Opening Belle (36 page)

I wrangle two high school students to watch our kids for a few hours on Saturday night. I promise myself to be as perfect to Bruce as possible, as close to the person who fell in love with Bruce years ago as I can be. I want to feel something tonight. I will laugh at his jokes, not mention kids, not allude to work or how much money I'm not bringing home anymore.

For the past seven years we've been renting an older, aluminum-sided house on the side of the highway away from the ocean. We're pretty distant from the happening parts of Southampton and live among year-round residents. We have a yard that rolls down to a freshwater lake so we have no need for a swimming pool. Our lawn is brown for most of the summer and the few flowers that manage to bloom get eaten by deer the very day they do. When summers get rainy, moss creeps into the kitchen and up the walls and the place takes on an earthy smell, the smell of nuts and life and something that reminds me of tea. We call our house the Tea Bag.

As the people I worked with became rich, the Tea Bag House no longer felt like a place to invite them to. Many of them purchased palatial places on the other side of the highway, shingled, classic homes with quickly assembled interiors of wood and stone, soaring ceilings, and powerful air-conditioning systems that assure a constant seventy-two degrees. Their homes have names, painted on quaint wooden boards, posted on their automatic gate systems, names like Swann's Way, Aspen East, or Meadowmere. We could have afforded the same if we hadn't been saving for the suburban escape hatch. Anyway, we liked our old Tea Bag House.

As we drive over to Amy's house share, I again get that almost-feeling of happy, the same feeling I got after selling most of our stock at that French Internet café.

We turn in to the estate section where the homes hug the ocean. Several of their owners are people I've either worked with or been on deals for IPOs with. I challenge myself to see if I remember who lives where and I point the homes out to Bruce. “Linda Wachner from Warnaco, the clothing company. Calvin Klein, designer, what a gorgeous house. John Paulson in that one, he's a hedge fund manager, was short the market in this latest crash and made a billion with a
b.
George Soros, who is George Soros, Howard Stern, that radio guy, Bob ‘SFX Entertainment' Sillerman, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. Tory Burch designs clothes, and King McPherson is somewhere along here too.” I was pretty pleased with myself for being able to speak as fast as Bruce was driving.

“You should man a tour bus” was all Bruce said.

I glance at the even number of Amy's address, which surprises me. The evens are the ocean side, not the bay. No house sells for less than $25 million on the ocean side. What sort of multi-gazillionaire rents his house out to be shared? We turn in to a graveled drive and a valet parker takes our car from us. Embarrassed, I chuck the Happy Meal toys stuck between the front seats into the back before I hand him my keys. I glance at poor Bruce in his surfer hoodie and Quiksilver shorts and compare his dress code to the white-jacketed waiters with trays of drinks standing at attention beside golf carts, ready to whisk us up the hundred yards to the starkly modern estate we can see from the bottom of the driveway. I sigh for Bruce. I married a regular guy who unstuck himself from the pretentious family he grew up with only to find himself in that world again. I think he just wants to have some fun and look where I've brought him.

“Well, you look nice,” he says generously as he smirks.

I'm wearing a simple cotton shift with a belt so tight I think it belongs to Kevin. At least it's colorful.

“We don't have to go,” I say.

“I don't give a shit if your friend doesn't know how to have fun. I'm happy to drink her beer.” He laughs in a crazy, unattractive way.

I look over at him, standing in his self-righteous, smirking slouch, and see something in Bruce I have never seen before. Bruce thinks he is better than all of us. The entitled way he was raised is still in his DNA. He thinks he is doing me a favor by even being here. All this time I was worried about hurting his confidence when really, he was quite certain that working for anyone was beneath him, that maybe even having kids with me was beneath him. It is the first time I feel something bordering hatred for him.

Our golf cart pulls up close and the driver indicates for us to get in. I need to let Bruce's words simmer to not get mad and ruin the night.

“I'm as surprised as you, Bruce. Maybe it's the people she shares this house with. Maybe one of them is really wealthy and just likes having people around.” My voice is steady.

