In the Light of What We Know (36 page)

I didn’t really grasp what all this meant—the physics eluded me—but I don’t think my father expected me to understand. In fact, I think he wanted to convey how baffling these ideas were even to him, even as he lived to wrestle with them.

After supper that evening, my mother headed out to her class; she was ever diligent about her retraining as a psychotherapist and never missed a lesson, even when I was home during vacations. My father and I loaded the dishwasher and again sat down at the dining table with some ice cream.

Chutes and Ladders?

Sure, I said.

We often played after supper, though I understand—and understood even sometime in my boyhood—that men seek out excuses to ease conversation.

Let’s play Twenty Questions also.

Twenty Questions first? I asked.

Let’s play them at the same time.

I smiled at my father. It was my turn to play it as he once did: He might be asking the questions, twenty questions, but with this new version of the game, I would be the one working out who I was.

We played the two games slowly, switching from one to the other and with so many digressions as we played, conversations about this and that. We talked a little about my studies. I was doing well enough, I’d say, and mention my grades—I always did well enough, never more, and he might remark on the surprises that come from pushing oneself, remarks delivered with an abstraction that at once directed them nowhere or to himself but were shared for my benefit. I know that this quality about my father, the keenness of eye, for instance, for the links between things—the digressiveness was something that Zafar had as well. I know there was a similarity between them that must have drawn me to Zafar. There were wild differences, of course. My father was deeply interested in the politics of the world; in his beliefs he was a liberal through and through. But Zafar back then had little to say on such matters. Yet for all the differences, their similarities—the digressions, the wandering searches, the discernment of links—they were all comfortingly familiar to me the first time I talked to Zafar in the Junior Common Room of our college at Oxford.

In science, my father said, nothing is worth a dime that doesn’t accord with our observations of the world. There’s really only one field in all of human endeavor where no observation can undermine the authority of a statement.

Mathematics?

Yes. Are you an animal?

No. Why didn’t you become a mathematician?

1, 2, 3, 4. I wasn’t good enough, he replied.

It was the first time I’d heard that tone in my father’s voice; an expression of a deficit and longing and—at the risk of putting it a touch too high—of a wound.

In Zafar’s notes, I came across a scrawled entry that I think reflects the sentiment. I don’t know whom Zafar was writing about or if it is a quotation from somewhere, but the note says,
His personal tragedy was the tragedy of all men, that they cannot shake off the lives that might have been, the unlived lives that follow them.

Do you know what St. Francis of Assisi said about proselytizing? asked my father.

What?

Evangelize by all means and, if necessary, use words.

That’s great.

Are you an abstract noun?

Yes, I replied and rolled the die.

I’ve never been inclined to give you instruction on how to live. I’m not sure I’d know where to begin. Besides, the most useful lessons your mother and I could teach you are the ones we’ve taught unwittingly through our actions. Don’t they say that the best lessons have no teacher, only a student?

But you want to say something now?

He rolled the die. Are you a scientific concept? I’m not sure it’s as much a lesson as something to consider.

Tricky. Probably not in the sense you’re thinking, I replied.

You know that theoretical physicists rather enjoy trying to find metaphors from everyday life to elucidate physics—why call it spin?—but it seems to me we could go the other way and use physics as a metaphor for life. I have been thinking about our game of Twenty Questions in the context of quantum mechanics, but it occurred to me a while ago that it is also a metaphor for living. The task is always to try to figure out who you are. Are you an emotion?

Yes, I answered.

I had a friend at Princeton, a Russian graduate student. He had a cute message on his answering machine, delivered in his thick Russian accent:
Who are you and what do you want? Some people spend a lifetime trying to answer these questions. You, however, have thirty seconds.

My father and I chuckled.

What happened to him?

Gone. My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you’re made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It’s only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties. It’s the strangest thing, this idea in quantum physics, and yet somehow unsurprising when you consider it as a metaphor. It’s when the thing interacts that its properties are revealed, even resolved.

I moved my game piece along, landing at the bottom of a ladder.

That’s it really, he added. That’s all I wanted to say.

*   *   *

All that was then, over two decades ago, and if I were required to provide a reason why that occasion comes to mind, it may be that I am thinking now also of a rather more recent day in September 2008, just before Zafar’s reappearance, when I visited my father with an ill-formed hope that he might have words of advice—however much the grown man in me might have resisted putting it in those terms. I drove up to Oxford on that same road I’ve driven so often before, but on this day with a heart weighted down by worries. I cannot say that I had the purpose of going through them with him, for I had not properly articulated anything in my own mind in the nature of a question. Granted, there was the question of whether and what to disclose to the financial regulator—I had yet to receive the formal invitation to appear before a congressional committee—but what I carried in my breast was, rather, a vague disenchantment and directionless sense of being. There was also the state of my marriage, the drift of which was, by then, too long and wide to be accommodated as the passing consequence of our respective and collective commitment to work. The road to Oxford was sure enough, but the course of my mind was lost in byways. Rather than by any resolve, I think now, I was drawn home because it was the first place of security.

It is, in the end, Zafar’s lack of home, to paraphrase his notes, the unmooring of his body, which leads to and results from the unmooring of his soul, in one of those incalculable feedback loops that rule us beyond our limited wit. I have been fortunate in many respects; life has been unsparing in its blessings. But I have come, early or late (I don’t know), to understand that what has made me in my own eyes at times, and I suspect in others’, a rather unadventurous and even boring human being has also saved me from greater woes; that my greatest asset was the stable love of parents I admired.

The plan that day was to join my parents for a dinner they were hosting. A social event was not what I had had in mind, but my father suggested it might be diverting—not a banker in sight—and I could stay on through Sunday.

