“What?”
“Yeah. They went hunting or whatever you call it when you toss dynamite to make ducks get off their feathers and fly into the air. Then the boys shoot the hapless creatures. Anyway, Buckfire tossed the dynamite stick but the poor dog thought he was playing fetch, so he picked it up and tried to run it back to Buckfire and the T. Rowe guy.”
“Wait. This is like a cartoon. The dog ran at them with dynamite?” Alice asks, coming the closest to smiling that I’ve ever seen her. I expect to see her stoic face spring some crack lines.
“So Fletch shot the dog?” I ask.
“You got it. Anyway, the old boys are a bit pissed at Fletch right now, Butler’s awful, and without me there’s nobody who actually transacts business between Feagin and T. Rowe Price so they’ve gone back to calling me, which is fine and I’m still doing all the same stuff except Butler and Fletch get paid instead of me.”
“Now that would be hard to swallow,” Amy says with motionless hands.
“It’s hard to swallow,” Lily agrees, pushing her chair back in finality. She shrugs like this is all a waste of time, like there isn’t anything any of us can do.
“I covered accounts for Belle when she was on maternity leave,” Amy says, “and she got them back. Maybe you’ll get T. Rowe back.”
I sit there thinking of what I did to get my accounts back each time I had a baby, thinking of Marcus warning me to watch out for Amy and how one evening, when she thought I had left for the day, I found her cutting and pasting client contact information from my unlocked computer. She was emailing everything to herself in a traceable way that a sleep-deprived, too-busy mother would never take the time to check. I guess the reason I still trust her is she didn’t lie or make excuses for this and our conversation went like this:
“What could I possibly have done to make you steal my accounts?” I had asked. “All I’ve ever done for your career is help it and this is how you thank me?”
Amy, all business all the time, didn’t even look guilty. She hadn’t tried to swipe to another screen. She didn’t redden, she just looked me in the eye.
“You’ve been great to me, Belle, but really, how long are you going to keep this kid/job thing going? I’m just getting myself ready for the inevitable. You would do the same thing.”
Would I have done the same thing? I’d like to think I wouldn’t. At this table here tonight she seems so trustworthy. What is it about our firm that has us doing things the outside world would never understand, things that only a few years ago we would have thought ourselves incapable of?
Michele, Violette, Lily, Amy, and I all work on the trading floor. One floor above us, the rest of the women work in research and investment banking. Though they have doors they can close, and offices with walls, their physical isolation makes unwanted male attention more covert. One of these women is Alice Harlington.
When she graduated from business school, Alice accelerated onto the fast lane at JPMorgan Chase, research department. She had such a client following that Feagin Dixon enticed her to join us. She was a mathematical whiz and fluent in complicated accounting. She married a plumber who balanced out her crazy travel schedule by pampering her when she was home. “He’s like a wife,” Alice liked to say, “and he fixes stuff.” “Nice,” the rest of us would sigh. I looked at Alice’s soft, rippled body, thick glasses, flat shoes, and felt admiration for her comfort in herself. Alice never tries to be anyone except Alice.
“Well, ladies, it’s important to support the people who help you rise in your career. And Amy, Belle’s been nothing but a cheerleader for you. Remember that.”
“I do,” said Amy, and I believe her.
Alice is another one who doesn’t mince words. “But I must share the story of my hiring Sook.”
Sook Park is her assistant, who came for his Wall Street interviews fresh out of business school. Alice was looking for a meticulous aide who could plow through spreadsheet computations, reconfigure balance sheets, and analyze income statements of public companies. Sook could do all of this.
“You see, when I called the head of research to finalize the offer to Sook and to come by his office for a handshake, I wasn’t prepared for the response I got.”
“So what was the response?” asked Violette, visibly annoyed by Alice’s buildup.
Here, Alice physically imitates answering a phone, looking over our heads, pushing her thick glasses closer to her eyes. “I got a phone call from a research director asking me if I had actually met Sook.”
Alice sits back in her chair, thoughtfully choosing her next words.
“So I said to him, ‘Of course I’ve met Sook, he’s interviewed here six times, he’s terrific with the models’,” she says, referring to the earnings predictions he would be responsible for creating.