The Underwriting (4 page)

“But then this one guy, Pete, started getting tired of going into town. He picked his favorite whore and had her come back to the barracks.” Harvey shook his head, laughing as he thought about it.

“He was from Princeton and thought he was pretty smart, and she was just a dumb whore who didn't speak much English. But then one night I came into my office and she was there, rifling through my files.”

Todd glanced out the window. The slightest bit of snow was starting to fall from the gray clouds.

“So I killed her,” Harvey said. Todd's eyes snapped back and Harvey pressed his lips into a calm, amused smile. “The authorities arrested Pete for it and, given it was his fault the whole thing had happened in the first place, I let justice take its course.”

Todd shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

“You see, Todd, what Pete didn't understand is that there are things you can't see. There are systems you can't see, but they're there, and they're bigger than you.”

Todd held his breath, his irritation returning: what was the point of all this?

“And to the system”—Harvey sat forward—“you are nothing.” He paused, like a self-important prick, then sat back. “Now, who's going to be on your team?”

Todd willed his eyes not to roll. “Neha Patel will be the analyst, she's the best in the group and—”

“I'll let you have Beau as your associate,” Harvey interrupted.

“What?” Beau Buckley was Harvey's business manager, a notoriously useless associate who owed his ironclad employment to the fact that his billionaire father was one of the firm's largest clients. Everyone knew he was being groomed for an executive role at the firm, which meant he spent all his time networking without touching any actual work.

“I've talked to Beau. He knows the application well and has an interest in technology. It'll be good experience for him to get exposure to a deal of this magnitude,” Harvey said, not leaving any room for discussion.

“All due respect, Beau has no experience and, with Josh wanting to keep the team small—”

“Lillian Dumas will be your point for Equity Capital Markets,” Harvey continued, ignoring Todd's protest. “She's been helping me with our Silicon Valley strategy.”

“Absolutely not.” Todd put his hands up. Not only did Lillian hate him for blowing off her advances three years ago, she was as high maintenance as women came: she was a female slick dick.

“Why not?” Harvey said calmly but firmly.

“Because she's a bitch—” Todd started, then corrected. “She'll make Josh uncomfortable.”

“You're selling the value of an online-dating site to a mostly male sales force. You need a girl on the team.”

“We've got Neha.”

“Is she pretty?” Harvey asked bluntly.

Todd paused. “Tara,” he heard himself say. “Tara Taylor can do it.”

Harvey studied Todd's face. “Fine. That's the team, then.”

“Fine,” Todd said, processing what he'd just said. Tara was a good idea, right?

“We need this to go out in time for second quarter earnings.”

Todd lifted a brow. “It's March. To make it into Q2 earnings it would have to be out by mid-May. You know this will take at least three and a half—”

“L.Cecil goes before the federal court the last week in May. I need this deal before then to counteract negative press.”

“You can't decide an IPO based on press reports.”

Harvey calmly crossed his hands on the desk, waiting.

“Fine,” Todd said. “We'll move as fast as we can.”

“When do you meet with the team?”

“Friday.”

“I'll look forward to your status report.”

“I don't have time for—” Todd stopped, knowing this wasn't worth his anger—he could have Neha do it. “Sure,” he finally said.

“Good,” Harvey said, picking up his phone as an indication the meeting was finished.

Todd stood, feeling like he'd won more points than Harvey but somehow still lost the game. Harvey was such a dick; he couldn't wait to blow this deal out of the park and put the old man in his place.

TARA

W
EDNESDAY
, M
ARCH
5; N
EW
Y
ORK
, N
EW
Y
ORK

“Oh my god, can you believe George E is dating that, like, total peasant? Like, on the one hand it's totally awesome that he, you know, is worth a gazillion dollars and dates normal people? But on the other hand, oh my god she's like totally busted. I mean, like, le-gi-ti-mate-ly not attractive.” Meagan talked like someone addicted to the sensation of vocalizing.

Tara stopped typing and waited, helplessly, for her colleague's voice to stop.

