“Insider trading scheme”—I use the generic description to avoid any misunderstanding. I broke the law. I became Peter’s personal portfolio manager, trading through an outside account of which, like a good company man, he was a blind beneficiary. For pay I took a standard percentage of his monthly yield, augmented by profits in my own accounts derived from the very same trades. Peter supplied the information and I took appropriate action. The arrangement made me more money than it did him, yet kept me his subordinate in our two-man hierarchy, thereby meeting each other’s criterion for trust and peace of mind. I had no knowledge of his source. He said he didn’t know the person either. “We deal in code. He’s Bluebird Two when I phone him.” I asked Peter, “Are you Bluebird One?” “What did I tell you, Phil? No questions.” Later, I learned Bluebird Two was a washroom attendant in a Wall Street law firm, a cocaine dealer who accepted stock tips in lieu of cash. I think Peter was embarrassed that our enterprise was rooted in something as common as drug dealing; certainly to my mind it took the gloss off what had seemed a neat idea. It’s a question of aesthetics such as distinguishes an art thief from a purse snatcher, a bigamist from a child molester. I felt dirty when I learned the truth.
We made a lot of money very fast. Get his tip, buy the option, rake in the dough: easy. It was a sleepwalk with no memory at waking. Ask me how, exactly, I made $600,000 in six months and I can only shrug. I remember something about Gulf Oil and T. Boone Pickens, something about Beatrice. It’s someone else’s dream beyond that.
My biggest benefit was sleeping at night. Operating in the red during the preceding months, I’d been plagued with insomnia to such a degree I wondered if poor people ever slept; solvency brought back to me the eight unburdened hours of rest I need to maintain optimism. And I was able finally to complete renovations on the building. With pride I inspected my expanded parking lot, the sidewalk with its handicap ramp, the tiled bathrooms and noiseless low-profile commodes; trading only stocks and bonds, I’d never known the satisfaction of creating something real. I spent little of the money I was making on myself. I stayed with my apartment and with public transportation. I’m not one to live high on ill-gotten gains. I tend toward guilt and bitter self-judgment, though I always suspend the sentence.
I rented the upstairs floor of the building to two dentists. Melina’s Little Bud Shop occupied the first-floor retail space. Nick’s mother, old Mrs. Bakes, ran the cash register with the stolid intensity of a crane operator, casting her lot with Nick instead of her elder son Frank.
Poor Frank. He had loser written all over him when I ran into him in December, at the brokerage of all places. There, in a sullen hulk at the end of the lobby bench, was the drunken anti-Semite himself, a private investor now. My goatee threw him at first; recognizing me, he seemed glad to see me, truly a lonesome fellow. In the manner of most newly reformed, it took about a minute for him to lay his life nakedly open to me. He was in Alcoholics Anonymous, he was a follower of Jesus Christ, and he was getting murdered in the stock market. “That’s rough,” I sympathized. To fill the silence I asked if he’d seen the new, improved building.
“I watch yesterday,” he said.
“Watch?”
“I watch Melina and Nikos and our mother. In my car I watch them all day with the damn flowers.”
“That doesn’t sound too healthy, Frank.”
“I was too shamed to visit. They make the money like fists, and I do piss in the ocean. I drive away finally.”
“Money isn’t everything. I’m sure they would have loved to see you.”
“Without my pride, Philly, I cannot do this. I must be standing big like them. Then I can say I forgive.”
“And making money will return your pride?”
“My investing! My American capital dream! But so far is shit. Every stock I buy falls like a dead bird.”
“Who’s your broker?”
“Myself.”
There was a time when I’d believed that achieving success was the first step toward establishing parity with one’s enemy. Father had been my enemy, once. But wealthy in my own right now, I’d realized that financial success would no more persuade him of my worth than it persuaded me. I was ready to reconcile with him. The suspense of our estrangement had begun to weigh on me. Would it end with welcome-home hugs or with somebody’s death? I wanted to know; I wanted, as attorneys say, to bring the matter to closure. Unable to effect a reconciliation for real, I resolved to do it vicariously, through Frank. I’d make Frank rich, then take heart as triumphantly he entered Melina’s Little Bud Shop and forgave those who’d sinned against him. I told him to open an account with Timmy Donley, “one of the brokers here.”
