by Scott Lasser
ALSO BY SCOTT LASSER
Battle Creek
All I Could Get
For my mother
and in memory of
Fred M. Ginsberg
What did I know, what did I know
Of love’s austere and lonely offices?
—ROBERT HAYDEN, Those Winter Sundays
Prologue
9/11
He heads toward Central Park, the sky still dark but activity picking up on the ground. To walk down a New York street as night tips to day is to understand the world on the move. By Lexington he pauses while a skinny kid tosses bundles of newspapers from the back of a delivery truck, its chassis on a tilt, two wheels parked on the sidewalk. At Fifth Avenue Kyle waits. When the traffic clears he jogs across, against the light, not stopping when he reaches the other side but running up the park’s entrance road as he does every workday, which, for him, is roughly two hundred and thirty days a year. The rest are weekends, national and bank holidays (on which the bond market is closed, thank God), and three or four weeks of vacation. He runs on these days, too, just a little later, when the sun is up. Movement keeps him sane.
He glides into the flow of joggers, bikers, Rollerbladers, walkers, pushers of baby strollers, and other fanatics who have come this early morning to enjoy the city’s approximation of nature. He misses the wide lawns and verdant trees of his youth, but to enjoy such green he’d have to buy a home in the country, and he doesn’t want to own anything that isn’t easily portable, without much effort of ownership. He rents his apartment, cars when he needs one, even drink glasses the one time he threw a cocktail party. He likes it this way, unencumbered and free.
At least for now.
He works his way north on the East Side, passing runners and walkers and even a few bikers—not as fast as he used to be but still not bad. He crosses Seventy-second Street, the back of the Met, skirts east of the reservoir, the birds audible now, a glowing ribbon of orange light visible above the buildings. He wanted to go in early today, but he wasn’t able to pull himself from bed till quarter to five, so now it looks as if he won’t get to work till seven, the normal time. He could cut his run short, but this is a sacrifice he’s not willing to make.
It is a day of planned meals. He has dinner with Cat. He and Caputo have a nine o’clock breakfast, and he’s taking a Columbia MBA to lunch. It’s the nature of his job always to be recruiting, a necessity in an industry that grinds up bodies like a war. Replacements are always needed. That he’s endured past forty is something of an anomaly, the sure sign of a survivor.
He runs, his mind still a riot from last week’s news. Siobhan has a baby boy, three months. The math is not difficult, the child conceived a year ago, about the time he and Siobhan split up. But a child? Would she keep that a secret? Could she? He still might not know anything had McHugh not mentioned it. It was exactly a week ago, the Tuesday after Labor Day. Kyle was talking on the phone to McHugh, setting up today’s breakfast, when he heard a shout go up in the background. He asked McHugh what was going on.
“Oh, nothing,” the man said. “One of my brokers just got back from maternity leave.”
“You let women work in that place?” Kyle said, his way of asking. A bond brokerage was a testosterone pit, just like Kyle’s trading floor, but without all the fancy educations. Only a couple of women worked for McHugh, all young enough to bear children.
“This one, anyway. Beautiful. Figured guys would use her just to have an excuse to talk to her. I should have known that sooner or later one would knock her up. Siobhan Boyle. You know her?”
“I’ve met her,” Kyle admitted. It seemed implausible that he hadn’t. In truth everyone knew Siobhan, and so they kept their affair quiet. It was the Wall Street way.
“Then you know what I’m talking about,” McHugh said.
“What did she have, a boy or girl?”
“A little Irish lad. Not that I know if the father is Irish. Neither does anyone else. Siobhan’s not saying.”
“Embarrassed?”
“I can only assume that she thinks so highly of the guy that she doesn’t want him around.”
Kyle hung up the phone and knew he had a son. It was possible another man was involved, but he thought it unlikely, and a career in the financial markets had taught him not to bet on the unlikely outcome. There was no profit in it. A son. This was not part of the plan—at least not yet—and now he had to figure out what to do. He let a week go by, knowing that Cat would be in town. He wanted to hear what his sister had to say. This was, perhaps, the one area where she could help. Otherwise, it was Cat who usually needed the helping.