“Let's give this ten minutes, tops,” he says, and I nod because that's what I need to do to keep from punching him. I'll do whatever it takes for us to make it through this evening, but my new realization is shaking my world. My husband is an arrogant, self-involved ass.

When we get to the golf cart, a uniformed waiter comes over to make sure we don't get too thirsty from the bottom of the driveway to the house. He offers us some rosé champagne. I take one and, still standing, empty the contents in two suffocating gulps. Bruce passes on his so I take his and gulp that too. I put both empty glasses back on the tray. The waiter looks impressed with me as I turn back to the cart.

“Let's go,” I say to the driver, jumping in the seat next to him and not beside Bruce.

Bruce sees him cradling a walkie-talkie. “I need you to preorder me a cold one, man,” he says like some demanding toddler in the backseat. “Tell them you have a desperate guest.” He does this while he texts on his phone, as if he has something important to take care of.

The driver doesn't even crack a smile. He lifts the walkie-talkie, eyes on the road, and inquires about the type of beer being served. A voice on the other end relays the fact that while it's a top-shelf bar, Mr. McPherson isn't serving beer tonight. Bruce digests the beer part of this answer while I digest the name part. McPherson? King? Amy is in a house share with King and his family? Kevin's belt seems to be strangling my middle.

The cart stops at the perfect place to inhale the ocean's magnificence and the modern art sculptures. The statue on the front lawn appears to be a bodacious woman holding a giant earth on her head. She's made of shiny metal.

“Looks like you,” says Bruce, and I can't answer him nor pull my eyes away from Amy. My world is upside down and I'm being sliced in two by a belt I borrowed from my eight-year-old. Boy.

Amy stands in a floor-length maxi dress that makes her look like some dewy-eyed trophy wife instead of the smart, brash managing director she is. King stands next to her, hand on her ass, greeting a guy I recognize as the latest Internet bazillionaire in caveman fashion. They chest-bump. Two middle-aged white men chest-bumping just looks stupid and I hear Bruce snort under his breath. Amy sees me and waves and I can't figure out how to get myself out of the cart and up those few steps. I hate being bulldozed. I never saw this coming.

Amy breaks from King's grip and comes over to Bruce and me. We appear to be two random people removed from the beach and placed here as a joke. She plants a kiss on my cheek and giggles through her whisper.

“There are several ways to get ahead, girlfriend. Welcome to our coming-out party.”

B
Y SEPTEMBER,
Amy is living with King and he has left his family behind, like a shoe style he tired of. Amy has no intention of marrying him; she's just enjoying the elevation of her career, the changed status of her social life, and King's intense attraction to a woman with no domestic ambition. She will not be begging him for babies. Marcus informs me that Amy is capable of pole dance–worthy gymnastics in the bedroom and though King is almost twelve years her senior, he manages to keep up with her through pharmaceutical encouragement. There may be fewer of us but still we have no secrets.

I remember the holiday party, nine months ago, when Amy was appalled by the women flirting at bonus time in the hopes of a bigger paycheck. It's hard to recognize her at the moment.

I mention this vignette to Marcus, who shrugs and says, “She wasn't beating them so she joined them. Where's the surprise in that?” He seems defeated these days. Besides taking a terrible financial hit from the markets, he's also contending with a harassment charge launched by Naked Girl. She was going to be one of the fired employees, one that Manchester realized they didn't need, so she beat them to it by plopping harassment charges into the human resources in-box and leaving. Naked Girl maintains she was not promoted because she was having sex with him, that Marcus held her non-career back in order to maintain control over her as his girlfriend. My stomach churns when I hear of women like Tiffany who never had much career ambition yet opportunistically yank the inequity card.

The purchase of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase closed in June but it will be early 2010 before their trading platforms are fully merged. Manchester will take a full year to merge with us. Like the Bear employees, we too sit in isolation where remnants of fired employees—family photos, deal mementos, and the bulletin board of chopped Hermès ties (whenever a huge trade was executed, the trader would be tackled, held down while someone chopped his tie off before pinning it to the board) now look like roadside grave markers. What happened to my career is a question that jumps out at me each day when I lean against or sit at the desk of someone who used to work here but has since vaporized.

