Mr. Jones and Me

How I threw away my banking career

You’d think you have a great view of the stars from the portholes of a 747 when you’re flying at night, but the scratched plastic on the inside of the window keeps you on this side of your miserable life.

One night in the late 1980s I was thinking about my life as I looked futilely for a single dot of starlight. I was five miles above Iceland, flying first class and wondering what it would be like to be a forest ranger or a lifeguard on Santa Monica, something you could enjoy doing. There would be a limousine waiting for me at JFK, but that was because my secretary thought I was being summoned back to New York to be fired, and she had felt sorry for me.

The way I ended up on a flight from London, on my way back to get fired in New York, began on a trip to Bermuda almost two years before, when I accompanied my Senior Vice President Dick Jones to pitch a bond deal in Hamilton.

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Jones and I had gotten off the plane in Bermuda, gone through customs and immigration, and gotten our passports stamped with the Bermudian entry visa that says “Entry permitted for tourism only. Gainful employment expressly prohibited during stay.”

“Not. Much. Chance. Of. That,” Jones said, sounding as if he had read the first line of the Gettysburg Address.

He was short and heavy, with a sparkle in his eye that didn’t fit in his severe face, and his hair was a shade longer than expected. He was a master at giving toasts. He would get up, one hand resting inside a pocket of his suit coat, the other hand holding a whisky, and with his drink Jones would indicate the audience with a magnanimous sweep and say, “We are so glad to be here with our fine friends . . . “ and there would be a dramatic pause, while I knew, from experience, that Jones was remembering who his guests were, “from IBM here tonight. You know, events like this are an opportunity. They’re an opportunity to reaffirm the importance of what we do together. And what we do together is all about teamwork, and cooperation, and trust. And I guess trust is really at the heart of the relationship we have with . . .IBM. A relationship that is more than just about bonds, or the capital markets, it’s a relationship that says a lot about who we are, all of us . . .”

It was a gift to be able to say nothing in such an agreeable way, and it had something to do with his extraordinary success with women.

When we arrived at our hotel in Hamilton we were informed there was a serious problem with our reservations. A hurricane had hit Bermuda the week before, and all the windows on the seaward side of the hotel had been blown out. Our reservations had been triaged.

Jones gave me a fierce look.

“Mr. Jones?” said the reservations manager, who had been talking into a telephone. “I have checked, and I can confirm that we can find you two suites in our sister hotel.”

Jones brightened.

“It’s called The Honeymoon Haven,” the manager said, “but I’m sure you’ll find it very nice. And they have two suites available.”

“Fine,” said Jones.

I had a premonition as the hotel car service wound us down the road along the coast leading out of Hamilton.

We pulled up at a low building with cottages clustered around on either side. The car pulled off into the stifling heat. There was no one to greet us or take our suit bags and briefcases, and we carried our luggage into the foyer. There was a little desk with two seats in front of it for a happy couple as they checked in.

The corners of Jones’s mouth pulled down grimly as we carried our luggage over to the desk.

“Good morning,” said the receptionist with a cheerful smile. “Mr. Jones and Mr. Coffman?”

“We are,” said Jones.

“Please sit down and make yourselves comfortable,” said the receptionist.

Jones looked darkly at me and sat down, daring me to sit in the chair next to him.

After she took our details and ran our corporate credit cards through her machine, she automatically began to run through the events scheduled for the day. It was eleven o’clock and we had a lunch with our Bermudian lawyers at twelve thirty.

“There’ll be a Get Together by the pool at high noon,” she said, “with complimentary strawberry daiquiris--”

“We’re not interested,” said Jones very slowly and distinctly.

As the documents got passed back and forth she continued, “At three in the afternoon we have a mixed doubles tennis tournament followed by---”

“We’re not interested,” said Jones.

As she stuffed two tickets into our guest folders, she said with a neutral, cheerful smile, “Honeymoon Happy Hour begins at four in the Love Lounge, where you can use these complimentary drink tickets—”

“We’re not interested,” growled Jones as he accepted his room key and folder.

We brightened at the arrival of a bellhop, who hefted our luggage, leading us back out of the foyer with a brisk step. Jones was glumly looking about, inspecting the rose trellises and peering out at the cottages through the flowers.

At the end of the walkway a bright red golf cart was parked, gleaming like a woman’s fingernail. It was shaped like a heart. Facing backwards was a seat for two.

I started to slow down as I saw it.

The bellhop loaded our bags onto it and jumped into the driver’s seat. He switched it on and looked back at us. “Is anything wrong?”

Jones didn’t look at me. “How far away are our cottages?” he asked.

“Let’s see,” said the bellhop. “You’re in the Primrose, Mr. Jones, and you’re in the Honeysuckle, Mr. Coffman.” He squinted off toward the clusters of cottages shimmering in the heat. “A fair bit.”

We were wearing worsted wool business suits.