Last month, for the first time, Cat called and asked for money. Kyle wasn’t surprised. No job or man had ever suited her especially well. Cat has sold houses, insurance, and, lately, mortgages. Kyle can’t quite figure his sister out. On the one hand, he thinks she is too smart not to be doing better, especially in the boom years that have likely just passed. On the other, Kyle sees why she has trouble. It resides in a deficiency of self, a lack of confidence. Last evening, just before dinner, Kyle heard Cat on her cell phone all but apologize to a customer for asking him to buy. How this contrasts with what Kyle sees everyday, salesmen—and saleswomen—jamming bonds into the portfolios of sophisticated managers who should know better, billions of dollars’ worth, and all borne on a conspiratorial tone that is really nothing but bravado.
And so now Cat needs money. She’s supporting a son, with little help from the boy’s father, and apparently the brokering of mortgages is no gravy train. Cat lives where she and Kyle grew up, Detroit, and Kyle finds this a little sad, as though his sister can’t imagine or manage more.
She wanted $5,000. Kyle sent her eleven, the maximum tax-free gift he could make. She called to thank him. Kyle was looking out his office window, down to the green fields of Stuyvesant High, where a couple of kids were messing around with a football in the August heat. Kyle was vaguely aware that she was thanking him. Then she asked, “But what are you doing?”
“Giving you money,” Kyle said. “Like you asked.”
“I only asked for five.”
“So?” Kyle said.
She took a deep breath. “I don’t know when I can pay you back.”
“It’s a gift.”
“No.”
“Yes,” Kyle said. “I owe it to you. I think I must owe you twenty years of birthday presents.”
“You did kinda just leave,” Cat said.
“I grew up. It’s what one does.”
“I didn’t leave,” she said.
“You left me in a tree once,” he responded, reminding her of the one time she’d really let him down. It was a low blow, but she had actually managed to make him feel guilty. He got an idea. “Look, why don’t you come out for a visit? September’s a great time of year. Whadda ya say?”
From the hesitation in Cat’s voice, Kyle knew it was the money, and so Kyle paid for everything, which was a $500 plane ticket and a car out to LaGuardia and back.
She flew in last night, in the midst of torrential thunderstorms. Her flight was stranded on the tarmac for an hour, the lightning flashing like a bombardment. When Cat finally made it to baggage claim she seemed tired, and older than the two years she had on him. She was always the big sister, tall and knowing. She had looked out for him, cooked for him after their mother died, taught him how to dress and a thing or two about girls. Back then she’d had long, dark hair, but she wore it shorter now. Waiting by the baggage carousel as she came down the steps, Kyle could see that something was missing, a loss of light in those dark eyes that had always made her seem young and girlish.
Tonight they will go to dinner. This is the month their mother died, and t
hey plan to eat and drink in her honor. It seems right that they do, though Kyle wonders now, as he approaches the southern end of the park, if they should just let it go. The time he’s been alive after his mother’s death is now ten years longer than what came before it, and what’s coming will push her memory back, perhaps beyond, a distant horizon. There’s no resolution with their mother, still no good way to deal with her. He has tried not to remember her final year, but it haunts him still. Kyle knew melancholy had set in her, he saw it every day, but she was his mother, he was a kid, and so he told himself that everything would be okay and that parents could take care of themselves. He’d seen her on the day she died, knew she was in some sort of trouble, and maybe he could have rescued her. But he didn’t. He was scared. When Cat finally acted, dragging him along, it was too late. Cat couldn’t save her, but Kyle has never forgotten that she tried. He wishes he could get that day back, another chance to get it right. Archer, his mentor on the trading floor, retired now to Florida, always used to tell him that the important thing was to trade so that you can come back tomorrow. But what if you don’t?
