Bank

by David Bledin

  “Twenty-three and mouthing off like that to strangers. What in god’s name were you thinking?”

  An awful rumbling in the pit of my stomach. It’s not exactly guilt; it’s more a bitterness that such a precious moment beyond the clutches of the Bank has come to this. Then again, maybe it’s just the fried rice.

  “Look, I’m sorry. Work has been so crazy over the last few months—”

  “It’s always work,” my dad interrupts, removing a cigar from his pocket. “Everything is always about work.”

  Lighting it, he continues, “You’re too young to be behaving like this. You should be out there having fun, enjoying yourself. Because I’ll tell you, this is the time to do it. When you start a family, everything changes.”

  “I know.”

  We approach their car, and my mom pecks me on the cheek.

  “So you’ll come to the play?”

  “I’ll try. I’ve just got to check—”

  Slipping into the passenger seat, she says, “You know what, don’t worry about it. Your uncle Bob mentioned he wanted to go. I’ll pass along your ticket to him.”

  “I just need to double-check—”

  But she’s already slammed the car door shut and is frowning at me through the window.

  I’m summoned into the Crazy Brit’s office. He’s as irritable as ever, waving an Excel print-out:

  “Did you put this together?”

  “Yes,” I say, nodding, “along with one of the new guys.”

  “Well, it’s atrocious,” he grunts. “I skimmed it over for a whopping ten seconds and I’ve already detected numerous inconsistencies.”

  It’s like Groundhog Day with him. Every morning the two of us are trapped in this unwavering routine: me standing before his desk, him shoving a minuscule error in my face, me promising I’ll be better next time.

  “See, this number here is reduced to two decimal places, and this number here to three. This is unacceptable work.”

  He scrutinizes me from behind his thick lenses. The hairs on my neck still prickle under his gaze, but it’s no more than a physical reaction; I’m too familiar with him now to feel any of the initial despair. I bring our conversation back on track, saying what is expected of me.

  “I don’t know how I missed that. I’m really sorry. I promise it won’t happen again.”

  We lock eyes and it happens: Both of us sigh simultaneously. It’s a Bobbsey Twins moment, a brief alignment of spirits, and we look away in mutual awkwardness.

  He clears his throat and says, “You will have the table reformatted and on my desk in ten minutes.”

  “Of course.”

  Then he furrows his brow, foreseeing the looming disappointment when I turn in the table five minutes past his deadline.

  “Are we clear?”

  “Yeah, we’re clear.”

  “Very good, then.”

  From: LuluHeifenschliefen@theBank.com

  To: All Employees

  Just a reminder: this Saturday is the Coldest Fish In The Pond’s Spring Barbecue and Pool Party. The time is 1pm until sunset. Recommended dress code is casual. Feel free to invite a guest and don’t forget your swim trunks! Directions are attached.

  “So you’ll bring that Asian strumpet again, piglet? My heavens, she was a feisty one. We’ll keep her away from the liquor cabinet, though.”

  “Nah, it’s not happening, Lulu.”

  “Why not?” she huffs.

  “I think once was enough.”

  Lulu Heifenschliefen is swathed in a giant white sheet, her feet are strapped into golden slippers, and giant hooped earrings stretch out her lobes.

  The Defeated One returns from the copy room and takes one look at her.

  “Lulu, what the hell is that? You’re a member of the Falun Gong now?”

  “Mein Gott, don’t you recognize a toga when you see one?”

  He raises an eyebrow, incredulous. “Lulu, you’re wearing a toga? At a financial institution?”

  “What?” She shakes a finger at us. “Let me tell you something, piglets, those Romans really knew what they were talking about.”

  “They also knew how to throw some seriously nasty orgies,” the Defeated One snorts.

  “Don’t be cheeky, boy-chick.”

  “Whatever.” The Defeated One swivels back around. “It’s historical fact.”

  “Mmmmm,” the Woman With The Scarf purrs as my finger grazes her cheekbone.

