I love new beginnings. I’ve compiled a lifetime of them. But I have a blind spot for the end of things. So when the end finally came, I had dug a hole so deep another new beginning was out of the question. The end came abruptly in December 2015. I should have seen it coming─the crisis looming for years. Vendors calling for payments, brokers stalking me at lunch, my partners calling for more meetings and financial disclosures—which I had been fabricating—and longer hours in the early morning transferring funds from dozens of bank accounts to avoid overdrafts happening more often. Looking back, I was probably given years of deference, most likely because there was a lot of successful history. But eventually, it all came out.
When I got the call from my partner Tom Mayer that December, I assumed the worst. By then I had come to dread his calls.
The most painful part is I have a terrible flaw─I need everyone to like me. I never achieved that with Tom, even during our most successful years. Although we had been partners for twenty years, it never felt like a partnership.
“Mr. Mayer on line one,” said Vicki, my receptionist.
During the decade as my receptionist, her cheerful announcements were often disconnected to the dread and anxiety they summoned. I didn’t take the call, and told her to tell him I was busy. But I couldn’t avoid him forever. I knew he would just keep calling, so eventually I called him back, and when I did, he was pissed off.
“John. I’m going to take a shot at you.” He paused for a moment. “Are you listening John?”
“I’m listening,” I said, my stomach in a knot.
“How come you never take my calls. You take Bill’s calls,” referring to my other partner, Bill Watson.
“I take your calls Tom,” I protested. But we both knew I was lying, which pissed him off even more.
“All right. Never mind,” he said gruffly. “Bill and I will come up tomorrow for a meeting in your office.”
We’d had a long meeting a few days earlier, and reviewed our entire portfolio. Our private real estate investment company, Seaboard Realty, had an extensive portfolio of office buildings, apartments, retail properties and hotels.
“We just met two days ago, Tom,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. Just a short meeting. I have a couple of things to go over.”
A red flag.
“OK.” I said. “See you tomorrow.”
At our last meeting we reviewed the prospective sales of our properties. I’d convinced them we should sell our entire portfolio. It was more desperation—we were overwhelmed with cash flow issues—than a viable strategy. Our portfolio was floundering, the properties compromised by vacancies and encumbered by debt I had secured without their knowledge. Even in 2015, the real estate market was still impacted by the Great Recession and the state of Connecticut was facing a financial crisis. Prospective purchasers to some of our properties had emerged, but finalizing deals was challenging.
Possibly, Tom only wanted to discuss some new strategy for the sale or had decided not to sell. His ideas were usually wild ones that resulted in hours of argument. Occasionally he was brilliant. Like the contaminated property we purchased in 1993 and subsequently sold at ten times the cost. But most of the time, his suggestions made no sense and wasted countless hours while Bill—my other partner—and I refuted them.
They arrived without greetings the next day. I was at my desk, crafting an agenda around the sale of the properties. They summoned me to the small conference table in my office and closed the door, which was unusual. They set files on the mahogany table, a gift from a loyal sub-contractor. Toms were open but Bill’s files─large loose-leaf binders─were closed. I tried to hand them my papers, but Tom waved them off. He was in a suit, his usual style: double-breasted, blazing red tie in a Windsor knot, a matching pocket square, shirt as crisp and white as an envelope. Through the window behind them, I could see the construction of our new hotel. The hotel was a potential game changer for the company. I had secured the franchise to construct a Residence Inn in the heart of downtown Stamford. A coup. Unfortunately, the hotel would never be completed. The project, encumbered by liens, lacked enough capital to complete the construction. A crane lifted a concrete bucket to a platform behind them. I could hear the muffled sound of the equipment, the workmen calling out to each other, steam coming out of their mouths from the bitter cold.
“Let’s get started,” Tom said, looking through me.
“John, what is this notice I received from a bank in Massachusetts, regarding a loan of $10,000,000?” He tapped the papers in front of him. “I never even heard of them.”
