Closing Costs

by Seth Margolis

  A moment passed before the name rang a bell. “Oh, hi! I’m Rosemary.”

  “I’m just visiting a friend,” Peggy said, regretting the need to justify her presence in what still felt like her building. “Are you enjoying the apartment?”

  “I’ll let you know when we move in, if and when that happens.”

  “You haven’t moved in? It’s been—”

  “An eternity. We’re not even close. I’m meeting Guy, my husband, at the apartment now, with our contractor, our architect, and hopefully the electrician and plumber. Are you settled in your new place?”

  “Settled? Yes…yes we are.” Peggy thought of how remarkably settled in she and Monroe were, two transplanted shrubs already sending out roots in the new soil, despite the presence of Lily and the children and that vile baby-sitter who’d followed them like a stubborn virus. But far from feeling smug about her situation, she felt inadequate. What did it say about her life, that it could be relocated so easily and quickly, without the assistance of a contractor, architect, electrician, and plumber?

  “I’m beginning to think we should have left the apartment alone. It was in excellent condition.”

  Peggy couldn’t suppress a smile. “Well, it wasn’t always easy to—”

  “I mean, we should have stopped at skim-coating the walls, and of course the moldings had to be replaced. Guy thought the kitchen and bathrooms needed redoing, though I felt they just needed updating. It’s amazing what you can do with a bit of paint and a few potted plants and pictures to hide the cracks and blemishes. But otherwise the place was immaculate. I don’t know how you did it.”

  Peggy managed a tiny shrug, thinking: What cracks? What blemishes? One of the twins began to stir, its eyes still scrunched closed but its arms and legs flailing as if it were dreaming of tumbling through space. Replace the moldings?

  “Guy is so busy at his company, and the twins don’t exactly allow me a lot of time to play general contractor…It’s been a very stressful time, as you can imagine.”

  Peggy couldn’t begin to imagine. Rosemary did look a bit harried, though nothing that a good haircut and some makeup couldn’t take care of. Young mothers always looked as if they were just barely holding on, even the ones without careers. Perhaps it was a kind of badge of honor, the strung-out new-mother look. Peggy felt certain that she and her friends never let on that they were having trouble coping; it would have been an admission of weakness, though admittedly none of them had a career back then, let alone a general contractor. Had the double stroller even been invented in the sixties?

  “Your husband is with Positano Software,” she said. “My husband owned stock in it.”

  “Really?” Rosemary smiled warily, then rolled her eyes. “So does mine.”

  “We sold months ago, around the time we moved.”

  “Really?”

  “In the nineties you could buy anything and look like a genius. What’s it at now?”

  “At?”

  “Positano stock.”

  “Oh, I don’t really…I’m not sure.” She flushed, as if she’d been asked to reveal her weight.

  “We sold at eleven. I used to check the price every morning after we sold and think, Thank God.” Rosemary grimaced and Peggy felt a twinge of pleasure. “I don’t even look at the stock tables anymore—what’s the point?”

  “You’ll have to stop by once we’re done. If we’re done.”

  “That would be nice,” Peggy said, though she doubted she’d ever again set foot in 6D. Who needed their nose rubbed in what a contractor and architect and plumber and electrician and six and a half months had done to her old place?

  Paint and potted plants and pictures, she thought as she nodded to afternoon José at the door and left the building. Cracks and blemishes.

  At least she’d gotten in that zinger about Positano Software. Leave it to Monroe to invest in a New York company named after an Italian resort. Maybe if you were selling leather goods, or olive oil. Okay, so there was that small crack above the sofa in the living room, and maybe one in the guest bathroom over the tub no one ever used. Buildings settle over time, like cakes from the oven, and cracks appear. They hardly justified skim-coating the entire apartment, and you want to talk about cracks? That fakakta company of her husband’s had more cracks than the sidewalk. Down to one and a half bucks a share, less than bus fare. She checked every morning since selling—of course she did—just to have something to feel good about.

