Bond Girl (6 page)

I was halfway through my third mini BLT when someone pulled my ponytail, yanking my head backward. I turned to see Reese with a big smile on his face, and a shrimp in his hand.

“This spot taken, Girlie?”

“Nope. No one else back here except for me and the swine.”

“The what?” He leaned his elbows on the railing so that we were closer to eye level. Reese must have been six foot four, and it was hard to hear him what with the noise of the wind and the boat engine, not to mention the din from the idiots bragging about the many feats of intellectual strength they'd performed over the past two months.

“Remember the day I started? You asked me if I fancied the swine. I'm a big fan of the swine. I just wanted you to know.” I held up the remaining half of my bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich.

Reese started laughing and patted me on the head. “I forgot about that! I like to unnerve the new kids right away. It's my idea of a personality test. If you had gotten all huffy on me, I never would have talked to you again, you see? With girls especially, you gotta know what you're dealing with if you want to stay out of trouble. Good job. So far, you're okay with me.”

“Thank God! I'm Alex, but my friends call me Girlie,” I said, as I extended my hand, feeling comfortable for the first time since stepping foot on the boat.

He laughed again. “Well, hello there, Girlie. You can call me Reese. How are you liking Cromwell so far?”

“I love it.”

“Really? No one's given you a hard time?”

“Nope! I'm having a ball. Everything is great.”

“Bullshit,” he replied with a smirk. “Don't lie to me on the first date, sugar. I only have room in my life for one woman who lies to my face, and I've already got a wife.” He held up his left hand and shook his ring-clad finger.

I didn't think complaining was a very good idea. So I stayed silent.

“I'm not letting you leave until you give me an honest answer, sugar. How are you liking Cromwell?”

He was serious.

“Well, I'm just worried that maybe I'm not doing enough or that people don't like me. I don't want to be annoying. I'm supposed to be asking everyone questions, but also staying out of the way. That's kind of hard to do considering I don't have my own desk yet.” There, I said it. Now I probably should just throw myself overboard.

“Why do you think people don't like you?” Reese chuckled. “Let me tell you something. If people didn't like you, you'd know it. You should ask some of the other kids what their time at the firm has been like, and then you'll see how nice people are really being.”

“I was just talking to some of the other analysts and I'm the only one who has to sit on a folding chair. It sounds like they have real work to do, and so far I really haven't been able to do anything except help Drew and a couple of others with a few things.”

“Is that why you're standing over here by yourself instead of mingling with the other rookies?”

“Sort of.”

“Ahhh. I see. And obviously, you believe everything they're saying.”

“Well, yeah, why would they lie?”

“Because they're guys,” he said, without hesitation. “I talked to one guy who's such a tool he doesn't even realize that his team is ripping on him. I'd feel bad for him if I didn't think he was such a prick after talking to him for two minutes.”

“Who?” I asked, eager to discover which Ivy Leaguer wasn't quite as impressive as he claimed.

“That guy, the one in the orange shirt. You know him?” Reese pointed to the gaggle of analysts.

I looked over and was not at all surprised to see Adam holding court. Still.

“Oh yeah. I know him,” I said. “He went to Princeton. And just in case anyone doesn't know he went to Princeton, he name-drops about his eating club, wears at least one orange item every day, and carries a duffel bag with a giant tiger's head on it. He has a huge ego.”

“Sugar, if you don't like big egos, you're in the wrong industry. I'm going to cheer you up though. Watch this. Hey, Tony the Tiger! Come over here.” Reese waved to Adam, whose face lit up like a hundred-watt bulb as he realized that Reese wanted to speak with him. He pulled his shoulders back and adjusted the buckle on his belt, clearly thinking that he was being summoned because he had made such a good impression on a Cromwell managing director. I wasn't sure why Reese asked him to join us, but I knew kudos were not on the menu. Adam smoothed the collar on his tangerine Lacoste polo shirt before he shook Reese's hand, while simultaneously patting him on the back.

“Hey, Reese, right? We spoke a little while ago about Greenspan and the Federal Reserve.” Adam flashed him a big smile before turning his attention toward me. “Hey, Amber.”

“My name's Alex.”

