26 | AFTER ROCK BOTTOM
February 2, 2006
I TAKE THE ELEVATOR DOWN, AND OUTSIDE THE OFFICE there’s an open taxi at the corner as though it knew I’d be coming. I burst into the back seat and out of the cold and give the cabbie my address. It’s nine fifteen in the morning.
What I’ve done is a betrayal of faith, and I did it publicly. Instead of going to Julia, I condemned her and looked for retribution. I need to get to her quickly to tell her what happened, to let her know it was my insecurity that blinded me. If she hears about what happened with Oliver from anyone else, it will be much worse. I picture entering the apartment, interrupting her from something, and holding her hand while I confess.
When I open the apartment door, I find her sitting at the breakfast table with her coffee just a half room away, surprised to see me. I felt prepared and ready only moments ago. Now I’m like a sprinting dog yanked to a stop by the limits of his tether. I stare at her while still standing in the open doorway.
“Nick, what are you doing home?”
It feels absurd to say, I just punched out the guy I thought you were sleeping with, so I came home early, but it’s the truth. “I had an incident today. With Oliver.” I pause. “I heard some things. Some rumors. And I made some assumptions. Some very bad, very wrong assumptions.”
“Oh, God, Nick. What did you do?”
“I confronted Oliver. I’m sorry. I thought you were sleeping with him.”
“Nick.” She puts the coffee down and brings her hand up to her face.
“I hit him. He was sleeping with someone other than Sybil, but obviously it wasn’t you. I should have known that. I should have just known that, but I thought maybe you were.”
I’m expecting anger but there is none. She’s just slowly shaking her head and not looking at me.
“I’m sorry, Julia. I’m so sorry. And I’m sorry it was so public. I should have come here first.”
“Oh, Nick.” Her voice is resigned, which is much worse than angry. “I wish you knew I’d never do that. You used to know that.”
We’re silent and unmoving. I’m standing and looking at her; she’s sitting and looking away. My arms hang at my sides feeling useless and needing instruction.
“When did everything change?” she asks, as though she is trying to work out the answer herself.
She’s right to ask. But it’s hard to pinpoint. Our connection has faded, so slowly we didn’t notice it happening until we started feeling unhappy and asked why. My job is the easy scapegoat. I’m away a lot, distracted when I’m here. We don’t know each other anymore. She asked an important question and I’m working it out, but because of my silence she treats it as rhetorical and goes on.
“At least you still care enough to be angry that I might have slept with someone else. We’ve still got a pulse. I guess that’s something. Or was it just your bruised ego?”
There’s not much I can say.
She brings her hands to her lap and shakes her head one firm time. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be your wife anymore, Nick.”
“Julia, wait a minute.”
“It’s not about what you did today. That’s just an example of what’s so wrong. You don’t know me, we don’t talk. Our relationship is broken.”
It’s broken but I know we can fix it because I know what’s changing in me. I want to tell her that I’ve found myself again and that I’m right here with her. I hope it’s not too late.
I’m coming up with my plan and she says, “We should have made this decision a while ago. We could have saved ourselves some pain.”
“There’re a lot of things I should have done a while ago,” I say. “I’m going to do them now.” It’s all clear. I know I can never work another day at Bear Stearns. Keeping Julia, getting her back, is the only thing that matters.
She’s only half listening.
I stand. “Julia, we’re broken, but not beyond repair.” I squeeze her hand.
“Nick, I want you to get out. You need to leave this apartment, or I’ll leave, I don’t care which, but I can’t be with you.”
I want to ask if she means forever or just for right now. Even if she means just for now, once I’m gone, she’ll probably feel such relief that she’ll realize she means forever, so it’s better not to ask and make her face the question yet. I want forgiveness and to make amends, but she doesn’t want me in the same room. I know enough about Julia and any woman that being pushy now will blow things up.
I feel motivation and suddenly clarity—the Wonderful Life moment I had thought was possible only in a movie. I just don’t know how to share it. I need a plan that will give me the opportunity to prove to Julia that I can change in a true and permanent way. I can start by proving it to myself.
“Okay. I’ll go.” I walk to the bedroom to pack a bag and whisper a wish that she doesn’t leave me alone to do it. I pull a suitcase from the closet and start to put a half dozen of everything into it.
Julia walks as far as the doorway but doesn’t come in the room.
I stop packing for a moment and look at her. “I’m going to go to the office tomorrow for the last time.”
She leans against the doorframe and crosses her arms. She’s evaluating my statement and seems to conclude that it’s not too little but it is too late. She smiles through tears. “I’m happy for you.”
My instinct is to hug her and lift her from the ground, to tell her everything can be okay now, but I know I need to give Julia room to come to believe in me rather than to try to persuade her with words. She needs to have enough time to want to see me again, at least a little.
