by Jonathan Dee
Though he kept to the south side of 81st Street, where the sidewalks were wider on the perimeter of the museum grounds, it was still stop and go; he had to work his way around or through the knots of tourists and the pairs of strollers advancing in unison as their nannies chatted behind them. There was nothing to be done until he crossed the transverse exit at Central Park West and passed through the low stone gate into the park, and then he found his rhythm. He glided around the softball fields, passing everyone else on the path-the fat guys with headbands and hair leaking up from the collars of their shirts, the women in Lycra tights with sweatshirts tied self-consciously around their waists, the serious rope-muscled runners with the perfect strides and fixed stares-feeling the familiar warmth and pulse of his blood radiating from his core until there was no part of his body uninvolved in it. He’d never been to the Conservatory Garden before, but he knew roughly where it was-not far from their old apartment, the one where April and Jonas had shared a room. He could have shortened his time by cutting across the North Meadow but it was blocked by that temporary soft orange fencing that signaled a reseeding; so he passed all the way out of the park again on the east side and turned north along Fifth Avenue until he saw the theatrical flight of stone steps that led down into the garden. It was laid out in the dimensions of a cross, with trellised roses and reflecting pools on the right and left of him; at the far end, at the foot of a flagstone path, another flight of steps led up to a long, curved, and colonnaded stone arch, and there, sitting on the top step with his arms around his knees, wearing a khaki suit, was Devon.
He stood up slowly and bemusedly as Adam sprinted up the steps, touched his watch again, and stood gazing around the garden with his hands clasped on top of his head, waiting for his heart rate to slow. “Multitasking,” Devon said, a little bitterly. “Nice. No reason meeting me should interfere with your regimen. Won’t you have to go home and change now, though, before work, or is it Casual Tuesday or something?”
Adam shook his head. “Not going in this morning,” he said. “The boss and I are flying to Minneapolis in a few hours.”
They stood beneath the arch, facing back toward Fifth Avenue across the top of the sunken gardens. In the unseasonable cold the paths were almost empty, but not quite; the incongruous country-squire layout made it a popular spot for wedding photos, and so there was a full bridal party standing by one of the reflecting pools, blowing on their hands to keep warm, while a couple of boys in suits who couldn’t have been older than six chased each other around the still water. In fact, Adam was the only one in the whole garden not dressed formally. Still, Devon felt like the conspicuous one.
“So?” Adam said. “Shall we go talk amongst the roses?”
“Why not,” Devon said. “I’m sure everybody thinks we’re fags anyway.”
They descended the steps and turned left on the flagstones toward the unoccupied reflecting pool. “Miguel is out,” Devon said.
“No names, please.”
“Whatever. One of my associates has told me he’s out. The one who works at Schwab. He’s getting married. He says he’s made enough and doesn’t want this hanging over his head anymore.”
“Okay,” Adam said. “You think he’s telling the truth? There’s nothing else going on there, no trouble he’s in, no debts or anything like that?”
“Why?” Devon said. He meant to sound sarcastic but it just came out petulant. “You thinking of having him killed?”
Adam rolled his eyes. “I’m just wondering why you considered it some kind of emergency. It’s happened before. I mean, you know this isn’t a good idea, our meeting like this. Not that I don’t enjoy your company.”
As they finished their first circuit Devon looked up and saw a strange bald man in a tuxedo struggling to fix an expensive camera onto a tripod. He was all the way across the garden, where the bridal party was, but the camera looked like it was pointing right at him. He fought down a taste of panic in his throat. “That’s kind of my point, that this same thing happened two months ago. It’s not like we can take out an ad to replace these guys. Pretty soon it will be down to you and me, and that would not be tenable. We couldn’t disguise it well enough.”
“Well,” Adam said, “you know a lot more guys in the trenches than I do. Can you think of anyone else you might bring in?”
