Feeling my weight on the boards, she glances up from her book.
“What are you looking at?” she asks.
“You,” I tell her.
“Why?”
“Because I love you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re beautiful.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re you.”
She smiles, lets her book slide. “Do you ever wonder why I love you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes it’s because you do things like talking me into getting out of the city for a few days. This old beat-up place with all the spider webs in the rafters. Our anniversary here.”
I step to her.
I kneel down. I kiss her softly, her skin hot and salty with sweat.
“Be careful,” she whispers. “You could kiss a girl right out of her pants like that.”
“I was thinking more about making this last forever. Us. Having this afternoon together.”
“That too,” she whispers.
7
I could not recall any point previous to these last few days when I had ever before been intimidated by daylight.
Mid-morning, I flicked my eyes around my office hurriedly to check for any overlooked details that would salvage my situation, preparing to push myself from my chair.
Yellowish sunlight, diffused by the tinted glass of the broad windows, had leaked in around me.
I hated it, bloated with lemony brightness.
With no shadows, I felt denied any sense that there was something left unseen, something yet to discover, some new possibilities or solutions.
I was hatefully tired.
I had spent the night in a chair in my living room. Three times I had tried to reach Albert Quan; falling back into a tense and listless sleep, the lamp light seeping under my eyelids, each time the man would not take my call. The final time I woke it had been dawn. With the twelve-hour time difference, the business day in Singapore had run to its conclusion. Bank of South Asia had closed. My attempted contact incomplete. My possibilities shrinking.
At my desk, I swallowed sorely, my throat dry. My eyes scratchy with fatigue. Feeling forced to take on my business day, empty-handed and reluctant, as it unfolded in uncertainty and false glare.
Time to report to Kyle’s called meeting.
I took a final breath, trying to disband my doubts. In unbroken momentum, I rocked to my feet, paced rapidly out of my office, down the hall, and through Kyle’s open door.
There were four of them waiting: Kyle behind his desk; on two inward-facing chairs, Brenda Gibbons from our treasury department, Dimitri Sarkans from trading; and, on the deep couch along the side wall, an older man I did not recognize.
Kyle commenced while I was still entering the room. “Sit down, Paris. I’ve invited Brenda and Dimitri in to keep them informed of what’s happening firsthand.”
I nodded to them.
“And I’d like to introduce Ted Dwyer.” Kyle swept his hand to the older man. “Ted and I go back a long way. All the way to Yale, in fact. At various times, Ted has been president of two of our largest brokerage houses and one of our largest banks. These days he spends most of his time up in Ottawa warming a bench in the Senate, but I persuaded him to fly down this morning to give us the benefit of some of his experience and perspective.”
I stepped over and shook hands with Dwyer who, with difficulty, hiked himself partially out of the couch cushions, prefacing his greeting with, “Sorry. With this hip replacement, I always need a little more advance notice to get up and running.”
I eyed the remaining chair.
Instinct warned me not to relinquish my command of the ground between Kyle and Dwyer.
“Okay.” Kyle launched the discussion impulsively, like tearing the paper from a cheaply wrapped package. “Paris, what have you got for us? Our treasury department has a stack of overnight messages from Bangkok Commercial Bank requesting settlement on the bond issue no latter than March tenth. That’s three weeks. How much do we have from Bank of South Asia?”
I stood before them.
I looked at their faces in sequence, all united with Kyle in their stares of doubt and indictment.
What to tell them? What not to?
(Was the raging in my ears what a diver felt while suspended in the drop with no return available to the anchored footing of the diving board? Did you consume the gravity in your descent, becoming calmer as you neared the crash with the water?)
“We may,” I opened, “have a lot less than we need. But …”
Kyle wedged in his demand like a knife blade. “Less?”
“But we may not need anything at all.”
“Why?”
“Because we may not have a deal at all.”
“Bottom line,” Kyle demanded, swift and severe.
I scrambled for some lean line of argument. “I got hold of Bank of South Asia last night. They’re our financing arm for the deal. Suddenly there’s a lot of confusion. Even though we’re sitting with all their contracts in hand. They sound like they’re trying to back out on us. From the looks of it, I think the whole deal is going to come unravelled. And we’re not going to have any financing. But there aren’t going to be any bonds available for us either. So we’re not going to get any bonds, we’re not going to owe anything. It’s a wash. And we just move on to the next deal.”
“No.”
Halted by Ted Dwyer’s pronouncement lobbed in from the side of the room, I stood, reticent, uncertain how to proceed, steeping in my own frustration.
Tall, thin, and balding, with thick folds of skin under his jaw where he had once been beefy, Ted leaned back into the couch, bunching the blazer bearing his thready air squadron crest on its pocket, and unceremoniously brushed a scattering of dandruff from his shoulders and lapels.
“We already know that this thing has blown up in your face,” Ted stated. “But it seems we’re not the only ones that know.”
Sensing I would make myself vulnerable by having to ask for more details, I only raised my eyebrows in inquiry to Dwyer.
Adroitly, he handed me back off to Kyle with a curt nod.
“This,” Kyle explained, lifting several sheets of paper from his desk with tangible disdain. “Waiting for me when I came in this morning. Faxed in to us from London just after their open. From Amsterdam Bank.”
I could only wait for more.
“It’s their offer, Paris. For the Bangkok Commercial Bank bonds. They’ll give us eighty cents on the dollar for bonds that we buy for ninety-two cents on the dollar. If we take it we’ll only lose twelve million.”
“But there’s no way – ”
“And if we hustle around and do a lot of selling for them on the side they’ll pay us enough commission that we can carve our loss down to ten million.”
Kyle snapped the pages against his fingers.
Thinking there would be more, I waited in the ensuing silence while Kyle’s words drifted down like dry, brittle leaves.
When no one else spoke up, I began constructing