And West Is West (2 page)

By the start of his second week on his project Ethan has added Ritalin to his brain cocktail in order to stay in the zone—that place where code pours from the fingertips in impulses directly from the brainstem with no detours up to the cerebral cortex or higher consciousness. Those parts of his frontal lobe have begun to suspect Zoe of more than a job search, for whenever he does make it back to River Terrace to crash, he more often than not finds notes and not her.

Out of town till Thursday on the great job hunt. Pizza in fridge. Don't eat cold. Microwave!
read the first of these, left on the kitchen counter.

The latest:
Making a quick day trip. Don't wait up if you're home.

He resists texting her for details because he knows how to play the game of hurt silence. Also he has a fantasy that by ignoring her absences he can stop them. But his suspicions about what she is really up to are growing. They have not had sex since Alex broke up with Lola—which happened the day after Lola torched her finger and then set his bed on fire while smoking. Whenever Ethan considers this time sequence his apartment begins to sway under him as though a hurricane is rocking the building.

His suspicion gives him license to go through Zoe's handbag whenever she is home. Late at night after she has gone to sleep, all Ethan finds are receipts for the Dragon Deluxe Chinatown bus to Washington. Then, a week later, a ticket stub for the Acela appears and he realizes what is happening. She must have a lover, a politician she met at the UN, and he has upgraded her travel arrangements to DC. Ethan imagines that he can outwait this stranger's play for Zoe. He is probably married anyway. Zoe will quickly see her mistake. At least it doesn't look like Alex is her lover.

It is three o'clock in the morning. Zoe is asleep in bed. Ethan is sitting with Zoe's purse in the living room. He swallows a Ritalin and opens his laptop to write code.

“HAVE YOU BEEN
up all night?” Zoe asks. Already dressed for work, she locates her hobo bag and energetically rummages among the tissues, gum wrappers, and lip balm, all the contents that Ethan had carefully put back in their places. “Crap. Where'd it go?”

Innocently Ethan dips his nose into his espresso cup and averts his eyes. What he blurrily perceives—through the corner window, around a curvilinear glass monolith and over the canyon of West Street—is his fragment of the Freedom Tower, which is beginning to oppress. Passing by it lately during his morning commute, he looks up and the tower becomes, with its twitching rooftop cranes, a monstrous mechanism with a skeletal head topped by antennae—an autobot from the Transformers movies ready to wreak havoc on lower Manhattan and then the world.

He worries that the psychostimulants are overfertilizing his imagination.

“Have you seen my Amtrak receipt?” Zoe asks.

“What receipt?” he replies.

“My train ticket. I need it for reimbursement. A hundred seventy bucks.”

Ethan puts a hand in his pocket and touches the ticket stub.

“Oh, well,” she says, giving up. “Good thing I'll be cashing a real paycheck soon.”

“A what?” Ethan says.

Zoe shrugs. “I didn't want to tell you until it was a sure thing. I got a job in Washington.”

“Cool,” Ethan says, though his face is locking up.

“I start next week.”

“Cool,” Ethan repeats through his teeth.

Zoe gives him a look, the one that always melts him—it is both a frown and a smile. “Ethan, you know that being with you has meant a lot to me.”

“Sure,” Ethan says. Unable to breathe he manages to keep looking at Zoe's lovely face. He may as well be looking up at the undercarriage of a subway car that is running him over.

“
Oh
, Ethan,” Zoe says. “For a second I thought you
were
okay with it.”

“I am okay with it,” Ethan lies.

“God, I have such a hard time reading you.”

After Zoe finishes readying herself for her penultimate day at the UN, she interrupts Ethan at his laptop. He is tracing an error in the code he wrote earlier that morning, a bug in a loop statement that is causing his program to repeat endlessly. His brain is stuck in a similar pattern, telling him over and over that he has lost Zoe forever, forever, forever.

“Hey,” Zoe says. “Can I ask a huge favor?”

“Sure,” Ethan says, staring at the laptop screen.

“My parents are back home. They're having a dinner tomorrow night and want to meet you.”

Dr. and Mrs. Leston, now retired, have been on back-to-back world cruises, tours of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres that coincided with Ethan's life with Zoe.

What's the point?
Ethan wants to say.
Aren't you moving to Washington? Aren't we done?
“Sure,” he says, managing not to stutter. He keeps his eyes on his coding to hold himself together.

