“On it, Mom,” Ronbeck mutters, hitting speed dial to the market maker.
“Don’t let him hear the fear in your voice,” Dooner yells, dropping down in his chair. “Or we’re royally fucked.”
Supply and demand, testosterone and poker make a market. The gospel according to Dooner. I tell the back of his head, his thick freckled neck bulging out of a stained Thomas Pink collar, “I can’t take the heat.”
“Get out of the kitchen,” he says impatiently, furiously typing away on the keyboard. “Global warming.”
“I think it’s part of a natural heat wave,” I say. “My grandma’s first memory is sitting on the back porch at Cage’s Bend with my great-grandmother, who had just barely survived the flu epidemic of 1918 when tens of thousands of Americans dropped like flies. It was Christmas and so hot that the roses were blooming four months early.”
“Roses are late bloomers.” Dooner sighs, glances over his shoulder, keeps on tapping keys. “They weren’t blooming early. They were blooming late.”
Aidan Dooner and I designed a black box that assures institutional investors trading large blocks of stock that they will get the volume-weighted average price, or better than VWAP, on any trading day. Pennies a share add up to millions. Our team is the program trading desk of the Union Bank of Luxembourg, which guarantees our trades with a two-billion-dollar intraday credit line. There are only eight of us, nine counting Asgar, but he’s on a short-term contract. We’re a plug-and-play operation. We’ve been with other houses, we’re going to a Hong Kong bank soon, taking a lot of our clients with us. Dooner’s the senior partner. He had the prototype. Two and a half years ago I got an equity stake in the start-up by quitting my job and writing code for nine months, then helping him pitch it on the Street. Dooner’s the Heavy Quant, the mathematical genius who sees market applications in fractal sets, stochastics, the Fibonacci sequence. I’m just a glorified Asgar.
“Asgar.” Five feet from his desk I raise my hand toward the windows, several hundred square miles of New Jersey, and say slowly, “One day all this will be yours.”
Asgar frowns, furrows his brow.
I peer into his eyes. “If you give me your soul.”
“Okay, Harper.” Asgar smiles. “E-mail, okay?”
At my desk I adjust the chair and consider e-mailing him Satan’s proposition but I want to get out of here as fast as possible. I ought to run home along the park by the Hudson, sweat out some of last night’s toxins in the sticky breeze. Every afternoon I think of jogging in the twilight but never remember to bring shorts and shoes. By the time I make it home by taxi or the subway, all I want is a beer. Dooner follows the important baskets through the day, intervening at times to lock in a trade, but lately I’ve been letting the box do it. He says I’ve developed a lame-duck attitude while the negotiations are going on, and he’s right. As soon as we jump ship, we’ll be working twice as hard trying to impress our new partners with our execution quality. I tell him that I’m saving my ammo for the firefight on the horizon. I watch the box closing my last trades, then stand up in my chair and look out the window. A thousand feet below, someone by the Merchant Marine statue has collapsed in the heat. A crowd is gathering. I hear the traders shouting as the markets close, sink back to my chair, pack a dip in my lip, start clearing the eight thousand trades from my station.
“Ronbeck!” I hear Dooner yell.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“IBM?”
“It’s on the tape,” Ronbeck says.
The elevator is crowded and a virtual sauna. Dooner seems to take up most of the space, dripping in the middle like he just walked off a rugby pitch. Descending fast through the tower, he says loudly, “Remember flying into Kyrgyzstan?”
“Fadies and gentlemen, ve are about to set down in Bishkek,” I mimic the Lufthansa pilot. “To adjust your vatches to zee local time, please set zem back zirty years.”
Dooner laughs.
The other twenty people in the sauna are silent.
Dooner hasn’t mentioned Kyrgyzstan in ages. Five years ago he hired me for a team he led to set up stock exchanges in Moldova, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. Dooner’s thirty-five, six years older than me.
“Gets old doing the same thing every day,” I say.
“Not to me,” Dooner says. “It’s war. The fucking Big Board. Protecting their stocks from the world. One day those licensed thieves are going to fall like a house of cards.”
