focus, the blurred lines along the ceilings and baseboards, and the dispersed angles in the corners of the room, refused to grant any purchase of motion or retreat from my thoughts and memories.
I saw our mornings, heard the growing silences between us. Felt the lost chances slip away.
I could not hide from pieces of life lived so deeply.
Nor were there any points of reference to plot my escape into the future.
Sitting at my kitchen table, hoarding my heartache, trying to write on the tabletop with my dripping coffee spoon in blotting letters “love has gone.”
The voice within me ran ahead of the pokey scratchings of my spoon, demanding:
What was my life any more?
What would it mean after I died?
Where would they go, all of my thoughts and feelings?
How long would it last, death?
Unable to move.
Unable to function.
By noon, sunlight surged over me like high tide. The rooms and hallways poured out into window-glass reflections and mirrors and confused soft shimmerings at the edge of my vision where there should have been clarity. In the glare, my vision receded, leaving me trapped in a brain soup of distortion, weakened by sorrow.
In ribbons of regret streaming from my fingertips, the day spun itself out.
* * *
Mid-afternoon. Only halfway down the river.
Despite remaining at my desk and computer keyboard through lunch to weed through my faxes, sow a handful of phone calls, and punch out new email, I had not produced the critical information needed to liberate the firm from the hundred-million-dollar payment it would have to make three weeks out. Singapore and Bangkok still asleep. With their information not yet available, I had only been able to work with a few stray calculations, recording the limited number of bond subscriptions booked from Toronto. Grabbing up their dollars like lifeboats and stringing them together where, at the bottom of my screen, they always sank under the immense load of the hundred-million-dollar bond payment.
For the last hour I had done little more than debate whether I could afford to escape the office on the pretence of going out to grab a sandwich if it meant Kyle or others might intercept negative information in messages returned to me before I had a chance to edit them.
What happened, instead, was that Michelle came to see me, hovering hesitantly just inside my office as if uneasy at being removed from the reception area.
“Mr. Smith. I always have coffee with Molly, Kyle Addison’s secretary. She says that Mr. Addison says that the firm’s in big trouble. That you did something in China or somewhere that is going to cause the firm to go bankrupt. Is that true? I’m really worried. I’m afraid to go on vacation and come home to find out that I don’t have a job anymore. I’m afraid I should try to cancel the cruise and get some of my money back if I’m going to lose my job. I haven’t got very much saved right now.”
I was bluntly reminded of how my actions, however high they soared above daily routines and however measured, spilled into the lives of others. A sobering sense of obligation swelled within me. “No, sit down. I’ll try to explain.”
She entered, perching her thick hips delicately on the edge of a chair in front of my desk.
“First of all, let’s begin at the beginning. You’ve been around here a year or so. Long enough to know how Kyle is. Haven’t you?”
Obviously fearful of endangering herself with any gesture of overt disrespect, she shrugged lamely.
“Okay,” I continued haphazardly, “suffice to say that over the last thirty years, Kyle’s gotten so used to sitting in there under his Yale diploma like a bishop at high mass that he thinks God also graduated from Yale. And when he thinks anybody here in the firm has sinned, he wants the whole firm to know about it.”
I watched her eyes drift; I was losing her in the residue of my own resentment.
“But that still doesn’t explain anything to you, does it?”
“No.”
“And that still doesn’t make your vacation any easier, does it?”
She shook her head.
I inhaled slowly, collected my thoughts. “The reason Kyle is storming around here this morning is because I committed the firm to buy up an entire bond issue in Bangkok. And we have to pay for it within a month. And Kyle’s convinced we haven’t got the cash. So he’s screaming that it’s going to drive the firm into bankruptcy.”
“Is this from all the work I did for you a couple of months ago?”
“That’s right.”
“Are we? At risk of going bankrupt?”
“I’ve pre-sold a lot of the bonds in syndication.”
She bit her lip. “I haven’t told anyone else. In January I started the level-one securities course on Thursday nights.”
“Good for you.”
“You always made it sound so interesting when I was doing that work.” She quickly added, “We haven’t got to syndications. Only stocks.”
“Okay. If stock is ownership of a piece of equity in a company, a bond is an IOU from the company. I borrow ten dollars from you. I promise to pay you back at the end of the month. I promise to pay you a dollar in interest. I write you an IOU that says I will pay you eleven dollars at the end of the month.”
She brightly contributed a piece from her coursework. “But there’s also secondary trading in stocks and bonds.”
“Right. You can wait until the end of the month, present my IOU, and demand eleven dollars payment. Or you can sell the IOU to someone else in the middle of the month for ten and a half dollars, take the money, and run.”
“Which is an over-the-counter trade.”
“Exactly. The next phase in financial engineering, after trading, is syndication. In syndication, instead of selling the bonds after they’re issued, we’re the mandated agent and lead book-runner, and we pre-sell the bonds to syndication partners and other book-runners before they’re issued.”
Her eagerness faded. I had lost her in technical terms. And she was embarrassed to admit it. I kicked myself. I wanted to be generous. I wanted to reimburse her for the emotions I had covertly borrowed from her, and to try, however inadequately, to compensate her for the silence of unseen men who had dismissed her as unworthy of attention.
“That’s okay,” I assured her. “You ever had a yard sale?”
“Sure.”
“So suppose your neighbour was going to have a yard sale a week from now and you looked over into his back yard at all the stuff he was going to sell next week. And you thought it looked like a lot a valuable stuff. So you offered to buy the whole lot of it for five