Not the question I expected, but the one I dreaded. He was calm, not the usual angst or prodding. This issue of the bank had come up before. I thought I handled it, somehow convincing them it was a mistake. But their faces told me there was no selling that today. I could barely breathe, like someone turned up the heat to a hundred degrees. I wanted to open the window. For a moment, I was distracted by the construction work. Several men shoveling concrete into a steel form on the deck for the hotel’s seventh floor. I embraced the distraction. They were waiting. But they knew the answer. We all knew the answer. Their expressions were vacuous, almost hopeful, as if I might provide another explanation and spare us. I wanted to come clean. I was holding a pencil. It fell to the ground. I couldn’t even lift my arms. But the instinct to survive dies hard, and I tried to soldier through one last explanation.
“What loan from Massachusetts?” I asked after a long pause.
“Citizens Bank,” Bill said, and tried to add something but Tom interrupted him.
“No, Bill. One man to do this,” he said. “Citizens Bank, John. They sent Bill and I a default notice of their loan. And the notice included a Note with our signatures. Signatures that were clearly not ours.”
I nodded, looked down at the papers in front of Tom. But they were too far to read them.
Tom continued. He was surprisingly calm, not the usual truculence, which only heightened the intensity of the awkward moment. Staring directly into his flushed Irish face, it seemed he was holding back, luring me like a detective chasing a confession─he’d be supportive, remain my friend, my partner. Go ahead just tell us the truth. But I resisted. I wasn’t going to say it. I was sure I’d think of something. For years, I’d always been able to come up with something. But nothing was coming. And then, without even deciding to say it, probably because there was absolutely no path, no other answer, it had to come out. I began to talk.
I couldn’t hear myself saying the words, but I know I spoke them. Then they just kept staring at me until I finally repeated whatever it was, I said before, so that even I could hear it, and confessed out loud that we were bankrupt and broken.
And then it was like a river. I can’t even remember what I said except that I admitted to everything: forgeries, unauthorized financings, false financial reports and countless other wrongdoings. I went through everything that was upside down while they remained silent, and I lumbered into a steady stream of confessions which were almost relief until I finished. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t relief. I knew my life was over.
There were some follow up questions.
“What about the contract to Sandler and the big deposit they put up?” Bill asked.
Tom had insisted that his son assist in the sale of our portfolio. In order to keep his son out of the process, I created a false purchase and sale agreement to sell a number of our properties, including a provision for a non-refundable deposit upon signing.
“Not happening.” I said.
“The cash balances?” Tom inquired.
I’d been providing false bank statements.
“All doctored,” I admitted. I’d been creating false bank statements. Copying real ones and then changing the numbers.
“I knew that” Bill said to Tom. Then turned back to me. “They were very amateurish. The fonts didn’t match up.”
“And that big earnest money deposit?” Tom asked. The false contract provided for a deposit of $24 million.
“There is none.” I answered, while looking over their heads at the construction workers behind, still pouring concrete.
He looked at Bill, paused for a moment before saying, “Bill, I knew that wasn’t real.”
After another long pause, Bill started to say something, but Tom interrupted him again.
“Bill, let’s not do anything until we meet with our lawyers this afternoon.”
We remained there looking at each other. No one said anything. Surprisingly neither looked angry, maybe resolute. I focused on Bill. It was heartbreaking to watch him. He had been like a big brother to me. The opposite of Tom, he was always dressed in business casual. A form fitting sweater to highlight his still athletic frame. Recently he’d grown a white beard, resembling an ageing Ernest Hemingway. Usually, you couldn’t finish a sentence before he’d interrupt. But he’d been quiet throughout the meeting. Eventually, they both got up. I remained in my chair, looking out at the construction. They paused at the door.
“I wish you had told me,” Tom said. “I could have helped you.” It was the kindest voice I ever heard from him. I was crushed with guilt. He was probably right. Then, without looking back at me, Bill said,
“This is the saddest day of my life. Twenty-three years of success down the drain in one day.”
Then they left the room without another word. I remained in my chair and stared out the window. The crane continued to swing buckets of concrete onto a wooden platform. Several workers scrambled to move the piles into place. I kept staring at the construction like it was important.
*
When I arrived, she was already there sitting in a corner table towards the back, looking at her phone, the lighting dark and no one else in the place as I expected. Grateful for that. But now, actually there in the restaurant, the prospect of coming clean overwhelmed me. I had lived a lifetime of procrastination, putting off the unpleasant by kidding myself, rationalizing, so it was easy to postpone the revelation and convince myself that it was too early to reveal what happened that day and that perhaps something could be worked out.