Without the anxiety of selling mortgages, my job has gotten easier. I look at balance sheets with real numbers on them of companies I believe in. The clients I have left are nice to me, and our trades are more long-term ideas we both want to see grow. Cheetah Global has begun trading with me as a Manchester Bank employee but at a fraction of the volume we once created. Henry has promoted a woman named Ariane Thanik to do much of his work and she has negated the need for Henry and me to speak. He called me once, just to tell me that he would no longer be the daily contact for investment banks, that Ariane would be that person who made more of the trading decisions for Cheetah. He told me that because of our Glass Ceiling Club discussions he specifically wanted a woman for the job. It wasn't because he felt an inequity he wanted to address, but rather because he agreed a woman could be more levelheaded, risk-averse, and representative of fifty percent of the population. Henry was being groomed to take over for Tim and would eventually run all of Cheetah. He never mentioned our terrible time in that apartment.

I felt a thrill for Henry, a genuine happiness for someone I used to care about. I missed the mental challenge of him forcing me to learn new things but I would find that somewhere else. Whenever I feel a wave of sadness about our really not knowing each other for the rest of our lives, I smack it down and wait for the healing power of time to wipe it away. A few times I wanted to reach for the phone just to update him on everything: the end of Feagin Dixon as we knew it, the evaporating markets, the scattering of GCC—but it just isn't possible. We had been something else that existed in a different place and time.

My only real professional friendship, if one could call it that, is with Kathryn Peterson. Kathryn was made a partner at Manchester Bank. These days she is Kathryn's version of happy, which looks a lot like Kathryn's version of unhappy, but I have a sense of her now, and there's a sincerity about her that I like.

Visiting with her is like a trip to the could-have-been-me museum. Kathryn is wealthier than me in the bank account but empty in everything else. I visit her at her trading turret almost daily, to get a sense of which toxic positions are left and what we're doing to get ourselves out of them. Nobody wants to buy the bonds we hold in inventory. Each night we mark the stuff to market, meaning we pick a shot-in-the-dark value of what it's worth and every day, with no buyers in sight, it becomes worth less. Manchester stock trades down accordingly, day after day. The McElroy net worth is less than it was three years ago and I sometimes imagine all the time I could have been with my children, been with Bruce, instead of my sleep-deprived, overeating, overdrinking, almost celibate lifestyle. To end up with this much in the bank, I could've done real things and still had a job, just a regular type of job.

On September 10 I went upstairs to speak with Kathryn when CNN announced that Lehman reported a $3.9 billion loss and was selling a majority stake in their investment management business. I sighed with relief, expecting the stock to rebound. It slid 7 percent. I wondered when this thing would find a bottom. The former CFO of the bank, Erin Callan, possibly the most senior woman on Wall Street, was asked to step down in June and she did. Now every discussion about the company comes from the CEO himself, Dick Fuld.

On September 13 I sat with Kathryn to listen to Tim Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, make a televised announcement. Tim admitted we were looking at a possible emergency liquidation of Lehman assets. All the financial stocks traded off again, lower than I ever thought possible. On September 15, before the market opened, Dick Fuld told the world that Lehman Brothers was filing for bankruptcy protection. Chapter 11. The market dropped over five hundred points, the most since September 11, 2001. It dropped like the world had lost its floor and I filled sell orders like a concession stand attendant filling orders for French fries.

My daily visits to Kathryn become therapy sessions, knowing that as long as one of us doesn't crack, we both are okay. On September 20, there are rumors now of Korean buyers willing to buy portions of the ailing banks, there are southern banks rumored to be stepping up too. The discount window is open from the Fed, meaning investment banks can now borrow money from the government. Feagin Dixon wouldn't have fallen had we been allowed to do this but even with this change of law, nothing seems to calm the markets.