“But that’s beside the point. Give this to Drewe as soon as you can tonight.” Piggelo set her red pepper down on a cocktail napkin and reached into a pocket, handing me an intricately folded origami creature that I couldn’t identify. It could have been a dragonfly or a bald eagle or a king cobra—I honestly had no idea but my bet was on the cobra. “And get Kirby over here to see me. Now.”
My heart sank. She might as well have asked me to go fetch a snow-white lamb so I could toss the helpless thing, its eyes wide and glassy with betrayal, directly into a blazing hell pit. Cupping the paper creature in my hand, I nodded my understanding and left her.
To my surprise, I found Jeremy and Belle planted next to Hologram Henry, the shoulders of all three bobbing up and down with shared laughter over some unimaginable punch line. Belle seemed totally taken with the fellow, which was expected as anything resurrected tended to enthrall her. When I approached them I heard Hologram Henry launch into a story about his sending home a new recruit for wearing a seersucker suit to the office. The first ten people in the queue—all desperate to meet Henry and pitched forward to catch snippets of his conversations—erupted with laughter. Drewe was at the front of the line in visible stitches. His eyes watered with amusement and it was alarming to see that the tears rolling down his cheeks were transparent and not the same color and consistency of liquid asphalt.
“In my day,” Henry explained, “a gentleman was expected to wear a dark suit and wear it all day long, keeping his jacket on, regardless of the heat or the lack of windows.”
Belle was lost fawning over the hologram as I pulled Jeremy away for a quiet word.
“Piggelo said she wants to see you now and she definitely meant pronto,” I said, apologetically. I looked over to Belle who was motioning toward Hologram Henry’s cravat instructing him on how to adjust it to produce an even more elegant effect. She gestured to something on the screen of her iPhone and Henry nodded with appreciation. “She must know the position she’s putting you in.”
“Piggelo always knows exactly what position she puts everyone in,” Jeremy said, evenly.
“I mean Belle, Jeremy. I told you not to fight her battles for her, but I should have also said that you can’t let her interfere with your ability to fight your own.”
He cocked his head to the side, puzzled, though his brown eyes waved momentarily with the reflection of Belle’s phone to indicate some kind of understanding. He darted across the lobby toward the vegetarian spread where Piggelo surveyed the room in disappointment, still pinching the same partially nibbled red pepper. With Jeremy gone, I looked down at the paper cobra in my palm and turned to face the next task at hand. Though he specialized at blending into his surroundings, when it was Drewe’s turn and he assumed his spot alongside Hologram Henry, he was suddenly aglow. The occasion transformed him—he was apple-cheeked and blooming in proximity to our corporate forefather. He didn’t want to give up his spot for the next person in line and I briefly wondered if I’d have to resort to a fireman’s lift to haul him away and transfer the miscellaneous origami creature into his hands. Thankfully, a surly security guard did the work for me, doing a bang-up impression of a kindergarten teacher asking a four-year-old to play nicer in the sandbox. You’ve had more than enough, sir, don’t you think? How about you give the others a turn?
“Piggelo asks that you look at this,” I said to Drewe, who moved toward me with arms hanging as two immobile plumb lines on both sides of his body, his cheeks draining rapidly. He accepted the paper cobra without surprise and nodded to me. After about three dozen defolds, he blinked down at the heavily creased sheet of paper. He held it up to show me a written instruction that I squinted at through the darkness:
Give her the new coordinates:
51.5171° N, 0.1062° W
“The new coordinates?” I dug my BlackBerry out of a pocket and punched the longitude and latitude numbers into its search engine. The answer spit itself back at me: London, England. I held up the small screen to show Drewe. “Am I the her, Drewe?”
“That’s right,” he answered. “I already knew about it. We’re building out a bigger presence for the Private Bank in London—it’s Piggelo’s priority for the fiscal year. You move on January tenth.” When I said nothing, he raised an eyebrow, a dark slug splaying itself across his forehead. “In case you have any doubts, let me assure you this is a spread you’ll want to take, M.”
