In the confusion and despondency that followed Florence’s success, Megan was experiencing one of those rare moments in which she wished her husband hadn’t died so unexpectedly last year. By the time she met him, Victor Allen’s colorful Wall Street career had already earned him the nickname “Mad Dog”; in the last ten years of their marriage he had been promoted to “Evil Fuck.” No major deal could take place, even ones that Victor had never glanced at, without the question, “Where is Evil Fuck on this one?” being voiced in anxious conference rooms around the world. He took considerable pride in turning what might have been a pathetically vague description, applicable to any number of his colleagues, into a personal title. In a world in which his rivals tended to be known as Darth Vader, Lord Sauron, or Voldemort, Victor also regarded his sobriquet as a sign of maturity, made up as it was of two plain English words, without any cute allusions to children’s entertainment. Generally speaking, he was a man exhilarated by insults, just as he was impatient of praise, which he regarded as either “a blinding statement of the obvious” or a Trojan horse for extracting money from him. It was hard to point to any particular deal or innovation that justified the title he grew to cherish: his exploitation of barely legal tax loopholes, his creation of catastrophic debt, using ever more intricate and deceptive financial instruments, his preparedness to rip apart old and successful companies, on which whole communities and tens of thousands of families depended, in order to make a few investors even more disruptively rich, were in themselves no more surprising on Wall Street than finding bread in a bakery, but the scale of his operations, the extent of his duplicity, and the intensity of his sarcasm and triumphalism meant that, like a runner who still has the reserves to sprint at the end of a marathon, he broke away from the bobbing mass of evil fucks in his generation and crossed the finish line ahead of the competition.
If only he were still around, or, even better, if only he could come back for a week, like a special guest star in a hot television series, and then disappear again. It had been tough for Megan to line up enough eulogies at Victor’s memorial service to do justice to her status as a very important widow, but right now she could almost have written a poem for that impoverished occasion. As Jesus busied himself trying to bring her to orgasm, she started to imagine the first line. “Victor, thou shouldst be living at this hour!” That was a firm traditional start…“We need thy venom and thy debt…” She couldn’t immediately think of anything that rhymed with “debt,” but in any case, the inspiration for her poem was the fact that Victor would have improvised some wonderfully aggressive or devious move to secure the buyout of the Dunbar Trust. His old partner, Dick Bild, was holding the line, but could he be trusted to go to the necessary extremes?
Oh, that was an unexpected little thrill! Jesus had managed to capture her attention. There was no doubt that he deserved an “A” for effort and he was certainly making better use of his tongue than when he murmured inane compliments from a neighboring pillow, showing her that he was not just a ruthless killer but a bashful little boy who allowed his mother’s tender Hispanic influence, already quite conspicuous enough in his Christian name, to give a sibilant softness to a Texan accent otherwise hardened and whitewashed by his belt-wielding, truck-driving, hard-drinking, dreadful old ex-military Pa. She already knew the whole dreary story.
She realized she hadn’t sighed for ages. She probably should, or perhaps even moan.
“Don’t stop,” she said, catching her breath, “please don’t stop.”
If he stopped, he might talk. On balance, she was better off as she was, although it was tempting to scream with frustration, while thrashing about to give the impression that she was in an epileptic sexual ecstasy.
Of course one had to be prepared to run into occasional patches of turbulence, but the last few hours had been really ridiculous. The British police, who wanted to question her team about Peter Walker’s suicide, had almost caught up with them, but they had just managed to get Global One off the ground in time. A few minutes later and they would have been in some godawful provincial police station. And then Braggs had started behaving strangely, saying it couldn’t represent them in this particular case, due to a conflict of interest. Obviously, Dr. Harris was more of a wily old fox than he seemed at first sight. In any case her conscience was clear: how were they supposed to be responsible, when they were miles away at the time, for a complete lunatic hanging himself in an asylum shower? She wasn’t surprised that they were being accused; people never tired of attacking her family. It was envy, of course, pure and simple. There was nothing one could do about envy, it was just part of human nature; her mother had warned her about it on her first day of kindergarten, but it was especially disappointing to see it rear its ugly head at this precise moment.
Florence had been a complete nightmare as usual. They had managed to get rid of her for a year, but now she had come back in order to meddle in things that she knew nothing about. Of course she had been the one to get Daddy, as she always had been. The last daughter to arrive, she was still the first to have really captured his attention. Through most of Megan’s life, Florence had sat there smugly monopolizing their father’s love, while no amount of obedience, flattery, or aping of his attitudes could secure a single drop for either of her sisters. This time it was too serious to let Florence get away with being Daddy’s little favorite. Florence now stood between Megan and the prize that she and Abby had been working toward for three years. Bloated on her father’s love, she was like a grazing cow that wanders onto the railway tracks just as a high-speed train is coming round the bend. As far as Megan was concerned, the consequences were inevitable.