“Let me see.” She heard Julian, the eager-to-please associate, roll his chair over to see Meagan's screen, fulfilling his duty as a junior colleague of making VPs feel good about themselves.

“Right?” Meagan asked.

“Do you think his stuff is really that good?”

“Of course it's that good: his last piece sold for seventeen million dollars.”

“But is it, like, good art?” Julian asked.

“Julian, the value of art cannot be measured objectively—it's like what I taught you about public equity markets: perception creates reality. Is Facebook worth fifty dollars a share? What does that even
mean
? The market says it is, and therefore it must be so. And the market says George E should be with someone
way
hotter than this girl.”

Tara sighed. What she wouldn't give for a scandal. The firm's current trading violations were news, but all they led to was an excuse for senior management to cut associate bonuses. What she needed was a bankruptcy or a Ponzi scheme or a massive round of layoffs to make life more interesting. She'd been at L.Cecil since she graduated from Stanford in 2007, back when markets were good and everyone with a 3.9 GPA from a top-tier university fought to get into investment banking or management consulting.

But that was seven years ago. The financial crisis had drained the adrenaline from Wall Street, as well as promotions and retire-at-thirty bonuses. Now the path that was supposed to be the right one felt . . . static. Tara did everything right: she worked out every morning; she showed up to the office on time and was never the first to leave; she avoided gluten, limited her dairy and didn't eat after nine p.m.; she called her parents once a week and contributed to her 401(k); she exfoliated her skin but not too often, cut her cuticles but not too close, waxed down there but not all the way; she read
The New Yorker
and
supported NPR; and she always remembered to drink a glass of water for every glass of wine. So why did she still feel unfulfilled? What self-help book had she missed?

Maybe she should call her doctor to up her Celexa prescription.

The office mail clerk arrived with a box, and Tara looked up hopefully for she-wasn't-sure-what, and sighed when the package was for Meagan.

“Oh, perfect,” Meagan said, taking the box.

Tara refocused on the status report she'd spent the last hour typing, taking her shoes off under her desk and spreading her toes on the carpet to ease her mind from existential crisis. She wondered what had happened to that girl Lori Pratt—the one who had left L.Cecil to become a writer—was she any happier?

“What's that?” Julian asked Meagan.

“It's my cleanse,” Meagan said, clearly pleased that he'd asked. “I'm juicing for five days starting tomorrow. I've
got
to lose six pounds before my Miami trip next weekend.”

“Yeah, totally,” Julian said.

“What?” Meagan's jaw dropped. Tara turned just enough to see. Meagan had wanted Julian to tell her she didn't need to lose weight, even though she really
did
need to drop a few pounds. Already prone to jelly bean binges, being on the same floor as the on-average-15-percent-below-healthy-body-weight public relations team had caused Meagan to pack two dress sizes onto her five-foot-four frame in fits of Luna Bar gorges. “Are you calling me fat?”

Julian's hands jumped in front of him to backpedal. “No, no, no—I just meant—those girls in Miami are just, like, so
ridiculously
skinny that I could understand why—”

“Please go get me a coffee,” Meagan interrupted, assigning the associate his punishment. “Two-pump sugar-free vanilla skinny latte, three Splendas. Tara, you want anything?”

“No, thanks.” Tara turned in her chair and smiled politely.

“Hey, by the way, do you know whether Kelly Jacobson accepted her offer?”

“I'm actually talking to her tonight,” Tara explained. Kelly was their top pick from last summer's intern class—a cheerful and bright Stanford senior whom Tara had been assigned to “convince to accept her offer” on account of their shared alma mater.

“Who is she deciding between?”

“Us and Google, I think.”

“Ugh.” Meagan made a face. “Why would you work at Google? Everyone gets totally fat there.”

“I'll be sure to mention that,” Tara said.

“I'm serious, Tara.” Meagan didn't appreciate the sarcasm. “You know I'm in charge of the summer intern recruiting committee. If she doesn't accept the position I'm going to look totally retarded.”

“Of course,” Tara demurred, turning back to her computer, pleased to find an instant message on her screen.

TERRENCE:
OMG I can hear her from here.

