Brightness Falls (21 page)

"You'd be surprised. It
is
really interesting."

"Actually—" she began, but he was caught up in his globe-altering vision.

"I buy and sell billion-dollar companies practically every day, and hardly anybody in the whole damn country understands the magnitude of what's going on. The government doesn't even understand. They don't have a clue. Which is actually just fine with us." He went on to explain how he and his colleagues were attacking bloated corporations, overthrowing corrupt and sybaritic management, slaying the dragons of inefficiency and complacency, carving up the slothful kingdoms into streamlined pieces and selling them off in the marketplace.

After years of inflation someone had noticed that the equity of corporate America, as reflected in stock prices, was undervalued. A new, pro-business president said it was morning in America, inflation subsided, and smart shoppers began to wake up and call their brokers. The financial-services industry grew like an oil town in full boom. And if buying stocks on margin in a rising market could double your rate of return, buying companies outright with borrowed money and reselling the parts seemed to be the fastest way anybody had ever thought of to get fabulously rich. Interest payments were tax-deductible, so it was just dumb not to borrow as much as possible and buy everything in sight. Debt was good, equity boring. He toiled, said Bradley Seaver, in the most lucrative field of his era.

"What do you do?" he paused to ask, after about twenty minutes.

"I'm in M and A at Silverman," she said, her own firm being a far more significant player in the field than his.

Flushing deep pink, Bradley Seaver donned his headphones and fiercely ignored her for the rest of the flight. An hour out of New York, Trina walked back to the restroom. The model she'd recognized earlier was waiting for a "Vacant" sign, peering nervously down the front of her blouse. "Do you know anything about implants," she asked Trina. "Because they feel kind of funny, like they're kind of expanding or something." The woman reached up and squeezed one of her own breasts, wincing piquantly.

She looked up with an expression that seemed to invite Trina to feel for herself, an experiment Trina chose not to perform.

"I don't know, I just got them last week and I just remembered this guy telling me a couple months ago about some girl whose implants like exploded on the Concorde. So I'm kind of worried."

"I didn't see any warnings on my ticket," Trina said.

"Really?" Appearing somewhat reassured, she glanced down at Trina's chest. "Are
they
real?"

A few hours later, Trina was getting the paisley tan in her midtown Manhattan office, soaking up radiation from her computer screen as she pored over a spread sheet. Hunched over the keyboard, she leaned into the monitor as though preparing to plunge into the emerald labyrinth of numbers. Since she'd hit the Street her eyesight had gone from twenty-twenty to something that sounded like her blood pressure, and now her eyes were watering behind her contacts, but given what had happened to her income over the same period she wasn't looking for sympathy. Just trying, at this moment, to figure out the cash flow on a division of a sportswear empire that management was taking private. Since the announcement of the tender offer, two other bidders had jumped in, driving up the price and effectively depriving Trina of another week of sleep. She leaned back and stretched her neck, stole a gulp of caffeinated primordial slime from her Harvard Business School mug.

Her assistant, Christopher, knocked and entered, bearing several garment bags draped over his outstretched arms with almost ceremonial delicacy. Christopher had excellent taste and a semiprofessional expertise in clothing, courtesy of the Fashion Institute of Technology, so she sent him out every season to pick some new suits. "I think you're really going to love these," he said, laying the bags out on Trina's couch and stroking them flat. "The new lines are fabulous. The Chanel especially."

"I'm sure they're terrific," Trina said as the phone buzzed. "Can you get that?"

Christopher walked stiffly over to the desk and picked up the receiver. He was still sulking when he said, unexpectedly, "Russell Calloway?"

It had been years since she'd seen him. Besieged as she felt, she was intrigued enough to take the call. "Hello, Russell? Is this a time warp, or what?"

"It has been a while," he agreed. "Gene Fisher's wedding a couple years back?"

"You're making me feel very old, but at least you'll always be older than me. Fat and balding yet?" And are you drumming up money for the alumni fund? she speculated. But Russell wasn't the alumni-fund type.

"I'm told I'm well preserved. I was wondering if I could buy you lunch."