Devon grimaced. “Yes, probably,” he said, “but that’s not the point. We can’t keep piling risk upon risk, right, and expect to stay lucky forever. I don’t know. Honestly I’m wondering if it’s time to get out. I want to be smart about this. I mean, am I the only one? Don’t you think about this stuff? Aren’t you fucking freezing, by the way?”
Of course Adam thought about it, not because he was prone to fear or paranoia but just as a matter of risk management. He saw perfectly clearly that the whole arrangement was held together at this point only by own his ability to lead, to inspire faith in himself even among people he met only briefly, if ever. Any one of these brokers, Devon included, who slipped up and got caught could always save himself by giving up the top of the chain, and the top of the chain was Adam. So he wasn’t sure what there was for Devon to get so stressed about. He had to admit that his initial assessment of the kid, aboard the Intrepid all those years ago, had turned out to be wrong in some respects, though not, of course, in the important one.
“You say you want to be smart about it,” he said, looking into Devon ’s eyes. “But to say that we can’t be successful today because we were successful yesterday-that’s not smart, that’s just superstitious. You start giving in to ideas about luck or fate or karma or whatever and you’re fucked. There’s no fate. Everything that you and I have made happen in these last however many years? It never happened. It’s gone. It doesn’t exist. The only thing that exists, the only risk to be analyzed, is what’s in front of us today.”
“I know,” Devon said sulkily. He looked down. Adam knew he had him.
“We are hypercareful. We always have been. We don’t give every piece of information to everybody in the chain. And I’m sure you figured out a long time ago that some of the information I give you is bogus, so it never looks to anyone like some unbroken winning streak.”
“I’m not questioning anything like that. It’s just-the whole thing isn’t like I thought it would be. The money is almost like a burden because I’m so paranoid about spending it. And how can you not look back? I don’t get that. Which is probably why I’ll never be a billionaire. I’m just not a stone killer like you are. See, that’s another thing I don’t get: as little as I know about you, I know that you are one of those guys, those guys who are like missing a part of their brain or something. No conscience. No memory for losses. So you don’t need this. You’d be a player anyway. Why are you doing it still? Don’t you think about stopping?”
The bridesmaids had run off to the car to get warm and the wedding photographer was packing his gear into a couple of canvas bags. No conscience? Adam thought. It’s not as though I can’t remember; it’s just that there’s nothing constructive about remembering. Still, when he did consider the life his family was living now, a life in which literally anything was possible, every desire was in reach, no potential was allowed to wither, and they had all seen so much of the world; when he thought back to the moment he had gone for it, to his own fearlessness when threatened with the unhappiness of those he loved, and how readily, in the face of that, he had cleared the hurdle that most men would never have the fortitude to clear; and how all this was accomplished by his taking all the risk onto himself, so much so that they would never even have a clue that there was any risk involved; the only reasonable conclusion, he felt, was that it was the noblest thing he had ever done in his life. It was humility, really, that made him so uncomfortable reminiscing about it.
But it was also true that that particular hurdle had been cleared a long time ago, and that there were other reasons he was loath to terminate the life of secret risk, the world inside the world. “ Devon,” he said,
“you’re going in to work today, right?”
He fingered his suit. “Some of us have to,” he said.
“Well when you do, just take a minute and look around you at everyone else in that office, everyone you work for, everyone who works for you. All of them with their fingers crossed, all of them so afraid that if getting some kind of inside information meant never seeing you again they would make that trade in a heartbeat. I think I know what you think of those people. But you are not one of them. You are Superman. You are a fucking gangster. The day we go back to feeling safe from risk is the day you can no longer look at them and say to yourself that there’s any difference between them and you. Are you really ready to go back to that? Are you really ready to go back to reading bullshit quarterly reports and trying to use those to figure out how the world works? It’s no kind of life, leaving your future in the hands of forces that have nothing to do with you and calling them fate or luck or whatever. And there is only this life, dude. I don’t want to get all mystical on you, but this is the only life we get, and either you leave your mark on it or it’s like you were never here.”
