Ghosts of Manhattan: A Novel(76)

I feel motivation and suddenly clarity—the Wonderful Life moment I had thought was possible only in a movie. I just don’t know how to share it. I need a plan that will give me the opportunity to prove to Julia that I can change in a true and permanent way. I can start by proving it to myself.

“Okay. I’ll go.” I walk to the bedroom to pack a bag and whisper a wish that she doesn’t leave me alone to do it. I pull a suitcase from the closet and start to put a half dozen of everything into it.

Julia walks as far as the doorway but doesn’t come in the room.

I stop packing for a moment and look at her. “I’m going to go to the office tomorrow for the last time.”

She leans against the doorframe and crosses her arms. She’s evaluating my statement and seems to conclude that it’s not too little but it is too late. She smiles through tears. “I’m happy for you.”

My instinct is to hug her and lift her from the ground, to tell her everything can be okay now, but I know I need to give Julia room to come to believe in me rather than to try to persuade her with words. She needs to have enough time to want to see me again, at least a little.

“Julia, don’t answer me now. I want you to know that I love you. Those aren’t just words. You’re everything that matters to me and I feel that with my whole heart. I have no right to ask for it, but I want a second chance. I want to give us a second chance. If you feel anything for me still, if you think there’s a chance for us, meet me tomorrow. I’m going to buy two tickets to somewhere quiet, some island in the Caribbean. At nine a.m. tomorrow I’m going to quit and I’ll be outside the office by nine fifteen and I’ll wait for you. We can go to the airport together and we can try a new start, away from here.”

Julia nods. Tears are running down her cheeks and falling from the line of her jaw. They’re not tears of happiness. She’s too exhausted to wipe them and she won’t make eye contact with me.

“Julia, I’m still the person you fell in love with and married. I hope you’ll give me the chance to show you that.”





27 | GHOSTS


February 3, 2006

THE TAXI TAKES PARK AVENUE AND I WATCH THE FEW trees that are planted in the median as we pass by. I can look up through the naked branches like cracks in a windshield. We turn on Forty-sixth Street toward 383 Madison. My breath comes easy. I’ll walk through these doors for the last time.

When I was twenty-two coming to work, I never did things with a plan. I didn’t do things based on how I wanted my life to be. I never stopped to think about what that life would eventually look like. I was paying the bills and living life. It all felt like a dress rehearsal and there would be plenty of time to get things exactly right.

But then the years go by and only belatedly do I realize there never was a dress rehearsal. It’s all been happening in a single take and it all counts.

I’m halfway across the lobby to the elevators and I hear, “Hi, Mr. Farmer.”

She’s a small, middle-aged woman and I know the face. It’s round and happy. Her clothes are inexpensive but neat and her hair is permed in a way that went out in the 1950s. “Hi, how are you?” My smile is real. There’s something comforting about her. I remember that she works in the back office, processing trade orders. She’s been at Bear for about two decades and might make fifty grand a year. She probably thinks I have the world at my feet, though right now I’m the one envying her happiness.

“Great. I like a little chill in the air. I’m going to get a coffee. Can I get you anything?” She smiles.

“No.” I wish I knew her name. I’d love to be able to say it to her now. I’d love to be able to go back thirteen years to tell myself that it’s an important thing to know and those are important things to care about. “But thank you.”

For thirteen years I haven’t been in my life, I’ve been hovering above it like a phantom, all the while with the nagging feeling that something isn’t right, that I’m not real. Jack Wilson is a phantom too. A ghost who still thinks he belongs among the living. He can’t understand the source of his confusion, why the only people who can see him are other ghosts, but he doesn’t know that they’re ghosts too. He knows only that they resemble him in some way.

With my mind made up and certain, I feel more powerful. I have nothing to lose anymore and everything to gain. I’m as eager to get upstairs as a child reaching to open a present.

In the elevator I press 6 for the executive offices, stopping short of the trading floor on seven. I roll my shoulders in a way to release tension and I find that I’m not tense at all and it occurs to me that the most dangerous person is not the one with the most strength or weaponry. The most dangerous person is the one who feels he has nothing to lose. I’ve tapped into this strength. I feel it flow through my body. My fingertips tingle with it. Nobody has a claim on me and I care nothing for a claim of my own on anything else. There is no consequence left for me to fear. It’s liberating, exhilarating.

I exit the elevator doors onto the sixth floor, as though concealing my weapons through a security checkpoint. The sixth floor is nothing like the trading floor. Here there are actual hallways and partitions and offices with doors to close them off. There is no line of sight from one end to another, but there is a main hallway that runs the perimeter of the floor, connecting all the executive windowed offices like an old post road. On the one side sits the executive in an office with sofas and an expensive desk, artwork, and lavish furnishings and with a view of the city. Steps across to the other side sits the secretary in the more humble setting of a cubicle, wishing she had enough privacy to pull up solitaire on her computer.