by Jane Heller
“No,” she said, with a shake of her head that made her blonde ponytail whip across the back of her neck. She was tall and sturdy and plain-looking in her sensible clothes and sensible shoes, but she projected a positive energy that made you forget she wasn’t pretty. Maybe it was the size of her mouth that threw her face off-kilter. It was too big—i.e., not in proportion to her other features—and when she smiled you got the impression she had seventy-five teeth. “He’s due any minute.” She checked her watch. “In five minutes, to be exact. Will you need me to sit in during the meeting?”
I smiled. She was so devoted to me, and in turn, I tried to do all I could to mentor her, involve her in my work at the company so that someday she would rise up the ranks as I had. “You’re sweet to ask, but no. I’ll be fine. I’ve got the speech down pat at this point.”
“Nobody reels in new clients the way you do, Mel.” She nodded and hurried off to answer my phones, my e-mails, and whatever else needed answering while I took a quick look at the messages on my desk, grabbed Ornbacher’s file, and headed for Bernie Shelley’s office, where the meeting was to take place. Bernie was sitting behind his throne—a Louis the Something antique table—scribbling notes to himself when I walked in.
“Mel, glad you made it,” he said.
“When did I ever not make it?” I said with a laugh. I hadn’t missed a meeting or even been late for one since the day I’d joined the company, but then Bernie was a worrywart. A worry-wart and a notorious sacker of people who were late and did miss meetings. The managing partner of Pierce, Shelley and Steinberg, he was a thin, wiry guy in his forties with a fair complexion and tons of red hair. I say “tons” because the red hair on his head was thick and coarse and because he had a red goatee and a red mustache too. And if you looked really closely, there was red hair on his fingers and red hair on the tops of his hands and still more red hair on his upper chest, which was visible when he wore open-collared shirts on casual Fridays. He’d asked me out shortly after my separation, but I’d begged off, saying I didn’t think it was a good idea to mix business and romance. The truth is, I wasn’t attracted to Bernie any more than I was attracted to Carrot Top.
“I guess I’m a little overeager,” he said, gnawing on a fingernail to prove it. “Would I ever love to have Jed Ornbacher as a client. If he comes on board, he just might bring along his oil-rich friends.”
“You can count on me,” I said.
“I know I can. You’re my top gun, so I’m just gonna sit back and let you fire away.”
A few minutes later Ornbacher arrived. He was a portly man with a leathery tan, and he was dressed like a cowboy—the hat, the boots, the blue jeans, the string tie. As Bernie introduced me, I kept thinking, Where’s the rodeo? And what is it with Texans anyway? People from other parts of the country don’t show up for business meetings in costumes that announce where they’re from. I had a client from Maine, for example, and he wasn’t wearing a checked flannel shirt, overalls, and a lobster bib when he came to the office.
But then Ornbacher had a reputation as a bit of an eccentric. He’d been a professional singer in his youth—a crooner of minor-key love ballads that didn’t go over well with the public because they were too morbid. His most famous song was a ditty he wrote himself called “Don’t You Go Dying on Me.” Later, before moving into oil, he ran a company that manufactured the cord that’s used to hold Venetian blinds together. Word was, he had many pursuits, another of which was the female species. While he’d never remarried, he had a slew of girlfriends. “He’s supposed to be a horny bastard,” Bernie had warned me. “A real toucher. But you’ll have to ignore it.” Easy for him to say, I thought. He wasn’t the one the guy would be touching.
“So nice to meet you, Mr. Ornbacher,” I said as we shook hands.
As he held on to mine for about an eternity, he gave me a big smile and his lips receded, making him look sort of predatory.
“Call me Jed,” he said in a too-loud Texas twang. It was as if he had bellowed through a bullhorn. I wondered if he might be a little deaf as well as horny.
“Jed it is,” I said, gesturing for him to sit. “Can we get you anything to drink? Coffee? Tea? Water?”
