Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (2 page)

“Jack told me he was up for a promotion. And
then it came and he told me what happened. Told me what both of you
had said.”

I crumpled then: I felt diminished. Reduced.
I had wanted to tell Sarah. Yet, at the same time, I hadn’t wanted
her to know.

“But Madeline, you said what you said and
Jack did what he wanted. That was his way. Once you’ve thought
about it, you’ll know what I’m saying is true. He loved the market.
He
lived
for the market. And he made a good living as a
broker. A very good living. He didn’t need the extra salary moving
into an office would have given him. He told me, ‘I’d miss the
sweat and the Maalox.’ Those were his exact words. And I know he
would have missed you.”

And that was just it. What if — more what
ifs — what if there
hadn’t
been a me? And if I’d never
joined Merriwether Bailey. It was clear to me that Jack would still
be alive.

I didn’t say this to Sarah. I figured she’d
been through enough. “Thank you, sweetie,” I said, hugging her
quickly. “It’s been so hard for me. And you’re his
wife
. I
feel like such a loser feeling as bad as I do and knowing how much
harder it must be for you.”

“That’s the thing about grief, hon’. It’s
not a contest. No one gets to win,” she smiled bitterly and I knew
that bitterness wasn’t directed at me. “I have felt...” she
searched for a word. “Flatlined. I’ve felt flatlined since it
happened. I go through the motions, but none of it matters.” She
shrugged. “So that’s my big plan, for now. For the kids. Just keep
the motions going and maybe sometime it’ll surprise me. Maybe
someday it won’t be pretend.”

The idea of the flatline got into my head.
It covered how I felt precisely. Entirely flat, not quite alive. I
was someone who had always thought of herself as buoyant.
Vibrant.
And suddenly I was anything but. For the first time
in my life, it was possible for me to spend a whole day in bed,
doing nothing. I’d drag myself up to go to the bathroom, maybe make
some toast with peanut butter or a soft-boiled egg and then try to
throw myself back into sleep.

I didn’t quit my job right away. Unlike
Jack, who got taken out with a bullet, I went with a whimper. I
took a leave of absence — a week that stretched into two then four
— and contemplated basic things. The meaning of life, for me. How I
fit into the pattern that I’d created. On good days I was able to
leave my apartment and I didn’t cry. On bad ones, I’d encounter
Jack’s face at every turn: in the antique mirror over my armoire,
in the dull gloss of the tiles behind the stove, through the window
when I tried to imagine what was in the world beyond my door.

Jack and I had never been lovers, though I’m
sure people in the office had their doubts. In the time we worked
together, both of us got married, one (me) got divorced, one (him)
had children and in between were all the challenges of lives being
lived: both in the markets and out of them. I loved Jack. Not as a
wife loves a husband, yet not quite as a sister loves a brother,
either. I’d always felt that what we shared transcended all those
things. That we’d be together always: each forever the emergency
other in our lives. And now...

My world was a lot of “what ifs.” What if
Jack had taken Sal’s offer and had been safely working with
corporate clients behind a closed office door? What if I had said
yes to Sal and Jack had followed my lead? But the world can be full
of too many what ifs. Stack them all together and you have to end
up a Woolworth’s cashier in Bend, Oregon, or a gas station
attendant in New Hampshire. You end up spending your life looking
for low risk gigs. What did low risk look like, anyway? No one had
ever warned me about the physical dangers involved with being a
stockbroker.

Before Jack died, I’d already been having
thoughts leading to a change in my life. I’d spent the last few
years coasting on a fat market, just like everybody else. It’s hard
to think about now, what it was like being a broker in the time
just before, but it was... delicious. Touch anything and it goes
gold. Pick some crappy little company with a happy idea and slick
annual report trading at six and a half dollars, trade it, promote
it and, within two weeks, it’s trading at twenty bucks. In the time
just before, I was working with scores of securities, just like
that; trading at twenty, forty, sixty dollars a share. For some of
them, two hundred wasn’t even a reach.

I saw and felt it coming. I was crunching
Advil like candy. Do I even
have
a stomach lining anymore?
And Maalox. I never drank it right out of the bottle like some of
the guys did, but that’s what was in the coffee mug on my desk any
time after lunch.

