The Deluge, page 49
I continued over crumbling highways, past once-immutable towns in the last stages of drying up and blowing away. Gas stations abandoned, factories gone, warehouses now run by robots. Farming operations that once took hundreds of people could now produce corn, soy, or pork with a handful of technicians overseeing the machines. Gazing out over the flawless green of a soy field, I imagined how my father would have hated this new farming world. I missed my dad intensely in that moment and thought of sitting on his lap as he drove the tractor, that beast jostling beneath us, one of his heavy, chapped hands acting as my seat belt. It wasn’t sepsis that killed him. It was giving up his work, his creativity, his communion with what was once our land. When the crisis of the eighties came and family farms were foreclosed across the country en masse, he and my grandpa beat the odds. As a young man, he’d stayed when the children of other farmers had run, only to lose it all in the end.
When the car pulled into the driveway, I barely recognized my childhood home. It looked feral. The yard was soggy, the grass yellow and pitted with mud puddles. The shingles were rotting, flaking off, and leaving the roof’s tar paper exposed. The vinyl siding my father had put on before his illness was moldy and cracking, battered by the ferocious summer storms of the past few years.
I went to knock but could tell the door wasn’t latched and let myself in, calling out to my mom.
Immediately, I wanted to scream at her.
My childhood home was a catastrophe. The TV was blaring, the living room coated in garbage. Old fast-food bags and take-out containers and pizza boxes. As kids, we’d never been allowed so much as a Happy Meal, and now I could see the crumpled Golden Arches in every crevice of the room. Flies buzzed around a stack of dishes in the sink. Everything I touched was sticky. There were wine bottles, half-finished, littered throughout each room. I couldn’t remember my mother drinking alcohol at all before about 2026. Apparently, her preference was JP. Chenet Rosé Dry sparkling wine. A gas station brand.
The TV’s volume was so high, I went sifting through a pile of unopened mail on the coffee table to try to find the remote. Finally, I remembered what decade I was living in and simply told the TV to turn itself down.
My mother emerged from the downstairs bathroom, though I’d not heard a flush.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, less surprised than suspicious.
“I told you I was coming.” She still looked uncertain. “I called Monday?”
She batted a hand. “Thought you was talking about another week.”
Still wearing her nightgown, she shuffled to the couch. She’d never looked so old to me, and watching her move, in pain from both hips, it was almost difficult to imagine how she’d looked when she was young. She’d been beautiful, at least in the way most daughters find their mothers beautiful. I’d envied her blond hair because Allie’s was also blond, but mine had been a mousy brown. Mom never wore makeup except for church, but I’d always been proud of this. My mom needed no makeup, I’d bragged to girlfriends.
The way the years took you—it was astonishing. In my circle, the game was defying age with simple cosmetic procedures. I looked at pictures of myself from ten years earlier and was pleased to see that the changes were imperceptible. A light facelift, a small surgery to smooth the cellulose from one’s thighs—no one need ever feel vain about it. Mom was proof of what happened without these inexpensive adaptations. She had deep, drooping bags under each eye and flesh that simply hung, rippled, and swayed around every portion of her face: cheeks, jowls, and turkey throat all part of the same mass. The meat of her triceps wobbled, skin patched with psoriasis, moles spiraling ever higher. Her hair sat atop her head in an unkempt mat of gray and white. She eased into the seat nearest an end table where a mug of JP. Chenet awaited her return.
“You finally got yourself some time, huh?”
“It’s been a busy start to the year,” I said.
“Doing what?” Her eyes trained on the TV.
“Fred’s fund has been growing. We’re starting to get serious returns. I really would like to spend some money on this place. Fix up a few things.” My eyes landed on a missing spindle in the balustrade. Beyond that, the pictures of our family. Me and my siblings lined up like grinning hostages before the feet of our parents in a picture snapped at Walmart when I was six.
“Don’t want your money, don’t need your money,” she sang.
I had developed a rule with my mother: only self-defense. Never take her bait. I walked to the sliding glass door at the back of the house. A gorgeous rainbow vaulted over the fields that once belonged to my family. I still loved this view from the back, where I could feel the ancient time of the prairie.
“What if you sold the house? Moved into my place in Chicago.”
“Don’t wanna go anywhere, especially not the city,” she sighed. “Besides, you know what I’m likely to get for this place? Property values round here are a Big Zip. Maybe the meth guys would take it off my hands as a place to cook, that’s about it.”
There was nothing to eat, so we went to the Hy-Vee, which had an armed guard at the entrance, something I’d never seen before. It was a hassle because so many of the products were now behind locked glass, and it took forever to hunt down an associate to open them. I bought fixings for lasagna and back at the house, the two of us slapped it together, adding some cayenne pepper for kick. After that, I took a trash bag and moved through the downstairs, cleaning up.
“Don’t have to do that,” my mother said.
“Oh yes I do, Mom. Tomorrow I’m getting you some flowers too.”
