“Ha ha. Always good to get together with you and get cut down to size a little.”
“That’s just what I was thinking.”
“Are you still a nonfat latte person?”
“Yes, I never change.”
“Not what I was implying.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Okay, I guess I feel like your coffee habits are pretty fixed, maybe I’m wrong.”
“These days I like half-and-half in an American coffee with a shot of espresso in it.”
“Whoa!”
“New theories, new stomach lining.”
“Surgery?”
“Yeah, I had that band put in? Not really. No, I’m feeling okay there now, I’m not sure what happened. Maybe the meditation is kicking in.”
“Medication?”
“Meditation. I told you last time, or the time before.”
“I forgot, sorry. What do you do?”
“It’s a kind of mindfulness meditation. I lie there in the tower’s farm and look at Brooklyn, and think about how many things there are that I can’t do anything about. After a while that becomes like the whole universe, and then I feel calmer.”
“I think I would fall asleep.”
“Usually I do, but that’s good too.”
“Still insomniac?”
“Now I think of it as spreading my sleep around. Sleep, meditation, wakefulness, it’s all getting to be the same for me.”
“Really?”
“No.”
He laughed politely. They sipped, looked around the park. It was the last part of autumn in New York, the leaves had all turned and many had fallen, but some oaks, sycamores, and tweaked elms planted a few decades before were paying off now with their last great globes of red or yellow. It was, as everyone said, one of the handsomest times of year in the city, the time of shortened afternoons and sudden chill, and a clear quality to the low light that made Manhattan like a dream city, stuffed with significance and drama. The only place to be. They had sat across from each other like this, here in various parts of Central Park, and elsewhere in the city, for almost thirty years now. Like giants plunged through the years, yes, and even though she was a bureaucrat and he was the head of the Fed, she knew all of a sudden that he considered them equals.
“So is the president really calm, do you think?”
“I think so. I think she’s in the strong line, you know. And as progressive as an American president can be.”
“Which isn’t very much.”
“No, but it matters when they are. I think she’s in the line of FDR and Johnson, and Eisenhower.”
“Those are all twentieth-century presidents. You might as well add Lincoln.”
“Well, I would, maybe, if it ever came up. If some kind of push came to shove. She wants that kind of opportunity, I think.”
“A civil war over slavery?”
“Well, whatever the current equivalent would be. I mean we do have some giant problems, as you know. And inequality is one of them, as you also know. So yeah, I think she would love to do something big.”
“Interesting.” Charlotte thought that over. “I guess if you were going to do something so stupid as to be president, you would want to go for something big.”
“I think so. The temptation is there. I mean, you wouldn’t do it thinking, Hey, now that I’m president I’ll play it safe, hope nothing happens. Would you?”
“I don’t know,” Charlotte confessed. “It’s way outside my thought zone.”
“You never meditate by thinking, What would I do as president?”
“No. Definitely not. But you’re working for her. You have to think about that. A lot of us think the head of the Fed is one of the crucial jobs.”
He looked surprised. “I’m glad to think you might be one of them.”
“How could I not? You know me.”
“Well, yes. Sort of.”
“I think you do. Say we were concerned with justice, when we were young. I think that was true of us, don’t you?”
He nodded, watching her with a small smile. His idealistic ex, still at it. He sipped his coffee. “But then I got into finance.”
“But that was moving toward power, right? Toward economics, which is toward political economy, which is toward power, which is still ultimately working on justice. Or can be.”
“That’s what I was thinking at the time, I guess.”
“And I always saw that. I always gave you credit for that.”
He smiled again. “Thank you.”
“People get into finance for different reasons. Some of them do it just to make money, I’m sure, but you were never like that.”
“No, maybe not.”
“I mean now you’re a federal employee. So you’re making peanuts compared to what you could be.”
“True. But I don’t have to worry about money anymore either. So I’m not sure if I get any credit for that. You could say that at a certain point, power is more interesting than money. Once you’ve got enough money. You see that all the time.”
“I know. But whatever, here you are, chair of the Fed, it’s big.”
“It’s interesting, I’ll admit that. It’s maybe too big. I feel like I should be able to do more than I find I can actually do. It’s like the Fed kind of runs itself, or the market runs it, or the world, and I sit there thinking, Do something, Larry, change something, but what, or how—it isn’t obvious, that’s for sure. For one thing, the rest of the board and the regional boards have a lot of clout. It’s not a strongly executive system.”
“No?”
“Not as much as I’d like. I feel more advisory than anything else.”
Charlotte thought about that. “But advisory to the president, and to Congress.”
“True.”
“And if push came to shove, you know, like in a financial crisis, then sometimes your advice is what everyone is going to do.”
He laughed. “Guess I’ll just have to hope for a crisis!”
Charlotte laughed too. Suddenly they were having a little fun. “Those seem to come along every decade or so, so you have to be ready.”
“I guess.”
They talked about other things, such as old friends and acquaintances they had enjoyed in the years when they were a couple; each had kept in touch with one or two, and they shared their news.
That led naturally to Henry Vinson.
Actually not. It would never be quite natural for Charlotte to ask Larry about any of his acquaintances in finance, as she had never taken any interest in them, nor had Larry been inclined to share details of his interactions with them. Most of that part of his life had happened after they broke up. So she had had to consider how best to bring it up, but now she saw the way, which was to make it about him and his possible conflicts of interest, because then he would assume that she was just tweaking him with problems arising from his success. That would fit their usual pattern.
“Do you ever end up regulating your old partners?” she asked.
He did frown a little at this, it was so outside her usual realm of interest; but then he winced a little, as if becoming aware she was needling him again, as she had hoped he would conclude.
“I’m not head of the SEC,” he pointed out, by way of a parry.
“I know that, but the Fed sets the rates, and that determines a lot of everything else, right? So some of your old partners will be helped and others hurt by any decisions you make.”
“Of course,” he said. “It’s the nature of the job. Basically, everyone I ever worked with is going to be impacted.”
“So, Henry Vinson too? Didn’t you guys have a kind of rocky breakup?”
“Not really.”
Now he was regarding her with some suspicion. He had left Adirondack after Vinson had been made CEO by its board of directors. It had been in the nature of a contest or competition, he had once admitted to her, in that the board of directors could have chosen either of them to be the next CEO, but they chose Vinson. Larry had still been the CFO, but there was not really room for the loser of such a selection process to stay in the company, especially since Larry didn’t like many of the things Vinson was doing; he had therefore left and started his own hedge fund, done well, and then been appointed head of the Fed by their old law school classmate, now president. Vinson had also done well at Adirondack, and then with his own fund, Alban Albany, after he too had gone out on his own. So it could be regarded as a case of no harm no foul, or two winners. Just one of those things. As Larry was explaining again now.