  Guy entered the conference room at Sycamore Partners, the venture capital firm whose founder, Dan Radakovic, sat on Positano’s board, and immediately sensed danger. The board meeting had been called at the last minute. He hadn’t been able to get in touch with Rosemary, who was probably waiting for him at the new apartment. The presence of a tie-and-jacketed stranger at the head of the large mahogany table couldn’t be a good sign. Grim expressions all around added to a sense of impending doom, as did the fact that they had obviously been meeting without him. Guy actually sniffed the air a few times upon entering, like a hunted deer.

  “Guy, welcome. Thanks for stopping by on such short notice.”

  The greeting, from Marc Gaiman of Sunrise Investments, felt perfunctory.

  “What’s up?” he asked as he sat down.

  “Guy, we’d like you to meet Mel Armitrage,” Radikovic said, gesturing to the meticulously groomed stranger at the head of the table.

  The name told the story. Mel Armitrage, a former divinity student, was CEO of Aquinas Solutions, a publicly traded holding company that had cut a giant swath across Wall Street by buying up small technology companies and promising to unlock highly profitable synergies among them. The fact that those synergies had never materialized, and that its stock, once a headline-making, jealousy-inducing $250 a share, had been marked down to the price of a small tin of Altoids, hadn’t stopped Armitrage from using his depressed currency to buy up the even cheaper shares of more technology companies.

  “We wanted you to know immediately that we’ve received an offer for Positano from Aquinas,” Gaiman said.

  “Positano’s not for sale.”

  “A very generous offer.” In the context of a board meeting to which he’d been invited as an afterthought, “generous” translated as “done deal.”

  “The company’s not for sale.”

  “We have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders. The offer is a forty percent premium over yesterday’s closing price.”

  In other words, a nickel over two bucks a share.

  “In Aquinas stock, I assume.”

  A few throats were cleared. These days, selling a company for Aquinas stock was like being paid with Confederate currency after Gettysburg.

  The door swung open and Sumner Freedman blew in on a breeze of panting self-importance.

  “Lehman’s lawyers think the FTC won’t have a problem with the antitrust issues,” he blurted, as if delivering news of an unexpected victory from the front. Then he noticed Guy. “Oh, hey,” he said. Guy glared at him. “Maybe this isn’t a good time.”

  “We have every intention of keeping the current management team in place.” Armitrage uttered the line in a bored monotone—verbal boilerplate. “And of course Positano’s headquarters will remain in New York.”

  Aquinas was based in Chicago. Of the twenty or so companies it had devoured over the past decade, the management teams of all but two or three had been replaced, and most headquarters had been “consolidated” in the Windy City. Armitrage liked to tell reporters, and anyone else who would listen, that he’d been reading Thomas Aquinas at the seminary in Oak Brook when he’d received a summons from above to start a company—no ordinary company, mind you, but a beacon of prosperity that would create value, untold value, for millions of people. Himself included, of course. Mostly himself. The next day he incorporated Aquinas Solutions and started looking for investors. The first to sign on was the archdiocese of Chicago. Two years later he was the ninth richest man in America and married to a
Wilhelmina model, though his reputation among investors was far less saintly these days, his net worth had plummeted, and there were rumors in the tabloids of trouble at home. Still, Armitrage’s rise from impoverished seminarian to NASDAQ kingpin remained a New Economy legend, almost folkloric in its power to inspire dreams, his history repeated reverently in the classrooms of business schools and the lunch rooms of veal farms from Palo Alto to Bangalore—and no doubt in the chaste dormitories of seminaries everywhere.

  “I reject this offer,” Guy said. “We’ll be cash-flow positive in fourteen months.”

  “Guy, Positano is trading at a ten percent discount to cash,” Sumner said. Guy turned to him and briefly considered a run at his throat with his Bic pen. He was visualizing blood gushing from Sumner’s carotid artery when his vibrating cell phone defibrillated him back to reality. The LCD readout showed Rosemary’s cell number. She was probably already at the new apartment, scene of his life’s other disaster.

