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CHAPTER 1
They argued there, from the first. The men who had built that institution had perfected their disputation in the alcoves of city colleges where sectarian rages bloomed, where truth and beauty and wit were weapons, and woe to those who compromised — they did not take their integrity seriously. The men had learned their disputation from their fathers and grandfathers, on Delancey, in Brownsville, who had argued about God and, later, God knows what. Freshler Feld had turned gray and agnostic and important in the eighty years since it was founded. The arguments, the arguers had become less shrill, the sport overtaking the subject (good-bye beauty), and the wavy coal-colored hair had passed through a polyglot prism; all hairs and skins and sexes filled the institution now. Yet a fume of the old spirit remained, hazed into inhabitant by inhabitant, an air that was a stone to sharpen your knife.
Or maybe it was just science, atomic mechanics. Fill a room with punchers and hoodlums, and eventually you'll have a fistfight. Fill a cafeteria with straight-A'ers and valedictorians, self-assured whiz kids and unsecured strivers, and eventually, always, uninterruptedly, you'll produce an argument.
The basement cafeteria of the previous headquarters had further and unintentionally encouraged the contrarians: its fluorescent ceiling, famously low, dampened most sounds. You could hear a colleague accuse you of delusion from across the table, but you couldn't hear the same dart ten feet away. When the company moved four years ago to its new headquarters, halfway between the Exchange and one of its main rivals, the new cafeteria produced the same end from different architecture. A proud advance over the rest of Broad Street's cream stone and aquatint glass, Freshler Feld's new headquarters was enskinned and stuffed in international high-tech. In the cafeteria (floors four and five), across from the outside windows, thirty televisions silently broadcast market reports and business news. Two screens each were embedded between fifteen tapered buttresses that formed the wall side of a series of thin triumphal arches and half-shielded one table from the next. A lucite walkway, midnight blue and bulb-speckled, ran through the center of the cafeteria and scored the footsteps into a human ticker tape.
Three were sitting at one of the little-prized tables, on the television side. Nathanson insisted — he only knew how to insist — that it had to have been Kelch, but David Kim refused to accept it. Nathanson drew in his lips, glared, and reached for his spoon. He flipped his necktie, bought that season, aggressive orange with navy dots, over his shoulder to protect his investment from the soup. Kim and Einstadt watched him steadily spoon in the soup and clearly heard his message: shrimp bisque (even from the cafeteria) supplies a better conversation than you two. Nathanson forgave Einstadt: he had been at Freshler for only two months. And, granted, Kim was Kim and had been Kim since they had started at the firm together six years ago — a jungle herbivore, an amiable bystander, often a butt, whose soul had never absorbed the need for unconditional surrender. Nathanson finished his spoonful. "Now, Kim, act rationally for once and don't, don't start an argument for the sake of arguing."
Above a sandwich entering his mouth, Einstadt's blue eyes, incongruous with his skin's sandy coloring, smiled. Nathanson, who did not notice this, decided, exasperated by Kim, to cellophane-wrap his half sandwich and finish it at his desk. He ate there more and more these days, with his and Torvil's and Kelch's and Kim's schedules never synchronized, all of them on the road a fifth of the year. Even when they were all in town, their lunchtime discussions tended toward the pale and bloodless, not like those old battles when their faces seemed colored by warpaint shadows cast by a cafeteria arch. But except for himself, Nathanson mourned, all the decent warriors were gone: gone to lesser rivals for on-the-cheap promotions, gone to upstart foreign banks for double the salary, to asset managers or private equity firms for a better lifestyle, to London or Hong Kong for an acceleration, two years of rocket fuel, on their ascent through Equity Strategy and Research. And in the last two years, as the boom turned exponential, a few of his peers had gone to technology firms, most of them Freshler clients, for the indiscriminately ladled options. Even the ones who stayed told Nathanson, You don't owe Freshler anything. If anyone offers you a dollar more, take it and go. And so most of his friends, his work friends, had left the Broad Street nursery, and he was stuck arguing the obvious with David Kim. He would have claimed his ribbon of victory already, but the current issue was important. "Kim, did you even read the article?" Late last night, Nathanson had called Kim at home and ordered him to buy the magazine and read it. And no, it couldn't wait until tomorrow.
"We all read it, okay," Kim answered, looking to Einstadt, who didn't catch the shift in Kim's eyes. Kim then turned his entire head to Einstadt, and Nathanson followed. Einstadt, good-mannered, flickered his finger between chin and nose. I read it. But my mouth's full.
"If you read it"— Nathanson spoke louder, his rising volume not slowed by his clenched teeth —"how can you then possibly, possibly believe it's not him?"
"Come on. Can you really see Kelch talking to some guy that long?"
