Money to Burn

3

I COULDN’T WAIT TO GET OFF THE SAXTON SILVERS PARTY BOAT THE next morning, and by noon the sails were full on our private charter. It was a fifty-foot Jeanneau International, which was probably more boat than we needed. But Ivy kept her promise-“This is one move you will never regret, Michael Cantella”-and we spent each of the first three nights breaking in a different stateroom. “A promise is a promise,” she told me, and by now I knew everything about her was as advertised. She hadn’t become the love of my life by pumping me full of candy-coated popcorn and then skunking me on the prize.

The past three months had been picture perfect. My relationship with Ploutus Investments had been well established by the time Ivy started working there, and she was just a month into her new job when I invited her to lunch. She turned me down-repeatedly. Ivy was serious about her career, and dating a guy like me could have created a conflict of interest. Or maybe she thought I was just another Wall Street jerk. Whatever the reason, we worked it out on the condition that I say nothing to her boss, agreeing to keep our first date “just between us.” By the second date, sparks were flying. Ten weeks later, we were sailing the Bahamas together.

“Michael, can you help with the anchor?”

“Got it,” I said.

This was our fourth day away from Saxton Silvers and the MS Excess. Just Ivy, me, and a Bahamian captain named Rumsey who lived in a T-shirt that read RELAX: IT’S MON-DAY, MON. Ivy had raced J/24s in college and was a skilled sailor in her own right. Our captain knew the waters and was also a fairly talented chef. I did all the important stuff, like phoning ahead to the marinas to restock the liquor cabinet-and helping with the anchor.

“Try not to fall overboard this time, okay, honey?”

“I didn’t fall. I just picked a not-so-convenient time to go for a swim.”

The fact that I couldn’t even stand on the bow of a sailboat and operate a motorized anchor reel was doubly embarrassing because my father lived for deep-sea fishing. People expected me to have boating in my blood, but in reality I hardly knew my dad, who had never married my mother. Mom died when I was six, and I was raised by my maternal grandparents, “Nana” and “Papa,” a couple of Depression-era immigrants who had grown up on the south side of Chicago and who regarded recreational boating as the sport of kings and millionaire tycoons. When I finished high school, Papa retired and we moved to south Florida, just a few miles from the ocean, but by then the die was cast. I had spent my formative years in a two-bedroom house that was across the street from an endless cornfield on the Illinois-Wisconsin border. Bowling, not boating, was what we were about. I could also kick anybody’s ass in Ping-Pong or bumper pool, but only if the match was held in an unfinished basement.

The electric motor whined and the heavy metal chain rattled as the anchor rose through water so clean and clear it seemed I could have reached in and touched bottom. There were no mishaps this time, and with the anchor aboard and the sails trimmed, we were on our way. Our plan was to sail from port to port as we wished-swimming, relaxing, snorkeling, relaxing some more. At the end of each day, if there was no slip available at the marina, or if we felt like a night away from civilization, we would find protected water off a deserted beach and simply drop anchor. Sometimes I called ahead to a local restaurant to arrange for a team to motor out to the sailboat at sunset and pamper us with fine wine, a local feast, and first-class service. On other nights we would “rough it,” take the rubber dinghy to shore, and sample the local brews as we explored the town.

I relaxed on the bow, watching Ivy at the helm. Right about then it occurred to me that the string bikini had been an excellent invention.

“What are you looking at?” said Ivy.

“Perfection,” I said.

“Thanks, mon,” said Rumsey. “You pretty cute you-self.”

We laughed, but Rumsey roared. Most Bahamians I’ve met have a great sense of humor and a joy for life. Yesterday, we’d sailed into a marina that was little more than a wooden shack where you could catch a rum buzz and dance to reggae. It was called “Happy People”-and everyone there really was. When I asked Rumsey about that now, he just shrugged.

“Some people happy. Some people not happy. You choose, mon. Not all Bahamians choose happy.”

“Like our cabdriver in Miami,” said Ivy.

I was sorry she’d brought that up. I’d been trying to put the FTAA riots out of my mind, but Ivy did have a point: Our driver definitely didn’t own any condos at the Happy People Marina. His life had probably been pretty simple back in Nassau, I thought. Now-driving a cab in Miami-the poor guy was stressed out enough to work the residential mortgage desk at Saxton Silvers.

“So, choose happy, mon,” said Rumsey.

I smiled and climbed into the boat’s hammock with my BlackBerry. I loved people for whom life was so simple. I hated people for whom life was so simple.

I woke to the sound of steel drums.

I had no idea how long my nap on the bow had lasted, but the boat was anchored, the sails were down, and we were twenty yards from shore floating in a bay of sun-sparkled turquoise. The beach stretched for miles in either direction, a seemingly endless pinkish-white ribbon of sand. It was deserted, save for a tiki bar we’d stumbled upon, where a half-dozen recreational boaters like us relaxed to calypso music. The choice between light or dark rum would be our only concern.

“Hey, Rip Van Winkle is up.”

