Kim Robinson - New York 2140

Charlotte Armstrong was not perfect, or nice. Good but not nice; and good is more important than nice. Grumpy and sharp-edged, and as I said, solid in form. And sixteen fucking years older. Right now I was thirty-four, which meant she was, oh my God, fifty. Fifty years old! She might as well be eighty!

Okay, big deal. So what. Because she made me laugh. And what’s more, I made her laugh. And I wanted to make her laugh. This was becoming something I was trying for, I mean really trying for. I angled what I did to please Charlotte Armstrong, to make her laugh. I looked around for things to do or say that would get that response from her. These days it was my main priority, it seemed.

That being the case, on this afternoon I got the bug up to speed and we lifted off the water and flew like a bird, like that bird called the shearwater, which you sometimes see out on the Atlantic skimming the waves, and which I once heard never lands at all, just lives and sleeps and dies at sea, an idea that I find strangely appealing. Especially when flying in the bug. Which it occurred to me I should christen the Shearwater . We shot out the Narrows under the big bridge and in my mind I named it that very moment, in the shadow of the bridge, and we flew.

South along the Jersey shore. And yes, Charlotte laughed. She stood and shuffled to the bow, holding on to the deck lines in a sensible way, and stood up there with her arms outstretched and her hair flying. I smiled and focused on piloting a clean line over the low swells, which were coming in from the east. By paying attention to the swells and veering smoothly to stay on a beam reach along the back of one for as long as possible, then jogging to the left up and over the next one to the east and then staying on that one also for as long as possible, our course came very close to transcending the swell and being a perfectly smooth ride, feeling something like one of the harbor ferries but very much faster. I had no idea if Charlotte was sensitive to the swell or not, but the last thing I wanted now was for her to get seasick. And the truth is that I myself don’t have any great stomach for the ocean’s up-and-down, be it heavy or slight, so I like to minimize the effect when I can. And there’s nothing like the Shearwater for doing that, because speed helps, somehow. And today the swell was not that large. So we flew!

After a while she came back to the cockpit and sensibly got in the wind shelter under the glassine half shell. I was in the airflow pocket at the stern, seated and twiddling the wheel with one little finger.

“Champagne?” I suggested.

“You shouldn’t drink and drive,” she said.

“You drink for both of us.”

“When we land. Or throw anchor. Whatever.”

In the cockpit’s air pocket the sound of the motor and the shearing of the foils through the water were all as subdued as the wind. We could talk, and did. The Jersey shore was low and autumnal, not with bright New England colors but more a brown sludgy tone, never very high over the horizon. Possibly the hurricane had ripped all its leaves away too. The East Coast was very obviously a drowned coastline; it had been like that even before the floods, and now more than ever. From our angle it looked like land on this planet was an afterthought.

Charlotte got a call and took it. She glanced at me as she listened, mouthed Fed Ex with her hand over the speaker, then nodded as she listened.

“Yeah, I’m on my way down now. By boat. My boatman. Yeah, the captain of my yacht. All congresspeople get a yacht, didn’t you know that?

“No, I know.

“Listen, you said you would need help in Congress. So now I’m there.

“No, of course not. But it’s not just me. I’ve been talking around the new members, and there’s a lot of them like me. It makes sense, right? Because now’s the time.

“I hope you’re right. I’ll try, sure.

“Shit yes we’ll back you. Just keep the president in line and it’ll happen. You’re the crucial figure in what gets tried. It’s fiscal policy.”

Then she listened for a long time. After a while she began to roll her eyes at me. She put her finger on her wristpad’s microphone. “He’s giving me all the reasons he can’t do it,” she said under her breath. “He’s chickening out.”

“Tell him the Paulson story,” I suggested.

“What do you mean? What about Paulson?”

Quickly and urgently I outlined the story for her. She nodded as I spoke.

When I was done she took her finger off the mike. Suddenly her look was fierce, her tone of voice likewise. She snapped, “Listen, Larry, I understand all that, but it doesn’t matter. Do you understand? That doesn’t matter. Now’s the time for you to be bold and do the right thing. It’s your moment, and you don’t get to do it over again if you get it wrong. And people will remember. Do you remember Paulson, Larry? He’s remembered as a chicken and a sleaze, because when the whole system was going down he ran up to New York and told his friends he was going to nationalize Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, right after he told everyone else he wasn’t going to. So his friends sold their shares while they were still worth something, and everyone else lost big-time. What? Yes, it would have been insider trading if he had had any investments in that stuff himself, but as it was he was just helping his friends. And now that’s all he’s remembered for. All. Nothing else. Your biggest move is what you get remembered for, Larry. So if it’s a bad one, that’s it. So fucking do the right thing.”

She listened to her ex for a while and then laughed shortly. “Sure, you’re welcome. Anytime! Talk to you later. Hang in there and do the right thing.”

She clicked the phone off and grinned at me, and I grinned back.

“You’re tough,” I said.

“I am,” she said. “And he deserves it. Thanks for the story.”

“Seemed like it was time for the stick.”

“It was.”

“So now you’re an advisor to the chair of the Fed!”

“My Fed Ex,” she said. “Well, he likes to be able to ignore me. I tell him what to do, he ignores me. It’ll be like old times.”

“But he’s doing what you told him to do this time, right?”

“We’ll see. I think he’ll do what the situation forces him to do. I’m just clarifying what that is. Actually you are.”

“It sounds way better coming from you.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Because you’re a realistic person, and he knows that.”

“Maybe. He thinks I’ve gone nuts, grinding in the city as long as I have.”

“Which is true, right?”

She laughed. “Yes, it is. Maybe I do want that champagne.”

“Good for you.”

I checked the ocean ahead and clicked on the autopilot, then went to the hatchway to the cabin, tousling her wild hair very briefly as I passed her. “Someone has to have the ideas,” I said down in the cabin.

“I thought that was you,” she called down the hatch.

“I did too,” I said as I came back up. “But these other ideas you’ve been talking about lately don’t sound familiar to me. So I’m thinking it’s not me. More like Karl Marx.”

She snorted. “If only. I think at best it’s Keynes. But that’s okay. It’s a Keynesian world, always has been.”

I shrugged. “He was a trader, right?”

She laughed. “I guess everybody’s a trader.”

“I’m not so sure about that.” I unwrapped the foil and wire from the champagne bottle, very old-fashioned, very French, and then aimed the cork to the side and sent it flying to leeward. Poured her a mason jar glass and sipped from it myself before giving it to her.

“Cheers,” she said, and clinked her jar to the bottle I was holding.