He stood and raised his arms wide like he wanted to hug me and I didn’t know what to do with myself.
“There’s a lot of you,” he snorted, caught a little off guard by my height and because my body language wasn’t in hug position. I awkwardly opened my arms.
“It’s good. It’s not great but it’s really good,” he said as he came in for some very stiff, congratulatory body touching. Little bumps of disgust sprang up on my forearms and that was my first interaction with Gruss. This letter now on my desk will be my second.
Marcus picks up where Jarrod left off. “Aww, Mr. Big Guy doesn’t write to me,” he says. “But of course, I’m not as cute as Mama Belle here.”
I put the unopened letter down so I can respond to my twinkling turret lights. All three of my lines are flashing while my new partner, Stone Dennis, chats on the phone with a friend. I roll my eyes at him and point at the phone bank, indicating that maybe answering the phone would be a decent way to further our partnership. Stone looks at me blankly.
Stone resents everything about me even though his commission runs now actually have numbers on them. I resist screaming at him by using my supreme self-control, the same I used when I caught my Kevin unwrapping, aiming, and sailing an entire box of tampons out our fourteenth-story window. With Stone there’s no way to give him a time-out, no way to punish him at all.
The first light I hit is from Chungda Dolma, managing director of the subprime mortgage department in Los Angeles. She’s a Nepalese workaholic who had a mystery pregnancy, never once hinting at the source of her state. People only realized she was pregnant five weeks before she delivered. Early.
“What’s the message here?” she says, without bothering to introduce herself.
“My weekend was fine, thanks,” I answer.
“Sorry,” she replies, “I know, how rude. How are you?”
“Didn’t you just have a baby?” I ask.
“Two weeks ago—”
“Two weeks—?”
And without waiting for us to pretend to be normal people, for me to ask the size, gender, or name of her baby, or for me to comment on the fact that she is in an office after giving birth fourteen days ago, we just get right into it.
“Is someone rocking the boat at Geisha Girl Central?” she asks.
Several months ago Feagin Dixon hired unemployed models to escort moneyed clients from our front doors to the executive dining rooms. BusinessWeek magazine ran a story about it, and the models were once again unemployed.
“What do you mean?” I answer.
“The letter, Isabelle, or tell me that you didn’t get one?”
“Hold, please.”
In one motion I put Chungda on hold, pick up the next line, and tear open the ivory envelope.
“Belle McElroy.”
“Isabelle. Kathryn Peterson here from mortgages. I was wondering if you’d gotten the Gruss letter.”
In the end, I’m the only member of the GCC who received this thing. It’s a summons to some of the most senior women of the firm to discuss “women’s issues.” It’s been cc’d to our legal department, the first red flag. Who sends a formal invitation and mentions a carbon copy on it? Maybe top management is realizing FD could be sued the same way Goldman and Merrill Lynch have, that maybe it’s a matter of time before FD is on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for all the wrong reasons.
The Glass Ceiling Club members, when they learn of it, become positively electrified and agree to meet for lunch that afternoon at a cavernous downtown place called Buddakan, a festival of hip and beautiful people. When I finally get downtown it looks like every patron in the place is employed in a career involving style. The leggy women around me dress richly but are probably not, while the women at my table, close to the same age, dress for less but really are rich. The dishes are large and the portions are small, artistic affairs. Eating is a weakness to this crowd but not to us. The alcohol starts to flow, the dishes start to arrive, and we start to talk. I’ve never once seen us drink at lunch but we seem to be celebrating something we can’t even describe.
“Maybe,” I suggest to the group, “Feagin is forming a diversity committee in this new fiscal year. Maybe we’re trying to catch up with other banks.”
“Gruss is worried about something, Belle,” says Amy. “It’s your job to find out what it is.”
“I’m sure he’s just responding to that letter Amanda sent our CEO, requesting that he meet with us,” I say.
“Yeah, I’d agree with you,” says Amanda, “if I’d actually sent the letter.”
“You didn’t send it?”
“Did not.”
“Then it’s the Metis memos. They’re going to everyone, probably even the press,” I say.
“Who better to address them than a guy famous for only attending really important meetings, a guy we’re all forced to respect? Send the ladies to chat with the chairman. That’ll shut them up. It’s genius.”