“Okay, but what about the softball game outfits?” Amanda asks. “Aren’t we done with them?”
Each year when autumn leaves have almost all fallen, Simon Greene sponsors a softball game pitting the investment bankers (nerds) against the research, sales, and trading group. It’s a “mandatory fun” event, meaning your attendance is required. Central Park would be the likely venue to play softball and have a picnic for three hundred people working twenty blocks away, but instead we carpool through Hedgistan, the area between New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut, where most hedge fund managers live. There, everyone can gasp at the sight of Simon’s waterfront compound, and imagine the amount of merchandise they need to trade and banking deals they must close before they too can own such a place.
The Greene compound is regal, with probably fifteen acres of manicured lawn overlooking the Long Island Sound. Two ten-thousand-square-foot white-shingled homes bookend the English-country gardens: one for Simon and his mysterious wife, and the other for his mother. Jewish guys take good care of their moms. A swimming pool in the distance, which remains open until the month of October, seems to melt into the water of the Sound. Despite the beauty of the place, the message is purely museum. We have never been invited to go inside these homes. We eat ham and butter sandwiches for hors d’oeuvres and a fried chicken dinner out of Styrofoam boxes.
Female investment bankers wear khakis from Brooks Brothers, cashmere sweater sets, and pearls. They don’t play, just stand on the sidelines and sip white wine while chatting with someone strategic. The banker guys always wear the remnants of their suits from the day, no tie or jacket, but their banker slacks and a dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves. They keep their cell phones going, hovering under the magnificent weeping willows, one finger plugged into their free ear to drown out imagined noise. Occasionally they gesture with the plugged finger and we all imagine they’re landing us yet another deal to sell.
The traders care nothing about fashion and wear cutoff shorts, golf gear, a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt from the 1980s, anything they have rummaged from their bottom drawer. They bring their own mitts. A few of our traders were professional athletes in a former life so it’s never a fair match. While I’m being checked off in the grand attendance book of team players, I miss my children desperately. It’s one thing to not be home because you have an important meeting. It’s another to not be home because you’re playing ball with adults rather than your own seven-year-old.
At the last game, our pitcher, a former NHL great, turned and conferred with the first baseman enough times to signal something was up. The two were bent in giggles, like naughty boys in church. Several times the pitcher would wind up his pitch but inexplicably stop. I finally saw the reason. Tiffany had just joined his team and was assigned to third base. With an earnest face, she stood bent at the waist, shifting from side to side, and waiting for action to come her way. Interesting, I thought. Does she know that nothing is actually happening in the game right now? But while she was bent over, the skintight Lycra shorts of hers (no question, no underwear) had ridden up her backside. But that was hardly the cause of the giggling. Above these shorts she wore a halter top, casually tied in a bow around her neck and dropping clear to her breastbone. Her astonishing shirt had no back. It simply dropped down, barely covering each breast, hanging teasingly in place. She either had bulk and spring in her chest to keep everything on or there was something hooking it together under her breasts. What nobody could figure out was without a back-tie, how did it not fly away?
“It was two-sided tape,” Amanda said.
“Some sort of elastic under the boob flap,” Amy guessed matter-of-factly.
From that point on it was impossible to get anyone to concentrate on the game. The pitcher threw Tiffany the ball a few times to try to get the damn shirt to move and nobody could look away. As I watched her positively strut across that compound, I thought about her courage. Tiffany had no self-conscious urge to either keep her chest covered or to pull the wedgie out of her shorts. She appeared to give no thought to the fact that the temperature was in the sixties. Tiffany knew everyone was watching her and she loved it.
By the time the game wound down, some of the wives started showing up, looking like they spent time getting ready to “drop by.” Their carefully applied makeup, bouncy-fresh hairdos, and iron creases in their pants acknowledged the pressure of the Y chromosome–charged workplace. They knew they had to look good because the herd would analyze them in the morning. I knew most of them and stood talking with Annika Hebert, the wife of our chemical analyst, Ryan.
“So, is this someone’s friend?” she asked, pointing a jeweled finger at Tiffany.