Bruce can’t stop talking now. “It’s okay to say no, that the reality is a housekeeper probably has insufficient income to buy a big house. It’s not okay to say sure she can afford it, knowing she can’t. Once they’ve bankrupted her and she has to surrender the house, her family will get to go live in her car while her bank takes the house, an asset they’ve made money on. It’s a crime.” Bruce rolls onto his back.
“The stuff I sell?” I say defensively. “They’re put into pools of mortgages, Bruce. They’re bunched together, good and bad.”
“That’s what I mean. Stop thinking in sweeping bunches of money and think of the human being, singular, on the other side of the trade, when that trade goes bad. There’s a guy who drives a dump truck who can’t handle his payments any longer, there’s a low-paid teacher in Minnesota struggling to hang on to her house because she lost her job. Little does she know that by borrowing and begging and getting herself whole on her mortgage, she’s also buying someone like King more chilled champagne. And if she doesn’t get herself whole? It’s not gonna hurt King’s wine cellar one bit. She’s taking all the risk. He’s taking all the money.”
Bruce entwines his fingers behind his head and starts doing sit-ups. He’s done speaking but now it’s me who is agitated. There are glimmers of something that deep down I’ve already known to be true about my line of work. It’s something I’d rather not think about and now I have to. I lie next to him and we synchronize our sit-ups. Brigid comes and sits on my middle to help. We go up and down without speaking, just thinking. Woof starts licking the salt off Bruce’s face. Together we grunt, contracting our soft bellies in uncomfortable crunches and exhaling with temporary relief. We do this over and over while we both wonder what is real and what is not. Do I have a great job or am I wrecking people’s lives? Do we have a great marriage or are we just getting by? We overflow with questions we can neither ask of each other nor answer ourselves.
CHAPTER 24
Women’s Issues
THE NEXT DAY a letter arrives via interoffice mail. Jarrod, a heavily tattooed and improbably lovable ex-con, who with much personal comment delivers mail to the five thousand people in our office, drops it off.
“Belle Bottom!” he shouts. “HELLS BELLE!” he goes on, despite my being on the telephone. “Better open this one . . . FAST!”
I glance down at the ivory-colored envelope he dropped on my desk after he showed it to Marcus. It’s Cartier stationery, the heaviest stock they make, with a wax seal that says “BG” on the back. This is no memo and there’s only one BG (B. Gruss II), a man so old-school that he handwrites everything. He receives but doesn’t send email, doesn’t use a cellular phone, and doesn’t seem to like having his title of chairman. When he attends a meeting, he sits with the CEO and King McPherson and when he speaks, it’s short and fueled by caffeinated drinks. If he isn’t the one speaking, he doesn’t seem interested. Still, he weighs in heavily on any discussions regarding the direction of the firm or bonus decisions. If any department slacks off, it’s Gruss who will address them publicly.
Nobody brings in as much banking business as Gruss, and of the 487 out of 500 male CEOs in the S&P 500, there are hardly any he hasn’t played golf or gone drinking with. He has the reputation of printing money for the firm as he sits alone in a glareless black-walled office with no papers visible to those who come to visit. He stabs at a row of twinkling telephone lights, reaching out to his fellow universe masters with a “Well how the hell have YOU been?” which he inevitably follows with “I called you today because the moment has come, my friend, to take some real cash out of that company of yours and put it in your pocket. Let’s sell more stock of yours to the public!” Then he will inevitably disappear on some pharmaceutically enhanced bender, usually near some oceanfront golf course.
In his late sixties, BG remains macho-handsome despite a shiny bald head, and a tendency to wear copious amounts of cologne and monogrammed velour slipperlike shoes. He isn’t accountable to anyone yet we are all accountable to him. He brings in massive banking deals, takes a piece of the action for himself, and enjoys a first-class life that Feagin Dixon pays for.
To this day I’ve had only one conversation with him, the day of my last promotion. He sent one of the four beautiful women who administratively assist him to retrieve me from the trading floor and buzz me into his office. There I stood, taking in the screens mounted on every wall, each depicting either a news headline or a financial market somewhere in the world. The only thing on his desk was an ashtray, a deck of cards, a Red Bull, and an unlit cigar. He never got up when I walked in, just creased up his always-in-the sun forehead and appeared to look me up and down while rubbing his head.
“You the one with the high-yield piece?” he asked, referring to the interdepartment investment paper I wrote each week.
“Yes,” I said, wondering if I’d made a mistake.
“And you got promoted?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You should be.”