“Julia, don’t answer me now. I want you to know that I love you. Those aren’t just words. You’re everything that matters to me and I feel that with my whole heart. I have no right to ask for it, but I want a second chance. I want to give us a second chance. If you feel anything for me still, if you think there’s a chance for us, meet me tomorrow. I’m going to buy two tickets to somewhere quiet, some island in the Caribbean. At nine a.m. tomorrow I’m going to quit and I’ll be outside the office by nine fifteen and I’ll wait for you. We can go to the airport together and we can try a new start, away from here.”
Julia nods. Tears are running down her cheeks and falling from the line of her jaw. They’re not tears of happiness. She’s too exhausted to wipe them and she won’t make eye contact with me.
“Julia, I’m still the person you fell in love with and married. I hope you’ll give me the chance to show you that.”
27 | GHOSTS
February 3, 2006
THE TAXI TAKES PARK AVENUE AND I WATCH THE FEW trees that are planted in the median as we pass by. I can look up through the naked branches like cracks in a windshield. We turn on Forty-sixth Street toward 383 Madison. My breath comes easy. I’ll walk through these doors for the last time.
When I was twenty-two coming to work, I never did things with a plan. I didn’t do things based on how I wanted my life to be. I never stopped to think about what that life would eventually look like. I was paying the bills and living life. It all felt like a dress rehearsal and there would be plenty of time to get things exactly right.
But then the years go by and only belatedly do I realize there never was a dress rehearsal. It’s all been happening in a single take and it all counts.
I’m halfway across the lobby to the elevators and I hear, “Hi, Mr. Farmer.”
She’s a small, middle-aged woman and I know the face. It’s round and happy. Her clothes are inexpensive but neat and her hair is permed in a way that went out in the 1950s. “Hi, how are you?” My smile is real. There’s something comforting about her. I remember that she works in the back office, processing trade orders. She’s been at Bear for about two decades and might make fifty grand a year. She probably thinks I have the world at my feet, though right now I’m the one envying her happiness.
“Great. I like a little chill in the air. I’m going to get a coffee. Can I get you anything?” She smiles.
“No.” I wish I knew her name. I’d love to be able to say it to her now. I’d love to be able to go back thirteen years to tell myself that it’s an important thing to know and those are important things to care about. “But thank you.”
For thirteen years I haven’t been in my life, I’ve been hovering above it like a phantom, all the while with the nagging feeling that something isn’t right, that I’m not real. Jack Wilson is a phantom too. A ghost who still thinks he belongs among the living. He can’t understand the source of his confusion, why the only people who can see him are other ghosts, but he doesn’t know that they’re ghosts too. He knows only that they resemble him in some way.
With my mind made up and certain, I feel more powerful. I have nothing to lose anymore and everything to gain. I’m as eager to get upstairs as a child reaching to open a present.
In the elevator I press 6 for the executive offices, stopping short of the trading floor on seven. I roll my shoulders in a way to release tension and I find that I’m not tense at all and it occurs to me that the most dangerous person is not the one with the most strength or weaponry. The most dangerous person is the one who feels he has nothing to lose. I’ve tapped into this strength. I feel it flow through my body. My fingertips tingle with it. Nobody has a claim on me and I care nothing for a claim of my own on anything else. There is no consequence left for me to fear. It’s liberating, exhilarating.
I exit the elevator doors onto the sixth floor, as though concealing my weapons through a security checkpoint. The sixth floor is nothing like the trading floor. Here there are actual hallways and partitions and offices with doors to close them off. There is no line of sight from one end to another, but there is a main hallway that runs the perimeter of the floor, connecting all the executive windowed offices like an old post road. On the one side sits the executive in an office with sofas and an expensive desk, artwork, and lavish furnishings and with a view of the city. Steps across to the other side sits the secretary in the more humble setting of a cubicle, wishing she had enough privacy to pull up solitaire on her computer.
This is where Dale Brown comes to work. I don’t want to see Joe Sansone because my immediate boss might treat me as a friend, try to persuade me to change my mind and give me time to do so. I want this to be official, cold, and friendless.
I haven’t seen Dale since the meeting with Freddie. I don’t know if he recognized me then or will now. I know his office is in the southwest corner, though I’ve never been there. I get on the post road and start my journey south, then west.
When I get near to the corner, I strain to see the office nameplates out of the corner of my eye without appearing as though I need them to find my way. I see “Dale Brown, President” across from an alert secretary who is watching me coming. She’s cute but not stunning and she seems to sense the danger in my gait. Dale hardly knows me and she certainly doesn’t know me at all. She starts to rise, then hovers inches above the seat of her chair as though she’s decided it’s best to get in a ready position.
“Is he in?”
“Do you have an appointment?”
I don’t answer and don’t stop. I’ve already got position on her and I’m to the door. I turn the knob and step into the office.