By the time the lasagna was ready, the living room, dining room, and kitchen looked habitable. We ate with the TV on, and when I sat down with my plate, I realized she had turned it to The Pastor’s new channel. Not him, but a show that looked like the news with coiffed anchors blasting President Randall’s response to the crisis on the US-Mexico border and “reporting” on what The Pastor had said about various issues of the day. They spoke of him, with newscaster intonation, as if he really was a prophet. They speculated on how God might guide his hand toward other revelations, and if the End of Days predictions would be coming soon or if they were still a few years away.
“This is the only place left you actually get at the truth,” my mom noted. I’d noticed the family Bible on the mantel, but now next to it, The Pastor’s “New Faith Translation” with a gold-leaf cross. It occurred to me that her eyes might light up if I told her I’d just seen the man in person, but I decided that might be more unsettling. Forget about what else I could tell her.
“Are you still going to church, Mom?”
“Of course. Not many people left in it, though. Don’t suppose you ever go?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “I’d go with you tomorrow, though.”
“That’d be nice.”
She didn’t smile, but I did.
After a few minutes of silent eating, I said, “You know, it doesn’t have to be Chicago. We could get you a place anywhere. Down in Saint Louis with Allie. Or Florida with Erik. I’d say New York near me but—”
“I don’t like the city!” she cried. “What the heck don’t you get about that, Jack? I don’t like the city, and now stop frickin’ bothering me about it.”
I couldn’t remember my mother ever raising her voice like that. My fork hung suspended over a noodle while she glared at me, eyes furious moons behind ornate glasses. Then she turned back to the TV.
“I’m just worried about you,” I said.
“Why?”
“That’s a silly thing to say, Mom. You’re my mom. I love you.”
“If you love me, you’d leave me be. I was born ten miles from here, I lived in Amber near all my life, I’m not moving nowhere else now. So just quit that idea, got it?”
“I got it. I’m just saying I’m doing well. I can afford to help you. Maybe move you to a posh retirement community where there are people around, and you can make friends.”
She snorted and her voice dripped with contempt.
“What you have yet to learn, Jackie-O, is that all that money you got, it’s an optical illusion. It ain’t nothing.”
For some reason, this was the thing that finally got to me. I could let so much go with her. Water off a duck’s back and all that. My therapist had given me this technique once: When a person you love hurts or angers you, think of a thing they’ve done that made you love them. With my mom, I would remember her “lice checks.” One time I’d come home from school quite excited because they’d checked our scalps for lice, and I thought it felt wonderful. Thereafter, my mom performed lice checks on my small head whenever I requested, and the feel of her careful fingers moving through my hair, nails gently scratching at the skin of my scalp always sent shivers of pleasure through me. She’d do this while the whole family sat around the TV, her fingernails performing with love.
“Mom, do you have any clue how much I made last year?”
“Think I heard your father say the same thing. Couple years before he had to sell the whole dang farm.”
I set my fork down, pulled my hair back, and arranged it into a quick, angry bun so I’d have something for my hands to work.
“In a few years, our fund is going to be one of the most important on Wall Street. We’re working with proprietary computer models and AI that will make other investors look like Stone Age bean counters.”
“Oh, how impressive. I take it all back.”
“And I worked for that!” I jammed myself in the breastbone with two fingers. “I didn’t get knocked up by a doctor twenty years older than me like Allie, I didn’t run away like Erik, I went out and worked my ass off and made myself invaluable. I’ve turned down more job offers from— I’ve done more than you or Dad ever could’ve dreamed for me. And as a woman! As a woman wading through sexist bullshit in every job my whole life. Because I had to watch you and Dad get your hearts broken by this goddamn place, and I wanted to be able to help you and take care of you guys. And are you grateful or even remotely happy for me? No. You resent me for it. And what have you done with your life, Mom? You go to the same church as Dad’s fucking mistress.”
I picked my fork back up and jammed a big piece of noodle into my mouth. My mother never looked away from the TV. She was quiet for a moment while the anchors squawked.
“You work for your boyfriend,” she said.
“I left a six-figure salary to help him do something special. And we’re doing it.”
“And he won’t marry you.”
I shook my head. Though I should’ve known this was what she was driving at, it amazed me how deft she was at the sneak attack. “Fred and I live together. We’re in love. It’s by far the best relationship of my life.”
“He’s still married.”
“He has a complicated situation, Mom.”
She nodded. “You know the old phrase about the milk and the cow.”
“Jesus Christ. Mom, they’re separated. She lives in San Francisco. Fred and I live together. Just because that doesn’t conform to your antiquated, white-wedding-dress idea of love…”
“You won’t bring him here, you won’t introduce him—”
“Is it any goddamn wonder?! I walk into this place and it looks like you haven’t cleaned it—or yourself—in months.”
“I read about his son.”
Just the fact that she cared enough to use the internet. To find out about Fred Jr.
“What about his son.”
“He killed a boy.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“He might as well have.” She sucked on her teeth to remove a piece of food, a disgusting sound she would have scolded me for thirty years ago. Staring down at my crossed arms, I thought about my skin: how the flesh would turn old and liver-spotted and psoriasized like hers.
Finally, I asked, “Are you trying to get me to leave?”
“Honey, I long ago stopped trying to get you to do anything.”
