Opening Belle

by Maureen Sherry

  “You sound like an ass.”

  “I’m a humor-seeking ass. What we’re trying to do here is find a plug for this flood. We aren’t here to save humanity. We can’t.”

  “I’m drowning in the debt of other people, Henry,” I say. “I think of these people and this situation far into the night. These people who were just numbers on a spreadsheet now haunt me.”

  Henry puts his hand on my back and rubs the right spot between my shoulder blades. I really shouldn’t let him do this, but it feels right to have human contact, possibly the only human not mad at me right now.

  “Look at this one,” I say. “Former librarian, has lived in the house for thirty-two years, refinanced to pay for medical care, now unemployed, no income.” The human crisis on the other end of these trades is making it harder to hold it together. The staggering amount of debt that banks have drummed up sits with people who can’t pay it back and why isn’t anyone talking about this? It isn’t possible to bring this stuff up at work without looking like a traitor. The newspapers barely mention it. Henry and Kathryn Peterson are my only outlets and she won’t talk about it. That just leaves Henry.

  He continues dragging and dropping with his outstretched arms alongside my own, like a father helping a kid steer an amusement park ride that dips and lifts and almost crashes but as of yet has not.

  CHAPTER 32

  Consumption

  WHEN I RETURN to the office, I find even fewer buyers for CDOs and CMOs than even one week ago. The stock market has been having intraday swings that are abnormally large only to finish up close to where it started.

  Back when I first started working, the Securities and Exchange Commission enforced something called an uptick rule, a rule that had been around since the 1930s. Any trader who was selling short, meaning taking a bet that a stock was going to fall, could only add to a short position after an uptick in the stock price, meaning the stock price moved slightly higher on the last trade. This severely lessened the chances of a stock collapsing. If a stock ticked up once, meaning there was a buyer out there, then someone else could sell that stock without owning it. Now stocks can be sold uncovered, nothing borrowed against the sale, all day long and I recall watching Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, speak on a news show. She was railing against the possibility of this rule being taken away. Less chaos in the market means fewer trades, but yes, a woman seemed to be the only one who could foresee that market order is more desirable than more money in her account. In just a few months the uptick rule would be tossed to the curb.

  I notice the number of uncovered shorts we own, the stocks that are sold that nobody really owns, is ticking up quickly. The stock market seems poised to do something dramatic and not good.

  To keep maintaining a somewhat active market, Feagin Dixon buys back the CDOs and CMOs that Henry and other institutional investors owned. Granted, we’re giving him less than he wants but still, it’s a lot of money and we’re left with possibly worthless bonds. I try to calm myself, telling myself stories of these things having AAA ratings and insurance and backstops in the event of a calamity, but my mind can’t still itself when I look at these screens.

  With Henry’s enormous trades, I’m earning commission both when they are bought and when they are sold and that should make me, Stone, and Kathryn happy. I think of the truckloads of returned inventory and how many other subprime players have the same issue. What about the really big banks, the Merrills, the Bear Stearns, and the Lehmans? What are they doing with their inventory? What if every pension fund and investor wanted to sell this stuff all at the same time and we had to return everyone’s money simultaneously? Does Feagin have that sort of money in its account? Do any banks? Banks don’t actually sit there with the cash in a vault. We sit with electronic notes and promises of an ability to tap cash when needed, but what if everyone demanded it at the same moment?

  Kathryn Peterson isn’t rattled by this turn of events. Whenever I go up to her land of make-believe money, the floor has the nervous hush of people waiting for their flight to be canceled. Everyone wants words of assurance from someone in charge, but nobody’s in charge. The traders on her floor are subdued and their moronic antics seem forced, almost melancholy. Monty’s birthday party seemed to have happened years ago. Tension is making people jittery, with the exception of Kathryn, but when I try to meet with her, she claims to be busy.