Florence would of course claim that her sudden presence was entirely motivated by concern for their father but, first of all, he had been in an excellent (and very expensive) facility where he was being given the best professional care and, secondly, he was not just any old doddery father who needed to be visited in his nursing home (which she had fully intended to do in due course), but a powerful symbol around whom all sorts of outdated and reactionary forces might gather. She and Abigail had been secretly cultivating the least self-righteous directors, offering them not entirely ethical inducements to favor Eagle Rock’s bid. They hadn’t dared approach Dunbar and Wilson’s old allies, but with their own votes and with Dr. Bob joining the Board, they expected to command a slim majority, hoping the rest of the directors would be brought around by the very generous proposal itself.
Eagle Rock would be offering fifteen percent over the current share price, making it a bonanza for ordinary shareholders. It would of course be quite wrong to pile a huge burden of debt on the poor Trust: it was, after all, excessive debts that led to massive redundancies, fire sales of subsidiaries, and the destruction of fine old companies. In other words, exactly what they had in mind! They were going to make the Trust leaner and meaner, and then make a new public offering of the streamlined company five years down the road. According to Dick Bild, she and Abby could expect to make 1.4 billion dollars each—which didn’t seem that much, considering what a pain it was turning out to be—but they were only doing what made sound business sense, and it was better to have it done by people who truly loved the company and not by some rapacious outsider. Really, there was nothing to worry about. Eagle Rock had a very clear, fully financed, legally bulletproof friendly merger proposal, and nobody else would be interested in the Dunbar Trust at this price since it had lost the China satellite deal to Unicom.
“Oh God, that feels good,” she groaned.
It was quite frightening how soon she tired of her lovers. J had seemed so thrilling last night, with his glowing young body, and his look of feverish concentration, worthy of a man working against the clock to defuse a nuclear device but all in fact lavished on bringing her wave after wave of pleasure. How could he already feel like a misguided revival? It couldn’t just be that Dr. Bob was no longer in the room next door, making it less fun to abandon herself to fits of amplified screaming. She wasn’t that superficial, although there had been a certain vindictive comfort in knowing that he was on the other side of the wall, seething with jealousy, or at least insomnia. In a better world than this, J might have lasted a few weeks, or just stuck around as a sexual opportunity she took up when it suited her, but the pressure of the times meant that she was going to have to ask him for a special favor. She wouldn’t have time to dress up the request, except to give it an air of heart-wrenching necessity. She would shed silent but copious tears, genuinely impressed by the burden placed on her in having to ask something so unnatural, but also intuiting that J would be powerless in the face of her tears, having spent much of his violent childhood comforting his beaten mother as she wept in a corner of their bungalow. J would assent with fitting gravity, while advancing the theory that in his opinion it took real courage on her part to make such a tough decision. She would respond by clinging to him more tightly and squeezing a little more fluid from her tear ducts onto his hairless chest. In a moment of pure stillness, a small puddle might form between his intimidating pectorals. Megan couldn’t help being impressed by her own painstaking choreography.
Perhaps that was the trouble: now that she had imagined J being launched, like a heat-seeking missile, it seemed counterintuitive, not to say hazardous, to keep hanging on to him. And yet she knew that this particular crash in erotic enthusiasm was only a detail in the pattern. Her lovers slept beside a precipice that seemed to move closer with each affair. Would the coastal erosion ever stop? Would it go on until she fell over the edge as well and joined the litter of broken bodies on the beach?
Love was all theater of course. She was the eternally dissatisfied director, as well as the star around whom the whole production was built. If the leading man got fired for some reason, there was always an understudy to take his place. Essentially, no one else in the cast mattered. There was no autonomous reason for their existence. They were multiples of zero. She could remember having her one and only Maths epiphany when she was ten, realizing that adding a zero to the end of a figure multiplied it tenfold, but multiplying a figure, however large, by zero, nullified it. That was why she preferred to think of a person as a multiple of zero rather than “a complete zero,” given the radically different roles played by that naughty nought in different contexts.
In J’s case, the relationship was going to be especially brief, since it wouldn’t be expedient to be seen with him after he had performed his little service for her; in fact, sadly enough, Kevin might have to eliminate the danger of any traces that could lead back to her. The trouble with getting people to eliminate traces was that they became a trace in their own right. Who eliminates the eliminator? There had been a time—she had never told anyone about it, and even in private it was a memory she resisted having—when she was capable of taking the initiative all on her own. Thank God the crash was bad enough to destroy all evidence of tampering. She had been so young and so merciless. All the bad things she’d done since had some sort of worldly pretext, but that had been an act of pure hatred. Although it had taken some time to organize, it had somehow remained impulsive, in the sense that her hatred renewed itself so forcefully that it never allowed a moment of reflection. Part of her was still a little shocked by what she had done all those years ago and didn’t want to dwell on it too long. It was so unsophisticated to be shocked by things.
