2 | WILLIAM
November 15, 2005
THE FIVE OF US LEAVE THE TRADING FLOOR LIKE KIDS let out for recess. With a need to cure my hangover, even I’m a little excited to get out of there and get going. The first couple drinks I always look forward to. It’s drinks ten and beyond that get me down.
“Nick, slight change in plan.” As we ride down the elevator, Jerry cocks his head like he’s about to hand me my Christmas stocking. I raise an eyebrow. Nothing is ever slight with Jerry. “Melon’s for some burgers.”
“You want to go to the Upper East Side?” I live in the West Village. I lean against the wall of the elevator, a little tired at the thought of a long car ride. It’s a posh elevator with leather and real wood and brass fixtures. The kind of elevator you see only in the top law firms and the big banks, the companies that make so much money that even after the huge bonus payouts they don’t know where to put it all except expensive lobby art and nice elevators. It’s the corporate version of the people who make the too-huge bonuses. You can always tell the people who don’t know what to do with all their money if they spend way too much on stupid accessories, like a Burberry umbrella. I can’t hang on to an umbrella for more than one or two rains before I leave it behind somewhere. Burberry umbrellas and gorgeous elevators. They’re really the same goddamn thing.
“No problem. I called a limo—it’s waiting outside for us. We’ll be there in no time.” Jerry loves limos, the way little girls love ponies. I can smell the leather and the polish on the brass.
“Yeah, okay.” I feel like the old man. The twenty-something-year-olds are like bulls about to be released in a rodeo, bucking against the walls of the elevator, ready to get a drink on. They still have that youthful reserve of energy that can be called up whenever they want it, no matter what they did the night before. I’m already at the age that I need to grope around for it.
We stroll outside the lobby of 383 Madison and Jerry immediately spots the driver in his little driver hat holding a white sign that has “Cavanaugh” written in black marker. “Here we go, boys,” Jerry says, and opens the door for us before the driver can get there to do it for him.
Frank, Jerry’s younger, slimmer image, jumps into the car in a sort of headfirst dive. William and Ron go next with a smoother, scissors-kick-style entry. They both have their new tailor-made suits that I can’t stand. The suits are snug as can be and the jackets have three buttons instead of two. This is the way fashionable people are getting suits now.
William and Ron both button the top two buttons and leave the third loose. Every time they stand up from their chairs, even to walk ten feet, they go through this buttoning routine. Jackasses. It’s at least two thousand bucks to have a tailor run a tape measure around your body and cut a suit from a bolt of cloth. More, depending on the cloth. Good for them for making a nice paycheck, but they should spend it somewhere else. Or at least get a suit with only two damn buttons on the jacket. They look like a couple of mopes.
The driver says there’s construction on a few of the avenues going north and it will be better to go out to the FDR. The highways around the outside of Manhattan are the only roads that move reliably, so we take the limo all the way east and, like children who can barely swim and who run around the edge of the pool to get to where they want to jump in, we ride the perimeter of the island north, then exit the FDR to come into the Upper East Side.
Jerry pours out five glasses of scotch from the limo wet bar and hands them out as though answering our ring of his doorbell on Halloween. Everyone ritualistically sucks down the crappy scotch and talks about the trades that happened earlier in the day and the dopes on the other end of the deals. With the limo for the evening and the drinks at Melon’s, we are at a price tag of about two grand and counting for the night. Usually Jerry has a broker from Chapdelaine, which everyone just calls Chappy, or one of the other shops take him out for the more expensive nights. He’ll have no problem expensing this back to Bear, though. We could call up the Goldman guys to come meet us to talk about the Continental bonds to add some semblance of legitimacy to it, but why bother?
The limo drops us in front of Melon’s on Third Avenue at East Seventy-fourth Street. The place feels like it hasn’t changed in a hundred years, including the bartenders. I don’t mean just the type, I mean the actual guys. It’s no frills here. There are no cute, sexy bartenders and waitresses. Here it is old men bartenders who look like they’ve been around alcohol their whole lives. If you order a mojito you get a glare that holds like stone until you realize you need to change your order. These guys don’t know any drink that came into fashion after 1950. For them, it’s old-fashioneds, rusty nails, maybe a grasshopper for the ladies. The place is narrow, with old New York relics hanging on the walls, rickety chairs, and simple tables with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths. There is a long, wooden, old-style bar running the length of the left wall with two bartenders who are such curmudgeons you have to love their style. We make directly for them. The place is usually jammed up but we’re early enough to find room for five to stand huddled at the bar.