Without looking at me, Jones raised his leg and clambered onto the back.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll never tell.”

Jones extracted a cigar from his suit pocket. His hands shaking slightly as we bounced along on the back of the cart, he pinched the end off with his fingernail and stuck it in his mouth.

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We rolled slowly under the sun, past a swimming pool where couples splashed, past couples dressed in tennis togs walking hand in hand toward the tennis courts. Our business suits started to stick to our limbs, and I leaned to avoid touching Jones.

Jones lit his cigar.

“Coffman,” he said, “I’m going to redesign your career.”

We got to the Primrose cottage first and Jones climbed down at an excruciatingly slow pace, as if trying to conjure some dignity out of the air.

The bellhop hefted Jones’s bag and started to lead him into his cottage. Jones still hadn’t looked at me.

I summoned up my courage. “When would you like to meet for lunch?”

“Be in the lobby at twelve fifteen,” he said.

As soon as I got into my cottage I tore off my limp, sweaty clothes and lay naked on the bed and called New York. I rang my girlfriend Caroline Nesbit.

“Well, how is he?” she asked.

“It’s been a disaster,” I said. I told her about ending up at the Honeymoon Haven.

“Well, I warned you to take it easy with him,” Caroline said.

“I know, I know,” I moaned. But then, to forestall any hope that Caroline might have that I wasn’t going to be leaving New York, I said, “I’m sure it’ll blow over. He was just putting me in my place.”

“That’s right, dear,” Caroline said. “Don’t panic, and keep your mouth shut as much as possible.”

I rang off.

Caroline was the daughter of Jones’s room mate at Brown. She was a beauty, tall and elegant, with widely spaced brown eyes that made her look more intelligent than she was, and the kind of presence that made everyone ask her if she was a model.

I had known for years that Caroline was friendly with Jones, but I had no idea until she and I started to go out that Jones treated her like an adopted daughter.

Then came the evening that I went to Caroline’s apartment on Madison Avenue and told her that the bank was transferring me to London.

The Nesbits had put too many good genes and too much hard work and money into Caroline for her to have reacted like anything but a lady. Her eyes welled with tears, and her face looked stricken, but she made me a drink, and had another one for herself, and it was an evening full of long pauses, sentences that began in one place and fluttered off towards somewhere else before dying in yet another extended pause. There were many issues to be considered by Caroline, and many alternatives that I couldn’t even begin to fathom for her to reflect upon.

The obvious one was to telephone Jones and ask him not to send me to London. As tempting as it must have been to her, Caroline never dared to get Jones involved. When we first started to go out, she made up an elaborate lie to tell Jones about seeing an investment banker from Goldman, Sachs who had a job very much like mine, and who looked very much like me. Caroline knew that Jones was like a big dog who patrolled his turf, pissing on the perimeters and sniffing to make sure no other male dog had been foolish enough to piss on one of his fire hydrants. If Jones had known I was dating his beloved Caroline, he would have fired me with a bad reference and left no one for her to marry and settle down with.

Jones was in a better mood when I met him in the lobby of the Honeymoon Haven half an hour later. The lunch with the lawyers went well, and they gave us an unexpected lead on another bond deal in Bermuda. We returned to the hotel at three thirty, and Jones said, “I’ve got some phone calls to make. How about we meet in the Love Lounge at four and burn those free drink tickets?”

“Good,” I said. I had been taciturn all afternoon.

We met at a table by the open french windows of the Love Lounge. A fan circled in the air above our heads, and we still wore our suits. I threaded my way through the swim suits and the tennis clothes and ordered two pink gins from the bar, and when I returned Jones pulled out two cigars and gave me one.

“Thanks, Dick,” I said.

“You know, Coffman,” he said, pulling on his cigar. “I came to Bermuda on my honeymoon almost exactly twenty-five years ago.”

“Evangeline was an heiress to one of the oldest and wealthiest Connecticut industrial fortunes,” Jones said. “Her old man was a Director of twenty companies. She’s remarried twice since then. Her latest is some faggot fashion designer.”

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“We stayed on the other side of the island,” said Jones slowly, blowing a plume of blue smoke to its doom in the blades of the fan, “in a beautiful place. Beautiful.”

We sat companionably in silence. I got up and brought back another free round of pink gins.

“I can’t help reflecting,” said Jones. “That here I am. Twenty-five years later. In the Honeymoon Haven. With you.”

I looked over at him, but Jones was staring up, watching the fan whip the smoke into tropical tendrils that vanished towards the ceiling.

The dinner that night went very well. I gave a brief presentation to the client on the current state of the yield curve, why we thought that ten year Bermudian corporate risk would be well received in the bond market at the moment, and described the flatteringly small spread over U.S. Treasuries that we were going to be able to deliver to the client as an interest obligation.

There was general satisfaction around the table afterwards, and when the brandy and dessert was served, Jones lit up one of the big Cuban cigars you can get in Bermuda.