“Right, sorry.”

(“No, you aren't.” I didn't say that.) “No problem.” Sounded better.

“Her friends call her Girlie, though.” Reese was enjoying this. I wondered if I could make it if I tried to swim to shore.

“Girlie?” Adam was confused, a new feeling for him.

“Only her friends, though. I mean, I call her Girlie. You should stick with Alex.”

Adam shrugged. “How long have you been at Cromwell, Reese?”

“Twenty-one years. How long have you been at Cromwell?”

“Two months. But I think I'm really adding value quickly.”

Reese gave me a wink. “Yeah, you were saying that earlier. Why don't you tell my girlie friend here about your trade last week.”

This caught my attention. He was allowed to do a trade? I wasn't even allowed to pick up the phone.

“It was great. I'm trading size already, you know? They want me to just hit the ground running.”

“What does trading size mean?” I asked. Reese pretended to cough to muffle his laughter.

“You know, big trades. Moneymakers, not the little dinky trades that don't matter if you fuck them up.”

“I sit on a folding chair. I guess I'm doing the opposite of trading size,” I said.

“Adam, tell Alex how you did it. Teach her how to work the ropes. Tell her the whole story like you told me.”

Adam was loving the attention. “So there's this company called Cox Communications, a major player. So this guy I'm working with is a fellow Tiger. He's a great guy and really lets me get involved—we were in the same eating club. He took the order from his client and then told me to shout out the order to the trader.”

Here I had to interrupt, because I knew he was lying. “Adam, you haven't passed the Series 7 or the Series 63 yet. You aren't allowed to trade. There's no way they let you do that. It's illegal.”

“Well, no, I didn't execute the actual trade, but his client wanted a big chunk of shares. I had to tell the trader to start building a position, but it wasn't an actual order.”

Reese continued to prompt Adam to finish the story. “So, Adam, what exactly did he tell you to do?”

“I had to stand up and scream across the floor to the trader that I was a large buyer of Cox.”

Reese started laughing and asked Adam to repeat what he'd said.

“You said what?”

“I said I was a large buyer of Cox. Everyone started clapping and cheering. It was awesome.”

I'd heard it before, but now I saw it was true: book smarts and street smarts are
not
the same thing. As far as street smarts went, Adam was clearly a complete idiot.

Reese stood there, his arms folded across his chest, slowly nodding his head. Then he stepped forward and put one hand on each of Adam's shoulders. “Adam, we've got to teach this girlie how 
real
 men operate. So, one more time, show us how you yelled it on the floor.”

“I'M A LARGE BUYER OF COX!” he yelled proudly.

Reese dropped his hands from Adam's shoulders. He tilted his head to one side, never losing eye contact with him, and said ever so slowly, “If I were you, Adam, I wouldn't be crowing about having announced that you're a pole smoker. I'm sure the guys in equities have been laughing their asses off at you ever since.”

Adam's body went rigid. He turned bright red as the full force of his own stupidity hit him. He tried to pretend he was invisible. He wasn't. His brow furrowed like he was in pain, and quietly he said good-bye, this time getting my name right. He walked away slowly, his shoulders slumped forward, no longer pulled back in their arrogant Princeton posture.

I stood silent. I wanted to laugh, but he was my peer, my counterpart on the equity floor. If they could make Adam—undeniably smart and aware—humiliate himself that way, what on earth did my team have in store for me?

Reese patted my head again. “Still think we don't like you, sugar?”

“I can't believe they did that to him.”

“See, that's what people will do when they don't like you. The more time you spend here, the more you'll see how badly we can torment someone when we want to make him miserable. If the worst thing that has happened to you is that you don't have a real desk, then you have nothing to worry about. Play the game, sugar, just play the game.”

“I don't know how to play the game.”

“You'll learn. Until then, just keep your head down and wear beige . . . you get what I'm saying?”

I did. It was the first thing I genuinely understood since I had started. That was something to be thankful for.

“I get it. And I should keep fancying the swine, right?”

“Always fancy the swine, sugar. Now, stop holding up the railing. Get over there and start mingling! You're in sales, for God's sake. We don't need any wallflowers in the group. Work the crowd, make people like you, and pretend to like the assholes you can't stand. That's all part of your new job.”

