Making Waves

by Catherine Todd

  I was sure that, all around me, well-manicured hands were underlining “Make Money” in their notebooks. I wished I didn’t find the subject so formidable and alienating. It was inconvenient, to say the least. Now I knew how all those people who had trouble distinguishing the parts of speech or basic linguistic patterns—abilities at which I had displayed an undeniable but quite useless proficiency—had felt. Steve had always said that a large component of business success was luck, however much the firm’s corporate clients wanted to believe otherwise, but I couldn’t help thinking there was some basic instinct to it as well, a kind of careless confidence that attracts money to it and makes it stick, like flypaper.

  After the lecture, Rob said, “Let’s go up to the front.” He was already moving away from me, down the aisle of closing Tumis and Atlases and newly capped pens.

  David Sanchez was leaning comfortably against the lectern, apparently debating the decline of the Fesbach brothers with a knowledgeable but unpleasantly avid short zealot who was particularly interested in the role of Scientology in the brothers’ rise and fall. As I knew next to nothing about any aspect of the subject, my eyes began to glaze over while I stood beside Rob, who was waiting for a polite moment to intrude. I lifted my eyebrows meaningfully at him, but he wouldn’t budge.

  At length Mr. Sanchez disengaged himself from his dialogue and turned inquiringly in our direction.

  Up close, he exhibited none of the air you expect to find in tax attorneys and accountants—that of a child who lines up every pencil in the box by color before he puts them away. There were no visible signs of anal retentiveness. Nor did he look like a pressure cooker-loving, swashbuckling pirate of the financial seas.

  His eyes were warm and brown and a little tired. His black hair was streaked with gray, and he looked about forty-five. If he had been a Regency hero, I would have described him as “tolerably handsome,” although if I had done so in a book I would have been compelled to go on to describe how the hero’s powerful thighs stretched out his tight-fitting stockinet pantaloons. I hadn’t a clue as to whether David Sanchez’s thighs were powerful or not; beneath his suit pants, they looked approximately normal.

  Rob seized his moment. “I just wanted to touch base with you, tell you how much I enjoyed your lecture,” he said. “I’m Ben Holland’s brother.”

  The zealot drifted away. David Sanchez extended his hand. “Of course. Ben mentioned you. Rob, isn’t it? I’m David.”

  Rob shook his hand and turned to me. “This is Caroline James.”

  David’s handshake was firm and warm, neither timid nor bone-crushingly hearty.

  “Caroline is my friend and neighbor,” explained Rob. “She’s looking for ways to expand her investment portfolio.”

  “Are you trying to diversify your holdings, Ms. James?”

  “Caroline. I’m getting a divorce.” It was out of my mouth before I realized I had finally said it out loud to somebody. I wondered, observing the remark dispassionately, what had moved me to utter it just then. It was true that I had a secret agenda—I’d been sizing up David Sanchez as a potential reader of Eleanor Hampton documents, despite the discouragement I had received from Gene—but this, to use a riding expression, was cramming the fences. It was far too soon to bring it up, and I bet it sounded pretty odd as a conversation opener.

  David Sanchez’s experience must have encompassed a wide variety of unusual confessions, because he handled this, too, with aplomb. “In that case, you might want to be very careful about getting into short selling, even into a fairly cautious managed fund like ours.” He managed to sound reasonably uncondescending, if a bit too practiced. “We generally prefer that our clients have a continuing high income stream, or enough assets so that putting a considerable amount at risk will not cause an immediate hardship.”

  I saw that he had sized me up, correctly, as a woman whose husband was the one who made all the money. Well, it was true, but it still rankled.

  “Can I buy you a drink or a cup of coffee?” Rob asked him.

  David consulted his watch, which I was glad to see was not a Rolex. “I have to be getting back soon,” he said. “But some coffee would be nice.”

  The coffeehouse was self-consciously arty, with rotating B-plus paintings on the wall and a clientele that dressed in a combination of underworld trendy and California exuberant. The tiny tables all had black vases containing a single flower that looked forlorn and desiccated amid so much opulent color. The coffee came in tall slender cups and was very expensive.

  Rob and I crowded together on one side of the table across from David Sanchez. Beside so many mummers, he looked like a person of substance and solidity, upright among the slumped. In addition, he was probably the only man in the room wearing navy blue socks.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Rob was saying between sips of his mocha caffé latte, “that being a short seller is almost a metaphor for the nineties.”

  “How’s that?” David asked politely, as if he had never heard of the concept.

  “Cleaning up the excesses of the eighties,” Rob said succinctly.

  “Ah,” said David.

  “I’m not sure I get it,” I confessed. It bothered me. I was usually good at metaphors.

  They both turned toward me politely.

  “The big gains in the eighties were fueled by leveraged buyouts or junk bond speculation or a lot of things that didn’t have a lot to do with real increases in productivity or assets,” Rob told me. He looked at David, who nodded encouragingly. “In the end, it was all a hollow shell. The future got downsized. Shorting relies on the same principle—selling at what you think is an inflated price and waiting some period for the price to sink before you buy back.”

  I looked at David, who was surreptitiously rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand and looking at his watch at the same time. He caught me looking and smiled. “Essentially, you’re a pessimist, then,” I said to him.