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“I went in to see the doc recently, and he thought that I might have had a stomach cancer,” he said slowly and with apparent satisfaction. “He told me that the only way to know for sure was to go down and look around. He said he was going to stick a camera in my mouth and down my throat and check it out.”

Jones looked around the table. “The doc showed it to me. It was this big hose with a round glass tip. I mean, this wasn’t some fibre optic gizmo. It was . . .” Jones paused and then held up the enormous cigar he was holding in his hand. “It was as thick as this. And the doc was going to jam it down my throat.”

The table contemplated the cigar.

“Quite a feat, Dick,” said the client.

“Yeah,” said Jones. “I had to get a tranquiliser from the doctor in order to sleep before I went in for the procedure. For a week, I had been laying awake at night worrying about gagging on the thing.”

Jones surveyed his listeners. “The morning I went in, the doctor put me in the chair and gave me a hit of Darvon. I’ve never felt so good in my life. I was so relaxed I hardly noticed when he put that camera down my throat. He could have cut my balls off and I wouldn’t have cared.”

It was almost midnight by then, and the client and his lawyer said that they had to go home. We saw them off and caught a taxi back around the island to Hamilton.

It was obvious Jones had no intention of calling it a night. “Where does one go for a little fun this time of night?” he asked the driver.

The driver looked in the mirror. “There’s the Blue Wharf,” he said. “It’s about the only place in town that’s likely to be open this late on a week night.”

“Fine,” said Jones. “Let’s go.”

The Blue Wharf turned out to be a modest disco. It was packed with not very attractive young couples who looked like honeymooners from the States.

Jones and I ordered vodkas.

“Coffman,” he said, nodding towards a woman sitting alone at the bar. “Why don’t you go ask her to dance.”

“I don’t know, Dick,” I said. She was a weather-beaten looking woman of about forty with a low-cut dress on that showed a lot of skin. She probably looked pretty good once, around the time Jones had been on his honeymoon.

“I’ve been watching her,” Jones said. “She’s not with anybody. Go ask her to dance.”

“Right,” I said.

I got up, walked over and asked her to dance, and when the dance was over, walked her back to her barstool, thanked her, and came back to the table. Jones was in the mens room when I returned.

Jones came back, sat down, and started to seriously scan the crowd. Our waitress had been whisking away our glasses as we drained them, but I was sure we had gone through five or six rounds by then. Jones wasn’t saying much, just commenting on any body parts he felt warranted mention as women passed. Mostly they were young, overweight, a little awkward, and seemed devoted to their new husbands.

It was getting late, and we were getting drunk, but two women there that night seemed beautiful. One was wearing a white dress, and the other wore a black dress. I went to the mens room myself, and when I came back, Jones had left the table. I sat down and sipped my drink until, as I was idly looking out at the dance floor, I saw Jones dancing with the woman in the black dress.

After a while, he returned with a self-satisfied air.

“She was nice,” he said.

“Yes, she was,” I said. “Well done.”

“Great tits,” he said. “Nice piece of ass.”

Jones seemed rejuvenated. The waitress came by for our order, and Jones ordered another round of drinks. When they came, he tossed his down.

Jones looked at me and said, “Coffman, you’re a young man. You shouldn’t let these opportunities pass you by. “

“I’m going out with someone, Dick,” I said.

“So what,” he grunted.

We were both pretty drunk and beginning to talk telegraphically, as if we were making up our own lines in Casablanca.

Jones shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

I looked at him.

“You only live once. Lots of women, only one life.”

“You’d be surprised if I told you something, Dick,” I said.

Jones shook his head, not as if he didn’t believe that I couldn’t surprise him, but as if he didn’t want to know.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you,” I said. “But I’m going to.”

“Don’t,” Jones said. “I don't want to hear that you’re a faggot or something.”

“I’m going out with Caroline Nesbit.”

Jones sat there, anesthetised by all the gin, and whiskey, and wine, and cognac, and vodka. He was like a bull elephant who had taken a .50 caliber slug between the eyes and wasn’t sure what to make of it. Then he looked at me, and I couldn’t see his eyes, only the shiny darkness between his heavy lids and the pouches underneath.

“You’re. Going. Out. With. Caroline. Nesbit,” he said at last.

“Yes,” I said.

“Tall girl? Thirty? Nice looking? From Boston?” he asked.

“Yeah, the one you know, Dick.”

Jones shook his head.

“How long you been going out?”

“About six months.”

He reflected on my response, sipping his vodka, and when he looked at me again, I could see something malicious in the shiny darkness turned towards me.

“You’re bullshitting, Coffman,” he said.

I looked at him.

“I don’t know why,” he growled. “Crazy fucking thing to do. You must be nuts.”

I didn’t understand.

“You’re a bullshit artist,” Jones said.

“What do you mean?” I managed to ask.

“I know the guy she’s seeing,” Jones said.

“Look, Dick, there’s been a misunderstanding,” I said.