“Thanks, Reese,” I said as I followed him into the crowd with a renewed sense of confidence and enthusiasm. “For the advice, I appreciate it.”

“You're one of us now, sugar. One thing about our desk: we always have each other's backs. It doesn't mean we won't fuck with you mercilessly, though.”

“Sort of like older brothers?”

“Exactly. Forty of them.”

Reese had given me my very first sales lesson, and it was probably the most important one that I would ever learn: if I wanted to be successful, then I needed to get really good at pretending to like people I didn't.

Four

If I Wanted to Educate the Youth of America, I'd Have Been a Fucking Nursery School Teacher

T
he first week of October, I celebrated a very important occasion with Annie and Liv at a sushi restaurant downtown named, ironically, Bond Street. I had passed all my exams. It was a Friday night and we were all in good moods, so we hit the downstairs lounge of the restaurant and threw back martinis, sushi, and Bloody Marys made with wasabi until two in the morning. It was a good thing we all had apartments to go home to or I have no doubt Liv and I would have fallen asleep on the train and ended up missing our stop on Metro North. Chick didn't register much when I proudly handed him the printouts proving my passing grades on all three exams. I don't know what I expected him to say. Maybe “Good job, Alex.” Or, even, “Take the day off, Alex.” But he didn't. He glanced at the paper, gave me a fist bump, and went into a meeting. I tried not to let it bother me.

I
thought maybe I'd get my own desk after I passed my exams, but November arrived and I was still stuck in the folding chair. Someone had written “Girlie” on the back of it with a Wite-Out pen, so I never had any trouble finding my seat. I wish I knew whom to thank for that.

Every few days I'd move my chair along the row to sit in between two new salespeople. It was impossible to remember the names of my coworkers, because everyone had multiple aliases and was called by various combinations of first, surname, and/or nickname at any given point in time. I didn't know how I was ever going to keep them all straight. There were multiple Johns, Joes, Bobs, and Peters plus those who went by Murph, Sully, or Fitzie, and their names may or may not have also started with John or Joe or Bob or Peter. Then there were the guys with nicknames that replaced whatever their first names were, usually because of personal quirks or idiosyncrasies. There was “Loaf,” named for his horrendously thick head of hair that looked like a loaf of bread; and there were “Tank,” “Moose,” and “Pigpen.” There was a guy called “Mangia” because he ate a lot, and one called “Two-Bite” because he didn't. There was “Shrek,” “Barney Rubble,” and one tall guy with an unusually long neck called “Dino” after the brontosaurus on
The Flintstones.
There was “Chewie,” a hairy guy they compared to Chewbacca, and “Wet Baby Possum,” the guy who sat in the back row who had arguably the worst hair I had ever seen. (Someone had once quipped that it looked like a wet baby possum crawled on his head and died there, and it stuck.) They all wore khakis, various patterned blue shirts, brown belts, and their egos on their sleeves. They laughed loudly and made fun of one another, and I found it virtually impossible to tell them apart. Just addressing someone was a panic-inducing event, because I learned the hard way calling someone Barney because you think that's his real name and not an insulting nickname assigned to him because he looked like Barney Rubble wasn't a good idea. At least Jarrett was pretty mad about it.

Every female on the floor had a name that the men used to reference her, and it was never her real name. Of course, there were only forty or so women, excluding the administrative assistants, among four hundred men, but still, that was a lot of code names to remember. There was “Magda,” so called because she had clearly spent too much time in the sun when she was younger, and “Pepper,” a Brazilian girl with an olive complexion. There was “Busted Britney Spears,” named for her resemblance to the pop star if you looked at her after consuming ten beers, and “Raggedy Ann,” a redhead who looked disheveled more often than not. Darth Vader's assistant, Hannah, was qualified to do absolutely nothing, and the guys ripped on her mercilessly. The men in my group called her “Baby Gap” because they figured that was where she bought her shirts. Her wiry frame was thin enough to get lost behind a parking meter if not for the fact that she had an enormous set of fake boobs of which she was clearly proud
.
And then there was the other woman in my group, the one I had thought would be a friend of mine because we women should stick together. The desk at the end of the front row was occupied by Kate Katz, otherwise known as “Cruella,” “The Puppy Skinner,” and/or “The Black Widow.”