She was looking at her phone and didn’t see me at first. She looked especially beautiful, almost like I was seeing her for the first time. I became emotional, teared up for a moment, but quickly clawed myself back. It reminded me of the first time I met her. Her brother introduced us, a barbeque at his parent’s house. One of those great, early summer nights─ their terrace high on a knoll and deep forests behind. Redwood picnic tables scattered about in the dark and candle lamps on the tables. When I arrived, a lot of people were already there, mingling, smiling, laughing, the smell of something sweet cooking on the barbeque. Change was in the air. Lynn came out of the house in a kind of beautiful shadow, emerging from the artificial light into the backyard. She looked right at me. I fell in love immediately. I wanted to marry her that moment. She had lovely dark hair and dark eyes. Strangely, even now, I couldn’t tell you if they were brown or black, only dark, beautiful, expressive eyes that told me she knew everything about me, but it was okay.
When she looked up, she was still beautiful, her hair still not gray, she smiled, and raised her head to kiss me. I sat down, my back to the entrance, the owner—a busty middle-aged woman with dark hair—approached our table. I had met her at an event for new businesses in Stamford and wished her luck. She remembered me and offered us a bottle of wine.
“Thanks for coming in,” she said. “Your wife is lovely. We’ve become acquainted waiting for you. Are we celebrating tonight?”
“Well, Jay got a new job today,” Lynn said, smiling at me. Jay, our oldest, the singer songwriter, had been out of work for months. He hooked up with some old friends who started a moving company in Brooklyn where he lived among other struggling artists.
“I guess we are celebrating,” I said.
I reached across the table and grabbed her hand, while the owner left to retrieve a bottle of wine. It was not a cause for celebration. Even so, I grabbed on to it. I had a long history of always making everything all right, pleasant. A great sense of relief washed over me and we started to talk about Jay and his situation.
“Well, it’s something,” I said. “I mean, not what we hoped for him.”
“I can barely talk about it,” she said, abruptly changing her tone as the owner left us. “I haven’t been able to sleep thinking about his life down there, living in some old warehouse.”
“Well, it’s not that bad,” I said, trying to reassure her. But I had seen his apartment and it was a dingy artist’s loft at best. An old warehouse converted to residential that was barely up to code.
“Can’t you find something for him at Seaboard,” she asked. Seaboard, the name of my company.
Then the owner returned to our table, and by the time she opened the wine and had me taste it, it was time to hear the specials. In one swallow, a crisp, cold, heady chardonnay went right to my head in sudden and grateful relief. We never returned to Jay or the meeting that day. I just couldn’t get there. I hated myself.
*
Tom and Bill returned to my office, a few days after they’d confronted me. On an exceptionally sunny, warm day for December, they presented a letter for me to resign from the company. We were in the main conference room—a very bright room, all glass partitions, a framed window behind, the same view of the hotel construction, which was still proceeding, the workers moving about robustly, unaware of us. With a clear view from reception, I could see the staff passing, the drama still not known to them.
“We don’t expect you to sign it until you’ve had your lawyers review it,” Bill said.
“Absolutely,” said Tom, kindly. Almost another side of him. Not that I believed it. But nothing was real anymore. I was Alice falling down the well. Without reading it, I started to sign it, but Bill interrupted me.
“John, you know when you sign that you’ll be wiped out,” he said matter of factly. I couldn’t tell if he was advising me or threatening me. Bill could control his emotions during the most stressful events.
After a short pause, filled with guilt for what I had done, and some crazy logic going through my head that signing this might restore some credibility with them, I signed it without reading it. Like jumping off a cliff.
*
I still hadn’t told my family. But my daughter, Meredith, who had been working part time as a marketing consultant for the company, was in the office during that week and became aware of all the events that transpired. She had a close relationship with Cecile, our office manager, who confided to her the events of that week. She confronted me in a phone call when I was at lunch, alone in a new eatery on the outskirts of Stamford, trying to gather myself with two glasses of wine at a well-appointed bar, marble and glass everywhere, and several large television screens, all tuned to the business channel. “Halftime Report” was in the middle of the morning’s stock report, and three familiar analysts, dressed in their usual individual styles, droning about the ups and downs of various stocks. It only reinforced my new reality that I had become totally disconnected to the daily narratives of the normal world.