Tara looked over to Terrence, who sat three cubicle-blocks away. He was the best-looking and most intelligent person Tara knew at L.Cecil but, as a half-black gay man, was a perpetual outsider. He had landed in Investor Relations because the firm felt the best way he could serve the company was by showing his face to the press and investors who might, seeing it, believe the company was committed to diversity.

He was also one of Tara's closest friends. They would have been friends under any circumstances, but being depressed in their jobs had helped to solidify the deal.

Tara smiled at Terrence across the room and typed back.

TARA:
Will I go to hell if I tell this Kelly girl she should come work here over Google?

TERRENCE:
At least the men are better looking here.

TERRENCE:
Even if they are douchebags.

TARA:
Speaking of . . . Todd Kent encounter in the elevator this morning.

TERRENCE:
Didn't you used to sleep with him?

Tara blushed . . . Had she told him that?

TARA:
No.

Best to deny these things.

TARA:
Once.

She could trust Terrence.

TARA:
Fine, twice. But it was college. It didn't mean anything.

It had, of course, meant something then, when she'd lost her virginity to him at SAE and then he'd never called. But it didn't matter now—not ten years later when they were both adult professionals.

TERRENCE:
Right.

“Tara, my office. Now.”

Tara looked up from her screen at Lillian Dumas, who swept by in knee-high boots that gapped around her hyper-skinny legs, a bold test of business formal attire that senior management let slide because the boots were clearly expensive.

Tara slipped her shoes back on, suddenly self-conscious of their last-seasonness, and followed Lillian to the glass-enclosed office. They reported to the same group head, but Lillian was a managing director five years Tara's senior in the Equity Capital Markets Group, and so liked to consider herself Tara's boss.

“Close the door.” Lillian's voice was shaking. Tara did as told and moved toward a chair. “Don't sit down.”

Lillian's skeletal collarbone heaved as she breathed heavily through her firmly set jaw. She crossed her arms in a stance she'd lately adopted to show off the four-and-a-half-carat diamond the hedge fund manager she'd been dating for three years had finally conceded to give her.

“I don't know who you slept with,” Lillian spat, “but I hope you realize who you're stealing from.”

Tara felt her stomach knot in instinctive dislike of being in trouble. “Wha—”

“Hook has decided to go public and they want you to be the ECM.”

“What?” Tara's brain and heart raced. “Who—” she started, but Lillian wasn't listening.

“I'm a managing director at this firm and you
just
got promoted to VP. And you
know
I've been working on a Silicon Valley strategy. Josh Hart has been in the system under my name for the past year.” One of Lillian's favorite pastimes was putting every executive or potential executive in the business universe in the internal database as someone she knew so that she could get credit if and when they became clients of the firm. “I was supposed to meet him next month,” she lied. “This deal should be mine.”

“Lillian, I—”

“You must have slept with someone. Who was it?”

“Lillian, how do you even know—”

“Steve got a call from Harvey Tate saying you're supposed to be one hundred percent on this and I have to pick up your other work.” She made a face. “How does Harvey Tate even know who you are? Eww, did you seduce him? He's like seventy.” Lillian's face went white and her painted lips parted. “Oh my god, did you fuck Todd?”

Lillian had infamously thrown herself at Todd Kent at a holiday party three years ago, only to be rejected in favor of a girl in IR, whom Lillian had been instrumental in edging out of the firm six months later. Despite filling her present calendar with wedding planning, Lillian still felt Todd was her territory.

“No, Lillian.” Tara shook her head. “I don't know what you're talking about. This is the first I've heard of any of this.”

Lillian's green eyes lasered into Tara's. Lillian was legitimately gorgeous: silky chestnut hair framed her perfectly symmetrical face, and her petite features looked handcrafted. Tara could feel Lillian thinking about whether Todd, the man who had rejected her in all her physical perfection, would actually be seduced by Tara's plain frame and last-season shoes. Lillian squinted her eyes at her junior colleague's imperfections until she regained her cool and turned to her computer, apparently satisfied that it was out of the question.