Jerry orders two bloody bulls for himself. A Bloody Mary with beef broth mixed in. He always chugs the first and sips the second. He’s made this his thing. He loves playing the part. I get Maker’s Mark on the rocks. I usually start with beer to ease in but today want a quicker start. Ron and William both get vodka sodas, with Ketel One. Has to be with Ketel One or they get into a snit. Frank, of course, gets a bloody bull, but only one. Two would be to step out of his subservience and encroach on Jerry’s thing.
I look over at the jackets of Ron and William, unbuttoned while seated in the limo, now rebuttoned again, but just the top two. Ron and William are both slim with dark hair and small features. They’re sort of normal and nice-looking and both give the appearance that they’re good kids, which makes them seem twice as devious when they aren’t. The main differences between them are in the way they move and in about six inches of height. Ron is about six three and moves slowly like he’s stretching his limbs with each motion. His speech is slow to match. William is five nine and speaks and moves in a blur.
“What is it with these three-button jackets? Can’t you two wear a normal goddamn suit to the office?”
Blank looks back at me from both of them. Clearly they like the suits and had thought they were making a favorable impression.
I’m feeling a little tired and grouchy and go further. “You’re not in Milan. Go to Brooks Brothers and get a normal goddamn suit and save yourselves some money.”
Jerry chuckles. He enjoys humor abuse of anything thin and good-looking. The fat bastard looks like he just stepped out of a JC Penney catalog. Ron and William just look uncomfortable. Because I sign off on their bonuses, they are now in the difficult position of having to come up with a witty retort that shows they aren’t defenseless but that doesn’t piss me off either. Not exactly a fair fight. I feel a rising knot of shame at behaving like a bully, but knock it back down with another sip of bourbon that makes the ice slide against the front of my teeth.
I almost never give these guys a hard time, and they aren’t used to hearing me dig at them with an edge. They laugh softly and uncomfortably and feel around for firm footing to make a stand.
“My fiancée likes the suits,” William offers. “I go to a tailor in Midtown that her dad always used. She drags me in there once in a while to get a few suits and shirts made. The shirts are stupidly expensive.” He shakes his head.
“All for the ladies,” chimes in Jerry. He’s finished his bloody bulls and his first beer. He used to drink hard liquor but would pass out in bars and on sidewalks. Now if he sticks with beer through the night, he at least makes it home. He’s already got the wound-up look of a big drinking night. Jerry’s sobriety is like an unstable chemical compound. Pour in a little liquid and it teeters off to something explosive.
“What’s your excuse?” I look at Ron.
Feeling the pressure is diffused a bit, he shrugs. “Hey, I just want to be stylish.”
“Stylish? That crap will be in the back of your closet in a few years and you’ll be embarrassed you ever wore it. Better to be classic than stylish—it’s the difference between Mick Jagger and Huey Lewis.”
A moment later comes a heavy exhale through Jerry’s nostrils—a sort of half laugh to indicate, Good one.
“Tell me about this fiancée,” I return to William. My shame is back and winning. Need another drink. “When are we going to meet this gal?”
“We’re having you and Julia over on Sunday for the dinner party, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” Crap, I had forgotten about that.
“I’m not invited?” Ron tries for mock astonishment but seems partly serious.
“It’s a dinner party with wives. You don’t have a wife, and you can’t bring a hooker. Jen’ll know.”
Ron seems satisfied. It’s not the kind of party he likes, anyway. Me either.
William turns back to me. “She’s great. She’s twenty-four, hot, great body. Likes to go out a lot, doesn’t mind me coming home drunk all the time.”
“That won’t last,” Jerry tosses in. “Trust me.” I think he’s referring just to the last point but could be any of them. Anyway, he’s right.
William nods to show that he’s considered this, then moves on. “Her guy friends from college are sorta lame. They’re like young kids, like they could be my little brothers.”
“Aren’t you twenty-six?”
“Yeah, but there’s something about being just out of college like these guys. They haven’t had enough time to grow up in the real world.” The real world, I think. You mean the limo ride we took to drinks and coke. “The girls seem my age, though. At least my age, maybe older. Weird.”
“She does have a tight little body, but that hasn’t slowed down your rub and tug routine.” Leaving nothing to chance, Ron makes sure the conversation goes to his comfort zone and gives his buddy a shove.
I play along. “You have a massage spot with a happy ending?”
Ron smiles. “Not a spot. The spot. Beautiful little Asian gals, and they’re amazing. They crawl all over you.”
