During our training program we had been rounded up onstage for dramatic improvisation exercises in the firm’s auditorium, air-conditioning blasting so gratuitously it could have doubled as an industrial meat locker or cryogenic freezing cell. A handful of expressionless managing directors filled the front row, rubbing their chins and clearing their throats as they observed the theatrics at close range. They must have been cold, cold-blooded creatures, otherwise the HR team buzzing nervously in the aisles would have had the foresight to distribute Brothers-branded ushankas to guard against frostbite. As with many components of our training, we were told this staged embarrassment would strengthen our verbal dexterity, our comfort levels in fantastically awkward pitch situations, and our ability to pluck artful responses out of thin air when a client asked a question we hadn’t the foggiest idea about. I was never clear how the improv game called “Die!” could improve any of those things, but it was included in the rotation. We were each given an object and a place and then had three minutes to enact our life’s ending using those circumstances. On one especially harrowing afternoon, I stood onstage in a line of equally feverish classmates, a spotlight cutting through the frigid auditorium air to blaze a beam of heat onto my beading forehead, praying to be overlooked for the round.
“Will Carter.”
I almost collapsed in relief, though I knew full well it was my turn—the hour was almost up and I hadn’t yet had a go. I looked down at my white-knuckled hands interlocked in front of me, noting that the beds of my nails had turned sky blue. Will Carter, standing just ahead of me to the left, issued a faint gurgling noise at the sound of his name. He did not look ready for “Die!” but he did look on the brink of death. His color had transitioned to a yellowish gray. He took one labored breath.
“Sir, I hesitate to raise this but you’ve neglected to call on one particular member of the class during this round. I know you work hard to keep these evaluations equitable.”
Those kind of grand gestures helped explain my view that chivalry was dead. The MD in charge, brow furrowing at the prospect of having made a gaffe in front of his underlings, flipped back and forth between clipboarded sheets.
“You are correct, Will,” he concluded, blandly.
My name was called and I took the long walk to the front of the stage to receive my instruction:
“On the moon with a blender. Go!”
They were the longest three minutes of my life. Not a single person cracked a smile as I writhed in my suit on the stage carpet with my arm jammed unconvincingly into an invisible blender. I knew this because, later that day, all one hundred of us returned to our training room to review the footage of our performances on a large screen that was split in half to reveal the audience’s reaction. As unofficial class master of improv, Chase Breckenridge savored every second of this. His “Die!” performance of “in a mineshaft with a canary” earned him a standing ovation from a former thespian MD who insisted on joining us back upstairs for a second viewing and slow-motion breakdown of Chase’s remarkably realistic portrayal of a beak attack.
While I hoped that preparing breakfast in Piggelo’s home would not result in carpet writhing or beak attack or death by blender, it would be an improv challenge in its own right. I could easily picture us clustered in a fragile half-moon pattern around her as she blasted her opening questions in an unsympathetic salvo:
“Who will take responsibility for squeezing the orange juice? Who will assume ownership of the scrambled egg? Who has procured the only acceptable walnut loaf in Manhattan?” With each demand, another woman would spontaneously shatter and fall into a heap of once-brilliant glass atop Piggelo’s resilient granite tiles.
I had been given the advanced assignment of securing the walnut loaf—sliced widely—from The Pie Chart, Piggelo’s favorite bakery on the corner of East Seventieth and Lex. There was only one widely sliced walnut loaf from one bakery in the city that would do. Though Leezel Bartholomew lived in the neighborhood and relied on The Pie Chart as one of her primary brioche sources, she had been characteristically useless. She left me a haughty Post-It note with the bakery address as though she had taken the trouble to translate elaborate Morse code transmissions for my benefit. It would be up to me, and me alone, to secure the loaf. I arrived at 5:45 a.m., a full fifteen minutes before the store opened so there was no possible way someone could beat me to the best pick of the walnut loaves. My only worry was whether or not The Pie Chart’s slicing machine would be working, as I’d been warned it was known to go on the fritz from time to time. I had taken contingency measures and packed a bread knife in my deal bag so I would be ready to make the crude, farmhouse slices on the counter myself if need be. Smoothing out a section of my Wall Street Journal on the bakery’s front stoop, I sat down and slipped into my dark and familiar habit of tracing the flow chart of life decisions, or nondecisions, that had carried me to this point. Two pigeons bobbed their bloated necks and trained red eyes on me as they circled in sinister figure eights—filthy and feathery reminders that I should not have been sitting there, or on any stretch of city sidewalk, in search of artisan bread at daybreak for the sake of my job. A jingling of keys behind me sent the grim birds flapping as The Pie Chart opened for business. I burst through the door of the bakery, ready to brandish my bread knife like a rapier. Setting two palms down on the counter I smiled and leaned eagerly toward a fatigued figure facing me in a stained white apron.
