“Gruss is worried about something, Belle,” says Amy. “It’s your job to find out what it is.”
“I’m sure he’s just responding to that letter Amanda sent our CEO, requesting that he meet with us,” I say.
“Yeah, I’d agree with you,” says Amanda, “if I’d actually sent the letter.”
“You didn’t send it?”
“Did not.”
“Then it’s the Metis memos. They’re going to everyone, probably even the press,” I say.
“Who better to address them than a guy famous for only attending really important meetings, a guy we’re all forced to respect? Send the ladies to chat with the chairman. That’ll shut them up. It’s genius.”
• • •
The GCC decides I should represent all of our concerns at the lunch, and as much as I don’t want to be seen as a troublemaker, I’m the only one of us who’ll get to ask any questions. Before I do that, I need to talk to Bruce. If our income is about to take another hit, he’s really got to know why. I mention this to the table.
“You need your husband’s permission?”
“You’re as submissive as we’re supposed to be.”
“Doesn’t her husband have, like, an office job or something?”
“She confuses me. I mean, she’s so strong in some ways and so wussy in others.” That last one was Amanda.
“You guys are like school bullies,” I point out. “If I was insecure, you’d actually bother me.”
“Ladies, give it a rest,” Amy says. “I mean, we don’t think like Belle because none of us is part of a decent marriage. Most of us who were married,” she says reflectively, “sucked at it.”
I sit here stunned to silence, not because of what they want me to do, but because I now understand they see Bruce and me as their finest example of a happy, working marriage.
“Focus on the constructive,” I say while Amanda nods and writes. She’s listing grievances and thoughts about how to change things going forward. She passes her draft around the table, making certain everything is there.
For us there is no real possibility of a career path, there’s just money. I tell myself that I know how to make money now. I have sales skills and an understanding of balance sheets that make me employable. I still believe in the good things that banking can do to help people and help our country. Loans allow growth, business growth means jobs, and jobs mean stability. While I’m not sure about the mortgage market, I do believe in investment and loans and people owning their own shelter. The women talk on and on while I think about my mother, something I don’t do enough. She was obsessed with owning the house where we eventually lived and it took years until we saved enough to make that happen. I get that. That’s not greed. It’s a basic human desire for safety and stability and control over your life. It’s knowing your kids have a home that won’t ever be taken away. Wanting such a thing did not make my mother greedy. It made her a good mom.
In the end our list looks like this:
• Equal pay for equal work.
• Recruitment of quality female MBAs remains a challenge because of our culture. Candidates have reservations about the arduous hours, lack of female partners, no female representation on the board.
• No flexibility for working mothers even though many of our jobs don’t require us to be physically in the office.
• Disallow romantic relationships between employees having direct power over each other.
• Give employees back their civil rights and drop the arbitration clause, letting individual harassers be sued. This will force the firm into a more professional culture.
• Risk management—Women need to be on the risk committee. We aren’t comfortable with current portfolio positions.
And that’s where we stopped. These items were imperative to the survival of our firm and I couldn’t imagine any employee being against them.
I leave Buddakan and any thoughts I had about returning to the office. Instead I head toward home. I stop at a Whole Foods and load up a cart for a family twice our size. Our cupboards are always ridiculously empty and while Bruce never complains or takes care of this problem, our kids’ penchant for consuming chemically concocted food, always in a rush, fills me with guilt.
I push my cart up and down those overflowing aisles like a suburban mother. The more good-looking fruits and vegetables I pile in the cart, the more I feel like I’m caring for my family. I try to not think of how quickly they will wilt, how fast this excited optimism about change will probably fade. I buy a fillet of beef and some fingerling potatoes and string beans so fresh they snap like a mousetrap in my hand. I buy bread hot from the oven and a deep, smokey Merlot.