  When I review the McElroy escape account, the lack of liquidity we have is almost incomprehensible. I have Feagin Dixon stock I’m not allowed to sell. I have a CeeV-TV position in a deal that hasn’t closed. My salary is paid by a bank with extreme risk on its balance sheet. If Feagin had to pay out cash to everyone trying to sell subprime back to us, what would that do to our own stock price?

  All employees are supposed to pretend that it’s business as usual. When a client calls and asks questions about our liquidity we have a party line about insurance and backstopping and repeat that there’s nothing to worry about. The tension is tight like an overstretched guitar string.

  I have a gripping need to speak to someone in the real world, someone in a job not related to this. I need a girlfriend who teaches or runs a bakery but I have none. The closest I have is Elizabeth, who works for a start-up where I don’t understand what she does, but I’m desperate. She was my best friend from college, though she gave up on our getting together months ago. I ask her for another chance and hope she’ll pick up the phone.

  CHAPTER 33

  Front Running

  ON SATURDAY MORNING Elizabeth offers me a limited chunk of her time on neutral turf. She’s not one to spend an endless afternoon in a germ-infested indoor gym or on a cold playground. We meet at a high-end brunch place filled with beautiful people who all seem to be experiencing some kind of postcoital tristesse. I’m bringing the only kids who will be in this place and as any parent of young kids can foresee, this is a commitment to failure.

  I jam the stroller through a too-tight door and catch the mystified face of Owen. This is not Central Park, he seems to say. I can let myself feel a little set up by Elizabeth, and Owen maybe feels a little set up by me. His face is asking me what I’m thinking.

  There’s another tidbit that makes this plan an assured fail: meeting at 10 a.m. I mean, yes, Elizabeth is probably freshly rolled from her boyfriend’s bed, but we McElroys ate breakfast three hours ago, had a midmorning snack, and are headed for a nap in an hour. We don’t do brunch. We don’t even know what that is.

  Elizabeth is married to her work, a career that consists of cranking up social media interest for her clients’ companies. She is paid handsomely for what really is her intuition and ability to notice trends. She’s an expert on the human mind and its varied desires, and she’s so good at this because she never stops studying men—her data are always virgin and her honesty makes her a valuable friend.

  “Isabelle . . . It’s been . . . like, a month!” she proclaims for all fellow diners to know. She leans forward to kiss my cheeks and the thinnest cashmere scarf brushes my neck. It feels like a thousand-dollar scarf.

  “Or six months or whatever,” I say, taking in her übercool yet classy look. She takes in my look too.

  “What’s that?” she asks, pointing to my little muffin belly. Yoga pants are slimming but when you toss a long white shirt over the show, it clings to the spandex. It’s not my best look.

  “These pants make me look fat so I wore them for you,” I say dryly.

  Elizabeth shakes my kids’ hands, being clueless that they aren’t twenty-one. She never brings them gifts or makes silly voices or fart noises on their bellies. She never even tells them they’ve gotten big. She’s one of my best friends and probably doesn’t know my kids’ names. I love her for this because she really only cares about me. The surveys of human life she seems to constantly be conducting don’t include children.

  “What’s his name?” I ask, reaching out my hands to imply that I’ve taken in her whole loo
k. Her face is glowing with pheromones. She’s tall like me but with some Polynesian Hawaiian thing in her genes. Her skin is just enough olive to be exotic, her teeth are vibrant and white, and she’s always rocking some fabulous jewelry. She wears jeans on Saturdays that are the three-digit-price-tag kind. You don’t know why they cost so much but they just look better and someone like Elizabeth knows how to wear them. When we were single and walking into rooms together, all heads turned toward our tallness and youth. Now when she stands to hug me, the room turns as expected but all eyes are for her. I’m not sad to give her a solo. I just take note of it.

  “Felípe? He’s, like, amazing.”

  “Is he ‘like’ amazing, or is he in fact amazing?”

  She cocks her head. “Like, amazing.” We both laugh.

