Breathe In, Cash Out

by Madeleine Henry

  You know what? This guy doesn’t give a shit about yoga.

  Fingernails rap my desk, finding the only wooden oasis in the mess of papers.

  “Hello,” Mark says.

  He doesn’t look me in the eye. He seems to be checking if anyone else is around, and no one is. Junior people are commuting or sleeping, and senior people are tucked into their glass enclaves. Mark walks around to stand behind my monitors, which display in a horizontally tiled sequence: his Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google-searched name. Every analyst has two desktop monitors, and his internet identity is smeared across both of mine. I corner-X out of every window as fast as humanly possible.

  “Allegra,” he says.

  “Yes?” I squeak.

  “Let’s be mature about this,” he says. He strides away.

  What does that even mean? He turns the corner, leaving me alone with his ambiguous decree. Should that go on my to-do list for, like, my job? I open Microsoft Outlook to get on with the day. Now, on top of everything else, I feel an urge to reflect on my fucking life. Like, how did things get this out of control? Maybe Mark was right when he called me rotten. Maybe I’ll never be the yogi I want to be and, really, at my core, I’m just an Anderson piece of shit.

  chapter 2

  No one grows up wanting to be an investment banker. Anyone who says they did is lying. One of the most common questions to prepare for analyst interviews is: What does an investment banker do? And the truth is, no one fucking knows.

  Most people are just here to make millions. The standard track is: two years of banking and then move to the “buy side”—i.e., investing—where you can earn an annual $450K at the entry level at age twenty-five. If you leave banking for a hedge fund and rise to the top—requiring you to roll sevens with your lucky-dice hand every day for a decade—you will get compensated on a “2 and 20” incentive structure. That means you take home 2 percent of the money you manage plus 20 percent of the profits every year. So, if you manage $1 billion, you will make $20 million a year no matter what, even if all you do is play solitaire.

  If hedge funds aren’t your thing, then there’s private equity—OMG, more finance! Hell yeah—where you buy and sell companies not available on the stock market. This also earns you millions at the top and offers the experience of sitting down all day just knowing that your bank account is growing. This is cool because then you can buy expensive things you won’t have time to use, but you can tell other people that you own these things.

  If you turn out to be a complete fuckup at banking, then you probably won’t get a hedge fund or private equity job, but that’s okay. There’s always business development at a Fortune 500 company waiting for you. This totally decent profession with a sustainable lifestyle carries great shame as an exit option. It’s fewer hours, less technical, less pay, and people are happier. The combination is disgraceful on Wall Street.

  But believe me when I say that not everyone goes into banking for the money. Some people just got swept up in Ivy League social pressure. I went to Princeton, where about half the graduating class matriculates into finance or consulting annually.

  The process unfolds like clockwork. Every fall, big banks and consulting firms flock to campus in droves. First-round interviews for all bulge brackets take place during the same week. You know who is interviewing, because you see them walking around in suits, and the cast of characters attending these interviews is gossiped about extensively at school. Everyone knows who gets called back, who gets cut, and when. If someone with a 3.8 GPA gets even a first-round at Anderson Shaw, people freak out and google how rich their parents are. The events of interview season are up for public consumption, and the job hunt becomes a competitive social game where small differences are overblown. Anderson is the best bank, and the gap between it and second place is, like, fucking cosmic.

  Now, as my peers climb to the next ladder rung—buy side, whatever—I won’t join them. I seriously do not belong.

  * * *

  My dad raised me. Mom died of bone cancer when I was eight, after six rounds of chemo and twenty-one hospital stays in ten months. She was a dancer turned dance instructor and had long blond hair like me. She stayed devoted to dancing—ballet, jazz, modern—in a local troupe until she got sick. I used to watch them rehearse after school. She moved in spectacular ways, as if she channeled powers from out of this world. For her to lose control of her body was hard on everyone.