“Good morning!” I piped, brightly. “One walnut loaf, please—sliced widely, an inch per slice if you could be as precise as possible about it.”
“All out,” the figure replied, ambivalently, rubbing a weary eye with a hairy forearm. My blood ran cold.
“All out? How is that possible? I’m your first customer.”
“Sorry about that. Could I interest you in a sourdough? Or a challah?”
Who was this sulking teenager masquerading as a baker? Why wasn’t he heading to school and who on Earth had said anything about a challah?
“I’m sorry, perhaps you didn’t hear me. I’m in need of one walnut loaf, widely sliced.”
“There’s no walnut this morning, only sourdough and challah. My walnuts had weevils in them.”
“Do weevils even exist in New York?” I asked in astonishment.
“Manhattan is an island.…” was his tentative response. “It’s been a bizarre morning, to tell you the truth.”
Weevils or no weevils, I knew it was game over for me. The breakfast was an elaborate test. There were rumblings that Piggelo would be making job cuts in our division—the increasingly bad press about The Brothers was causing clients to grow wary and, in some cases, defect. Our stock multiple was, for the first time in our 150-year history, on somewhat shaky ground. The breakfast would help her make decisions regarding female associates on the floor. I had been given a preassigned task that seemed relatively simple: pick up a particular loaf at a bakery a stone’s throw from Piggelo’s town house. Failure to do so could only be viewed as complete and utter incompetence.
“What about your Brooklyn location?” I tried, frantically.
He shook his head.
“They don’t make the walnut bread there. It’s our specialty at this location. Brioche?”
“Some specialty if you’re letting the weevils run the show!” I shot back, wildly.
But it was useless to pursue the line any further. I knew there was only one possible solution. It was a long shot but I had no choice but to give it a try.
Back outside the bakery, the circling pigeons eyed me cryptically as I dialed out on my BlackBerry, pacing back and forth on the stoop.
“Hello!” a voice sang in greeting, its tone evoking images of Maria von Trapp on the verge of leading a circle of towheaded children in a pitch-perfect round of “Do-Re-Mi.”
“Belle? It’s me. I know you’re always up early.” Desperation clung to my voice like a soaked T-shirt. “I’m in a very bad place.”
“Oh, M. Is it the squash bracket a
gain?”
“No, it’s not the squash bracket!” I yelled. “It’s my job, Belle. I know how much you despise the place but it matters to me and it could be on the line.” I explained the situation in as calm and collected a manner as possible.
“Let me get this straight. Your job at an investment bank could be on the line over walnut bread?”
“Please spare me the judgment, Belle. The firm works in … its own special way. I may not lose my job but I can guarantee my stock will plummet in Piggelo’s eyes.” I swallowed. “We think she’ll be making cuts soon.”
“Listen,” Belle said, crisply. “We will fix this. We will find a solution.” It was Belle at her best. Hopeful, assertive, scarily efficient. With the help of her reassurances, the world could expand around you with ladders of possibility leading everywhere. It was what I loved most about her. “Leave it with me. I will call you back within ten minutes.”
Eight minutes later, my BlackBerry shrilled with an incoming call.
“There will be a walnut loaf—indistinguishable from The Pie Chart’s, with slices an inch wide—waiting for you at Eighty-Second and Park in exactly fifty minutes,” Belle reported.
