“You get these orders?” asks Kevin.

“I got ‘em. Take the CSCO and PMCS to Goldman, give it to them not held, we gotta pay our soft dollar bill. I’m taking the rest to Morgan.”

“I pick things up, I put them down.”

More buy orders. It almost made me wonder if there was a secret, parallel trading desk on the other side of the building where he sent all the sell orders.

Weber: B 500 INKT Apr 115 calls

Weber: B 6000 WBVN Apr 10 calls

Weber: B 3000 EGHT Apr 10 calls

Options, now. The vol is so jacked, we’re paying $5 million a day just to have these positions. But it doesn’t matter—our stocks keep ripping through strikes. Weber likes buying the short-dated, at the money stuff, for maximum gamma. If it didn’t work, it would be incredibly expensive. Now he’s buying calls on shitty WBVN, which everyone knows is going to go tits up very soon. I call this one into Lehman Brothers, and within minutes of the trade hitting the floor, the stock is up a buck. Even the floor monkeys know a Weber order when they see it; they gleefully front-run the shit out of it.

This fucking guy is going to blow himself up. I know what’s going to happen; we’re going to be down a smooth 5 percent in a day. Then, I remember that we don’t really even have any investors left; it’s all Weber’s money. So who would know? How would the press find out? It’s almost to the point where we don’t even need to fill out the ADV any more, we can just do whatever the hell we want. But I need the money.

How do I tell him?

trdrbear: Weber

trdrbear: you ok?

trdrbear: maybe we should slow down a little

No answer.

* * * *

After Katharine told me, I wasn’t really angry. Not at first. I was introspective. I went through her accusations line by line: never around. A little bit of a drunk. Not easy to deal with. Distant. I blamed it all on myself. I didn’t stop and think that I had given Katharine a giant blank check and complete freedom to do whatever she wanted with her life, on the unspoken condition that she keep up appearances and take care of the children. She ended up outsourcing that fairly early on.

I told her I was sorry for the things I had done and left undone. Maybe it was wrong of me to expect contrition—I got none. She told me every detail of everything I had done to wrong her over the course of our marriage. Every detail. How did she remember that stuff? It is almost as if she was keeping a journal: “Things I Can’t Let Go Of.” In retrospect, it was such an odd marriage because we never fought. If I did something to upset her, she put it in her mental shit list journal. If she did something to wrong me, I simply forgot about it because I was too busy to care. The scorecard, therefore, was not balanced.