On this Wednesday morning, I’ve brushed past Henry’s secretary, who never ceases to have a bitchy comment for me.
“Again?” she asked while rolling her eyes. She is a stick-thin, model-like woman with long black hair and skin that seems to have never met an ultraviolet ray. Her name is Opal and even though we’ve spoken almost daily, she always pauses in an attempt to recall who I am. I went right into Henry’s office and sat in my usual seat, a tightly pulled crème chenille chair. In front of me hangs a real Roy Lichtenstein painting on the wall. Tim Boylan decorates Cheetah’s walls with his personal art collection that he rotates from his home. The Lichtenstein wasn’t here a week ago. Opal follows me in and asks in some affected way, “Might you enjoy some sparkling water?”
“No, but can you tell me when Henry will be here? I only have two hours this morning.”
“Mr. Wilkins shall return in ten minutes.” Opal places a hand on the small of her back, adjusts her hips forward, and catwalks back to her desk.
I snap open my laptop and place it on the far side of his sumptuous desk. Using a color-coded system, I begin to group Henry’s inventory into three columns, based on worthiness. After a few meetings like this, the enormity of the problem, the futility of trying to make worthless, make-believe mortgages turn into something of value, is apparent. Henry and I seem to be in some slow dance of doom. And because this is our job and because we’ve inherited this problem together, we go through these motions together.
Henry comes up quietly behind me and I smell him before I feel him look over my shoulder at the red splotches on his screen. He sighs and pulls his French cuffs farther down his wrist, twisting off each cuff link one by one and placing them next to my screen. He folds back his starched sleeves, revealing greatly defined forearms from years of sitting in front of a computer while choking the life out of a squeezy ball.
“Belle,” he says simply.
“Hmm. Hi,” I say softly, getting right to the point. “Look at this one.” I show him a basket of mortgages I’m particularly troubled by. I don’t turn around. “A two-hundred-forty-thousand-dollar vacation condo in Myrtle Beach. It’s not on the beach but on what appears to be a highway. Second home. B-minus rating. She’s a hairdresser.”
“Put it in the trash,” Henry sighs.
“Who wants a second home on the highway?”
“It’s your American dream,” Henry says softly. “You guys just want to own a lot of stuff.”
Sometimes when Henry isn’t thinking, he assigns us to different socioeconomic classes. He seems to forget his own simple roots, assuming the fancier childhood of his wife’s as his own. He leaves me behind in his calculation. I’m the beauty salon owner with a second home on the side of the highway. And maybe I am. The only difference between her and me was an education that taught me what I can really afford. How was she supposed to resist the offers from a slick mortgage broker selling her a dream home? It’s clear that the lenders preyed on the ignorant and the misinformed. How had I become involved in this?
“It’s a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar home in Nowhere, Nebraska,” I continue. “Both owners unemployed. Five dependents. I can just see the sheriff taking some crying babies out of the house.” My eyes well up and we sit there for a moment with something bordering wonder. I never saw things going this way. When I see Henry’s face, I don’t believe he thought this game all the way through. Or did he? To me, these mortgages were always lines on an Excel spreadsheet and I want to believe he saw it that way too. I want to believe he didn’t know what he was buying when he filled his portfolio with baskets of greed and lies.
Henry gives up trying to lean over my shoulder to see what I see. He hikes up a pant leg and slips behind me, straddling me from behind and sharing the wide chair. It’s so hard to defamiliarize ourselves.
“You have to separate yourself from this. It’s not reality,” he says matter-of-factly.
“But it is reality,” I say. “The ride up was the unreality.”
“Nobody thought it through, Belle. Everyone had so much faith in our rating agencies, in the banks writing the loans, and in a government that encourages cheap money so everyone can own a home.”
He gently removes my hands from the keyboard and places them on my thighs. He lets his own hands ring the executioner’s bell, quickly dragging and dropping loans into red baskets, as if he were picking berries, but only the rotten ones. I watch him place the soon-to-be-homeless family from Nebraska into the red basket but at least I see a pause, a show of some deference.
“How can you do that?” I ask softly. “How can we do this over and over?”
“I’m tearing the Band-Aid off fast, and yes, I hate how sad this makes you.”
Henry thinks he has found happier news on the screen. “Triple-A, twenty-five-million-dollar Florida mansion that sold with three percent down.”