I was overwhelmed. I looked at my watch and calculated that I could make it to Piggelo’s without a minute to spare if I had a cab ready and waiting on Eighty-Second, grabbed the loaf from the mystery baker through the taxi window, and sped south eleven blocks without hitting a red light.
“How on Earth did you swing it, Belle?”
“Oh, just pulled a blogger’s string or two. I know the woman who runs the baking blog Sprinkle and Whisk. Darling blog—have you heard of it? Of course not. Silly question. Her whole premise is helping the everywoman whip up her favorite bakery’s recipes from the comfort of home. She’s up at 5:00 a.m. most days baking—I did a La Belle Vie feature from her kitchen last month so she owed me one.”
“Well, now I owe you one,” I said, gratefully.
“We’ve been friends for years, M.,” she replied. “We’re long past owing each other anything.” I understood the gist of what she meant, that old friends were friends without needing to feel obligated, but her words were tinged with an ambiguous frost.
Fifty-two minutes later, my female colleagues and I were assembled around the island in Piggelo’s twenty-second-century kitchen on East Seventy-First Street. We had been instructed to remove our shoes upon entry in the foyer. An anonymous housekeeper appeared and rushed the offending footwear into large plastic bins that she sealed and carried off before Piggelo—on constant high alert to protect her beloved glass staircase—could get an unsavory sniff of them.
The town house was expectedly sleek, with everything camouflaged in granite and gray; in the kitchen you had to pat around blindly until a door would spring open signaling that you had finally found the garbage receptacle. A large cornflower-and-white Matisse cutout of a human torso faced us on an opposing wall, an angular and stark signpost of her astronomical wealth. It was said to be an original—Piggelo had become a partner before The Brothers went public and, though everyone disagreed on the specific number, her post-IPO net worth was estimated at close to six hundred million. There were no personal photos or mementoes, not a hint of her self, alongside the headless torso and polished chrome. Or maybe that was the full extent of her.
Women assumed nervous positions around the kitchen—egg whisker, French toast flipper, orange squeezer, napkin folder and such—with the clipboarded Piggelo watching attentively from a corner.
“Everything appears to be in order,” she announced. “The only thing missing, of course, is the banana loaf.” Piggelo’s eyes swept the room and locked on me. There was a physical weight to her stare that many agreed could press air from human lungs.
“Banana loaf?” I uttered, dumbly.
“The banana loaf you were preassigned to bring.”
“It was a walnut loaf, I assure you, I…” All activity had ceased in the kitchen. There was an uncomfortable ding as perfectly browned, inch-wide slides of walnut bread leapt ceiling-ward from Piggelo’s twelve-slice toaster.
“Of course it was. That was a joke! Everyone, please lighten up!” A very thin wave of laughter issued from the traumatized group. “This is a social breakfast! A chance for us to spend time with one another outside of the office and fulfill an hour of required diversity training while we’re doing it! Note that your transportation time, even if you make the journey together, does not count as an additional hour of diversity training.”
As the scrambled eggs were served and the walnut bread buttered and the freshly squeezed orange juice poured, Piggelo petrified me further by pulling me into the hallway outside of her kitchen.
“I want to commend you on your initiative.” All forms of praise were so rare at The Brothers that a film of tears gathered in my eyes as she spoke. “The Pie Chart has been hopeless with their walnut loaves since they assigned that hairy sloth to the early shift. I have no idea how you secured that loaf but it is a flour-based miracle. It tells me that if you’re given a directive, you’ll find a way to get it done. That’s the stuff of Bartholomew through and through.”
I mumbled a feeble thank you, stopping myself from crediting Belle and handing Piggelo a Sprinkle and Whisk business card, scattered with pretty, multicolored, letterpress sprinkles.
“I worry about the people I need to jump-start, not the people I need to rein in. Get time on my calendar,” she instructed, walking back to the kitchen and stopping to straighten a perfectly even painting on her gray wall. “There are a few things I’d like to discuss.”