“He’s a sharpie?”
“He’s a dummy. But trust me.”
Matching his stock trades with my own, I’d made Frank Bakes quite well-off by March 1984. Timmy had been earning commissions hand over fist on my business alone; now with Frank’s commissions included, it was getting obscene. Timmy got smug. I didn’t mind him strutting like a rooster ever since Carrie came back to him. I didn’t mind that his clients were copying my trades exactly or even that Timmy was participating, buying a Toyota and a Rolex with the profits. But when, one day, while leaving for lunch with some office colleagues, he walked by me in the brokerage lobby without acknowledging my greeting, I knew it was time to discipline him.
Timmy’s mother had told me he was being considered for promotion to the head office in New York. My first idea was to let it happen, let Timmy show his true stuff in a job he could never have managed. My affection for Thelma dissuaded me from orchestrating such a public comeuppance. Instead, I took Timmy aside and gently reminded him that he was a no-talent clerk, I was his master and benefactor, and that any more snotty displays of ingratitude would be to his eternal regret. I was shocked when he said to go fuck myself.
I wondered if his impertinence came of more than inflated ego. I phoned his wife Carrie, after six months of silence, to see if in some fit of candor she’d told him of our affair. Timmy had access to my private business—I had to know if I could trust him. She said she had not. I next asked if she thought about us ever. She said she did. “Really?” I said. “Like how?”
Ever since Carrie broke off with me, I’d been haunted by nighttime visions of her, masturbatory holograms conjured to cure wakefulness; those visions took a sugary turn the very night after I contacted her again. Rather than the madcap antics of a jolly dominatrix, I now imagined her lying in bed beside me, the two of us naked and facing front to front with the room lights on—talking, if you can believe it, about our kids in school and her job and mine and whose parents we’d endure next holiday. I attribute my deviance to Susan, whom I was losing to her domestic dream. To compensate, I was casting Carrie in a similar dream of my own. Perhaps it was predictable that my life’s next pitfall should come disguised as a happy home.
When Carrie and I met the next day for an afternoon drink, I could barely brag of my business success for the crazy voices in my head demanding instant conformity: “Ask her to marry you! Take her grocery shopping! Copulate in the missionary style and kiss her when you come!”
Across the table, Carrie wore a lovely sad expression. “I’m married,” she said, cutting short the jabber in my head and mouth. “I’m married but I desire you. Which means I shouldn’t be married.” She looked at me. “You were the last person I needed to hear from. I’d almost fooled myself.”
“Into thinking you didn’t like me?”
She grew quizzical. “How old are you, Philip?”
At this irrelevancy, the voices in my head went haywire with impatience: “Ask her to copulate! Take her to the missionary! Kiss her in the married style and come when you grocery shop!” I stammered, “Twenty-four.”
“I’m almost twenty-seven. So when do we drop ‘like’ for ‘love’? When do we upgrade the language? I’m asking because I don’t know.”
“Some people say ‘love’ from the start. Some refr
ain.”
“As early as high school, Timmy was saying he loved me—and my feelings for him faded. You never got sentimental with me at all, and I can’t stop thinking about you.”
“I’ve thought about you a lot, too.” I described the vision I’d had of her. “We’re lying together uncovered in bed. Chatting. Nuzzling. Exchanging views.”
“Like old people? That’s beautiful.” Then she said, “I’ve had visions, too. Of you and me holding hands.”
“Like kids?”
“Just like kids.”
I reached across the table and took her hand in mine. “It’s a start.” She leaned down and pressed her cheek to my wrist.
“I missed you, you prick.” Then, with a tone that progressed from sheep to wolf, “I’ve had other visions, too.”