  “The entire market is depressed,” he managed to say.

  “Guy…” Sumner began.

  “I know my name, putz.”

  Sumner’s right eyelid twitched. “Yes, well…we have thirty-five million in cash on the books. Our market cap is thirty million bucks. What the market’s saying is that our entire business model, our products and our customers and”—he coughed—“and our management team, our strategy, it’s all worth zero.”

  “Less than zero,” intoned Alan Norbertson of Greystone Ventures. Long faces and slowly nodding heads all around.

  “What investors are saying is that we’re not going to make it,” said Pete Tallyrand of Apex Unlimited. “When the cash runs out—which is expected to occur sometime next year—Positano will no longer exist.”

  “We’re offering a lifeline,” Armitrage said. “Let’s work together to make this happen, not as adversaries.” Armitrage had a narrow face, hooded eyes, tanned skin. He was good looking in an unblinking, predatory way: His habit of frequently moistening his lips with the tip of his tongue suggested a lizard eyeing a small insect.

  His phone vibrated again—this time it was that pioneer of personalized porn and Positano’s most important customer, Derek Ventnor. Despite everything that was happening, or perhaps because of it, Guy had a brief but deeply satisfying image of the four board members butt naked and forced to perform unspeakable acts on one another in the studios of Ventnor Place as millions of horny Webcasters typed in their fantasies. I wanna see you slap Tallyrand’s $500 million ass! Suck that wimp Gaiman’s micro-dick, loser! Suck it till the NASDAQ hits 4,000 again!

  “We have a strong pipeline of prospective customers,” Guy said. “We can’t keep up with the RFPs.” Particularly since two-thirds of the sales support staff had been fired.

  “Today’s investor isn’t interested in pipelines, Guy,” Norbertson said with paternalistic calm, as if instructing a young child in the rules of baseball. “The market wants cash flow.” Guy returned to the far more enjoyable show in Ventnor’s studio. Shove that big dildo up that capitalist’s ass! Make his cash flow in buckets!

  “Guy, are you with us here?” someone asked.

  “Fuck the market,” he said, standing up. “I’ll take the company private before I sell it to—” He glanced down the table, suddenly speechless at the prospect of working, however briefly, for the saurian Mel Armitrage. “To him.” He thrust a J’accusatory finger at Armitrage and headed for the door.

  “You’ll never get financing for a buyout,” Gaiman said. “We’ve explored every option already.”

  Guy considered pointing out that if Positano’s market cap was less than its cash position, it wouldn’t be difficult to arrange financing for a management buyout of the company. Positano’s cash would serve as its own collateral. But he was reluctant to interrupt what he felt was a dramatic and principled exit. So he merely flung open the door, which hit the wall with a gratifying bang, and stormed out.

  Twenty-seven

  “This candy man, he has a wested interest in keeping your husband on the run,” Mohammed observed one morning as she hung a fresh batch of newly bathed twenties on the line to dry. Increasingly, Mohammed relaxed in an old patio chair in the garage, smoking cigarette after cigarette while she scanned, printed, cut, washed, and dried. He never seemed pleased to see her, but he’d stopped complaining, treating her like a frequent visitor to be endured, if not enjoyed—a mother-in-law, perhaps. “If you prove that your husband is innocent, he will come back and reclaim you.”

  “Like dry cleaning.”

  “Do you want him to come back?”

  She avoided asking herself that question, and God knows Larry hadn’t gone near it. Barnett had become like a serious illness in remission; no one knew if or when he’d be back, so it seemed best just to avoid the topic and get on with life.

  “I want justice,” she said after a long pause, but that sounded pompous and hollow. “Well, I want our money back, our things. As for Barnett…”

  “Do you love this candy man?”

  “He’s sweet,” she said.

  “Yes, but—Oh, I see, a joke.” He offered a strained approximation of a smile.

  “I like to suck on him.”

  “Good grief, you—Oh, yes, I see, another joke. Perhaps you are awoiding the issue I raised in my question with witticisms. Do you love the candy man?”

