I know now that my quiet ability to send young men in search of the bathroom was in some part my own doing, even when I wasn’t beating them at darts or grinding my heel in the hopes of maiming them. I didn’t do a great deal to dial up my “naturally good looks,” as my mother liked to call them. I kept my dark hair chopped in a practical bob, easy to keep out of my eyes during squash matches with a terry-cloth headband. My dress sense was the same at age twenty-three as it had been at thirteen. My affinity for the timeless and the understated meant outside the office I still wore the same style of Brooks Brothers and L.L.Bean—collared button-downs and cable knits and corduroy—that many might have labeled under the sartorial banner of Uncontemporary and Unalluring Prep. And I’m willing to call a spade a spade: in a young man’s eyes there probably isn’t anything terrifically beguiling about a woman sporting a pair of duck boots.
My mother wouldn’t forgive me for it. No matter how hard I worked or how prestigious my firm, she insisted Belle Bailey was the one who had it all figured out. Belle was charming, fashion-forward, and a burgeoning expert on essential topics like tea sandwiches and table settings and making a kick-ass blueberry trifle but not in nonessential areas like equity markets or squash or anything I had moderate interest in. The sum total was this: at brunches and museum benefits and cocktail parties, I was the sort of girl boys escaped, while Belle was the sort they escaped to find.
The ease and flexibility of Belle’s livelihood certainly helped. After College, her career path—or lack thereof—kept her unblemished as we swiveled through the spin cycle of our twenties. In New York she looked like a more sophisticated and stylized version of her old campus self, rose-flushed cheekbones and dew-dropped complexion still intact. Many women eagerly rush large sums of money over counters at Bendel’s and Barney’s to re-create the effect of that dew. But Belle’s magic never came out of any jar. She was fully immersed in La Belle Vie and had built a niche cult following among “young women in pursuit of love, adventure, quality urban living, and a refined aesthetic.” From her West Village home base, every other day she posted pictures of baubles and dust jackets and doorframes and dream dresses, which her followers would snatch up and reblog with delight. She snapped photos of elegant sconces and daring amuse-bouches and chic aperitifs and gorgeously wallpapered dressing rooms and a never-ending supply of shockingly colored macarons. Yellow cabs held little appeal for Belle; she preferred to cycle everywhere on her old basket-clad Pashley that she at some point christened Cupid’s Arrow, a name that delighted her followers. Though we were light-years from crime-free New Hampshire, she would leave Cupid’s Arrow—carelessly, with hardly a thought—leaning around town against telephone poles or fire hydrants or brownstone brick and miraculously no one would steal it. She issued only the boldest and brightest promises. Carrying a stick of pink chalk on all of her urban adventures, she marked spontaneous messages for her followers as signposts of hope: I believe in … L-O-V-E! or Never ever stop searching for evidence of wonder … or L’amour triomphe de tout … or Smile! You might be about to meet the Love of Your Life around the next corner! Life may have been cloudy, but Belle insisted it always came with a 100 percent chance of Romance.
There was, undoubtedly, a market for all of this. Woolgathering young girls clung to Belle’s online mosaics and musings and sidewalk scratchings as confirmation that there was in fact beauty and brightness and a boy who would spring into their lives as The One waiting to be discovered at every intersection of their otherwise smeared and cynical city. She tossed handfuls of stars into their eagerly searching eyes. She offered them seasonal wish lists and daily dreams and avant-garde style advice. With her guidance these young women convinced themselves to buy a Louis Philippe wingback chair or a hand-carved African footstool or a set of vintage gold door knocker earrings, even if it completely compromised their ability to make that month’s rent payment. Belle was gal-next-door-meets-big-city-glamour, always radiating at the nucleus of go-to events for New York’s young glitterati—the Frick’s Young Fellows Ball and the Met’s Apollo Circle Benefit—dressed in something golden and floor-length and backless and shimmering. “La Vie…,” she promised her followers through yet another photo of her clutching a batch of red balloons in one hand as she zipped happily by atop Cupid’s Arrow, “… est Belle!” It all underscored her credo that parroted Picasso and featured prominently in an elegant typeface on her Web site:
Everything you can imagine is real.
