Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

You know what Erich Fromm said about love?

Who’s Erich Fromm?

Jewish German American philosopher and psychoanalyst. He said that we must give up the notion that since love is a condition of the mind, its presence can be proven by a form of words. We give up this idea when we see that far from being a condition of the mind, love is an activity, a form of conduct.

Interesting, but so what?

She’s away a lot, but you never call her.

Marriage isn’t a transaction.

So she calls you, but you don’t call her, he said.

What’s going on?

I’m asking questions and you’re uncomfortable. Relax. I can stop, said Zafar.

Of course he could stop and I could have stopped him. I can hear it when I listen to the recording. I could have said Do stop , but I said nothing. It’s a difficult thing to admit, but Zafar’s potential for cruelty has always pulled me in, binding me to him. Here he was, staying at my home, eating my food, availing himself of my hospitality. I wanted to tell him that I was the successful one here. But the ungenerous thought couldn’t withstand the reality: My marriage was a disaster; my home, this retreat, was foreign soil, made bearable only by his arrival. And as I think about it now, even the huge house was a stucco-fronted lie made of bricks and mortar. I bought the house, as Zafar remarked, before I joined the firm, before my first paycheck. I’ve relied on my family in so many ways that can never be escaped. I used to think these were the bonds across generations.

I could have told Zafar I’d made something of my life, that I was still young and there was so much more I could do, but even then I knew the hollowness of it, the irrelevance of it. I had just been fired from the firm after a vote of the partnership, by people I had counted as friends, fired by an email asking me if I had a moment to spare for a chat, fired for taking risks whose payoffs funded their children’s schooling ten times over; risks that they encouraged me to take; risks that the regulators and central bankers encouraged us to take; risks that homeowners and governments the world over encouraged us to take; risks that no one knew would come back like this. Who would have thought in the first quarter of 2008 that Lehman Brothers would go belly-up before the year was out? Who actually thought that the markets were going to sink into the worst crisis since the Great Depression? None of the absentminded rocket scientists on Wall Street did. I’m not one of them, but I worked with them, hired them, and respected them. They’re smart people, very smart. Here was their golden opportunity to make a mint betting against the market — that’s what you can do, bet against the market, and if they’d thought the market would tank, then they’d have been the first to bet against it. Sure, there were mavericks here and there already betting against the housing market, where it all started. But they never gave you convincing reasons for their view. They might have said the housing market was heading south, but nothing they said, at the time, given what we knew, at the time, given what the market expressed, at the time, none of their reasons, at the time, nothing they said was ever more worthy of our belief, my belief, than what everyone else — the overwhelming majority — was saying. What do you do when everyone believes things are going well except the few who aren’t any more convincing?

And here was Zafar, opening the wounds, a friend coming at me from behind my back. Who did he think he was?

Do you remember what you said years ago in New York? Finance was a meritocracy, you said, and you liked that about it.

I remember, I said.

Well, was it?

By and large, I said. The was stung.

Why did that matter to you? Actually, hold that thought. I need the gents. Can’t put it off any longer.

It was a fair question. After all, back then I couldn’t very well have said that a meritocracy was likely to favor me. The evidence probably pointed the other way: I had gained only an upper second-class degree at Oxford and was able to stay on for a graduate program because I wasn’t relying on a scholarship or research council grant. I suspect that the extent of self-financing in higher education, at that time and, as far as I know, even now, is not common knowledge, but there it is; those in the know, the paying students and the receiving university, didn’t have much incentive to advertise the fact. And as for those who don’t go on because they can’t self-finance, they’re never heard from again. But that is how the world is and it seems to me little use to fight it, especially when no one else seems to be doing so.

As I waited for Zafar, the absurd notion formed in my mind that he might have vanished. That while I had been looking out the window, he had slipped out the door and simply disappeared.

I overheard two young women sitting at an adjoining table.

My friends think I’m mad, said one. They’re always saying, Cheryl, you’re mad, you are. But I think it’s all right, you know. It’s like you got to be a bit crazy, otherwise you’d go mad.

Mayonnaise is just posh salad cream, innit?

I suppose so, replied the one.

It’s American, right?

No, I think it’s French.

Yeah, but why do they say, “Easy on the mayo,” then?

On the telly?

Yeah.

Americans like French stuff.

You like it, don’t you?

It’s not as greasy.

You mean salad cream?

Greasier than mayo.

What’s pastrami?

At another table, a young American was talking about his yoga class. He complained to his friend: It was like someone in the room was draining my green energy.

So why, Zafar asked after he returned, did the meritocracy matter to you back then? It’s not as if you’d suffered because the world had failed to recognize your merits.

I expect you’re going to tell me.

I think it’s tougher for people like you. You guys make the right calls and things happen, whereas regular folks— like me , he said, shooting me a grin — regular people have grown up knowing full well the world is unfair. We don’t expect anything different, and we’re so battered by the unfairness that we don’t even hope for anything better. The world is — and I’m not trying to use your words against you; or were they my words? — anyway, for most of us, the world is what it is. You guys are the idealists.

Finance, I said, is by and large a meritocracy, and that’s a good thing. You can’t fault me for wanting to be a part of that. After all, you got something out of it, didn’t you?

But you weren’t really attracted to finance because of what it was but because of what it was not.

Here we go again, I said. I think I might have rolled my eyes.

Finance is not about connections, it’s not about who you know but what you know, it isn’t like your grandfather’s world, with secret deals on golf courses and in country clubs, kickbacks and Swiss bank accounts.

You don’t know him.

I don’t have anything to protect by lying to myself.

I think Zafar was wrong, but the irony is that I so wish he’d been right. The fact is that my own early success in finance did owe something to connections, connections that have now come home to roost.

What’s your point? I asked.

You could have tried for academe, but what if you’d failed? Or worse still, what if you’d ended up with a second-rate lectureship at a second-rate university somewhere? What would your father have thought? Ivy League or why bother? Now, finance, on the other hand, that was safer. At least you couldn’t be compared to your father or grandfather.

Or maybe I just knew what I wanted, I replied.

The conversation now taking place did not feel like two friends trying to figure something out. It had none of that affection and trust of conversations on our walks everywhere else all those years ago. There was instead an earnest, impatient drive to get to the root of things, dispensing with the markers of friendship. More than once, he’d asked me, Why does it matter to you? , a mischievous question that he loved. But this time there were no accompanying smiles, no unspoken gentleness. If anything, his comments and questions seemed presumptuous; I hadn’t seen him in years. One of those articles my father sent was about some studies that show that while every person thinks he himself has changed hugely over time, those close to him typically think he’s changed very little. Was that it? Did he think that he knew me because he believed people didn’t change?