He surveyed me carefully.

“The guy from Goldman, Sachs--he’s me,” I said.

Jones sat back suddenly. His head jerked around as if to signal the waitress. Then he cocked his head as if his collar was too tight.

Then his jaw dropped, and he roared, “Caroline. Wouldn’t. Lie. To ME!”

I sank back in my seat. “It’s a misunderstanding, Dick, that’s all.” I didn’t look at him.

“Coffman.”

I looked at him.

“I’m going to call Caroline, and if she doesn’t want you going to London, you’re not going.”

Jones stood up with dignity. I watched him walk off stiffly, a drunk steering into a controlled crash, as he threaded his way through the crowd until he disappeared. It must have been close to three o’clock in the morning.

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When I saw him again, he was on the dance floor with the woman in the white dress.

I was staring into my drink when Jones returned to the table.

We ordered another round of drinks, but the lights came on and spoiled it. The drinks came to us as we sat in the bright light and Jones downed his in a gulp and paid. I tasted mine, but it had gotten to the point for me when the vodka didn’t even taste wet anymore, it was like rolling a small handful of splinters over my tongue. I left it on the table. Jones turned and gave the glass a long, inspecting glance as we walked away. He wanted it, I could tell.

It was just before four o’clock in the morning as we walked down the Coffman. Jones was suddenly in an excellent mood. “Those babes were something else,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “And you danced with both of them.”

“Some people think that the only fucking thing in Bermuda are bond deals!” Jones chortled.

We neared the piers where four or five big cruise ships were docked. The Bermudians profess not to like cruise ships, because the passengers have already paid for all-in packages and only come ashore to buy t-shirts and postcards. They don’t spend enough money to merit respect.

“Coffman.”

“Yes, Dick,” I said.

“We all make choices in life.”

I waited, but he seemed to want a response.

“Right,” I said.

“And sometimes we do things we don’t want to do.”

“Right,” I said, this time on cue.

“But we do what we do, because we think it’s right.”

“Sure,” I said, bracing myself.

“You know what I always wanted to be?” Jones asked.

“No, Dick,” I said. “What?”

“A submarine commander,” Jones said.

He wasn’t even looking at me, just up at the big cruise ships that we were walking by.

I thought about it for a while, and when I glanced at Jones he was still staring up at the cruise ships.

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“Come on, Dick,” I said. “Let’s go on board!”

“They’ve got security on the pier,” Jones protested.

“We’re a couple of guys in suits,” I said. “We’ll flash our work IDs as we pass.”

Sure enough, we strode as purposefully as we could manage past the sleepy guard in the security kiosk and boarded the biggest cruise ship.

We wandered around the ship for an hour. There was no moon that night, and the stars couldn’t pry their way through the humidity that hung over the sea. Most of the lights of Hamilton were extinguished, so only oily looking orange street lights were reflected in long wavy streaks in the water. We passed a couple making love against the banister of the afterdeck, and another couple sleeping on a deck chair by the pool. Below decks we found the ball room, and with the help of a young man, his girl friend, and her sister, we got the sound system going. Jones sang a very passable imitation of Johnny Cash. We bumped into people on stairs and in empty game rooms. I introduced Jones to anybody who wasn’t passed out or busy screwing as Mr. Jones, the ship’s owner.

They would eye him, not sure what to make of him, and he would point his cigar at them and growl, “Listen, I like you, so I’m going to tell you something. I’m going to scuttle the boat tomorrow and collect the insurance, so make sure you’re off it, understand?”

It was growing light when we got back to The Honeymoon Haven. The last thing Jones said to me was, “Reschedule our flight.”

The two months before I left for London were not pleasant. Caroline used the time remaining to us to slap me three times, once in a taxi on my birthday, once at a party, and once at a restaurant. Not only does it hurt like hell to be slapped, it’s embarrassing, because everybody looks at you, trying to imagine what you might have said to such an elegant woman to make her react like that. On my last night in New York she had me over to her apartment, cooked dinner, and talked about the good memories we had. The next morning, when the doorman rang to say the taxi was waiting downstairs, Caroline pushed me down on the bed, unzipped my pants, lay on me with her back straightened along my stomach and chest, and then pulled my penis out and put it inside her. Her head resting against my face like it was a pillow, her long hair in my eyes and nose and mouth, she rubbed herself until she came. Then she sat up.

“That was good,” she said. “I could pretend you weren’t even here.”

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I didn’t call Caroline Nesbit when I arrived in London. I was too jet-lagged for the first several days as I settled into my bank-funded terrace house in Chelsea, and then it always seemed to be too early or too late to reach her. After a couple of weeks, it became hard to think of how I was going to explain the delay. In the end I didn’t speak to her for nine months.

Jones flew out a couple times during that time, and I went back to New York once, and both times he was friendly, although somewhat formal with me. I earned a good bonus that year, but it was mostly for deals I had done in New York, like the Bermuda deal.