  Elizabeth pours the three kids bubbly water in real and breakable stemware. Owen is in my lap but not touching or banging anything. It’s like she mesmerizes kids by ignoring them. I think about pulling out the bright red plastic sippy cups conveniently located on the back of the stroller and suggesting we veer toward the ingestion of BPAs, but I hesitate. The table looks too perfect. Everything is white and crisp. A single, perfect lily on a tall stem sits in the middle and no small hands grab for it. If I weren’t wearing the yoga pants and maybe took the scrunchie out of my ponytail, we could even look like some two-mommy photo shoot.

  I pass the basket of croissants around and, leaving no time for niceties, dive in and tell her about the mortgage market. She nods her head and asks if there’s any part of me that’s surprised by this. She acts like I should have seen this all coming. No. I’m boring her, and the fact that she doesn’t care soothes me. If real people don’t see this as a crisis, it probably isn’t.

  I move on to the Glass Ceiling Club. I can’t let this chance pass for me to share all this with someone I trust. When I delve into the Gruss lunch she again looks bored.

  “Belle,” she interrupts, “you’re describing the whole tech start-up scene in this town. We have options instead of real money, we’re probably scruffier than your crew, but what’s the news here? Men need to react to threats to their superiority so they misbehave. Businesses with big money at stake become arrogant and chauvinistic. Where’s the news flash in that? Why are you so bothered?”

  “I’m bothered because I work there. I have stock in the place and, well, I’m ashamed of it.”

  “What makes you think the finance industry is so different from the rest of America?” she responds. “What makes you think I don’t see the same stuff just with younger guys? Am I ashamed of my company? Not really. I let the bullshit go.”

  “What other industry in America keeps this behavior so secret? I mean, our contracts ensure that you will never read about this in the newspaper.”

  “Maybe the paper doesn’t want to print these stories. Maybe this is the oldest story ever written. Maybe it’s boring. Look, I get that you Wall Street people lose good women because they can’t handle the environment. We have the same thing, but guess what? The committed ones stay, the ones we want to stay, stay.” She points a butter knife at me when she says the word stay.

  “You sound like B. Gruss II.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  I sigh. “Elizabeth, doesn’t it bother you to be spoken to like that?”

  “Like what? Nobody speaks to me any certain way ’cause I’m their boss. They’re all, like, twenty-two. I’m the babysitter, the one the parents left in charge.”

  “So that’s the difference. What if you weren’t able to be the boss? What if you know you’re better than people more senior than you but never get promoted?”

  As we shoot back and forth, three little-kid heads turn in unison. What’s making my kids suddenly intrigued by adult conversation? Why are they being so good?

  “Here’s how I see it.” She pushes up the sleeves on her blazer and flips her hair from one side to the other. Two men at a nearby table have their mouths almost in panting position. One even drops his phone on the floor, right at her feet. I roll my eyes at him and even though it fell to her side it’s me who snaps it up and puts it back on their table forcefully, ignoring his gracious thank-yous.

  She’s used the moment to contemplate what I’ve said. “We both work in really open environments. There’s not so much as a cubicle wall in either of our lives, okay? People let their guard down when they operate like that and then they go tribal.”

  “Tribal?”

  “Yeah, like those orphaned elephants in Africa who find a new family in the pack of other orphaned elephants. They get wild ’cause they have no parents.”

  “Elephants!” Owen squeals, and proceeds to move his head like he has the weight of a trunk swinging off his front.

  “Orphaned elephants?” I repeat dully. “That’s an excuse?”

  “Can I get champagne?” she asks the waiter. “Does anyone else want one?” She looks at me in my yoga pants and my disheveled kids and doesn’t bat an eye. “Anyone?” She’s not even joking. This is whom I’m seeking advice from, someone offering champagne to minors.

  “Look at it this way,” I try again. “I have these MBA women, graduates from Duke and Harvard and Wharton, and they’ve got so much potential and we hire them, we train them, and then some dope does something and there we are watching her leave with a nice check in her hands, never to work on Wall Street again. I never get the upside of that woman. I spend the time to train her, I use up my very limited energy bucket to mentor her, and in a way it’s my money spent to have her leave. Is it worth it to me to even hire someone like that? These women could be so useful to the firm, they could be a voice of reason on the risk committee, and they could help raise the whole culture of the bank, but instead the men treat them like sex objects and they run.”

