort of. At least in the case of Palmer, the move from the world of Maupassant to mergers, acquisitions And All of That Rot is true. Your Girl has word from a reliable source inside the Towers of Mammon that Palmer has been spotted looking earnest and wearing a smashing set of new It Girl business suits while being shepherded around by none other than cutie-pie tycoon Wayne Johns, aka "Win," in the trading pit of Bond & Bond Brothers on the 33rd floor of the Winchester Building. But she's no intern, it seems, and this is no research "stint" for a next novel. No, India Palmer has, indeed, put her shoulder to the capitalist wheel and made her way up the ranks, from lowly first-year associate to MD (that would be Managing Director to you, bub). And this after only three years on the Street. Her spectacularly swift rise has ruffled a few feathers in the Government-Sponsored Entities division of mortgage-backed securities at B&B, my sources say, but they also confirm that she's no paper tiger. She's actually pulled in some big deals and is making money despite the grumbling. I'll be honest, though—the idea of bonds, or a pool of bonds, is something that makes me go glassy-eyed, so I set out to track down the New India Palmer to see what was what.

  On a balmy late-October day I meet with her at Boulon to discuss her monumental career change. Surrounded by mothers who lunch in Louboutin heels and Balenciaga's techno-prints, Palmer, a statuesque blonde with sky-blue eyes, dressed hippie-conservative with style flair—Jimmy Choo slingbacks and a soft, easy skirt made from a tablecloth (fabulous) by Behnaz Sarafpour and curvy small jacket designed deliciously by Celine—entered late, apologizing profusely. So much for the suit, I thought. Her outfit was accented with a Larson necklace of large blue sea glass wrapped in gold leaf and linked with gold chain, the work of Theodor Larson, India Palmer's fabulously handsome sculptor husband. Would you two please just stop! I shouted. She laughed and demurely covered her mouth with the back of her hand.

  "I don't subordinate my feminine side," Palmer said of the testosterone-infused universe she now inhabits. "I'm very open about being a girl. I have great conversations with the boys about my outfits. They'd never admit it, but I think they like the change of pace."

  One observer, who wished to remain anonymous, said, "It's given them a new focus to distract them from all the bodies she's stepped over—guys who didn't get promoted because she did." Meeow! You go, girl!

  Palmer, who had taken the afternoon off from B&B, sipped a Chateau Lefrois white Burgundy (her selection) and said, "You're here to find out What In The World Was She Thinking?" I was, indeed. "The switch was easy," she said. "Everyone around me was making gobs of money and finally I wanted to make gobs of money too. I wanted to prove to myself that I could. Theodor helped," she said with a laugh. "He called it my Duchampian Experiment."

  Duchamp she did. Just four weeks before our meeting, Palmer made an astounding play that is gossiped about (one of B&Bs largest rate trades ever, is the rumor). But Palmer is mum when I ask for details. She dismisses me with a chuckle. "You don't discuss these things. I'd be put in the box forever."

  Would Duchamp have approved? She paused and took a sip from her glass. "This is about money, dear," she said with a smile, and then, sitting back in her chair, a bit whimsically, "Wouldn't that make a title? Dear Money." She savored it, then added, "It's actually a British financial term for money that's tight, hard to get—frozen credit markets."

  Dear Money: Perhaps this is a kind of obituary—though, as one who sobbed her way through freshman orientation at Swarthmore reading The Way We Do Things Here, I can't quite let India Palmer go so easily. I want to fight for the winner of the Washington Award for fiction. (She won when she was only 26.) I want to celebrate a writer whose books never sold in breakout numbers, though she had earned for herself a solid literary reputation and high regard among critics.

  You'll forgive me for recalling that, 14 years ago, I found myself assigned to write, a little staggered and daunted, a short profile of Palmer for these pages. I stammered and read from a list of 35 prepared questions, but Palmer couldn't have been more gracious. With her next novel, India Palmer was stolen away from Deutsch, her first publisher, by Leonardo Cavelli for Piccadilly. This move began a trend that persisted until her last novel was published, in 2003. She leapt from one publisher to the next, receiving ever-bigger advances (at least initially) and promises of being introduced to the wider audience that all writers long to find.

  "In some ways I was too ambitious to be a novelist," she told me at our recent lunch. "Lots of ambition, no hope."

  Now she has wandered into unfamiliar territory indeed, but that fierce ambition is still with her. "I don't believe in flittering around the edges of things. I guess I was never a voyeur by nature, which seems like a kind of job requirement for a writer. I simply decided I wanted to be surprised, to surprise myself, not by watching on the sidelines, but by doing."

  It all started on a beach in Maine, "out of the clear blue sky," as she likes to say, when a new career literally fell in her lap. Through a friend, the acclaimed novelist Will Chapman (he was an M&A guy at the time), she met the hunky Win Johns—famous for shorting Silver Star in 1999 and making several hundred million for the company overnight. Johns brought Palmer on board more or less on a whim, says Palmer. "He admired my work, I admired his. One thing led to another." (Johns could not be reached for comment.)

  What has changed most for her? "The grueling 16-hour days. The intensity, the pressure of being absorbed into competition. Oh, yes, and all the silly office pranks and the side bets that go on here."

  Side bets?

  "Everyone bets on everything. It's like being stuck with a bunch of numerically gifted gambling addicts who will bet on absolutely anything. What tastes better, Perrier or Pellegrino? That was a recent office bet. Who can eat the most hamburgers—I won that one—not the betting part but the eating part. People were betting on—or against—me, and I won. That victory sort of put me on the map, in terms of accelerated hamburger consumption," Palme
r said with a grin, "as someone to be feared." All of the silliness, Palmer confided, is about building morale. "High jinks are a needed contrast to the intense pressure. It's all very locker room," she explained, "but I don't know what would happen if we didn't have that kind of pressure-release valve."

  Still, it was hard to imagine the author of Scion gulping down burgers. I wanted to know if she missed writing, missed the process of working through one of her gorgeous chapters. "I had a professor whom I adored in grad school," she said. "He used to say to the class all the time—a bit too much—that if we could imagine ourselves doing anything else, anything at all other than writing, we should do it." She looked me squarely in the eye. "So, the short answer is no. I don't miss it at all. I found something else I liked doing as well, perhaps better."

  I also couldn't resist asking, "What does this say about our culture?"

  Rolling her eyes, she dismissed me: "I don't know. Ask an anthropologist. Or a novelist, maybe."

  Nineteen

  CAVELLI'S CALL, which came a day after the latest article about me hit the newsstands, arrived like a kind of fickle but predictable weather. Caller ID announced Piccadilly Publishers. At any other time in my life, my heart would have skipped. Such calls could tilt the balance of things ever so slightly in one's favor.