For the Love of Money

by Sam Polk

  “Sharktooth is a seller of twenty million more,” he yelled.

  I didn’t say anything. I’d just sent out a market, and protocol obligated me to honor both sides of that market. If I didn’t buy Sharktooth’s bonds, I’d lose face. I couldn’t buy any more bonds. I just stood there, as if I hadn’t heard. Seconds passed.

  Suddenly, the head of sales stood up. “I’ve got a buyer of twenty million at 99.375,” he said.

  “Sold to you,” I yelled. To the Sharktooth salesman I made an I’ll-take-them gesture. I’d bought and sold $20 million in bonds at the same price. I hadn’t made any money, but at least I was still in the game. I picked up the hoot. “Buyer comes in at 99.375! I have more for sale there!”

  Nothing happened. A minute passed.

  Then another salesman yelled, “I’ll take twenty million at 99.375.” I was locking in a loss; I’d purchased most of the bonds I owned at higher prices. But I needed to build momentum.

  All of a sudden, I felt the energy shift. Salesmen were listening intently into their phones. I could feel accounts sniffing around, wondering if we’d bottomed. I decided to make a ballsy move.

  I stood up and shouted into the loudspeaker, “Ninety-nine point five lock. The market moves up.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Marshall nod.

  By locking myself at a higher price, I was making a statement of confidence that the momentum had shifted. I kept a poker face, knowing that I owned $170 million in Verizon bonds. If someone came in to sell bonds here, I’d have to drop the market back down. All hope for a rally would be lost.

  I saw Chuck Henry, a salesman who covered major hedge funds, stand up two rows away. I held my breath as I saw him take the phone from his ear. The fate of this deal, I knew, lay in what his accounts were going to do now.

  Chuck was a wizened veteran. He knew how important this was. He stared at me for a second, expressionless. Then his face broke out in a smile. “I’ve got a buyer,” he finally screamed. “I’ll take ten million at 99.5.”

  “Done,” I yelled over the hoot. “I’d sell ten million more at 99.5,” I yelled. “Then I’m jacking the price up.”

  “I’ll take ’em,” someone yelled from across the room, and that was it. Momentum was crucial on a new deal, and it was now all going the right way. I moved the market up to 99.625, and another buyer came in.

  “Ninety-nine point seven five lock,” I yelled out. Back to issue bid. The bankers standing over at the side of the floor looked visibly relieved. Another buyer came in.

  After I sold him bonds, I yelled out, “New market, 99.875-100!” The market seemed exhausted; no one responded. I was bidding higher than issue price, and no one was selling.

  At five o’clock I totaled up the trades. Marshall and I had traded over a billion dollars of bonds. We sat there, drained, as people came up and congratulated us. Thank God for Marshall, I thought. I also knew the whole market had watched me trade the Verizon deal. I now had a big-time reputation on Wall Street.

  A few weeks later when Marshall told me my bonus that year was $70,000, I didn’t complain even though it was far below what other traders made. I was in the three-year analyst program, which meant my pay was capped. I’d earn the same as my classmates, who were still fetching coffee. I left Marshall’s office and hovered by the watercooler. An analyst whom I’d been friendly with came over.

  “How did your bonus talk go?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “That’s great,” he said. “Did you hear that David got promoted early?”

  “That’s great,” I forced out and then turned away quickly so he wouldn’t see my face burn with jealousy. David, the MIT guy who had made fun of me, called me protector of the stupid, had been promoted early? I was furious at Alexei, and especially at Marshall. He must have known David was getting promoted. Why hadn’t he fought for me to get promoted, too?

  After the Verizon deal, I’d thought I was the youngest, hottest trader in the market. Part of me knew that David’s promotion didn’t take away from my success. But another part of me was devastated. I daydreamed about being president of the United States, not vice president. I seethed with impotent rage.