“What’s that?” he yelled, cupping his hand to his ear.
I stood closer and repeated the offer.
“A shot of bourbon would be swell,” he said and laughed one of those phlegmy smoker’s laughs that morphs into a death rattle. “Water’s good,” he said when he recovered.
We got him his water. I sat in the chair next to his and began my routine.
“So,” I said, “Bernie tells me you’re in the market for new financial management, Jed.”
“New what?” he said.
“New financial management,” I repeated. He probably gets away with a lot of touching, I figured. Women tell him to buzz off and he can’t hear them.
“Yes, ma’am. I decided it was time for a change,” he said. “Can’t let other people get too comfortable with your money, you know what I mean?”
Did I ever. If Dan hadn’t gotten so comfortable with my money, I wouldn’t be living at the Heartbreak Hotel in a—“I know exactly what you mean,” I said, blinking away the intrusive thought. Where had it come from? No matter how angry I’d been at my ex earlier, I couldn’t let him get to me now. Not in the middle of a client presentation. “And you’ve come to the right place,” I went on. “Pierce, Shelley’s excellent reputation speaks for itself, but it’s the personal attention we give our clients that separates us from the pack. Our experts are the best in their respective fields, but we’re not a money mall.”
“A what?” he said.
“A money mall,” I repeated. “Like a shopping mall.”
“A money mall. I get it,” he said, then laughed-coughed-wheezed for several long, excruciating seconds.
“I’m saying that while we have CPAs, insurance agents, retirement specialists, and stockbrokers under our roof, we’re not just a one-stop-shopping experience. You won’t be passed around from department to department. You’ll be assigned to a qualified account executive who will work closely with you, overseeing all your assets. A person you can trust. Someone you can depend on day or night.”
I caught Bernie’s eye. He was grinning at me, pleased with me. So far, so good.
“I like the sound of that,” said Jed. “With the kind of money we’re talking about, I should be able to call you people whenever I damn well feel like it.”
“Yes, you should,” I agreed. “Our job doesn’t end when the markets close. If I’m the lucky one who gets to oversee your account, you can be sure I’ll be available to you twenty-four/seven.”
He tipped his hat, revealing a head with exactly two strands of gray hair on it—strands that went straight across his scalp in a do I would come to call his cowboy comb-over. “I admire a gal who doesn’t mind long hours,” he said. “If you sign me up, you’ve gotta be willing to roll up your sleeves.”
Sleeves. Yes. Dan’s plush bathrobe was definitely Polo and definitely worth twice the price of the old terry cloth number that was hanging in my—Oh, God. Why was I even thinking—“Long hours aren’t a problem at all,” I said, furious with myself for allowing the distraction.
“Good. Getting back to the markets,” said Jed, “what’s the word on the Dow? We’re at the end of the year. What does next year look like to you?”
“My opinion is that while there will be opportunities next year, there will be challenges too,” I said. “It’s a very bifurcated market. The recovery has been tech-centric and risk-oriented. Last year everybody jumped on safe, quality stocks as the place to be, but they turned out to be the place not to be.”
“I’m betting that interest rates will spike, dragging everything else down the tubes,” he said.
I didn’t answer. Instead, I was picturing Dan’s new moccasins and wondering how much he’d spent on them. The leather reminded me of—
“Interest rates, Melanie?” Bernie
prodded.
“Right,” I said, berating myself yet again for my lapse in concentration. It must have been my ex’s crack about the champagne that was making me nuts. I wanted to bash him over the head with the bottle every time I thought about him toasting me with it. “The Fed will probably tighten later as opposed to earlier. They have tremendous fears about moving too fast. They don’t want to re-create the deflationary atmosphere of the nineties in Asia, so they’ll probably take baby steps. We, on the other hand, will take huge steps with your assets, Jed.”
“Damn right,” he said, pumping his fist at Bernie. “How about the bond market?”
