Nothing as intimate as sex could remain unaffected by the drying up of their emotional wells. Gradually Diane had discovered a growing fear and distaste for lovemaking. She had suffered it, more and more, with trembling limbs and clenched teeth. She had tried-he had to give her that credit-she had tried with increasing desperation. But finally she had stopped trying. One night she had stood by the bed and slipped out of her robe, looking away, not at him. Without speaking, she settled down on her back and spread her legs out neatly, not disturbing the sheets, looking mindlessly at the ceiling and waiting with a flat, lifeless expression that promised she would resign herself to doing her sweaty functional duty but she could no longer pretend to like any part of it.
Filled with sudden revulsion, he had put his clothes on and walked to the door. Looking back, seeing the pain in her eyes, he had felt viciously glad: it showed, at least, that it was still in his power to hurt her.
Force of habit was stronger than love; they had kept up the outward pretense of marriage for a time. But one day he had stepped into the elevator, and it had hit him, unmistakable, the scent of her perfume. She must have just gone up to the apartment. He had left the elevator at the third floor and walked down the fire stairs to the lobby, gone to a hotel, and telephoned her. That was how it had ended.
He shrugged into a seersucker jacket and glanced in the mirror; he looked, he thought, like a burned-out reporter, a young-old man with deep creases bracketing his mouth, hair starting to gray, eyes puffy and bloodshot. On his way down to the sidewalk he was thinking of Carol McCloud. My trouble is, I’m just horny, that’s all. But he couldn’t shake her image. He went along Thirty-fourth Street and had a meager breakfast at a lunch counter; stopped afterward to paw through a sidewalk bin of old books. He found nothing but a layer of dirt on his fingers. Suddenly he turned into the street between two parked cars and hailed a downtown-bound taxi, got in, and gave the driver Saul Cohen’s address.
Saul Cohen’s office was in a small brown old building of almost colonial vintage that squatted cringing next to one of the tall Wall Street slabs checkered with glass, steel, and concrete-a nondescript new structure of the kind he had once heard Elliot Judd scorn: “I don’t intend to be put in a box like that until I’m dead. This city complains of vandals and they’re tearing down historic buildings to make room for that!” The new buildings weren’t even ugly; they were only boring, as inhuman as digital computers, and as cold.
But Saul Cohen inhabited the overshadowed little building next door. It was a dark, pleasant place, carved and ornamented, with aged woodwork and a brass-cage elevator that took him slowly but comfortably to the third floor. The office was small but homey and elegant-there was an elaborate Tabriz carpet swirling with vivid birds and animals, an Etruscan figurine on a wooden pedestal, and beyond a walnut rail fence with a swinging gate in it, an old man sitting at a huge antique desk in the corner.
Saul was the room’s only occupant; the secretary’s desk was unoccupied. There were tickers and a Quotron; phone wires were tangled on the old man’s cluttered desk.
Saul got up from his chair spryly. “Russ, my boy.” When the old man grinned, his eyes wrinkled up until they were almost shut. He walked forward to the rail, held the swing gate open, and shook hands. “How are you? Come and sit-come and sit.”
“I was hoping I’d catch you here this early. But if I’m taking up work time-”
“Nonsense. For you I make all the time you want. Sit.”
Saul Cohen was a crickety, bookish, gentle little man with a harsh simian face, tangled eyebrows, prominent nose, gray hair cropped close to the little round skull. His voice was rapid, scratchy, impatient. His expression, painted on indelibly, was that of a man who smelled something distasteful; it made his face seem a repository for the anguish of the ages. Hastings had never been able to look at that suffering face without seeing the old man as torment personified.
He took the proffered chair. “I need some wisdom.”
“That I don’t sell. Only stocks and bonds. I made a couple of good trades last week in your account and your father’s. Do you need cash? Is that why you come to me with such a long face? To ask me to sell your investments for cash?”
“Nothing like that.”
“I’m happy, then. But wisdom? The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise. Ecclesiasticus, thirty-eight: twenty-four. What can I tell you? I’m a businessman all my life. I’m seventy-six years of age, and I’m still working, only because what else do I know how to do? I never learned the wisdom of spending money, all I can do is play the game here. I own a seat that’s fifty years old, I bought it for a few thousand, and now it’s worth a small fortune-what can I tell you?”
“You can give me the impossible, Saul. A Wall Street education in one lesson.”
The old man smiled gently. He was a Wall Street gadfly, a keen-eyed gnome with a clever mind salted away behind his indulgent cracker-barrel philosophizing. He said, “Instant knowledge. What everybody wants nowadays. Ah, my young friend, you’ll never get that outright. But what you can get, if you’ve got the right brain, is two here and two there, to put together with the two you’ve already got, to make six. You’ve gone to work for the Securities and Exchange since I’ve seen you last.”
“That’s right. Word gets around, doesn’t it?”
“As I said, I keep in touch. Besides, I’ve known you since you were so young you’d be embarrassed to be reminded. I actually did bounce you on my knee. Naturally I’d be interested to follow your career.”
“Such as it is,” Hastings said, smiling. “My problem’s an odd one. I’ve picked up vague hints that something may be going on out of sight in the market. But I’m too new to this business to be sure of myself. The problem is-”
The old man held up a hand, palm out, and grinned, full of mischief. “We will wait to hear what the exact problem is. You come to me as a neophyte, and the opportunity to lecture is too great for me to pass up. I will tell you about this Street, and then you will ask your questions.” He settled back, steepling his fingers, with a deep breath and a manner that instantly identified him as an in-training long-distance talker. Hastings smiled fondly. Watching Hastings from the pained depths of his eyes, Saul Cohen said, “Do you read Freud? No? You should. Freud observed that Galileo removed the earth from the center of the universe; Darwin removed man’s uniqueness, and made him but a link in a chain; and Freud himself removed the illusion that a man is his own master. But most of us still cherish that illusion-and you see evidence of it here in Wall Street. Everybody thinks he can control his own destiny by working out a logical investment policy and making himself a millionaire overnight. They make a mistake, of course-they should read Freud. There’s no such thing as a logical man, there’s no such thing as a logical investment policy. The market isn’t any more logical than the men who make it. It operates out of greed, fear, rumors, hints, intuitions-and for your first lesson I can tell you that selecting investments by throwing darts at a list of stocks is the best method of beating the market. You see?”
Hastings began to smile, but Cohen shook a knobby finger at him. “I meant it seriously, young man-it’s quite true. It is a plain bare fact, beyond argument, that more people lose than win in the stock market. If you buy one share of every share listed, across the board, you’ll end up losing. To be specific, you’ll lose about seven and a half percent on your investment. Because in the end all we do in Wall Street is shift piles of manure from one corner of the barn to another, and we brokers charge a commission for the service of shifting it back and forth.”