We were in bed twenty minutes later. Before we got serious, I arranged us like I’d pictured it in my mind. The electric light was harsh on our physical imperfections, but that was the point, I think. Our fingers entwined with a sort of fearful delicacy, like the palps of courting crustaceans.
“Philly,” she said. “That thing on your face—”
“My goatee? Kinda cool, huh?”
“You look like an idiot. Shave it.”
I put on a baby voice. “Do I hafta?”
She smiled. Sexual tics are like riding a bicycle—you never forget. “Oh you naughty boy …”
Later we talked. She pondered leaving Timmy, filing for divorce, moving in with me. I cut her off with regret. I had to get downtown to the hospital to meet Susan for our Lamaze class. It had almost slipped my mind.
17
Of my many missteps in those pivotal weeks, participating with Susan in her Lamaze instruction was the biggest. I wasn’t needed. There was a lesbian in our class whose girlfriend was her breathing coach (the lesbian had been artificially inseminated, she explained to us all. “Me too,” Susan said), and it struck me that Alison or Dominique could have managed the chore for Susan. The prospect of attending the birth didn’t worry me; I have high tolerance for other people’s pain. But I was skittish about getting attached to the baby during preparations for its arrival. It had grown conveniently remote from me with each interval of noncontact with its mother. And since seeing Susan less, my material fortunes had soared. I was superstitious about altering the balance.
She insisted. Despite her tough talk about having and supporting the child alone, she wanted a partner to give the process normalcy. The nearer her due date, the crankier she became. It was her old manner again, vulnerability countered with punitive measures, though this time its cause wasn’t her embarrassing (to her) sexual submissiveness, but rather, to quote Susan, “the goddamn kid and its asshole father.” I was drawn to the baby as a fellow conspirator. When, during our second Lamaze class, she cussed the baby while huffing through her exercises, I kissed her basketball belly and said, “Don’t talk to my child that way!” Susan’s eyes flared combatively. Then she smiled. What she wanted, I think she realized at that moment, was the natural bond of a mother and father and child, the bond most people achieve without trying. All her good sense was against it. All emotion in favor.
Carrie had abandoned Timmy and was holed up at a friend’s place waiting for me to marry her. Not for love or because I’m so great, but because at the time her mind was more muddled than mine; she even forgot to resume birth control after she left her husband. I didn’t believe it either. I believed she’d got herself pregnant to lock us together first as parents and then as man and wife. And I probably would have fallen for it had I not just been through it with Susan. I wouldn’t be bullied this time. I quickly wore down Carrie’s delusions of motherhood, even had her agreeing that abortion was in everyone’s interest, not least the baby’s.
Timmy, dumped again, didn’t fall into the weepy depression that had followed their earlier split. He was downright snide in the last of our business dealings, acting as if I had no cause to transfer my portfolio to another brokerage when it was his own inflated self-importance that was forcing me to do it. Finally I said, “It’s business, Timmy. We had a nice ride, now it’s over. You must seek your fortune alone.”
“Good riddance, Phil.”
With sadness I realized the kindly pothead I’d known in college was dead. I’d created a monster. “Don’t be an ingrate, Timmy. I made you a lot of money.”
“You? Or Peter Rice?”
Created a monster indeed—with power to kill its creator!
He grinned, watching my reaction. “Don’t worry, Phil. I’m just as guilty as you, for letting these dirty deals happen. For taking advantage.”
“And don’t you forget it.”
Thelma Donley and Frank Bakes were on the bench in the outside lobby. Frank had become a regular here, watching his wealth replicate with the glee of a kid breeding hamsters. I wasn’t keen on seeing Thelma, thinking Timmy might have turned her against me. Frank hollered me over: “You Philly! Come see something!” He and Thelma had started dating and evidently had got serious. He lifted her hand to show me her emerald ring.
“Congratulations. What’d you do, Frank, hit the number?”
He gave me a wink. “My stocks are killer. I don’t know why.”
“It’s your broker,” Thelma said. She knew nothing, bless her. “My Timmy is a genius.”
