“Oh, I don’t think so. Actually I’m feeling kind of beat tonight, I don’t know why. Would you mind if we just took a turn and headed on home pretty soon?”
“You don’t want to just drift out here? We could drift down past Governors Island and come up the other side.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You’re shorting me!” I blurted.
She looked at me as if I had just said something very stupid. Or as if she felt sorry for me. Suddenly I realized I didn’t know her well enough to have any idea what her look meant or what she was thinking.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to joke,” I said, again without intending to say it—without reviewing it in advance.
“I know,” she said, with a little tightening at the corners of her mouth. She was watching me closely. “Well,” she said, trying for lightness, “everyone hedges, right?”
“No!” I said. “Enough of that!”
She shrugged, as if to say If that’s what you want. “And so…?”
“So…” I didn’t know what to say. I had to say something. “But I like you!”
Again she shrugged, as if to say So what. And I realized I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was really like.
I turned the bug in toward shore. The few lit buildings ahead of us made the West Village look like a mouth that had lost most of its teeth.
“No, come on,” I said, again surprising myself. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
She shrugged yet again. I thought she wasn’t going to say more, and the pit of my stomach dropped down and clutched my scrotum tight, yanked my balls up into me. Then she said, “I don’t know—I guess it’s not really working for me. I mean you’re a nice guy, but you’re kind of old school, you know? Trade trade trade, a little bit of semiaccidental spoofing, hoping for a big short… like it’s all about money.”
I thought that over. “We’re in finance,” I pointed out. “It is all about money.”
“But the money can be about something. I mean, you can do things with money.”
“We work for hedge funds,” I reminded her. “We work so that people who are rich enough to afford it can hire people who will get them a larger rate of return than the average rate of return. That’s what we do.”
“Yes, but one of the ways you can get the alpha for them is to do venture capital and invest in good things. You can make a difference in people’s lives, make them better, and still get the alpha for the customers.”
“And your bonuses.”
“Yes, of course. But it isn’t just about bonuses. It’s investing in the real economy, in real work. Making things happen.”
“Is that what you do?” I asked.
She nodded in the darkness. Every hedge fund guarded its methods, so she was sworn to secrecy here. Any competitive advantage between funds came from a proprietary mix of strategies that were usually set by the founder of the fund, as the resident genius, and then by his closest advisors. That Eldorado went in for something as uncertain and illiquid as venture capital—that they had any at all in their mix—that was something she probably shouldn’t be talking about. But she had told me, basically in order to let me know why she had gone cool on our relationship. Which idea was still chilling me like a frost. I looked at her and realized that I wanted so bad for this one to work out. It wasn’t like it had been with Amanda and most of the others. Damn! I had done the stupid thing, I had gone with a gut feeling rather than a careful analysis. Again.
“Well, that’s interesting. I’m going to think about that,” I said. “And I hope you’ll have dinner with me again, from time to time anyway. Even just in the Met,” I added desperately, when she looked away from me, across the river. “I mean you live right next door. So, like instead of eating at home, maybe.”
“That would be nice,” she said. “Really, I only mean I want to slow down here a bit. I want to talk.”
“That’s good,” I said. “I want to talk too.”
But while I’m sleeping with you! I didn’t add. Lots of talk, after and even while making love, and showering together, and sleeping in the same bed! Talking all the while!
Well, but all these things were precisely what she had put on hold. Or, more likely, politely nixed for good.
If they were going to happen, I was going to have to figure her out. Figure out what would please her. It would be hard if I wasn’t seeing her. So as I steered the bug rather clumsily up into Twenty-third toward home, lost in my worry, missing obvious wake patterns and even other boats, feeling crushed, even resentful, even angry, I was still figuring out how to get along with her, how to go on, how to get her back. Damn. Damn me for a fool.
New York is less a place than an idea or a neurosis.
The scale of New York scorns the indulgences of personal sentiment.
b) Charlotte
The day had arrived when the Met’s board was going to decide what to do about the offer to buy the building. Charlotte didn’t want to discuss it in a general meeting of all the co-op members, which she knew was wrong of her, but she didn’t. If it came to a general vote and the members voted to sell, her head would explode. She could feel the pressure and she didn’t like it. She would scream heavy abuse at them and then feel worse than ever. “People urge me to trust people, but I don’t,” she said to her colleague at work, Ramona, who nodded sympathetically.
“Why trust people?” Ramona said. “What does it get you?”
“Oh be quiet,” Charlotte said. Ramona liked to tweak her, and mostly she liked it too, but this was too scary. “I wonder if I could declare myself dictator of the building. Isn’t that how it worked back in the Greek city-states? A crisis from outside would come, things might fall apart, so someone would declare themself dictator and everyone would agree to let them guide the polis through the crisis.”
“Good idea!”
“Quit it.”
Then the day’s first appointment, a family from Baton Rouge, stood before her, and she got to work with them on their case. Americans were supposed to have citizens’ rights that made them impervious to the kind of discrimination that foreigners faced when moving into the city, but in practice this could fail. Lots of people were simply without papers or any cloud documentation; it was hard to believe until you met them by the hundreds and eventually the thousands, day after day for years. The cloud’s Very Bad Day in the aftermath of the Second Pulse had wiped out millions of people’s records, and no country had completely recovered from that, except for Iceland, which had not believed in the cloud and kept paper records of everything.
Today there was also going to be an influx of new refugees from New Amsterdam, the Dutch township. This floating city was one of the oldest of the townships, and like the rest of them it floated slowly around the world, a detached piece of the Netherlands, which had been so flooded by the Second Pulse that New Amsterdam equaled something like five percent of the home country’s remaining actual land. Like all the townships it was essentially a floating island, mainly self-sufficient, and directed by Holland’s government to wander the Earth helping intertidal peoples in whatever way possible, including relocating them to higher ground. Charlotte enjoyed visiting it when it jellyfished by New York, eddying outside the Verrazano Narrows in the big counterclockwise current that curled off the Gulf Stream. Townships couldn’t come too close to the Narrows because there was a danger of getting sucked in on an incoming tide and crashing into one shore or the other, or crashing into both and getting corked, but a flight out to them in a small plane often took less than half an hour in the air. So she took one of the flights from the Turtle Bay aircraft carrier and enjoyed the sudden view from the air: the city, the Narrows and its bridge, the open ocean. On the left as they headed out to sea she could see the drowned shallows of Coney Island, lined on its seaward edge by the barges that were dredging the sand of the old beach and moving it north to the new shoreline. Then over the blue plate of the ocean, and soon they descended to the startling green island floating ahead of them—a big island, big enough that its airport’s landing strips could land jets, not that there were many jets left. The city plane descended and rolled to a taxiing speed in about a third of the length of the runway.