The Deep

To his surprise, Sanders liked the work. It was easy and exciting and remunerative. He was gregarious, liked to take chances with money, and his early successes (accomplished simply by following the advice of more experienced brokers) brought him as many clients as he chose to service. He was bright enough to realize that though the Dow might hit the fabulous 1,000 mark, something would eventually happen to bring the market down, so he learned about hedge funds and selling short. The slide that began in 1968 made him, on paper, reasonably well off.

He took himself off salary and became a “customer’s man,” surviving solely on commissions received from buying and selling stocks for his clients. He was very good at his job (he believed he had a special gift for sensing impending changes in the market, and he relished taking risks based on hunches), and three rival firms tried to hire him at handsome salaries. He refused, preferring the unpredictable life of the customer’s man. The fact that he never knew, from one month to the next, how much money he would make, excited him.

He viewed it as freedom. If he failed to make a living, he had no one to blame but himself. If (as was the case) he succeeded, there was no one with whom he had to share credit.

His wife, Gloria, however, regarded this freedom, this so-called courage, as madness. She was an orderly person who did not take chances, who liked to know exactly how much money would be in each of the envelopes she kept in a file drawer labeled “budget.” There was envelopes for food, clothing, toys, entertainment, and schoolbooks.

By 1971, Sanders had two children, a co-operative apartment on West Sixty-seventh Street, and a house in Westhampton. He knew he should have been a happy man, but he was bored. Gloria bored him. She was interested in, and knowledgeable about, only two things: clothes and food. Their sex life had become routine and predictable. Gloria professed a fondness for sex, but she refused to discuss—let alone attempt—ways of making it more interesting. Sanders found himself, during love-making, fantasizing about movie stars, secretaries, and Billie Jean King.

Soon his work began to bore him. He had proved to himself that he could make money in every kind of market, and he enjoyed both the making and the spending of money.

But the challenge was gone. He grew restless and began to do careless things.

He still dreamed, from time to time, of working with Cousteau.

He kept himself in excellent physical condition, as if in anticipation of a phone call from Cousteau.

But he was not satisfied with fine-tuning his body: he liked to test it. Once, he intentionally gained ten pounds, to see if, as he believed, a special diet he had concocted would strip off the poundage in three days. Another time, on a bet, he set out to run ten miles.

He collapsed after six miles, but took consolation in a doctor—friend’s statement that—considering that Sanders hadn’t trained for the marathon-he should have collapsed after two or three miles. He saw a television show about hang-gliding-soaring through the air suspended from a giant kite-and determined to build himself a hang glider. He built it and intended to test it by jumping off an Adirondack cliff, until a hang-gliding expert convinced him that his kite was aerodynamically unsound: the wing struts were too weak and probably would have broken, causing the kite to fold up and Sanders to fall like a stone down the side of the mountain.

There was only one week a year when he wasn’t bored, the week in winter when his children visited their grandparents, his wife went to an Arizona health spa, and he went diving at one of the Club Mediterranee resorts in the Caribbean.

He met Gail at the Club Med on Guadalupe—or, rather, under the Club Med. They were on a guided diving tour of some coral gardens. The water was clear, and the sunlight brought out all the natural colors on the shallow reef. After a few minutes of following the meticulous guide, who stopped at every specimen of sea life and made sure each diver took a long look, Sanders left the group and let himself glide down the face of the reef toward the bottom. He was vaguely aware that he was not alone, but he paid no attention to the figure who followed him. He let himself float with the motion of the sea, turning in lazy circles.

He swam along the base of the reef, peering in crannies. A small octopus darted across his path, squirting black fluid, and disappeared into the reef. Sanders swam to the hole the octopus had entered and was trying to coax it out of its den, when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned and saw a woman’s face, white with fear, her eyes wide and bulging. She made the divers’ signal for “out of air,” a finger drawn across the throat in a slitting motion. He took a breath and handed her his mouthpiece. She breathed deeply twice and passed the mouthpiece back to him. Together they “buddy-breathed” to the surface.