Opening Belle (19 page)

“Oh, a bunch of secretaries looking for a big payday?” Simon rolls his eyes. “Yes. I've heard of them.”

“You do realize we operate in a similar culture at Feagin and that it's a matter of time until we get slapped with something like that.” I'm careful to put myself on the “we” side of things, as if his decision is bad for everyone.

Simon doesn't say a thing for a moment before softening his tone, “Those other ladies look up to you. Be a role model for them. Fighting me on this will only come back to hurt you someday.”

I think I have just been threatened but I'm not sure. I begin softly, “Who will be Marcus's partner? What about King, doesn't he need a partner?”

“I believe we're here to discuss your bonus,” Simon retorts, and waves his hand, indicating the discussion is over, and if I want to get paid I need to get my head back in the game. So I do. But I really don't.

Several hours later I'm doing math at my desk. Simon has paid me for the past year. Every bonus dollar, so carefully recorded in my nightly Excel spreadsheet, will be handed to me in the form of a check a few weeks from now. It's a number just under three million dollars. I will take that check to my bank and hand it to the teller, who could never fathom such a sum. She will wonder if I won the lottery or have a rich husband and I'll feel embarrassed by what is probably a warped sense of what I need or don't need in my bank account. I think all this comes from growing up without ever having anything new or undamaged or having sandwiches wrapped in newspaper instead of being able to buy the school lunch or even Ziploc bags. Or maybe it's because I never know how much Bruce will spend or if he'll ever work again. I don't know exactly why I think we need so much but I do. It's not to buy a yacht or a new house, it's to feel safe with a partner who brings no money to the table.

By the end of the day, three women were partnered with three young men. Simon couldn't use the same excuse he used for me when it came to partnering up the other women. The other two, Amy and Violette, have no kids or husband or anything else Simon could claim would prevent them from bringing in money. Of course Ballsbridge had his opinion about this.

“Girlfriend,” he had said, “you're all fertile lassies. Simon doesn't want some bumper crop of equities markets pushing ever higher while he's caught with sowers and reapers who aren't available to harvest the goods. If the reason they're unavailable is because they've been having unprotected sex, he ends up looking like a moron. Can't blame the guy, you gals need backup.”

“Boyfriend,” I sigh to him, as I know he's only half joking, “I've been proving I can do the mom/banker/sales thing for a while. The others have no kids. And what's the difference between any woman and you? What's to stop you from just walking out the door one day? What would happen to your accounts? Nobody knows your accounts, so why don't you have a partner?”

“Honey, what I lack are two ovaries. You ladies are a pain in the ass to him. He doesn't want to depend on you. It's that simple.” Marcus tweaks my cheek. “You're so damn cute and you're rich. Why worry so much about the things that don't really matter?”

When he says this, the image I have of Brigid crying at the door this morning with red, swollen eyes comes into my head.

If I hurry back home, I can grab both our bathing suits and take her out of school. The two of us can swim at the indoor pool on the roof of the Mandarin Hotel, order boxed bento lunches, wear thick robes, and act like we're visiting from Texas. We can try out fake accents and play Marco Polo and splash anyone who dares to come near us. Without telling anyone where I'm headed, I set my lines to voice mail, rise from my desk, and walk out.

T
HE NEXT WEEK
my business slows when Henry takes his family to an island in the Caribbean called Necker. I find myself looking at Internet photos of what appears to be heaven, and learn that guests have to rent the entire island to stay there. I thought it would be a relief to have him off the island of Manhattan, but instead I'm a woman who surfs photos of someone else's vacation. Maybe that's what Bruce, the kids, and I need, some over-the-top vacation with sparkling sunshine, hiking trails, beach beds, and blended drinks.

Ballsbridge is onto my plan of a sexy getaway when he spies what's on my screen.

“That is not a place to take the kids,” he says helpfully while hovering behind my chair, “and it's always a welcoming sign when they tell you to inquire about pricing. Isn't the rule that if you have to ask, you can't afford?”

