CHAPTER TWO #3
Carver rubbed his eyes, feeling light-headed.
He did enjoy solving a problem, but this situation was overly familiar, almost rote.
He had solved this exact problem before.
These problems always got solved somehow, anyway — the sheer amount of capital and man-hours that went into these deals had a gravity all their own.
Small things went wrong all the time while the institutions themselves chugged along, unstoppable, too big to fail.
Right now he was the person who needed to pick up the phone and fix this, but if he got hit by a bus tomorrow then it would just be someone else picking up the phone.
Lloyd Harmer of the Deutsche Bank deal team could have easily talked to Lillian, he would just prefer to talk to Carver, who he liked better.
If Carver was an option — if he had no ready excuse like “I am climbing K2 without cell service” or “I got hit to death by a bus” — and Lloyd got Lillian instead, he would perhaps feel slighted and be less cooperative in the future.
Perhaps. And while they could gamble with billions of dollars, they did not want to gamble with one guy’s ego, even though Lloyd himself could also get hit by a bus tomorrow.
All of Carver’s clawing and climbing and late nights, all the frantic hard work of the last fourteen years, had lifted him into this gilded cage.
He barely even got to do interesting math anymore — there were so many people under him doing his scut work and producing his creativity for him.
He was mostly needed for his institutional wisdom or as someone with the gravitas to make a kill, and his appetite for the latter only diminished as he got older.
He suspected that part of his appeal for Lillian was that he was happy to let her make so many of his kills.
He always thought he was in this for the money, and the money had thrilled him at first, but he was going numb to it.
The more it piled up, the more it piled up, and in the last few years their resources had reached a self-sustaining pitch — it could go on multiplying forever with little to no input from them.
Carver rose unsteadily from the bed, then leaned on it with one hand when his vision went black.
“You okay?” Lillian said as she got into the bed with a jar of La Mer body cream.
“Yeah. I should have had dinner.”
“Didn’t you have some of the chicken Emilio made?”
“I didn’t want any. I had a protein bar.”
“Oh, Carver, don’t prove your yokel family right,” Lillian sighed, rubbing lotion into her left calf.
Carver’s head cleared and he straightened up. “In what sense?”
“Don’t perform the behaviors of an anorexic.”
“I don’t,” Carver snapped. “And my family aren’t yokels, Jesus. This is a two million dollar house.”
“Sorry,” Lillian recited. “You know you say worse about them.”
“You say terrible things about your family.”
Lillian was from one of those diminished and creepy old-money families whose remaining holdings were tied up in immoral investments and bolstered by insider trading.
She had grown up on yachts and in boarding schools, and it seemed like half of her family had been maimed or died in unusual ways.
Her great-uncle was gored to death by a rhino on a trophy-hunting expedition, her father made paraplegic by a polo accident, her sister had died in a twin-engine plane crash, et cetera.
None of this bothered her much. Her father was addicted to prostitutes, so better for everyone that his genitals no longer worked; her sister had tried to kill her several times when they were children, so good riddance; and her great-uncle was continually testing the limits of the world’s laws against human slavery.
Lillian told him all of this on their first date while they were waiting for their salads.
“Yeah, but all those things are true,” she said, looking confused. “And it’s true that your family are yokels, darling. I don’t mean to say that they’re poor, I know they’re upper middle class. And I really do like them. But most of their concerns are prosaic.”
“Well, your family are a bunch of sinister lunatics and parasites.”
“Right,” Lillian agreed.
Carver moved toward the bathroom. “And what happened to the motto? You can always be thinner, look better?”
“That’s more of a vision board quote than gospel, baby. You’re already lean, you don’t need to be cutting. Why do you think your times have sucked lately?”
“I’m not in training right now.”
“Still, when’s the last time you hit a PR?”
She knew right where to sting him. “Maybe I’m just getting old,” he snapped.
Lillian rolled her eyes. “Don’t play dumb.”
“I’m not playing, okay? I’m gonna deal with Lloyd and get ready for bed.”
“Good,” she said, giving him a twinkly smile and a little wave.
Carver shut the bathroom door behind him and bent over the sink to splash his face with water, pressing his fingers against his upper eyelids and massaging those muscles around his orbital bones which seemed to stay perpetually tense and sore.
He’d noticed the same things Lillian had, though he also irrationally believed that the thinner he got the faster he could run.
He knew he was teetering near the weight he’d been in high school, saved only by the lean muscle he’d put on since then.
But the basic motions of life had been difficult lately, and eating felt like a drag force — another chore, another box to check, another humiliating submission.
Hunger was liberating. He didn’t appreciate people trying to steal it from him.
Carver brushed his teeth with his toothbrush and toothpaste that lived in this bathroom, then dried his hands and called Lloyd. He put the phone to his ear and stared through the bathroom window at the vast dark expanse of his parents’ backyard while the line rang.
“Yello,” Lloyd said, all friendly.
“Hey, man. Sorry to call so late.”
“No problem — everything alright?”
“Well, I think you know the answer is no,” Carver said, drumming his fingers on the marble counter.