  His smile broadened. “I prefer to think of myself as a realist.” He shifted in his seat. “There’s more to it than just sitting around waiting for things to go bad. About a third of our firm’s employees are in research.”

  He said the magic word: “research.” I didn’t even wait for him to finish. “Do you ever take on work that isn’t just related to a company’s value in the marketplace? Research for private clients?” It had occurred to me that he would be the perfect person to review any prospective financial settlement, once he had seen, via a peek at Eleanor’s documents, what could be done through creative accounting. He had the intelligence, the background, and the objectivity. Best of all, he didn’t seem to be a lawyer. Besides, I really wanted someone else to confirm that Barclay was the rotten pond scum I thought he was.

  “Like what?” he inquired politely.

  “Private financial documents, such as personal loan transactions or…”

  This time his smile had just a touch of condescension. “Documents relating to a divorce settlement, for example?”

  I was annoyed at being so transparent. I looked at my napkin and nodded.

  “We don’t do that kind of research, Ms. James…Caroline. What we do is a little broader. We pore over a company’s financial documents; we call their competitors, suppliers, and customers. We look for weaknesses or outright lying. Sometimes we hire private investigators.”

  I considered this and decided to pay him back a little for making me feel like a fool for asking. “But if word leaks out that you’re investigating a company, couldn’t that turn your negative opinion into a self-fulfilling prophesy? I mean, rumors could start, and then investors would lose confidence, and—”

  “I know what you mean,” he said in a decidedly chillier tone of voice. “But, in our opinion, investors are far more likely to get hurt by companies that hype their projections or tout favorable developments and then fail to live up to them. Besides, if we smell something fishy, we tip off the regulators, and then they investigate.”

  Which doesn’t hel
p the stock price either, I thought.

  “It was a short who uncovered the fraud at ZZZ Best,” said Rob eagerly. I could tell Rob was disappointed in me, and I was sorry, because he had gone to considerable trouble on my behalf. “You remember ZZZ Best, don’t you?”

  I didn’t, as a matter of fact, though by now I know quite a bit about it. ZZZ Best was a carpet-cleaning company in the L.A. area that faked a pile of contracts and essentially made money in a gigantic pyramid scheme. The whiz-kid founder, who was Wall Street’s darling before the truth was uncovered, went to jail. Before I could open my mouth to reply, David said, “This has been nice, but I have an early day tomorrow.”

  “Looking for bad guys?” I asked him.

  “Jesus, Caroline,” Rob muttered under his breath.

  David stood and raised a graceful black eyebrow in inquiry. “Are you by any chance a Republican, Ms. James?”

  It was the first personal question he had asked me all evening, but since he had spent most of it implicitly blaming the party of Lincoln for the financial mess that was currently making his fortune, I was scarcely flattered. He was stereotyping me again, this time inaccurately.

  “As a matter of fact, I’m not.”

  “I’m sure La Jolla is a hotbed of Democratic activism,” he assured me.

  Well, he had me there. I don’t suppose there were more than a few dozen residents who hadn’t voted for the GOP at least since the days of Eisenhower, and some of those were probably live-in domestic help. Still, you couldn’t really tell for sure. Bumper stickers, like FOR SALE signs, were too vulgar for display within the town limits.

  “So nice to have met you,” I told him with what I hoped was unruffled savoir faire. His confident manner and superior assumptions (however accurate) had gotten under my skin, but not so much that I wanted to seem like a shrew. Why is it that when men are well-disposed toward you, they argue for the sake of argument and the men all accept that, but if a woman disagrees with a man, she’s a bitch?

  Mr. Sanchez had the air of one politely but firmly extricating himself from a situation that was an obligation rather than a pleasure, like a family reunion or a PTA meeting. “Thank you for the coffee,” he told Rob. He shook both our hands formally.

  “Christ,” said Rob, when he had gone. “No wonder you want to join Undersexed Anonymous or whatever it was.”

  I let that one pass.

  “I mean, you practically went for his balls. Did you mean to accuse him of planting misinformation so that the stock price collapses?”

  “Of course not. I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t say it, but you implied it. All the short sellers are sensitive about that kind of thing.”

  “Well, his sensitivity may have been dealt a mortal blow by my failure to admire his life’s work, but I somehow doubt it. Besides, what’s the big deal? All I did was ask him a question. The SEC must have at least prepared him for that.”

  He gazed meditatively into his empty coffee cup and then looked up at me. “What’s really bothering you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Was it what you asked him about looking at private financial documents?”

  “No, not really.” Pause. “I told you I wasn’t ready.”

  “You didn’t have to go down on the guy. All you had to do was sound reasonably interested. Your social skills haven’t atrophied that much.”

  “Well, he was too sure of himself. It got irritating.”

  I didn’t have to see his expression to know how that sounded.

  “Admit you were snide,” he commanded.

  “I was snide,” I conceded. “But he deserved it.”

  “Caroline, he was perfectly decent. He didn’t brag about his millions. He didn’t blow cigar smoke in your face or make sexist remarks. I could have gone for him myself, and I’m far from desperate.”