“Dad. We have to have a family meeting,” she said. “Mom has no idea what’s going on.”
“Yes,” I answered. “I know that. Just was waiting for some more discussion with the workout guys before I told everyone.”
I wasn’t being honest. I was just putting off the unpleasant discussion that I knew was inevitable. My partners had hired a restructuring specialist to reorganize the company after my resignation.
But I didn’t fool her, she said that if I didn’t set up a meeting today, she would call her mother herself.
When I returned to the office, Meredith confronted me before I even sat down in my chair. An early winter storm was brewing. I hadn’t taken an overcoat to lunch. It was a long walk in a chilling wind from the restaurant. I was still cold when I sat down. Meredith had chosen to stand in front of me instead of being seated on one of the leather visitors chairs in front of my desk.
“Dad, I called Mom,” she said abruptly. “I told her everything.”
Having just turned forty, and a new mother the past summer, her singing career was on hold and she worked part time for me from home. But she was out of the loop on the business status until that week.
“What did she say,” I said as calmly as possible. My go-to reaction in crisis was always to act like it wasn’t. I acted like she just told me what time it was. But my head was exploding. I had lost control. After so many years of managing and trying to control revelations about the company, I had nothing left to assuage them. I was like a plastic bottle floating in the ocean.
“I told Mom we’d have a family meeting this afternoon,” she said. Not answering my question. Then continued. “I called the boys too. They’re all coming.”
*
When I arrived home, Lynn was in the Great room. Not as in great or large, but an open area of kitchen, dining and den altogether, overlooking the patio and the tall pines behind it. Seated on a chair, she was looking straight ahead out to the patio, the high pines bare and blowing, the early winter storm ramping up. She didn’t turn toward me, though I knew she heard me come in. I sat in the love seat next to her but looked away from her. There was a long pause. Like the “come to Jesus” meeting with Tom and Bill, I couldn’t retrieve anything to say. I needed something reassuring to say, but there was nothing reassuring to say. What, ‘we’ll be all right…it’s not true…I have a plan.’ There was nothing. We were financially wiped out and I was going to jail, and I couldn’t do anything to protect her. Warren Buffett said it takes “twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” My five minutes had arrived and I was at a loss for words.
“I guess you finally heard,” I said, finally breaking the silence.
“Meredith makes me feel so stupid,” she said, still looking straight ahead outside. It was starting to snow and had become windy, blowing light flurries. The kind that presages a big storm.
“Is it true. Everything’s gone?”
“Yes,” I said, so weakly, I wasn’t sure that she heard me. I looked at her for a moment. It was painful to face her. She just kept looking straight away. Sad, frightened, confused.
“Why does she have to make me feel so stupid. I mean should I have known?” Then she looked at me for the first time before continuing. Not angry, still processing. “You’ve been keeping crazy hours, so I knew something was up. But you’ve always come out of these things.”
“Not this time,” I said.
She put her hands over her eyes, bending down and shaking her head. “I just can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. Everything gone,” she said.
Then, leaning back in her chair, she continued, looking directly at me to asses my real feelings. She knew that I tend to understate everything. “She said you could go to jail.”
“Yes.” I answered. I had become a passive participant. Just waiting for questions. I had nothing to offer.
She stood up, walked to the glass doors leading to the patio, placed her hands on the glass, but pulled them off quickly. The glass was ice cold. A nasty wind had strewn branches on the empty planters with dead plants from the summer that she hadn’t removed. She was unlucky in the garden. It was one of her sore points. She was so artistically centered with her music, her portraits, even her cooking, but she had no success in the garden. All efforts to create the garden she envisioned disappointed. After a long pause, she answered without looking at me.
“I could live in a hut with you. I could care less. We’ve had everything. But you in jail? I don’t think I could take that.”
Another pause. I didn’t think she wanted to press me. She never really pushed me.
“How could you get to this?” she asked, turning to look at me, but still in front of the patio door. “I can’t imagine you would risk everything after all we’ve been through.”
