There was a knock on the door, and the pimply girl was there again. I added the business section to the stack of papers I’d collected since New York, and left.
The Lethe Lounge was empty, and CNBC was on the box again. The bartender was loading beer bottles into a cooler and looked up when I came in. His forehead wrinkled in recognition.
“Coke?” he asked.
I shook my head. “A Bud.”
He pulled one from the cooler. “If you want lunch, you’re early.”
I took a long drink. “I can wait.”
He shrugged and tossed a thumb at the television. “You want to watch something else?”
“This is fine,” I said.
A lacquered blonde was interviewing an edgy-looking guy in a dealing room somewhere. The edgy man was talking about another broad sell-off in equities — led again by financial stocks — but I wasn’t listening. My attention was on the background: the long, crowded rows of desks, the well-dressed bodies hunched over keyboards, the dense mosaic of glowing monitors, the chirping telephones, the muted rumble of a thousand urgent conversations — all the low-gear chaos and white noise of money made and lost.
It hauled me back to my first day on the Ketchum Leeds trading floor, on the interest rate swaps desk. Eight years ago, and it still made my face hot. I could barely figure out how to work the telephones that morning, much less make sense of what the traders were talking about on the calls. Everything I learned in b-school seemed to blur and slide and wash away, until all I heard was meaningless sound and I was covered in sweat. When the senior trader who’d been saddled with me asked if I had questions, I choked on my embarrassment and shook my head no. He pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow, and we both knew I was lying.
I deciphered the phones eventually, and the vocabulary, too, but I’d never escaped the feeling of that day — of being two steps behind everyone else, of never being the first, or even the second, to see the bud of an opportunity or the tip of an iceberg. Of being in over my head. Two mortifying months later, the senior trader took pity on me, and put me down in front of something that sat still when I looked at it — something that made sense to me — a spreadsheet.
It was a pricing model — a collection of formulas that determined the value of the instruments we were trading, and let us mark our positions to market every day, and calculate our profits and losses. At least that’s what it was supposed to do. The trader was convinced it was fucked-up somehow, and low-balling his P&L.
“Some dick from accounting came by last week with an IT guy who didn’t know a discounted cash flow from his asshole. They swear up and down they were just tweaking it, but now I don’t believe the numbers.”
I pored over the spreadsheet for two hours, and every time I glanced up the senior trader was looking at me. The problem, when I found it, was a subtle one — a change in how the yield curves were being built — and it wasn’t so much a glitch as a more conservative approach to valuing our swaps. I explained it all to the trader, who listened without expression and smiled when I was done.
“They think I’m a little too aggressive,” he chuckled. “Now change it back.” And I did, without pause or question. It added 108 grand to that month’s profit, and the senior trader grinned wider. It was Carter Strickland’s test, and I had passed.
“You want some?” the bartender asked, and brought me back with a jolt.
It was the lunch special — brown and lumpy. It was a long way from the Four Seasons, but the beer and coffee needed something to hold them down. I nodded and he dropped a ladleful into a bowl and set it on the bar and picked up the remote.
“Enough of this,” he said, and changed the channel to ESPN. They were covering the trade of a reliable closer and two journeymen right-handers for a big-hitting catcher and an aging first-baseman whose wife was a country singer. The bartender shook his head.
“Fucking Cubbies,” he sighed. “Every year the same thing — always a master plan.”
“You know what they say about plans.”
“What’s that?”
“That everybody has one — until you hit ’em in the face.”
“Mike Tyson, the great philosopher, right?”
I nodded and looked up. I saw the bumper sticker over the cash register — Bleed Cubbie Blue — and the Sammy Sosa bobblehead with the chipped nose next to it. The bartender followed my eyes.
“Never missed a home opener,” he said.
“You have a lot of patience.”
“What else can you do? Eventually they’ll get it right.”
“Optimistic too.”
He shrugged. “You do what you can with the cards you’re dealt, and you hope for something better on the next go round. The important thing is to stay in the game, right?”
“That’s the plan.”
He put the remote on the bar and went in back. I pushed my food around and flicked the channels. There was a cop show rerun on TBS, with world-weary detectives and an arrogant prick of a suspect who’d be a pathetic wreck by the end. I kept surfing.
I stopped at the fashion channel. It was something about making perfume, and I wasn’t sure where the show left off and the commercials started, but I watched anyway. I was looking for Mia. I knew there was little chance of seeing her — she’d only been on that once, and it was months ago — a documentary about aspiring fashion designers. Still, I looked. I remembered how nervous she’d been the night before it first aired, her over-caffeinated engine amped higher than usual.
“They’re going to make me look like an asshole, I know it. That’s what they do on these things. Either that or I’ll come off as a babbling idiot. Or maybe both. And they probably won’t even show the clothes. That cocktail dress is one of my best things, and I bet they cut it out.” She got nine minutes and fifty-one seconds of screen time, total — more than anyone else — and no one looked better.
Strickland had introduced us a year and a half ago, at Milk & Honey. She was raising money, and glad to see anyone who would pick up a check. I was looking for the usual — a model to fuck — and though she’d never made it on the runway, Mia looked the part: tall and pale, with a glossy wing of hair across a naughty, sulky face. I’d fronted the cash for her fall line, and for the spring one afterwards, and six months back she’d given up her apartment and moved into mine. I wondered how long it would be before someone asked her to move out again. Probably around the time my monthly maintenance check didn’t show.
A knot rolled through my gut and I pushed the bowl away. The perfume show ended and another one, about eyeliner, began. I called into the kitchen for the check.
I was crossing the lot at the Lethe Lounge when a rust-scabbed pickup turned too fast off the road. It churned up stones and a cloud of icy dust, and its rear end slewed wildly. I jumped out of the way. A big guy in a blue parka with an American flag patch on the sleeve fell out of the passenger side and stumbled into the bar. The driver paused by the door and looked back at me. He took off his red cap and waved.
On the third day I bought maps. The quick-mart had more of these than it did newspapers, and I got ones for points north, south, and west. I bought a twelve-pack of tallboys and a bag of pork rinds, too, and carried it all to my room. I turned on the TV and spread the maps on the bed and opened a beer.
I’d had no plan when I left New York — nothing besides getting as far as I could from the office and from the questions that’d been growing like barnacles on my trading desk ever since that fucking auditor, DiMarco, had come around. But now I was running out of country. A couple of days driving and I’d hit water, and then what? South to Mexico? North to Canada? Or maybe straight on through, into the Pacific.