  Dad is strong at sixty, the same height and weight as DC Comics’ Superman, at six foot three and 235 pounds, as he says. He has all of Mom’s strength, expressed differently. He talks like a fucking sailor, and when I was young it made him happy whenever I talked like him or won anything. In general, he thinks the world is way too politically correct and way too sensitive: he wasn’t going to raise a wimp. Mom was warmer, but they shared a strong work ethic and sense of family: we were the Cobbs, and no one could mess with us.

  After Mom passed away, I just wanted Dad to be happy again. One way to do that, I learned, was by excelling. No matter what I achieved—straight As, sports games—my success brought him joy. Plus, he relished coaching me. So achievement became the only space where we really connected. It may have looked like he was pushing me too much, or was too firm, but that’s just how he showed love. I showed love for him in return by engaging. Our bond is deep but, at the same time, forged entirely over my potential.

  On weekends, he’d run the back roads around us in Princeton, New Jersey, while I biked next to him. We’d shoot the shit about whoever we were passing and about my future: Princeton and then Anderson Shaw was always the dream plan. Best college, best job. Princeton was coincidentally the college closest to home, but he never said that out loud. Even though Dad is much smarter than I am, he never had a steady career. Instead, he had a series of odd jobs—management consultant, fitness instructor—and he only actively managed his savings by the time I got to high school. I felt like his purpose.

  It wasn’t until eighth grade that I glimpsed our limits. I got my period and didn’t tell him. He noticed my oddly light load of laundry that night. The next morning, over cold cereal, he told me “facts” about the “female” body in complete sentences. Later that year, we were watching a movie after dinner, and a sex scene came on. He cleared his throat. “That,” he said. He paused. “Is sex.” But talking about Princeton and Anderson was seamless. Those conversations fed our relationship and excited him about the future.

  To this day, he thinks I’m a career banker.

  * * *

  Wherever there’s a ton of money to be made, there’s cutthroat competition. Your best shot of getting into Anderson is a summer internship in college. Anderson makes most of its interns offers, and thus fills out its incoming class of new analysts. If you miss that chance, you’re basically fucked forever.

  Leading up to the internship interview gauntlet, Dad helped me cram. What does an investment banking analyst fucking do? All right, that. What is the weighted average cost of capital? All right, that formula with words I’ve never seen before. We figured out what Anderson wants in an intern through my lunches with Princeton alumni who worked there. For instance, Anderson’s is a team-based culture, so I should talk about how much I love working on teams. Whenever possible, I should say the word team.

  We knew that I might get fucked with. One interviewer was known to stay silent for the first ten minutes just to see how candidates would react to unexpected stress. Dad made me a reading list of a dozen books and I read them all, including one entirely about credit default swaps. I learned how to do things like calculate a company’s unlevered beta to the S&P. Finally, we reached Anderson’s Super Day. I’d endured final-round interviews with two other banks that week already and had not been to class in a month.

  A week later, an alum and head of the Princeton recruiting effort at AS called me with the news: Anderson Shaw wanted to extend me an offer for their ten-week summer internship. I’d always had two names in my head—Prin
ceton, Anderson—and finally, we’d done it. I called Dad immediately; he’d never been so happy.

  * * *

  By week two of the internship, I wanted out. There is a big difference between knowing you will spend a hundred hours a week doing bullshit work for rich, selfish assholes, and then actually fucking doing it.

  Analysts who will be in finance forever and analysts quitting tomorrow are indistinguishable in terms of how much they complain about the job. Hating your life is part of the culture. How are you? “So fucking miserable.” Yeah, same. “Okay, cool, see you later.” In that dialogue, one person will bank for life, and the other is actually having an identity crisis. Which is which? No one knows.

  Dad and I didn’t talk much that summer because of my schedule, but we texted every day. Given the masturbating-to-misery norm of banking, when I would complain to Dad about how awful the job was, my point was not made that I didn’t want to be there. He would text back, Proud of you. He adopted Anderson’s use of the word team. Sometimes, he texted back, Proud of team.