They had stopped walking. The garden was now abandoned. Devon, head down, nodded sullenly, like a child. Adam put his hands on the younger man’s shoulders.
“No one else,” Adam said gently, “knows the things that you and I know. Now. Speaking of being careful. It’s time for new cell numbers, right? Did you memorize yours?”
Devon nodded, and recited it. “Done,” Adam said, and began bouncing on the balls of his feet again. “Now relax a little. Have some fun. Wait to hear from me.” He ran up the garden steps, headed south until he could breach the low stone wall again, and twenty minutes later he was home. He showered, put on a suit, grabbed his briefcase, hailed a cab, and met Sanford inside the first-class lounge in the Delta terminal at LaGuardia. Sanford was sitting in a too-low club chair in front of a muted TV, holding a glass of wine and looking miserable.
“I can’t tell you how much I hate flying these days,” he said. “Commercial especially. It’s so degraded. Look at what passes for first class now.” His face was tired and florid, even though the glass of wine was his first. They were on their way to Minneapolis to close a deal with the state’s teachers union, which had agreed to let Perini grow their pension fund.
“I almost wonder why we have to go at all,” Sanford said to him as they boarded the plane, a few drinks later. “It’s all in the bag. But they just need a little face time, before they hand over the pension money to a couple of sharks from New York City. Maybe they just want to make sure we’re not Nigerian princes.” Adam had the aisle seat and thus took the brunt of the resentful glances from those who boarded after them and had to stand waiting while others tried to smash their carry-ons into the tiny overhead bins in coach. “You know,” Sanford said once they were in the air, “I spent a lot of time talking you up with them, and then one of them asked me an odd question. ‘If this guy’s such a star,’ he asked me, ‘how do we know he won’t bolt and start his own hedge fund or something?’”
Adam smiled. “And you said, ‘Hey, you’re right, I’d better go and give that guy a massive midyear bonus right away’?”
Sanford slapped him affectionately on the knee. “Good one,” he said. “No, I told him that you were still a young man. And that the best thing about you is that with all the ego in this business, you’re not one of those guys obsessed with having a high profile. Honestly, if you’d asked me ten years ago, I would have bet I’d have lost you by now. But you’re an old-school guy, a throwback in a lot of ways. Put your head down, do your job, respect the traditions, and everybody gets rich enough in the end. Lazard was like that when I worked there, a hundred years ago. Anyway, I can’t tell you what a comfort it is to me now.”
He looked out the window at the ground far below, the lit veins of the empty streets, the bright ball fields and parking lots. “It’s funny how much I’ve grown to hate this,” he said. “I used to take it for granted. Airplanes and airports. But lately I just want to be out on the water. It’s almost all I think about.”
A few minutes later he was asleep, his cheek sunk against his shoulder, his lower lip drooping. Not a flattering look, Adam thought, and closed his eyes.
There was a template for everything somewhere, an overgrown headwater of the original and unprecedented, and you might hack away in search of it your whole life long and never find it. Or, on the other hand, you might. Jonas hated having his ignorance exposed. On the M79 bus coming home from school some fat guy wearing board shorts even though it was about forty degrees out tried to peek over his shoulder to see what he was listening to on his iPod. Jonas showed him the screen. The guy made a condescending face: “Reheated Joy Division,” he said, and Jonas nodded in agreement, like what-can-you-do, but then he couldn’t wait to get home and get on the computer and find out who Joy Division was. And a couple of hours later he had to conclude that the fat guy was right. Mostly just by virtue of being older, but still. The more you learned about something you thought was good, the more holes like this you fell into. His own obsessions tended to bear Jonas backward in time, and eventually they led him to the sad but empirical conclusion that the popular music of his own day and age sucked ass.
