Rosemary walked back to the living room and lowered herself and her boys onto the sofa. She put them on the sofa, one on each side, pulled off her T-shirt, scooped them back up, and applied one to each breast. In seconds they were slurping contentedly.
Positano Software was down another twenty-five cents that morning—she’d taken to logging on to Yahoo Finance to check up on it whenever the twins were sleeping. That still left more than enough to buy the apartment—more than enough on paper, that is, and the operative word was finance the apartment, since buying implied an actual exchange of money and they wouldn’t be parting with a cent.
The whole idea of buying/financing a new place in this climate made her incredibly uneasy, but she was eager nonetheless to see the apartment Lucinda had found. She looked down at her boys, milking her dry. Soon they’d need high chairs and big-boy toys—where would all that go? They were growing so quickly. She imagined them inflated like balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, engorged on her milk until they no longer fit in the small apartment, their plump arms and thighs forced out the windows like icing through a pastry bag. Yuck, as Lucinda would say. She spotted the phone in the seat of one of the baby swings and decided she’d call Lucinda as soon as the boys fell into their postprandial nap.
Three
Guy Pierce loved the moment when people first entered his corner office at Positano Software. Like the woman from Goldman Sachs—what was her name? He checked the card she’d just handed him. Kristin Liu, Vice President, Private Client Investment Services. She’d probably walked into his smallish office on the third floor of a nondescript East Twenties building thinking, Nothing special. Thinking, I should have insisted that he come downtown to us, maybe offered lunch. And then she saw the tank.
“Wow,” said Kristin Liu. “Amazing. Incredible.”
They always reacted like that to the huge aquarium that formed most of the wall between his office and the main conference room. Nine hundred gallons of salt water, state-of-the-art filtration system, fifteen different breeds of fish, nine types of coral. Practically an entire saltwater reef, right in the center of Manhattan. Positano’s architect had been against the idea, and the CFO, a twitchy bean counter named Henry Delano, had been appalled by the cost (the floor had to be specially reinforced, the tank custom-built, and he’d been particularly enraged by the Indonesian Fighting Fish—Christ, even Le Bernardin doesn’t get a hundred bucks a fish). He’d almost resigned when he learned of the $25,000 owed to the aquarist who’d designed, installed, and stocked the tank. The fucking aquarist is more profitable than we are! But the tank impressed the hell out of potential customers, and it gave employees a lift, just knowing that a company that hadn’t existed five years ago could have the coolest office accessory in town. Hell, even a Prada-clad banker from Goldman Sachs couldn’t take her eyes off it.
“How long have you had this?” she asked.
“Since we moved in four months ago.”
“Just after the IPO—I guess that’s one use of proceeds that didn’t find its way into the prospectus.”
He forced a chuckle. Was she being censorious about the extravagance of the tank or just making a little joke?
“Clients love it,” he said.
“I’m sure they do.” Kristin Liu looked elegantly slender in a sleek black pantsuit. She had shoulder-length, bluntly cut, glossy black hair and wore rectangular glasses with thick black rims. Banker-cool. Chinese, he guessed. Half the bankers on the IPO were either Chinese or Indian. In the new Positano corporate brochure, a fifty-two-page four-color, embossed, de-bossed, and die-cut extravaganza (another use of proceeds), many of the photographs showed Asian people in front of monitors, at airports, in meetings. Asians signaled intelligence, globality, and tech-savviness, the brochure’s designer had told him. The new Jews.
Kristin Liu sat on the gray faux-suede sofa across from his desk and he took an armchair facing her.
“I thought I’d begin with an overview of what we do in Private Client Investment Services,” she said. “PCIS,” she added with a prim smile.
He nodded for her to begin, though he already knew what PCIS was all about: making rich folks richer. Goldman hadn’t been one of Positano’s IPO underwriters—Positano wasn’t quite up to snuff for the tier-one bankers like Goldman and Morgan Stanley, especially after the Internet bubble had burst. But now that the company was public, bankers with the whitest of shoes were all over him. He had three million shares of a public company—snuff enough even for Goldman.