“Thanks. You're a pal,” Zoe says and leans over to hug him. He inhales her hair. “By the way, I borrowed some of your Ritalin to keep me going. Busy times,” she says and is out the door.

For the rest of the day, just as he might obsess over an algorithm, Ethan fixates on Zoe. On whether they are done or
not
done. On the possibility of a long-distance relationship. On the fear that they might never have had a true relationship but only a variation on a hookup. Yet if this were the case, if they had only been live-in fuck buddies,
why
had she invited him to meet her parents?

CHAPTER 2

Upstate New York

“Dr. Leston, I presume,” Ethan says nervously. Extending a hand, he tries to grin away the lame joke.

Zoe's father regards him perhaps the way he regarded the tumors he once excised for a living. After a hesitation, he takes Ethan's hand and crushes it. Like many surgeons he makes his presence known. His height, an inch over Ethan's, his crystalline eyes akin to his daughter's, and his nose, arched and bony in a long face, give him a severe authority. Zoe had been a late child so he calculates that Leston must be at least seventy, but he still possesses a thick mane. “I presume you're referring to Dr. Livingstone, a great humanitarian,” Leston says before releasing Ethan's hand and walking to the other side of his den.

“Dad, don't be such an old grouch!” Zoe says. In a black dress and a string of pearls, Zoe has regressed in appearance and manner to an era when people embraced adulthood earlier, a show of maturity obviously intended for her parents.

“What's your poison, Winter?” Leston asks. He opens the liquor cabinet.

“I, uh, don't,” Ethan replies feebly. Leston's steady gaze forces him to explain. “It's a long drive back to the city.”

“Stop drinking before we eat and you'll be fine,” Leston says dismissively.

“Just sparkling water,” Ethan says, feeling like a boy drawing a line in the sand. He moves toward the fireplace, which is burning with a decorative gas flame. Zoe comes up behind him.

“Thanks for this,” she whispers and nips Ethan's ear. Then she wipes from the lobe what he guesses is her lipstick.

“Sure,” he says, her proximity soothing, the side of her breast pressing his arm.

“Zoe, go check up on your mother,” Leston interrupts. “Make sure her dress is on right side out.”

“Stop it, Daddy!” Zoe shoots back. Then she whispers to Ethan, “Hold the fort.”

“Huh?” he says before grasping her words. After she's gone he freezes as though he has stumbled into a cobra's nest. Leston's den is male, heavy with dark wood and leather upholstery. The volumes on the bookcases stand tidy and matching—the complete Dickens, Wells'
History
, Gibbon's
Fall of the Roman Empire
—with most of the spines creased. There is scrimshaw on a varnished plank table that looks like a boat hatch. On the wall above the bar hang black-and-white photographs of a schooner, once the doctor's, Ethan presumes. But he does not ask.

“So, Winter, my daughter tells me you're one of the masters of the universe,” Leston says.

Ethan feels almost flattered, as if they might, in retro fifties fashion, be talking man-to-man. But he doesn't want to build himself up as something he's not—not yet. “Really, I just work for—”

Leston's mouth wrinkles into a sneer. “It wasn't a compliment.” He approaches, tinkling, with iced drinks in whisky glasses. “You just enable them then?”

“Them?” Ethan takes the proffered glass.

“Those banking sons-a-bitches that wrecked my portfolio, the economy, a hundred million Americans' retirement, what have you.”

Ethan's bank, United Imperial Bank, had contributed its share of shaky credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, but all this was outside his division. Leston is blaming him for steering the
Titanic
into an iceberg when he was only manning the ship's telegraph. His work as a quant, Ethan believes, actually hedged some of the damage by providing liquidity to the markets—his algorithms increased the number of daily trades and prevented the currency market from falling, albeit fractionally, farther than it might have. But try to explain this to anyone. Ethan gulps the drink that the doctor has put into his hand and it sluices down his throat like broken glass. Some of it comes back up.

“Slow down. That's good gin. Don't waste it,” Leston says.

Through his coughing Ethan responds. “I'm just . . . an analyst.”

The doctor, smacking Ethan's back, almost tips him into the fireplace. “Don't be modest, man. I know what a quant is. I might have become something similar if I'd grown up on the banks of the Orinoco.”

“Really,” Ethan says, not quite remembering where the Orinoco is.

“Yes. I'd have been a witch doctor.”

“Columbia,” Ethan says, offering his college in defense.

“They teach voodoo there? That's a shame.”