Lloyd laughed. “Listen…”
“Why’s the credit committee going bear on me?”
“Not my circus nor my monkeys, as you are no doubt aware.”
“They may not be your monkeys, but this is your circus, dude.”
“I wish I had more to tell you.”
Carver started getting angry, which made him light-headed again. Black spots swam in his vision. “You could tell me more. You could tell me something I actually want to hear. I’m coming to you personally because we have a good relationship.”
“We do,” Lloyd agreed.
“But you won’t go to bat for us, is what you’re saying?”
“My hands are tied, okay?”
“By what?”
“By the fact that I can’t argue this on the merits.
McKinsey’s methodology was solid, but the report was thin — honestly, they’re a two dollar whore these days and they took you for a ride, and I think you know it.
” (He did.) “The committee had a lot of questions, which is not what they want at this stage. I trust you guys, but —”
“See, that’s the issue, you clearly don’t —”
“— but I also understand that we have to protect our bank.”
Carver switched his gaze from the window to the mirror, looking himself in the eyes as he spoke. Maybe everybody had a point — his cheeks looked a little hollow. “If you trusted us, we’d be moving forward with this, not hitting a brick wall on Thursday night.”
“They just want to see more equity. We see a risk, we want you to address that risk.”
“And what about what we want?”
“Well, frankly, it’s less important, as the leverage is on our side.”
“Sure,” Carver said. “Except we always reserve the right to walk entirely.”
There was silence on the line. Carver’s heart sped up, and he grinned at himself in the mirror. What now, asshole?
“That’s not a real threat,” Lloyd said. “You know you’d end up far worse off for that than we would.”
“Sure, except you’d take the reputational hit, not us,” Carver said.
He inhaled, then for a moment allowed himself to be possessed by the shrieking frustration and resentment which he was always keeping a lid on and which had spiked in the last few hours.
In the mirror, his pretty-boy face suddenly looked ugly and twisted as he hissed into the phone, “We will fry you. I’ll make this the last deal DB ever does with Blackbrick, and we’ll rip you a new asshole up and down the street.
You want to be the bank that blows up deals last minute?
Fine, then that’s what you’ll be. We all know what deep shit you guys are in lately.
How many jobs are you gonna have to cut in Q3?
Ten percent? Fifteen? Twenty? We have dry powder.
We’d survive walking away from this deal. ”
He could have kept going, but forced himself to stop before he got too crazy. Then he muted himself so Lloyd couldn’t hear how heavily he was now breathing. More black spots were clouding his vision. Carver leaned his elbows on the counter.
“Okay, let’s back up,” Lloyd said in a voice of forced calm. He cleared his throat. “You, uh… Okay. Look, we got this call off on the wrong foot, obviously. Any way we can meet in the middle here?”
Carver unmuted himself. “We’d prefer to increase the equity as little as possible, if at all.”
“But there’s room there?”
“A tiny little bit of room.”
“Okay, well, I can take that back to them and make a strong argument on the merits to see what gaps we can close.”
“Good, Lloyd. I wish you’d made that strong argument to them to begin with.”
“You know, I did, but I didn’t really press the issue,” Lloyd said. He genuinely sounded rattled. Carver had never spoken to him like this before. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Great. Have a good night.”
Lloyd muttered something and hung up. Carver stalked out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, stripped to his boxers and collapsed facedown on the bed beside Lillian. She put her phone down and stroked his hair.
“That was good,” she said. “I like when you go full intemperate lunatic. He went for it?”
“Yeah,” Carver said, muffled. “He peed his pants and he’s gonna go run and show the committee his pee pants.”
“Yesss,” Lillian cheered. “Wanna have sex?”
Carver’s body remembered its earlier longings, and his dick stirred.
Unfortunately it wasn’t stirring for Lillian but instead for a memory of the current poolhouse guest fucking him senseless in this very bed, five months before 9/11.
These physical reactions had to be aftershocks from seeing Scott after so long.
He rolled onto his back and offered himself to his wife. Lillian pulled his dick through his boxer slit and stroked him, then bent to use her mouth on it, trying to get him hard. Carver closed his eyes and went elsewhere.
“Xanax dick?” Lillian asked after a few minutes.
Carver lolled his head. “Mmm.”
“You bring any Cialis?”
“To my parents’ house? No. Let’s just go to sleep.”
Lillian shoved him over to his side of the bed, then spooned up against him. He pressed himself backward into her, sighing, wanting what she couldn’t give him.
She kissed his bare shoulder and said, “You were a good boy tonight.”
Carver’s dick twitched for her, then. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I think you handled yourself well with your parents, you didn’t give them an inch. And not with Lloyd either. You did exactly what I wanted.”
“Good,” Carver said. She ran her warm hands over his arms and torso, and he shivered.
“I like when you’re a dickhead to other people and obedient to me,” Lillian whispered in his ear.
Carver shivered again and made a soft sound. His body was attempting an erection but couldn’t quite get there. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.
“Alright,” Lillian said after a moment. “I gave it a shot.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said honestly. “I’m gonna get some sleep.”
She patted his arm and rolled onto her other side, facing away from him.