When I returned from my holidays in February, Liz Shannon stopped off in London while on a trip through Europe. Jones had hired Liz years before and we’d become friendly colleagues. Liz and I were both from California, and back then there weren’t too many people from the West Coast working in the New York financial markets.

When I was in college in California I’d decided I was going to be a writer, and Liz had fronted an LA rock band struggling to make the big time. They were the opening act at the Roxy on Sunset Boulevard once, but that was the closest they got to success and fame.

When I started working for Jones, Liz had just announced she was leaving for Morgan Stanley. Jones seemed to think of Liz like he thought of Caroline Nesbit, even after she left and went to Morgan Stanley. He used to say, “Liz was one of the best. Rock and roll is the perfect way to learn how to sell bonds.”

But there was a big difference between Caroline Nesbit and Liz Shannon. While Jones thought of Caroline as a daughter, Liz was one of many women who had worked for Jones rumoured to have won promotion on their knees.

It was how Jones did business. In Liz’s case, I didn’t believe it.

Liz and I went out to dinner when she got to London. I took her to a French restaurant in Chelsea.

“I was at a party in New York a couple of weeks ago,” Liz said. “I ran into Dick there. We got around to talking about you, and he went on a tirade about what a misogynist you are.”

“A misogynist?”

“Yeah,” Liz said.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” Liz said.

After dinner we walked back up Redburn Street to the terrace house where I was living on the bank’s expense account, and after we tasted the champagne I poured, we ended up kissing for the first time in our lives. We went upstairs, took our clothes off, and after a while Liz said, “No, don’t, I’m not protected.”

Then her silent mouth was unexpectedly expert.

“This is unbelievable,” I murmured.

Later I lay back as Liz got up from the bed and walked to the bathroom. Her jaw was cocked as if she were gripping a cigarette holder in her teeth.

“All this for me?” she said indistinctly.

I suddenly realised she had probably done the same thing with Jones. He wouldn’t have been easy to impress, and he was her biggest fan on Wall Street. Liz must have learned that stuff in the rock band: she was sensational.

She came back to bed and I curled her into my arms and began to caress her. But she took my wrist and gently, but firmly, laid it to the side. “I’m fine,” she said.

I lay awake a long time that night, listening to Liz’s gentle breathing, thinking about the beast with two backs, how he thrusts, she heaves, about this ungainly mingled creature, a man and a woman, and how it resembles some sort of awkward member of the animal kingdom, a new entrant to the collection of camel, platypus, turtle, giraffe, or wallaby. Certainly not a tiger, or a gazelle, or an eagle.

In The Symposium, Plato puts into the mouth of Aristophanes a theory of love based upon a myth. The myth of Aristophanes is that the original human race was once comprised of combined creatures, resembling spheres, with a two-faced head on their necks, and four legs and four arms. These original humans also had two sets of genitals, some with a set of male and female, some with two sets of male and some with two sets of female. Primordial humans were a proud and rebellious race, and to weaken them without destroying them Zeus cut them in half and healed over the great wound that now composes our chest and stomach, moving around the remaining set of genitals from what was now the back to the front.

New humans, whom we ourselves remain, long to be re-united with their other half, and this is the meaning of love, this yearning to find wholeness, either between a man and a woman, or, as it happens, between a woman and a woman or a man and a man, if the new human being is the product of one of the originals whose genitals were two of the same gender.

It seemed to me, as I lay awake next to Liz, there was something not just inhuman about this matter of love, but superhuman, in the sense of Aristophane’s myth or of the Hindu gods with their troubling but fascinating arrays of limbs—arms, legs, heads, breasts—a synthesis of the monstrous and the divine. Sexual exertion is not merely athletic, but also somehow a stressing and a subjection of the flesh, not unlike the incredible transformation of a woman’s body in the final wrack of giving birth, when the crown of an infant’s head pushes through to the light, its host, the mother’s body, turned almost inside out in the agony and the triumph of bringing forth life.

I wondered as I lay next to Liz at the curious structural incompatibility of the human design, the difficulty of experiencing simultaneous pleasure spontaneously, without sophistication, collaboration, choreography, guile. I wondered which of Aristophane’s new divided humans felt most bereft, the ones who had not experienced pleasure but given it, or the ones who had not given pleasure but experienced it.

Yearning. We think sex is about pleasure, but it’s about a yearning we can never satisfy.

Over the following months, things slowly started going wrong at work. Jones stopped approving deals I was proposing, and then cut back on the capital that was committed to the London office. I tried to telephone him, but he wouldn’t take my calls.

About that time Liz Shannon came back through London. I got a phone call from her when she was in Frankfurt, and we agreed to get together the next day when she arrived in London. I had friends visiting me and staying at my place, so I met Liz for a drink before we were all to go out for dinner together.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked, studying my face as we sat down at the bar.

I tried to explain what was happening in the London office.