The conversation is less male bonding than mano a mano combat. Silently Ethan watches the fire. He takes a moment to form his words and puts his drink on the mantel. “Dr. Leston. You do know that Zoe is leaving me to work in Washington?”

“Oh?” Anticipatory, the doctor's eyes gleam with malice. He swirls his glass and studies the rattling ice.

“That means we're not engaged. Or going to get engaged.”

The assertion makes Leston smile large. His teeth are so even and so white that Ethan decides they must be false. “God forbid that,” the doctor says with a laugh.

Ethan swallows the insult. “And that means you don't have to worry about me. Or prove your dominance. In a matter of days I'll be out of your daughter's life and you can forget we ever met. You do know that?”

“Yes.” Leston nods agreeably.

“Then why are you knocking me?”

A burst of laughter sprays Ethan and again Leston slaps his back in macho, comradely fashion. “Why? You ass, you've been sleeping with her. People like you, the advantage takers, disgust me. You take up with some bright-eyed young girl and get rid of her after you've had your fun.”

Ethan feels like he's stepped through a time warp. Does he really need to explain to the doctor how relationships work these days? If anything, Zoe is more casual about what they are doing together than he. After all,
she
is the one who is leaving.

“Having a nice chat, boys?” a throaty voice calls through the double doorway separating Leston's den from the living room. “Bring yourselves on in here.”

Solid but elegant, Elizabeth Leston stands as tall as her daughter and also wears black. But this is all they have in common—Elizabeth is a much softer woman: her face round not oval, her nose snub not aquiline. Around the high neck of her gown glistens a spray of diamonds. If real, they must be a better investment than her husband's stock portfolio. Being numeric, and now morally freed by Leston's verbal assault, Ethan begins to appraise the couple's possessions. Elizabeth's necklace—fifteen thousand. The renovated country farmhouse—six hundred thousand. The five-year-old Mercedes in the driveway—thirty thousand. The Inuit scrimshaw and other unseen household valuables—one hundred thousand, roughly. Leston's damaged retirement portfolio—one million, two maybe. In total Leston is worth, generously, three million. While Ethan, if he can last as a quant for another five years and make VP, hopes to earn twenty percent of that amount per annum. He steps over a leather footstool in the shape of a bull and exits the doctor's study. “Mrs. Leston,” he says brightly when he reaches her.

“You've lovely eyes, Mr. Winter. So pleased to meet you.” Mrs. Leston's clutching hand feels cold to Ethan, or perhaps his is warm from baking in front of the doctor's unseasonable blaze. In the living room, between floral wingchairs, glows another gas fireplace. This is where Mrs. Leston is leading him, very slowly. Or is he leading her? He grips her arm, suddenly fearful she might trip over one of the many tapestry footstools. “Suzie, dear, you didn't tell me your young man was such a charmer. So clingy.”

Passing out of his study, Dr. Leston jerks to a halt. “That's Zoe, Liz,” he says tersely.

Zoe, standing behind one of the wing chairs, examines her mother and then shoots a worried look at her father.

“I lied,” he says quietly to Zoe. “Your mother puts on a good front, but she's not any better. Tonight I hoped she would be all right for you.”

Mrs. Leston smiles, oblivious to the discussion about her. “We were so worried about our Suzie,” she says to Ethan. “I'm glad it was only a fever. Walter thought it was meningitis, but what does he know. He's a surgeon. What did you say your name was, Doctor?”

“Ethan. But I don't have a PhD. Still working on it.”

“
Ethan
? Ethan who?”

“Winter.”

“No. I'm afraid I don't know any Winters who are physicians.”

In the car coming up from the city, Zoe had explained to Ethan that her parents' extended cruise had been therapeutic. Her mother was recovering from a stroke. Ethan has no medical background, but to his mind Elizabeth does not display the paralysis or slurred speech he'd imagine that affliction would cause. Rather she appears to be suffering from dementia.

“Daddy. Who's Suzie?” Zoe asks.

Her father approaches the chair that Zoe is standing behind and he sits down. He has shrunken considerably. “Just a name.”

It is becoming clear to Ethan that the Lestons' recent travels were not for recuperation but a last hurrah.

Suddenly, Mrs. Leston begins to speak loudly. “Now wait a minute. I believe we did know an Archbishop Winter. But that was in Hartford. You're not from the Hartford diocese, are you, Father?” Even in her confusion Mrs. Leston still manages to play the hostess.

