Part 9 (1/2)

Perini was still at the same address, the same layout as ever. Sanford came in less and less but talked to Adam four or five times a day wherever he was. Adam had his own office but the rest of them worked in a kind of open-floor plan and he spent most of his time out there anyway. He hadn't been beaten on the office foosball table in four years.

Usually if Sanford wanted to make a big personal display about something, he took you out to lunch. But one morning in February, just about the time Adam was walking normally again, a few weeks after the removal of the accursed splint, the boss came in at ten-early, by his standards-called Adam into his office behind him, and told him that he had decided to retire, effective in two weeks, and to turn his executive partners.h.i.+p position in Perini Capital, minus only some deferred compensation, over to Adam.

”It's largely a tax thing,” the old man said. ”I had to redraw my will and there are certain things they advised me to make clear.” But his eyes were watering when he said it.

Adam was profoundly unprepared. He never saw it coming; for all the old man's sentimentality, Adam never imagined he'd let go voluntarily of anything truly estimable without dying first.

”Barry,” he said. ”You don't need to do this now.”

”What should I wait for?” Sanford said. ”You have to look forward. This is a beautiful inst.i.tution and I want it to continue.”

”Don't you-I mean, I know you have children of your own?”

”They'll be provided for,” he said, ”according to their merits. This is a separate thing.”

Adam fought down an alien panic. ”This place could never exist without you,” he said. ”It's a monument to you.”

”Well, that does remind me, there is one condition to all this, and that is that the fund keeps its name. Even after I'm gone. One does want to leave a legacy, you know. One does want to be remembered. Why that should make a d.a.m.n bit of difference I'm not really sure, but it does. Anyway, that will be a provision of the ten thousand things we will both have to sign.”

Adam wound up saying that it was something he would need to talk over with his wife. Sanford took that to mean that he was too moved to say yes on the spot and decorously granted his request. Adam went home that night and in the margins of a newspaper added up all the money he had offsh.o.r.e. It was rare for him to write anything down; he kept accounts in his head. There was enough for them to live on for the rest of their lives; but what did that even mean? It was unsettling to think of money in terms other than those of growth, of how it might be used to make more money. Something about it smelled of death to him but he didn't know why.

He went in the next day and told Sanford that he was going to decline the offer. He felt it was premature, he said, because Sanford was still a t.i.tan in the world of private equity and would be for years to come; anyway, Perini Capital was literally unthinkable without its founder at the helm and he was sure everyone else in the office would say the same thing. Then he said he was going to use a week of vacation time. It didn't take even an hour for Sanford's hurt and astonishment to turn into anger. It was a strangely joyous sort of anger, though, as if he'd found out that his doctors had made some terrible diagnostic error and in fact he was going to live forever. He stormed out without a word to anyone at about three o'clock and when the others turned to Adam to ask what the f.u.c.k was going on between the two of them, he said, in a tone that terrified them, that it was nothing for them to worry about.

He probably should have gone to Anguilla right away, but instead, that night at dinner, he told Jonas and April that he was taking them out of school for a week so they could all go to London. They looked at him like he was nuts, as did Cynthia, but they had always been raised to respect spontaneity and it was much too good an offer to turn down. On short notice, in the high season, everything was outrageously expensive, but even though they kept referring to that, it didn't really mean anything to them. They found a place in Mayfair and when April found out a former school friend of hers was on a modeling job in Surrey, Adam took them all to Battersea and chartered a helicopter to take them out there for a visit.

The model friend wound up asking April and Jonas if they wanted to come with her to see The Strokes that night at Hammersmith Palais; she was meeting some people there, and she herself was so freakishly hot that the mere prospect of her friends was enough to overcome Jonas's disdain for the band. Cynthia and Adam went out to dinner in Kensington and had two bottles of wine. There he told her that a few days ago Sanford had offered to retire and basically bequeath him the whole fund, but that he had turned the offer down. ”Jesus,” Cynthia said. ”He must have been crushed. What did he say when you told him?”

Instead of answering that question, Adam said, ”I was worried you'd be disappointed in me,” and he was surprised to feel a little catch in his throat when he said it.

She took his hand, which was a pretty good indicator that she was drunk. ”Listen,” she said. ”You're a f.u.c.king genius. Every single move you've made has worked out for us. Look where we are. Everything has happened for us just the way you said it would. What kind of an idiot would I have to be to second-guess you?”

He held her fingers to his lips and closed his eyes. Other diners were starting to turn in their direction.

”Go ahead and stare,” Cynthia said softly, without taking her eyes off him. ”f.u.c.king old s.k.a.n.ks wish they were me.”

