My voice has gotten louder all on its own and the waiter scurries away instead of refilling our coffee cups. I’m fighting to find composure, but I just can’t do it. I haven’t rehearsed this part. I thought I had anticipated every turn this meeting could have taken but I never saw this coming.
“Simon, a partner implies equality and I can’t think of any man who’s going to bring an account package equal to mine to the table. It’d be one thing if I was not producing, but I am producing. You gave me the worst accounts years ago, you gave me nothing and I’ve turned them into something and you still haven’t told me which partner you’re considering.”
“Stone Dennis.”
The guy who stole Brigid’s Barbie head and considered punching me at the office holiday party. I don’t think the guy has any accounts or any work ethic and he’s been with us long enough to have found both. That is who Simon considers to be my equal.
Our conversation has spun far from the reason we were meeting in the first place, the bonus. It’s time for me to take control. I can discuss the partnering idea later. I need the upper hand of this conversation. “Simon, you do realize that I’m your biggest producer over the last twelve months. I expect to get paid as such.” I say this with an icy cool that puts out the fire on my face.
“Well, you do have some of the largest accounts so I should hope you would be.”
“Yes, but please tell me you remember the important fact that they weren’t big accounts when I got them, and that I grew them, and most importantly I can take them wherever I end up working.”
Simon and I begin to zing at each other. Like a Ping-Pong ball, our anger flies back and forth over a votive candle weirdly lit for breakfast service. We’re very good at the pithy one-liners delivered in civil tones. He tries to make me believe Stone can grow my accounts even more.
“There’s no low-hanging fruit that isn’t picked off the tree,” I say. “Not on any tree I’m responsible for.”
“It’s the fruit in the higher branches that Stone is going to pick for you,” he retorts with his cheek turning from red to white, from sheepish embarrassment of doing something unethical to anger at being challenged.
“Enough with the fruit metaphors,” I hiss at him. “Stone will bring nothing and take something. It’s that simple.”
We sit in silence for a moment while I try to get my heart rate to settle and his face returns to a more neutral pallor.
“You do realize you’re cutting my income in half?” I practically whisper. “Nobody gets their income cut like this when they’re doing a good job.”
“I didn’t say it would be a fifty-fifty split.”
“What exactly are you saying?”
“Sixty-forty.”
“Stone Dennis will get forty percent of my income for doing what?”
“Belle, he will grow the income. You will take sixty percent home of what will be a much larger pot.”
“You don’t really believe that.” My voice quavers like a girl getting dumped.
“I do and you’re not alone. Many people on the desk are going to be splitting accounts.”
“Name them,” I say, knowing there won’t be one male named.
“It’s not your business. This is your business.” Greene plants his fat fingers flat on my spreadsheet of accomplishments, my list of deals and trades executed in the past year and the stuff we’ve come to talk about.
“Simon, I came to this firm thinking the sky was the limit. Any ambition I had to run a department was slowly chipped away by the reality of the environment I work in. I replaced that ambition with another, the desire to use my brain to make money and my energy to do it quickly. I’m hitting the ball out of the park on every basis that is measured and you keep changing the rules on me, moving the boundaries, making things impossible. My job is a one-person job. Unless—”
I interrupt myself with a terrible thought. It’s a one-person job unless they want me to teach Stone my accounts before they push me out. They can’t fire me because I bring in too much money, but what if someone knew how to do what I do? What if someone also had good relationships with my accounts? What if I were to become more disposable? I freak just a little bit more.
“Look,” Simon says, trying to calm me down, “I see Stone being the party boy on the account, the guy willing to take the clients to strip clubs, the guy who’ll drink shots with the junior-level analysts who will one day run those firms. How do I justify paying Stone if I don’t give him any opportunity? The guy is getting married to a woman who is a shopper. Then he’ll have kids and if he sees no place to grow his business, he’s gone.”
“Yes, that would be a terrible loss,” I mutter.
It’s time for me to play with Simon’s head.
“Have you heard about this class action suit out of Goldman Sachs?” I ask. “Or the one that Merrill Lynch had to settle for fifty million dollars? Or maybe the Morgan Stanley one?”