I should call a friend right now, a Carron or an Elizabeth. What do regular people do at times like this? I’ve had bad things happen to me before but I always fixed things on my own. I’m a fixer, I remind myself, and I need to resolve this. But I don’t know where to start and I catch myself for one weak moment wishing I could call Henry.
I want to see my kids right now but I’m not going home. I’m afraid of what I’ll say. I have to be sure of the outcome I want before I enter a room with Bruce in it. If I get sidetracked with drama and tears and rebuttals, I’ll lose the resolve that has brought me to the decision that I have already made. It’s interesting that Bruce hasn’t called once today. He doesn’t miss anything about me.
The three “arb” guys stand, ashen-faced. I guess the weak markets made them go long, buy stocks on weakness, expecting them to rebound quickly for a profit. Had they done that in recent days, their clocks would have been cleaned. There are no buyers out there at any price, so they watched their positions sink, Titanic-like, while they smashed things on their desks. Their faces tell me that entire story.
The last one of them to leave looks across at me. I pretend to be engrossed in my screen of 7s.
“Isabelle?” he asks.
I used to love when coworkers, men I didn’t know at all, knew of me just by reputation, but not tonight. He’s a midsized, athletic man, gray at the temples, and I don’t remember ever seeing him.
“Yes?” I answer with a frog noise blocking the usual sound of my voice.
He walks over to me and stands behind my screen, looking over my shoulder at the nothingness in front of me.
“Belle,” he says again, “you look like you need a drink. Want to get a drink?”
He appears to need one terribly, and I know I should try to be friendly. If I had a drink with him I might possibly tell him, this stranger, everything.
“Thanks,” I say gratefully. “But no. Need to be getting home.”
“Maybe we should both go home and face the music,” he says.
He believes my problem is the worst stock market since the Great Depression. People recovered from that.
“Need to go make a home,” I say, knowing it will mean nothing to him, but oddly it gives me some comfort.
CHAPTER 40
Yield
MY LAST DAY at Feagin ended in a blue-collar town in New Jersey in the arms of a large Hispanic man.
I was on a business trip, seeing clients in Trenton and Princeton and then, in a crazed attempt to make it home in time for dinner, I took the New Jersey Turnpike. Like some teenager in her rich-girl convertible, I wove in and out of HOV lanes I didn’t belong in, desperate to pick the kids up from Bruce’s new one-bedroom apartment, a place of glass and chrome that screams bachelor to all who enter. Bruce took none of the trappings of little kids with him. Besides some nice pieces of furniture he took nothing except half my money and a sizeable portion of my gut. We’re all new to this split-custody lifestyle and to me it feels like an unending game of make-believe, as if we’re playacting in someone else’s uncomfortable drama. Nothing feels routine or natural yet.
The markets have rebounded some, but loans to businesses and individuals have dried up. The only trades I was having were sells and some value buyers tucking blue-chip names into young investors’ accounts, people who would see this thing through for the long haul.
Since Bruce and I separated, I’ve had a vicious need to be with my children. World markets imploding and deals being canceled make no impression on me. I just need the people who need me. The apartment seemed suffocating in Bruce’s absence and I have taken to leaving windows open all the time, exorcising some virus that infected our world. I put the thing up for sale in the weakest real estate market in a decade and haven’t gotten the slightest sniff of interest from anyone. The playground and the Tea Bag House in Southampton are the only places where things feel right to me and I keep wondering about the public school system out there on Long Island and how my kids would fare in a world not artificially partitioned by money.