“I don’t have to do anything. You’re going to shove bonds at me and ask me to find buyers where there are none and I can’t sell stuff I don’t believe in.”
Henry isn’t fazed. “You’ll be glad you came, Belle. I promise. This will be so good for you.” This time his tone is softer, even caring, something I respond to way better than a demand.
“What could possibly be good for me?” I asked. I started to consider what he meant. Maybe he had an exit plan for me, maybe a job offer or some strategy to salvage the risky bonds we owned. The more I thought about it, the more intrigued I got.
So I went.
? ? ?
Two hours later I stood on the street outside my office knowing I had no time to be there. It’s one thing to talk business with Henry on the telephone, and it’s another to see him. I watched his huge frame cast a shadow over everyone else on Park Avenue, as he walked like some superhuman—at a crushing pace that had him veering around the mortals in his path. Henry saw me and stared as he came close with the slightly googly-eyed face that admiring boys had when my teenaged breasts were surprisingly new and growing by the day. But from Henry that look really isn’t for me, it’s about the potential deals he’s looking to do, or other trades he’s thinking about executing. Maybe the reason he wanted to meet in person was to avoid speaking over taped phone lines about the grim future he foresaw in the financial system of 2008. I decided to start speaking first.
“It’s March fourteenth and Feagin Dixon is still in business,” I said in my best Pollyanna voice.
“So I hear.” He pecked me on the cheek. I hated that I wanted to really grab hold of him, to have him hug some of the worry out of me.
“I don’t know how to replicate this job in any way,” I said. “I know you think I should be bailing out and selling my stock while it’s still worth something, but I like my job.”
“There are other jobs.”
“We have a lot of expenses.”
“Perhaps your husband could get a job.”
I rolled my eyes at him as we walked purposefully toward something that only Henry seemed to know about.
“Do we have a train to catch?” I asked. “Because if we do, I have to be home by tomorrow.”
“Do we ever,” he said, and I saw a very un-Henry thing: he blushed. Farther north, around 60th Street, Henry went into one of those fancy luxury condo buildings, remodeled out of old buildings on Park Avenue, everything except the fa?ade of the building ripped out and replaced by golden glitz. The doorman tipped his hat to Henry in a way that told me he knew him.
We got in the elevator and rose to the penthouse level, giving me the sudden clue that maybe we were going to visit Tim, the master of the hedge fund and Henry’s boss. It was well known that Tim liked to go home and nap in the middle of the day. That’s how big a deal Tim is—he gets to nap. I smoothed my hair while I thought of intelligent responses to what I imagined would be Tim’s insisting we buy back the awful bonds I had sold them. Had Henry set me up again? Was I about to be ambushed by his boss?
When the elevator opened directly into the apartment, there was no Tim Boylan. The entire floor of the building was one apartment. The sight before me made my eyes widen the way Charlie’s did when he entered the Chocolate Factory, the way Alice’s did when she fell into Wonderland. It was that good. The windows made up the entire outside wall, with one thin seam every ten feet or so, and there wasn’t a child’s handprint on any of them. Gossamer-fine, sheer curtains puddled loosely on the floor like veils of golden protection from the outside world. The whole place made me think of the perfect movie set for the one about the rich, single banker. I couldn’t help but walk from window to window, sucking in the view, touching the linen-colored couches so plush I had to push a cushion down just to feel what luxury can be when Froot Loops and Cheez-Its are outlawed. I gently put my bag down on a white ottoman, thought for a moment that it might leave a mark, and put it on the floor.