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.
“Still, it must be fun to tell him what to do?”
Larry laughed. “Actually he tells me what to do.”
“Really?”
“But of course. Repeatedly, all the time. He wants rates this way, he wants them that way.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“He can talk to me, anyone can. He’s free to talk to me and I’m free to ignore him.”
“So nothing’s changed.”
He laughed again. “True.”
“So is that how it works, with you now in government regulating them?”
“It’s just me in a different job. I don’t stay in touch, but no one ever does.”
“So it’s not the fox guarding the henhouse?”
“No, I hope not.” He frowned at this idea. “I think what everyone likes is for the Fed and Treasury to be staffed by people who know the ropes and speak the language. It helps just in being able to communicate.”
“But it’s not just a language, it’s a worldview.”
“I suppose.”
“So you don’t automatically support the banks over the people, if push ever comes to shove?”
“I hope not. I support the Federal Reserve.”
Charlotte nodded, trying to look like she believed it. Or that he hadn’t just answered her question by saying he would support the banks.
The late-afternoon light was bronzing the air of the park, giving all the autumn leaves and the air itself a yellowy luster. The ground was now in shadow. It was crisp but not cold.
“Want to walk around a bit?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, and got up. She would be able to show that she had become a stronger walker. Assuming he had ever noticed she had been having trouble with that, as probably he hadn’t. She pondered how to bring up Vinson again. Once they got up and going, headed north up the west side, she said, “It’s an odd little thing, but a cousin of Henry Vinson’s was living in my building as a temporary guest, and then he went missing. We have the police looking into it, and they were the ones who found this relationship to Vinson.”
“Cousin?”
“Family relationship? Child of a parent’s sibling?”
He tried to shove her and she dodged it. “It’s just one of the things they’ve been finding out,” she added.
“That is odd. I don’t know what to say.”
“I only mention it because we were talking about the old days, and that made me think of Vinson, and how I had heard about him in this other connection.”
“I see.”
Larry being Larry, he managed to make that sound like he saw more than Charlotte would like. They had fought a lot, back in the day; she was remembering that now. That stuff had happened; that was why they had divorced. The good times before that were hard to remember, but not that hard. As they walked around the park paths, she found their past was very present to her mind, all of it. She often imagined the past as an archaeological dig, with later events overlying and crushing the earlier ones, but in fact it wasn’t like that; really every moment of her past was present to her all at once, as in the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. So the good times stood right next to the bad times, alternating panel by panel, room by room, making for a garbled queasy stew of feelings. The past.
The upper halves of the superscrapers ringing the north end of the park caught the last of the day’s sunlight. Some windows facing southwest blinked gold, inlaid in immense glass curves of plum, cobalt, bronze, mallard green. The park’s advocates had had to fight ferociously to keep the park free of buildings; as dry land it was now ten times more valuable than it had been before. But it would take more than drowning lower Manhattan to make New Yorkers give up on Central Park. They had made one concession by filling in Onassis Pond, feeling that there was enough water in the city without it; but other than that, here it was, forested, autumnal, same as always, lying as if at the bottom of a steep-walled open-roofed rectangular room. It looked like they were ants.
Charlotte said something to this effect, and Larry shook his head and chuckled at her. “There you go again, always thinking we’re so small,” he said.
“I do not! I don’t know what you mean!”
“Ah well.” He waved it aside; it wasn’t worth trying to explain, the gesture said. Would only cause her to protest more, protest something obvious about herself. He didn’t want to get into it.
Annoyed, Charlotte said nothing. Suddenly the persistent sense of being ever so slightly condescended to coalesced in her. He was indulging her; he was a busy important man, making time for an old flame. A form of nostalgia for him: this was what lay there under the surface of his easy tolerance.
“We should do this more often,” Charlotte lied.
“For sure,” Larry lied back.