I had a nice little co-op apartment — stand
on a chair and look out the bathroom window and see Central Park —
that I’d paid mostly cash for. My own trading had never been on the
margin. I lost the bazillion or so dollars I’d been worth on paper.
But I was a broker: I’d never been convinced that was real money
anyway. I had my apartment. I had a Chagall etching I’d bought with
some pretend money I’d converted into real money. I thought: I’m
gonna be OK. I’m gonna coast through this. I still had a job. Not
everyone did.

Then Jack.

I thought briefly about not doing something
with stocks. I wanted to make a new life. I could do
anything.
I could wait tables. Become a real estate agent.
Be a film director. Open a dress shop. Or a cafe. But the reality
is this: the stock market is the only thing I know. Except I also
knew I didn’t want to be a broker anymore: I didn't want to invest
other people’s money. And I realized I was tired of having to stand
on a chair to see a slice of green. My apartment was worth enough
to buy a whole house in most cities that aren’t New York: it was
certainly enough for a stake.

I had a lot of questions, was shy on
answers, but there was one thing I knew: my days at Merriwether
Bailey — or any other brokerage — were over. And it wasn’t just
that the new economy was looking like it was going to suck so badly
there’d be too many of us. I was good. I could have kept my job. I
just didn’t want it anymore.

“What are you gonna do?” Sal asked when I
went in to the office to clean out my desk.

As I loaded the cardboard box that was
proving to be too large for my few personal possessions, I had been
trying to impress details on my mind so I wouldn’t forget: The
laminated woodgrain that seemed to coat every hard surface in the
office (active traders can be messy), the dumb dippy bird on Jamal
Henderson’s desk (bright red with a real feather on his head and
always dipping towards water but never making it), the viral hum of
the air conditioner (noiseless noise, white noise). My eye stopped
on Jack’s desk, catty corner from mine. Empty now, his family
pictures gone. Had Sarah come in for everything? Or was there a box
somewhere in one of the back offices with “Shoenberger” scrawled
across it in big, black letters? I figured I didn’t really want to
know.

It was 4:30 pm on a trading day. The markets
were closed, the bullpen in the post-coital lull that follows the
closing bell: Brokers cleaning up their desks, doing paperwork,
chatting softly, amicably; traders horsing around like the
self-satisfied adolescents they seem always to pride themselves on
being. All of this varied activity, all in anticipation of
tomorrow’s opening bell, while still riding the ebbing high of the
day’s trading. I knew this was one of the things I’d miss.

“Carter?”

“Sorry Sal. I was just thinking.”

“I asked what you’re going to do.” I noticed
that the corner of Sal’s mouth was twitching, as it does when he’s
worried about something. I wondered if I might be the cause.

Sal was my boss, but he was more, as well.
My father died when I’d only been at Merriwether Bailey a couple of
years. Sal hadn’t tried to be a father to me after my Dad was gone,
but he’d slid into the senior-male-figure in my life position
comfortably. Watching me closely through heartbreaks and workaholic
periods. Prodding me when I seemed to spend too much time at the
office or forgot to eat. He worried about me. I could see it on him
now.

“I don’t know,” I told him honestly.

“Just not this, huh?”

I nodded.

“Jack,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“I guess,” I looked again at the empty desk,
allowing my eyes to scan to the place where Jack had fallen.
Self-indulgent, self-punishing, I made myself stop. “And it just
doesn’t make sense to me anymore. Not so much.”

He hugged me then. I hadn’t expected a hug,
not from Sal. But we both needed it: the touch of another human.
The world was changing. Jack’s death was the grand finale for me,
but Sal and I had both seen the changes coming for a long time. You
don’t get to be an old racehorse without learning to recognize the
sound of the starting gate. Or, for that matter, the feel of the
finish wire.

Sal pulled a strand of hair away from my
eyes, tucked it behind my ear. “We’re gonna miss your smiling mug,
kiddo. I always said you were too pretty to be a broker.”

