I rise from the bed to catch my reflection again in the gaudy mirror. There’s a gleam in my eye. Is it the money? Is it Henry or CeeV-TV? I don’t know. I do know I like being alone as my conscience does some sorting. Shouldn’t I feel dirty and wrong? Does kissing qualify as cheating? How could I be a semi-part of this Glass Ceiling Club that hates having to cover for cheating men while I now straddle that line myself?
Feeling his hands on my face again awoke something that never really left me, something close to giddy. After a few knockout kisses, his hands started moving everywhere, and I finally clasped them behind his back and held them firmly with one hand while my other hand pointed directly into his face.
“We both don’t want that,” I said matter-of-factly. “What we do want is to talk and we’re only going to talk about what we get paid to talk about. Okay?”
“You mean to tell me this is now a business meeting?”
“You are correct.”
“Is there a punishment for misbehaving?”
“Expulsion. Immediate expulsion. No second chances,” I said, retying the bathrobe and jumping under what felt like twenty pounds of eiderdown in the comforter.
Henry stood, watching me until an idea came to him. He brought a hairbrush from the bathroom and began brushing my hair, reminding me of how I loved when he did this. But I took the brush from him. He then brought over the chair I had propped my computer on in the bathroom, sat on it, and sighed. There was total silence for thirty seconds.
“It’s very lonely and cold on this chair.”
“You’ll be okay.”
“Permission to lie down? I’m so damn tired.”
I laughed and held open the covers. I felt like I was nineteen. “Permission granted, but I meant what I said about the ‘no touching’ rule.”
We were very well behaved in a Florida hotel room frozen by air conditioning. Henry and I talked for hours about subprime mortgage markets, money market options trading, TIPS, the price of gold, and the fluctuations of the Chinese yuan. We steered clear of the spouses and the six children that lived between us, and I never asked why he left me because at that moment I didn’t need to know. I’ve always been attracted to Henry’s brain as much as his body and I always learn something from him, even if we’re pulling apart investment deals rather than clothing under the sheets. For us, all that talking was sexy.
Henry asked about work and for some reason I told him about the Glass Ceiling Club. He asked thoughtful, caring questions, soft questions, and I found myself telling him much more than I probably should have. I told him how both a part of and apart from the other women I felt, how frustrated I was not being able to get any further in the firm, and then I was quiet.
“But do these women really deserve to take it to the next step?”
“Some, yes.”
“And when you were more junior than you are today and men spoke shit to you, what did you do?”
“It bothered me less than it bothers most women. My skin is thicker.”
“Why is your skin thicker?”
I think about that. “I had an awesome dad, which I think is a nice vaccination for life. It also didn’t hurt to not be rich. When you’re scrabbling upward, the big picture is clearer. I didn’t get sidetracked by bullshit.”
“Interesting. But it’s the limitations that bother you. It’s not the politically incorrect stuff. Your elevator stops one floor beneath the top, and you want the penthouse.”
“I’m mad someone is telling me where my career tops out, not letting me at least have the possibility of getting to the top. It burns my rubber to know I’m smarter than some of the guys in the penthouse and that I could do a better job than them.”
Henry smiles. “You really love the markets. That’s always what’s made this job for you. You love the story of the markets and that’s why you stay. For most people the money is why they stay, but for us it’s the markets.”
“I love the markets. I mean, every day is different in our jobs and we have to really care what the rest of the world is up to because what’s going on in Europe matters. Whether or not the governments in the Middle East are getting along is something we need to know about. This job makes me feel connected to the world. I’m not sitting in some cubicle somewhere being isolated and out of touch and wondering how many subscribers my magazine will have this month or how many batteries my firm will need to buy. This job makes me feel alive.”
“We love the markets,” he said, and we grinned at each other in a total nerd-fest way.
“But look at Ina,” he says, referring to Ina Drew, a woman about ten years older than me, whose career seemed unstoppable. Men loved her. Women loved her. She kept getting promoted and managed to have two kids. She switched firms a few times but was now the chief investment officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and a member of their risk committee.
“Yeah, it sure looks like it’s working out for her. Also Sallie Krawcheck, CFO of Citigroup, the world’s largest bank.”
“So it can happen.”