Caregiver is out when I get home and I stand in my kitchen, which is lightly coated with some greasy substance. We can never quite get to the status of clean in our house. That’s okay, I think as I look around at the crayon marks on the wall and the edge of our cork flooring peeling upward. We’re doing okay and I feel so hopeful. Speaking openly about our culture of risk and secrecy and invisible ceilings and playground behavior will be a really good thing.
I see a message from Henry in my in-box and I ignore it.
Like a four-armed person I marinate, chop, steam, and sauté. I uncork and decant the wine after pouring myself a plastic sippy cup–ful, which I gulp down. I pour boiling water into the sink and bend low to receive as close to a facial as I have time for these days. As I stand bent at the waist, two hands come from behind me and pull me close.
“You’re home early.” Bruce’s voice sounds lower than usual.
“Yeah. Something overcame me today,” I say with my face flush.
Bruce is making me feel girly, making me relieved to know I haven’t hardened into some unmeltable Clarisse figure, some stoic Kathryn, or some sad Amy.
“That’s not a béarnaise sauce I smell,” he says, pushing his boyish hair out of his face. “I mean, whenever I smell something good coming up the elevator I just have to assume the smell belongs to the neighbors.”
“Yeah, wish they’d invite us over sometime.”
“Yeah, nobody invites us over. Why doesn’t anyone invite us over?” He’s laughing now.
“Would you invite us over?” I say, offering him the dregs of the sippy cup.
Bruce seems to actually think about this. “Maybe if Brigid would give the theatrics a rest.”
“Or if Owen changed his own diapers,” I add.
“Or Kevin stopped eating with his hands. And Woof Woof promised not to eat shoes. Yeah, we have promise as future dinner guests.” Bruce pours more wine into the sippy cup and lets me have first dibs, all without letting one hand leave my waist.
“We’ve got to change that damn dog’s name,” I say.
“Woof Woof is a fine and telling name.”
“Yeah, Woof Woof is the name that tells everyone his owners were too lazy to bother coming up with a real name.”
“We were too tired to think of something, which is different than lazy. And besides, Kevin couldn’t speak very well. He just kept saying ‘Woof.’ ”
“But Kevin’s seven now,” I say wistfully.
And like that, we suddenly realize that five years have slipped by and we haven’t gotten around to naming our beloved dog. We’re pathetic.
“They say these years go fast,” I tell Bruce.
“That’s so damn corny. I can’t believe I’m married to someone who speaks like that.”
“I’m not your wife. Your wife doesn’t talk like that. I talk like that and I cook. Your wife doesn’t cook.”
“Damn right she doesn’t.”
“I’m replacing your wife tonight, giving her a night off,” I say in some June Cleaver tone. “Can I pour you a drink in a real glass? Get you your slippers?”
“Do we even own slippers?” Bruce asks while rubbing his non-wife’s backside. I pretend to not enjoy my caveman husband. “No. We’re slipperless.”
“Did I tell you that your real wife c
an cook?” I grin and hold each of his shoulders with kitchen mitts that I’ve put on my hands.
“I know she can,” he says, “but she doesn’t.”
“Poor you,” I say. “That’s got to be hard.”
“You know what’s hard?” he says, looking down at his pants.
We laugh.
Something about the smell of meat raises the testosterone level in my husband and he lifts me as easily as he would a kid and takes me Neanderthal-style back to our perfectly-neat-and-without-one-toy-on-the-floor bedroom and I allow him to have his way with me. I fumble with the oven mitts still stupidly on my hands but he shakes his head no, as if this is some domestic fantasy of his, and I blissfully relax into letting him be in charge. Without thinking once about small feet and high voices that will come at any minute, we rock each other’s world.
In the moments that follow, we’re in that sweet spot where one is both vulnerable and able to listen well. This is also the moment before the meat will begin to burn so I have to talk fast. I inhale and let it rip:
“So about a dozen senior women at Feagin Dixon were invited to meet with B. Gruss,” I say.
