Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside

Actually it took less than that. Selig slipped into Nyquist’s mind for a quick cram course in financial terminology. Nyquist had all the definitions beautifully arranged: common stocks and preferred, shores and longs, puts and calls, debentures, convertibles, capital gains, special situations, closed-end versus open-end funds, secondary offerings, specialists and what they do, the over-the-counter market, the Dow-Jones averages, point-and-figure charts, and everything else. Selig memorized all of it. There was a vivid quality about mind-to-mind transferences with Nyquist that made memorizing things easy. The next step was to enroll as a trainee. Every big brokerage firm was looking for beginners—Merrill Lynch, Goodbody, Hayden Stone, Clark Dodge, scads of them. Selig picked one at random and applied. They gave him a stock-market quiz by way of preliminary screening; he knew most of the answers, and those he didn’t know he picked up out of the minds of his fellow testees, most of whom had been following the market since childhood. He got a perfect score and was hired. After a brief training period he passed the licensing test, and before long he was a registered representative operating out of a fairly new brokerage office on Broadway near 72nd Street.

He was one of five brokers, all of them fairly young. The clientele was predominantly Jewish and generally geriatric: 75-year-old widows from the huge apartment houses along 72nd Street, and cigar-chomping retired garment manufacturers who lived on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. Some of them had quite a lot of money, which they invested in the most cautious way possible. Some were practically penniless, but insisted on buying four shares of Con Edison or three shares of Telephone just to have the illusion of prosperity. Since most of the clients were elderly and didn’t work, the bulk of dealings at the office were transacted in person rather than by phone; there were always ten or twelve senior citizens schmoozing in front of the stock ticker, and now and then one of them would dodder to the desk of his pet broker and place an order. On Selig’s fourth day at work one venerable client suffered a fatal heart attack during a nine-point rally. Nobody seemed surprised or even dismayed, neither the brokers nor the friends of the victim: customers died in the shop about once a month, Selig learned. Kismet. You come to expect your friends to drop dead, once you reach a certain age. He quickly became a favorite, especially among the old ladies; they liked him because he was a nice Jewish boy, and several offered to introduce him to comely granddaughters. These offers he always refused, but politely; he made a point of being courteous and patient with them, of playing grandson. Most of them were ignorant, practically illiterate women, kept in a state of lifelong innocence by their hard-driving, acquisitive, coronary-prone husbands; now, having inherited more money than they could possibly spend, they had no real idea of how to manage it, and were wholly dependent on the nice young broker. Probing their minds, Selig found them almost always to be dim and sadly unformed—how could you live to the age of 75 without ever having had an idea?—but a few of the livelier ladies showed vigorous, passionate peasant rapacity, charming in its way. The men were less agreeable—loaded with dough, yet always on the lookout for more. The vulgarity and ferocity of their ambitions repelled him, and he glanced into their minds no more often than necessary, merely probing to have a better idea of their investment goals so he could serve them as they would be served. A month among such people, he decided, would be sufficient to turn a Rockefeller into a socialist.

Business was steady but unspectacular; once he had acquired his own nucleus of regulars, Selig’s commissions ran to about $160 a week, which was more money than he had ever made before, but hardly the kind of income he imagined brokers pulled down. “You’re lucky you came here in the spring,” one of the other customer’s men told him. “In the winter months all the clients go to Florida and we can choke before anybody gives us any business here.” As Nyquist had predicted, he was able to turn some pleasant profits by trading for his own account; there were always nice little deals circulating in the office, hot tips with substance behind them. He started with savings of $350 and quickly pyramided his wad to a high four-figure sum, making money on Chrysler and Control Data and RCA and Sunray DX Oil, nimbly trading in and out on rumors of mergers, stock splits, or dynamic earnings gains; but he discovered that Wall Street runs in two directions, and much of his winnings melted away through badly timed trades in Brunswick, Beckman Instruments, and Martin Marietta. He came to see that he was never going to have enough of a stake to go off and write that novel. Possibly just as well: did the world need another amateur novelist? He wondered what he would do next. After three months as a broker he had some money in the bank, but not much, and he was hideously bored.

Luck delivered Kitty to him. She came in one muggy July morning at half past nine. The market hadn’t opened yet, most of the customers had fled to the Catskills for the summer, and the only people in the office were Martinson, the manager, Nadel, one of the other customer’s men, and Selig. Martinson was going over his totals, Nadel was on the phone to somebody downtown trying to work a complicated finagle in American Photocopy, and Selig, idle, was daydreaming of falling in love with somebody’s beautiful granddaughter. Then the door opened and somebody’s beautiful granddaughter came in. Not exactly beautiful, maybe, but certainly attractive: a girl in her early twenties, slim and well proportioned, perhaps five feet three or four, with fluffy light-brown hair, blue-green eyes, finely outlined features, a graceful slender figure. She seemed shy, intelligent, somehow innocent, a curious mixture of knowledge and naiveté. She wore a white silk blouse—gold chain lying on the smallish breasts—and an ankle-length brown skirt, offering a hint of excellent legs beneath. No, not a beautiful girl, but certainly pretty. Refreshing to look at. What the hell, Selig wondered, does she want in this temple of Mammon at her age? She’s here fifty years too early. Curiosity led him to send a probe drilling into her forehead as she walked toward him. Seeking only surface stuff: name, age, marital status, address, telephone number, purpose of visit—what else?

He got nothing.

That shocked him. It was an incredible experience. Unique. To reach toward a mind and find it absolutely inaccessible, opaque, hidden as if behind an impenetrable wall—he had never had that happen to him before. He got no aura from her at all. She might as well have been a department store’s plaster window mannequin, or a mindless robot from another planet. He sat there blinking, trying to account for his failure to make contact. He was so astounded by her total blankness that he forgot to listen to what she was saying to him, and had to ask her to repeat.

“I said, I’d like to open a brokerage account. Are you a broker?”

Sheepish, fumbling, stricken with sudden adolescent clumsiness, he gave her the new-account forms. By this time the other brokers had arrived, but too late: by the rules of the house she was his client. Sitting beside his cluttered desk, she told him of her investment needs while he studied the elegant tapered structure of her high-bridged nose, fought without success against her perplexing and enigmatic mental inaccessibility, and, despite or perhaps because of that inaccessibility, felt himself helplessly falling in love with her.

She was 22, one year out of Radcliffe, came from Long Island, and shared a West End Avenue apartment with two other girls. Unmarried—there had been a long futile love affair ending in a broken engagement not long before, he would discover later. (How strange it was for him not to be discovering everything at once, taking the information as he desired it.) Her background was in mathematics and she worked as a computer programmer, a term which, in 1963, meant very little to him; he wasn’t sure whether she designed computers, operated them, or repaired them. Recently she had inherited $6500 from an aunt in Arizona, and her parents, who evidently were stern and formidable advocates of sink-or-swim education, had told her to invest the money on her own, by way of assuming adult responsibilities. So she had gone to her friendly neighborhood brokerage office, a lamb for the shearing, to invest her money. “What do you want?” Selig asked her. “To stash it away in safe blue chips, or to go for a little action, a chance for capital gains?”