And he’s playing catch in Central Park this afternoon, I thought. Isn’t that special? I’m sitting here with this randy blowhard, busting my butt to pay my bills, and he’ll be tossing around a football with—
“Melanie?” said Bernie, who had resumed his fingernail chewing. “Jed asked about the bond market.”
“Right. My guess is it’ll be a low-return world,” I said. “Not just next year, but beyond.” I leaned forward, met Jed’s eyes underneath the brow of his hat, and prepared to deliver my signature line. It always got a laugh. “You know, Jed, Will Rogers once remarked, ‘I’m not looking so much for the return on my money, but the return of my money.’ ”
On cue, Jed Ornbacher chuckled. We spent another hour or so on the details of his financial picture, and when it was all over he reached for my hand, stroked it suggestively, and declared that he wanted not only to move his money over to Pierce, Shelley and Steinberg but also to have me watch over it personally. He felt comfortable with the fact that I would be so accessible, he said, staring unapologetically at my breasts, as if he’d never heard of manners, much less appropriate behavior in the workplace.
After he left, Bernie congratulated me and went on and on about how I was still his top gun and always would be. He did ask me if anything was wrong, however.
“If you’re talking about Jed, his hand-holding didn’t faze me.”
“I wasn’t talking about Jed,” said Bernie as he escorted me out of his office. “You didn’t seem yourself during the presentation. There were a few minutes when I wasn’t sure we had your full attention.”
“Are you kidding? I was totally engaged,” I said with a laugh. “We got his account, didn’t we?”
I waved away his concern. What I couldn’t wave away was my own. I did zone out a couple of times during the presentation. It had never happened before, and it worried me. I would have to see to it that it never happened again.
Despite my victory at the office, I felt glummer than usual when I stepped into my apartment that night, mostly because Buster wasn’t around, but also because there was sobbing coming from the unit next door. Patty, my neighbor, was the owner of Letsmakeup.com, a company that sold high-end cosmetics online. She’d recently been dumped by her photographer husband and was extremely despondent about it. Normally, I kept to myself after a long, hard day at the office, but it would have been inhuman of me not to extend myself and try to comfort her.
“Patty?” I said as I knocked on her door. “It’s Melanie Banks from 3B.”
When she didn’t answer right away, I pressed my ear to the door to listen. The sobbing had stopped, and there was silence—until the loud crash. A china plate? A glass vase? Definitely something shattering.
“Patty?” I said, pounding on the door with my fist now. “Let me in, okay?”
A few seconds later she appeared, her eyes flooded with tears, her mascara running down her cheeks in black streaks and sticking to them like tar. I made a mental note not to purchase the mascara on Letsmakeup.com.
She was about my age and very “done.” Hair professionally blonded. Nose professionally bobbed. Chest professionally boobed. She’d even had a couple of toes shortened so she didn’t have to cram her feet into her stilettos. And she was clearly a guinea pig for the products she peddled. In addition to the mascara, there was evidence of three different shades of eye shadow, a heavy eyebrow pencil, lipstick and lip liner, and enough foundation to replaster the walls of the Heartbreak Hotel.
“Melanie, hi,” she said between sniffs. “Wanna come in?”
“Is it safe?” I said as I entered her studio, which was furnished identically to mine. All the units at the Heartbreak Hotel were set up with the same cheesy tables, chairs, and lamps, which looked like they were held together with Krazy Glue and produced in some third-world country. I guess you’d call the decor “outsourced chic.”
“Sure,” she said and pointed to the photograph of the studly guy she’d taped to the wall. Shards of a crystal champagne flute were lying on the floor below it. “I was just taking target practice.” She grabbed another glass off a tray of about a dozen glasses and flung it at the photo. I feared it would be a long night if I didn’t intervene.
I held her elbow and guided her away from the weapons of mass destruction, toward the sofa.
“That’s your ex?” I said, nodding at the photo as we sat.