  It’s well past midnight, and I’ve just dropped by, part of a routine we’ve developed over the past few months: If her roommate is traveling, then I’ll go over after work, or else she’ll come to me, and we’ll make small talk for a bit—

  “So how was work?”

  “Okay, and you?”

  “Uneventful.”

  “That’s better than eventful, I guess.”

  “Yeah.”

  —?mess around, and sleep until the alarm goes off at six under the pretense that one of us will get up and prepare breakfast, though our shared affection for the snooze button usually results in a mad scramble to get ready closer to seven-thirty.

  So, if you really think about it, ninety-five percent of our relationship is taking place in a foggy fatigue. Not that I’m complaining or anything.

  “What are you looking at?” She yawns.

  I’m fixated on her profile: the gentle sloping features contrasting with her sharp jawline, and her long lashes, as thick as paintbrush bristles.

  “Just you.”

  I lean over to kiss her eyelids. It’s crazy to think this is all going to end in, what, four months from now? Five months. I listen to her soft breathing, as steady as a metronome, until she whispers, “I got my letter of acceptance from Berkeley today.”

  Curling my body around her, I nuzzle the back of her neck.

  “That’s fantastic, right? Wasn’t Berkeley your first choice? Or was it Columbia?”

  “Yeah, Berkeley.”

  She rolls away from me. I shift over to caress her shoulder, but she flinches at my touch. Weird.

  “What’s going on? Shouldn’t you be ecstatic about this?”

  She squirms around to face me and cradles her head in her arm.

  “Doesn’t it mean anything to you?”

  “Huh? What are you talking about?”

  She closes her eyes and says, “Come September, this upcoming September, I’ll be studying on the other side of the country. Only five months from now. Isn’t that important?”

  She buries her face in her arm, her hair falling across the sheets like velvet. I pull myself up to a sitting position against the headboard.

  “Of course it’s important. But I knew about this a few months back, remember? So it’s not exactly a surprise or anything.”

  She remains silent, her face still covered. Oh shit, I’m fucking this all up.

  “Okay, I’m not really understanding this, but what choice do I have but to accept it? This is what you really want to do with your life. You said it yourself.”

  She looks up and groans, “But it’s in California.”

  “I know it’s not the most ideal setup,” I mumble, “but we can always try the long-distance thing if it comes to that, can’t we?”

  She rolls her eyes and says, “With your schedule? Give me a fucking break.”

  I’m beginning to feel a little aggravated by this attitude—I mean, what’s going on here? First my parents flipped out because my work schedule interfered with some stupid play, and now this nonsense. She is the one who is deciding to leave me; it’s not like I’ve done anything wrong. The Woman With The Scarf continues:

  “I know I’m not being entirely fair. It’s just . . . I wish things weren’t unfolding this quickly, you know?”

  She reaches out and strokes my kneecap, drawing circles with her fingertips.

  “I’m not sure if you’ve figured this out yet, and it’s strange, I tried to hold myself back over the past few months, knowing that grad school was just around the corner,
knowing you’d be confined to your job here in the city, but it’s like this: I care about you a lot. I mean, imagine you could jump ahead into the future, and you see yourself settled down with somebody, a nice house and a big family and everything about it just feeling so dead-on. And then you zip back into the present, still holding on to this vision, but you see all these peripheral factors getting in the way of things, ripping the vision apart.”

  Fuck, why is she telling me this now? My voice trembles, betraying my emotions. “Sometimes you can’t really help these things, right? That’s the way life works.”

  The Woman With The Scarf bites her lower lip. “Then why won’t you just—”

  She sighs, closing her eyes. “No, I shouldn’t be asking that from you.”

  She covers her face with the sheet. The things that remain unsaid are left to swarm around in the darkness, keeping sleep at bay.

  After just a few months on the job, one of the Tools has his first meltdown. It happens on a trip back from the Most Depressing Donut Store in Downtown. Tool #2 stumbles forward and spills coffee down the front of his shirt.

  “Fuuuuuuuuck!” he shrieks.

