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.