“Actually,” Liz said. “I heard some rumours about what was going on over here from our Milan guys. I asked Jones about it when I saw him last.”

“And? What did he say?”

Liz shook her head. “You’ve got some repair work to do with your boss.”

I couldn’t believe it. “What does that mean?”

Liz shrugged. “He said you were a misogynist.”

I looked at her in amazement. “He’s still on that misogynist thing? Where does he get it from? What does it have to do with the bond market?”

“He doesn’t like you,” Liz said. “And he doesn’t trust you.”

We met my friends for dinner, and then we all went back to my terrace house. We all drank Port and I lit a fire in the fireplace, but after an hour Liz said she had to go.

I walked up Flood Street with her towards King’s Road to catch her a taxi. It was just past midnight.

“I was hoping to spend more time with you,” she said.

“Yeah, me too,” I said.

“I don’t suppose you could come back to the hotel,” she said.

“Not with Phil and Nancy staying with me,” I said.

“You could go home later,” she said.

I shook my head. “I don’t want to just disappear.”

I took her hand, and after a few paces we stopped and kissed. Soon her thighs were gripping my knee, and we panted into one another’s mouths as we kissed. Liz rubbed her breasts against me and I slipped my hand underneath her jumper. We were leaning against the cast iron fence of a darkened terrace house. A plane tree screened the moonlight, and we were shadows in deeper shadow.

I opened Liz’s jeans and stroked her belly. I released myself and she grasped me in her delicate strong hand. We kissed fiercely. Teeth, lips and tongues bared and tangled. I leaned and kissed her neck and throat, and she whispered, “We can’t do this. We have to stop. Someone is going to see us.”

“Ok,” I said. “Just kiss me.”

She turned her face towards mine, but I guided her head down through the dark warm night air.

She must have been surprised. Then she did what she did so well.

She didn’t say anything as we walked the two blocks to King’s Road. A taxi appeared almost immediately, and I hailed it. I told the driver the hotel, kissed Liz, and put her in the taxi.

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“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said.

Liz nodded.

I spoke to her in the morning. She was going out with clients that night, and flying out the next morning.

“I don’t suppose we can get together tonight,” she said through the telephone.

“You probably won’t be done until around one in the morning,” I said.

“I hope not, but maybe you’re right,” she said.

“We’ll definitely spend time when you’re out next,” I said.

There was a pause on the line.

“You know, I’ve never done anything like that before,” she said.

“Neither have I,” I said.

“Hmm,” she said.

She called at the end of the week. “I’ve got a stop in London on my way back,” she said. “I want to see you.”

I went to her hotel. She was waiting for me in the cigar room. She was one of those women who seem even more attractive when surrounded by a masculine environment. We drank quickly and heavily. I drank whisky and watched her drink her vodkas down thirstily. Several times she puffed on my cigar, blowing fountains of blue smoke into my face and into the haze hanging over us.

Almost silently we went to her room, and in the darkness she stretched me out on her bed and began things again the way we had left them. Then, with my heart still pounding and my chest heaving, I felt her leap up onto me. She pounced on my chest, pinning my shoulders with a knee on either side of my head, my face uplifted in the darkness. She tangled her fingers in my hair and rode me. As I submitted to her thrusts I thought of some antique image of a lioness or a tigress pouncing on a horse, claws splayed out and into the quivering flesh of her prey, back arched and curved in the triumph of her hunger and her lust.

The darkness seemed to touch my open eyes as she began to pant above me, and I felt myself transform into some conjoined limb of the being rocking above me in the darkness, my lips and my tongue and my neck and my head crushed and tossed and rolling, clasped against herself by her fingers and limbs, my head harnessed and my lips and tongue parted in her bit and reins, my ears threaded by her sighs.

We couldn’t get closer—finally we were as close as could possibly be—and we stayed that way.

At last she toppled backward as if shot off her horse and I only knew she had recovered when I again felt with a tremor down my spine the warm subtle caress of her tongue. Then it was I who fell asleep, until in the darkness a quiet, but not a soft voice said, “I flew for most of the day and I will be in the air for many hours tomorrow. I need you to go.”

She was close to me but I couldn’t feel her, or even see her, and in the darkness I rose and groped for my clothes and shoes and managed to get dressed. I bent to seek her and the same inhuman voice said “Goodbye” and I was kissed in the gloom. As I walked to the lifts in the fluorescent light of the hotel hallway I suddenly felt very alone.

Shortly after Liz returned to New York I got the phone call. Jones didn’t call me. It was my old secretary telling me I was to appear in New York in three days, and telling me the arrangements she had made to get me there.

The first day back in New York, I lost my nerve when I walked into the vast lobby of the headquarters on Park Avenue. When I stepped off the elevator and passed through security to my old office, I tried to avoid Jones by hanging out with the sales desk on the trading floor, ostensibly to get a feel for the market and the latest products but really to stay out of Jones’ way in the investment banking suites until I knew what was going on.

