New York - The Novel

lucky, but not more.
    The bad side, however, depressed him deeply. For as he considered all the other banks, and all the executives he knew, he became almost certain of one thing. In every likely contingency he could envision, it would be his opposite number in the other bank who would be asked to stay, and he who would be asked to leave.
    With his good name intact, of course. These departures happened all the time. Plenty of men would take their money and retire quite happily, and live well for the rest of their lives. But he’d wanted more than that. He’d wanted the top, the big time. He’d wanted to be the man who was honored at important functions in the city, and who was asked onto boards. That had been the plan.
    Instead of that, he was going to be the spouse of B & C partner Maggie O’Donnell, the nice guy who’d been a banker until he was eased out. And this while his kids were still in school. It hadn’t happened yet, but the prospect haunted him.
    Even this might not have been so bad, however, if it hadn’t been for what was happening all around him.
    New money. Nineties money. Seventies and eighties money hadn’t been so bad. When entrepreneurs had developed the technologies that became Silicon Valley, there had been something heroic about their enterprise. Technology wizards had mortgaged their houses and started workingout of their garages; daring venture capitalists had had the vision to back them. Companies had been created that, in time, threw off huge amounts of cash and changed the world. In the process, some of the entrepreneurs had become vastly rich, but they had taken on few of the old-fashioned trappings of wealth. They led exciting lives of real quality. They created charities in which they became personally involved. Wealth was not about status, but about new ideas.
    But nineties money, it seemed to Gorham, was different. The dot.com boom was about using the new technology to provide all kinds of services, so that new companies could be invented with such speed that he couldn’t keep track of them. Some, he reckoned, had a chance of success. But others appeared to Gorham to be based on concepts so flimsy that it reminded him of the story he’d once read about a prospectus, issued before London’s great South Sea Bubble market crash of 1720, which had announced that a company was to be formed “for a purpose yet to be discovered.” Yet these companies were being formed, their initial public offerings were being oversubscribed, and making their founders instantly rich, often before there was even a smell of profit.
    “The way I see it,” he’d said to Maggie, “the process is similar to what happened in the nineteenth century with the railroads. In those days, competing companies fought for control of the route along which people and freight was to be carried. Dot.com companies are racing to gain control of an information highway, to build up a huge network before any significant traffic actually flows along it.” He shrugged. “People are investing in expectations.”
    But people were investing, and getting hugely rich. The NASDAQ exchange was booming. Kids in their twenties were walking away with tens, even hundreds of millions, and buying huge lofts down in Tribeca because they thought the old-money crowd on Park and Fifth were boring. Private equity men who arranged these IPOs were making similar amounts. Wall Street traders were getting huge bonuses and buying multimillion-dollar apartments for cash.
    Was his family benefiting from this explosion of money? Maggie was doing well—lawyers always did. Her brother Martin was now living with a man who, having sold a small dot.com company, had bought an entire building in Soho for use as a private residence and art gallery, in addition to the beach house he owned out on Fire Island.
    Gorham, however, had failed to join the party. As he looked back now,he regretted that decision not to join the investment house in ’87. He should have taken the high road—God knows what he’d be worth now if he’d done that. Most days, in the office, surrounded by commercial bankers like himself, he was too busy to let it prey upon his mind. But sometimes there would be sudden ugly reminders.
    Going to watch the ball game at his children’s private school, for instance, one couldn’t fail to notice the limousines outside the gym from which some of the fathers, the Wall Street big hitters, had just stepped. Not that anything was ever