Last night the car from LaGuardia dropped them at Kyle’s building. Cat left her bag inside his door and Kyle fetched two umbrellas from his front closet, where he had over a dozen, bought during various New York rainstorms when he’d been unprepared, or received at some golf outing in Westchester County or out on Long Island. Still, there was no avoiding the rain. It fell so hard the drops bounced off the pavement and soaked Kyle’s pants almost to the knee on a mere two-block walk down Third Avenue to the little pub where he likes to drink and have an appetizer on nights when he doesn’t have a dinner and doesn’t want to go home. He has two bedrooms—more than he needs—twenty-three floors above the street, but for him the city is really his living room, the place he likes to stretch out.
“So,” Cat said when they were ensconced at the bar, waiting for a table. “You like this place, huh?”
“It’s not bad. Cold beer, a full bar, good food, and a nice place to eat it. Warm in the winter, cool in the summer. What else could you want?” Kyle caught his reflection in the mirror behind the bar, and his sister’s. Well, she was older, yes, there were crow’s-feet about her eyes, the skin was perhaps a little loose on her neck, but she was still a good-looking woman, if a bit resigned. He wondered if she was like so many of the women he knew, wanting a man and always unhappy with what they found.
“No,” she said. “I mean New York. All the buildings and concrete.”
“I like the constant activity. I miss the trees, nature, seeing stars in the night sky. Birdsong. Remember how we’d get up in the morning when we were kids and hear the birds? You don’t get that here.”
“I remember the birds,” Cat said. “And I’m getting plenty of nature right now. My feet are soaked.”
“You’ll dry. You want a drink?”
“Just one.”
“I didn’t ask if you wanted two.”
“I allow myself one drink a day,” she said.
Kyle was surprised by this. He hadn’t known she had a problem, and said so.
“Oh, the drinking wasn’t really a problem, it just wasn’t a solution, either. I like the one-drink regimen. Gives me something to look forward to, both the drink and the stopping, the sense of control that comes from it. Discipline. That’s what I need, I think.”
“I drink as much as I like.”
“And you get up and run every morning at what? Five? Anything you decide to do, it gets done. For a while it used to piss me off. Now I admire it.”
“It’s just me,” Kyle said.
Cat raised her hand, then grabbed Kyle’s shoulder. “I know, little bro, I know. Look, I just gotta say, thanks for the money. I’m gonna pay you back.”
“I told you, I don’t want it back.”
“So what?” Cat said. “I want to pay it.”
Kyle waited till he finished his steak to break the news. “I think I’m a father,” he said, a ridiculous line if he’d ever heard one. Cat put down her fork and wiped her lips, leaving a pinkish smudge on the white napkin. She asked Kyle to repeat what he’d said. He explained.
“What’s her name?” Cat asked.
“Siobhan.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“Irish. Not so uncommon here.”
“Never met a Siobhan in Motown,” Cat said.
“Well, she’s from Babylon.”
“Babylon? Is that a joke?”
“It’s on the Island,” Kyle explained.
“You’ve called her?”
“Not yet.”
“You will,” Cat insisted.
“Yeah.”
“And you’re waiting for what?” Here was the old tone, prodding him and making fun at the same time. She cocked her head, as if literally trying to get her mind around the situation.
“Advice,” Kyle said.
“Tell me about her,” Cat said. “She’s, no doubt, an attractive woman.”
Kyle nodded, and felt the blood rush to his face. It was like being back in high school and having Cat check out his girls. He was too enamored of looks, she always said.
“I didn’t see her photo in the apartment, not that you gave me much of a chance to look around.”
“There are a few, in a drawer.”
“Nice,” Cat said.
Kyle thought of their mother, how when their father moved out she went through all her photos and cut him out. Even the wedding pictures got sliced in half. Kyle wondered what Siobhan had done with the pictures of him. Not in a drawer, he hoped. He thought of her small apartment in Brooklyn, and then of her. There was a lot to like about Siobhan. She didn’t have his education or his job, but she could match him for wit and smarts. Their affair had been a lot of fun, and very passionate. She had eyes somewhere between hazel and gray, and when she looked at him he had to catch himself, as if just by her stare she could throw him off balance. She wanted kids, wanted them with him, and told him so. That changed everything. Suddenly, she scared the hell out of him.