Naked Girl needs to see what he's talking about so she sits on my desk,
on my desk
, and leans in so she can get up close to my screen. She crosses one leg over the other and we're so close that I'm staring at a mole on her thigh.

“You can take kids there,” she says confidently, while wrapping her ginger locks into a loose bun. From her recent body language I get the feeling Naked Girl and Ballsbridge are some sort of an item. “But be prepared to bring the nanny. It's not a ‘kids club' place, if you know what I mean.”

Marcus and I stare at her but she's not done.

“I did receive the massage of my life on Necker. It was on a bed that floated in the water.” She sighs dreamily and pulls her hair down again, making Marcus agitated.

“Because you've actually been there?” he asks.

“It was a short trip but yeah, I've been,” she says, and rolls her eyes as if it bored her. “I was on a boat trip and we stopped there for two nights.”

I choose to ignore who the “we” was. “A boat like a cruise ship?” I ask while thinking no five-thousand-passenger anything is parking near those delicate reefs.

“A boat like a yacht,” she says. “And yeah, if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it.” She unwinds her legs and saunters away.

The short riffs from Henry have appeared sporadically: sometimes once per day, sometimes not for three days, launched like stealth missiles directly to their target in the middle of the night. I find myself waking from deep sleep, intuitively expecting their arrival, darting my eyes between my sleeping husband, if he has successfully made it to our bed, and my sleeping phone. One in the bed and one next to the bed and only one begs to be touched and lit up, and it isn't Bruce.

When I open my mail, my pulse quickens. I'm a live, hovering heartbeat, a cocktail party paused, existing for a moment between feeling remembered and not. Each message delivers me into a fairy tale, away from my life of tired working person and exhausted mother. I return to being the person I was, not that many years ago.

I know I'm dabbling in a dangerous space, getting the high an addict craves. But the person I pretend Henry to be really doesn't exist so I tell myself I'm still in safe territory. Reading one-way email is not exactly participating in something that feels close to being a cheater.

If Henry and I had stayed together, would I have left this job by now? Would I be drinking something chilled and frothy on an island and be burying our kids up to their necks in the sand?

I'm wasting time. The whole entanglement with Henry has led to a new habit, something entirely foreign to me. I daydream even now while my in-box pings. Message from Henry:

I just found a leg in the sand. It's blue with a black boot. Plastic. I guess we're not the first humans to visit here. The good news is I found the most perfect rock to give to you. The bad news is that I want to give it to you in person.

I remind myself that I have to end his little game, but his email has made me feel instantly better. I feel energized and girly. Am I so starved for attention that these emails make me some version of happy? Even Stone, who is now cutting his fingernails over his wastebasket, isn't bothering me as much as he should. He began our partnership in an unusual way, acting uninterested in everything except the Metis memos. He bets other guys in the office on who the author is and once told me I speak the way Metis writes. The brat is trying to play with my head and I hate that I let him mentally clutter my brain.

Ping!
It's another Henry message. I don't breathe as I open it. It reads:

I've been taking a look at swaps, longevity swaps. What can you tell me about those?

I crash back to earth. Longevity swaps? I know a lot about currency swaps and helped Tim do a few of those, but longevity swaps? I think they have something to do with betting on the length of someone's life. How does a guy go from dreaming about me while on an island to figuring out how to profit from speculating on the human life span?

I'm about to call the swaps desk but glance again at Stone snapping his nail clipper. I feel massive irritation at his very existence. I call him even though he's ten feet away and watch as he lets it ring five excruciating times. He has caller ID so he knows it's me. He puts down the clippers when his pinky finger is perfect and answers.

“Hey, Stone,” I say. “Finished with the manicure?”

He says nothing so I continue, “What do you know about longevity swaps?”