By their last night, Adam was saying to Cynthia that they ought to just buy the flat they were staying in so they could come and go as they pleased. ”I had a good year,” he said. She looked at him as if he were a little mad, but then she caught something exciting in his eyes and threw up her hands and said, ”Why not?” That was it: everything was open to them. What was life's object if not that? Adam knew on some level that he had to get as much money out of those Anguillian accounts as possible and shut them down, but more than that he wanted to just spend it all on the three of them, as orgiastically as possible, challenge his family to come up with desires they hadn't even thought of yet and then make those desires real. There was, after all, no life but this life. The days were swallowed up behind you. He'd had a little too much gin. He wanted to be more like Sanford, actually, and just give it all away: he wanted to self-immolate in the name of the love he felt for his wife and children, a love for which no conventional outlet was close to sufficient.

By the time they returned to New York he'd come down a little bit. He went back in to work on Monday morning, and before he had his coat off Sanford called him into his office and fired him. It was not a cordial scene. ”You haven't looked this young in years,” Adam told him. Sanford gave him until 9:15 to clean out his desk. ”I don't know what you're planning,” Sanford said, trembling, ”but I will find out. You will learn the hard way that you cannot f.u.c.k with me. I made you.” Which was funny not just in the sense that Adam had been f.u.c.king with him for years with great success but also because the elaborate plan Sanford believed was behind this decision-a plan to start his own fund, a plan to force him out of this one, whatever-didn't exist, not in any form. Adam had no clue what came next.

When he got back home it was still only about eleven o'clock in the morning and no one else was in the apartment. He sat in the media room and watched TV, scrolling through the channels without stopping. He'd been careful for so long that he felt like doing something especially stupid, something that would finish him off once and for all. But he didn't. He reminded himself that there were other people involved, people he was bound to protect. Sanford was angry enough to do anything, to look anywhere. He went to the bedroom closet and got the disposable cell phone out of its hiding place inside one of his sneakers.

”I thought we said never during business hours,” Devon said.

”It's over,” Adam said. ”We have to shut it down.”

”What?”

”It's over starting now. Okay? Nothing for you to worry about.”

”Nothing for me to worry worry about?” he said, in a kind of strangled whisper. ”What the f.u.c.k are you talking about? Has somebody found out?” about?” he said, in a kind of strangled whisper. ”What the f.u.c.k are you talking about? Has somebody found out?”

There was something in his voice. It should have been simple, Adam thought-yesterday is done, it never happened, tomorrow you start over-but he could hear the give in Devon's voice and knew that his thoughts were turning in a bad direction.

”Listen to me,” Adam said. ”It's just time. Nothing has happened. No one knows anything. We will be fine. And I will take care of you. I will not forget what you and I have put on the line for each other. Understand? Now, you will not hear from me for a while, maybe a long while, but that's just about being cautious. You have my word that I will not leave you hanging. Our future is still together. We could take each other down, but it's way preferable for neither of us to go down at all. Preferable and honorable. We've done something amazing together. I would never, ever give you up for any reason. And I know that I can count on your loyalty too. Right?”

Even in the silence that wasn't silence-there was too much noise in the background, phones beeping and keyboards clicking and salesmen screaming and purring-Adam could hear him coming around.

”Right,” Devon said, to himself as much as to Adam. ”No snitching. If you say we'll be fine, we'll be fine.”

”We will be better than fine. The future is brilliant and I promise you you have a place in it. I won't leave you hanging. In the meantime get rid of the phone, get rid of everything. Just to be safe. Just don't look back and when the time is right you will hear from me again. Okay? Eyes forward. Trust me.”

So that was taken care of, he thought. Still, though he had always known how to act boldly in the moment, as the day pa.s.sed in idleness the idea of his own past opened up in front of him as something threatening and, amazingly, ineradicable. You couldn't undo it, it didn't belong to you anymore, and yet it was still there. This was a new one on him. It was just as real-more real, in fact, as each day of unaccustomed inaction went by-as the present, but in another sense it was inviolate, behind gla.s.s, where even if you wanted to get rid of it you could not.

He had three different job offers in the first week, as word spread of his firing, but he declined all three and the offers stopped coming, no doubt because people a.s.sumed, as Sanford did, that Adam had some plan that had yet to be revealed. He didn't want to go to work for anyone else. Yet the solitude of sitting at home-even in his bright, high-ceilinged home office, the sky over Central Park like a frame around his computer monitor-wasn't good for him either. Eventually he figured out that there was one thing that did return him at least temporarily to himself, and that was risk. He took flyers in the market on companies that might turn out to be way undervalued and then watched with a gambler's intensity to see whether his instincts were correct. There was one memorable afternoon when Cyn went off to a Children's Aid Society board meeting and by the time she returned and said ”How was your day?” he had lost two hundred and thirty thousand dollars of their own money. It was all their own money now. He told her he'd been to the gym, and that was answer enough for her. He felt, as he hadn't in years, what it was to be loved. He had a strong intuition that he would die without her, that just as any slacking off in his workout routine would surely lead to a rapid and shocking physical decline, so would time spent outside the field of her total belief in him eventually unmoor him from his status as a civilized man.