Dooner believes if he can perfect the box, we can sell it for ten million, plus a million a year for the two of us to keep adapting it to subtle changes in the markets. We split seventy-thirty. I believe Dooner. I’m his highly paid apostle. If we cash out big, Dooner will go on to create something bigger. I’ll just travel for a few years. Theoretically I would like to sleep with women of diverse ethnicities in their original environments. A Nubian in the Nubia, for instance. A Roman in Rome. Ideally you would live with them for a few months, a season, for, as the Italians say, a story. I picture Tatiana brushing her pale hair off her blue eyes in Moscow, Katinka’s dark eyes and sweet smile in Bishkek. They were both carefree, lusty girls. We still correspond. They’re married now. They still long to come to America. Now with their families. Right up front I told them I wasn’t looking for a wife but for someone to share my bed, dinners, weekend getaways. They hoped first secretly then openly that I would fall in love—the ambition that the expat exploits. I send Katinka’s kid to kindergarten. Got pictures of her little family on my refrigerator. Maybe if we cash out big, I’ll help them immigrate to the promised land.
“What you up to tonight?” Dooner has circles of sweat beneath his armpits. Rivulets stream out of his thatch of red hair down his forehead and sideburns.
“Drinks with one girl and dinner with another.”
“Hundred bucks both of them have dark hair and big tits like that picture of your mommy on your desk.”
A woman beside Dooner looks at him distastefully. The elevator door opens. The lobby is still crowded at six o’clock but slightly cooler.
“Keep your money.” I angle a shoulder between two guys in suits going too slowly.
“Am I right?” Dooner doesn’t slide through the throngs of suits. They seem to sense the big silver back from behind, give him wide berth. He always steps aside for ladies.
“No. Two blondes.” I give up and stroll behind him, let him run interference through the crowd.
“You’re making a conscious effort to break the pattern.” Over his shoulder he asks, “Betsy Sloan?”
“Bat Girl Betsy,” I say. “Fast creature of the night.”
“I’ve got to stop introducing you to dangerous older women. It’s starting to fuck with your work ethic.” Outside, Dooner offers me a Marlboro Light. “Thinking stick?”
“I’ve switched to dip entirely now,” I say, trying to decide if it’s hotter out here.
“Statistically I’m not sure that’s a good move.”
“Right, Mom.” Walking across the plaza, I tell him, “I’m going out to San Francisco to track Cage down.”
Dooner draws on his cigarette, then pushes his hand away from his face, a sell signal on the floor, which means he thinks it’s a bad idea. “He could be in Mexico or Canada by the time you get there.”
“Yeah, statistically it’s useless but I feel obligated. I promised my mama. And my granny. And my uncle right before he died.”
Dooner nods, perhaps thinking about his own brother who has been in and out of rehab clinics. “Bad timing with Hong Kong hanging in the balance.” A block east of the towers, he flags down a cab on Church Street.
“You don’t need me to close the deal.”
“When are you leaving?” He opens the door.
“Monday. Tuesday. Cage hasn’t called for money for ten days. I might hear from him Saturday. It’s his birthday.”
“Want a lift?”
“Nah, I want to sweat like a pig. Walk up the river.”
“Like Jesus?” Dooner smiles,
tosses his thinking stick.
“Where you going?”
“Dinner at Cipriani in SoHo with Nicola,” Dooner says, tall against the taxi. The great silver back is a serial monogamist. In the five years I’ve known him he has only been unfaithful to his girlfriend twice, two years apart, both rare coke-fueled nights with a billionaire client who forced a goddess-for-hire on him, more out of desire to accept the man’s hospitality than to fornicate. He’s faithful to an attractive, smart girlfriend for a year or two and then he can’t close the trade. They leave because he’s too obsessed with his work. Maneuvering his wide frame into the cab, he says, “Get in early.”
Betsy Sloan has a huge natural rack, not unlike my mama’s, Dooner would point out. Across 10th Street, at thirty feet, those two globes dominate your field of vision, then your eyes take in her hourglass figure in a tight skirt and matching jacket and helmet of light hair set in the CNN studio that frames her wide cheekbones. Betsy may very well be a textbook nymphomaniac but she doesn’t suffer from female orgasmic disorder. She’s the most orgasmic girl I’ve ever met. She comes six times a night, minimum. She was the attack forward on the Stanford lacrosse team. Two weeks ago we were boogie boarding sizable waves off Bermuda. I was getting hammered, rolled over and crushed, thrashed against the bottom, and nearly drowned. Betsy would watch as the wave peaked and started to curl over her head, then paddle fast, screaming, “Come on, motherfucker!” and ride the big ones all the way to the shore. Bat Girl Betsy, the roving reporter. She was an investment banker at Goldman. Lust for fame took her to CNN. Twenty feet away she doesn’t look in my direction and I don’t call out. She prances on high heels like a Tennessee walker three steps up into Il Cantinori.