There was no underlying profit model. And that meant she was safe—unlike me, she would never deliver the wrong answer to any young man’s one-liner. Regardless, she never seemed to worry much about what she said—or didn’t say—to any guy. This was thanks, in part, to her on-again-off-again relationship with Chase Breckenridge—my old darts partner from Dartmouth who, by some morbid coincidence, was one of my fellow trainees at Bartholomew Brothers. Little had changed for Chase since College; he still approached everything like a ten-goal polo player charging forward at full gallop with custom-made mallet gripped confidently in hand. He was an amorphous but potent force in Belle’s city life that somehow dialed up her boldness and breeziness when dealing with other men. Though they had frequent rocky stretches, to the fast and fashionable crowds they circled in, they were always the Golden Couple. And back then it seemed she would always be a faithful fixture in the passenger seat of his racing green roadster, blazing off in one undefined but fabulous direction or another. Together they cut a striking tableau, with people adoring them in the same unreasonable way tourists pined after billboards lording high above the Long Island Expressway on taxi rides from LaGuardia into Manhattan. I would never stop puzzling over it, and I would never find all of the answers, but there was something beyond his brashness and his brawn that she must have loved in him, just as there was something that she must have loved about the picture they projected when they were together.
My mother would ring me up from time to time just to belabor all of these points, underscoring the startling contrast between Belle’s and my life:
“You know, a thought just occurred to me. Wouldn’t Belle have some good ideas about a nice young man to pair you with?” I had mutated into a tricky shade of lipstick, stubbornly resisting a match with any article of clothing in the closet. “Or that handsome man of hers—Chase? The one with those wonderfully broad shoulders? Doesn’t he have an available friend? One that works at your bank—or another bank? He must know someone who works at a bank. Either way, I’m sure Belle can think of something, button. She’s such a clever girl in all the ways that count.”
* * *
I would never tell my mother about the fateful day I met a banker I’d come to love—the Great Dream she had pinned on me like one of her vintage brooches she insisted would look lovely on me. It didn’t play out exactly the way she’d always hoped. In mid-September, the weekend we would have been going back to College if only we hadn’t graduated, I cycled through the dull brass revolving door of The Vanderbilt. My cheeks were flushed from my morning round robin as I stepped into the cooling daylight, disoriented by how out of place the lengthening shadows and crispening air seemed amidst all of the steel and concrete. A curious sight stopped me on the sidewalk. A young man, dressed rather formally for a Saturday I thought, was standing in front of the Club, gesturing to an upper floor of the building. The autumn tourist surge was already starting; a small cluster of tube-socked and visored visitors milled in front of him, gaping and clicking cameras.
“Mr. Porter came to New York City and moved into this Club in 1916. And if his first musical that year hadn’t been a complete flop, he might never have moved to Paris in 1917 where his career really flourished. So maybe New York isn’t quite what Sinatra sang … maybe if you can’t make it here, you can make it anywhere else!”
The tourists erupted with appreciative applause, laughing and piping up with things like “Ha, no kidding!” and “Damn clever!” and even one overly hearty strain of “Start spreading the
news, I’m leaving today!”
My curiosity got the better of me. I stepped discreetly behind one of the taller tourists to try and figure out what exactly I was witnessing. It was easy to see how charmed the group was by the young man. A scarlet geranium was clipped into his buttonhole, making him the picture of a just-appointed Dickensian gentleman, alert and fresh-faced and practically glowing with youthful and good-natured expectation as he versed the strangers in frequently forgotten facts about Midtown Manhattan. He had fine features and a lean build that tagged him as beautiful rather than handsome, with large brown eyes so telling that you knew straight off what a pathetic card player he must have been. A horse-drawn hansom cab could have easily charged around a corner, pausing to pluck him off the pavement and rattle him uptown to a nineteenth-century luncheon at his great-great-great-grandmother’s.
“You can find every kind of magic in this city,” he continued. “You just have to look. And listen.” Then he paused, and the group—me included—leaned toward him as a single, suspense-filled mass. “Some say to this day the ghost of Cole Porter still haunts the places he loved most in New York.” He cupped a hand around one ear and shifted his weight onto his left polished oxford. “And on some evenings, if you stand in this very spot, you’ll hear faint trills of his piano echoing through the building. The old Steinway he used to play is still up there in the grand ballroom, waiting for Mr. Porter to sit back down and play another ditty.”