  I got Anderson’s full-time offer at the end of the summer and had forty-eight hours to respond. As I finally taxied home that night from the train station, I planned to tell Dad in person that I would turn it down. He still lived in the two-bedroom in Princeton, New Jersey, where I’d grown up. It’s on a block of houses that look the same, each with a patch of lawn. When I pulled up, all of our neighbors were waiting outside the house for me, and Dad beamed front and center on the sidewalk. The whole block knew I worked at Anderson. Dad and I hugged—it was good to be home—and he pointed out to the neighbors how pale I was in August, how unexercised, how miserable. These were signs of having made it. We, the Cobbs, had made it.

  Dad and I had deep-dish pizza for dinner. I nibbled nervously at our kitchen table. As a warm-up, I started by saying that the only reason to be an Anderson analyst was for the money. But with the thrift he’d passed onto me by example, piles of cash would be abstractions: Dad’s the kind of guy who turns the thermostat down in rooms while I’m sitting in them, just to save. I never wanted fancy things.

  “I mean, there’s no other reason to be there,” I say. He laughs for no reason. He’s just happy.

  “It’s too fucking awful,” I say.

  “Fucking Anderson,” he says, smiling. “I love it.”

  I haven’t made my point.

  “You’re too skinny,” he says. “Eat.”

  “I’m trying to talk to you,” I say.

  “Talk with your mouth full,” he says.

  “Do you know most analysts leave Anderson after two years?” I ask.

  “Leave?” He doesn’t understand. “Wimps.”

  No. Banking isn’t what it used to be in the 1980s. These days, every analyst leaves banking for the buy side after two years, for better pay and better hours. There is a U-curve of talent that peaks at analyst level and then at the top with managing directors. Career bankers aren’t as smart. If they could cut it elsewhere, they would. I realized this over the summer. Now, I am up against his image of the brand from forty years ago.

  “Cobbs are not wimps,” he says.

  I stare at the refrigerator behind him, speckled with magnets of me. They are portraits commemorating my participation in sports teams, mostly middle school softball and soccer. Dad coached most of those teams.

  “You’re not thinking of turning them down, are you?” he asks. I pause. He lowers his pizza to his plate.

  “No, of course not,” I say. “Other people leave. I’m just explaining.”

  He starts eating again, slowly. I reach for a fork and poke at my own slice of pizza.

  Dad looks at me skeptically.

  “Sorry, I’m just not that hungry,” I say.

  “Allegra?” he says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Proud of you.”

  * * *

  I took the yoga class that changed my life senior fall, after I signed the two-year contract with Anderson. I’d been cramming for midterms all morning and impulsively signed up for the class as a break. It turned out to be ninety minutes straight of an instructor telling me calmly that I actually mattered. Like, Listen to your body Take it easy. Breathe. Do less. Have fun. Trust yourself. Feel the love around you.

  It was fucking incredible.

  I’d always been active. I played a team sport every season growing up. That was in addition to some after-school gymnastics, yoga, and dance. But yoga never really spoke to me until that moment. I had to be stressed out of my mind, on the verge of taking responsibility for myself in the “real world,” before I finally paid attention to what I liked instead of to what everyone else was doing.

  Dad didn’t know much about yoga. Over Thanksgiving break, when I mentioned that I was doing hot yoga classes almost every day near school, he googled “girls hot yoga” in front of me. His search returned what could be seen as a gallery of strippers in sexually provocative poses.

  “No, but it’s athletic,” I tried to explain.

  He grunted.

  I thought to bring up dance as a reference point because he’d always respected Mom’s art. Mom could hold a perfect split while leaping across a stage. She practiced on her own every day, even as a full-time teacher. She endured muscle tears and bloody feet. The way he admired dance, maybe he could understand at least the physical part of yoga. But of course, I couldn’t mention Mom, because her memory hurt him. Besides, most yoga doesn’t look as difficult.