He was not there when I arrived. He had been in Trieste for a conference and was supposed to be on a flight back that morning, but, my mother explained, he’d got the departure time wrong when he booked his tickets. My mother could have sent me a message before I set off for Oxford, letting me know, but I suppose she had been looking forward to seeing me.

Except for my father, the party was complete when I arrived. There was Oswyn Hapgood, a middle-aged classics professor at All Souls, and his wife, Maud, the two of them standing in the drawing room, drinks in hand, sweet sherries the both of them, I’m sure. Of the two, Maud was the connection; she and my mother were fast friends—my mother explained from where but I cannot recall. I’m not sure now, in fact, if my father really liked Hapgood (perhaps that’s why he didn’t just ditch the ticket in hand and catch an earlier flight). Also invited was one of my father’s doctoral students, Nathan Littwack, a Rhodes Scholar originally from Philadelphia, ten years younger than I, who was, I learned, set to take up a professorship at Caltech only a few months later. He was very clever, and the terms my father had used when speaking of him suggested a friendship across the generational divide. Nathan was laying the table and seemed to know his way about the place.

With Nathan was Lauren. I say
with
, although that wasn’t immediately apparent. Lauren had the ease of so many Americans I’ve met, an air of familiarity with whatever environment they were placed in that some Europeans take for pushiness or even a sign of entitlement. I think it was a
Hey, hon
between them—from whom to whom I don’t remember—that tipped me off. It would be disingenuous of me not to confess that what was most striking about Lauren were her breasts. I would have bet my bottom dollar it was a push-up bra that made for the flawless curves.

My mother made introductions quickly before returning to the kitchen, where she was putting the finishing touches to dinner. She was assisted by Rehana, a Pakistani woman from Cowley, whom my parents retained as a housekeeper.

I set about helping Nathan. But when I couldn’t find what we called the
nice cutlery
in the drawer where it had always been kept, Nathan suggested I try the drawer on the other side of the hutch dresser. He was right. I can’t be the first visiting son or daughter to find unsettling the small ways home changes once the children have vacated the nest, even setting aside the agency of parents in instigating those changes. The nice cutlery had been in the drawer on the right for as long as we’d lived there. But that was the point.
We
no longer lived there, I reminded myself, but only
they
, and
they
could make their home in such image as suited them.

You’re in banking, I hear, said Oswyn Hapgood, his head leaning back. I could see his nostril hairs. His high forehead was fringed by a mat of tightly coiled silver hair and below, some way below, by two of the bushiest eyebrows ever to crawl the earth. Some people are said to have a face for radio, so the quip goes; Hapgood had a cranial arrangement for academe.

I am, I replied, and left it there.

Inserting herself into the pause I’d opened, my mother explained that I was a partner in the firm. At the time, she knew less than my father did about my work and certainly had no idea about the mounting difficulties I was facing at the firm. But I was surprised by the hint of pride in her voice. When I was growing up, my parents were never the sort to brag about their son, but in more recent years, I’ve noticed, there has come through something of the proud parent in them both, and in my mother particularly.

Who would think there’d be such drama in banking? added the professor.

His manner, his every gesture, suspended him on the brink of superciliousness, and I wondered if there was simply some shy man inside whose timidity had isolated him from the norms of acceptable social behavior. My mother refers to academia as “the Asylum.”

But gauche though he was, Hapgood was right. In the preceding twelve months, the British bank Northern Rock had been nationalized, mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley was wobbling precipitously, the stock markets had suffered their largest fall since September 11, 2001, and the European Central Bank had raised interest rates by twenty-five basis points. Even in that September of 2008, there had been more drama than I had seen in all my time in finance. American investment bank Bear Stearns, on its knees with huge liabilities, was bought for a paltry $2 a share by JPMorgan Chase. The giant U.S. mortgage lenders, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, were taken over by the government after the disclosure of $5 trillion in liabilities they couldn’t meet. Lehman Brothers—good God, Lehman Brothers—filed for bankruptcy protection. AIG, one of the largest companies in the world, was bailed out by the government, and in the meantime Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed a massive taxpayer-funded rescue plan for the financial services industry: the Troubled Assets Relief Program. Less than forty-eight hours before I visited my parents, Washington Mutual went into receivership, making it the largest bank failure in U.S. history.

I’m in
investment
banking, I said to Hapgood. The trouble is in commercial banking—in lending. We don’t provide mortgages.

The distinction might seem disingenuous, but it was the one partners had been encouraged to draw where circumstances allowed it. And it might have been enough of an answer for Hapgood, but not, I see now, for anyone with a sharp intelligence.

In September 2008, I was still a partner of the firm, and the firm’s interests were mine and mine the firm’s. That, more or less, was what partnership meant, a united front of common interests. The first rule of the firm was not to do any interviews and to keep the firm out of the public view. Most people don’t really know what investment banking involves, and because of that ignorance, and because a mob is in too much of a hurry to bother with evidence or reason, it was best simply to stay out of the public eye. But the financial crisis was changing things. The firm had mobilized a PR machine, and the posture adopted in the face of public criticism was that the firm needed to do a better job explaining to people what it actually did, something the firm, head bowed and cap in hand, admitted it hadn’t been good at doing. It is what politicians do when confronting a hostile public: an expression of regret for failing to explain choices and decisions—which is no apology at all.

What I don’t understand, continued Hapgood, is how it is that so many banks could do so badly and yet pay their staff such large bonuses.

Some banks are doing well, I replied.

How did yours do?

It’s doing well, I said, although
not too badly
would have been closer to the mark.