* * *
That Saturday evening, Scott Bosher was seated at Minetta Tavern’s polished oak bar stirring horseradish into a grass-green cocktail when I approached him. I was surprised he didn’t look over—with the kettledrum pound of my heart and the castanets rattle of my nervously knocking knees I felt like a mobile percussion section. When I smiled, I was sure everyone could hear the bright ding of a triangle projecting forward ahead of me. Scott was chatting amicably with the bartender, showing no sign of being a guy who based his livelihood on technology. He was one of a handful of people seated along the bar and the only one not stooped over a personal electronic device signaling to the world that their thoughts and interests and hopes bloomed somewhere other than their current location. I was steps away from him when it occurred to me that for someone who insisted on having all her ducks in a row, I hadn’t given a single thought to what I would actually say to him when we met again. Fighting off mild panic, I took a deep breath and forged ahead.
“This place is a bit nostalgic for a techie like you, isn’t it?”
He looked up from his glass, pleasantly, without his tortoiseshell glasses, and stood to kiss me hello, leaving a light tingling sensation on my right cheek. When he leaned back, the fresh scent of limes floated in the air between us. I noticed—how had I not noticed this at the Bender?—that one of his boyish freckles had gone rogue to find a home on the very bottom of his lower lip. To compose myself, I looked away, surveying the restaurant’s atmospherically lit front and back rooms—checkered tiles and red banquettes and walls papered with vintage, severely angled caricatures of faces yanked straight out of Ayn Rand’s novels or Al Capone’s gang. Months had passed and we were beside each other again, back in a neo-speakeasy, but this time aboveground and at a bona fide address. The Minetta Tavern in its modern form was a revival of a classic old New York haunt opened in the 1930s, named after the stream that used to run southwest from Twenty-Third Street across to the Hudson River. The New York Times once described the stream as placid, flush with trout and surrounded by dense forest. All of that overflowing beauty was razed generations ago, but urban explorers would contend the brook still exists, traversing its way—insistently, without fanfare—a few dozen feet beneath the city streets. I knew all of this because I wouldn’t have dared meet Scott without doing some online homework. I sensed there was a thoughtfulness about him that meant he had picked this
place for a very good reason.
“Do you think I’ve caught the bygone bug?” he asked me, smiling.
“I hear it’s airborne and spreading fast.”
“The truth is I’ve developed a bit of an addiction to these green Bloody Marys,” he explained, sheepishly. “They only make them on the weekends when they ship in the green tomatoes.” He turned back to his bright-green glass with a fond look in his eye and swizzled it again for good measure. “Now what shall we get you?”
“It sounds like it’d be sacrilegious to have anything else.” I laughed, sliding onto the bar stool next to him. “Make it another Green Mary.”
The morning after the cupcake debacle—the morning after I found Scott again through his Manhattan Magazine interview—I canceled my usual Sunday-morning squash match with the Club pro, made myself a double Americano at home, and sat down in front of my computer to figure out what his creation Verity was all about. I didn’t want to be disturbed by anyone and had barely started my research when my BlackBerry, a morbid beetle frozen on my desk, jangled with an incoming call. I saw that it was Belle and I ignored her though I knew she hated nothing more. I could sense her displeasure skipping in snappish little arcs uptown from Bleecker Street to snip at my heels before I kicked them away with my right loafer. Reading article after article I learned that Scott had founded Verity as a place for people to present their real selves online. Members created profiles and posted “truths” that fellow members could search by topic or by zip code to commiserate with or offer advice on. Scott’s mission was an ambitious one: he hoped to create a more open, aware, and authentic world powered by the Internet. Though I always preferred offline dealings with people and had no social media presence to speak of, his mission struck a chord in me. I went out on a wild limb and created my own anonymous Verity profile (user name: TheDivineMissM—no one in their right mind would ever associate me with Bette Midler’s early seventies stage persona), slowly and with a great deal of squinting and sighing as though I were a seventy-year-old trying to navigate a computer mouse for the first time. The whole thing made me nervous. All posts were supposed to be anonymous but if Scott ran the site, would he be aware of my profile and able to track my movements? How did this kind of thing actually work? Would he somehow know who TheDivineMissM really was and would my humiliation be inevitable? Once I was signed up and reached the Verity home page, a series of “truths” populated my screen. They were unfiltered thoughts posted by people located within a mile of my apartment. I read only a handful and was surprised at how moved I was by the confessions:
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