“Sir, excuse me.” I close the door behind me to shut out her protests.
The opening and abrupt shutting of the door startles Dale. He looks up from his computer screen. An expression of panic travels across his face before dissolving to one of annoyance. A man in a suit who must be a Bear Stearns underling has interrupted his reading. There is a flicker of recognition, and probably an association with Freddie.
“Can I help you?” He says this in a way to let me know that helping me has nothing to do with his question.
The door opens behind me. “I’m sorry, Mr. Brown.” She snaps out her words and comes around to stand next to me, glaring and with the corners of her mouth pulled flat back toward the hinge of her jawbone.
“I’m Nick Farmer. I quit.”
His eyebrows rise in symmetrical arches of surprise. He seems to be trying to decide if this is something he should care about before he commits to a response.
I don’t care to wait. I turn and let myself out and close the door behind me and shut them in. They’re left to stare at each other, each to confirm for the other that what they think just happened actually happened.
I retrace my steps to the elevator and press Down for the lobby. I see the 7 button for the trading floor and I think of all the souls trapped in there. Not against their will, but against their knowledge. I wonder if corruption can reach levels to be self-defeating, or if Bear will always be here.
I think of Freddie and his prognostications putting a date on the end of the world. A nerd-like Nostradamus predicting that Bear’s insane bets and manipulation of securities will create a black hole. Once critical mass is reached, the global economy will crumple in on itself in an instant. Bear will be compressed to the size of a grain of sand. I imagine people and banks throughout Europe and Asia ripped from their foundations and screaming across oceans, the way things are sucked with violent force toward a gash in an airplane at altitude. Everything colliding into Bear.
Is a person like William the first to be destroyed, or does he show up in a post-Armageddon world like a cockroach? I’ll find a safe place far from here to rebuild, and if the rest of the world has to rebuild around me, so much the better. I answer my own question as I realize William will survive too, because there’s always a place for a soulless soldier.
Traveling down in the empty elevator, I already sense a change, like a fever breaking, and I think I could like myself again. Enough to be alone, and I hope that’s the first step to not being alone.
As the elevator drops, so does my strength and certainty, because I don’t know what’s coming next. I never get nervous when I know what I’m going to do, and I had known exactly how I was going to quit. It felt like an actor was playing the role of Nick Farmer and delivering the lines I had already written and I wasn’t there at all. But now I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can feel the nerves bunch up in my throat and my stomach feels light, as though I need to weigh it down, but I’m too nauseous to eat.
The elevator doors open and I hope to see Julia waiting in the lobby with a reluctant smile, but I know right away she’s not there. In my periphery I can tell all the bodies are moving with purpose to destinations. No one is waiting for anyone. I circle the lobby to reaffirm what I already know. It’s 9:15 a.m. exactly.
I walk outside to the cold air and the sounds of city traffic. The sidewalks are still thick with people though not with the crush of an hour earlier. I take a few more steps away from the building to look up and down the sidewalk, knowing I can pick out her movements from the crowd.
She’s not there and I don’t blame her. I’ll wait until 11 a.m. for her, then go to the airport by myself and hope she just needs a couple weeks to herself before she’ll see me.
I turn back around to move against the building so I’m not standing still in the middle of a stream of brisk walkers. My eyes stop on a woman seated on the backrest of a bench, at an angle so that I see her in profile. I recognize the posture and the tilt of her head.
Seeing her is the kind of gift that changes everything. I am the luckiest. I don’t realize I’ve been holding my breath until I hear myself exhale. We have a chance.
She hasn’t moved and doesn’t see me. She’s resting against the empty bench, her body facing into the wind like a seagull on a pylon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It feels funny to thank Megyn Kelly. She and I are so far beyond that. Not only is a “thanks” beneath the proportion of what she has given, it is also the least profound of the ways that we express what we mean to each other. But there are limits to the Acknowledgments piece of a novel.
Megyn is my biggest supporter and fan, despite the fact that she gets the first read of the first draft (before even I read it) when the novel is in its crappiest state. Her ideas for plot and character development as well as editorial judgment are unsurpassed, and her influence shows up across this novel. Megyn, thank you. I’ll express more outside the confines of these pages.
Thanks to my agents, Lane Zachary and Todd Shuster, for being early believers in the novel and helping to develop it. Also to Jane Rosenman and Jacklyn Brunt for their early feedback. Thanks to Peter and Linda Kirwan for their support. Thanks to Manly Yates Brunt Jr. for instilling in me a love of literature.
At Touchstone, thanks to my brilliant, fun, and dynamic editor, Stacy Creamer. Her ideas and encouragement brought the novel to its final form. Thanks also to Meredith Vilarello and Megan Reid for educating me in the ways of the publishing world.
Thanks to Yates and Yardley. Their presence has changed my life and inspired me to reach for things that make me happy—things like this book.