I made a shooing motion with my hands,
though I couldn’t stop the grin that slid over my face. It was an
old line with us. Lady brokers were seldom slender, 5’11” blondes
with lots of unruly hair. I’ve never thought of myself as gorgeous
— attractive, sure — but in the early days, the guys gave me a
fairly hard time. After a while, once I’d earned my stripes, it
turned into good-natured ribbing. These days it was all around
Barbie. If I made the company a lot of money, they’d call me
Vacation Barbie, as in, I’d earned a vacation. Or if word leaked
out that I was seeing someone, the guys would say: How’s Ken?

The Barbie stuff didn’t irritate me perhaps
as much as it should have. The trading floor is always tense. As a
result brokers get their laughs as cheaply and easily as possible:
there’s no time or energy for sophisticated humor, not during
working hours.

Now Sal said, “Good luck, Barbie,” And,
despite the teeny inside joke, I could see the sentiment was
sincere. “You always know where I am.”

And I did.

* * *

I was disappointed when, a couple of weeks
after I’d quit my job, I didn’t feel any better and I started
getting seriously worried about myself. Was this what had happened
to those crazy ladies you saw pushing shopping carts filled with
all their possessions? Did it start with some sharp, personal
tragedy from which they never recovered? The moment that seemed
like an achingly clear forecast of my future, I pulled myself out
of bed and made a conscious effort to do something.
Anything.
And in those first few days of stumbling recovery,
a walk around a couple of blocks chased my breath away. But it
helped. It was like there was a light ahead somewhere, if I only
squinted diligently enough.

My timing on choosing to return to what was
left of my life was flawless. About when I could manage a whole
meal, cared enough to shower every day and felt strong enough to
catch up on my laundry, my co-op sold and I knew that the time for
introspection was over. In 30 days new people would be moving into
my apartment and would expect me not to be living there. I had to
do
something.
I just wasn’t quite sure what.

Chapter Two

I felt apprehensive until my lungs met the
air outside the terminal. Inside it hadn’t felt very different from
the plane or JFK before that. But right outside the building,
thinking about finding a cab, it hit me in an amazing wave. The
smog, almost dense enough to cut with scissors, the moist heat
after the air conditioned neutrality of the airport, the smell of
the sea and, inexplicably and faintly, the scent of something
vaguely tropical and sweet. This, to me, is the smell of Los
Angeles: thick and moist and slightly mysterious beneath the dirt,
though the dirt is real. I smiled as I hailed a cab. The cabbie
smiled back as he stopped for me. I’d never been in the city
before, but I knew I was home.

Before I’d decided on Los Angeles I’d
considered Seattle, but that would have been going back. I wasn’t
sure what I wanted, but I knew that retracing my steps wasn’t it. I
had a brief fling with the idea of Canada — cool and clean — but
even though a lot of Canadians speak English, it’s a different
culture and I didn’t feel up to that. I saw some program on
television about Sedona, Arizona. It looked so pretty, so new. But
I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get daily
Times
delivery out
there and, if I decided to stay involved with the markets, that
would be key.

By then I knew I wanted west and warm and
new
. It wasn’t that big of a leap to think of LA. I’d heard
so much about the place. Not all of it had been good, but I’d been
living in New York City for over 10 years: adversity didn’t daunt
me. Especially not at a steady 70 degrees.

“Where to?” the driver asked, still smiling,
when my stuff was stored in the trunk and I was settled in the
cab.

Where to, indeed? Sal had given me a lead on
an apartment in a friend’s house out in Malibu, but I felt the need
to touch the Earth and regroup a little bit.

“The Beverly Hills Hotel, please.” It was
cliché and would probably be expensive, but I was
here
and I
needed somewhere to land while I scouted a course of action. What
better place than that famous landmark? More, from what I knew
about it, like a museum than a hotel.

I didn’t have a reservation, but it was
midweek in March, I knew they’d find something for me. And when
they did, it was all about airy lightness and so exactly as I’d
imagined — right down to the pool and the palm trees I could see
out my window — that I pulled off my clothes, flung myself onto the
pillow-top bed and slept off my six hour flight. Welcome to
L.A.