“I never told you”—Douglas had told him—“but I lost a small fortune on Amazon. Call it trading with the enemy, but I was holding some serious stock.”
Reference to his father’s portfolio was awkward at the best of times. Carter didn’t want to seem too interested, but Douglas would never be persuaded by a contrived indifference. Carter had always to indulge the conceit that of course Pop’s investment decisions were none of his business—which was horseshit. While he and his sister saw eye to eye on little, they agreed on this much: their father’s unfettered day trading with their inheritance was worrisome. If Douglas seemed pretty together, they might only be alerted to the fact that he’d lost it by the discovery that he’d lost the money, too.
Douglas unstoppered a crystal decanter on the liquor cabinet. “Noah’s Mill?”
“Early for me. And I’m driving.”
“I thought nobody drives anymore, either.”
Carter accepted the bourbon he thought he’d declined. Given the visit’s agenda, he’d drain it. Driverless cars having virtually eliminated DWI, cops weren’t on the interstate prowl anymore. “Our BeEtle has a driverless function, but I don’t use it. I’m like you—a dinosaur.”
“To paleontology, then!” Clinking Carter’s cut-glass tumbler against his own, Douglas sank into a leather armchair by the window. Even five-inch tennis must have worn him out. “It was a splendid life while it lasted. At least Enola had a good run.”
“But Nollie refuses to write for nothing. Which means an esteemed novelist like my sister writes nothing.” Carter added unctuously, “Such a terrible waste.”
“As her former agent, I can only approve.”
“I never have sorted out how much she raked in,” Carter fished. “She didn’t have another bestseller after Better Late Than.”
“We’re all entitled to our financial privacy.” Not the most promising preface for their pending confrontation, and the short i in privacy was annoying.
“So how’s Luella?” Carter asked, though he didn’t care.
“Oh, same, same. In remarkably fine fettle, I’m told.” He sounded dismayed.
Leaving Carter’s mother, Mimi, at sixty for a thirty-eight-year-old assistant might have given Douglas a second lease on life, but in due course the joke was on him. Oh, Douglas and his floozy girl Friday had a good stretch together—or so Carter was informed, since Nollie buddied up to their father after the divorce, while for years Carter avoided the couple’s sumptuous new estate in Oyster Bay out of loyalty to their mother. But the willowy, elegant interloper—who was trendily Afri-merican to boot, which seemed to a liberal New York family like cheating—was stricken with dementia in her late fifties. Douglas kept the condition under wraps for years. But at length he came upon his second wife naked in the shower, a mechanism she didn’t know how to turn on and whose purpose escaped her. That proved unfortunate, since she was also smeared head-to-toe in a smelly, sticky brown substance she could no longer identify and was trying to eat. Were it not for Luella, Douglas might have lasted a lot longer on Long Island. An irony that Mimi never ceased to savor: when Douglas dropped a thirty-six-year marriage like a hot brick, his wife was running the Dementia Research Foundation, and at ninety-five she was still on the board—stubbornly of sound mind, if only for revenge.
Relieved of his wife’s day-to-day care by Wellcome staff, Douglas now modeled his marriage on the relationship of master and pet. He fed Luella treats, to which she responded with the human equivalent of a tail-wag—when she remembered to chew and swallow, and didn’t remove the chocolate to melt it on the radiator. He did continue to talk to her; Carter had heard the running commentary when the two were in the next room. But then, lonely people talked the same way to their dogs.
“Ever wonder if this family is cursed?” Carter mused, still standing. Assuming the chair beside his father would have demarcated the point at which they were really going to talk. “I’m a newspaper journalist, and now Jayne complains that she can’t find any newsprint to clean the windows. As for Nollie, the career novelist is over. And, Pop, you were a king! But of one of those island nations swamped by sea-level rise that aren’t even a dot on the map anymore. There are no more literary agents. Even diesel engines: they’ve sunk without a trace. Everything we’ve done has vanished.”
Reference to diesel engines was strategic. The bulk of the Mandible money was amassed by Carter’s great-grandfather Elliot, a Midwestern industrialist. Douglas had added to the pile a bit, but he’d always lived high, and Mimi extracted a fair whack of his agency earnings in the divorce. The inheritance from Mandible Engine Corp. was protected from marital depredations by a trust. So if Carter hadn’t earned the cash to which he should soon be entitled, neither had his father. It pleased him to underscore that Douglas was a mere fiduciary caretaker, another undeserving beneficiary of capitalistic injustice.
Douglas expressed a sudden frustration with preparatory social niceties by rising with some difficulty for another finger of bourbon. Bad sign. He never drank before 8 p.m. “Since you were a journalist, you’ve been following the news?”
“Insofar as it’s possible, with no in-depth coverage, no fact-checking—”
“The end of the New York Times,” Douglas said patiently, “was not the end of the world. We all miss it, Carter. But it became a shadow of its former self.”
“Meaning when I worked for it.”
“Tetchiness doesn’t suit you. Aren’t you over seventy?”
“Not yet.”
“But old enough to realize that the end of the world takes place on rather a larger scale. As you must have begun to appreciate. Quite a week!”
“Well”—Carter took a deep breath—“with the stock exchange shut down, I guess you’ve had something of a vacation.”
“If having the federal government deny you access to your own accounts—scarcely different from being locked out of your own house—well, if that’s your idea of a vacation, yes. It’s been all beach umbrellas and boat drinks.”
“And do you know, ah—I mean, ballpark, what kind of a hit you’ve taken?” His father played his financial cards close to his chest. Carter had no idea of the size of the portfolio, down to the number of zeros.
“Use your head. Trading closes automatically once the market dives a set percentage or point drop. The SEC hasn’t deigned to re-open the Exchange since the Level 3 circuit breaker kicked in on Thursday. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture what will happen to the market when they do. I’m sure the SEC has pictured it. So whatever the values at which stocks left off are academic. The question is not what they are worth, but what they will be worth three seconds after the bell. Imagine all those investment-bank computers primed at the starting line—with which my poor fleXcreen can’t compete. Of course, one could argue that the value of assets to which you are denied access, perhaps indefinitely, is zero.” Reseated at a jaunty angle, Douglas had assumed a whimsical demeanor. He seemed almost pleased.
“One could argue?” said Carter. “Or that’s what you’re saying?”
“One could also argue,” Douglas continued with an infuriating mildness, “as a contingent on the web is already promoting, that this is an extraordinary and irrational hysteria from which the market will promptly bounce back. After a historically unprecedented dip, about which academics like your son-in-law will produce miles of trying analytical text, the dollar and the market may both more than recover. In which case, the next month or so could provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy low and sell high. With a bit of leveraging, investors swimming against the tide could easily grow their holdings by three or four times.”