It was a good point, Nathanson allowed, to himself. He picked at the meat in his sandwich and sneered. "That's completely irrelevant."
"I just didn't see it, Nathanson."
"Then you didn't read it closely enough."
"I read it as closely as you did." Kim had circled the I and you in a field of emphasis, and separation.
"You didn't. Trust me."
"What do you want me to say?" Kim leaned nearer the table, his mouth open, willing to receive Nathanson's sermon, its sustaining truth. Abruptly, he sat at attention — the man approaching said, "Mr. Kim" — and nodded his head. Nathanson turned, looked, and received "Mr. Nathanson." Once the greeter had passed through three arches, Nathanson turned to the others. In a singsong mock: "Mr. Asshole."
As Kim — and Nathanson — chuckled, Einstadt asked, "Who was that?"
"This guy in Institutional Sales, Lumquist or Humquist —"
"Holmquist," Kim corrected by routine. Nathanson would forget his own mother's name if it served a moment's purpose.
"Yes, yes, yes. Holmquist. Anyway, this asshole comes out of business school last year, and like the rest of these morons, no offense" — Einstadt: none taken — "he can barely wrap his puny mind around such difficult concepts as the P/E ratio. The guy must have majored in power networking because he comes up to Torvil out of the blue and asks him out to dinner and tells him to invite some other 'rising star' analysts. So Kim, Torvil, Kelch, and I go —"
"To Padison's," Kim contributed.
"Right, Padison's," Nathanson drew the cliché out of the first syllable. "This guy turns out to be the European grand champion of ass kissing. He was laying it on so thick that I was almost incapable of eating my food. Grade-A crap like 'The part of my job that I'm most excited about is becoming close to the young superstars of the firm.' And what was it? Oh, yes: 'I really think that absorbing fundamental research will be my strength as a salesman.' He said that, 'absorbing,' like he's a roll of fucking paper towels. And then this schmuck asks us for ideas, and after I give him my best one at the time, TLB — I'll never forget this — he responds in this completely ingratiating Euro-accent, 'Great, great but too long-term.' Again and again, with Kelch and Torvil, the same line, 'Great, great but too long-term.' Eventually, he interrupts 'Mr.' Kim so he can recite his private theory on the New Economy, which he probably read in Sports Illustrated or on a box of Raisin Bran." Kim continued to nod enthusiastically. "He was making absolutely no sense, but that didn't stop him from babbling on. And the sum total of this dissertation was some pig with a cockamamie ticker, BQFD, BQ ..."
"BQQD."
"Yes, yes, BQQD — two Q's, mind you — which is now down, by the way, about eighty percent."
Einstadt's mouth joined his eyes in a reasonable, shallow smile, but he didn't laugh, which surprised Nathanson. Nathanson had told the Holmquist story a half dozen times before, usually in a much longer version, with his clown-Nazi accent for the Swede becoming more excitable and wild with each subsequent great, great but too longterm. Nathanson's storytelling posture had rubberized his arms and legs, but now, as he looked across to Kim, who had heard the story four of the six times, he regrouped in a taped-tight package. He cupped the styrofoam bowl of soup with more force than the bowl could, in the long term, take. "I have to go upstairs," he addressed Kim. "Unlike you, I don't eat lunch for a living. So just for my own peace of mind, so I can salvage any bit of respect for your obviously limited intellectual capabilities" — Kim sighed at the length of the needless lead-in — "tell me you were kidding before."
"I wasn't. It could have been about a lot of people on the Street."
"You're incredible. They might as well have written in big tabloid sixinch letters above the article K-E-L-C-H." Kelch, yesterday, had been out of the office. However innocent the reason, it hadn't helped his case.
"I just don't see it."
As always, Nathanson slammed his honor on the table. "I guarantee that it was him."
Kim let his honor drop and dally, featherlike, and didn't mind as it slid, hidden, under his lunch tray. "I guarantee that it wasn't."
"What's your collateral, Kim, Num-bah Two Sister?" Three years ago, Kim's co-workers had met his sisters. The three girls, through meat and milk and vitamins beyond the reach of their parents' Korean childhoods, had grown tall, narrow, stunning, their skin like fine-sanded pine. David, who was the youngest child, had not. Although all of his colleagues, even Nathanson, were speechless when they first met Kim's sisters, their tongues rejoined their minds after the girls left. They had never since abandoned the bottomless well of comedy. Kim now bobbed his head, acclimated, and waited for the latest to pass. Nathanson's voice tightened: "It's absolutely beyond me why you can't see the truth here."
"Leave me alone, okay," Kim tried to end the discussion. But then he offered, "Maybe I'm not claiming that it's him or it's not him. Maybe I'm just saying that I would need more — you know, you're sure, I'm not sure — information."