This sounded like a come-on. Was it possible that he had split up with the beautiful and perfect Corrine Makepeace?

"Love to," she said, the doubtful sincerity of this statement accompanied by a reflexive surge of native southern intonation. "But I'm kind of busy for the next three or four years. I've had to cancel like six of my last seven nonbusiness dinner dates, which makes me real popular, as you can imagine..."

But she was curious enough to flip through her datebook, searching the end of April for an open day. Normally Christopher would tell her if she had a lunch free, but he had retreated in a bit of a huff.

"How about next Tuesday? It'll have to be somewhere close. You know Smith and Wollensky? If I don't call to cancel I'll see you at twelve-thirty."

He must have seen the article puffing her as one of the top women in M&A, Trina decided, though he didn't seem the type to read
Fortune.
But she didn't have time to speculate right now. She didn't have time for a love life right now, either, but it was important to feel the buzz of sexual tension once in a while, keep the frequency open just in case she met somebody really wonderful on a plane when her laptop was down and the bathroom happened to be vacant.

Russell had been a year ahead of her. They hadn't known each other well, and if memory served, she disliked him almost as much as she sort of liked him. She ran with the jocks and the kids whose last names were on the dorms and the classroom buildings. He seemed scornful of all that—a midwesterner determined to be arty and political. She remembered him smoking those French cigarettes that smelled like asphalt, sitting over coffee in the snack bar conspiring about literature with Jeff Pierce, that slouching bad boy whose grandfather had built the gym, with whom Trina would've liked to have gotten sweaty.

Never very bohemian, Trina Cox had gone into investment banking on graduating, just as a frenzy was beginning. As a trainee, she had fortunately found herself in mergers and acquisitions at First Boston, where the new game was being invented. Her department advised corporate clients on takeovers and helped arrange financing in exchange for fees in the millions; soon it was clear that the bank was missing out on the big action by merely serving as bridesmaid for these multimillion-dollar unions. First Boston started to put its own cash into the deals. Bliss it was in that dawn to be in finance, but to be in M&A was heaven.

After two years as an analyst she did the mandatory MBA; from business school, Cox took her nascent expertise to a white-shoe investment bank that was itching to get in on the new M&A action, but which, much to her irritation, remained reluctant to dirty its hands with hostile takeovers. She was trying to get them to loosen up.

Being a girl had not made it easier; the
Fortune
piece was sort of a joke, since Trina was one of about three women in M&A. The locker-room, dick-waving ethos of Wall Street had as much to do with the fact that half the guys were former nerds and dweebs as with the fact that the other half had actually
played
contact sports and belonged to fraternities. Knowing this gave a woman leverage. Trina herself was far from being a nerd, and had the kind of feminine self-confidence that can instantly pierce the armor of male posturing. Her voice, perennially hoarse and raspy, had the authority of money and breeding; and in the manner of men who are said to undress women with their eyes, Trina had the ability to make certain men recall every instance of sexual dysfunction they'd ever experienced. Her sexual appeal was more a function of vitality than of raw beauty, her cheeks having a fullness that made her look too much younger than she was, her hair an inconspicuous shade of brown; she was seldom the most attractive woman in a crowded room, but she was usually in the running. Born in Virginia of what is still called, without irony, a good family, she might have married well and ridden to foxes, as her mother and her older sister had done. Reacting against the trust-funded languor of her father, a gentleman ornithologist who tripped off to the Amazon to look for new parrots and grebes, she followed earlier generations of empire-building male Coxes to Wall Street. It didn't hurt that she was a better rider, skier, wing shot and tennis player than most of the men she worked with—accomplishments that mattered more to them than to her. A man had a harder time treating you like a bimbo if you'd hammered him at squash the week before. He might hate you, or he might want to marry you, but he would surely stop asking you to fetch him a cup of coffee.

After another hour of cash-flow analysis she looked up and saw the garment bags lying on the couch.

"Christopher," she called out. "Let's see the new wardrobe. Show me what you've got."

"There's no hurry," he said, still petulant.

"No, really, I'm dying to see."

