Beginner's Greek

by James Collins

  Now, Arthur had also loved his wife. They had fallen in love when he was twenty and she was seventeen, but, unlike the Harrisons, they were not married until several years later (and for that occasion, Sam had made Arthur a new morning coat for free). Without question, that had been the happiest day of Arthur’s life. As he said his vows, his voice cracked and he wept. He and Maria (pronounced with a long “i”) had been married for sixteen years, and he loved her throughout all that time and he loved her now. But she had died of cancer at age forty (at her most beautiful, Arthur and others believed). As he had been purely happy on his wedding day, so he was in pure despair on the day that Maria died. If the sun had burnt out and the seas dried up, Arthur might have been mildly troubled. Maria’s death made him distraught.

  The person who best understood what had happened to Arthur was Sam Harrison. “It’s a tough break, kid,” Sam had said. Arthur had trembled.

  “You know, Sam,” he had said hoarsely, “I have to travel a lot. The worst thing about it was always leaving her. But it was almost worth it because of how wonderful it was to see her again.” Arthur had been unable to speak for a moment. “Now I won’t see her again.” He had looked at Sam and saw the loose skin under his chin quiver and his eyes, each studded with a mole at the lower lid, begin to water. Sam held Arthur’s arm. “Yeetgadal v’yeetkadash sh’mey rabbah,” he had whispered. “B’olmo d’vero keerutey.” Arthur had not understood the words, nor had he fully grasped the significance of an atheistic Marxist’s uttering a prayer, but he appreciated the sentiment.

  Sam and Arthur had always talked about Miriam and Maria, and they continued to long after Maria’s death. Years later, Arthur would ask Sam about Miriam, and Sam would grin and say, “Well, the other day . . .” But he would pause and look at Arthur, who would look back at him in the three-way mirror. Then Sam would say, “You’re still thinking about her.” And Arthur would say yes, and he would tell Sam some memory he had recently had about Maria — the soup in Madrid, her salamander brooch.

  Maria was dead. They had had no children; Arthur himself had been an only child. His father was dead and now old Sam Harrison was dead. Arthur rose and looked out the window. The rising sun gave the rain clouds a dull glow. More cars had appeared. In a typical office building, even on a floor at this height, you could hear traffic, especially the slithering sound of tires on wet asphalt; typically, on a stormy day on a floor this high, the wind created spooky sonic reverberations and the building actually swayed. Arthur’s office was different. He heard no traffic or wuthering wind, and he felt no swaying. In his office, all was quiet, still. From his vantage he could see a dozen other buildings, and he thought about all the people who would soon be arriving for work. They constituted a lot of energy, activity, money. A lot of life. Arthur did not wonder what it was all for. It seemed obvious to him what it was all for. His own life was busy and full. He had good friends; his mother was still alive and he was close to her. But he felt heavyhearted and alone.

  A few hours later on that same June morning, a meeting was taking place on the fifty-ninth floor of the Beeche Building. It was in the small conference room, the one with no windows. One of the participants in the meeting, indeed its central figure, was a young man named Peter Russell. Peter was thirty-two years old; he had been working for Beeche and Company since his graduation from college, and he had advanced nicely. Despite the doubts he sometimes entertained about the value of his work, he had enjoyed it, he had enjoyed his success, and he had enjoyed his high pay.

  On this morning, though, Peter was quite unhappy. In fact, he was at this moment the unhappiest he had ever been during his entire time at Beeche. The meeting, which he had gone into with enthusiasm, had become a savage, grotesque spectacle in which he was the victim. His tormentors had poured hot lead down his throat, cut off his private parts and stuck them in his mouth, and now, while he was still alive, they were tying each of his limbs to four different horses before sending the horses galloping off in four directions. Peter had fixed his face with an interested, wry expression while he listened to his colleagues, but he knew he was blushing bright red and that he was fooling no one. He felt sweat trickling down from his armpits.