Jones found me. He didn’t do it very often, but on my first morning in New York he wandered down the long aisles of the trading floor, nodding to colleagues amid the din, a cigar stuck in his molars. He stopped next to me. I was ready for almost anything, but he was so friendly it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. After a pleasant conversation, during which he treated me more like a son in law than an employee, he invited me for a drink after work at the bar tucked away at the bottom of the Waldorf Astoria, on the Lexington Avenue side.

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When we got to the bar that evening, we talked about sports, and New York City politics, and about interest rates for the first three rounds of single malt scotch.

I started to hope. But as the evening continued, I realised Jones was deliberately talking about anything but business or the way he was sucking the oxygen out of the London office.

We were on our sixth or seventh round as I pondered whether or not I wanted to get sent back to London, as great a city as it was, or just get sacked here in New York where I could go somewhere else before the inactivity Jones was forcing me into in London damaged my resumé.

“Dick,” I said, “a great deal has happened in the last year, and lately most of it has been bad.”

Jones looked at me impassively, but I thought I detected in his eye the gleam I had seen in Bermuda, when he thought he could prove I wasn’t the guy going out with Caroline Nesbit.

“I have to say,” I continued, “that most of your decisions have been hard to understand.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said.

“I think you’re making a big mistake in my market,” I said. “And you’re not a fool.”

“I’m also not a dishonest son of a bitch.”

“Why don’t you elaborate on that, Dick,” I said.

“Coffman, I’m disappointed in you,” Jones said slowly.

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m disappointed in you because I expected you to play the game.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“It’s all about process,” Jones said. “It’s about the right way to do things, and the wrong way to do things. You’re not getting along. You’re a subversive. You’re a hoodlum. You’re trying to get where you want to go too fast. And you’re taking short cuts to do it. That’s not acceptable.”

“I--”

“We all have our roles in life, Coffman. We have responsibilities towards others. And I don’t see you taking responsibility. You’re prepared to go behind my back--”

“Dick,” I raised my voice to be heard. “That’s not true. I’ve been totally loyal to you. I built the business in London. I brought in the mandates and doubled market share.”

“I . . . I . . . I,” Jones intoned. “Me . . .me . . . me. That’s your problem, Coffman. The whole damn universe revolves around you. What do you care about others?”

“We’re talking about Caroline, aren’t we?” I said softly.

“I didn’t say that,” Jones snarled. He threw a handful of peanuts into his mouth and signalled for another round of drinks.

“Look,” I said. “It wouldn’t have done Caroline any good to marry me when I left for London--”

“Damn straight,” Jones said.

“I wasn’t ready to get married, and I’m not now,” I said.

“You don’t give a fuck for anybody but yourself,” Jones said, swallowing his single malt.

“At least I didn’t marry her and then end up divorced two years later,” I said.

I thought that might stop him.

He just glared at me, the bull elephant again, shrugging off a bullet as he charged.

“Coffman,” Jones said, “I got married, because I was willing to give it a try. There was hope in me, a belief in something better than myself. That’s why I was willing to give it my best. It didn’t work out. But my marriage demonstrated something. It showed I have something you haven’t got. And what I’ve got that you don’t can be expressed in one word. Character.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You married an heiress whose dad was related to half of corporate America because you had character. And I didn’t marry an heiress who was practically the adopted daughter of my boss—despite everything that could have meant for my future—because I don’t have character. I think you’ve got that backwards.”

“What you have is an attitude problem,” Jones said.

“I just want to do bond deals, Dick.”

Jones grimaced contemptuously and turned away, signalling for the check.

The next day, I sat around the bank waiting for something to happen. Just before lunch I gave Caroline a call and she agreed to meet me for a drink in The Oak Room early that evening.

She looked good, of course. Her cheek was soft, and I remembered her old perfume when I kissed her. We were sitting in a booth and it was loud at first, but soon my ear was calibrated to the throaty register of her voice again and I could hear distinctly everything she said. She was friendly too, just like Jones.

“Well, you’re looking good, Chris,” she told me. “Living in London must agree with you.”

I thought about trying to explain the City and Chelsea and the lovely English countryside to her, but it seemed pointless. “Yeah, it’s not what you’d expect,” I said. “It’s a good place to spend a couple of years.”

Her chin lifted. “You’d know, Chris,” she said.

She’d been seeing a fifty year old lawyer, but she wasn’t really interested in him.

We talked for a while, and it was when she started talking about the New York City mayoral election that I realised that if she knew anything about sports or interest rates we would be talking about those, too. She was waiting for me to give her some kind of opening.

“Have you ever thought of visiting London?” I asked.

“If I were to visit, could I stay with you?” Caroline asked.

“I’ve got a big terrace house in Chelsea,” I said. “I would be offended if you stayed in a hotel.”

She was leaning across the table, looking at me with her beautiful brown eyes.

