Moral Hazard Read Online Free PDF

be found sitting immediately inside the door, waiting for me, our cat in his arms, both alert to my arrival.
    That first summer, after Bailey was asleep, I lay on the sofa in the living room, watching the shifting evening sky above the Carlyle Hotel and listening to musicals:
South Pacific
,
Carousel
,
Kismet
,
The King and I.
I fell in love with the voices of William Tabbert and Alfred Drake, with music that consoled in its hopefulness. Music that was as far from my circumstances as could be imagined.
Play on the cymbal, the timbale, the lyre / Play with appropriate passion, fashion / Songs of delight and delicious desire…

7
    The anthropological approach to corporate life was Mike’s idea; I was too off-balance, too thrown by events, to think of it. Mike and I became friends on the day of Nixon’s funeral, declared a holiday on Wall Street. Hanny hadn’t taken the day off—a big speech was pressing—so neither did I. As usual, the first item on my agenda was to be Hanny’s audience. Naturally, he went into raptures about Nixon: a
great
man.
    Escaping, I went down to the front of the World Financial Center, where pink granite benches face a marina. One of these achieved notoriety when a trader sat down and calmly shot himself on a sunny day, people promenading, seagulls perching, boats plowing. Mike arrived shortly after I did and settled on the same bench.
    “Hello,” I said. Forward of me. Though we’d met a couple of times, I didn’t expect him to remember me. After all, he was executive management, and I a dime-a-dozen vice president.
    “Hi.” He slid a little closer. “If I remember, you’re Cath. The derivatives speech. How’d it go?”
    “It went fine.”
    Mike was a smoker and so was I. Mike, I found out, had never bothered to give it up. I had stopped years ago, but with Bailey’s illness, resumed, telling myself, whatever gets you through the night. I took painkillers, for migraines, and too many of them, no doubt. I was probably ripe for an intervention. The idea of anyone willingly intervening in my life made me laugh out loud, and still does. Husband with Alzheimer’s? He’s all yours, gal.
    We lit up, sipped coffee. Mike broke the silence. “ ‘The Day Lady Died.’ That’s my favorite O’Hara poem.” This was not out of the blue. Marvelously, some lines of Frank O’Hara wind along the wrought-iron fence that fronts the marina:
    One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally
regret
life.
    Walt Whitman is there, too:
    City of the world. (For all races are here, all the lands of the earth make contributions here.) City of the sea! City of the wharves and stores—city of the tall facades of marble and iron! Proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
    So Mike knew his O’Hara. And that is how our friendship began. A New York friendship, given it was restricted to the bench and the conversations we had there; like a Greek drama, all the action was off-stage. A friendship larded with the cultural allusions and references common to people of our age, background, education.
    “Not taking the day off?” I ventured, unsure where to go with O’Hara.
    “For Nixon? No. Definitely no.” His turn to take the conversation in another direction. “How long have you worked for Niedecker?”
    “A year.”
    “Before that?”
    “I was a freelancer. Magazines. Travel stories, profiles, some essays, that kind of stuff. Never worked in finance. Totally new to it.” I told him about Bailey.
    “So sorry.” A few more slow drags. It was a cool, windy day, with streaky clouds. Because of the wind, Mike was smoking like James Dean, his cigarette hooded by his hand. Anyone less like James Dean than Mike—large head, bony body that he occupied as if it were rented—I couldn’t imagine. “What do you make