He saw that Barron's Barron's had a strong sell recommendation on a pharmaceutical stock called Amity. He'd long thought had a strong sell recommendation on a pharmaceutical stock called Amity. He'd long thought Barron's Barron's fatally unimaginative and decided it would be fun to prove them wrong. He bought ten thousand shares, and a week later sold them again at a net loss of four hundred and eight thousand dollars. fatally unimaginative and decided it would be fun to prove them wrong. He bought ten thousand shares, and a week later sold them again at a net loss of four hundred and eight thousand dollars.

Cynthia had no idea about any of this, and if she had, her concern would have been disproportionate because she had no idea how much money Adam had managed to put away in accounts she knew nothing about. He couldn't think of a way to justify a solo trip to Anguilla when spring break was less than a month away and so he just had to bite the bullet and wait. He did float the idea that maybe this would be their last trip. He said he was bored with it and had heard about other places he wanted to try, maybe the South Pacific. She believed him. The whole scheme, he reminded himself, had been for her benefit, and in fact it had worked out just the way he hoped it would: he had seen her stuck and unhappy and the thought of it had been too much for him; he had an image of the life he was going to make for all of them and it wasn't coming fast enough and so he had done what he'd had to do to speed things up, to get them all intact to that place of limitlessness that she so deserved and that he had always had faith they would occupy. It wasn't about being rich per se. It was about living a big life, a life that was larger than life. Money was just the instrument. He thought about calling someone at Perini just to ask what was new, like say a visit from the SEC, but he decided that was a bad idea.

It was hard, some days, to keep himself stimulated. He shorted Wisconsin Cryogenics International, his old stomping ground, thinking that maybe irony would protect him now. Guy Farbar was long gone: the deal Adam had put together for him had made him a millionaire many times over but then he was fired by his own board for impregnating his secretary. The stock started soaring as soon as Adam picked it up, almost as if it had been waiting for him. He told himself that taking the loss was a smart move in this case because if anyone was looking into his past then this kind of miscalculation was bound to throw them off the trail.

Cynthia said she had something important to talk to him about. After the kids were home and fed and had disappeared downstairs for the evening, she came into his office and sat across the desk from him. Incredibly, what she wanted to discuss was his fortieth birthday-something that was completely off his radar, not because he was in any sort of denial about it but because he had turned forty ten months ago.

”We didn't do enough to celebrate,” she said, ”but that's okay, it's not too late, it's technically still the Jubilee Year. I want us to go somewhere. Somewhere amazing, somewhere we've never been. I thought about surprising you, but I decided that what I really want is for you to surprise me. Where would you go if you could just go anywhere?”

She was so excited. She looked older than she used to, that was true, and the unfairness of that made him a little sad. He opened his mouth to speak but he felt the catch in his throat and had to close it again. He smiled apologetically. He hoped she'd figure he was too choked up by her thoughtfulness to speak. He hoped she'd figure he was taking a moment to think about it, about where he would go if he could go anywhere. Or that he was sitting there thinking about how much he loved her.

But he watched her get up and shut his office door. ”What's going on?” she said.

He told her everything. Even as he was talking he couldn't make himself stop trying to think of some way out of saying it, some way to keep her in the dark. Her eyes got very big. When he'd said everything he could think of to say, she started to cry.

”Are they going to find out?” she said. ”Are they going to arrest you or something?”

He said that a lot of people liked him on Wall Street and so if someone were looking into him, someone from the SEC or the U.S. Attorney's office or even just some investigator hired by Sanford, he had to believe he would have heard something about it by now. But it was a possibility, and maybe it would always be. And she should know that if he was ever even charged with anything, their powers were very broad. They might arrest him or they might just seize the money, which in some ways was worse, because they could seize everything they figured the money might have been spent on, including the apartment in which all four of them were sitting right now. She shook her head.

”I don't give a s.h.i.+t about the money,” she said.

”You don't?”

”I don't. I want to ask you something else. It might seem off topic. Have you ever been unfaithful to me?”

And the amazing part was that he understood right away how she had gotten there, how it was part of what they were discussing. He stood up from his chair but kept the desk between them. ”No,” he said as gravely as he could. His heart was beating dangerously hard; he put his hand on it. ”I never have, and I never would. If I lose you, it's all over for me. I don't care if they take everything else away. I honestly don't.”

She walked around his desk and fit herself against him with her arms around his neck. He was shaking.

”Thank you for not telling me,” she said. ”All this time, I mean. What a burden that must have been for you. I know why you did it. I know you did it for us. I'm f.u.c.king proud of you, if you want to know the truth. You are a man, Adam. You are a man among men. Let them come after us. They can't touch us.”