“B. Gruss? Haven’t heard his name in a while. What the hell type of name is B anyway?”
“It’s not a name. It’s an initial.”
“Like fill in the blank, like Brahmin or Barnacle Bob or Batman or—”
“Or Bruce. Yeah. So can we stay on topic here?”
Bruce shifts to his side and his shoulder is angled and bulging like that of a man in his twenties. He crinkles his face. “So a meeting. Will you do bong hits together and then figure out new ways to make money?”
“No, that’s another bank that has the chairman pot smoker. This guy’s addicted to caffeine and stuff you get a prescription for. Anyway, Gruss invited me to a lunch to discuss women’s issues at the firm and this is big because he doesn’t hold too many meetings and when he does, they matter. I’m thinking of speaking up and outing myself as a non–team player. I want your approval.”
“My approval? Do you need the shoeshine guy’s approval too? Lady, I’m the crushed bug. You don’t need anything from me,” he says.
I don’t even begin to do the obvious, to tell him he isn’t worthless and other responses too uncomfortable to get into. I just continue.
“I want to really illustrate to him the stuff that goes on, to explain what it’s like for women who work there. He’s been in an office and not on the trading floor for so long he can’t fully understand it. I have suggestions for him too. I mean, he may not welcome them, but what if he does? Senior management adores him and they’ll take his advice. What if it turns into a really fruitful meeting? I’m sticking my neck out here and, well, you know there’ll be repercussions.”
Bruce is silent for a moment. “Did you just use the word fruitful?”
“What? Oh yeah, I guess.”
“That’s so dorky.” He smiles.
“It is. I’m a dork. The word fruitful suits me. I mean, look at me, I’m wearing oven mitts.”
Bruce is quiet as he strokes my naked hip up and down, over and over. He seems fixated on a mole I have at the place where my leg dips toward the groin. After he tenderly removes my oven mitts, he pushes some hair from my face and speaks.
“Belle, there have been times recently where I don’t know who I married anymore. In a sea of suits, you shone like some effervescent angel and I’m not some guy who believes in love at first sight but man, you were ethereal.”
He hasn’t spoken so gently to me in a very long time. I know I should say something equally flattering back but I don’t. I also know that whatever is coming next won’t be so nice. It’s going to be something about how I’ve changed, something about how unhappy he is with me, or about how I stink as a mother and that if it weren’t for him our kids would be in social services. As a rule of business, now would be the time to nip a conversation heading toward the negative and take it over. But I don’t want to be Ms. Managing Director right now, I don’t want to be Henry’s virtual lover right now either, I want to be Bruce’s wife.
“I cheered for you as you climbed the ladder in that mad place you work,” Bruce said. “I listened to some of the stories and tried not to be judgmental. Baby, I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit you make our mortgage payments easy to swallow and our kids couldn’t go to their great schools if we didn’t have your income. The emasculation is one thing and I’m fine with that now.”
Bruce is still looking at my freckled thigh, still stroking away at me. He suddenly smacks his fabulous six-pack abdominals and I notice everything is so solid there. My husband’s been working out and dieting and I haven’t even noticed.
“I can handle that, I’m a semi-solid guy,” he says. “But the lifestyle?” He turns his deep-green eyes to look right into mine. “We aren’t living large here, Belle. You never see the kids, you never see me—like this, that is.” He pulls the covers down to reveal all of him, making his point funny, and yet not so funny. “You know I support you in whatever it is you’re really about to do. Even if it costs us this lifestyle, ’cause honestly, babe, you can’t tell me this is all that great. Whatever it is you want to say in that meeting, you say it.”
I can’t resist him. Even though I’m tired and my dinner is about to become undone. I cannot resist my husband in the late-afternoon sun on our big white bed with the almost clean sheets when I know his love for me is hanging by a thread and I know I still can turn so many things around. In his own Bruce-like way, he is saying, “Yes.”
