Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

What harm could it do, he thought. No one was here and he wasn’t going to steal anything. He cracked the door just wide enough to listen. No sound but the hum of the fridge.

As soon as he stepped into the kitchen and closed the door behind him, he could feel blood rushing to his head from the excitement. He walked to the counter and paused there to listen again. The room smelled of wood wax and cleaning fluid. Moving farther into the house, he crossed the marble floor of the front hall and proceeded into a room nearly as large as the downstairs of his entire house. The outsize fireplace had no grate in it and its mantel was bare. Beyond this was the room with the couch placed at an angle facing the giant TV in the corner. The beer bottle he’d seen on that first day that he’d peered through the windows was gone and there was a stack of files on the floor.

He had never trespassed before. He had no idea it could be so exhilarating, all his senses alive with anticipation. The fear of being caught was close to exquisite. And who was it that lived like this? What kind of life did it imply?

Entering the back wing of the house, he stood at the foot of a staircase, stopping once more, trying to detect the slightest sound.

Upstairs, he walked down a central hallway, passing more unfurnished rooms on either side. The scent of pine freshener and just a hint of paint hung in the motionless air. While the thrill of transgression still filled him, he was beginning to find the emptiness of the place almost soothing. A house so unmarked, so unstained by memory or disappointment. It didn’t even feel like Finden anymore.

At the fourth door along the hall, he glanced through what seemed to be the entryway to a suite of some kind. Entering it, he came up short at the sight of a king-size bed, recently slept in, the sheets ruffled, the pillow still bearing the wrinkled impression of a head. On the floor, a cordless phone rested facedown, and next to that stood a water glass. The only other objects in the room were a television and a standing lamp.

For several minutes he stood motionless, staring at the bed.

Along the opposite wall was a walk-in closet. Ten or twelve suits, blue, black, and dark gray, hung in a row on one side while dozens of freshly laundered shirts still in their plastic were lined up along the other. At the back stood a dresser, a pile of laundry heaped against its bottom drawer. Dress shoes arranged beneath the suits gave off the scent of newly polished leather. Cautiously, his hand beginning to tremble, Nate reached out to feel the arm of one of the suit jackets, marveling at how smoothly the fine wool moved between his fingers. That’s when he heard the sound of a car door slamming shut.

Doug didn’t usually return to the house at such an early hour. But that afternoon he’d received a call out of the blue from Vrieger, his old commanding officer. It turned out he was living south of Boston and had heard through friends that Doug worked in the city. He’d phoned around noon from a restaurant not far from the office and asked if they could meet for lunch. Doug’s first inclination was to say of course he couldn’t, that he scheduled appointments weeks in advance, and that they would have to set a later date. But to tell Vrieger that seemed ridiculous and he found himself saying, yes, it was fine, that he would be there in an hour.

Walking beneath what remained of the Central Artery, he crossed into the narrow streets of the North End, glad to be out of the office for a little while at least.

The last week had been hectic. The Japanese Ministry of Finance’s intervention to prop up the country’s stock market had finally been made public, causing the Nikkei index to start dropping. Doug had phoned McTeague straightaway, instructing him to trim back Atlantic Securities’ positions, limiting their exposure. McTeague had seemed reluctant at first, arguing that it was only a blip, that they would be getting out of the market too soon if they sold now. Eventually, Doug had been forced to make it clear to him that the choice wasn’t his to make. The firm’s bets, built up over the course of months, were huge by now and would take time to unwind. Done right, however, they could get out with nearly all their profit intact and the whole Finden Holdings operation would still count as a major success. If McTeague’s clients wanted to keep going, pouring more money into the strategy, that was their business and their risk.

Making his way up Prince Street, Doug entered the restaurant and found Vrieger at the bar sipping a glass of bourbon, a nearly full ashtray at his side. In the decade and a half since Doug had last seen him, he had put on a bit of weight, but on the whole he looked remarkably unchanged with his ramrod posture and hair still clipped regulation short. He wore a version of his same square metal glasses, as unfashionable now as they had been back in the eighties.

“Christ,” he said, when he spotted Doug. “The least you could have done was get a bit uglier.”

“Lieutenant Commander, a pleasure to see you.”

“So you’re a corporate guy, huh? A suit. You always said that’s what you wanted to do.”

“Did I? To tell you the truth, I don’t remember talking about it.”

Doug ordered a beer and the bartender produced a few sandwich menus. Before the two of them had last parted in San Diego, Vrieger had told Doug that he planned to sign up for another tour. As he began describing it to Doug now, that third stint of his had taken him back to the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm. Later, in the mid-nineties, he’d run clandestine interdiction off the coast of North Korea as part of a loose nukes operation. The way he told it, he’d pissed off too many captains along the way to expect further promotion. “Truth is,” he said, “after Vincennes I didn’t really care. I just wanted to keep going.” When the navy assigned him desk duty back in Norfolk, Virginia, he’d decided to quit. “That was four years ago,” he said. “I thought I’d get a job out at Raytheon. Test battle systems. Something like that. I lasted through about two interviews.” Since then he’d been living with his father in Quincy, working at a liquor warehouse.

He reported all this in an affectless tone, his eyes fixed on the television over the bar, where cable news was spooling a loop of satellite images of building complexes in the Iraqi desert, as a commentator detailed the suspicious movement of trucks.

“So what about you? You seem to have done okay for yourself.”

Doug told him about getting his first job in New York, and how he’d spent his time learning the business, listening to the geeks and the quants, the pale men in ill-fitting suits who could tell you the yield curve on a Brazilian pipeline bond without looking up from their sandwich. And how when it came time to charm the Ivy League VPs, he’d just opened with a compliment and let them do the rest of the talking. And later, when he fired some of them, how disdainful the look in their eyes had been, as if all along they’d known he was a hustler and that they should never have let him into the club they were so fond of saying no longer existed, believing with fervor that all of finance was a meritocracy now.

“You’d recognize it,” Doug said. “Bullshit hierarchies and a bunch of rules you got to get around to get anything done.”

“You married?” Vrieger asked.

“No. You?”

“Are you kidding? Nine months is my record. And she was a drinker. But you? I mean, come on. You’re a pretty boy. You must have to fight ’em off.”

Doug couldn’t remember the last time he’d been asked such questions by anyone. He and Mikey never talked about personal stuff and no matter how often Sabrina Svetz tried, he’d never given her much detail either. The one woman he’d stayed with for more than a few weeks was Jessica Tenger and he hadn’t thought about her in ages.