In tenth grade this was not a mainstream view. If you wanted to be a music snob, fine, but you were expected to do so by raving obnoxiously about some band no one else had ever heard of because they’d only formed three weeks ago and played one gig. Jonas knew guys like that, older guys who ran the high-school radio station nobody listened to and who were flunking English because they spent so much time commenting on one another’s blogs, and even though he wanted nothing to do with them he had to cop to their being kindred spirits, because really they were jonesing for the same thing he was: the unspoiled, the uncorrupted, the pure of intent. They were just looking for it in the wrong place. Then of course there were all the kids in the happy mainstream, the kids whose moms drove them out to Nassau Coliseum to see some dancing boy-band lip-synch songs of longing vetted by a focus group of ten-year-old girls. That shit was beyond the pale. It was too hard to believe that there was such a thing as not even caring, not bothering to distinguish in terms of value between the simulated and the real.
There was something sort of priestly about him when it came to music, and as with most priests, some people respected his outlook and some people just found the whole attitude a bit much. Certainly it put him outside the realm of anything girls might be interested in. And there was another big downside to having such an exacting ear, which was that it tortured Jonas to know how mediocre and ordinary his own band sounded, himself not excepted. They were never going to be good. Still, he practiced and practiced. The others were blissfully optimistic, which was, he thought, a lovely thing to be able to be. They did a decent “Sweet Jane,” because really if you couldn’t get that down what hope was there for you? They played together once or twice a week in an old boathouse near the FDR Drive, a property that their lead singer’s father had bought up but hadn’t yet gotten a zoning abeyance to convert. It was hard to find places in the city to rehearse-probably easier to find places to perform, which was unfortunately where the fantasies of Jonas’s band-mates tended to drift anyway.
Girls did sometimes come to their rehearsals, though. Even senior girls like the completely unattainable Tori Barbosa. It proved once and for all the tremendous magical properties of rock and roll, Jonas thought, that even a band that sucked as bad as they did still attracted girls. He was the youngest among them and had the reputation of being the best musician as well, but that was because he was the only one who bothered to practice outside of rehearsal. One of the most depressing manifestations of their lameness was how much time they spent naming themselves. Haskell, their singer, thought some preemptive irony was in order and wanted them to call themselves The Privileged, or The Privileges. The notion of preemptive irony made Jonas want to kill himself; since he was always trying to interest the
m in a more rootsy direction anyway, he kept suggesting The Headwaters, like a kind of quest for the source rather than just some bar band-style aping of that month’s Top 40. But every time they wrote it down and looked at it, somebody would say, “The Headwaiters?” Every time. Then Alex, the drummer, had a revelation while watching a film in 20th Century U.S. History and so their name, at least until the next time they decided to argue about it, was Run Bobby Run.
With the cars roaring by on the FDR outside the boathouse door, they summoned the attention span for a passable version of “People Who Died.” Everyone was impressed with Jonas’s solo, and a couple of the spectators even came over afterward to tell him so, but at the end of the evening of course all the girls went off with the older guys and Jonas called the car service to come take him home. He needed to study, and he needed to sleep, but surplus adrenaline wouldn’t really permit him to do either; instead he turned on the record player and put on his headphones. Lately he was on a serious bluegrass kick. There was no end to that stuff-you were always stumbling on these amazing old 78s or field recordings that, the first time you played them, went off in your head like little bombs. He’d think so-and-so was a discovery of his and then learn later that, to real aficionados of the music, so-and-so was like Shakespeare or Tolstoy. His ignorance, he sometimes felt, was boundless.
He saw a shadow fall across the line of light that came in from the hallway, under his bedroom door. It was his mom, he knew, just checking to make sure he was back home. He didn’t even need to take the headphones off; he shifted around in his chair so it squeaked a little, and the foot shadows moved off again. Someone was always awake in that apartment. He opened up his cell and checked the time: 1:52. Then he turned back toward the blue lights of the planetarium outside his window.
I used to think my daddy was a black man