I follow her in. The air is icy, the first Louisiana-style air-conditioning I’ve felt all day. When I come in, Alfredo is kissing both of her cheeks, letting his hand glide down the curve of her back and her ass in the Italian fashion. I’m fairly sure he’s gay. He must figure that the female clientele like to be groped. Or maybe he likes the light, quick touch of a woman’s flesh through the safety of fabric. He spots me and says, “Ciao, Harper.”
“Ciao, Alfredo.”
Betsy turns and beams. Her eyes look naughty, like she’s already done a couple of bumps. She could have already fucked one of her ex-boyfriends, too. I don’t care and I can’t take the moral high ground. I’m freshly showered after wrestling a long, tall twenty-year-old debutramp named Laura Day from Tuxedo Park. It took about an hour to get her off. The girl must achieve orgasm. That’s my guiding principle between the sheets. Truly, I feel absolutely miserable if she doesn’t.
“Look at his jeans, Alfredo.” Betsy nods at my knees, the blue denim almost white. “I’ve got to buy this boy some Levi’s.”
“Ah, but his jacket.” Alfredo runs his hand down the lapel of my green Otesta linen blazer. “More than makes up for them.”
“Hungry?” Betsy pulls me against her bosom, kisses me on the mouth, tracing her tongue across my lips.
“Starving.”
Alfredo leaves us at a table by the window.
“Geraldo invited me out to his beach house next weekend.”
I have no reason to believe that is true. “Bring back a lock of his mustache.”
“He’s married.”
“That never stopped you.”
Two Stoli greyhounds arrive at the table, anticipating our order.
“Thanks.” Betsy bats her eyelashes at the waiter, then turns to me. “Don’t be unkind.”
I take a big swallow of my drink. Betsy’s father squandered a fortune and looked down on her for going to Harvard Business School. He was an alcoholic who never worked a day in his life. Betsy’s mother left him for a girl who cleaned their pool. Her dad died of a heart attack a few years ago. I spit an ice cube back in the glass and say, “Do you think that you like sex so much because your father didn’t love you?”
“What do you mean ‘like sex so much’?” Betsy still has on a thick layer of TV makeup. It’s disconcerting, almost like talking to a mask.
“Let’s face it. We’re both sex addicts. Us. Clinton. We’re a sign of the times.”
“Clinton is slime and scum. And I’m not talking about cigars. He and Hillary are evil. They’ve had people knocked off.”
“Bat Girl, my darling.” I lift the hem of the tablecloth from the floor to my knees and reach beneath for her right foot, take off the shoe, start massaging. “I believe that I am a sex addict because I’m angry at my mother, who put a lot of pressure on me to succeed. I think that’s why I cannot settle down with one woman and be true to her, this anger at my mother.”
“Sounds simplistic.” Betsy purrs as I massage. She runs around all day in high heels covering the Street on camera. I don’t see why she can’t wear trainers. You never see TV reporters’ feet. Vanity over sanity. I stuff a piece of focaccia in my mouth with one hand, take a swig of my greyhound, then use both thumbs to knead her arch.
“Were you always worried that your father didn’t love you as much as your other sisters?”
“Yes.” She sips from her glass, closes her eyes.
“When you think of your father, what images come to mind?” I rub two of her toes at a time with my thumbs and first fingers.
“I see him cuddling Jenny.” Without opening her eyes she raises her left foot to my thigh. As I begin to rub it, she grinds her right foot in my crotch.
“How far away are you from them?”
“Harper, do you want to make me cry?”
“Not here.”
She opens one eye.
“I never want to make you cry,” I say. “I want you to feel good.”
“You’re such a sweet boy.” She smiles with her eyes, her lips slightly parted.
“Boy, who you callin’ boy?” I imitate Grandpa Cage’s gracious baritone. I’ve lost much of my Louisiana accent in the six years since I left the South. “My dear Elisabeth, you are a mere five years my senior.” Which is a lie. I peeked at her passport in Bermuda. She’s thirty-seven. I’m starting to get hard, so I put her feet gently back on the floor. “I do believe you have aroused me something considerable.”
