Ordinary Hazards

by Anna Bruno

  “It’s nothing,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Ten thousand is a lot of money,” she says.

  I think about the Wrestler, how wrestling is the thing that defines him, even though he probably hasn’t been on the mat in years.

  “I’ll handle it. Are you done?” Yag reaches for his phone. She’s not done.

  “Look at me,” the girl says.

  Yag turns his head toward her. His left hand is on the bar and his right foot is on the base of her stool.

  “How many times did you put your dick in her?”

  “I don’t know. Less than three. We were drunk. We’re just friends.”

  “You are always drunk.” If the girl ever took my class, we’d have a serious conversation about up-talk.

  Yag shakes his head, not in protest or denial, more like, So shoot me.

  The pitcher has not yet thrown a single pitch to the batter. He’s in a standoff with the guy on first.

  “You take zero responsibility?”

  “It’s a Gen X thing,” Yag says.

  “A Gen X thing?” I’m not sure if the girl isn’t familiar with Gen X as a category or if she’s questioning Yag’s moronic excuse. For her sake, I hope it’s the latter.

  “We invented hookup culture in college,” Yag says. “Four years of popping pills and getting laid—that’s pretty hard to turn off.” It took Yag more than four years to graduate, but I don’t want to split hairs.

  Every time Yag opens his mouth, I detest him more. He is brilliant—a mathematician, a doctor for Chrissake—but he will never leave this town. He’ll drink every day at this bar for the rest of his life. He won’t stop banging twenty-one-year-olds until they stop saying yes, and they might not stop saying yes for another ten years. They seem to be getting stupider by the year, less discriminating.

  And maybe it is just a bad night, but I find myself disliking the girl too, though I have no cause. I find her pain distasteful because it isn’t real pain. Together with Yag. Not together with Yag. It means nothing, thin as the air at twenty thousand feet.

  None of the other regulars are listening. Cal is at the other end of the bar talking shop with a young man who looks about twenty-one or twenty-two. Short Pete and Fancy Pete are chewing the fat about local politics. Summer is at the front table sucking down Cherry Cokes.

  Yag puts his arm around Caroline, pulling her toward his chest. She pushes him away, kicks his foot off the base of her stool, and scoots in the opposite direction. He looks at her as if they’ve been talking about the weather or what they had for lunch, and says flatly, “I’m gonna go play pool. See ya later.” His tone reminds me of my father. It rings with superiority. It implies, I’m done with this now.

  * * *

  A GLIMMER SQUEEZES THROUGH the door, daylight finding its way in. Jimmy comes in from the heat, wiping the sweat from his forehead, making his way to the bar. He’s wearing a dark-blue T-shirt, a size too small. A band name, DIGISAURUS, is inscribed across a boom box with lightning bolts shooting out. The letters are stretched over his pecs, and the bolts curve over his gut, not quite reaching his belly button. This shirt is paired with old Levi’s and black-and-white Sambas—the same shoes kids wore for indoor soccer back in the nineties.

  Sometimes I feel like I’m straddling where I came from—Wilton, Cambridge, San Francisco, New York—and where I am, this town, like they are two different worlds. Then the whiskey touches my lips and I realize no matter where I am it tastes just the same.

  In towns like ours, there’s a fine line between rustic and run-down. There are still a few cows in the fields. There are refurbished barns where kids from the U. have wedding receptions. There is a nearby swimming hole maintained as a state park. There’s a burger place where you can get your name on the wall and a free T-shirt for eating four burgers in under an hour. There’s also an opioid epidemic. And family farms in foreclosure. And historic houses so dilapidated even the frat bros won’t live in them. Our town is like a woman who looks good from fifty yards.

  Amelia tosses a coaster in his direction and says, “What’ll it be?” She says it just like that, the way the bartenders in the movies say it. Jimmy orders a stein of beer, which costs three dollars on Wednesday. Glasses clank as Amelia pulls a frosty mug out of the freezer. A little bit of beer swooshes out as she sets it down in front of Jimmy. She grabs a towel to wipe off the glass, but he is already halfway across the bar, saying hello to one of the other regulars.