“I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings,” she said.

“You did once,” I said.

Caroline smiled.

I realised she had waited a year to know whether her last comment before I left New York had hurt me. Now she knew. I also understood that her gesture had been a grasp at an elusive wholeness in those last moments before I abandoned her. She had gambled that if she could still feel the pleasure just as she was losing it, she would capture for herself, forever, what was about to be lost.

I looked at her white throat and the fine bones of her shoulders, and I realised there was a way out of this mess. We weren’t enemies. I hurt her, and she hurt me, and through a combination of how she treated me before I left New York, and how she convinced Jones to treat me once I was in London, I had been through a year of hell. It was enough.

I had to go home with her. Very simple. One night in bed with her, hardly an unpleasant prospect, and I could fly back to London knowing my job was secure, even after yanking Jones’s chain the way I had the night before.

Caroline would look after me now.

And, of course, when I got back to London, all I would have to do is stall to keep her from coming out for a visit until I had another job, at a different investment bank—and could put the whole sorry mess behind me.

When we left The Oak Room, my arm was around her shoulder. Her long elegant arm, around my waist, reached down and dragged light careless fingertips like leaves falling against my suitcoat and palpating inside my hip. I flagged a cab and we headed east on Central Park South, away from my hotel and towards Caroline’s apartment. I kissed her, and like a reflex remembered after a year her hand slipped across my thigh and rested in its familiar place.

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I found it difficult to breathe so I sat back for a moment and studied the dark Avenue through the windscreen of the taxi. My life was hurtling by in a direction that didn’t make any sense. I could feel her breast pressing against my side. Her breath was rhythmic and deliberate as she nipped the lobe of my ear with her little white teeth.

For some reason, I suddenly thought about what Jones had said the night he told me about wanting to be a submarine commander. He’d spent his twenties on Wall Coffman while the Vietnam War was raging, but he hadn’t said he wanted to be a door gunner on a Huey helicopter. In fact, he had probably busted his ass back then arranging deferments once a year until he turned twenty-eight and didn’t have to worry about the draft.

The Pill had just been invented, and I could see Jones, stimulated by the remote chance he would be drafted and end up dying in some jungle, prowling the bars of the Upper East Side looking for those girls with heavy mascara and the bouffant hairdos you see on TV reruns and in old copies of Life magazine.

It occurred to me that submarine commanders weren’t likely to be good guys. German U-boats prowled under the ocean in search of big vessels to rise and pump a torpedo into: it seemed unsporting, and cruel.

I thought about Jones, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a somber-suited investment banker, walking the sidewalks of Manhattan like a submarine commander hidden beneath the waves, with the big office buildings towering above him like the prows of Cunard liners, like the Lusitania, full of women waiting to be torpedoed.

I turned to Caroline with the street lights of Madison Avenue flashing on her face as our taxi hurtled through light traffic uptown.

I didn’t need to consider what Jones’s advice would have been. I almost saw him, his eyes crinkling in a smile, and I didn’t have to hear the opinion he would have intoned if he had been there. I had a feeling that Caroline had already heard it before we met that evening.

I suddenly knew what he said to her, and I knew exactly what he would say to me.

I was starting to turn into Jones.

Then I thought of the first night Liz Shannon slept with me in London, and I realised these acts were like rituals, and like religious ceremonies they could not only be ineffective, but deeply harmful if performed with the wrong inner intention.

There is something for which we yearn, but at risk is something else truly precious, something I knew existed but couldn’t name, and I suddenly understood it was perfectly possible to lose everything as I grasped for what I thought I wanted.

“Caroline,” I said to her, my lips so close to her I could have kissed her, “I really care for you. More than you know.”

She murmured something I didn’t understand. Her hand slipped down, and my pulse pounded in my ears. I almost gave up, but like a rock climber heaving himself up onto a blind lip and hoping, praying, it was the top of the mountain I said, “I love you like a sister.”

She stiffened. “What?”

“I care for you very much,” I said. “I love you like a sister.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Are you going to come home with me?”

“I can’t sleep with you,” I said.

When the taxi pulled up at her building, we got out. I started to walk her towards the door of her building as the doorman stood waiting, watching us. Out of the darkness a hand whirled towards me and caught me on the cheek. She must have gotten one of her rings turned around because it tore into the skin above my lip and blood ran into my mouth.

“You bastard!” she hissed. “Misogynist! Faggot! Don’t come one step closer!”

I caught a flight to London the next day. When I got to my office the next morning Jones called me. It was 7:30AM his time. “You’re out, Coffman. I want you to come back to New York. You can choose your departure date. Wrap things up in London.”

I thought about it. “Ok, why don’t I come back in six weeks,” I said.

“Fine,” Jones said, and hung up.

I felt a sense of relief as I looked out the window of my office, watching the rain fall through the tainted air hovering above Princes Street, which separated our headquarters from the Bank of England.

It was time to start learning to become a human being.