James Lasdun - Its Beginning to Hurt: Stories

Joseph Nagel slumped forward, head in hands.

My God, he groaned.

Elise snapped off the car radio.

Calm down, Joseph.

Thats four straight days since we got here.

Joseph, please.

What do you think were down now? Sixty? Eighty thousand? Itll come back.

We should have sold everything after the first twenty. That would have been an acceptable loss. Given that we were too stupid to sell when we were actually ahead

Joseph felt the petulant note in his voice, told himself to shut up, and plunged on. I did say we should get out, didnt I? Frankly it was irresponsible committing all that moneyshut up, shut upnot to mention the unseemliness of buying in when you did oh God ...

His wife spoke icily I didnt hear you complain when we were ahead.

All right, but thats not the point. The point is...

What?

Her face had tightened angrily on itself, all line and bone.

The point is .. But he had lost his train of thought and sat blinking, walled in a thick grief that seemed for a moment unaccounted for by money or anything else he could put his finger on.

Elise got out of the car.

Lets go for a swim, shall we, Darcy?

She opened the rear door for their daughter and led her away.

Glumly, Joseph watched them walk hand in hand down through the scrub oaks and pines to the sandy edge of the kettle pond.

He gathered the two bags from their shopping expedition into his lap but remained in the car, heavily immobile.

Money ... For the first time in their lives they had some capital. It had come from the sale of an apartment Elise had inherited, and it had aroused volatile forces in their household. Though not a vast amountunder a quarter of a million dollars after estate taxesit was large enough, if considered a stake rather than a nest egg, to form the basis for a dream of real riches, and Joseph had found himself unexpectedly susceptible to this dream. The money he made as a dealer in antique prints and furniture was enough, combined with Elises income from occasional Web design jobs, to keep them in modest comforttwo cars, an old brick house in Aurelia with lilac bushes and a grape arbor, the yearly trip up here to the Capebut there wasnt much left over for Darcys college fund, let alone their own retirement. In the past such matters hadnt troubled him greatly, but with the advent of Elises inheritance he had felt suddenly awoken into new and urgent responsibilities. At their age they shouldnt be worrying about how to pay for medical coverage every year, should they? Or debating whether they could afford the dental and eye care package too? And wasnt it about time they built a studio so that Elise could concentrate on her painting?

The more he considered these things, the more necessary, as opposed to merely desirable, they had seemed, until he began to think that to go on much longer without them would be to accept failure, a marginal existence that would doubtless grow more pinched as time went by and end in squalor.

After probate had cleared and Elise had sold the apartment, they had gone to a man on Wall Street, a money manager who didnt as a rule handle accounts of less than a million dollars but who, as a special favor to the mutual acquaintance who had recommended him, had agreed to consider allowing the Nagels to invest their capital in one of his funds.

Morton Dowell, the mans name was. Gazing out at the pond glittering through the pines, Joseph recalled him vividly: a tanned, smiling, sapphire-eyed man in a striped shirt with white collar and cuffs and a pair of elasticized silver sleeve links circling his arms.

A young assistant, balding and grave, had shown them into Dowells cherry-paneled bower overlooking Governors Island. There, sunk in dimpled leather armchairs, Joseph and Elise had listened to Dowell muse in an English-accented drawl on his extraordinary run of good luck these past twenty years, inclining his head in modest disavowal when the assistant murmured that he could think of a better word for it than luck, while casually evoking image after image of the transformations he had wrought upon his clients lives and hinting casually at the special intimacies within the higher circles of finance that had enabled him to accomplish these transformations.

I think its just so much fun to help people attain the things they want from life, he had said, be it a yacht or a house on St. Barts or a Steinway for their musical child...

Joseph had listened, mesmerized, hardly daring to hope that this mighty personage would consent to sprinkle his magic upon their modest capital. He was almost overcome with gratitude when at the end of the meeting Dowell appeared to have decided they would make acceptable clients, sending his assistant to fetch his Sovereign Mutual Fund prospectus for them to take home.

What a creep, Elise had murmured as they waited for the elevator outside. I wouldnt leave him in a room with Darcys piggy bank.

Stunned, Joseph had opened his mouth to defend the man but at once found himself hesitating. Perhaps she was right... He knew himself to be a poor judge of people. He, who could detect the most skillfully faked Mission desk or Federal-era sleigh bed merely by standing in its presence for a moment, was less sure of himself when it came to human beings. He tended to like them on principle, but his sense of what they were, essentially, was vague, unstable, qualities he suspected might be linked to some corresponding instability in himself. Whereas Elise, who had little interest in material things (and who had been altogether less unsettled by her inheritance than he had), took a keen, if somewhat detached, interest in other people and was shrewd at assessing them.

Even as their elevator began descending from Dowells office, Joseph had found his sense of the man beginning to falter. And by the time they got home it had reversed itself entirely. Of course, he had thought, picturing the mans tanned smile and sparkling armbands again, what an obvious phony! A reptile! He shuddered to think how easily he had been taken in.

You know what? You should invest the money yourself, he had told Elise.

That had crossed my mind.

You should do it, Elise! It cant be that hard. He was brimming with sudden enthusiasm for the idea.

Perhaps I will give it a try.

You should! You have good instincts. Thats all that matters.

These money managers are just guessing like anyone else. Youd be as good as any of them.

And this in fact had appeared to be the case. After biding her time for several weeks, Elise had made her move with an audacity that stunned him. It was right after the September 11 attacks, when the shell-shocked markets reopened. Over ten days, as the Dow reeled and staggered, she bought and bought and bought, icily resolute while Joseph flailed around her, wrenched between his fearful certainty that the entire capitalist system was about to collapse, his guilty terror of being punished by the gods for attempting to profit from disaster, and his rising excitement, as the tide turned and he could see, on the Schwab Web page over his wifes shoulder, the figure in the Total Gain column swelling day after day in exuberant vindication of her instincts. An immense contentment had filled him. Thank God she had kept the money out of that fiend Dowells clutches!

But then the tide had turned again. The number that had been growing so rapidly in the Total Gain column, putting out a third, a fourth, then a fifth figure, like a ship unfurling sails in the great wind of prosperity that had seemed set to blow once again across America, had slowed to a halt, lowered its sails one by one, and then, terrifyingly, had begun to sink. And suddenly Elises shrewdness, the innate financial acumen he had attributed to her, had begun to look like nothing more than beginners luck, while in place of his contentment, a mass of anxieties began teeming inside him...