  This isn’t over, I thought. I’ll show them what a mistake they just made. But deep inside, in a place I didn’t want to look at, I was afraid. Afraid that David was just smarter than me. Afraid I’d never earn as much money as him. Afraid I’d come in second, as I had my whole life. Afraid I’d never get the recognition I so profoundly craved.

  * * *

  1 Bond prices are quoted in percentages. So, 99.75 means for every thousand dollars’ worth of bonds, the price is $997.50. For ten thousand dollars’ worth of bonds, the price is $9,975, and so on.

  2 This is a market, which means clients can transact on both sides. The left side, 99.75, is the bid side, or the price I would pay someone who was selling their bonds. The right side, 99.875, is the offer side, or the price that investors who were looking to buy would have to pay.

  3 Investment banks trade with each other through interdealer brokers, and those trades are referred to as “in the street.”

  CHAPTER 26

  A Castle on a Cloud

  ¤

  A few months after the Verizon trade, I was alone in my apartment when my phone buzzed. It was my dad. We hadn’t spoken since the trip to Charleston.

  “Hey Dad,” I said.

  “Sit down,” he said. “I’ve got some news.”

  I sat. “What’s up?” I said.

  “We sold the company,” he said. “I’m a millionaire. A multi­millionaire. A multi-multi-millionaire.”

  I was shocked. Dad had been talking about his stock options in the company—a tech firm that processed legal documents for litigation—for years. I thought it was just another pipe dream.

  “How much did you make?” I asked.

  He paused for effect. “Fifteen million dollars,” he said.

  I was glad I was sitting down. I had no idea the company was worth that much, let alone my dad’s stake in it.

  I knew immediately what a huge deal this was for Dad. In a single instant, all of his fantasies were realized, all his dreams fulfilled. “Dad, congratulations. I’m so happy for you.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “You know how much this means to Sara and me.”

  Sara. My stomach tightened. “Dad,” I said, “how much does Mom get?”

  Mom and Dad had been divorced three years, after being married for twenty-five. Mom had paid Dad’s way through film school. Her earnings had financed the start of the public relations business that had led him to the technology company he’d just sold.

  Mom had never quite recovered from the discovery of my dad’s affair. She’d gotten heavier, hadn’t dated. But still she worked. Full-time. Day in, day out.

  “She’ll be taken care of,” Dad said. “This was contemplated in the divorce agreement.”

  The way he said it made me suspicious. I let the thought pass. “Congratulations again, Dad,” I said. We said our good-byes and hung up.

  I lay back on the couch and thought about how our family had struggled with money all my life. I was happy for my father, but part of me felt like I’d been cheated. Now that he could finally take care of me in the way I’d always wanted, I no longer needed it.

  A year had passed. I was loving the life of a Wall Street trader. Every day, I woke at 5:15 a.m., took a cab to the Midtown trading floor of Bank of America, sat down at my desk, and didn’t get up for twelve hours except to go to the bathroom. At night I went to dinners or ball games with clients. I didn’t enjoy the dinners, but I liked that I was important enough to be invited; every client wanted to meet the telecom trader. When I got home, I’d dive into bed so I could get a few hours of sleep before doing it all again.

  I was twenty-five, and now I had an intern
sitting next to me, asking me questions. In the year since I’d been back in New York, I had discovered some of the perks of being a Wall Street trader. Her name was Katie.

  I met Katie a few weeks after the Verizon new issue. One hot-winded New York summer night, I was riding home in a cab after another client dinner. The window was down and the warm air brushed over my face. I wasn’t ready to go home, so I called Lance Peters.

  Lance Peters was a bond broker, which meant he facilitated trades between traders at investment banks. I was one of his clients. I did not like Lance. He was one of those guys born on third base, convinced he’d hit a triple. But I knew he’d be out on the town, and I wanted company.

  He was at Hudson Bar and Books, a block from my apartment, sitting at an outdoor table with a pencil-thin blonde in a summer dress. Lance introduced us. When I ordered a Diet Coke and she didn’t comment, I knew Lance had told her I was sober. I was grateful I had reached a position where I didn’t always have to explain myself; now, sometimes, other people did it for me.

