The Futures(33)

I hit Enter.

The top search results were from Spire’s website, Michael’s official company biography. Undergrad at South Dakota, wildcatting for oil in West Texas for a year, MBA completed in 1983. He started at Spire in 1986. Michael never said anything about working anyplace but Spire. I wondered about that three-year window after his MBA.

I kept clicking through the results. A few pages in, there was a link to an archived article in the New York Times. A profile from the business section, dated 1985. There was a grainy photo on the page. I squinted. It was Michael, twenty-odd years earlier.

I scanned through the article. Michael had worked at another hedge fund called Millworth Capital. In the summer of 1985, he made upwards of $400 million for Millworth, shorting foreign currencies. The profile described his unlikely success: a farm boy, the first in his family to go to college, a rising star on Wall Street at age twenty-six. The reporter asked Michael what he thought he could attribute his success to.

Mr. Casey tilts back in his chair, resting his feet on the desk. There are no traces of his former life in his office: no family pictures, no college diploma.

“I don’t think there’s any one way to answer that question,” he says. “You could point to any number of things. But I think there was a moment when I got hooked on this. My first big trade. I cleared $50 million in one day. I was twenty-four years old. I wasn’t going to look back after that.”

“Evan? Evan? Hello?”

Julia was standing in front of me, hair rumpled and eyes scrunched against the glow of the computer screen. I twitched, my hand slamming the laptop shut. “Oh,” I said. “Hi. I didn’t hear you get up.”

“I said, what are you doing? Work?”

“Uh, just some e-mails. I’m done now.”

She padded over to the kitchen sink, her bare legs sticking out from beneath her T-shirt. She took a glass from the cabinet, turned on the tap, held her finger in the stream of water, waiting for it to get cold. Mundane gestures I’d seen a hundred times before, but at that moment, they felt too private for me to witness. Part of a separate life. I wanted something from Julia that it felt impossible to ask for. A silence different from the one that had grown between us.

“I’m coming to bed,” I said. She waved a hand to show that she’d heard before disappearing into the darkness of the bedroom.





Chapter 6


Julia



I looked up from the donor database I was updating to see Eleanor march into Laurie’s office. Others maintained a certain deference around Laurie, asking me in a whisper if she was available before approaching her door, but not Eleanor. Not this day, not any day. She slammed the door shut behind her, but her voice vibrated through the wall.

“Laurie, I don’t know how you expect me to pull this gala off. Not with this shitty budget. This is pathetic.”

“It’s the best we can do. You know things have been tight around here.”

“But this is ridiculous. This is less than half our budget from last year. Do you expect me to cook the food myself? There’s no way this is going to work.”

This conversation kept repeating itself. Each week, Eleanor secured a few more dollars for the November gala. Then she turned right back around and cajoled Laurie for more. And, strangely, Laurie never lost her patience with Eleanor. It was clear that the crash was creating a strain. Laurie had taken to sighing a lot and rubbing her temple. She grew brittle with the rest of us. But never once did she shout back at Eleanor. It baffled me, but then again, almost everything about Laurie baffled me. I answered her phone and kept her schedule, but I had no insight into what she was thinking. Her remove seemed deliberate. She must have seen me as just one more link in a chain—another assistant, another year. I wondered if I could ever prove I was different. But then what? I didn’t want to work there. I didn’t want to be Eleanor in five years. Eleanor, who breezed in and out of the office when she felt like it, who threw temper tantrums, who’d barely spoken to me since our lunch over the summer.

In late October, Eleanor declared that she would be leaving town to “recharge” before the gala. She would be unreachable for the next five days, on some tropical island. The following day, a Thursday, Laurie told me to get Henry Fletcher on the phone. His secretary said he wasn’t available, but she could pass along a message. “I don’t want to leave a message,” Laurie yelled from inside her office. “I’ll try him this afternoon.”

He remained unavailable that afternoon, and Friday morning, and Friday afternoon. Laurie swirled around her office, slamming file drawers, throwing out papers, rearranging furniture. I wanted to help—it was distressing to witness—but I wasn’t going to put myself directly in her line of fire. She seemed ready to snap at any moment. And as much as I disliked the job, it was still the only job I had.

I wonder. Could I see it at the time? My life crystallizing into a new pattern. Evan and I drifting, each of us caught in different currents. Adam and I had grown closer, and I contemplated what I had ever done without him. I was never good at skepticism, at questioning what was happening to me. And besides, nothing had even happened—nothing that couldn’t be explained away in innocence. Until one specific night, the weekend at the end of October. When imagination hardened into reality.

Abby called me that Saturday afternoon. “Come to this party with me,” she said. “I’m schlepping all the way to Brooklyn. I need a buddy for the subway.”