“You gonna talk to me?” Cat asked.
“I don’t know how to be a father,” Kyle said. “I always figured I’d be one, but never saw the hurry. Dad always used to say to wait till I’m forty. And I remember watching him fathering, dealing with us. I’m not so sure he was having a good time.”
“It’s not always fun being a parent,” Cat said. “I don’t think it’s supposed to be. But you could do better than I have.”
Yes, Kyle thought, Cat has made a mess, but she knows things, probably more than she realizes. How to change a diaper, what food to buy. Car seats, formula, strollers, day care, vitamins, vaccinations, pediatricians. Somewhere in that mess there had to be wisdom. Kyle looked at his sister. “You wanna give me any advice?”
Cat waited a moment, then leaned forward. “I can tell you that a child changes your life completely. You might as well call it a different life. I also know that very soon, with every breath that little boy takes, he’ll be wanting to know who his father is. I think you need to call this Siobhan woman and work something out.”
Kyle had come to this conclusion, but it was still good to hear it from his sister.
“Promise me you’ll call this woman,” Cat said. Something in her voice made Kyle sit up.
“I promise. What’s up with you?”
“I just need to know you’re really going to do it. Men often don’t follow through on things.”
“Consider it done. I’ll call her at work tomorrow.”
“Where does she work?”
“Right across the street from me, in the Trade Center.”
“Call her.”
Kyle watched as Cat sipped what was left of her wine, which she’d been carefully nursing the whole meal. He spied her hand on the glass, noticed that she was still biting her nails. She glanced to the side, her lips pursed. Something was eating at his sister, something other than money.
“Connor with his dad?” he aske
d, to break the silence.
“Yep. I keep telling myself it’s a good thing. I know it’s important that he spend time with his father, but I still see it as four days of learning bad habits.”
“How’s the little guy doing?”
“He’s good. Really good.”
“I want to come and visit him,” Kyle said.
“Listen to you.”
“I mean it. I’m going to make some changes.”
Showered and dressed, Kyle makes his way to the usual corner where he’ll catch a cab downtown with some of the other Wall Street stiffs. They’ll all read the Journal, a morning ritual Kyle has dispensed with. Having been on the trading floor the day before, he knows what’s going to be in the Journal. For a while he tried the Post or the Daily News, but felt everyone reading over his shoulder, so now he takes the Times, and he’s left alone.
What a glorious day, he thinks, looking up past the building tops to the sky, a rich and deep blue. He can feel the air on his face, the skin raw from having just shaved, the air for once not humid, but dry and refreshing. God, he thinks, I’ve got to start spending more time outside.
There were five glorious years for the stock market, but that is over now, and as a bond guy Kyle feels he’s in a pretty good place. Money is already flowing to bonds, the stock market feels weak, and early October, that season of intermittent panic, is only three weeks away. He decides to count the Octobers. Maybe he’ll do four more, hang around for the bonus paid in February—he’ll be forty-five by then—and call it a career. Go outside more, get serious about one girl at one time. Or, maybe, he’ll be with Siobhan. Have a son. Sleep six hours a night. Visit his father. All the stuff the markets don’t allow for.
In his office—“You ever gonna put anything on your walls?” Caputo asked him last week—he grabs a cup of coffee, checks the LIBOR fixings and the treasury market, then thinks about calling Siobhan. No, he should wait till the market closes and get her at five-thirty and see if she’ll have dinner with him tomorrow at the little Middle Eastern place she likes on Thirteenth. He can have Cat come by later to meet her. Instead, he calls Maclean in London. Maclean is American, an Annapolis grad, the kind of thing that would be important to Kyle’s father and, oddly, is to Kyle. There’s a connection, as if here is a man Kyle understands. They talk every day. A couple of times a year Maclean comes to the States and he and Kyle go out for drinks, but something is always off. Sitting next to Maclean isn’t the same as talking to him.