Stone stands, uncurls his massive frame from his rolling chair, carefully places his clippers inside his drawer, and finally turns to face me. He's about six foot two and keeps his tailored shirtsleeves pulled up to his highly developed biceps. Ruffling his unkempt hair is a favorite pastime of his. He seems aware of the fact that he's good-looking.

“Ummm, nothing?”

“Right. Well, give me some good ideas on these things. I'm going home early today.”

“Okay, need any help writing memos?”

I stare at him. He stares at me. “I am not, repeat not, writing those memos and I'm also not sure why you believe it's your place to even say that.”

His second line flashes now and we look at the turret. It's his fiancée. He hasn't called a client yet or researched anything or initiated any sort of trade and it's been weeks. He's an expensive thing to look at. His face appears pained to not be answering her.

“Oh,” he said. “It's for Cougar?”

“Cheetah. Stone, the largest account you now cover with me is called Cheetah.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Those tranches of subprime mortgages I put together for Henry sparked a deluge of orders from Cheetah. I write orders for CMOs with a Cheetah account number on them several times per day. Marcus, Amy, and King all sit back in awe as I do less with the slow-moving stock market and more with this shiny new toy called subprime mortgage bonds.

Clarisse is seething with jealousy at my commission runs since they're fatter than anyone else's. Ballsbridge eavesdrops on me, trying to understand how I'm selling so much of this stuff. But Ballsbridge and Clarisse don't have what I have, a counterpart on the bond desk who realizes that together we make a great team. Most bond traders would never share the work and wealth with someone like me, from a different department. My counterpart in fixed income is the goddess Kathryn Peterson, the most senior woman on the mortgage desk, who, up until now, hadn't done one trade with Cheetah, and while I trade all day with Cheetah, I'd never traded a bond before.

A few weeks ago, I approached Kathryn and told her I could get her into that account if we split the commissions and that we would then not need to split them with Stone. She loved the idea and we launched our own partnership. I see her as the perfect way to push Simon back on this partnering thing. He never saw a two-woman partnership, hatched from a department he doesn't run, coming.

Feagin Dixon didn't invent this new mortgage vehicle, Goldman Sachs did, and we, like several other Wall Street firms, are in such a desperate race to catch up that Simon and King don't care who sells this stuff, just get it done, and that's why I'm allowed to sell something not even traded on my floor. In my opinion Henry is a visionary and Henry can't get enough of them. Kathryn and I are happy to be his dealer of choice.

There is a group here at Feagin called the Fundamental Strategies Group. They're supposed to evaluate the risk and profit potential of mortgage packages like the ones I sell to Henry. If I ask them to evaluate the risk of the products I sell, they will hand me a neat piece of paper with maybe ten or twenty bundles that would be a good fit for my client's needs. Then I could go home and take my kids ice skating or feed them something not spawned by our microwave oven. But the problem with using this in-house group is that I don't trust them. The Fundamental Strategies guys also advise our in-house traders, the King McPhersons of my world who have investment positions they want and don't want. It's easy for them to suggest their wannabe castoffs to me for my client to buy. That way Kathryn and I hand them their profit while they load Cheetah up with some junk Henry would probably take a loss on. The way to not get suckered by them is to do the work ourselves. Kathryn and I split the pile while I picture my upcoming evening replete with coffee, a calculator, a sex-starved husband, and children who refuse to go to sleep. Still, to me this seems like a good trade.

T
HE COLUMN OF
papers stacked on my desk fan at their edges because Marcus Ballsbridge's ball fan is tilted upward. A ball fan is a fan angled to cool a man's private parts, an appliance apparently necessary when the owner is agitated, and Ballsy is agitated.

Naked Girl has limited movements today because her skirt seems sewn onto her body. Still, she shimmies herself into standing position so she can berate Marcus.

“The breeze from that damn fan gets up my skirt and makes me horrr-ny,” she practically yells. Heads lift from twenty feet in every direction.

“When you wear such a narrow skirt,” Ballsbridge retorts, “no air can possibly squeeze up there, honey. I wouldn't worry about it.”