  It had all come about like this. A few weeks earlier, after a couple of his patrons had been shifted to different offices around the world, Peter had found himself working for a boss whom he didn’t know well. The things he’d heard about Gregg Thropp were not encouraging. Thropp was a short, stocky fellow, and he displayed all the Napoleonic traits so common among those of his physical type. He was driven, ambitious, self-important. When he walked, he moved his stubby legs so fast that even the long-legged had to work to keep up. Peter could see for himself that Thropp was insulting and rude to those below him. Others had warned him that Thropp was a devious, lying, backstabbing worm.

  Yet toward Peter, Thropp hadn’t acted badly at all. To the contrary! Thropp had treated Peter with courtesy. He’d shown Peter respect in meetings. He’d given Peter credit when it was due him and encouraged and praised him, calling him “Champ.” Oh, sure, sometimes he could be pretty blunt, but it was hard to see what was so bad about Gregg Thropp. Peter had come to trust Thropp so much that he even went into Thropp’s office one day to show him something that had made Peter especially proud. He had played an important part in a couple of notably profitable transactions that had come to fruition when he was working for Thropp but that had been initiated previously. On this day Peter had discovered a small square envelope in his interoffice mail; inside, there was a handwritten note from Arthur Beeche himself! The note read as follows:

  Dear Mr. Russell,

  Please accept my congratulations on your fine work in the reinsurance and Italian bond matters. Well done!

  Yours very truly,

  Arthur Beeche

  P.S. I hope you will join us soon for one of our entertainments.

  Well, as one might imagine, Peter had been bowled over. A personal note from Arthur Beeche! What was more, it looked as if Peter was in line to receive an invitation to dinner at Beeche’s house. Arthur entertained often, and his dinners were legendary for the quality of the food and drink and for the glamour of the guests. A few people from the firm were usually included, and to receive your first invitation was an important honor. You were supposed to act nonchalant about it, but Peter had been so amazed and pleased that he’d taken the note into Thropp’s office and showed it to him.

  “Well, well, well!” Thropp had said. “The Champ scores!” He had stood up and begun to lift and lower his arms in front of him, an absurd-looking motion for one so short. “Come on! The wave! The wave!” Thropp did this a few times before he started laughing too hard to continue. When he had recovered, he had looked at Peter earnestly.

  “I’m proud of you, Peter,” Thropp had said. “I really am. One thing you can sure say about Arthur Beeche is that he has his eye out for talent. You’ve done good work and you deserve to be noticed. Congratulations.”

  Thropp had held out his hand and Peter shook it.

  “When I’m working for you,” Thropp had continued, “and it looks like that’ll be any day now, you won’t screw me, will you?”

  They had both laughed.

  Thropp wasn’t such a bad guy!

  A few days later, Thropp had wandered into Peter’s office, looking thoughtful. “Say, Peter,” he had said, “you know your idea about securitizing home equity? I’d like to have a meeting on it.”

  “Really?” said Peter. “But, God, it’s such a big thing, and it was just something I was fooling around with. I don’t think it’s anywhere near ready for a meeting.”

  “Oh, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Just Huang, Kelly, Matt, you know, people like that.”

  “But —”

  “I’ve been thinking about it. There are a lot of possibilities. Let’s kick it around. Be a good thing for the team. Get some juices going.”

  So it had been agreed that in a few days a meeting would be held at
which Peter would give a presentation on his idea. This was the aforementioned meeting, which had descended into a bloodthirsty dance of death.

  Peter had gotten a jolt as soon as he had entered the conference room. First of all, the place was already full, which was suspicious. Then he noticed that he didn’t see Huang, Kelly, Matt, or any of his other friends. Where was T.J.? T.J. should have been there! Peter barely knew some of the attendees. More troubling still, a man and woman from Upstairs were sitting in a corner of the room, away from the table. The man, a trim, fortyish black guy, was wearing his jacket even though everyone else was in shirtsleeves. The woman, in her fifties, sat there with an imperious, pre-bored expression. Peter had never met them, but he knew who they must be. He set up his computer and its connections; he noticed that his hands were shaking.

