I was also aware – not to lose the run of myself here – that whenever an individual is on the receiving end of a revelation like this, addressed to himself alone (and written out, say, on the night sky, as Nathaniel Hawthorne would have it), the revelation can only be the result of a morbid and disordered state of mind, but surely this was somehow different, surely this was empirical, demonstrable – after all, at the end of my sixth day of trading at Lafayette, I had an unbroken chain of winners and over a million dollars in my brokerage account.
That evening I went for a drink with Jay and a few of the others to a place on Fulton Street. After my third beer and half a dozen cigarettes, not to mention a torrent of day-trading lore from my new colleagues, I resolved to set a few things in train – changes that I felt it was now time to make. I resolved to put a deposit down on an apartment – somewhere bigger than my place on Tenth Street, and in a different part of town, maybe Gramercy Park, or even Brooklyn Heights. I also resolved to throw out all my old clothes and furniture and accumulated stuff, and only replace what I absolutely needed. Most important, however, I resolved to move on from day-trading and into a wider playing field, to move up to money management maybe, or hedge funds or global markets.
I’d only been trading for little over a week, so naturally I didn’t have much idea about how I was going to pull something like this off, but when I got back to my apartment, as though on cue, there was a message from Kevin Doyle on my answering machine.
Click.
Beeep.
‘Hi Eddie, Kevin – what is all this stuff I’ve been hearing? Call me.’
Without even taking my jacket off, I picked up the phone and dialled his number.
‘Hello.’
‘So what have you been hearing?’
Beat.
‘Lafayette, Eddie. Everyone’s talking about you.’
‘About me?’
‘Yeah. I happened to be having lunch with Carl and a few other people today when someone mentioned they’d heard rumours about a day-trading firm on Broad Street – and some trader there who was performing phenomenally. I made a few enquiries after lunch and your name came up.’
I smiled to myself and said, ‘Oh yeah?’
‘And Eddie, that’s not all. I was speaking to Carl again later and I told him what I’d found out. He was really interested, and when I said you were actually a friend of mine he said he’d like to meet you.’
‘That’s great, Kevin. I’d like to meet him. Any time that suits.’
‘Are you free tomorrow night?’
‘Yeah.’
He paused. ‘Let me call you back.’
He rang off immediately.
I went over and sat on the couch and looked around. I was going to be getting out of here soon – and not a moment too soon, either. I envisaged the spacious, elegantly decorated living-room of a house in Brooklyn Heights. I saw myself standing at a bay window, looking out on to one of those tree-lined streets that Melissa and I, on our way from Carroll Gardens into the city, on summer days, had often walked along, and even talked about one day living on. Cranberry Street. Orange Street. Pineapple Street.
The phone rang again. I stood up and walked across the room to answer it.
‘Eddie – Kevin. Drinks tomorrow night? At the Orpheus Room?’
‘Great. What time?’
‘Eight. But why don’t you and I meet at seven-thirty, that way I can fill you in on some stuff.’
‘Sure.’
I put the phone down.
As I stood there, with my hand still on the receiver, I began to feel light-headed and dizzy, and everything went dark for a second. Then, without consciously registering that I had moved – and moved to the other side of the room – I suddenly found myself reaching out to the edge of the couch for something to lean against.
It was only then that I realized I hadn’t eaten anything in three days.
12
I ARRIVED AT THE ORPHEUS ROOM before Kevin and took a seat at the bar. I ordered a club soda.
I didn’t know what I expected from this meeting, but it would certainly be interesting. Carl Van Loon was one of those names I’d seen in newspapers and magazines all throughout the 1980s, a name synonymous with that decade and its celebrated devotion to Greed. He might be quiet and retiring these days, but back then the chairman of Van Loon & Associates had been involved in several notorious property deals, including the construction of a gigantic and controversial office building in Manhattan. He had also been involved in some of the highest-profile leveraged buyouts of the period, and in countless mergers and acquisitions.
Back in those days, as well, Van Loon and his second wife, interior-designer Gabby De Paganis, had been denizens of the black-tie charity circuit and had had their pictures in the social pages of every issue of New York magazine and Quest and Town and Country. To me, he’d been a member of that gallery of cartoon characters – along with people like Al Sharpton, Leona Helmsley and John Gotti – that had made up the public life of the times, the public life we’d all consumed so voraciously on a daily basis, and then discussed and dissected at the slightest provocation.
I remember once being in the West Village with Melissa, for instance, about 1985 or 1986 – in Caffe Vivaldi – when she got up on her high horse about the proposed Van Loon Building. Van Loon had long wanted to regain the title of World’s Tallest for New York, and was proposing a glass box on the site of the old St Nicholas Hotel on Forty-eighth Street. It had been designed at over fifteen hundred feet, but after endless objections was eventually built at just under a thousand. ‘What is this shit with skyscrapers?’ she’d said, holding up her espresso cup, ‘I mean, haven’t we gotten over it yet?’ OK, the skyscraper had once been the supreme symbol of corporate capitalism, indeed of America itself – what Ayn Rand referring to the Woolworth Building as seen from New York Harbour had called ‘the finger of God’ – but surely we no longer needed it, no longer needed people like Carl Van Loon coming along trying to imprint their adolescent fantasies on the city skyline. For the most part, in any case – she went on – the question of height had been irrelevant, a red herring, as skyscrapers had merely been commercial billboards for the likes of sewing-machine companies and retailers and car manufacturers and newspapers. So what was this one going to be? A billboard for fucking junk bonds? Jesus.
Melissa, on occasions such as this, had wielded her espresso cup with a rare elegance – suitably indignant, but never spilling a drop, and always ready if necessary to flip the axis and start laughing at herself.
‘Eddie.’
She always calmed down in the same way, too – no matter how animated she’d become. She would lean her head slightly forward, maybe swirling whatever coffee was left in the cup, and go still and quiet, diaphanous strands of hair settling gently across her face.
‘Eddie?’
I turned around in my seat, away from the bar. Kevin was standing there, staring at me.
I held out my hand.
‘Kevin.’
‘Eddie.’
‘How are you?’
‘Fine.’
As we shook hands, I tried to edge that image of Melissa from my mind. I asked him if he wanted a drink – an Absolut on the rocks – and he did. A few minutes of small talk followed, and then Kevin started priming me for the meeting with Van Loon.
‘He’s… mercurial – one day he’s your best friend and the next he’ll look right through you, so don’t be put off if he’s a little weird.’