We’d used up our common ground, and there seemed nothing left to chat about. She assured me that I would hear from her again, and marveled once more, in what had become a quite irritating way, that we had run into each other. I don’t really believe in coincidences, she said. Something either happens or it doesn’t, coincidence has nothing to do with it.
THIRTEEN
At the beginning of February, I went down to Wall Street to meet Parrish, the accountant who was doing my taxes, but I forgot to bring my checkbook. Speaking with him just before I left home, I had asked if I should bring anything, and he’d said I should bring a check, so I could pay him. I had taken the checkbook out of its drawer and placed it on the table with my gloves and keys. But I then left it behind, and didn’t realize I had done so until the 2 train came to the station. I was embarrassed at having to meet him empty-handed. But I was supposed to give him only two hundred dollars, and I had my bank card with me. I could get cash. It seemed vaguely illicit, putting cash in an envelope and sliding it across a table, but it was better than not paying him right away.
When I came out of the Wall Street station, I looked around for a cash machine. I hadn’t been to that part of town since I had gone on my night walk there in November. Now, in daylight, with the sun pouring into the deep clefts formed by the sides of skyscrapers, the street’s ominous character was tamed. It had become an ordinary street, a place of work, marred in the normal way by construction cordons and divots where the road was undergoing repair, and nothing at all like the Dante-esque vision of huddled and faceless bodies I had experienced a few months earlier. After a short walk, I found a cash machine inside a pharmacy, but was unable to take money out of it because I typed in the wrong four-digit code for my card. So I tried again, and failed again. I tried five times, with different numbers, all of them wrong. I wasn’t alarmed — which I would have been if I had thought the card was compromised — but rather, sad: I had simply forgotten the number. A thought flitted through my mind: how terrible it would be to blank out like this while seeing a patient. This was the ATM card I had used for more than six years, and it had always had the same code. I had used the card on my recent trip to Brussels and, indeed, I had been entirely dependent on it for that journey.
Now, as I stood in a little pharmacy on the corner of Water Street and Wall Street, my mind was empty, subject to a nervous condition; this was the expression that came to me as I stood there, as though I had become a minor character in a Jane Austen novel. Such sudden mental weakness, I thought (as the machine asked if I would like to try again, and I did, and failed again), was from a simplified version of the self, an area of simplicity where things had once been more robust. This was true of a broken leg, too: one was suddenly lessened, walking with an incomplete understanding of what walking was about.
I was already late for my meeting with Parrish, who had been recommended to me by a colleague. But I left the pharmacy and wandered around the area, and tried to calm myself down. It was cold out, the sunshine giving no warmth as a breeze came stiffly off the East River two blocks away. The clouds in the bright sky were small and numerous, and ruffled like breaking waves. I shivered, and tried to ignore the nervousness, hoping it would simply float away. I went down to Hanover Square and twenty minutes later, having no definite number in mind, went to another machine, this one in the lobby of a bank. I tried the withdrawal again, hoping that the memory in my fingers, their familiarity with the pattern, might bail me out, as it sometimes did in the case of phone numbers. I was surprised the machines permitted so many attempts. In any case, all failed, and I was left with a handful of printed receipts. I had kept thinking that the number was 2046. But that wasn’t it; that number came from the title of the film by Wong Kar Wai. The number I was after was something similar, had been picked even before the film was made, but it was 2046 that kept echoing in my head.
When I finally sat down with Parrish, I told him that I had neglected to bring my checkbook. I said nothing about the cash machines. He was solemn, and as he adjusted his cuff links, I had the feeling of having disturbed a carefully calibrated universe. I apologized, and assured him I would put the check in the mail right away. He shrugged, and I signed the tax paperwork he had prepared for me. I was awed by this unsuspected area of fragility in myself. It was an insignificant portent of age, the kind I tended to smile at in others, the kind I took as a mark of vanity. I thought of the few white curls that had sprung up and were now nestled in the black mass of my hair. I used to joke about them, but I knew also that the entire head of hair would someday change color, that the white strands would multiply, and would win eventually, that if I lived to old age, like Mama, there would be hardly any of the black ones left.
I went down Broadway, past the old Customs House, and down to Battery Park. It was a clear day and I could see right across to Brooklyn, to Staten Island, and the glimmering green figurine of the Statue of Liberty. The Tetris-like line of buildings sat in the still afternoon air. The park brimmed over with the noise of children too young for school. Their mothers fussed around them in the playground. The creak-creak of the swings was a signal, I thought, there to remind the children that they were having fun; if there were no creak, they would be confused. This had been a busy mercantile part of the city in the middle of the nineteenth century. Trading in slaves had become a capital offense in the United States in 1820, but New York long remained the most important port for the building, outfitting, insuring, and launching of slavers’ ships. Much of the human cargo of those vessels was going to Cuba; Africans did the work on the sugar plantations there.
In profiting from slavery, the City Bank of New York was not unlike the other companies founded by merchants and bankers in the same time period — the companies that later became ATT and Con Edison emerged from the same milieu. Moses Taylor, one of the world’s wealthiest men, had joined the board of the City Bank in 1837 after a long and successful career as a sugar merchant. He became the president of the bank in 1855, and served in that capacity until his death in 1882. Taylor had helped fund the war effort on the Union side; but he had also made massive profits from brokering the sale of Cuban sugar in the port of New York, investing the profits of the sugar planters, facilitating the processing of the cargo at the New York City Customs House, and helping finance the acquisition of a “labor force.” He had made it possible, in other words, for plantation owners to pay for the purchase of slaves; this he did in part by operating his own ships. He had six of them sailing the high seas. Taylor and other bankers like him knew exactly what they were doing, and their optimism paid off. The profit margins were irresistible: a fully outfitted slaving ship costing around $13,000 could be expected to deliver a human cargo worth more than $200,000. The New York Times noted in 1852, as the City Bank brought in its greatest profits, that if the authorities pleaded that they could not stop this profiteering, they were simply confessing their own imbecility, and that, if it was a matter of will, the moral guilt they were incurring was equivalent to that of slave traders themselves.