  So I was just honest.

  “Yoga is the only thing I’ve ever done where I feel like my full self,” I said. “I don’t just care about my mind. I care about my body, and I feel like I have a soul, and yoga studios are the only places I know that nurture all three.”

  He was silent.

  “Dad?” I asked. “Hello?”

  “All the rich kids at Princeton have you talking like we’re rich.”

  “I know we’re not rich,” I said.

  “Well, then stop acting like it,” he snapped.

  I showed my surprise.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he apologized. “Work out all you want before Anderson.”

  He Xed out of the “girls hot yoga” search. I was frustrated. I wasn’t trying to run away from responsibility—I just never cared about prestige or power the way Dad did. I cared more about my inner life.

  I wanted to do and be around yoga as much as possible, and eventually that sparked the idea: teach. Meanwhile, the more I practiced, the more I poured energy into part of my life where Dad couldn’t relate. We grew apart by omission until he emailed me an article describing the American Yoga Championship, a competition judging yoga postures. “Yoga for Cobbs!!!” he wrote. Dad’s follow-up emails with more information were so animated that I looked into it.

  Every year, American Yoga holds regional qualifiers across the country that prelude a national finale. Each round requires the athlete to perform a choreographed yoga flow in five minutes, followed by ten mandatory and two optional poses. The contest unfolds onstage before a panel of judges. A brief written test follows, where contestants write about the benefits of each posture. I entered, and Dad and I grew closer while I trained. He sent me workouts for shoulder strength and researched judges’ criteria. I knew he had been a little aimless now that he wasn’t coaching me, but here he was again, ignited by purpose. In his mind, I was still the Allegra he knew, kicking yoga ass. Anderson, now yoga gold. The Cobbs.

  But the more we trained, the farther I got from what I’d loved about yoga in the first place. Dad supplied me with a steady stream of quotes to keep me in a “winner’s mind-set,” including, “Winners do what losers won’t.” That became my practice mantra. By the time I realized how off-track we were from the spirit of yoga, teaching us to relax, quitting no longer made sense. After all, the competition is respected. I figured it might help me get my footing in the yoga world after Anderson. So I prepared. I competed. I did my absolute best. And, out of the thousand other people who competed that year—t
here are no entry-level requirements—I earned the women’s gold.

  * * *

  Now, two years later, banking has nearly sucked dry my yoga soul. I try to practice, but working at Anderson makes that tough on every level. I haven’t told anyone my plan to quit and teach—I haven’t even picked a training program, because that feels like abandoning Dad. I imagine him on the sofa alone, wearing his necklace chain strung with his wedding ring, watching the game.

  So here I am, in transition. I am neither full banker nor full yogi and don’t mesh seamlessly with either group. The closer I get to the end of my contract, the more I catch myself missing Mom. She was just over five feet tall and, in a lot of ways, a helpful contrast to Dad. She saw dance as much more than a sport. She thought expressing your inner life was important. I don’t know what she would say to me now, but I feel like she would understand, or at least make me feel less fucking ridiculous.

  chapter 3

  Assistants trickle in before the rest of the analysts. There is one for every five or so bankers, shared across levels. My assistant, Trixie, sits at the desk around the corner. Her back is just barely in sight, like a shark fin. Her tightly coiled gray perm swims in and out of view. Mornings are usually peaceful, but not today. Today, I fucked my boss.

  “Hey, Alfredo.”

  It’s Tripp. He changes my nickname every time we talk—I don’t think he actually knows my name. A lot of people don’t like Tripp—they say he’s a “privileged clownshit” or something. The fact that he’s attractive makes him even less popular on a floor full of quants who need this job to get any ass at all. Tripp sits down next to me looking like the Hugo Boss brand personified: tall, strong jaw, and floppy brown hair.

  “Late night?” he asks. “Or early morning?”

  I don’t know. There is no sun in hell.