  Thropp had begun the meeting. “Welcome, everyone.” He nodded toward the man and woman. “Rich, Andrea, thanks for taking the time to come down.” He rubbed his hands together. “Well, now, we’re all here to listen to Peter tell us about his new idea. Peter has been quite mysterious about it, playing it close to the vest, so I can’t tell you much about what he’s cooked up. He tells me it has the potential to be something very big. I’d usually want to spend some time going over a presentation like this myself, but Peter was so insistent on having a meeting that I said okay just to get him off my back!” Mild chuckles.

  Thropp turned to Peter with a smile and gestured to him. “Go ahead, Peter,” he said. “It’s your meeting.”

  This isn’t right, Peter thought. His heart began to pound. “Thank you, Gregg,” he said with a quaver.

  What he had to say was very preliminary, he explained, and he had only a few slides to show. Then he had gone through it all: What is the greatest source of wealth in the country? The equity people have in their houses. Over the past twenty years, the debt on people’s houses had been securitized, providing a great benefit to borrowers and investors — and the firms in the middle. In Peter’s view, the mortgage market looked shaky. Would there be a way of securitizing home equity? Say a homeowner could sell some of the equity in his house. There could be individual transactions (after all, each mortgage is individual), and you could bundle up those equity stakes just as in the mortgage-backed market. Think of the advantages: home buyers would have an alternative to debt; homeowners could pay down debt and benefit from a rise in prices without selling their houses or borrowing more; they could diversify, buying equity in houses in different markets from their own. With the home equity securities would come hedging opportunities: people could short their own houses if they were in a bubble, and there would be any number of derivative plays. It would spread risk around, make the market more efficient. Then imagine the money you could make if you were the first to come up with such a product.

  Peter liked his idea even though it was at only the fantasy stage, and as he spoke he couldn’t help but become more enthusiastic about it; this excitement combined with his anxiety made for a great agitation within him, as he allowed himself to think that he might possibly have carried others along.

  He hadn’t. After he finished, saying, “Well, that’s about it. As I mentioned, it’s all very preliminary,” there was silence. A cough. A rustle of papers. Some taps of a pencil. Another cough.

  Thropp spread out his hands. “Reactions? Rajandran?”

  Rajandran was one of Thropp’s liege men, and Peter didn’t know him well; he spoke with great precision, polishing every phoneme. “Well, I am sure we all agree that Peter has some interesting ideas.” He smiled. It was amazing how white his teeth were. “But it seems to me that he’s missed the boat on this one.” Rajandran rattled on for several minutes, enumerating all the reasons everything Peter had said was absurd. The basic premise was nonsensical. The problems with execution would be horrendous. Peter completely misunderstood the market, the simplest model would show that. And on and on. Someone — some mysterious person — had obviously briefed Rajandran on what Peter was going to say and then instructed him to prepare an informed rebuttal. Peter glanced at Thropp, who was rocking in his chair and trying to suppress a smirk. Peter thought he could hear him humming.

  As soon as Rajandran finished, before Peter could even begin to respond, someone else piped up. “You know, of course, Peter, that a futures market for housing prices was tried in London and was a complete disaster.” Another case of advance research!

  “Yes,” Peter said, “but, really, there was a marketing problem —”

  “Marketing problem!” his antagonist said sarcastically. “You want the firm to spend billions of dollars to redo the economics of housing — and you think a few ads will make the difference?” A snicker traveled the room.

  A third henchman joined in. “What about the owner’s balance sheet?”

  And then each member of the trio simply began to fire away: “Look at the piss-poor reaction to the Chicago Merc product.” “Wouldn’t insurance make more sense?” “Is it stochastic?”

  Peter tried to answer (“. . . preliminary, something that would need to be looked at, I can’t be sure, um, uh . . .”). And then he just sat there listening, trying to look unfazed despite his red face and the sweat trickling down from his armpits. Finally, the bloodlust of his tormentors seemed to have been sated.

  “Anyone else?” Thropp asked. When no one spoke, he turned to Peter. “Well, Champ, I guess you’re a few bricks shy of a load.”

  The man and woman from Upstairs had whispered to each other and gotten out of their seats and were now leaving. They gave a nod to Thropp, who said, “Rich, Andrea, we’ll try to give you a better show next time.”