Judging that it was probably time for the big scream, Megan started to gasp and to tense her body. She found herself enjoying the sensation of having J’s head clamped firmly between her thighs and started to arch her back and tighten her grip. She couldn’t help thinking that he probably hadn’t been in such a vulnerable position since his personal combat training at the Green Beret Center for Martial Arts Excellence. Maybe if she twisted suddenly enough, she could just snap his neck and kick his limp body onto the floor. She found herself irresistibly drawn to that prospect. There she was, about to produce the fakest orgasm of all time, but now there was no doubt that she was getting really worked up by her little fantasy.
“Oh, my God,” she said, imagining the sound of his snapping neck, “Oh, my God.”
She clenched her thighs harder and rose higher off the bed. One simple, sudden twist, that’s all it would take.
“Oh, my God…I’m coming!” she gasped, with genuine astonishment.
J hoisted himself up, crawled along beside her still trembling body and collapsed next to her, gently massaging his neck.
“You sure got strong thighs,” he remarked, admiringly.
“Oh, J, you’re an artist,” said Megan. “I can’t tell you how you inspired me.”
“It’s only because I’m so inspired by you, querida,” said J, looking foolishly pleased.
His lisping endearment and his devoted expression instantly irritated Megan.
“Oh, J,” she said, “I haven’t come so hard since, well, since last night.” She smiled, grazing his rib cage with her fingernails.
“Querida, I want to hold you all night in my arms,” said the besotted warrior.
“Hold me, hold me,” said Megan.
“I don’t know if this is just a regular thing for you,” said J, “but I don’t think I’ve ever really been in love before.”
“That’s such a sweet thing to say,” she said. “Of course it’s not a regular thing for me. I’m completely dazzled by how strong it all feels.”
She kissed his chest, managing to extort a small tear from one eye that, after an annoyingly long journey down the side of her nose, finally dripped onto its target.
“Querida!” said the hypersensitive J, devastated that the woman he was holding in his arms, his woman, was crying. “Que passa?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” said Megan bravely.
Hearing her own fortitude filled her with self-pity and released another precious tear. She plunged into the feeling with all the method at her command—she had done two semesters at the Lee Strasberg Institute before dropping out. She closed her eyes and tried to picture the sorrows that were afflicting her. Just when she had found a sexual fantasy that really worked for her, she was having it taken away. She knew that it wasn’t randomly transferable, but intimately tied up with J being a soldier, with the feeling of having a killer in her power, of having fatally weakened a man enchanted by his own physical strength. All the more reason not to fall into the Delilah Trap, thought Megan, straying from her purpose and returning to more familiar calculations, and leave Samson chained to a couple of blackmailing pillars, ready to bring the whole edifice of her life crashing down around her. After he had done what had to be done, J would have to go. Maybe they could do it one more time; it was only Tuesday, after all. Yes, that would work, one more time tonight in the city and maybe one more time before breakfast. Then she would let go of him. A missile was the exemplary multiple of zero: once it hit the target it ceased to exist. Thanks to Mark, they were a step ahead of their rivals. He had given them all sorts of useful information when he climbed on board Global One, saving them hours of research. His explanation for being in Manchester was completely unconvincing, but after flirting with the enemy, he had obviously decided that his real interests ultimately lay with his wife. He had overheard that Florence was planning to disinherit her own sisters of all the non-Trust property. Greedy bitch.
All these misfortunes: Florence’s manhunting triumph and appropriation of all their father’s personal property; her own loss of a lover to the higher purpose of a total victory over her loathsome half-sister and, above all, the cumulative burden of always having to be strong and sharp and in charge and one step ahead, suddenly engendered the breakdown she had been straining to achieve. Her eyes streamed, and her trembling, sobbing body clung ever more tightly to her protector. She had gone to see a therapist once who irritated her so much that she had quit almost immediately. He used to interrupt what she thought were rather amusing anecdotes, giving him a glimpse of a world that he would never have access to in his own right, by saying things like, “And where is little Megan at this glitzy party? Where is she hiding?” Now, unexpectedly, his voice and his ridiculous questions came back to her and she let out a wail of real pain.
J was completely helpless, as Megan had imagined he would be, holding the weeping body of the woman he loved.
“Querida, please,” he pleaded. “I will do anything to stop you crying. Just tell me what is wrong.”
Megan sobbed a little longer and then sat up, reached for the box of handkerchiefs beside the bed and blew her nose.
She put her head back on J’s shoulder, and continued to cry more quietly. She had found little Megan now, hiding in the cupboard, and when she spoke it was in the strangely young voice of a frightened, distrustful child.
“Anything?” she whispered.
“Anything,” said J. “I swear, anything at all.”