  “Wait, so your question is should you hire these types of lassies? You just answered yourself.”

  “So I should never hire women.”

  “Never.”

  “Liz, gimme a break.”

  “They frickin’ whine, they reproduce, they’re litigious. Stick to guys.”

  “You only hire guys?”

  “I mostly hire guys. Guys and lesbians. I’m not going to lie. I just have less drama with those two groups. Maybe do your next recruiting trip to the LGBT office at one of those fancy universities you visit. Minorities too. They work out well. They’re hungry to move ahead and don’t give a rat’s behind about Johnnie thwacking someone’s ass.”

  “Enough. You’re saying gay women and minorities don’t mind being harassed? Who the hell are you these days?”

  “I’m saying they aren’t so sensitive. They’re above it, they’re focused, and they’re not analyzing every nuance of every comment, looking for some sort of harassment angle. I’ve always said the stuff you think but are afraid to say. Look at that description I just gave you of successful women. You’re one of them. I’m one of them. You’re even more of one of them ’cause you have the whole kid package too. You’re like one of those women leaning in. Or is it leaning over?”

  “You’re hurting my ears.”

  “Belle. Reality check. We’re ambitious and we aren’t overly sensitive. Guys like us. They know how to work with us. The guys aren’t going to change. It’s too late for them. The women need to just deal with it. I get to move ahead ’cause I picked an industry where the average company has twenty employees and very few rules. You work in a big bank with lots of structure and rules that nobody pays attention to anyway. You’re talking like you suddenly want to enforce stuff that’s never been enforced. You want to be the headmistress of a bunch of cowboys wearing pinstripes and that’s a loser’s job. Any growth industry is too busy to adhere to lots of rules and manners. It’s a wild landgrab for me and for you and so yes, a little ass pinching goes along with that.”

  I sit back on my faux-fur banquette and think about this while Elizabeth rants on. If I didn’t love her, I’d hate her right about now. She still isn’t done talking.

/>   “Look, if you want to run something you have to go small and start it yourself, and speaking of small, I have a job for you.”

  Elizabeth proceeds to tell me about a group at her firm who created a high-speed technology that allows traders to see stock market orders coming in a millisecond before they trade. Elizabeth’s group can then jump in and buy that stock before the trade is executed and before the order will make the price rise. They are essentially buying the stock for a smidgen less, a millisecond faster. Once the big order is done at the higher price, her group sells and takes their minimal profit. If you do this hundreds of times a day, it adds up. To me it sounds like front running, to me it sounds illegal. I can’t believe her firm can do this and still have clearance as a broker/dealer. But they don’t. They outsource this stuff as a service to a bank that does. This side business at her social media firm is now raking in cash at such a rate that what I call frontrunning is their largest profit center.

  “I’m worried about the market,” I tell her. “There are too many people finding loopholes like that. I have no interest in making someone’s grandmother pay one-sixteenth of a dollar more than she should and pocketing the difference. There’s so much credit and borrowing and people doing things they can’t afford.”

  Finally one of my kids spills something. Brigid had pulled multiple flakes off her croissant and watched them float like flotsam to the bottom of the glass. But now her glass is sideways on the table. Kevin tries to be helpful by grabbing a fresh diaper from the stroller and dabbing at the mess. The result is something that looks horrifying and we need to roll on out of here.

  As we assemble ourselves and rise from the table, I look back at my beautiful, ruthless friend. One of the guys at the next table makes all the body language clues that he’s about to begin chatting her up. My tribe and I can’t get out of there fast enough for him and I see the relief on his face as he figures Elizabeth is in fact mother to none. He’s irritating me. She’s irritating me. There’s something I want to tell her.