  Amelia lives in a room above the bar. I’ve been upstairs only once. Before Amelia moved in, Lucas’s friend Jacob had her room. One night, he sent us up to do a line of coke off his empty dresser. His bed was unmade, bare, no sheets, not even a mattress cover. The room had no kitchen, only a small microwave on the floor in the corner. There was one shared bathroom in the hallway. The experience of his room was so depressing that I never followed Lucas up there again. I imagine Amelia has fixed it up a little, maybe painted the walls a deep purple or red, hung a painting purchased from the antique shop up the street.

  Jimmy walks toward me. He’s put on a few pounds. Jimmy only played soccer, never football, because his parents are scientists and thus take issue with repeated trauma to the brain. He has the anatomy of a football player, though, six foot four with broad shoulders and big hands.

  I motion for him to take the empty seat to my left. He smells like a combination of hamburger and fries, greasy and stale. Not a whiff of tapioca, I think to myself.

  “How ya doin’, old friend?” I ask.

  It’s doubtful that Jimmy thinks of me as a friend—he’s Lucas’s friend—but the greeting seems to please him nonetheless.

  I gesture toward Yag. “How do you stand him?”

  He takes a long drink from his beer. “I’ve learned to compartmentalize. We’re only friends at the bar.”

  “He’s being rude to that girl,” I say.

  If Jimmy cares, he doesn’t let on. He shrugs, as if to say, Tell me something I don’t already know.

  A jolt of worry strikes. Or is it hope? I can’t tell the difference. Lucas might meet Jimmy here. My mind says, He never comes to the bar anymore. He avoids me. But my heart asks, Maybe tonight is different?

  I decide to fish. “Meeting anyone?”

  “Not tonight,” Jimmy says. “It’s a slow one, so I dipped out for a drink.”

  He puts a coaster on top of his beer and steps out front for a smoke.

  Before Jimmy took that job at the diner up the street, he worked as an aerospace engineer. As kids, he and Lucas set off rockets in his backyard, and Jimmy talked about wanting to be an astronaut. By the time he left for college, he had a private pilot’s certificate. After college, he lived out west for several years, designing commercial aircraft for Boeing. He moved back home when the doctors announced the cancer had spread to his sister’s lymph nodes, lungs, and liver. He was here to say goodbye and to help his parents, and we all expected him to leave again when she died. He never did.

  He’s going on five years at the diner. Every year, on the anniversary of his sister’s death, Jimmy wraps up two burgers to go and brings them over to his dad’s house. They sit on the porch together and eat. He told me once that they don’t say much but it’s not the talking that matters. It’s the being here. Sometimes it’s hard for me to reconcile the fact that this Jimmy—the Jimmy who sticks around this town so he can sit on the porch with his dad—is the same Jimmy who lives to party, the Jimmy who used to do lines of coke off the kitchen counter with Lucas and take all our money at the poker table.

  Amelia reads my mind. She says, “Lucas hasn’t set foot in here in months. He came in on Thanksgiving Day and then again on Christmas Eve. I remember because the second time he came in, he gave me a huge tip—called it a Christmas bonus.”

  Our divorce was finalized a week before Thanksgiving, three quarters of a year ago, which feels like both an eternity and a flash, like tacky wet paint that’s already started to peel from weather. Thanksgi
ving and Christmas are the only two days that Lucas could be absolutely certain I would be in Connecticut with my mom.

  Thanksgiving is Lucas’s favorite holiday. He likes cooking all day and walking around in socks and a flannel. But his family never celebrates it on actual Thanksgiving. His mom puts the holiday on hold until his brother, the prodigal son, makes it up from New York City with his wife and two kids. So, for Lucas, Thanksgiving falls on a random Saturday, sometime in November or December, when the big shot litigator, hair combed back and gelled, piles into his Mercedes SUV with his Barbie-doll wife and Norman Rockwell kids, drives four hours, and graces Upstate New York with his indomitable presence. It doesn’t surprise me that Lucas spends actual Thanksgiving and Christmas here at The Final Final.