  He drops his bag of doughnut holes and rubs frantically at the stain.

  “Relax, man, it’s only a spill,” I say.

  The Tool is totally overreacting; the coffee is too tepid for any scalding, and it’s already the end of the workday, so none of the senior people will be around to witness it. I keep walking but stop when I realize he isn’t following behind me. Turning around and seeing Tool #2 standing absolutely still, gazing forlornly at the splotch on his shirt, I retrace my steps.

  “Look, it’s only coffee. You can get the stain out no problem. Just take it to the dry cleaners if you’re worried about it.”

  Tool #2 shakes his head sadly and says, “It doesn’t get any better than this, does it?”

  It takes me a moment to realize he’s no longer talking about the shirt. When he peers at me, his eyes brimming with desolate bleakness, I figure I’ll just pull something out of my ass.

  “Don’t worry, you get used to it. Once you start getting comfortable with Excel functions, after you’ve grown accustomed to the various personalities in our department . . .”

  Tool #2 doesn’t look too convinced as we continue our walk back to the office. Then again, neither am I.

  Later that evening I receive an e-mail from Mark, my college roommate who’s gone off to Bulgaria with the Peace Corps. It’s not the first e-mail I’ve received since he left; Mark has been diligent about keeping us all up-to-date on his noble quest to save the gypsies and the malnourished orphans and the marginalized farmers, toiling away to give these people the view that not all Westerners are myopic self-interested bastards, that we are not a nation of greedy capitalists itching to swoop down and usurp their natural resources and pepper their bucolic landscape with McDonald’s and Wal-Mart just for shits and giggles. In other words, he is the antithesis of me.

  Normally I enjoy the updates, his Marxist experiences standing in such stark contrast with my sterile days at the Bank, but as I’m reading about how he spent the past week rebuilding the collapsed roof of a village community hall and is now imploring us to send donations for a planned Internet center, I’m finding it all too earnest, too blatantly do-goody. I mean, does he seriously think he’s improving anything over there? So he fixes the shingles; how long before another bad storm, and the roof collapses all over again? Better to have these megaglobalized companies enter the market—a brutal transition, perhaps, a few indigenous communities sent packing—and bring these raggedy, pathetic people up to par with the rest of the world, right?

  I experience a moment of lucidity as I appreciate exactly how far I’ve come.

  Oh god. What’s happening to me?

  On Saturday the May weather is uncomfortably muggy as I stroll into the Fish’s garden wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt, khakis, and flip-flops. Passing by a hedge, I find myself in the midst of a crowd of suits and ties and flowing dresses, the rest of the Bank employees dressed to their very ritziest. Those in my immediate vicinity eye my tackiness with a mix of curiosity and contempt.

  “I thought you said this was casual,” the Woman With The Scarf hisses through clenched teeth.

  She’s not as bad off as I am in her black sweater and floral skirt, but she’s still a bit underdressed for this crowd.

  “It is,” I say and shrug meekly.

  I wade through the throng, my face burning with embarrassment, until I reach my oasis: a suit-clad Defeated One hanging out by the bar with Tool #1, also in a suit.

  “Way to go, Mumbles,” the Defeated One chuckles over his beer. “Leave it to you to wear flip-flops to this thing.”

  “Didn’t the e-mail say it was casual?”

  The Defeated One takes a swig.

  “There’s no such thing as casual on the Street. Come on, even the Tool figured that one out.”

  Tool #1 bobs his head enthusiastically at this.

  “Anyway,” I mumble, “guys, this is my girlfriend.”

  The Defeated One reaches out and kisses the back of her hand.

  “A pleasure. I think we’ve met before, actually, at Han’s. Mumbles, why don’t you grab a beer for the fair lady and I’ll give you both the grand tour? Wait until you check out his wine cellar.”

  After I’ve nabbed two Heinekens from the bar, we follow a manicured path toward the main house. The surrounding shrubbery is pruned to perfection, a few of the taller bushes shaped into columns supporting a canopy of vines. Jutting out from one side of the house rests a pool, seemingly carved out of the surrounding landscape.