Jerry leans forward, a little more interested. Frank has just been listening in this whole time and has nothing to offer. He seems like the kind of guy who has never had any ego tied up in girls. Everyone has a role. Helps to get comfortable with it. He just wants a nice, normal girl so he can settle that part of his life and not compete with other guys on it. He’ll probably end up the only one of us with a good marriage.
“Where is this place?” barks Jerry. The image of a caramel-colored, ninety-pound Asian girl draped over his pasty enormous form goes through my brain like a flicker of the lights.
“Tribeca. They have a converted loft. A few makeshift rooms and a few gals there. It’s open all day. You can just duck over for lunch.”
“Get me that address tomorrow.”
“Will do.” Ron and William stand a little straighter as though they’ve just been promoted.
Frank cocks his head the way a dog will when you speak to it and it is trying hard to understand your words. “Do you feel like that’s cheating?” This is a courageous question, especially since Jerry already showed interest. Honest, from the heart. Maybe this is how Jerry was too, thirteen years ago. I can’t remember. For a moment, I start to like Frank. On the other hand, it is the sort of wet-blanket question no one wants to hear and is a conversation killer. Bad form.
“I’ve actually thought about that, and the answer is no, for two reasons.” Conversation still alive. William continues his CPR. “The first reason is simple. If I scratch an itch and no one’s the wiser, then no one gets hurt. It’s like the tree falling in the forest. It’s not cheating unless both parties are involved and you complete the transaction.”
It occurs to me that “simple” to him means that any corner that can be cut will be cut. “But aren’t you stuck in a relationship covered with itches?”
“But they’re mine, it’s my business. If I’m okay, the relationship is okay. It’s not cheating.”
I don’t follow the logic but am amused by it, so I let it pass. I’ve been to a rub and tug too. It’s just been about ten years since and I did it twice in my life. I haven’t waved it in a few times a week like a turkey sandwich. “Okay, so what’s reason number two?”
“Number two is a little more complicated.” Here we go. “You have to switch roles in your head. If my fiancée had an itch and she went to some Asian guy, or gal, therapist who gave her a massage, then fingered her to orgasm to help her relax and feel good, I wouldn’t care. I don’t feel an ounce of jealousy over that. It just makes her happier and better able to deal with me.”
I find myself smiling while listening to this. I haven’t yet decided if it is sheer lunacy or if there is some twisted genius in what this kid is saying. Jerry has leaned back, slowly nodding, while Ron has an “amen, brother” look on his face. Frank looks confused. The silence from all of us lasts long enough that William just continues.
“Anyway, it’s not cheating. Because, what is cheating? Cheating is an affair with someone you know, a personal relationship. Not a professional relationship. An anonymous hooker or massage gal is not cheating.”
He says this with the tone of a philosopher, like he’s quoting an important passage. The philosophy of William. A one-woman-and-many-hookers man. I turn and get another drink. Not only did Frank not kill the conversation, but we just brought back a red-light district Frankenstein. I’m still pondering William’s theory of personal versus professional cheating, or noncheating. I’m struggling to connect the dots. Good for him if he can get some mileage out of professional noncheating and make it work. I can allow that he is on to something in that there are degrees between the two. I don’t think I could handle being on the receiving end of my wife having an affair and actually developing another relationship that had more meaning than just scratching an itch.
From this happy thought I begin to suffer from another bout of the syndrome I have recently begun to call “what am I doing in a bar with a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds when I’m thirty-five.” Bourbon always helps amplify my mood, for good or ill. In the last twenty minutes it’s been heading down, and fast. This is my career. By day I sell paper from companies whose business I don’t fully understand and could never run. By night, this. I’ve developed no real talents. A few people report to me, but the extent of my management skills is to give them a hard time over cocktails. Every time I think I need to get out and do something else, that thought is followed up with the realization that there is nothing else. What the hell else can I do? This job is all I’ve done for more than a dozen years and I have no other skill, if you can even call this a skill. At least I’m making some money. At thirty-five is it too late to pull out and switch careers? I think better never than late.
“Guys, I feel like crap. I’m going to pull the rip cord and get home.”
“What!” in chorus. “Come on. A couple more drinks and we’ll head over to Scores. We’re already on the East Side.” Jerry attempts the argument of geographic convenience after having dragged us all the way uptown. Home is downtown and farther west, so there isn’t any advantage for me. Plus it has gotten hard to expense strip club bills and we’d probably have to come out of pocket. And I really do feel like crap.
“Not tonight, guys. Enjoy the club, I’m out.” I bolt for the door before they can mount another argument.