The three “arb” guys stand, ashen-faced. I guess the weak markets made them go long, buy stocks on weakness, expecting them to rebound quickly for a profit. Had they done that in recent days, their clocks would have been cleaned. There are no buyers out there at any price, so they watched their positions sink, Titanic-like, while they smashed things on their desks. Their faces tell me that entire story.
The last one of them to leave looks across at me. I pretend to be engrossed in my screen of 7s.
“Isabelle?” he asks.
I used to love when coworkers, men I didn’t know at all, knew of me just by reputation, but not tonight. He’s a midsized, athletic man, gray at the temples, and I don’t remember ever seeing him.
“Yes?” I answer with a frog noise blocking the usual sound of my voice.
He walks over to me and stands behind my screen, looking over my shoulder at the nothingness in front of me.
“Belle,” he says again, “you look like you need a drink. Want to get a drink?”
He appears to need one terribly, and I know I should try to be friendly. If I had a drink with him I might possibly tell him, this stranger, everything.
“Thanks,” I say gratefully. “But no. Need to be getting home.”
“Maybe we should both go home and face the music,” he says.
He believes my problem is the worst stock market since the Great Depression. People recovered from that.
“Need to go make a home,” I say, knowing it will mean nothing to him, but oddly it gives me some comfort.
CHAPTER 40
Yield
MY LAST DAY at Feagin ended in a blue-collar town in New Jersey in the arms of a large Hispanic man.
I was on a business trip, seeing clients in Trenton and Princeton and then, in a crazed attempt to make it home in time for dinner, I took the New Jersey Turnpike. Like some teenager in her rich-girl convertible, I wove in and out of HOV lanes I didn’t belong in, desperate to pick the kids up from Bruce’s new one-bedroom apartment, a place of glass and chrome that screams bachelor to all who enter. Bruce took none of the trappings of little kids with him. Besides some nice pieces of furniture he took nothing except half my money and a sizeable portion of my gut. We’re all new to this split-custody lifestyle and to me it feels like an unending game of make-believe, as if we’re playacting in someone else’s uncomfortable drama. Nothing feels routine or natural yet.
The markets have rebounded some, but loans to businesses and individuals have dried up. The only trades I was having were sells and some value buyers tucking blue-chip names into young investors’ accounts, people who would see this thing through for the long haul.
Since Bruce and I separated, I’ve had a vicious need to be with my children. World markets imploding and deals being canceled make no impression on me. I just need the people who need me. The apartment seemed suffocating in Bruce’s absence and I have taken to leaving windows open all the time, exorcising some virus that infected our world. I put the thing up for sale in the weakest real estate market in a decade and haven’t gotten the slightest sniff of interest from anyone. The playground and the Tea Bag House in Southampton are the only places where things feel right to me and I keep wondering about the public school system out there on Long Island and how my kids would fare in a world not artificially partitioned by money.
Each night I scan my children’s faces for some sign of distress. I’ve oversensitized myself to the point where I consider every instance of lethargy or aggression to be some fallout from our lousy parenting. I never stay at work past 6 p.m. and I no longer entertain. Work has become simply a means to a paycheck and the paycheck is just to cover the day-to-day expenses for this unhappy existence. That evening in New Jersey where everything changed yet again, I was just a harried worker, needing to get home to her kids.
I was about halfway home when I stopped in Rutherford, New Jersey. I needed a bathroom so badly and couldn’t make it all the way home. I took an exit and entered a town of old brick buildings where the businesses had names like Luigi’s and Carmine’s though everyone appeared to be Hispanic. I saw a Burger King, home of the easily accessible toilet. I jumped out of my rented Ford Taurus, locked the doors, and went into the stall with toilet water chemically coaxed to purple. I placed the keys on top of the toilet paper holder, that shelf too small to hold a purse but large enough to be in the way of getting to the paper. But in a rushed attempt to get out of the stall and back to the turnpike, I swung to hit the flusher with my foot. My size-101/2 pointy-toed boot caught the Hertz key ring in just the right place and knocked the keys into the toilet, where they splashed the second I pushed my foot against the flusher. While I tried to tell myself that I hadn’t actually done what I did, I waited in vain for them to appear at the bottom of the toilet as the water settled. I pleaded with invisible forces to reverse the actions of those last two seconds while I suppose the swirling vortex of keys headed speedily on their way to some wastewater treatment plant in New Jersey. I was instantly a transportationless, frantic, pathetic mother who couldn’t manage to get home to pick her children up from their father’s one-bedroom sex pad because she flushed her Ford Taurus keys down the toilet.