CHAPTER 25
Tribal Knowledge
THE ELEVATOR lifts me to the executive dining room and my calm grows with each passing floor. I’ve rehearsed what I want to say, so there’s nothing left to do except play it through. To hold on to my resolve, I’ve left unopened every message from Henry and I’ve made Stone or Kathryn return every phone call to him. If Henry knew what I’m about to do, he’d talk me out of it.
I enter an intimate side room off the executive dining room. This room has a nasty reputation and another name, the BJ Ballroom, because it offers the perfect amount of discretion for afternoon delights that don’t include food.
There’s a round table with twelve silver place settings, starched white linens, and a simple flower arrangement in the middle. The windows are covered with a gauzy material that allows the presence of daylight to be hinted at. Gruss’s place is set with a silver cigar cutter, a cigar, and an ashtray in the place where a soup spoon should be. I go to the seat next to his to ensure I get access to the guy.
A woman is already standing in the room, ready to greet Gruss’s guests. It’s Blythe Quidel, one of Feagin Dixon’s legal counsel, and technically the last word on all things human resourcey. When she sees where I’m about to sit, she raises one bleached eyebrow in curiosity.
“Oh, is this assigned seating?” I say to the question on her face.
“Now, Ms. McElroy, of course not,” Blythe says crisply, though I can tell my bullheaded move has surprised her.
I glance at the embedded microphones on the table. They’re a permanent installation and there’s no way to tell if they are on or off. I’m going to guess we’re being recorded.
“Belle,” Blythe gushes in her false southern tone, and comes around the table to shake my hand. Her accent is like Madonna’s English affectation; it tells you where she wishes she were from. Blythe takes a moment to think about how to speak in a way that doesn’t sound so defensive and goes forward with this person, altered from thirty seconds ago.
The top of her head only reaches my shoulder and I stoop a bit to shake her hand. It’s hard for me to smile at someone I just don’t like, but I do my best. Blythe is a fantastic lawyer and a complete sellout. Each time I took a maternity leave, she’d read me a speech that basically said Feagin owed me a job but legally didn’t owe me the exact position I was leaving behind. Each time I had to sit there, my head lowered while I took a subconscious bashing for my audac
ious move of reproducing. Blythe’s method of achieving success on Wall Street is to be one of the boys. It’s as if she can’t understand why any woman wants both motherhood and a great career. To her it should be one or the other and in nuanced, nonlitigious language, she will tell you that.
Other women now begin to enter the room exactly at noon and as a pack. They stand around air-kissing and admiring one another for a moment, but they aren’t chitchatters so things quiet down fast. Most have never spent time with Gruss, so curiosity and an innate desire to please others makes everyone sit quickly and snap napkins to their laps and wait for something big to happen.
Blythe instructs everyone to begin eating even though B. Gruss II, the main event, hasn’t arrived, and obedient picking of the salads begins. Stories of trades and deals, from Chicago, Boston, the West Coast, are swapped and a waiter fruitlessly tries to pour wine with no acceptor. I move colorful little legumes about my plate and feel my heartbeat pick up when I hear footsteps approach. It’s one of the women who guard Gruss’s office, followed by the man himself.
He seems taller than I remembered and more fit too. I’m told he now has a treadmill desk so he walks all day while manning his phone calls. The sheen off his head radiates some of the light in the room and he gives us a presidential wave and intense eye contact. His giant smile reveals expensive orthodontia yellowed slightly to appear real and I think to myself that BG could pass for any number of stereotypes: retired retail executive, 47th Street jewelry salesman, or sports celebrity handler, but the biggest deal maker at one of the world’s largest investment banks? You wouldn’t have guessed that one.
“So it’s my girl partners and girl partner–lights,” he crows. “All in the same room at the same time.”
We titter because that’s what we’re supposed to do. He athletically moves himself to his designated spot at the round table. He settles into his seat and makes a few more jokes to make us feel important.
Opening Belle Page 17