Look, Jane, Look! Noooooo!

Nightmare on Wall Street

NEW YORK, Oct. 10 -- There was a time -- four weeks ago, to be precise -- when you could check your portfolio without having to screw up your courage. You could drop by every few days, often just to gaze with some mix of hope and pride, like a parent at their kid's school play.

Awww. You're adorable, you'd say to yourself. And you are going to be huge.

But at some point, the stock market went from national casino to national crisis, and the country acquired a new way to tell people apart: There are those who can bear to look and those who avert their gaze; those who follow the nose-diving value of their investments and those who want to close their eyes and hum until the noise stops. This is what happens when the financial news gets truly grim.

"I can't stand it," says Liz Stone, an accountant from Atlanta, visiting Manhattan with her husband, Troy. "And he can't stop talking about it. Which drives me crazy. I mean, we were just at lunch and he says, 'Do you know what's going on with our portfolio?' And then he tells me. Which kills me!"

Troy, who is in the software business, is smiling a little.

"I look because I want to know," he says. "And at some point, if prices get low enough, I think we should be buying more stocks."

"The thing is, he gets so consumed that it affects his mood," Liz says.

The Stones were standing Friday next to Nasdaq headquarters in Times Square, a building with a first-floor TV studio visible from the sidewalk and dozens of video screens, all of them blinking the day's hideous news from the frontier of U.S. capitalism. Nearly every number is red, and all the arrows point down. Now and then, a correspondent shows up in the studio, and there are a lot of waving hands. Across the street, news bulletins run ticker-style around the digital "zipper" at One Times Square: "GE net falls 22 percent . . . Macy's reins in expectations . . . Morgan Stanley outlook darkens as stock tumbles 26 percent."

This seems the perfect place for a quick survey of Lookers and Gaze Averters. The Lookers tend to fall into two categories: those who sift through the wreckage for scraps that might be worth something and those who think it's important to embrace reality, no matter how unpleasant. They rubberneck at their own pace.

"I can look twice a week," says Stephanie McMahon, a federal employee, heading back to her office after lunch.

"I look with one eye," Allyn Burrows says, as he stares through the Nasdaq window. "Twice a day."

"We didn't look until last week," Jackson Neros says. "But we got a statement in the mail with the college savings plan for our kids, and I opened it."

Neros's wife, Darla, is shaking her head, as if she's reliving a mugging.

"Yeah," Jackson says. "Pretty bad."

Richard Burgos didn't look until Friday. Something about the three consecutive sessions of stock market losses gave his inner Looker the upper hand. He typed his password into Fidelity.com and then, ouch.

"It was shocking," he says. "I knew it would be a lot. But it was shocking."

He has already taken some budget-cutting measures -- he unplugged his alarm system, which comes with a monthly fee, and he won't be calling his maid any time soon.

The Looker/Gaze Averter divide stands ready for the attention of the social scientists. Does gender play a role? (The Lookers tend to be men, though there are plenty of couples in which it's the husband who wants to avert his gaze.) Does Gaze Averting correlate with a capacity for denial? How about optimism? And if you're a Looker, are you more likely to be a risk-lover, too?

Area for further study: What happens when adamant Gaze Averters realize that they're married to natural-born Lookers? One spouse wants to live with the lights out, the other with the lights on. Is there a middle ground of dusk? You get the sense that couples are negotiating this very question now, looking for a place where the pain of knowledge and the bliss of ignorance can coexist.

"As soon as I get home, my husband wants to talk about what happened in the market that day," says Diane Schwebel, who was visiting from New Jersey with her daughter Leah. "I mean, he didn't want to come into the city today because he thought -- well, in part he thought there would be people jumping out of windows. And also, he wanted to stay home and look for bargains. He's on his computer, trading. He was, like, 'How can I take the day off now?' "

For Gaze Averters, the question boils down to, "Why would you look?" It's not like you're going to sell. The gains were on paper, and so are the losses, and if you've got enough time before you retire, or need the money, maybe there'll be gains again.

But more than that, looking is just a bummer.

"I don't want to ruin my birthday," says Burgos's companion, who declined to give her name. "I plan to celebrate."