On the Peculiar Custom of Waiting for a Number

I read, this morning, over a grapefruit that arrived already segmented — one does hate to *labor* before ten — that Wall Street has entered something called a "holding pattern." The futures, apparently, are "little changed." Traders, poor lambs, are said to be "cautious," bracing themselves, as though for weather, for a fresh delivery of "inflation data," after which — and only after which — they will permit themselves to decide anything at all.

I have read this sentence perhaps six times now, turning it over the way one turns over a stone to see what's living under it, and I confess I simply cannot locate the part where anyone *does* anything. They are waiting. For a number. That a different set of people, somewhere else, will produce later, on their own schedule, for reasons that remain entirely their own. And until that number arrives, the whole apparatus — trillions of dollars, presumably, worth of decision-making capacity — simply sits there. Idling. Like a car in a driveway whose owner has misplaced the keys and decided, rather than looking for them, to have a small sit-down on the porch instead.

I don't wait for numbers. I have never once, in my life, delayed a purchase, a plan, a lunch, or a whim, pending confirmation from a spreadsheet. If I want the sweater, one simply *has* the sweater. If I want the house in Biarritz — and last spring I did, rather badly, for about a fortnight — one simply telephones Father, and by Thursday there is a house, and by Friday I have already lost interest in it, and it sits there still, I believe, being dusted by someone lovely named Marisol. At no point in that transaction did I consult an "indicator." At no point did I brace for anything. Bracing, as a physical posture, is for people who suspect the ground beneath them might move, and the ground beneath *me*, you understand, was poured in concrete some generations back and has never once so much as trembled.

But this is the article's whole tragedy, isn't it, dressed up in little grey suits and calling itself finance: an entire class of people whose relationship to their own money is one of *permission-seeking*. They cannot simply decide to buy the thing, or sell the thing, or hold the thing — no, they must first ask the number if it's allowed. It's terribly close, if you squint, to asking Mummy if you can have a biscuit before dinner, except Mummy, in this case, is a rolling twelve-month Consumer Price Index, and dinner is never actually coming, and the biscuit, I am given to understand, is a house.

"Conviction is thin across markets," the article says, and there is something almost moving about that phrase, in the way that a very small, very damp dog is moving. Thin conviction! I have never had thin conviction about anything in my life. My convictions arrive fully upholstered. I woke up this past Tuesday with the unshakeable certainty that the Deauville house wanted re-tiling in a paler travertine, and by lunch there were three men with samples, and by Wednesday the old tile — which, I should say, was in *perfectly* good condition, but had begun to bore me — was simply gone, to wherever tile goes, and nobody at any point asked me to await a data release. That is what conviction looks like. It does not require confirmation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It requires a telephone and a general sense that Father's account can absorb the disappointment.

I think what troubles me — no, "troubles" is too strong, nothing troubles me past the second course, but what *disappoints* me, which is really my only setting — is the sheer scale of the deferral. These are, I gather, professional people. Grown adults, with degrees, with actual desks, who have organized their entire waking lives around the anticipation of a Thursday morning report on the price of milk and rent and whatever else the poors are purchasing this month, and who will not act — will not so much as *twitch* — until they know whether that number came in warm or cool. It's rather like watching an enormously expensive weather vane. All that machinery, all that suiting, all that Bloomberg-terminal glow, in service of finding out which way to lean.

One does wonder why they don't simply ask someone who already knows the answer to money, which is that it behaves the way you tell it to, provided you're speaking to it in the right tone and from the right zip code. I have never once experienced "inflation" as a phenomenon that inconveniences me, because Father's people — I believe there are several of them, with charts, in a building I've been to exactly once and found terribly beige — appear to handle that sort of weather on my behalf, the way an umbrella handles rain, without my ever needing to know it's happening. The poors, meanwhile, seem to feel every single tremor of it directly, in the actual groceries, which strikes me as an extraordinarily inefficient way to live, rather like insisting on standing outside during the storm to "really feel the data."

And "traders," as a vocation — I want to be terribly fair to them, because I understand it is, technically, a job, in the sense that one shows up somewhere and is compensated for one's attendance — but what a strange little ritual it is, this staring at a screen from dawn hoping the screen will grant you permission to act on your own money. I have staff who are paid to have opinions on my behalf about far less consequential things — whether the Sancerre has "opened" enough, say — and even *they* don't require a government release to render a verdict. They simply taste it and tell me. Perhaps what Wall Street wants, more than an inflation print, is a very good sommelier.

I don't say any of this with cruelty, you understand — I find I'm not really capable of the emotion, in the sense that cruelty requires imagining the other person's interior life, and I confess the interior life of a man in a beige suit refreshing a data terminal is not a room I've ever had reason to enter. I simply find the whole choreography a touch sad, in the way a matinee is sad — all that effort, in the middle of a perfectly good day, to sit very still and *wait*. One does hope, for their sake, that the number comes in the way they'd like. And if it doesn't — well. One simply asks Father. It is astonishing how few problems survive that sentence, you know?

Two stars, and I am, as ever, being generous.

— Cynthia, from the veranda, where nothing whatsoever is pending