  “The other half is inside the veranda. Retractable roof, so during the summer the entire pool can be out in the open,” the Defeated One explains.

  I whistle. “Must have cost a fortune.”

  “Only the finest,” the Defeated One says.

  With Tool #1 and the Woman With The Scarf walking a little ahead, he whispers to me, “Dude, why’d you bring her along? Didn’t you learn your lesson from the holiday party?”

  I shrug. “She wanted to come—a chance to match some faces to the stories I’ve been laying on her.”

  We step through an imposing archway and enter the Fish’s labyrinthine abode. Slinking past room after room, we are overwhelmed by the absurd ostentation of the decor: Napoleonic couches with gilded golden armrests, sprawling Persian carpets, sixty-inch plasma televisions, massive crystal chandeliers, a Ming vase, a reflecting pool, two grand pianos, a harp, a fully equipped gym, a room with all the contents in white, a room with all the contents in beige, a four-poster bed with each post resembling a steel girder. Hung above a blockish granite fireplace, a large painting that looks similar to the rest of Monet’s water lilies series.

  “It’s like the love child of Versailles and Philippe Starck,” the Woman With The Scarf muses in half-appreciation and half-contempt.

  We’re all feeling the same thing, I think: In one respect we’re awed by the enormous wealth of it, the rampant materialism that must have spurred this accumulation, but at the same time, we’re troubled by a tasseled pillow costing more than somebody’s welfare check, that the possible Monet is more valuable than the net worth of entire African nations.

  We wind our way through the house until the Defeated One ushers us into a dark room where the air is perceptibly cooler than the rest of the mansion. He flicks a light switch and we gasp: The room, shaped like a turret, is the biggest wine cellar I could ever have imagined. The bottles glint 360 degrees around us on shelves that spiral all the way up to the looming ceiling.

  “Even though I’ve seen it before, it still gets me right here,” the Defeated One says, covering his heart. “And none of these are cheap, either. You could probably hunt down thousand-dollar bottles of rare vintages somewhere in his collection.”

  “Jesus,” I say, craning my neck.

  A sound from the hallway. We hurriedly flick off the lights and rush from the room.
A false alarm: It’s just one of the maids feather-dusting a jewel-encrusted gong. She glances at us apathetically as we speed-walk past her.

  Back in the garden, we grab a few more drinks and find a discreet niche in which to observe the crowd. Over by a bed of rosebushes, the Philandering Managing Director is chatting up the Utterly Incompetent Assistant, the latter wearing a silly broad-rimmed sunhat, her face flushed pink from too many wine coolers. Some ways behind them, the Crazy Brit stands alone, sipping a glass of brandy.

  The Woman With The Scarf tugs at my elbow and says, “Come on, I didn’t come here to hide away in a corner. Let’s mingle for a bit.”

  I’m still feeling self-conscious about the flip-flops, but she’s already dragging me out of our seclusion.

  “Bon voyage,” the Defeated One says, smirking.

  Before I can resist further, she’s marched straight ahead in the direction of the Crazy Brit. He scowls at our approach. I smile nervously.

  “Um, hello.” I extend my hand, but he’s reluctant to touch it, barely shaking a few of the fingers.

  “Hello,” he sighs.

  I introduce the Woman With The Scarf.

  “My girlfriend.”

  He doesn’t even bother making eye contact.

  “A pleasure.”

  “So, you’ve been here long?”

  “Too long.”

  “And, uh, are you having a good time?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Oh.”

  After an awkward pause, he sniffs. “An interesting choice of footwear.”

  “The invitation said casual,” I say, blushing. “I guess I didn’t interpret it correctly . . .”

  I realize the Crazy Brit is barely paying attention to me, his gaze straying around the garden; he’s probably hatching an escape plan.

  “You will have those comps prepared for Monday morning, yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Funny, then, that you should be here instead of at the office, hmmm?”