I shuddered. Of course the abstract prospect of London was an exciting one. I had gone on exchange to the University College London during my junior year and had fond memories of sinus-clearing vindaloo curries and admirably stiff upper lips and a financial district important enough to actually be called the City. Though I wasn’t a massive drinker, I developed great respect for how no-nonsense and utilitarian London pubs were, with bartenders giving you a look of concentrated loathing if you were after anything more than a warm pint and a packet of pork scratchings. Something about the British reserve—the totally appalled look a person received if they made the mistake of speaking aloud on the Tube, for example—appealed to me. It was like attracting like, I suppose. Besides, everyone knew an international assignment was a prerequisite of moving up the food chain at The Brothers. Few Managing Directors had ever been promoted without time spent in London or Hong Kong or Tokyo or Mumbai. This tapping meant I was on my way.
But that was all in theory. In reality, the news filled me with a general feeling of dread. I had been tapped to move to London by Piggelo in an amazingly ritualistic manner involving a paper cobra, for crying out loud. She didn’t bother to ask me, let alone secure my explicit agreement, before sharing my Fate with the robotic likes of Drewe. And she didn’t take the time to deliver the news to me herself, though she clearly had nothing to do that night but don her exoskeleton and survey the party with pincered pepper in hand. But still, she had tapped me—and that was something.
Drewe handed me the deconstructed cobra and excused himself to line up for another shot with the hologram. Holding the creased sheet of coordinates in my hand, I drifted back in the general direction of the fig table to find a settee, lay back, and make heads or tails of everything. Along the way, I discovered Jeremy and Belle standing against a wall, in the middle of a hushed but heated argument. I was shaking with the news that had just rocketed in but got promptly sucked back in to the ever-cycling drama that was Belle Bailey.
“It’s not personal, Belle,” Jeremy explained to her, wearily. “The Brothers doesn’t permit anyone to bring cameras on campus. They won’t let us horse around like this.”
“On campus,” she huffed. “I’ll have you know this isn’t an institution of higher learning. And who are they to tell me whether or not I can horse around?”
“I know it seems extreme, but please do me this one favor and put your phone away. You can delete the pictures later tonight.”
“Delete the pictures? Delete the pictures! There isn’t a chance I will delete any pictures. Deleting pictures would be a lie.”
“What do you mean, a lie?” He huddled her even closer to the wall, and pulled me in alongside them. “This could mean my job, Belle.”
“Oh, I’m sure! It’s not as though I haven’t heard that one before.” With that she rested her eyes on me for a disdainful moment and an image of walnut bread slices danced farcically in the air between us.
“M., help Belle understand.”
“I don’t need M. to help me understand anything,” she answered, frostily, refusing to meet my eye again. “I’m here, and this is my job. You knew what I did for a living when you invited me, Jeremy. And if the phone wasn’t permitted, then those hulking men at the door should have confiscated it from me. So if it’s all the same to you two, I would just like to get on with my work and enjoy the evening.”
Belle pushed us aside and floated into the thick of the party, continuing to snap photos and tap her iPhone screen periodically. Her eyebrows were arched high and it was clear the bloom was off her adventure.
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“What did Piggelo say to you?” I asked Jeremy, nervously.
“Her instruction was pretty clear: keep that date of yours in check. See that every photo she takes is history. Or you’ll be history.”
“Cripes.” I glanced down at Jeremy’s lapel. Only the bright purple center of his cornflower buttonhole remained. It was as though proximity to Piggelo had, in a matter of thirty seconds, singed its petals into oblivion. “Let me see what I can do.”
I searched the crowd and saw Belle’s beanstalk neck shoot up to eavesdrop on conversations, typing notes into her phone whenever inspiration or horror struck. When I finally caught up to her—distracted once again by intricate motifs on the ceiling—a cocksure analyst had mistaken her for a dew-dropped twenty-two-year-old and sidled up to her with his best attempt at a romantic overture:
“Frigging awesome, isn’t it?” He put his hands in his trouser pockets and threw his slicked head back as though some billion-dollar constellation had just unraveled itself above him. “But the most awesome thing about it is getting to stroll through here every day while we keep it all off-limits to the thousands of people who actually give a shit about Art Décor. Right? Ha ha—high five?” He actually pulled a hand out of a trouser pocket and held it limply toward Belle.