She took a large, comb-bound pitch book from a sleek leather briefcase and began turning the laminated pages as she launched into a canned presentation. He didn’t pay much attention. Instead, he considered, with some pleasure, how his situation had changed in five short years. Back then he was a lowly systems manager at a brokerage firm, toiling anonymously in the Secaucus processing center. Secaucus! Talk about back office: hundreds of pallid techies tending networked computers in row after row of small, airless cubicles. The veal farm, they’d called it. The likes of Kristin Liu, wining and dining clients, investing billions of their capital, barely knew the place existed. Client statements were produced, mailed, archived—who even stopped to consider how it all got done? Not Kristin Liu with her thousand-dollar pantsuits and killer eyewear.
His assistant, Dinitia Siting, poked her head in. “Guy, Rosemary’s on the phone.”
He apologized to Kristin Liu and picked up the phone next to the sofa.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“I found an apartment,” she said. He could hear the twins wailing in the background and felt a guilty sense of relief that he wasn’t there. “It needs some work…”
She sounded more wary than enthusiastic. Rosemary simply had no faith in the future of Positano’s stock. Yes, it had taken a nauseating dive in recent months, but fluctuations went with the territory. The company was on track to achieve profitability in two years, revenues were doubling every six months…true, there would be no secondary offering anytime soon (the market just wasn’t ready), but he had Goldman Sachs sitting right there next to the saltwater reef, ready to make virtually any amount of money available to them.
“Great, when can I see it?”
“Lucinda, the broker, thinks we need to make an offer quickly—if we’re going to make an offer. Otherwise she’s going to schedule an open house next week.”
“I’ll look at it tonight, then. Why don’t you set it up. I’m in a meeting now…”
“You haven’t asked how much.”
I’ve got Goldman Fucking Sachs here, honey. Who cares how much?
Trying to sound interested, he asked, “How much?”
“Two million three hundred thousand dollars.” She dragged out each syllable, as if she were writing the figure on a check.
“Okay, that’s in our range.” He smiled indulgently at Kristin Liu. Perhaps sensing Rosemary’s anxiety, the twins’ wailing escalated.
“Try to set it up for tonight, then,” he said. “I have to go. Love you!”
He hung up and looked at his visitor. “My wife thinks she’s found our dream home. But she’s nervous about the price.”
“It’s a strong real-estate market,” Kristin Liu said. “Real-estate values trail equities by a year or more, in our experience.”
Our experience. She was probably twelve when the last bear market hit.
“But we have strategies that could make her more comfortable with your situation. I was just getting to the zero-cost collar—are you familiar with that?”
A banker from Morgan had already trudged through it with him. Basically, you locked in, or collared, a floor price for your stock in return for giving up most of the upside potential. It cost you nothing, the ultimate hedge for executives with all their wealth tied up in their company’s stock.
“When Rosemary and I met, I was writing code for an investment firm,” he said. “I don’t think our new…situation has completely sunk in with her.”
Kr
istin Liu took off her glasses and leaned forward. “Would it help if I walked her through this presentation?” she asked with the soothing, slightly impatient tone of an oncologist addressing the spouse of a mortally ill patient. Guy almost laughed. Just the mention of a zero-cost collar would send Rosemary into fits of insecurity. In Rosemary’s world, nothing came without a cost, certainly not collars.