  “You ask the tough ones, Mohammed.”

  “We are here, printing money, for which we could go to jail for a long time. Asking tough questions is easy, when you think of it.”

  “At this stage in my life I don’t ask tough questions,” she said. “I just do what I have to do.”

  “But you could do nothing about this investigation and your husband will stay in Europe and you will be with the candy man indefinitely.”

  “I would miss the…miss Larry very much if I couldn’t see him. Is that love?”

  “It is funny when you think of it.” He drew on yet another Marlboro, his lean body distending for the few seconds in which he held the smoke. “Our spouses are both abroad. Here I am, risking prison to have money to send for my wife. Your husband ran away to awoid prison. Maybe they should get together to wait and see what happens.”

  She smiled at the image of Barnett and—

  “What is your wife’s name?”

  “Kassim. She is called Kassie by most people.”

  “I hope I get to meet her one day.”

  “Oh, you will, do not doubt it.” He smiled shyly at this first admission of an ongoing relationship between them. Otherwise, each time she left him, there was no acknowledgment on his part that she’d be returning. He was like a bad boyfriend in that respect. “I have a photograph.”

  He handed her a picture from his wallet. Kassie was a small woman with dark skin, long, straight black hair, big eyes, and a broad smile. She sat, legs crossed at the ankles, on a long sofa surrounded by four boys of varying sizes who stared unsmiling at the camera, like a phalanx of bodyguards.

  “You have a beautiful family, Mohammed.”

  He took back the photo and studied it, as if to confirm her comment.

  “I hope I am doing the right thing for them,” he said.

  “Making a better life?” she said, omitting the fact that he was doing so by breaking a big-ass federal law. “How can that be wrong?”

  “Yesterday there was a stabbing at the local high school. In Guyana the schools are poor, but the students wear uniforms and no one takes a knife to anyone else. Sometimes I wonder if they are better off where they are.”

  What a sad state of affairs, when immigrants from Third World countries consider their children safer back home.

  “When I wake up at night and can’t sleep, I sit on the front steps and smoke a cigarette and worry that my sons will hate me for leaving them. Children do not concern themselves with making a better life. They only want you with them. They do not take the long perspective. And then I think, Will they hate me more when they get here? Will they th
ink it has all been worth it, or will they miss their old life and their old friends? How do you know what is the right thing to do? And Kassie, what must she be going through? At night, in fact all day long, my body desires her, it is like an ache in the joints, what I imagine it feels like to have arthritis in every joint and muscle.”

  Lily smiled sympathetically.

  “It is true, my body aches everywhere from missing her.” He held his hands in front of him and observed them clinically. “My fingers, my arms…it is like I am not getting some important nutrient or wegetable.”

  “It won’t be long before you see them.”

  “Do you think she feels the same way?” he said, still studying his fingers.

  “I’m sure she does.”

  He looked at her, brow furrowed. The thought of a wife living a thousand miles away whose body ached with lust wasn’t, perhaps, comforting.

  “I think I’m done for the day,” she said. After flicking off the scanner and shutting down the computer, she removed her apron and hung it on its customary nail, as if she’d just transferred the last batch of cookies to a rack. “Let me ask you something, Mohammed. All the checks drawn against my husband’s firm’s accounts were written while we were out of town.”

  “Ah, you are onto that again. It doesn’t look good for the candy man.”

  “Why would that be, Mohammed? Why were the checks written when we were out of town?”

  “Because it would be harder to determine that it was your husband depositing them.”

  “Yes, but Barnett traveled all the time, three or four times a month at least. The checks were written when we were both away, which was much less frequent. Why would someone care if I was out of town?”

  “Could it be coincidence?”

  She shook her head. “There were twenty-six checks, written over a period of years. It’s as if someone was tracking our movements.”

  “Perhaps your husband did cash those checks, and wanted to be in a foreign place to deposit them. Holidays with you were a perfect cover.”

  “He didn’t cash those checks.”