"What is the big, big thing Blue said to us when we got promoted? Come on ... the big theme of his speech. ... Time's up. 'Anyone can find information, anyone is able to process information, but —' But. Come on, Kimmy."
Kim finished it, mopey and parodic: "To succeed requires three things: maximum clarity" — he rolled his hand, fast-forwarding — "acting forcefully with incomplete information, and understanding how your competitors and clients will do the same."
"See, Joel, we got ourselves a real bona fide company boy here." Einstadt would have expected Kim to be able to recite the gospel, but Nathanson, to Einstadt's surprise, knew it too. Einstadt had heard it for the first time seven weeks ago in Freshler Feld's twenty-fifth-floor auditorium, a half-clam room with a video monitor in each seat, where Harold "Blue" Padaway had delivered one of his famous introductory convocations to Einstadt's group of new associates. I have no interest in working for an ordinary firm, and you, the people in this room, are going to make sure that that never happens. Blue was the CEO of Freshler Feld with a divine glow, a common touch, and a reign of immemorial bountiful harvests. (It was actually only eight years.) Why is it so hard to get a job at Freshler Feld? Because it's the greatest job in the world. Blue would deliver some version of this truth, never contested, in his annual talks and chatty firmwide conference calls and monthly visits to the cafeteria, where the undisguised sovereign would choose a table at random and solicit his fellow citizens' opinion on the kingdom's direction. Einstadt had been more impressed by Blue than he had planned to be.
Kim asked, for his own defense, "Why do you want it to be Kelch so much?"
"What does that mean?"
"I thought he was your friend."
Sure, Nathanson thought, he was his friend because he worked in this glass box. Kelch and Nathanson (and Kim) had spent three years together as junior analysts working until ten, eleven every night, when shared trench suffering led to comradeship sealed by complaints about the officers, the food, the hours, the pay. But Nathanson's parents hadn't spent twenty thousand dollars a year since he was in the first grade, hadn't clogged him full of classical music and test tutors and museum visits so he could be friends with a midwestern boiled potato like Kelch. Okay, Kelch was laid-back and free of pretense — and he listened to you when you explained things — but that was hardly enough to deny the truth that was screamingly obvious by that article's second paragraph. "This has nothing to do with him being my friend or not."
Kim shot up in his chair, steel-spined, as if a holy spirit had descended from the ceiling and overtaken his body. Nathanson understood that Kim was mocking him and had reached for the rest of his sandwich to take it to his desk. Then the spirit sat down.
"Hey, Joel," Kelch said, getting adjusted. He had met Einstadt twice, briefly, the first time when Nathanson had introduced them a month ago. Kelch nudged the pickle on his plate to a safe uncontaminating distance away from his sandwich.
He held in his breath.
Nathanson offered, friendly, "I thought you were in Boston suckering innocent clients into your overvalued pigs."
"Um, I took the shuttle back last night. Tee-Fog's reporting this afternoon."
"What's that?" Einstadt asked the table. He felt caught behind, running with untied shoes, for Nathanson had defied the laws of emotional inertia: a mood in motion should not be able to spontaneously reverse. Einstadt had been lightly acquainted with Nathanson through friends of friends for most of his life — they had gone to schools on opposite sides of the park — but it was only in the past two months that Einstadt had studied him up close.
"Ticker T-F-double-G," Nathanson answered for Kelch. "Known affectionately by the traders as Tee-Fog, and, not incidentally, Kelch's big 'Focus Buy' stock and road to research analyst glory. Right, Christopher?"
As he removed his pickle from the foam china plate altogether, Kelch, untouched by Nathanson's question, asked Kim with clumsy urgency, "What are you eating?"
Kim mumbled through his bite, "Tuna salad."
Kelch stared at the sandwich as though it were a personal enemy. He hated the smell of its construction, the canned brine and rot, the curdling mayonnaise, the relish's remote dill. When his mother would open a can of tuna in the kitchen back in Rockford, it would pollute the whole house. She would be smoking of course while she made the salad — it was her only claim to the kitchen — and the smoke particles, which had already formed a constant coating on Kelch's sweaters, hair, youth, would deliver on their backs, up the warped stairs, the tuna smell to his room. Even a towel under the door wouldn't help. Kelch couldn't understand why he couldn't smell Kim's tuna now; the sandwich was only three feet away. And he couldn't understand why he couldn't smell his own grilled chicken or that aftershavy crap that Nathanson wore. "That's tuna salad?" He then added, flatly, "Huh."
"Kimchi rikes it"— Nathanson winked at Einstadt —"because it remind him of Numbah Tree Sister." No one at the table laughed, and Nathanson quickly pressed on, "Who, by the way, has agreed to be my sex slave for the weekend."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Contrarians"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Gary Sernovitz.
Excerpted by permission of Picador.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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