  “Got it,” I say to Amelia. “Thanks.” I’m not sure why I’m thanking her—I suppose for the information. Her intonation suggests disapproval. She prefers Lucas as a customer. He tips better.

  * * *

  ABOUT A YEAR AFTER I met Pamela Randolph Walsh and left Manhattan behind, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about her. The headline was “Daughter of a Bookmaker Becomes Darling of Wall Street.”

  I showed it to Lucas. “Not Ivan Ilyich after all,” he said.

  Pamela would never look back on her career and point to this article as a seminal moment. Having met her, however briefly, I understood the publicity was most likely a source of embarrassment, or perhaps not embarrassment exactly, but diminishment. Her success was not intrinsic. It wasn’t attributable to anything she did.

  Maybe she wasn’t Ivan Ilyich. But what was the alternative? I pictured her stick-straight, cropped hair, the perfect arc of her back, the heaviness of her steps as she walked away from me.

  If Pamela fell suddenly ill in her forties, she might suffer physical pain, but no mental anguish—and even if she did suffer mental anguish, it would not be the subject of Tolstoy. There would be more salacious points of inquiry. No one would care if her interior décor was exactly the same as every other banker—modern leather chairs, white walls, stainless steel appliances: clean and crisp. No one would question her early maneuvers, the climb from researcher to analyst to VP. No one would examine her family life and consider that time spent at the office might have been an evasion. No one, finally, would take notice of spouse and child, the former a ham-fisted kept man, the latter a private school brat, all that for which she had lived, and see, in them, Pamela: a deception.

  Lucas paused, processing what he’d read, thinking, no doubt, about the writings of historians and philosophers, charting ideas in his brain. Finally, he said, “Daniel was a nobody too. Then the king threw him to the lions.”

  Imagine: Wilton, Connecticut, is a modern-day Babylon. The kings of men wear blue blazers and starched button-downs. They live in six-bedroom, eight-bathroom mansions, made of stone and brick. Most of the rooms are vacant because they have only one-point-five kids. One will go to Harvard. The point-five will probably go to Brown.

  If you are Pamela Randolph Walsh, this is your station in life. Your life in Babylon is the result of a series of events that transpire because of one predominant motivation: the acquisition of wealth. You have talent; you have ambition; and, if you’re like Daniel, you have piety. His Jerusalem is your Wall Street. His God, your Economy. He prays daily. You trade daily. Either way, life is a series of transactions.

  You refuse the food and wine of the new money elites. You avoid their yoga studios and coffee shops. You don’t set foot in a Whole Foods. And when you take that job at a Wall Street bank, you ditch the Audi your dad bought you with his bookmaking profits, and you take the subway because it keeps you humble.

  Sitting in your tower, high above the concrete jungle, you look at your tickers and study your reports, and you begin to understand visions and dreams of all kinds. Management asks you to interpret a series of disclosures, after their wisest men have failed, and you deliver a prophecy about the end of a long reign and all the ways leadership is found wanting.

  The bank transitions through a series of kings—one goes crazy and moves to Brooklyn; one is overthrown in a coup. You persevere. You rise through the ranks, first, an underling in the royal court; then, having distinguished yourself among analysts, you are given the title of VP, above the satraps. You are neither corrupt nor negligent, and best of all, you have a high tolerance for pain.

  Do you question your piety? Do you cry out in the night? Do you distract yourself with Prada handbags and Jimmy Choo heels and powder-white cocaine? Or, like Daniel, do you stay true to your God?

  Daniel, Ivan Ilyich, Pamela Randolph Walsh: each nothing more than a subordinate leader, a talented middle manager subject to the whim of a king. They are barely distinguishable but for the stuff of legends: Daniel is thrown to the lions! Pamela is the daughter of a bookmaker! And what becomes of them? Only Ivan Ilyich dies a nobody.

  Pamela’s story may never have come to light, or it may have surfaced much later—too late to have an impact on her career—if not for her father’s early death and for his obituary in a local Wilton newspaper. As luck would have it, the obit guy at the Wilton Weekly actually did his homework, and her name, occupation, and Harvard pedigree were mentioned in an unusually lengthy chronicle of the life and times of a bookmaker some twenty years prior. Apparently, after his release from prison, Walter Randolph lived a reclusive life without incident.