I stood motionless in the locked stall, and I begged for a do-over. In fact I demanded a big do-over, a many-years, many-choices do-over and I wanted it to begin right away. I had always been the good girl, the cooperative one, the girl who didn’t party too much or get facial tattoos or sleep with strangers. I was the one who answered the teacher’s questions, who did her homework, who opted to rise early and work late after everyone else left. Shouldn’t it be guaranteed for that girl to not have her life turn out like this? Isn’t there a pact with some sacred being, a deal with the angels? I didn’t realize I was actually pounding on the metal wall that separated my stall from the one next to me. I didn’t realize I was moaning in some guttural, frightening way that would send little girls running for their mommies. I also don’t know how long it went on.
Some man was sent in to save me from myself though I could hardly see him through my tears. I caught sight of something paper and golden on his head that appeared to be some sort of crown. I think he was the King of Burgers, and somehow he got assigned to the lunatic in the ladies’ room. He was a nice man, large and Spanish-speaking. I know enough Spanish to understand the word loca, spoken into a radio receiver. He was telling people this white lady in an expensive suit was nuts. He put his large, brown arms around me in an effort to contain me but I interpreted this as his desire to hug me. I hugged him right back, with a force that I’m sure surprised him. I couldn’t hold tightly enough to his thick middle that smelled like French fries. My ferocious grip caused his crown to fall into the toilet but I didn’t let go, wouldn’t let go of this adult-sized human who felt strong and supportive and in charge of something, even if it was security at the Rutherford Burger King.
Eventually my heart, which had been racing, slowed. I heard people come and go, turning on water, pushing on hand dryers, sighing at us just standing there in our open second stall. Another man came to the door to ask if he was okay and he said, “No problema.”
I pushed back enough to read the name tag on the man’s shirt. “Leonardo,” it read. He winced and adjusted the tag and only then did I realize it had opened and I’d been stabbing him with the pin. He even had droplets of blood forming on his mustard-yellow shirt.
“Lo siento,” I said, reaching for toilet paper to dab at his wound.
He shook his head and squeezed my shoulders and said, “You’re okay.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.
I thought about my next move, about how I should call Hertz or call a locksmith. I thought of the fact it was now 6 p.m. and that Friday evening at 6 p.m. in New Jersey is probably a time that all locksmiths and all Hertz car rental agents have universally agreed to go home. It’s the time that no human should ever do something stupid.
I went into the dining area and sat in a Formica booth watchin
g some soccer team scarf down food and grab fries from each other’s pile, chattering over each other’s words. I could see Leonardo playing some sort of Simon Says game with a group of kids inside a glassed-in room. It seemed everyone around me was speaking but I couldn’t understand anyone’s words.
I rose and went outside to find the wind had picked up on this early spring evening. I peered in the car window and took inventory of what was inside: my work computer, packets of deal material for an IPO, an HP calculator, and a cold cup of coffee. Then I looked at what I had with me outside the car: my wallet and my phone. Really I had everything I needed. A police car pulled into the parking lot and I thought about asking them to jimmy open the door but everything in my car appeared to be so bulky, so heavy, my car was full of quicksand. Instead I asked them if there was a bus to New York City.