The TV blared, on and on, a babbling brook of voices and light streaming quietly over our dark faces.
* * *
Two weeks later, Fred and I arrived in Venice for our working vacation. We stayed in the Aman Venice on the Grand Canal amid its gorgeous period furniture, frescoes, and gilded walls, waking to the crisp, cool morning air flowing through open patio doors. The saltwater and waste scent aside, I’m not sure I’d ever seen such a beautiful place in my life. Fred arranged for private tours of Saint Mark’s Basilica and the Doge’s Palace. Over the course of a day, our tour guide, a retired professor from the University of Padua, spun a fabulous portrait of fourteenth-century Venice, a mercantile superpower that drew together some of the most brilliant minds of the age, only to destroy itself when the city’s oligarchy initiated La Serrata, or the Closure.
Later, Fred and I sipped champagne on a private water taxi up and down the Grand Canal and strolled hand in hand across the Piazza San Marco, nibbling at stracciatella. In the Murano Glass Museum, we watched one of the craftsmen fashion a vase and then had it shipped back to New York. That night at dinner, we drank a $1,000 bottle of champagne from the Trentino region in the Dolomites. According to our Bengali waiter, “the high peaks and the steep valleys make for the best champagne in the world.”
During that week in Venice, work, my mother, my difficult, fractured family—it all melted away. And Fred, he did his typical Fred thing: So at ease, he put me at ease. When we’d first begun seeing each other I’d just assumed he’d come from money, and he laughed at this. He was born in Humboldt County, his mother had died young, and his father had gone through long stretches of unemployment, depression, and alcoholism after the timber companies were forced out following the battle over old-growth redwoods. “My dad and I were moving towns every year,” he said. “We could never make rent, even when I started working. He became a really angry guy.”
Hearing the echoes of my own father’s life, it was the first time I felt something more than just attraction to him. It ran deeper than similar biographies. I recognized that specific pain of watching someone you love have their pride taken from them and the sad carapace it leaves behind. Fred escaped these bitter circumstances when he got into Stanford. From there, it was on to his first position at Leo Burnett, and then Galvani, the major D.C. PR firm. Finally, at thirty-three he cofounded Palacio-Wimpel and made a raucous name for himself in the industry. By the time I met him, he was plotting his move to become head of investor relations for a new hedge fund. Wall Street had chuckled at the cute little PR boy suddenly diving into the hedge fund game, and Fred had welcomed their scorn. It took him time to convince me to join him—not only because we were sleeping together but because I didn’t see how my background as a creative could translate at all to the world of high finance. But he was persuasive. “I saw you in that room with those big-leaguers of the SFC, just this rough, pissy, old-boy network of backslappers, and you were fearless. Your creativity is what’s going to make you so good at selling investors on us.”
The night of the $1,000 champagne we made love and then wrapped ourselves in terry-cloth bathrobes and sat on the patio looking out over the lights of this priceless city.
“I love sharing this with you,” he said quietly. “Promise me we’ll do this every year for the rest of our lives.”
I scoffed. “Don’t need to ask me twice, buster.”
Carrying on a romantic and professional relationship at the same time could have been disastrous, but Fred was too kind a man and the work too interesting. I buried myself in the literature of hedge funds and finance, an opaque, complex field. Fred had been recruited by a man named Peter O’Connell, who began his career in sports gambling and had gone on to make yet another small fortune betting on cryptocurrencies. Peter himself had no real computational talent, and in fact, was barely literate in programming, but he did have an impeccable instinct for talent in the field. He found brilliant programmers, and he owned a modeling system built by Ashir al-Hasan, widely thought to be one of the most important minds in the field of complex modeling. Fred brought a ferocious work ethic and a lifetime’s worth of connections to some of the richest players in the corporate world.
Their scrappy fund quickly gathered a lot of excitement due to the DNA of its proprietary model. They each put up $25 million of their own fortunes and were able to raise an additional $250 million. In the hedge fund world this was a modest beginning. But Peter’s model and his team of analysts—these whiz kids plucked from the Ivy League, the acne still bright on their cheeks—had something special on their hands, making bets with forward-thinking algorithms accounting for environment, weather, and water in groundbreaking ways. Their model embraced risk assets at speed, dumping them at the exact moment before they could plummet in value.
As Fred once put it, “It’s math but it’s also narrative… What are the underlying stories beneath the trends? And more importantly, how do we manipulate those narratives to our advantage?”
Within the first year we’d grown the fund to $3 billion in assets, and I’d made my first small fortune. I could now become an accredited investor and put money into the fund. This was jarring. I hadn’t been doing badly before, but I had the typical debts: student loans, a mortgage, credit cards, car payments. My retirement consisted only of my 401(k) and a bit of money in a Roth IRA I’d set up after college. Having learned the lessons of my father, I’d been prudent with money, and then suddenly, almost overnight, I was in a new class of investor. There was a grand casino, and very few people were even allowed to come through the doors and approach the tables. I understood why finance drew so many talented people. The competition, the adrenaline, the sense of permanent adventure was intoxicating the moment you had it at your fingertips.