  No one would have seen this local obit, except for the fact that a student reporter at the Harvard Crimson scoured internet news sites for obituaries of noteworthy alums. While Pamela’s father was not an alumnus, his obituary came up in the search because the school was mentioned alongside Pamela’s name.

  It was this kid at Harvard who realized there was a story here, although there’s no way he would have had the slightest idea how it would all spin out. He had been working on a series of articles about Wall Street influencers after the financial crisis, which profiled a number of Harvard graduates. I read some of the articles in the series.

  A fellow Harvard alum who worked at the New York Times read the one on Pamela and concluded, Who better than the daughter of a bookmaker to clean up Wall Street? That article led to the article I happened upon in the Journal.

  Pamela Randolph Walsh was a nobody before she had a story. She survived on Wall Street because she had a high tolerance for pain. Then the press threw her in with the lions, their jaws locked shut by angels, and she emerged untouched and altogether more spectacular, the talk of the town, a legend.

  In short order, she was head of global compliance, and then CFO.

  Lucas said, “You should write a book.”

  * * *

  LATER, I WOULD CALL the book The Breakout Effect: How Stories Make Leaders; it would become a best seller.

  The breakout effect is the phenomenon whereby a person pushes through a predetermined ceiling as a result of some extrinsic factor (i.e., not hard work or a brilliant idea). I co-opted it for my own purposes, but breakout is a common term in finance. Securities—stocks and bonds—typically move within certain thresholds. The upper limit of these thresholds is the level of resistance. Imagine a chart that shows the movement of the stock. It has peaks and troughs and jagged edges, but for a period of time, the line does not go above a certain ceiling or below a certain floor. Investors look for a breakout point—the point at which the security will climb past the level of resistance. There are many factors that might lead to a breakout: an abrupt shift in supply and demand, which is sometimes predictable; a major news event, the effects of which are often unpredictable. The goal is to take a long position when the price of the security approaches the resistance line.

  When you graph the success curves of human beings, adjusting for people who have major health problems and people who are so poor that upward mobility is an American myth, you find that they look exactly like stocks. Everyone has peaks and troughs and resistance levels, and just like the market always goes up in the long run, people, collectively,
trend upward. This begs the question: How do people break through their resistance levels and become leaders? This is the central concern of the book.

  The key insight of The Breakout Effect is that it’s not who you are that makes you a leader; it’s the story about who you are. Because the story is what allows you to break out. The story is what matters, not the reality. Furthermore, telling a good story is like beating a polygraph: anyone can do it with a little training, or the help of a good book. Hence, the appeal.

  Beyond principles of storytelling, the book espouses one idea above all else: the story, regardless of subject, must be humanizing, not humbling, necessarily, though it could be, just humanizing.

  * * *

  A COUNTRY SONG PLAYS on the jukebox. It’s Cal’s pick.

  Ridin’ gravel to the jobsite

  Smokin’ cigarettes on the morning road

  Everything’s gonna be alright

  While my baby dreams at home

  The tune takes me back. It was playing when I brought my mother to The Final Final for the first time. The only time. She’d never spent much time on country roads. Wilton wasn’t exactly a walking community unless you count the arduous journey from master bedroom to three-car garage. Before she drove up, Mom called and asked if she should bring her boots. I closed my eyes and imagined her high-heeled, pointy-toe Ferragamos and promptly said, “Sure, Mom, bring your boots.”

  Only city boys sleep through the morning

  Only royals eat bacon and eggs

  Only bourgeois read the newspaper

  Drivin’ to work while my baby dreams at home

  When she rolled into town, she said she wanted a martini so we stopped at The Final Final. Upon entry, her nose crinkled up and her body collapsed into itself. She refused to sit down or touch anything. She did not use the bathroom. So I was surprised when she ordered a second martini. She lost herself in thought for a moment as Amelia drained the shaker into her glass.