The young officers looked curiously at my suit and boots not designed for walking, but they pointed and said it’s about three miles from there and that was good enough for me. The road rose about one hundred yards away from that Burger King and I stopped for a moment to look back at the car and all I was leaving behind. The hill offered just enough pitch for me to catch the final moment of daylight reflecting off the darkened Taurus’s window. It was there I said good-bye to the Glass Ceiling Club, which, while well-meaning, represented nothing in the end, good-bye to obsessing about Bruce screwing his flexible friend, good-bye to that white car with its load of papers and the suck of the money inside it. I said good-bye to it all on a hill in New Jersey as a last flash of sunlight hit the driver’s window at just the right angle. For a moment I could have sworn I saw that car wink right back at me.
CHAPTER 41
Rational Exuberance
September 2015
THE GLASS DOORS of our offices at Arbella Financial are propped open, letting the spring ocean breeze fill the trading room. If it weren’t littered with LCD screens, the place would look like some trendy downtown showroom, rather than a boutique investment bank. Colorful boxes, all framed in white plastic, contain the few papers we deal with each day. Amy designed and Bruce built out the trading turrets. As a single man he’s become a fantastically talented carpenter and the result is stunningly beautiful.
Once you grab your egg crate of possessions each morning, you pick your favorite colored cushion and go find yourself a seat—not unlike a preschool class where each kid chooses her circle spot. We make ourselves sit next to someone different each day, to help us share ideas and to avoid planting the seeds of clique-gossip that exists in most offices. Our mission is far too important to play the games of the past years.
We have a Ping-Pong room, which makes us look like a hip technology start-up, which we are not. We aren’t very cool and we haven’t overextended our adolescence; we have a playroom because we have kids. We are a boutique investment firm, predominately run by women. While we have a tiny office in Manhattan to make us seem more legitimate, our headquarters are here in Hampton Bays, New York, about two miles from the Atlantic Ocean and ninety miles from New York City. It’s a town with simple ranch houses and no celebrity visits. A yellow school bus stops outside our door each afternoon and deposits five of my employees’ children, plus my three, whom I now get to see while a bit of sunlight still is present. I like just about everything going on in my life right now, here in September 2015.
We started this place with settlement money the GCC received. Manchester Bank set aside money for pending Feagin Dixon lawsuits. Once they got to know the firm they bought, they foresaw litigation raining from the sky regarding shady mortgages, extreme financial instruments, and, where the GCC came in, harassment and unfair pay practices.
An accrual or reserve was set up to hash this stuff out before the banks became one. For a brief while, the management of Feagin Dixon still ran the firm and settled these smaller issues before the deal closed. While a small rounding error in the face of the mortgage crisis numbers was to come, the GCC was handed $27 million. It was a lot of money with not one cent for me. I was too puzzled to sue and was unclear what exactly I was suing for. But my friends, yes friends, from the GCC were rich. They combined their settlement money to start this firm, and they chose me as their leader at a nice salary, which rocked my pride button more than any promotion I’ve ever received. We manage our own money and provide seed money to small, promising companies. We help them to grow and one of them has even come public. We aren’t making millions but we’re doing really well.
Why didn’t I sue? That night I was racing from a Burger King in New Jersey to New York City, desperate to pick up the kids on time, I was supposed to have swung by a law office to join the other women in their complaint. I took the glass elevator up to Bruce’s sex pad. Instead of him being mad, he fixated puppy eyes on me and acted like he was in mourning.
“So run and do your thing and leave the kids here tonight,” Bruce had said in a tone far too nice for me to trust. He sounded so giving and borderline loving. He sounded like someone I used to know.
“Yes, but I’m late, and what if you use that against me?”
“Against you?”
“With the judge and all.”
“Belle, we aren’t living out some episode of Kramer vs. Kramer.”
“We’re not?” I hated that Bruce was looking so well. I thought he’d get scruffy and fat. I had heard he broke up with his young girlfriend and hadn’t dated since and was working. Some part of me wanted him eating Fritos on the couch and bankrupting himself.
