Behold the Dreamers(54)
“Jende,” she called from the living room. “Jende, oh!”
“Eh?” he replied, running out of the bedroom, where he was folding the clean clothes he’d just brought back from the laundromat. Her panicked voice made him nervous; every time she called his name like that, he feared it had to do with the baby.
“Watch,” she said, pointing to the TV. “Something about Lehman Brothers. Is that not where Mr. Edwards works?”
Yes, it was, he said, not yet panicking, not wanting to think that the news had anything to do with what Leah had been dreading. He heard a journalist say that the collapse was a massive earthquake that would reverberate across the world for months to come. He heard another journalist talk about the catastrophic fall in stock prices and the possibility of a recession. A former employee of Lehman Brothers was interviewed. She hadn’t seen this coming, she said. People were suspicious but no one thought it was really going to come to this. They’d been told just today that it was over. She had no idea what she was going to do. No one knew what they were going to do now.
Neni placed her hand on her chest. “Does it mean Mr. Edwards has no job now?” she asked.
Neither of them asked the next question—did it mean Jende would have no job, too? The fear within them could not let loose the words. Similar questions would burrow into the minds of many in New York City in the coming weeks. Many would be convinced that the plague that had descended on the homes of former Lehman employees was only a few blocks from theirs. Restaurateurs, artists, private tutors, magazine publishers, foundation directors, limousine drivers, nannies, housekeepers, employment agencies, virtually everyone who stood along the path where money flowed to and from the Street fretted and panicked that day. For some, the fears were justified: Their bread and wine would indeed disappear, along with the billions of dollars that vanished the day Lehman died.
“I have to call Mr. Edwards,” Jende said, hurriedly picking up his cell phone from the dinette table.
Clark did not answer his cell phone, but Cindy did when he called the house number. “You still have a job,” she said to him.
“Oh, thank you, madam. Thank you so much!”
“Nothing’s changing,” she said. “Clark’s going to call you to let you know when to come back to work,” she added, before quickly getting off the phone to take another call.
Jende placed the cell phone on the table and sat down next to Neni. He was dizzy, grateful but stunned. It had just dawned on him how tightly his fate was linked to another man’s. What if something ever happened to Mr. Edwards? His work permit was set to expire in March and he might not be able to renew it again, depending on how his court case went. Without working papers, he would never be able to get another job that paid as much. How would he take care of a wife and two children? How many restaurant dishwashing jobs would he have to do for cash?
“Please let’s not think like that,” Neni said. “You have a job for now, eh? As long as we have Mr. Edwards, we have a job. Are we not better off today than all those people walking out of Lehman? Look at them. I just feel so sorry for them. But then, we don’t know what’s on the road coming for us, too. We just don’t know. So let’s only be happy that today we were spared.”
Twenty-seven
NEITHER OF THEM SAID MUCH TO THE OTHER ON THE FIRST DAY THEY spent together after Lehman fell. There wasn’t much to say and there was certainly too little time to say it, with Clark sighing and hammering on his laptop as if the keys were obstinate. He seemed to have gotten older by ten years in seven days—a deep crease suddenly evident on his forehead—and Jende couldn’t stop wondering why the man was doing this to himself, why, with all the money he’d made, he couldn’t pick up and go live a quiet stress-free life somewhere far away from New York City. That’s what he would do if he were in Mr. Edwards’s position. By the time he was close to being a millionaire, he would give suffering a firm handshake and tell it goodbye. Why should a man intentionally live his life with one kind of anxiety followed by another? But men like Clark Edwards did not think like that, it appeared. It didn’t seem to be about the money anymore. His life on Wall Street, as suffocating as it was, appeared to be what was giving him air.
“I am very sorry, sir,” Jende finally forced himself to say, ten minutes after they’d been in the car together, as they drove to Clark’s new workplace at Barclays, the British giant that had swallowed up Lehman after it was declared legally dead.
“Thanks,” Clark said without looking up from his laptop.
“I hope everyone will be okay, sir.”
“Eventually.”
Jende knew what the curt response meant: Stop talking. So he did precisely that. He kept his eyes on the road and drove in silence for the rest of the week—from the Sapphire apartment building on the Upper East Side to Barclays in Midtown East, or the Lehman-turned-Barclays office tower on Seventh Avenue; from a meeting with ex–Lehman executives to a meeting with Barclays executives; from a lunch with Treasury officials in Washington, D.C., to a dinner with lawyers at a Long Island steak house. Clark said little to him except for quick greetings, or orders to hurry up, or reminders to return by a certain time after picking up Cindy or dropping off Mighty. Once, he barked at Jende to cut around another car, but most days he sweated in the backseat, mumbling to himself when he wasn’t on the phone, moving from one end of the seat to the other, speaking in rushed, anxious tones to various people, flipping through piles of papers, opening and closing his laptop, opening and closing The Wall Street Journal, scribbling on his notepad. Jende understood nothing of what he heard him say—after months of educating himself with the Journal, he’d come to understand the concept of buying low and selling high, but the things Clark was talking about these days, things like derivatives and regulations, ratings and overrated junk, were indecipherable. The only things decipherable in his voice were misery and exhaustion.