The following Tuesday she was fifteen minutes late and Russell was waiting at the bar. He had filled out since she'd last seen him, but was still very collegiate. Boyish face, blue blazer over jeans, and—cute touch, this—a bow tie. Seemed like years since she had seen a man less than fully pin-striped.

Theirs was an acquaintance just tenuous and faded enough to make the kiss on the cheek slightly awkward, both tilting heads to the same side, both simultaneously correcting to the other side.

"Been up to Providence, recently," he asked after they were seated.

"Haven't had the time." He looked nervous, increasing her suspicions that this was a date. The waiter came over and greeted them in a thick mid-European accent, plunking down the heavy flatware.

"Cutlery for the men who carve up America's big corporations," Trina said, picking up a formidable steak knife. "This is sort of a midtown outpost of the Street," she added, explaining that her first boss had always taken her here with clients. "There's some kind of sumptuary law that requires investment bankers to eat prime beef surrounded by mahogany paneling and brass rails." She looked out at the room. A fat man two tables over waved at her. His companions were shouting for the waiter, pointing at empty glasses, hacking away at giant lobsters and prime ribs that spilled over the edges of their plates.

"Friends of yours?"

She shook her head. "Traders," she said, "the Neanderthals of the financial world. Oral compulsives. They scream and cuss into the phone all day, fueled on martinis and beef and cigars."

"You people in M and A aren't exactly shy and retiring."

"Naw, we kick some serious butt," she said in a deep, masculine voice. "But I doubt you're interested in any of this stuff, Mr. Calloway."

"Curiously, I am."

"Russell Calloway, class poet? Admit it, you feel this vast superiority to us money-grubbers."

"On the contrary, I think it's fascinating what you do. Especially now. Which is part of the reason I asked you to lunch."

This didn't sound promising, she thought. "I was hoping you remembered I had a great ass."

"Actually, I'm more of a breast man," he said, with a bad-boy grin, keeping his eyes fixed scrupulously on hers.

"I met a girl on the Concorde you might like."

"Just what I need."

"What
do
you need?"

"I recently got a submission, a novel, I think it's good. The protagonist works for a medium-sized company. He thinks he's about to get fired, and he gets this crazy idea to buy the company."

"That isn't crazy. "

"Well, that's what I wanted to know. I was hoping you could listen to this thing and tell me if it's realistic. This guy doesn't have any money. He borrows like seventy million."

"Lunch money," Trina said, buttering a slab of bread. "Why don't you make it seven hundred—just to keep from falling asleep."

"Let's work with what we have for a minute. This character isn't rich."

"Not yet he isn't, but that's the whole point of leverage. Big corporations used to acquire smaller corporations, but now we're seeing minnows swallow whales on practically a daily basis. The minnow goes to the bank and borrows money to buy Moby-Dick. You need collateral for a loan, so the little old minnow pledges the whale, which he doesn't yet own, as collateral. Then when the deal is done he pays off the loan with pieces of blubber. "

"Sounds perfectly reasonable," Russell said facetiously.

"Who was it said, 'Give me a big enough lever and I'll move the world'? Well, you give me enough leverage and I'll buy General Motors."

"Personally, I wouldn't want it," he said. "My father's a GM man."

"You're from Grosse Pointe, right? I like the Pistons for the playoffs." She turned toward the waiter, who was standing lumpishly beside their table. "Shrimp cocktail, sirloin medium rare, creamed spinach and more of this diet caffeine. Are you ready to order?"

After scanning the menu, Russell ordered the sole and a salad.

"So what industry are we talking about here?"

Russell hesitated. She raised her palms interrogatively. "Hog farming, software?"

"Publishing, basically."

"Basically?"

Shrugging his shoulders, he drew his lips into a tight, pensive grin and glanced up at her with eyes that seemed to plead for some kind of understanding: he had to go to the bathroom immediately, or else he was about to make some declaration of love. She reached across the table and put her hand on top of one of his. "What is it, honey?" She didn't remember him as the shy type at all. In fact, what she had just remembered was a drunken grope with him on someone's couch after a kegger. But there was another possibility.