“Art Deco,” Belle said to him in a ghost-like whisper, smacking his hand away with a glare of hate. As he scoffed and slinked off, she added: “You absolute ape of a man, it’s Art Deco.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Who exactly are these people, M.?”
“Oh, they’re not all that bad. Hubris is running high tonight,” I explained. “Everyone’s celebrating.”
Before Belle could answer, the conversation of a pin-striped and patent-leathered trio of bankers unspooling just a few feet in front of us boomed back to rattle us like unanticipated and unwanted cannon fire.
“Finally got roped in to buying the cow!” one suit barked.
“You don’t say! Well done for biting the bullet, old boy—it’s more than I’ll ever be able to bear!” another bellowed. “When’s the big day?”
“Late second quarter or early third,” the first suit chipped back. He sniffed, dryly. “We’re still ironing out the details.”
“God, you are a banker,” a third suit gushed, flushing deep with admiration. Backslapping ensued. The trio collapsed inwardly into a self-satisfied embrace where their pinstripes and cuff links and silken knots merged into a single brotherly blur in which each man was even less distinguishable from the next.
“You call this celebrating?” Belle’s voice was thick with vexation and I could see a thought bubble reading “BUY THE COW?!” pulsing angrily above her blond head. I shook off the urge to start mudslinging—pointing out the absurdities and arrogances of her own line of work, from heirloom tomato juggling to no-holds-barred brawling for a Gardenia Bakery cupcake on a Saturday night—and stayed focused on the mission at hand.
“Look, Belle, I’m just asking you to think about Jeremy. Put yourself in his shoes for a second. And whatever you do, please don’t bring up the walnut bread. This is a totally different ball of wax.”
“You call it different but it sounds like the same tedious old tune to me.”
With that, she drifted back into the bloodless sea of affluence around us. Everything assumed a dark and foreboding feel—with jagged angles and geometric shadows—and I was sweating as though in the vivid throes of a fever dream. Adding to the effect, I saw Leezel reappear in the lobby sporting a knee bandage and crudely constructed gauze eye patch. The full-body bow of her dress had reinflated. Chase was looming above her, his suit jacket straining between his shoulder blades as he swung hefty arms around in the manner of a third-base coach waving a runner home to score the winning run. She absorbed whatever directives he was throwing at her, nodding back up at him and, despite her injuries, jumping up in a girlish skip to give him a dutiful salute.
I spiraled back in search of Jeremy, my only safe harbor, who was plucking the bald head of his buttonhole from his lapel when I rejoined him.
“I’m sorry, Jeremy, I struck out. But you keep trying. Belle has to come around. And if nothing else works, send Drewe after her. That would petrify anyone into surrendering.” I knew Belle wasn’t obliged to do anything—she was made of stubborn stock and would do what suited her best. If faced with the hockey mask of Drewe, she would more than likely pull out a Magic Marker and, with the lightest of laughs, deface it with masterfully drawn mustache graffiti. Oh, let’s draw you some devil horns, too, shall we? Perfecto!
“Thanks for giving it a shot, M.,” Jeremy sighed.
“There’s more,” I continued, slowly.
“What else could there possibly be?”
“Piggelo delivered a message to me via Drewe. They’re sending me to London.”
“London,” he repeated, stunned. “For how long?”
“I’m not really sure”—I shrugged at him—“but I assume it’s at least a year, maybe two.”
“Did you agree to it?”
“You know better than to ask me that. I move January tenth.”
“And Drewe was the one who told you? Well, for Pete’s sake, M., why didn’t they just ask Hologram Henry to do it? Or is his dance card too full tonight?” I flashed to a grotesque image of Drewe and Hologram Henry, arms crossed and locked as they spun each other around in a delighted Scottish reel.
