“The grown-ups?” George interrupted. “The grown-ups?”
“-with what happens to be a highly complex situation-”
“Daylight robbery is not complex, and who the fuck are the grown-ups?”
“What I’m trying to say is blaming the bankers for the inevitable problems that occur from time to time in a free market is like blaming your stomach when you overeat. It’s just facile. It’s singling out a small group of mostly honest and decent people, and turning them into scapegoats for the consequences of wanting to have cars and houses and easy credit for everyone instead of just, you know, the lucky few. What I’m saying is we’re all implicated.”
“Bollocks. How am I implicated when Charlie here sweet-talks some little old lady into signing up for a mortgage she can’t afford and then runs off and sells that mortgage on to some thicko pension fund manager, knowing that the little old lady and all the other little old ladies he’s sweet-talked in similar honey-tongued fashion are going to default, and the pension fund is going to go pear-shaped, and all the pensioners are going to be living off thin gruel for the rest of their days? How am I implicated in that, pray tell? What do you think, Charlie?”
Again Charlie abstained from comment. His back was straight, his mouth slightly open. Looking at him, Matthew realized it was his meditating posture. Not the full lotus, of course, but the erect spine, the centering of the body mass on the abdominal triangle-the tanden, as Matthew had seen it called in the Zen books lying around the house-the belly breathing, regulated so as to achieve mushin, no mind. It was a technique, as far as Matthew understood, for reducing other people to mere disturbances in the visual field.
Charlie did break his silence, however, a little later. George had moved on to the subject of the banks short-selling mortgage-backed securities even as they were aggressively marketing those same securities to their clients, a practice she seemed to consider worthy of a whole new palette of disgust-effects. While she was in full cry, Charlie muttered something that, perhaps because he’d been so quiet until then, caused her to stop midsentence.
“Pardon?”
“You’re talking about Goldman Sachs,” Charlie said. “I worked for Morgan Stanley. They didn’t do that. “
“Oh!” George said brightly. “In that case I owe you a massive fucking apology, don’t I? Here, darling…” Leaning across the table, she planted a big kiss on Charlie’s lips and sat back, laughing.
The gesture briefly dissolved the tension at the table.
But then Hugh spoke. He’d been drinking steadily all through dinner, and Matthew had assumed he was more or less in a stupor. But that didn’t appear to be the case. Quite the reverse, if anything.
“Not that Morgan Stanley was a model of rectitude, exactly…” he said.
“I wasn’t-” Charlie began. Chloe looked at him expectantly but he broke off, seeming to decide in favor of stoical endurance over further argument.
“I’ve read quite a bit about them,” Hugh said. “It’s a subject that interests me.”
“Uh-oh, Charlie,” George said. “Now Hughie’s having a go at you. This time you’re really in trouble!”
Chloe poured herself a glass of wine and looked out across the dark valley, seeming to absent herself. Political debate, with its tedious moral one-upmanship, had never seemed to interest her much, and this too was something Matthew admired in her. It was a kind of cleanness, he’d always thought; a refusal to join in the demeaning parlor game of judging and being judged. No doubt this English couple would dismiss it as the complacency of the overprivileged, but he knew her better than that: she’d have been the same Chloe rich or poor; taking whatever life offered, without guilt, and without envy. He was very certain of that.
“No, but I find it all very intriguing,” Hugh said. “We tend to see subcultures like Wall Street or Silicon Valley as monolithic entities but in fact they’re fascinatingly diverse. Goldman Sachs, as far as I understand it, got its sort of über-predator edge by recruiting purely on the basis of how clever and hungry applicants were. They filled their ranks with all these high-IQ but completely ruthless young blokes out of projects in the Bronx who’d never had any inhibitions about grabbing whatever they could. Morgan Stanley was more old school, wasn’t it? You had to have connections to get a decent job there, which made the whole operation a bit, well, no offense, Charlie, but a bit less sharp. The only reason they weren’t short-selling those securities was that no one there saw the crash coming. Isn’t that right? Not that being slower off the mark made them any more ethical-then or now, by all accounts. Didn’t they just handle the Facebook IPO?”
“I wasn’t there,” Charlie said. “I left in 2005.”
“Ah. But now when was Eliot Spitzer’s thing, the Global Settlement? 2003, wasn’t it?”
A guarded look appeared on Charlie’s face.
“Around then.”
“Eliot Spitzer!” Bill said, rolling his eyes.
Hugh ignored him:
“And didn’t Morgan Stanley get the biggest fine of any of them?”
“It’s possible,” Charlie muttered.
“I’m fairly certain they did. That’s been their racket for quite a while, hasn’t it? Getting their analysts to sex up the profile of companies on the verge of going public?”
George broke in: “Is that what you did, Charlie? Were you an analyst?”
In a breathy voice, Jana said, “I think we should give Charlie a break, already!”
“Me too,” said Bill.
“I’m curious, though,” George pressed. “Were you?”
Matthew happened to turn toward Charlie just then. He was thinking it was high time someone mentioned Charlie’s long-established interest in ethical investment, and was intending to mention it himself. But as he caught Charlie’s eye, a look of anger, hatred almost, flashed across Charlie’s features. It was gone before anyone but Matthew could notice it, but it shocked him. He dropped his glance immediately.
“Yes, I was a telecom analyst,” Charlie said quietly to George.
“Really?”
“Come on, guys,” Jana said. “Let it go.”
There was a silence, long and uncomfortable. In it, the distant sound of drumming wafted in on a breeze.
“What’s that?” Jana asked.
Matthew answered:
“The Rainbow people.”
“Who are they?”
“Bums in war paint,” Bill declared.
“Actually, they’re interesting,” Matthew said. Seeing an opportunity to atone for whatever he’d done to upset his cousin, he began talking about his encounters with the Rainbow people at the creek. He’d already told Charlie and Chloe the story of his meeting with Pike and the two girls, but Chloe pressed him to repeat it, laughing again as he described the wizened old guy with his embroidered bag. She, at least, seemed grateful to him for steering the conversation away from banking.
“Tell them about those words they use,” she said, smiling at him. “They have their own vocabulary for everything.”
He rattled off as many of the words as he could remember. Hugh took out a notebook and asked him to repeat them.
“That’s priceless,” he said, writing them down. “Absolutely priceless.”
“Now Hughie’s going to write an article about them,” George said, “and everyone’s going to think we spent our time in America living in a fucking teepee!”
A more relaxed conversation developed. Charlie brought out liqueurs and Bill produced some medical-grade pot. The moon rose from behind the mountain, newish, and bright enough that even its dark part had discernible substance and shape. By the time the party broke up everyone was behaving as if nothing untoward had happened.