“Yeah, that’s Jason. He shot his picture with one of those self-timers. It was probably the last time he used the camera.” She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “He was too busy with the hundred-and-fifty-dollars-a-session shrink appointments.”
“So he didn’t really work as a photographer?”
“Jason didn’t really work, period. He didn’t have to. He lived off me.” She blew her nose, causing a fissure in the foundation underneath her left eye.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What attracted you to him in the first place? Other than his good looks, I mean.”
“I thought he was an artistic type. Who knew he’d turn out to be a freeloading type. A total bumbo.”
“Bumbo?”
“Yeah. That’s what you call a male bimbo who doesn’t have a job.” She started to cry again. “And now I have to pay him alimony. How much does that suck?”
“A lot,” I said. “I’ll never understand how the lawyers come up with these settlements.”
“It’s all about the math,” she said. “If you’re the one who earns it, you’re the one who pays it. Such a joke, huh?”
“I hear you,” I said with a sigh and told her about Dan.
“I think a lot about killing mine,” she said with a faraway look.
“I think about killing mine too, but I’d never go through with it,” I said. “We have a dog together.”
She nodded. “Jason and I talked about getting a dog, but I figured I’d be the one who’d have to do everything. Housebreak it. Train it. Walk it.”
“Actually, Dan did all that. He may be a bumbo, but he loves our Buster.”
“Let’s get back to killing our exes,” she said, rubbing her hands together with entirely too much enthusiasm.
“I wasn’t serious about that, Patty.”
“Okay, forget killing. But Jason’s just begging me to smack him around. Last week he took his girlfriend to Australia. To the outback.” She started crying again in earnest. “The only outback he ever took me to was the steakhouse. And I paid.”
“It’s torture to watch them piss away our money, I know.” I patted her. “But you say Jason has a girlfriend?”
“Yeah, the little bitch he left me for.”
“Is he living with her?”
“Don’t I wish. Then I could nail him on the cohabitation provision and terminate the support payments. Another joke, huh? The guy’s too dumb to get a job, but he’s not dumb enough to lose his meal ticket.”
I then remembered my conversation with Robin—the part about the terms of the agreement. “So you have a cohabitation clause too?”
She shrugged, as if I’d asked a dumb question. “Everybody has one. Is your ex living with somebody?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, no one I know about.”
“No one you know about?” Her jaw dropped. “Like, you’re not keeping tabs on the women he sees?”
“Why should I? I’m trying to get him out of my life. The last thing I
want to do is involve myself in his affairs.”
“Hellooo? If he lives with somebody for ninety days, you’ll get him out of your life. No more chest pain every time you add up what you’re paying him. No more headache every time you see him wearing something stupidly expensive. No more irritable bowel every time you realize you’ve been thinking about him in the middle of an important business meeting.”
That last one got my attention. I’d do anything not to repeat my lapses in Bernie’s office, minor though they were. And all it would take to get Dan out of my mind and out of my bank account was ninety days with a woman? It sounded so simple, but how could it be? Robin and I had already concluded that he wouldn’t fall for it, wouldn’t let me off the hook. Nobody in their right mind would forfeit their support payments unless…
“If Jason really loved his girlfriend—I mean, really loved her, in spite of the negative experience he had with you—he’d want to be with her every night,” I said, testing out what was just a vague notion, a harmless line of reasoning. “He’d decide that the money isn’t nearly as important as waking up next to her in the morning.”
Patty gave me another look that suggested I was out of touch. “That’s very romantic, Melanie, but you’ve been reading too many Danielle Steel novels. Men aren’t wired that way. They’ve always got an agenda.”
“I’m not sure you can generalize. There must be some men who’d rebound from a bad marriage, find new love, and put it ahead of money.” I was grasping, I suppose. Hoping. Nothing serious. It was only Patty’s next response that bumped up the hoping a notch—to something more akin to wondering if maybe, possibly, conceivably the hope could become a reality.