“We’re in this thing together,” he went on, “and you got stuck in traffic or whatever, so no biggie.”
“Yeah, traffic, or lost my rental car keys, actually,” I said.
“You lost them? You don’t lose stuff.”
I remember thinking that even though I was still wearing the spiky boots and a nice suit, I was anything but hot-looking. I looked more like what I was, the bedraggled soon-to-be divorcée. I sat on his bottom step and Bruce instinctively bent over and pulled each boot off. They made a sucking sound as they detached from each foot and he laughed while we looked at each other awkwardly.
“Sorry,” he said. “I forget who we are now.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to change the subject fast. “Well, all I know about the keys is that they’re still in New Jersey. Maybe underground.”
Bruce lifted his eyebrows, making his face look adorable. “Underground? So how did you get to the city with no car keys?”
“I took a bus,” I said. “Like on Buses of New Jersey or something. They offer very slow service.”
When he gave me a slight smile, I suddenly remembered how I once loved this man. It all came back to me.
“Well, I think that subliminally you didn’t want to be on time. You didn’t want to sign on to any lawsuit,” he said.
“Not true.”
“You were treated poorly and you were treated great,” he said, nailing exactly what I was thinking. Despite the sometimes insane working conditions, that place gave me a shot to move so far, so fast, at least for the first bunch of years. This was what I loved about Bruce. He could see through everyone and everything and then could tell me what I already knew about myself. I forgot he could do this. I forgot that once, Bruce had been my friend.
“I just didn’t think that my getting money out of this was going to help change anything about Wall Street. I mean, how is paying me going to help the women coming behind me? Besides, I do like to move on.”
“Yeah,” Bruce said. “You move on fast.” His eyes misted up.
I couldn’t believe it. While this whole gut-throbbing, anxiety-plagued, crappy separation managed to bring me to my knees, and sometimes had me walking around teary and terrified, Bruce had shown as much emotion as the guy who collects toll money on the George Washington Bridge. I was starting to think he should date Kathryn Peterson just to see who could exhibit less feeling. But that night something was changing about him, or some feeling was returning to him. There we stood, on child-defying sl
ate floors, with bad modern art canvases hung at finger-painting level, and he went gooey on me. I could tell the guy still loved me and I wanted to figure out a way to love him back. But I couldn’t. Not then.
That was the night that Bruce and I became friends and he started growing up. He supported my decision to go live in the Tea Bag House, and to put the kids into a public school. Within three months he missed our joyful chaos far too much, so he gave up his bachelor pad and, I believe, his tantric yoga practice. He rented a quaint, tiny house in Southampton and planted a vegetable garden with the kids and got a job. He has a young, single, next-door-neighbor lady, who hits on him, leaves him cutesy notes and (gag me) casseroles. Really. A frickin’ casserole with condensed soup as an ingredient, which I asked him to not serve the kids, as canned foods are a known carcinogen. That was my own way of saying, “Please don’t take your neighbor’s bait. Please. We may just still have a chance.”
His job is designing and building furniture, mostly in fancy homes, and he even worked in King’s house, which is no longer Amy’s house, because Amy is in love with a really good man and going to be a mother. Bruce and I also never bothered to get divorced after this five-year pseudo-separation. Neither of us is dating anyone seriously, we just sort of work out a lot, run one-hundred-yard dashes on the beach together with the kids planted at the fifty-yard line. We don’t have a caregiver. We look better than we did a few years ago, we’re better parents, and we’re good to each other. We flirt like crazy and we remember how to be kind. We’re boring as hell, but aren’t bored at all.
The few women heroines the Glass Ceiling Club had have all been taken down. Ina Drew, one of the top executives at JPMorgan, was responsible for a group that managed a $6 billion loss and became a very public casualty for women everywhere. Sallie Krawcheck got promoted to run the two wealth management divisions of Bank of America/Merrill Lynch and was touted as the most powerful woman on Wall Street, at least for a few months, and then got fired in what the company described, in original terms, as “delayering.”
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