It was Ivy’s voice, but she was nowhere to be seen. I walked toward the cockpit and spotted her floating on an inflated air mattress near the boat.

“How long was I asleep?”

“Forty years,” said Ivy. “The market crashed, we lost the house, the kids hate us, and a pack of IRS bloodhounds turned us into a couple of island-hopping fugitives. Welcome to paradise.”

I removed my figurative bachelor’s hat to process that one. With the exception of the kids hating us, Ivy’s look into the future had its allure. It was arguably better than forty years in a capitalist-eats-capitalist world where there was an open trading market-a place to scratch, claw, and make money-every minute of every single day.

My BlackBerry rang. It was in the hammock thirty feet away, but I could hear it loud and clear, even over the steel drums. New mothers who instinctively knew the sound of their crying infant had absolutely nothing on guys like me and the sound of a ringing BlackBerry. I ignored it, jumped overboard, and took a leisurely swim toward Ivy. Three days in the sun had bronzed her Pilates-toned body, and it would have been easy to think only of taking her back to the boat and checking out the tan lines.

“I had a strange dream,” I said, resting my forearms on the edge of her air mattress.

Ivy lay on her stomach, looking straight into my eyes. “Tell me.”

“The sun is just coming up, and I’m alone on my bicycle, pedaling hard down the highway. A black SUV with dark tinted windows is approaching in the opposite lane, faster and faster. All of sudden it swerves into my lane and, before I can react, the bumper clips my front tire and sends me flying into the ditch.”

Her eyes clouded with concern. “Don’t let that jerk with the pepper spray in Miami get to you,” she said.

“He did creep me out,” I said. “The way he looked at me and said, ‘It’s only gonna get worse.’ It was like a threat.”

“That’s what the whole FTAA protest was about. Corporate greed: It’s only getting worse.”

“You’re probably right, it’s just…”

“Just what?”

I pulled myself closer up on the raft. “The thing is that the dream I just told you about-the car running me off the road-actually happened to me.”

“What? When?”

“About ten days before our trip.”

“Were you hurt?”

“A few bruises. My elbow still kind of hurts. Worst part is that the jackass in the SUV kept on going, as if he couldn’t have cared less if I was alive or dead.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“Because you would have told me to stop riding my bicycle on the highway at sunrise.”

“And now you’re having nightmares about it?”

“I don’t know if you’d call this a nightmare. It was kind of goofy.”

“How do you mean?”

“In my dream the SUV stops,” I said. “The driver gets out, runs around to the back of the car, throws open the doors, and grabs a dog.”

“A dog?”

“Not just any dog. It’s Tippy, a black Lab my grandparents gave me for my sixth birthday, right after I moved in with them. She has him in her arms and runs toward me, yelling, ‘Hurry, let’s go, Tippy’s gonna die if we don’t get him to the DQ!’”

“You mean the ER?”

“No, she’s definitely taking him to Dairy Queen.”

“That’s too weird. But back up a second. You said the driver’s a ‘she’?”

“That’s the even weirder part,” I said. “It’s you.”

“I ran you off the road?”

“Not on purpose.”

“No, of course not. I was just in too much of a hurry to get Tippy over to the DQ for a hot fudge sundae and save his life.”

“Crazy, I know.”

“Nah. Any skilled psychiatrist would give you a very simple interpretation of the underlying meaning.”

“And that would be…”

“Don’t have piña coladas for breakfast.”

I pushed up from below and flipped her air mattress. Ivy screamed and went under, then popped right back up and grabbed me in a scissor hold, my face somehow buried between her breasts, her thighs squeezing the air from my lungs. If ever a man was going to drown, I figured this was probably the way to go.

Damn, she’s strong.

“Had enough?” she said.

“Uh-uh,” I said, her bikini-top string in my teeth.

We started laughing so hard, the hedge fund in total control as Wall Street hung on by a thread, so to speak. I cried uncle, and we were still laughing and coughing up water as we swam back to the air mattress.

“I’m so glad we ditched Saxton Silvers,” I said as I laid my head next to hers.

“Me, too.”

“I really like being with you.”

“Me, too.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“We should get married.”

Instantly I started thinking of ways to retract my words, to explain them away-I didn’t mean now, I meant ten years from now; or I didn’t really mean it at all, it was just a follow-up joke to the crack she’d made earlier about losing the house and the kids hating us. But I’d found success by trusting my instincts, and even though we’d dated only three months, something about my slip felt oddly right.

“Okay,” she said.

I was suddenly having trouble understanding. “Okay what?”

“Let’s get married,” she said.

Her response was so casual that I thought she was kidding. “Are you serious?”

“Michael, read my lips: Yes.”

My mouth fell open, but no words came. I was about to grab her and give her a kiss, but she sat up quickly, her legs straddling the air mattress.

“We should do it here.”

I looked around. “Like a destination wedding where we invite-”

“No invitations. I mean do it today.”

She looked so beautiful sitting there, and every fiber of my body was singing.

“Rumsey!” I called out.

Our dreadlocked captain rose up from the sailboat. “Yeah, mon?”

“Find us a preacher.”