“I don’t think that would help. I think it’s more…”
Without her glasses Kristin Liu looked suddenly, unexpectedly hot. She was intimidating in that Asian, smartest-kid-in-the-class way, but the absence of eyewear humanized her somewhat. Her skin was flawless, and her tiny, nearly round mouth seemed perpetually on the verge of a chaste but promising kiss. He checked her left hand: no wedding ring. Five years ago such a woman would have had nothing to do with him. He was acceptably handsome, he supposed, but a haze of disappointment had trailed him like body odor as he trudged out to the Secaucus veal farm by subway and PATH train, dressed in ill-fitting polo shirts and khakis back when dressing like a slob wasn’t yet a New Economy status symbol. Now he was CEO of a highflying technology firm with three million publicly traded shares and New York’s largest tropical fish tank in his office, and though his wardrobe hadn’t changed much (Who had time to shop? Who cared?), he’d noticed that women reacted differently to him, a sexual energy seemed to animate conversations with women these days, an energy he’d never noticed before—because it hadn’t been there! Kristin Liu, for example, was gazing so intently at him just then, so seductively, he thought, that he had to cross and then uncross his legs just to disguise his growing interest.
“I used to feel a million miles from the real business of the firm,” he said, sensing that she was eager to hear his tale of rags to riches—or back office to front office. “I was out in New Jersey making sure monthly statements and year-end tax forms went out on time, while you…I mean, the bankers, were making million-dollar decisions before breakfast and taking wealthy investors to Lutèce and the Four Seasons.”
She nodded and squinted sympathetically. He recalled reading that Lutèce wasn’t considered wonderful anymore—was it even open?—and felt a twinge of the old insecurity.
“I graduated near the top of my class at Columbia, a math major. I never thought I’d end up in a code-writing factory in New Jersey. I felt like I’d never get out of there. Then I got a call, five and a half years ago, from a managing director. Apparently a few customers—excuse me, clients—were starting to send e-mails to their brokers. Some of these clients had never even met their brokers face-to-face, they’d inherited them along with the fifty mil in Daddy’s estate. Daddy never owned a computer, but his kids did, and they wanted to move their relationship with their brokers online. So the brokers suddenly had these annoying messages waiting for them in the morning, full of annoying questions about earnings per share and dividend yields, and they couldn’t keep up. So they asked me to design a program that would automatically send back an e-mail saying, you know, the basic bullshit: ‘Thank you for your important and keenly insightful inquiry. We’re working on getting the information you need and will respond as soon as we can, so please don’t send us any other fucking messages, okay?’”
Kristin began to squirm. Too bad for her. He loved telling the story of Positano’s beginning the same way Rosemary liked relating the twins’ births: that first, twin-revealing sonogram, the rush to Mount Sinai six weeks ahead of schedule, the last-minute C-section. Positano’s birth was no less dramatic.
“It took me about five months to design that program. A real beauty, though kind of basic compared to what came after. E-mail messages were automatically sent, the brokers returned to…to their four-star restaurants, and I settled back into my cube in New Jersey without so much as a thank you from anyone on Park Avenue. And then, one night, I couldn’t sleep.”
He loved this part, his Eureka moment, and didn’t care whether Kristin Goldman Sachs was interested or not.
“I was tossing and turning when it hit me. What if I sold the program I’d designed to other companies? Everyone and his grandmother was selling shit online. My little program could handle incoming e-mail without human intervention. Complaints, order inquiries, you name it. A week later I gave notice, hocked myself and Rosemary up to our eyeballs to buy the hardware I needed, and basically re-created the e-mail program I’d developed for the brokerage house in our living room. My first customer was AutoTrade.com. Once I had their endorsement, things really took off and the venture funding started to flow.”
“Fascinating,” Kristin Liu said in the same unfathomable tone she’d used to praise the tank. She turned a page in her pitch book, but he wasn’t done.
“I keep reading that the Internet has unleashed this creative force in the world, that’s its changing the entire economy, but when I go to trade shows and technology investor conferences, you know what I think?”
She cocked her head and moved the pitch book a few inches closer to her, as if preparing to defend it.
“I think the Internet has been the salvation of guys like me. It’s moved us from the back office to the front office, right to the top of the food chain. Math majors, code jockeys, computer nerds—we’re cool now, I’m cool now.”
She didn’t respond. Well, he could hardly expect her to offer an endorsement.