  Peter’s head throbbed. He felt rage and shame. He knew that he was putrefying before everyone’s eyes. A nauseous odor was beginning to arise from him, the putrescent stench of failure. From this moment on, people would slip by him quickly in the halls; they would respond to his phone messages and e-mails in the most perfunctory way; they would edge toward the walls when they found themselves in the same room with him. Even if some of them knew that Peter had been set up, they would treat him as one infected with the plague; it was enough that somebody very senior had wanted to lay a trap for him and that he had fallen into it.

  “Okay, everybody,” Thropp was saying. “That’s it.” Then he turned to Peter with hooded, menacing eyes. “My office. Five minutes.”

  When Peter presented himself at Thropp’s office, he found Thropp rocking in his chair with his folded hands on his stomach; he wore gold cuff links the size of quarters.

  “Ah, Russell, come in,” he said.

  Peter stood in front of the desk. Thropp didn’t invite him to sit.

  “Quite an interesting meeting,” Thropp said.

  Peter nodded.

  “Yes, quite interesting,” Thropp said. “Tell me, Russell, do you like walnuts?”

  There was a large bowl of walnuts sitting on Thropp’s desk, but this non sequitur bewildered Peter. He shrugged.

  “Go ahead and pick out a couple,” said Thropp.

  Indifferently, Peter picked up two walnuts.

  “Take a look at them.”

  Peter did so.

  “Now give them to me,” Thropp said.

  Peter handed the walnuts to Thropp, who looked at them for a moment while rolling them around in his right hand.

  “Do you know what these are?” Thropp asked.

  Peter shook his head.

  “These are your nuts, Russell,” Thropp brayed. Still holding the walnuts in his right hand, he squeezed them so hard that his fingers turned white. “And I’ve got ’em, right here!” Then he leaned back and laughed. “Oh, it was wonderful!” he said, laughing even harder. “ ‘Home equity securities!’ ” He could hardly speak. “ ‘Home equity securities!’ ” Stretching out his thumb and pinkie, he held his hand up to his head like a phone and put on a deep voice. “ ‘Hello, I’d like to buy one hundred shares of 487 Maple Drive.’ ” Thropp was laughing so hard now that tears came to his
eyes. “And the look on your face when Raj got going! Oh God! Beautiful!” He laughed and laughed and wiped his eyes. “Oh, it was wonderful,” he said finally, as his laughter subsided in a sigh.

  “I’m happy to have been able to give you so much pleasure,” said Peter. “But I wonder if I could ask why you’ve done this?”

  “Why? Why?” Thropp’s eyes narrowed and his face went black with malice. “I’ll tell you why: I despise you.” He snorted and began to grind his teeth. “Peter Russell, so bright and attractive, everybody says. Such a hard worker, such nice guy. Top decile. Everything going for him. It makes me want to puke. Before I’m through, nobody will think you’re worth your weight in cockroach dung!” Thropp cackled. “But, oh, did you ever fall for it when I came on all lovey-dovey! Think of it, you come in here” — now he put on an effeminate voice — “ ‘Oh, Greggy, yoo-hoo! Look-see, I’ve got a note from Arthur Beeche!’ ” He fluttered his eyelashes and flapped his hands with loose wrists; then his voice became vicious again. “I’m going to destroy you, Russell.” He laughed with depraved glee. “I’m going to destroy you!”

  Peter waited a moment before speaking.

  “Okay, Gregg,” he said patiently. “What I’m hearing is that you despise me. Is that right?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m also hearing, Gregg, that you hope to destroy me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I see, I see.” Peter said. He furrowed his brow and thought for a moment. “Gregg, I wonder if the real issue isn’t that my skill set may not be the one you’re looking for. Under the circumstances, I’m wondering — and I’m just throwing this out — I’m wondering if it would make sense for me to transition to another spot. I’m thinking about the team, here.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere. I’ve been looking forward to this too much.”

  “I think, Gregg, that there might be others in the firm who —”

  “Nobody’s going to save your ass, Russell. Furlanetto — you’ve crawled up her sphincter, right? Well, she’s in Switzerland for the next two years. And Mulvahey? He’s jumped ship.”