Before I met Cruella, Drew and a few of the Bobs and Joes told me her story. She had been in the Business for twenty-five years. She was very smart, very driven, and very tough. In her younger days she was the cause of many a broken marriage, before finally settling down and having children in her late thirties. Her husband was a wildly successful equity trader who worked at another firm, so she wasn't in this business for the money anymore. From what the group could gather, the only reason that she worked from 6:30
A.M.
until 6:00
P.M.
, traveling to and from Westchester on either end, was because she hated her husband and kids or, more likely, they hated her. Once upon a time I was sure she'd been beautiful, but she had suffered under the strain of the Business and its endless demands. Her middle-aged metabolism and sedentary lifestyle resulted in excess padding in her hips and thighs, no matter how many hours she may have logged with her personal trainer. But she appeared harmless, so I found it very hard to believe that the stories I heard were true.

“Wassup, sugar?” Reese asked, as he playfully kicked the legs of my chair. “Do you want to come hang with me today?”

“Thanks, Reese, but I was actually thinking of sitting with Kate today. You know, girl bonding.”

“Are you insane? Have you not been paying attention? Don't do it.” Reese pretended to shudder with fear.

“Listen to the man, Girlie. She's evil. Stay as far away from her as possible,” Drew interjected.

“I've been here for four months now. I'm not as clueless as I used to be. I think it will be fine. Besides, Chick told me to sit with
everyone
. That includes Kate.”

“Suit yourself, sugar. If you want to ignore my advice, you go right ahead. Don't say I didn't warn you,” Reese said as he folded his arms across his chest.

“You're going to be sorry,” Drew sang as I made my way down the row.

I unfolded my chair next to her without an ounce of fear. “Excuse me, Kate? I was wondering if I could sit with you this morning,” I said in my most cheerful voice.

This was the closest I had ever been to her, and for the first time I noticed she had a diamond on her left hand that the Rangers could use as a practice rink. She wore very little makeup, and the dark blue circles under her eyes made her look older than her fifty years. It was like she had given up. For a second, I felt bad for her. Maybe she was overwhelmed with the pressure of balancing a successful career with a husband and children; or maybe she was exhausted from too much stress and too little sleep. She turned her chair to face me slowly, staring at my outstretched hand while hers remained tightly clasped in her lap.

Then she spoke. “I'm sorry, what was it about me sitting down here ignoring you that signaled you to come over and whine in my ear?”

Or maybe she was the true incarnation of evil and was too busy breaking kids' crayons in half to care about what she looked like. I waited for her to laugh and say she was kidding. She didn't.

“Let me tell you something, little girl. I don't get paid the money I do to educate the youth of America. If I wanted to educate the youth of America, I would have been a fucking nursery school teacher. Now, since you have been here for all of what, two days?”—correcting her didn't seem like a good idea—“I suggest you learn a few things before you attempt to talk to me again and waste my time with what I'm sure are questions that my twelve-year-old could answer. That being said, maybe the cluster fuck over there”—she waved her hand dismissively at Drew and Reese, who pretended they weren't listening to our conversation—“could have done you some good by actually giving you something to read, instead of trying to look down your shirt all day. Oh, and maybe I should be more specific. I mean read something that doesn't have big color pictures of Tom Cruise or shiny tubes of lip gloss. Those types of books actually exist and could probably help you since it is blatantly obvious you don't know the first fucking thing about the bond business.”

She spun around and opened the bottom drawer of a large file cabinet positioned behind her desk, and one by one removed a massive collection of hardcover books and photocopied packets. She shoved them at me, piling them up in my arms one after the other until I could barely see over the top of the stack.