“Some people think the Internet’s peaked,” he said. “That’s bullshit, of course, it’s just the stock market talking. We haven’t even seen what the Net can do. We’re working on the third release of our Sorrento product, which automatically scans incoming e-mails for designated key words, maps them along predetermined quadrants, and develops a customized response…within seconds! I’ve got customers lined up out the door waiting for it.”
She glanced doorward, then back at him.
“If I had to go back to the veal farm, if this was all some kind of Brigadoon thing, I think I’d die a slow death, like a plant without light.”
“But you won’t have to,” she said, reseizing the conversational thread. “We have strategies for locking in the value of your assets now. Forever.” She thrust the pitch book toward him.
“I don’t want to hedge my bets. Positano is a great company, it’s got a great future. Why would I give up the upside just to play it safe?”
“You don’t have to hedge your entire investment in Positano. We can arrange a strategy that—”
“I’m not hedging a single share.”
She considered this a beat, then flipped over several pages of the pitch book. She was Goldman Sachs and probably had an MBA from Harvard, but he had three million shares of a publicly traded company.
“Let’s talk real-estate loans,” she said.
The red-eyed vireo alit on a maple branch so fragile it seemed a miracle it didn’t snap. But the branch dipped gracefully, then swung back to its original position.
Lily Grantham wondered what it felt like to execute a graceful plié on so slender a branch. She adjusted her binoculars and tried to read the vireo’s expression. It looked wary and rather satisfied but hardly thrilled. Birds were hard to read, which is what she admired about them. She’d never liked dogs or cats, with their transparent tail-wagging and purring, so cheesily gratifying to people who required that kind of thing. Birds were elusive and inscrutable, they lived among us, but they remained apart, resourceful and independent.
This was the first red-eyed vireo she’d seen all year. She was in the Rambles, the remotest and wildest section of Central Park, which she visited several times a week with her top-of-the-line 12X36 image stabilizing binoculars and a sandwich. She was aware of other bird-watchers, many of whom seemed to be there every day, huddling in small groups to share their latest sitings. She eschewed this camaraderie, which seemed antithetical to the whole idea of bird watching. Socializing, in Lily’s opinion, was very un-birdlike.
The red-eyed vireo remained obligingly still as she admired its subtle coloring, that patch of mauve under its throat that signale
d its maleness, the dusky brown of its tail feathers. A few weeks earlier, she’d seen the first grosbeaks of the year, the finches. The pair of red-tailed hawks over at 960 Fifth, where the Zelwins had their duplex, would be fortifying their nest on the ninth-floor balcony in preparation for the spring breeding season. Such seasonal inevitability depressed her in most contexts, but with birds she found it reassuring. Why they returned to Manhattan, which struck her as inhospitable to all living creatures except the very rich, she couldn’t imagine.
A voice intruded on her solitary contemplation, trilling the words “red-eyed vireo.” She lowered her binoculars and saw two middle-aged women several yards away, just a few feet from the maple tree, their binoculars trained upward. She felt robbed, violated, and found herself wondering, irritably, what kind of life the two women had that they could spend what her mother would call a perfectly good afternoon watching birds. That this was precisely what she was doing with her ample free time only fanned the fire of her irritation. Soon an elderly man joined them and quickly aimed his binoculars on the red-eyed vireo, her red-eyed vireo, in response to the breathless exhortations of the women. She heard him say, “Welcome back, my little friend!” to the delight of the two women.
She felt like clocking him with her binoculars. It’s just a bird, she wanted to call out as she stood up. In fact, she didn’t particularly like birds, anxious, jumpy creatures drawn, like delusional actors, to the bright lights of Manhattan as they made their grimly regular commute up and down the Atlantic coast, hundreds of them each year colliding into the tallest buildings and plunging to the Midtown sidewalks. But for reasons she really couldn’t explain, even to herself, she liked to be among them, spying anonymously on their private, unfathomable world. She sorely wanted to take a final look at the vireo, reclaim it. But pinned in the gaze of three other pairs of lens-enhanced eyes, the vireo wasn’t the same bird she’d discovered on her own a few minutes ago. She headed home.
Closing Costs Page 3