The travails of the past had become anecdotes and interesting stories we enjoyed telling, even hyping them, like other successful people who’d overcome previous failures and wear them like a badge of honor. I had three previous careers: a family construction business that failed, a real estate start up that cratered and eleven relocations since we were married. Seaboard had changed everything, twenty years of success and prosperity, a fantasy comeback story, all the failures seemingly behind us.
“It was a slow creeping conundrum. Not a big deal at first. Then more serious. There was a tipping point. I crossed it without recognizing it or ignoring it, or rationalizing it. And then it was too late.”
She walked back to her chair. She turned towards me and started to say something two or three times before she finally spoke after a long pause. “What are we going to do now?”
I was leaning over, staring at the floor but briefly turned toward the patio, the wind was picking up and shook the glass door. It was like the meeting with Tom and Bill, searching for something reassuring to say. But nothing coming.
“We’ll sell the house here,” I said. I hadn’t even thought about moving. It just came out and I kept going. “Move to our place in Florida until I know what the outcome of my legal situation will be.”
“Aye, Yaye Yaye. Just like that?”
“There’s really no other option.”
We had moved eleven times since we married. We thought this house was the last move. I kept telling everyone. “They’ll carry me out of this one.”
She didn’t say anything else. She just kept staring out to the patio. I sat back in my chair, staring ahead. The light in the room created a sharp reflection of us in the patio’s glass door. Staring at it, I was sure she didn’t like the reflection. She wasn’t happy with her weight, her hair. A substitute hairdresser ruined her hair earlier in the week. She often asked if she should let her hair go gray. Her weight was only a marginal issue. She didn’t look overweight, just not her weight from ten years ago. Overall, she didn’t look her age, and was still, a beautiful woman. I looked younger than my age growing up. As I got older, it became a positive. Even then, hardly any gray hair for a man in his seventies. But my reflection told the story, my eyes were drawn and puffy, and I looked my age. I had put on weight, skipping my morning work outs, over eating, drinking more, and losing some height. Once six toot two, now, barely six feet. I turned away from it. So much more to discuss. But I was spent, and neither of us could break the silence.
She kept looking down. I wondered if she was thinking of all the other men she could have married. She told me once that she was happy she never married any of them. I was so different from them, and the other husbands of our friends.
“All those hyper-competitive men with their flashing egos and little boy insecurities. You are not like that,” she said. “You never come home from work slamming doors or bringing a long face or a tantrum from the day’s battles.” She said she was so sure of me.
Then my daughter arrived. She came in the back door which opens directly into the great room. The door was always open, we never locked it, even when we went on vacations. Our house was at the end of a quiet dead-end lane surrounded by woods. Something so safe about it. There was a cold chill when she opened the door, that seemed to follow her in. She walked past us and sat down in the last chair in the room and didn’t say anything at first.
“I told the boys.” She said, very matter of factly.
I can’t remember the conversation, but everything Meredith said, she spoke with anger and annoyance at both of us. Something like we both were to blame. Something she should have been aware of and her mother as well. Like she’d been duped or screwed.
A few minutes later, my middle son Tom arrived, working on a career in stand-up comedy with a one-man, Off-Broadway show struggling to find its audience. He entered softly, unlike his sister. But letting in another cold stream of air. The room was still chilled from Meredith’s entrance. He didn’t sit down. He just stood behind his mother and waited for someone to say something. I saw how uncomfortable he was and I got up and hugged him. I could feel his discomfort. Like he wasn’t sure to hug me back, so he didn’t.
I don’t remember if the other boys came or didn’t, or any other conversation. Probably because it’s just too painful to hold all those memories. I just remember the snow piling up on the patio, long painful pauses and silences, Meredith’s anger, Tom’s confusion and Lynn’s sadness.
*
Backing out of the driveway, we took one last look at the red converted carriage house with the statue of George Washington in the front, which brought me back to the first time we went to see the house and didn’t know which one of the houses on the street was the one we were looking for. Still, we knew it was number 19, and none of the houses had numbers on them. We stopped in front of the red carriage house with the statue and wished that this was the house. Just as we were pulling past it, we saw on the back door the number 19 and then knew that this was the house. We fell in love with it immediately. It was heartbreaking to leave it now, and we stopped again in the front for one more long look at the house that I told everyone they would carry me out of.
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