“Let's start with the basics.
Inside the Yield Curve, Mortgage Bond Basics, Modeling the Swap Curve, The Treasury Bond Basis, The Fabozzi Fixed Income Handbook, The Handbook of Economic Indicators, Understanding Option Market Volatility
. Read all of these. And when you're done, you can come back to me, and
maybe
I'll talk to you. From the looks of you, that should probably take you a good eight to ten years, so let's plan to chat again then. And do yourself a favor. If you want to work here, if you want to graduate off your pathetic little chair and into a big girl's desk, then other than these books, you shouldn't so much as glance at any other publication of any kind unless it's thrown at your front door every morning by a kid on a bicycle.” (Again, probably not the best time to point out that I lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment building.) “Now, go bother someone else. I've reached my painful-conversations-with-idiots quota for the day.”

My arms were starting to ache under the strain of the library she had just thrown into them. I had hoped that Cruella would take me under her wing, guide me through the testosterone maze that we both worked in. She had been in the Business forever, so obviously she had to be tough, but she was way more than tough; she was wicked. I caught myself wondering if maybe once upon a time she had been like me, ignorant, unsure of how to act like a lady when you spent your days surrounded by men. What if she had been, and the years on the trading floor had hardened her into something else, something vicious, vile, and well, scary? What if that was what happened to
all
women after a few years in this environment? Maybe that was what
needed
to happen to you if you were going to have a successful career on the Street. I made a silent promise to quit before I'd allow myself to follow in her angry, unattractive footsteps. I carried my library back to Drew's desk, Cruella's insults still ringing in my ears.

“I tried to warn you,” Drew said as he removed the top half of the stack from my hands.

“Does the offer to sit with you today still stand, Reese? I'm not above begging,” I asked him while he sat on the edge of Drew's desk clicking his stapler so that staples flew randomly all over the carpet.

“Sure, Girlie. Don't worry,” Reese said as he wrapped his arm protectively around my shoulders. “Stick with me and you'll be just fine. Buckle your seat belt, baby. Today I'll teach you how to work the phones.”

O
n Wednesday the following week Chick pointed at me early in the morning and said, “Girlie, you need to update these models for us. We need the new currents on the sheet, and remove any bonds that rolled out of the basket this cycle. I want them to be cleaner. Also, work in the forward drops for the swap curve. I want to see the three-month, six-month, and one-year forward rates as well as the spot rates. Why don't we have that?”

“I don't know, Chick,” I replied honestly. If only because I had no idea what he was talking about. “I'll get to work on them. When do you want them by?”

“Tomorrow. I'm leaving for a golf tourney. Reese taught you how to use the phones, right?”

“Yeah. I know how to work them,” I said. Which was true. I originally thought Reese's offer to give me a phone tutorial was a complete waste of time. I was a girl, for God's sake. I was well versed in phones and all their functions. Until I realized that the phone system at Cromwell was slightly more advanced than the cordless phone I'd had in my room in high school. The Cromwell phone system was more complicated than anything I had ever seen. It had various types of lines: inside-only; outside-only; direct-to-client; desk-to-desk (New York office and our desks in other cities in the United States and overseas). A few phone lines were labeled with abbreviations I didn't understand and that Reese told me not to “worry” about; I never touched those. They scared me. I had stayed late after my coaching session with Reese, calling my mom and Liv and seeing if I could, in fact, mute them, disconnect them, place them on hold, conference them, or transfer them to each other without accidentally hanging up on one of them. It took me two hours to get it right. Don't tell anyone that.

“Good. Sit at my desk while I'm gone. I left the models up on my screen so you can work on them from my desk. Touch my e-mail and I'll kill you, but the team will need help with the phones. There are a lot of people out today for some reason and without me they'll need an extra set of hands. Pick up the outside lights only. No client directs. Capiche?”

“Sure, Chick. No problem.”

“Good. See you in the morning.”

I slid into Chick's chair, closed down his e-mail, and looked at the models on his monitor. He wanted them fixed by tomorrow. Wonderful. I prayed that the day would be quiet and I'd be able to spend all twelve hours working on the models. I still didn't understand all the market jargon and my Excel skills sucked, so figuring out how to fix these formulas was going to be painful.

The morning was fairly quiet, and the rest of the team had no problem fielding occasional phone calls while I worked on Chick's models. I spent hours working on the sheet, dissecting each formula symbol by symbol, and I was beginning to make progress. Then, somewhere around 3:00
P.M.
, things went crazy.