By that point there were audible gasps from the group and a frenzied rush of camera clicks.
“That’s all the trivia I have for you today, I’m afraid,” the young man apologized, genteelly. “But if you walk two blocks north to Forty-Sixth Street and head west, you’ll find yourselves smack-dab in Times Square. I promise you can’t miss it.” He winked to the group, and waved two hands to his left then farther to his left in a helpful demonstration. “I think that’s where you said you were going?”
“I just have to tell you that you’ve absolutely made our day,” the boldest woman stepped forward from the group to gush at him. “Whoever said New Yorkers aren’t friendly is dead wrong. You’re a dream! Could I possibly take my picture with you?”
After an intense period of howling and hooting and posing that the young man endured politely, he ushered the group to his left, bidding them adieu with an old-fashioned bow that prompted one final explosion of delight as they toppled their way onto Forty-Sixth Street, out of sight. And just like that, I was left standing on the sidewalk totally exposed and facing him, unsure of whether to say something or hotfoot it out of there.
“I’m not actually a tour guide,” he admitted, blushing deeply at me and, with a snap of his fingers, dissolving any embarrassment I had felt for barging in. “But when I see them so lost like that, I always end up stepping in. I really should start charging a fee.”
“You really should,” I agreed. “You had that last group in raptures.”
He laughed and his brown eyes flickered down to the navy-and-green, Brothers-branded duffel bag I had slung over my shoulder, adorned with two woven ribbons stamped with dozens of step-and-repeat logos. People liked to call them “deal bags”—canvas badges of honor distributed to all first-year analysts and associates at investment banks—but the truth was there was nothing deal-related about them. They were awkward and sagging, with no pockets or adjustable straps, meaning 95 percent of the time eager young bankers like me used them to transport their gym clothes.
“If I’m not mistaken, I think we’re in the same training program at Bartholomew Brothers? I’m Jeremy Kirby.”
I recognized the name immediately. Jeremy Kirby was infamous in my training class, though few of us, if pressed, could have picked him out of a police lineup. He spent his time cowering uncomfortably in the back row of our classroom or vanishing to the men’s room during all role-play exercises and cold-call simulations. It was a ballsy move; according to corporate code, hiding in the bathroom to avoid an oral exam was tantamount to projectile vomiting on the CEO. Our training was so torturous that I couldn’t blame him for choosing to remove himself from the racket—slipping away with his cup of coffee into the men’s room where he worked on The Times’s Saturday crossword during all open meetings. In a funny way, even before we officially met, I respected him for his silent acts of defiance. I was so rule oriented that no matter how much I wanted to do the same, I stayed glued to my chair, trying to figure out exactly how I had ended up there, like a stupefied person trying to grasp her way back to the start of a lost conversational thread.
It felt slightly surreal to finally be face-to-face with the man, a burgeoning antihero in my mind.
“That’s right, we’re in the same Brothers program.” I introduced myself, giving him a friendly nod and handshake.
“So, tell me, did you vanquish the enemy?” He gestured at my racquet bag, as though a young woman winning an amateur squash match at her Midtown club deserved a description more suitable for a Roman gladiator calling it a day after slaying a pride of lions in a local amphitheatre.
“Yes, I did win.” I smiled, warming up with juvenile pride. “I try and make a point of doing that.”
“Ahh, you’re working for the right firm, then.” As a green and totally insecure newbie, I appreciated that reassurance. Many of us were wracked with anxiety that maybe The Brothers had made a mistake—maybe we had miraculously slipped through a rare crack in the recruiting process or a CV had been slotted into the wrong folder. Maybe we didn’t actually deserve to be there. I would have probably said something meaningless back to him like Well, thanks very much for the informative tour or See you in the training room on Monday and been on my way, if Jeremy hadn’t made the effort to take things further. Life always relies on one person making that effort. “You must be hungry after all that winning. How about having a bite to eat with me?”
It seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do and besides, who knew what other fun and fanciful trivia he’d point out to me along the way. We walked north to Jeremy’s favorite hot dog cart in the Upper Sixties on the edge of Central Park. It wasn’t the prototypical Dickensian lunch venue I had imagined, which told me I should expect anything but expected things from him going forward. We were less than halfway to the cart before one of us, I think it must have been Jeremy, made an admission about The Brothers that kicked open the floodgates: “I know they have us wired and I’ll probably be detonated when they hear this, but I find the whole thing very disturbing.”
“Dear God, you too?” I blurted out, and saw relief saturate his brown eyes. Jeremy was the first and only person in our class who admitted to sharing my distress over our training. “I’m sure you saw me booted from the classroom this week after Piggelo stormed in and demanded that I tell her the historical significance of the day.” I had puzzled over her question for a moment then asked: Are you sure you don’t mean tomorrow? Allied and German forces dug the first trenches on the Western Front on September 15, 1914. Today is the fourteenth. I swear to God insolence wasn’t my end goal. The sickened film that closed over Piggelo’s beady eyes like a retractable roof confirmed she thought otherwise. “It was an honest question! Did she really need to kick me out of the room? Who knows. There must be some method behind the madness, right?”
“Maybe it’s just the way the firm has always done things,” he observed, thoughtfully. “And they don’t see any need to change it. Why would they? Maybe it’s what everyone keeps doing to get a job there that’s the looniest part of all.”
Jeremy explained that The Brothers didn’t travel upstate to recruit on his third-tier college campus. So he’d secured his job offer the old-fashioned way: he sent a series of cover letters via snail mail then physically turned up in The House of Bartholomew lobby in search of a meeting with CEO Bill Withers. Amazingly Withers took the meeting and invited him into an executive boardroom where an intricate balsa model bomber—the B-17G Flying Fortress famous for penetrating enemy lines to blast Third Reich war producti
on facilities during World War II—was partially constructed on the shiny expanse of the boardroom table. Withers had been wrestling with it for months. Jeremy’s background in flying—backed by his sharp eye, steady hand, and unruffled tenacity—seemed to do the trick. Within three-quarters of an hour the airplane frame was fully intact and Jeremy was offered a first-year analyst position at Bartholomew Brothers. Just like the ghostly Cole Porter tale he told the Midtown tourists, his story was lit with the fantastical twinkle of a modern-day fairy tale—totally at odds with the unsentimental battlefield of banking.
After those first confessions Jeremy and I stood in front of his favorite hot dog cart—the frank’s insulating foil slightly warm in my hand and my first bright, mustard-smothered bite of it so childishly pleasant—both understanding that we were jammed together knee-deep in the same muddy Bartholomew trenches. I think he also sensed that I didn’t belong there any more than he did. He was able to do that, to see so much more than met the eye in people. He was thoughtful enough to look past superficial judgment and window dressings—the proud look of a flush-faced girl so apparently pleased about her most recent squash victory. I’d always given everything I had to everything I did—the old college try and then some—and so many people took that for overconfidence or conceit. I didn’t believe I was setting the world on fire, I just believed I could always give it my best shot. Jeremy could see that in me. He couldn’t help it. Everywhere, every damn place he turned, he saw nothing but effort and earnestness packed like dense clusters of molecules bumping around furiously—trapped and helpless and hopeful and valiant—in people.
From that first autumn on, our Saturday walks to the hot dog cart became a quiet but cherished tradition in my city life. It was always sauerkraut and mustard for him and just plain mustard for me and we quietly appreciated our differences—never dreaming of trying to convince each other to order anything but our usuals. But no matter how solid our friendship was in the real world, out on the stirring streets of New York, inside The House of Bartholomew we knew we were solitary soldiers required to put up our own fights. By October, Jeremy was found out—for whatever reason he didn’t make his standard escape to the men’s room and was called to the front of the classroom for a role-play exercise. Clearly, the thought of doing something as uncouth as calling a person who didn’t want to hear from him compacted him into a tight and tormented ball of nerves. Piggelo dialed up the cringeworthiness by forcing him to cold-call a real-life prospect at the podium in front of all of us. She handed him a headset and piped the call through loudspeakers at the highest volume, so we could all catch every tortured crack in his voice.
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