The Futures(69)

He ran over. He ran. That’s how much he cared. I dissolved. “Oh, Julia,” Adam said, kissing my forehead. “Babe, babe. It’s okay. I’m here.” He was the only one who understood. He put his arm around me and steered me toward a booth in the corner. I hadn’t wanted to cry in front of him like this, but maybe it didn’t matter. If Adam and I were going to be together, really together, I had to trust that he wouldn’t care about a few tears. He went to the bar and returned with whiskey for him and a vodka soda for me, with a wedge of lime floating on top. A little part of me wondered whether he’d finally remembered my drink order or whether the bartender had corrected his mistake.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked. He held his glass up, clinking it against mine. “Or should we just leave it at ‘Fuck them, they’re idiots’?”

He wanted me to laugh. I did, and he smiled.

When I told him what happened, I found that a story emerged. A narrative with a satisfying arc. It was so obvious when I traced it from beginning to end: I was the victim. I didn’t deserve this. So what if I’d hated the job? That wasn’t the point. The point was that it was unfair. I had worked hard, never made a mistake. I’d been fucked over, and I was angry about it. I had every right to be angry. It had taken the firing for me to see that. I was angry at Laurie and the Fletchers and Evan and everyone who had been treating me like shit for the previous six months. The floodgates were opening.

“So wait a second,” Adam said. “Laurie said that the Fletchers had to cancel their donation for financial reasons, right?”

“Yeah. Apparently they’re having a bad year.” I thought of my father, on the phone with Henry Fletcher every day over Thanksgiving weekend. It made sense. The Fletchers were running out of money.

“Did she say specifically that they were strapped for cash?”

“I don’t really remember. It happened so fast.” He was staring at me. “Why? What is it?”

“It doesn’t add up.” Adam pulled his phone out, typed something in, then handed it to me. “Look at this.”

“What?”

“It’s from today’s Journal. Just read the first paragraph.”

ForeCloser, a company that tracks upcoming foreclosure auctions within a given geographic range, announced today that it has raised $20 million in Series B financing. The round was led by Fletcher Partners and included founding investor Henry Fletcher. ForeCloser will use the financing to aggressively increase the scope of its geographic coverage, which is currently limited to California, Washington and Oregon. In the announcement, the company outlined a goal of covering all 50 states by the end of 2009.

I looked up at him.

“Do you see what this means?” he said. “The Fletchers are fine. They have plenty of money. Maybe they withdrew their donation, but it wasn’t because they didn’t have the cash for it.”

“So they still could have donated the—then what?”

“I’m sorry, babe. It isn’t right.”

Something turned. Darkened. “What the fuck, then? Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know, Jules. These people play by a different set of rules. Henry Fletcher isn’t thinking about what’s fair or not. Maybe when things were flush, he was happy to toss a little aside to make his wife happy. You know, give her a charity to play with. But now that the market’s bucking, he has to stay lean. You see what he’s doing, don’t you?”

Adam finished his drink, held up two fingers at the bartender. His eyes were hard, shining, in pursuit of something. I’d never seen them like that. Or at least that’s what I thought, in the moment. I had seen that gleam before. I knew what it meant. But I’d suppressed that memory with remarkable success.

“I mean, look at this company he’s investing in. People want to snap up these foreclosures while they’re cheap, and Henry Fletcher is going to get rich by helping them do it faster. They’ll make money flipping these properties, and he’ll make money giving them access. These guys just drove the economy off a cliff, and now they’re trying to suck more money from the corpses. They’re actually profiting from all this. It’s more than unfair. They should go to jail, if you ask me.”

The alcohol made everything swirl together. Evan always at work. Tossing aside the manila envelope, like it was nothing. The arrogance, the indifference. Why did no one ever care about right or wrong? Why did no one ever care about me? Adam slid a new drink in front of me.

“It’s fucked up, right?” He held my hand tenderly. My mind was going fuzzy, the radio signal growing faint. “They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with these things. None of these guys should.”

The spark had been lit. I’d succeeded at one thing, at least: getting really, really drunk. I was aware, in a detached way, of the rising pitch of my voice, of my frustration releasing in a continuous vent. Everything came spilling out. Adam kept signaling to the bartender, never letting my glass sit empty. What was I saying? I lost my train of thought. He mentioned Evan’s name. I shook my head. I hated Evan; I hated everything that Evan made me feel. Evan, who reminded me of everything that had gone wrong, of every disappointment.

I felt myself curling in at the edges, growing blacker. Evan. It spun together into one theme: Fletcher, Spire, Madoff, all of it. I grasped at it through the vodka, the point I was trying to make to Adam. How had I never seen it before, the way the world worked? I described the strange identification I’d felt with Madoff’s sad, gray-haired victims on TV. We were casualties of the same greed-fueled catastrophe. Adam nodded vigorously. He understood. Don’t we have to do something about it? Don’t we have a responsibility to stop these things? He asked me about Evan again. What had I meant about Spire? What was going on there? You don’t have to protect him, Julia. You need to let these things out. You can’t carry this around by yourself.