  “And I am?”

  “Of course you are. This evening just proves it. Listen, short sellers aren’t shrinking-violet types, but you’re carrying on as if he were Attila the Hun, trampling your virginity underfoot with his terrible swift sword or some such thing.”

  “That’s a mixed metaphor.”

  “You’re taking refuge in nonessentials,” he accused.

  “Why does everything have to be about sex?” I asked him.

  He slipped a twenty-dollar bill under the vase with the check. “Because everything is about sex,” he replied.

  6

  The porch light was on. Melmoth strode purposefully out from under the azalea bush, stalking miniature wildebeests. He swatted futilely at an ichneumon fly and rounded the corner of the house. That was as much of a greeting as anyone ever got from him while he was patrolling his perimeters, unless it was one of his frequent mealtimes.

  Jason was sitting in the living room, his feet slung over the arm of the chair. A magazine was open in his lap, but I could see that he had not been reading, that something was troubling him. I felt a pang for that moment, not far away, when I would no longer be able to read his expressions and his body language, when I would see only what he chose to let me see. Already he and Megan kept so much secret. This was the moment at which every mother wanted to shout, “I bathed you! I changed your diapers!” and snatch her offspring back into childhood.

  “Hi, Jas,” I said.

  Unaware of his transparency, he attempted nonchalance. “Hi, Mom.” He sat up and yawned. “What time is it?”

  The antique wall clock was not five feet from his head. “Almost ten thirty,” I told him.

  His eyes widened and shifted and then came back to my face. “Dad’s here,” he said with a little shrug.

  The apprehension in his look pierced my heart. No matter how many times you vow not to involve the children in your marital struggles, no matter how many divorce workshops you go to where the speakers tell you all about creative parenting and enhanced self-esteem, you know. It hurts them. You throw a great big wrecking ball into their lives and then you ask them to pretend they believe in this comfortable fiction you weave in which Daddy loves you and Mommy loves you and nothing fundamental is going to change in the family structure except that Mommy and Daddy won’t live in the same house anymore. We’ll all be so much happier now that there’s no more fighting.

  Right.

  I had never anticipated putting the children I loved through the domestic version of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but here I was, causing my son to look at me anxiously and wonder how I would react to his father’s presence in the house.

  “Great,” I said with determined cheerfulness. “I didn’t see the car.”

  He watched me carefully, testing the weather. “It’s in back. He couldn’t get in the garage.”

  I smiled through clenched teeth. I thought: What the fuck is Steve doing here at ten thirty at night, and who the hell does he think he is, trying to open up the garage without asking me first? What I said was, “Is he with Megan?”

  Jason shook his head. I saw that part of his problem was that whatever the purpose of Steve’s visit, it had nothing to do with his children.

  “He’s in his—the—your office,” he said finally. I had converted the guest room where Steve had retired—occasionally at first, and then, toward the end, on a nightly basis—to finish the day’s legal work, read his photography magazines, and work out on his exercycle, into my office and library. I had to resist the impulse to run down the hall and yank open the door.

  “How long has Dad been here?” I asked him.

  He shrugged again. “About an hour, I guess.”

  “Maybe I’ll see if he wants anything to eat,” I offered casually. “Would you like anything?”

  “No, Mom,” he said sadly. “You go ahead.”

  When the office had been Steve’s, I had never entered it without knocking, not so much because he demanded it but as a talisman, a gesture that I could hold up against his growing need for solitude and privacy. Invariably he would look up from his work, his magazine, his book, etc., etc., wi
th an expression of controlled annoyance. It wasn’t that he snarled “What do you want?” at me or anything like that. He was always very courteous. Still, he made me feel as if I were bringing him a drawing from my coloring book, something he could promise to put on the refrigerator door before going back to his grown-up work.

  Old habits die hard. My hand was poised in its little fist to knock, ready to set the routine in motion again. I caught myself just in time and jerked on the doorknob instead.

  The assertive woman comes into her own.

  There were papers everywhere—on the floor, on the desk, spilling out of the filing cabinet like survivors of a shipwreck. Steve whirled at the sound of my entrance, and a manila folder slipped from his fingers. He did not look annoyed, he looked flustered.

  I was too much taken aback to do more than mouth “What are you doing?” in a squeaky voice.

  “I—I lost a file I needed at work. I thought it might be here.” He averted his eyes. Was he actually embarrassed? I decided to stick to the moral high ground.

  “If you had let me know, I would have looked for you and saved you all of…this.” I looked meaningfully at the mess on the ground. “I thought you cleaned out all your files when you moved out. I haven’t seen anything of yours for months.”

  “I know,” he said, recovering a bit. “I’m sorry, but it was really urgent, and you were out.”

  “You called first?”

  “Yes, Caroline, I called. What is this, an investigation? I’ve said I’m sorry about the mess, and I’ll clean it up before I leave, so let’s just leave it at that, okay?”

  “Not okay. Those are my papers you’re going through.”

  He folded his arms. “You have secrets now? For Christ’s sake.”

  I made a conscious effort not to look away. “I expect you to respect my privacy. Why don’t you tell me what it is you’re looking for, so if I come across it I can let you know.”