Frank said to me, “Tomorrow I go with Telma to the flower shop. We get new Cadillac in morning and so Melina and Nikos will see how I am success. And with a hot woman!” Thelma laid her head on his shoulder. “I will forgive them, Philly. I am ten times their shit now. I owe this to you.”
“You mean Timmy,” Thelma corrected him.
“Of course.” He winked again. “Teemy!”
That night I met Susan for our third Lamaze class. I still had no car, so bused to the hospital where the classes were held. The instructor guided our group, as integrated as Sesame Street, through the birthing rooms and maternity ward. We saw some babies behind a big window that was like an aquarium wall, the newborn babies like larval sea creatures, sleeping and crying in a sort of dense silence. Susan took my hand as we watched. I thought of Carrie; her abortion was scheduled for tomorrow. I hoped she wasn’t alone on this eve, but better alone than here, seeing these. I felt like a dispassionate angel watching lives on earth unfold simultaneously, Susan’s and Carrie’s and babies’ born and unborn. It was a lousy feeling—so exhausting knowing the future. The maternity ward was warm and my hand in Susan’s sweated. She didn’t seem to mind. We were intimates for better or worse, for now.
She was due in four weeks. And though clearly her heart had softened toward me, she still mingled need with autocratic standoffishness in her bid to be superwoman. Nothing captured her contradictions more than when, over coffee after that third Lamaze class (hers decaf, mine Irish), she gave me a telephone beeper to wear, with instructions to call her whenever it beeped. “It’ll mean my contractions have started. You drive to Neil’s house, pick me up, and we’ll go have this kid. But call first, so I’ll know you’re on the way.”
“I thought we could meet at the hospital.”
“You want me to drive myself? I’ll only be in agony. Maybe I should hitchhike. Maybe I should jog.”
“Maybe Neil could drive you, since you’re living there.”
“The father of my child can’t be bothered?”
“I don’t have a car, is the problem.”
“I told you to buy one!” True; and it was a command I’d gladly obeyed. Public transportation had lost its charm for me.
“I’ve ordered a BMW. I take delivery in two months.”
“I take delivery in one! You rent something, goddamn it. I could pop any minute.”
I finished my coffee. “They do have a Porsche for lease.”
Susan wanted to test the beeper. She went to the pay phone and dialed the call numbers. On the table the beeper beeped in squeaky bursts like a burglar alarm in Lilliput. I’ve since heard that sound in nightmares.
Wh
en I got back to my place I telephoned Carrie. “All set for tomorrow?”
“Oh sure.”
“You’ll pick me up when?” Since I had no car, we’d planned for Carrie to drive to my place. Then I would take over so she could relax on the ride to and from the abortion clinic.
“Five o’clock. They’re open late Fridays.” She gave a hard laugh. “Like a bank.”
“It’s for the best, Carrie. We’re not fit to be parents together.”
“It goes against everything I believe in. For other people, I think abortion is their own private business. For me, I think it’s wrong. It’s murder,” she said, her voice cracking.
“A little murder.”
“Whatsat mean?”
“You pull a garden seedling, it’s a little murder. You chop down a sequoia, it’s heinous.” I’d given the matter some thought, knowing Carrie would want comfort. “It’s like in geometry, a point as compared to a line. A point has no dimension. It has no past or future. In itself it doesn’t exist.”
“A baby has a future.”
“A six-week-old fetus does not.”
“It could!”
“Its future belongs to you. It’s your choice.”
She took time to consider. “I am barely pregnant.”
“Exactly. It’s one life at this point. Yours. Take charge of it.” This last was a low blow—an inability to take charge of her life was the source of Carrie’s insecurity. Her self-esteem had grown immensely since when we’d first become lovers. My having now to destroy it was no cause for satisfaction, as once it might have been.
“You’re right. No one’s gonna drag me down, not even a baby.”
“Atta girl.”
“Philly?”
“Yes?”
She hesitated. Her voice was meek, completely regressed into helplessness. “What will we be, after tomorrow? Will we be lovers or friends or what?”
Up, Down and Sideways Page 11