Betsy sits up perfectly straight, anchor posture, leans forward, and smiles. “Want some of that bad stuff?”
“It’s almost eight-thirty. Sun’s long over the yardarm,” I say. “A bump before dinner can be stimulating to the appetite.”
We are about to go to the toilet together when a waiter arrives. I order a Caesar salad. Betsy orders the fifty-dollar veal. Then we get up and meander through the tables, smile at Alfredo, and go down the steps to the basement. I open the door to a toilet for her, then lock it behind us.
Betsy is at the mirror, her head tilted back, holding a key to her nose. I move beside her, watch her scoop another bump from a plastic bag on the sink, hoover it up her sharp nose.
“This morning Dooner made me promise that I wouldn’t get dirty tonight,” I say ruefully.
“He’s a genius, your partner.” Betsy presses her cleavage into my sternum, holding the key high.
In the mirror I see that my face has not begun to fatten up like the rest of my body but my eyes look puffy from a week of vodka nights. In the bright light and heavy makeup Betsy looks like a parody of herself, sexy in a strange circuslike way. I tilt my head back, glide the key to my nose in the mirror, clamp one nostril shut with my left forefinger. It burns as it hits the sensitive red skin inside. I grimace and load up the key. Betsy slides her hand softly down the back of my head. I numb out the other side of my nose, feel the little lift of energy, and my palms begin to sweat.
“That’s it.” I kiss Betsy’s cheek, put my arm around her waist. “Don’t want to ruin my appetite.”
She loads up the key. “You sure?”
“Yeah, baby. Go for it.”
Betsy whips the key to her nose, snorts it up, then puts her key and the gram bag in her change purse. She turns and places her arms around my back, slides her kne
e under my crotch, and squeezes my leg between hers, which are nearly as heavy as mine, all toned muscle, and rolls her hips round and round, rubbing against my zipper.
“I thought so.” She stoops, unzips my pants, and pulls my dick out. “You have a great cock.”
You ought to be an informed judge, I almost say. “You had me hard back at the table.”
“Why did you think I wanted to come down here?” She laughs. “Blow?”
Hunkering on her high heels, one hand on the sink, she puts me in her mouth.
“You like them circumcised, don’t you?” I look down at the top of her head. The only dark roots are in the center, the little round spot where the hair grows out in all directions, the same medium brown as her bush. She probably spends a thousand a month on her colorist uptown.
“That’s not a courtly question.” She glances up. Her unguarded smile is unusually warm and friendly. Her eyes seem to say, I love you. You are just like me. Don’t we have an exciting time together? “But, actually, yes, I do.”
She takes it deep in her throat. Her warm saliva feels heavenly.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I touch her shoulder. She draws slowly up, raises her head, and I fall back into myself.
Someone turns the door handle from the outside.
“Do you?” She licks her lips.
“I’m hard as a rock and you look so beautiful down there.”
She pushes me over to a little padded bench opposite the mirror. I slip off my linen blazer and spread it on the floor.
“Such a southern gentleman,” Betsy says as I sit down on the bench and lean back. She kneels on the jacket and parts my legs, unbuckles my Levi’s, and pulls them down to my knees.
“How pretty you are. Such a big boy.” Betsy cups my balls with one hand, leans forward. “Shame that Harper never named you.” She places her mouth on me, slides slowly up and down. “Mmmmm.”
“Aaahh.” I rest my head against the wall, letting the tension of making Laura come without coming myself—after an hour I simply couldn’t release—wash out of my neck down through my shoulders and chest into the head of my penis. I open my eyes and glance down at her cleavage, the breasts touching, swelling beneath her jacket. I wonder, as I have countless times, why the image excites me. Did I imprint on my mother’s so young that the image is embedded, deep and strong in my subconscious? The only tangible reason I can muster as proof of the existence of God is that some higher power must have created the beauty of the breast. Scientists describe tits as secondary sexual characteristics. A therapist told me that they are designed to resemble buttocks, which Homo sapiens are programmed to target for the perpetuation of the species. Breasts are butts. The little dimple on my chin is a little butt. That’s why Betsy likes it so much. A cross-species comparison is the bladder that a female camel blows out of her mouth and inflates, a big red balloon, to attract randy male camels. Secondary sexual characteristics.
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