Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

Carr hadn’t minded the weeklong enforced vacation. He went to the seashore. He swam every day, and read and drank at night. What he’d minded was learning, when he returned, that Luisa Rios, an art student at UNAM, had had her face slashed from her left earlobe to the corner of her mouth and her right arm broken in three places.

The wind rises, and the sounds of the rain and ocean and thrashing palms merge into a great wave, and Carr’s chair is slipping out from under him, falling backward, and Carr with it. The jolt knocks the breath out of him, and his glass breaks on the balcony deck. He carries the pieces inside and dries his face. Then he picks up his cell phone.

“You up for a road trip?” he asks when Valerie answers.

The cheerleader figure is sloppy now, and the etched features are blurred. Her skin is lined and lax, like her paint-stained jeans, and her brown eyes are wary. The avid smile-so much on display in the wedding announcements Carr found online-is nowhere in sight, and her hair, lacquered chestnut in those photos, is curled by the ocean air, sweat-dampened, and streaked with gray. The cheerleader’s older sister, Carr thinks: wiser certainly, but angrier too, with little left in the way of expectations. He is certain that more than just time has worked these changes on Tracy Holland-six years of marriage to Howard Bessemer doubtless played a part.

Holland lays her roller in the metal tray, and wipes her hands on her T-shirt. She sweeps hair off her forehead and gazes at Carr suspiciously.

“We rang the bell,” he says, smiling. “But no one answered.”

Holland frowns and looks at Valerie. “You’re the one who called yesterday, about the film? Megan…?” Her voice is scratchy.

Valerie walks through the French doors. She steps around the ladder and the paint cans and extends a hand. “Hecht, Megan Hecht. Looks like we caught you in the middle of something.”

“A place this age, there’s always something,” Holland says.

Carr nods. The white shingle pile, all porches and dormers, must be 150 years old at least. It sprawls against a hillside, above a rocky stretch of Maine coast and a choppy sea-Townsend Gut emptying into Boothbay Harbor.

Valerie pushes her plaid sleeves above her elbows and looks around the dining room. She smiles appreciatively at the meticulous paint job-dove gray with intricate eggshell trim. “This looks like a pretty big project.”

“Scraping and sanding were the hard parts; this is just boring,” Holland says. She looks at Carr. “Who is he?”

“Brian,” Carr says, putting out a hand.

“Brian helps me with research,” Valerie says, “and scouting locations.”

“And getting coffee,” Carr adds, but still there is no smile from Tracy Holland. She wipes a forearm across her brow, drinks from a sweating bottle of Sam Adams, and moves through the French doors to the porch. Carr and Valerie follow.

“A documentary about Wall Street wives,” Holland says, doubtfully. “Not the most sympathetic subjects in the world, are they? Probably do better with a reality TV show-some crap about a bunch of women you love to hate. That’s more like it.”

“You may have a point,” Valerie says. “But as I mentioned on the phone, our director thinks women like you have some interesting stories to tell. A perspective on the crash that we haven’t seen before.”

“ Women like me,” she says. “I’m not sure what that means.” Holland leads them to a pair of wicker armchairs. She and Valerie sit, and Carr leans on the porch rail.

“Do you mind if we tape?” Carr asks, and reaches for the camera case slung over his shoulder.

Holland frowns. “Yes, I mind. I’m still not sure if I want to be involved in this.”

“Sure,” Valerie says soothingly. “Talking is great.”

“But why talk to me? It’s not like Howard and I were boldfaced names in New York. The most coverage he got was when he got arrested.”

“The kind of storytelling we do-it’s about taking the particular experiences of individuals and finding the broader themes. You and your husband led a certain kind of life in New York: his job, the Upper East Side co-op, private schools, charity boards. Now that’s all over-the market, his career, that whole life. And you seem to be a kind of refugee. There are other Wall Street wives in that spot. More than a few.”

Tracy Holland sips some beer and looks out at the water. She chuckles again, more bitterly this time. “By which you mean what-women who made deals with the devil, only to find the devil couldn’t hold up his end?”

Valerie’s smile turns confiding. “Is that what happened,” she asks, “a breach of contract on Satan’s part?”

Holland smiles back. “Isn’t that how those deals always end?” she says. “But you should probably talk to those other wives. It was a long time ago, and I don’t think I’m typical of anything.”

“No?”

“I’m pretty sure none of my old friends do their own painting, diminished circumstances or not.”

“You keep in touch with many of them?” Carr asks.

She squints at him, surprised he has spoken. “No.”

“What about your ex-husband? Do you think he was-”

The squint turns into a scowl. “My lawyers deal with him. I don’t.”

“I was just going to ask if he was typical of men who worked on Wall Street then.”

“You think there was only one type-a bunch of Gordon Gekko wannabes in suspenders and slick hair? Kind of outdated, isn’t it?”

Carr makes a conciliatory nod. “I’m sure they’re all unique, but maybe they had motivations in common.”

“You mean greed.”

“It’s what makes the markets go, and what inflates bubbles-according to popular wisdom, anyway.”

Holland takes an angry swig. “You seem to know it all. I don’t see why you need me.”

Valerie looks at Carr and coughs discreetly. “I’m sure we know hardly anything,” she says, “but I’m hoping you can educate us. What made Howard tick? What led him to Wall Street?”

Holland holds the beer bottle against the side of her neck and sighs. “He wasn’t typical. Not one of those people who always had their sights set on a Wall Street career. Basically, most of Howard’s trust fund was gone by the time he left college. He needed to work, and he didn’t think he could get a job anywhere else.”

“It’s not like bagging groceries at the supermarket,” Valerie says. “There was a lot of competition for those jobs.”

“There still is. But Howard didn’t have to worry about that-he had family connections at Melton-Peck.”

“So it was the only firm that would hire him?”

“So Howard thought. He also thought it was the only thing he was cut out for.”

“Banking?”

“He said he wasn’t enough of a quant to be a trader, and that he didn’t have enough energy to be in sales. He said that catering to the whims of people richer than he was was the closest thing to planning parties for his fraternity, and that was all he was ever good at. Hence private banking.”

Valerie nods slowly. “Sounds like he gave it a lot of thought.”

Tracy Holland sighs again, more deeply this time. “Another way Howard wasn’t typical. Wall Street people aren’t much given to self-reflection, not the ones I knew anyway. Howard was different that way.”

“Introspective?”

“Enough to know his own failings, though not enough to do anything about them. Does that make him better or worse than the guys who never give it a thought?”

“Doing something is always the hard part,” Valerie says. “What were they-his failings?”

“Jesus-where to begin? Always taking the path of least resistance? No impulse control? Chronic self-pity? How about his sense of entitlement? Or his whining about the burdens of growing up with the appearance and expectations of wealth, but without the actual money to back them up?” She takes another sip of Sam Adams and sighs. “You don’t have the time, and I don’t have the energy.”