Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers

NEITHER OF THEM SAID MUCH TO THE OTHER ON THE FIRST DAY THEY spent together after Lehman fell. There wasn’t much to say and there was certainly too little time to say it, with Clark sighing and hammering on his laptop as if the keys were obstinate. He seemed to have gotten older by ten years in seven days — a deep crease suddenly evident on his forehead — and Jende couldn’t stop wondering why the man was doing this to himself, why, with all the money he’d made, he couldn’t pick up and go live a quiet stress-free life somewhere far away from New York City. That’s what he would do if he were in Mr. Edwards’s position. By the time he was close to being a millionaire, he would give suffering a firm handshake and tell it goodbye. Why should a man intentionally live his life with one kind of anxiety followed by another? But men like Clark Edwards did not think like that, it appeared. It didn’t seem to be about the money anymore. His life on Wall Street, as suffocating as it was, appeared to be what was giving him air.

“I am very sorry, sir,” Jende finally forced himself to say, ten minutes after they’d been in the car together, as they drove to Clark’s new workplace at Barclays, the British giant that had swallowed up Lehman after it was declared legally dead.

“Thanks,” Clark said without looking up from his laptop.

“I hope everyone will be okay, sir.”

“Eventually.”

Jende knew what the curt response meant: Stop talking. So he did precisely that. He kept his eyes on the road and drove in silence for the rest of the week — from the Sapphire apartment building on the Upper East Side to Barclays in Midtown East, or the Lehman-turned-Barclays office tower on Seventh Avenue; from a meeting with ex — Lehman executives to a meeting with Barclays executives; from a lunch with Treasury officials in Washington, D.C., to a dinner with lawyers at a Long Island steak house. Clark said little to him except for quick greetings, or orders to hurry up, or reminders to return by a certain time after picking up Cindy or dropping off Mighty. Once, he barked at Jende to cut around another car, but most days he sweated in the backseat, mumbling to himself when he wasn’t on the phone, moving from one end of the seat to the other, speaking in rushed, anxious tones to various people, flipping through piles of papers, opening and closing his laptop, opening and closing The Wall Street Journal, scribbling on his notepad. Jende understood nothing of what he heard him say — after months of educating himself with the Journal, he’d come to understand the concept of buying low and selling high, but the things Clark was talking about these days, things like derivatives and regulations, ratings and overrated junk, were indecipherable. The only things decipherable in his voice were misery and exhaustion.

“You should have seen him the night it happened,” Cindy said to Cheri as Jende drove them to Stamford to visit Cheri’s mother. “I’ve never seen him that scared.”

“Of course he would be,” Cheri said. “Everything he worked for just went down the drain. And Lehman, of all companies? I was speechless!”

“You, me, and the whole world.”

“For some reason these things keep happening when I’m out of the country. 9/11, I was out. Oklahoma City, I was out. This one I was out.”

“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” Cindy said. “Sometimes it’s better to be far away from the center of the madness.”

“No,” Cheri said. “I’d rather be home. There’s nothing pleasant about running across Florence so you can get back to your hotel room and stare at the TV, watching what’s happening in your country. I’d rather be home and go to sleep scared in my own bed.”

“I guess.”

“I tried to call you the moment I landed last night.”

“I know. I’m sorry, I wasn’t in a talking mood. But I sent you a text. Didn’t you see it?”

“No, I didn’t see any text. If you hadn’t called this morning, I would have taken the train alone. I figured you’d probably changed your mind, with everything that’s going on.”

“Oh, no, I need this,” Cindy said. “I need to get out of the city. It’s just too much.”

“It is.”

“I would have left yesterday for a long weekend alone but Mighty and I have a movie-and-dinner date on Saturday, and I need to help him prepare for his youth orchestra audition. Besides, I promised your mom I was going to come back. I need to get my mind off myself for a little bit. It’s just been awful. Clark has been so hard to be around.”

“He must have looked like crap when it happened,” Cheri said, and Cindy nodded.

Clark had returned home early from work two nights before, she told Cheri, around nine o’clock. He took off his shirt and sat on the edge of the bed with his head bowed, his bare back humped like that of a man waiting for a load to descend. He did not move or speak, not even when she came in, said hello, and climbed into bed. She had an early-morning appointment for a mammogram and needed a good rest, so she wasn’t in the mood for small talk, which was why she hadn’t asked him why he was just sitting there like that, somber and mute and motionless. Instead, she had picked up The New Yorker —she hadn’t had a chance to read the profile of Obama — and flipped it open.

Lehman is going to file for bankruptcy, he’d said abruptly, his head still bowed. She’d gasped, dropping the magazine and covering her mouth with her hand. She sat up in the bed, staring at the back of his head. You heard me right, he said without turning to face her. They’d done everything. The company couldn’t be saved. The announcement would be coming within days. They were still trying to fight it, hold on to it, but … He shook his head.

“The poor thing,” Cheri said.

“I had no idea what to do or say to him,” Cindy went on.

All she could do was gasp again, as it sunk in. She looked at her hands — she hadn’t realized they were shivering. A thousand questions were rushing through her mind: How much were they going to lose? What were they going to do if they lost too much? What was going to happen to his career? Was he okay? What was he feeling? How was this possible? Was there a chance the Fed would make a last-minute decision to intervene and prevent the bankruptcy? They intervened with BS, didn’t they? She wanted to move close and hold him so they could be together in their fear, but she couldn’t be certain he wanted or needed any of it, so she slid to the edge of the bed and sat beside him.

“Did you know any of this?” Cheri asked. “That it was this bad?”

Not really, Cindy said. She had known of the struggles at Lehman but not in detail, certainly not how close it was to its end. He had told her only that the company was treading perilous waters, and asked her to understand when he had to cancel plans in order to work. But how was she to know that the times he did it over the summer were any different from all the other times when she’d had to cancel dinner plans and postpone vacations and attend parties alone because he had to work?

“That’s the danger of dealing with workaholics,” Cheri said. “It’s hard to trust them.”

“Welcome to my life,” Cindy said mournfully. “Or whatever’s left of it.”

“Everything’s going to be all right, Cindy. We’ll be all right. Sean has to constantly remind me, too. He says I have to stop checking our portfolios twenty times a day, but I can’t help it. I woke up every morning in Florence panicking about losing everything. Of course, I call Sean to talk and he’s sleeping. I have no idea how he still sleeps so peacefully at night. I don’t think I’ve slept more than four hours any night all week.”