“I’ve got to go tell Scott.” The thirty minutes I promised him were long up. I pictured him back at his apartment with a much more modest sashimi spread, take-out from his local sushi spot assembled on his kitchen counter. I knew he’d have two sets of chopsticks waiting—and that he wouldn’t start eating without me. The conversation I would have with him would be excruciating. Scott’s business and life were in New York, and he had been encouraging me to step out from my Bartholomew Brothers shackles from the moment we met. I had a good idea of how he’d react to the news.
“Go,” Jeremy urged me, “before Piggelo starts piping the announcement through the neon ticker tape in Times Square.”
“It might already be too late.”
“No, it’s not,” he countered, and then for no reason at all grabbed my hand and placed his bald buttonhole in my palm, folding my fingers over it. He couldn’t help giving his possessions and parts of himself to the people he loved. “Because you don’t have to go, M. You don’t need to do this for them.”
But I did. My marching orders had been handed to me. To question them, to turn them down for the sake of a sweet, early-days romance, would not only have been a risk, it would also have been a clear sign of weakness—a sign that maybe, by not giving as much of myself to my job, I was soft. It would be validation that I wasn’t as high aspiring, or as high achieving as my contemporaries. It meant I would, just like that, flush away the gallons of blood and sweat I had already conscientiously wrung from my body in my years at the firm. I refused to look at those gallons as a sunk cost that I could move on from. And I was far from alone in that self-deception.
A funny thing had started happening when my peers and I came of age. Once the new millennium ticked into our midst, millions of us started falling for the warped fallacy of measuring the value of our lives through the demands and related status of our jobs. Our parents had worked hard for a company and stayed there forty years because it was a productive means to a more secure end—a stable family existence that included healthy pension plans and full medical coverage and the promise of home ownership and real wages that ticked upward gratifyingly as the years clicked by. I’m sure I’m idealizing it. But that equation twisted into something different for our generation. When we grew up, we put off having families and our jobs became the pursued ends in and of themselves. We became proudest of what our companies took from us. For highly educated professionals, working ourselves into the ground, turning ourselves into tough-skinned, human punching bags, was a badge of honor. The more personal the sacrifice, the more offensive the hit, the more distressing and gray-h
air-inducing the professional scenario, the bigger our boasting rights. People who lazed away working forty-five-hour workweeks were, by definition, unimportant. If we could just keep working harder, we could find fulfillment—we could be truly important people, and if we were truly important maybe then we could be happy. In the meantime we were all stuck playing the same dismal game of misery poker. Asking someone the simple question of whether they wanted to meet for dinner during the workweek yielded a range of insecurity-breeding answers:
Jamming on a pitchbook. I’ll ping you if I ever free up.
Sorry. Slammed until March.
Gotta jump. Third Chinese fire drill in the past 24 hours.
Unless your name is Kobayashi-san who needs this merger model by 4:00 p.m. Tokyo time tomorrow, you don’t exist to me.
Would love to, buddy, but my bandwidth is nil this week. I’ve been getting crushed.
Nah, I’m really cranking over here. You seriously have time for dinner?
Bartholomew Brothers had written the rules and raised the stakes of misery poker. And yet it permitted some astounding contradictions. A twenty-two-year-old investment banker literally dropped dead one morning following three consecutive all-nighters while, three floors above him, Leezel Bartholomew turned her cubicle into an opium den of Chanel No. 5 and meticulously buffed her ten-years-of-exceptional-service Lucite cube with a cable-knit cashmere rag.
Maybe Jeremy wasn’t the ultimate sap for being sentimental and earnest. Maybe competitive and earnest types like me were the biggest suckers of all. We assumed a tight-tuck position, fitting ourselves onto a silver platter that we offered ourselves up on, again and again. The Brothers happily accepted that platter of goodwill and sacrifice and converted it to liquid form that it piped in as its dark red lifeblood. In the end, they knew no one could ever blame them. We had signed up for it, after all. We had rolled back our sleeves, exposed our antecubitals, and agreed to take the stab of the hungry needle. We had done it to ourselves.
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