  When Lance suggested we grab a nightcap at the Gansevoort hotel in the Meatpacking District, I agreed. Normally, I would’ve gone home to bed, but Katie had laughed at some of my jokes and I thought I had a chance. I was excited—I hadn’t had a woman interested in me since Sloane Taylor. The years in Charlotte were dry and lonely.

  At the Gansevoort hotel, we met a bunch of Lance’s friends. When Katie said hello to them and then turned back toward me, her dress whipping tight against her body, I knew she was interested. At midnight I walked her to a cab. She declined my invitation to see my apartment, but when the cab pulled up, she leaned in and kissed me on the mouth, and then ducked into the backseat.

  Our first date was at a French restaurant in the Meatpacking District, and while I waited for Katie to arrive, I thought delightedly about what I’d learned about her. Jack, a trader I worked with, had gone to high school with her and said her nickname had been Regina George, after the popular girl played by Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls. Katie was the recipient of the Class Body award (They really have that? I’d asked), and Jack was impressed I was taking her out.

  Katie arrived for our date looking tan and sexy. When the waiter seated us, I noticed she looked nervous. I could guess why.

  “Don’t mind me,” I said. “Drink whatever you want.”

  “Thank God,” she blurted out. “First dates can be so awkward.”

  She ordered wine. When it came, she held the glass lightly at the ends of her long manicured fingers. I was glad she was drinking. I still felt uncool not drinking, so I enjoyed having some wine on the table, although I made sure to keep my nose away from it, because the heady smell of merlot made me salivate. Also, Katie getting tipsy took some pressure off me to make interesting conversation; the more she drank, the more easily she laughed.

  We went home together that night, and many nights after, and soon I had a girlfriend.

  Katie loved nice restaurants and I loved being seen with her, so we went out a lot. On summer weekends, Katie and I would drive out to Westhampton where her family kept a small apartment. We went to the beach during the day—she read US Weekly; I read Barron’s—and at night we went out for fresh seafood.

  I took Katie on a Caribbean vacation. The resort in Turks and Caicos, Parrot Cay, cost $600 a night. I learned how to windsurf, we had sex in the afternoons, and we ate too much at every meal. After spending our third afternoon at the beach, we returned to our room. Instead of having sex, we each picked up our books. Lying on that pillow-top bed, in my fresh terry-cloth robe, with the ocean breeze wafting in through the window, next to my beautiful, blond girlfriend, I realized I was bored. For a moment it seemed like Katie and I were just actors, playing the role of a happy couple.

  Still, I loved that I was dating Katie. I loved how she looked on my arm. I loved our life, the expensive restaurants, the island vacations, the apartment in the Hamptons. So it didn’t bother me that sometimes I didn’t like her.

  She was an unflinching gossip. Sometimes listening to her eviscerate someone behind their back, I felt ill. She urged her best friend to dump a guy because he was a penniless writer (who now writes for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair). She also didn’t like to talk about relationship problems; if we had an argument, she preferred to just forget it.

  But the real problem with Katie was that she was not Sloane Taylor.

  One day, Sloane called and asked if I was free for dinner in New York. I had dreamed about her the night before, in bed next to Katie. In my dream Sloane was getting married, and I was flying to LA to stop the wedding.

  It was supposed to be a dinner between friends, but I spent weeks researching the perfect restaurant. I finally secured a table at Bette, a new spot started by the owner of Bungalow 8, the hippest club in New York. Bette was perfect—dark, candlelit, trendy but intimate.

  When she walked in, I felt leveled by her beauty. We sat down, ordered, and started talking about old times. When our conversation led us to the time we saw Les Misérables together, I asked Sloane to sing the song we both loved. She was bashful about her voice, and I thought she’d say no, but she didn’t. I leaned forward in the quiet stillness of our dark table and listened as, almost in a whisper, she began to sing.

  There is a castle on a cloud.