“My family is from New Jersey,” Ethan says.

“No. I'm afraid that's not right. I believe it was a Bishop Snow.”

Ethan gently shakes his head.

“Lessard,” Dr. Leston says to his wife, rescuing Ethan from her imprecise gaze. “You're thinking of a blizzard, Liz. It was Bishop Lessard.”

“Yes. Bishop Blizzard. That's it,” Elizabeth says, grasping Ethan's hands. “Welcome, Bishop.” The poor woman, Ethan sees, is trying to keep herself together through pretense.

“Oh, Mom,” Zoe says and goes to her by the fireplace. “You've spilled your drink. Come upstairs with me. We'll get you cleaned up.”

Mrs. Leston lowers her gaze, as does Ethan, to the liquid accumulating around her high heels and the back of her dress. “Oh dear,” she says. She releases Ethan's arm and looks at her daughter. Her voice goes small. “Please, Suzie, help me.”

As Zoe leads her mother from the room, Ethan's face feels scalded. He fears he might appear eager to bolt from the house, a coward.

“Oh hell,” says Dr. Leston. Then he refocuses the distress on his face into a coldness aimed at Ethan. “Stay, would you? You're our only guest tonight. We won't embarrass you in front of company.”

ETHAN'S EXPERTISE IS
the Monte Carlo simulation, a mathematical model that tries to account for all likely outcomes of a given scenario. His bank, UIB, has been using the Monte Carlo to exploit currency movements during particular events: a merger, a national disaster, and the more exotic events on which he works. For the past two years his specialty has been algorithms based on terrorist incidents. When word of the bomb blasts in Stockholm hit the newswires a year and a half before, his programming triggered UIB's high-frequency trading mainframes to sell what kronas it owned or managed for clients. As the market caught up, his algo measured the krona's volatility and, microsecond by microsecond, began to repurchase and sell that currency with the dollar, renminbi, or euro—whatever was momentarily most favorable—as the currency seesawed down to a lower valuation. And then when the algorithm sensed the krona's bottom, it pulled out of it completely. Ethan was glowing by the end of that day, and not just because of the bonus he would earn. His work has kept him enthralled ever since.

His latest algorithms have shown such good results that yesterday, after the Pentagon announced that Jabir al-Yarisi had been eliminated, UIB's director of liquidity, Dwayne Hoke, rushed to Ethan's office to watch the currency prices gyrate. Now Dwayne is hot over Ethan's new concept, the subprogram that focuses on antiterrorism—in particular, on drone strikes against Al Qaeda leaders. Lately the military has been touting the strikes as a means of keeping America safe, boasting of successful kills as if the Middle East weren't its next Vietnam. Following each strike, Ethan had noted a volatility in South Asian currencies against the dollar and he began to see what should have been obvious, that antiterrorism to one country was terrorism to another—say, an American drone strike on a Pakistani madrassa. As such, with minor tweaks, his current terrorist-incident algo spawned an antiterrorist algo.

“Beautiful,” Hoke had said. “We'll not only kill the bastards but make money from them twice over.”

The comment made Ethan blink, until he recalled that one of UIB's vast array of investments included military drone technology.

Ethan knows that his work is not the work of a genius, though it can give him this impression when he watches UIB's arbitrage profits mount. What he does—thanks to the speed of the bank's globally located mainframes and the short transmission routes through which they place orders—is a little like scalping tickets for a Lady Gaga concert. The show's going to be a sellout so the real trick is to buy as many tickets as you can before the true concert-goers have a chance. Dwayne, however, has assured him that what they do is useful and good: it is helping a currency establish its true value.

Zoe, however, operates outside his technology. Having used the Monte Carlo on her he has concluded that their relationship can have several likely outcomes: that they will marry, that they will live together a number of years before marrying, that she will leave him for another man, that he will leave her for another woman, and most recently added, that she will leave him for an out-of-town job. What his mathematics cannot account for is what is happening now.

“Stop,” Zoe says as their Mini Cooper glides through the misty Ulster County countryside.

“What?” Ethan asks. “Here?”

“Just pull over. I need to think.”

Two minutes earlier they had said their goodnights to her parents. Mrs. Leston had managed to complete the dinner without further incident except for a few name slips, calling Ethan “Bishop,” and Zoe “Suzie.” She had, apparently, completely forgotten wetting her dress and changing into fresh clothes. There are aspects of dementia that are not cruel.