  I like to go there in my sleep.

  The song is about a fantasy, and as Sloane’s lovely voice traced quietly over the beautiful words, it was as if I heard them for the first time. I heard the sorrow and sadness of Cosette’s words, the words of a young girl clinging to the life she has created in her mind to distract her from the pain of her reality. Something nagged in my consciousness, as if this time, the song pertained to me, but I dismissed that and instead stared with huge eyes at the woman I loved, who was not the woman I was dating. If Sloane had asked me to get back together at that moment, I would have said yes. She didn’t.

  CHAPTER 27

  A Handwritten Note

  ¤

  In the summer of 2006, at the age of twenty-six, I flew home for my sister’s high school graduation. I was nervous. I planned to confront my father. A year had passed since he became a millionaire, and I’d finally learned how much of his windfall my mother received.

  Years earlier, when they were negotiating the divorce agreement, my mom was spending most of her days in bed, still crushed by the revelation of my father’s affair. She hired a bumpkin of a lawyer; Dad hired a shark. His lawyer inserted a clause that stipulated, in the event my father’s company sold, the proceeds would be split according to a complex calculation. Mom didn’t realize that the calculation diminished her share over time. When the technology company finally sold, three years after the divorce, they applied the calculation. The result: Dad, 90 percent; Mom, 10 percent.

  I was far from my mother’s champion, but even I knew that calculus wasn’t fair. I’d watched my mom slave overtime for years. I couldn’t believe Dad would allow her to keep working, while he and Sara took early retirement. I kept expecting to hear that he had increased her share, but he didn’t. After a few months, I brought up the subject with him.

  “That’s between your mother and me,” he said.

  But I felt like it impacted our whole family. And it wasn’t just how he was treating Mom. It was how he was treating everyone.

  When Bain transferred Ben to London, Dad offered to accompany him during the move to help him find an apartment. Ben, whose bank account was near empty, was thrilled. Now that Dad was a millionaire, Ben thought he might help furnish his new apartment. But when Ben asked for money, Dad got furious. Ben started crying. Dad said, “Your tears mean nothing to me.” He caught a cab to the airport and boarded the next plane home. Ben called me, burst into tears, and asked me to wire him money so he could eat dinner that night.

  Dad had always been tightfisted. In high school he insisted Ben and I share a drivers license—we looked s
o much alike that a cop would never be able to tell the difference—so that we would only have to pay for one car insurance policy. In college Ben had gotten a DUI on my license. I’d always thought Dad was cheap because he didn’t have enough money. As a millionaire, he seemed more miserly than ever.

  The consequences of living with a father whose focus was entirely on his new money and new wife, and with a mother still shattered from divorce, were apparent in the waistlines and addictive habits of my younger brother and sister. Julia was nearing two hundred pounds and had gotten in several fistfights at school. Daniel had graduated from pot to cocaine, from obese to morbidly obese. He spent a lot of time on the streets and usually wouldn’t arrive at Dad’s downtown apartment until well after midnight.

  I was worried about Daniel and Julia, and was pissed about how Dad seemed to be hoarding money, even from his own family. Since Dad wouldn’t answer the questions I asked about Mom, I started asking him questions that pertained to me. What, I asked him, is in your will? I wanted to know how much my siblings and I would get, and how much his new wife would get. At first, he wouldn’t talk about it. But I persisted until he agreed to discuss the matter.

  We sat across from each other at a coffee shop. He said that in the event of his death, Sara would get half the money. The other half would be for my siblings and me. I was angry that Sara would get more than my mom, or me. Then Dad told me that there were conditions on my inheritance. Upon his death, the money would be put in a trust. Instead of getting a lump sum, each of the children would get a monthly stipend. If we wanted a large amount, for a down payment on a house or to start a business, we would have to apply to the trust. He called it the “I Have a Dream” clause. He looked pleased with himself.

  “Who decides if our application is approved?” I asked.

  “Sara, of course,” he said. “She’ll control the trust.”