“Now, Ms. McElroy, of course not,” Blythe says crisply, though I can tell my bullheaded move has surprised her.
I glance at the embedded microphones on the table. They’re a permanent installation and there’s no way to tell if they are on or off. I’m going to guess we’re being recorded.
“Belle,” Blythe gushes in her false southern tone, and comes around the table to shake my hand. Her accent is like Madonna’s English affectation; it tells you where she wishes she were from. Blythe takes a moment to think about how to speak in a way that doesn’t sound so defensive and goes forward with this person, altered from thirty seconds ago.
The top of her head only reaches my shoulder and I stoop a bit to shake her hand. It’s hard for me to smile at someone I just don’t like, but I do my best. Blythe is a fantastic lawyer and a complete sellout. Each time I took a maternity leave, she’d read me a speech that basically said Feagin owed me a job but legally didn’t owe me the exact position I was leaving behind. Each time I had to sit there, my head lowered while I took a subconscious bashing for my audacious move of reproducing. Blythe’s method of achieving success on Wall Street is to be one of the boys. It’s as if she can’t understand why any woman wants both motherhood and a great career. To her it should be one or the other and in nuanced, nonlitigious language, she will tell you that.
Other women now begin to enter the room exactly at noon and as a pack. They stand around air-kissing and admiring one another for a moment, but they aren’t chitchatters so things quiet down fast. Most have never spent time with Gruss, so curiosity and an innate desire to please others makes everyone sit quickly and snap napkins to their laps and wait for something big to happen.
Blythe instructs everyone to begin eating even though B. Gruss II, the main event, hasn’t arrived, and obedient picking of the salads begins. Stories of trades and deals, from Chicago, Boston, the West Coast, are swapped and a waiter fruitlessly tries to pour wine with no acceptor. I move colorful little legumes about my plate and feel my heartbeat pick up when I hear footsteps approach. It’s one of the women who guard Gruss’s office, followed by the man himself.
He seems taller than I remembered and more fit too. I’m told he now has a treadmill desk so he walks all day while manning his phone calls. The sheen off his head radiates some of the light in the room and he gives us a presidential wave and intense eye contact. His giant smile reveals expensive orthodontia yellowed slightly to appear real and I think to myself that BG could pass for any number of stereotypes: retired retail executive, 47th Street jewelry salesman, or sports celebrity handler, but the biggest deal maker at one of the world’s largest investment banks? You wouldn’t have guessed that one.
“So it’s my girl partners and girl partner–lights,” he crows. “All in the same room at the same time.”
We titter because that’s what we’re supposed to do. He athletically moves himself to his designated spot at the round table. He settles into his seat and makes a few more jokes to make us feel important.
“I requested that the most senior women of the firm be gathered so we can talk about issues of concern to women,” he says. “I see some memos running around here that I don’t like and I thought a good place to start would be by discussing the glass ceiling.” I blush and then hate that I’m blushing.
“However,” he continues, “since you’re all sitting here, it’s obvious there is no glass ceiling at Feagin or you’d all be taking steno downstairs.” He guffaws at his own humor and I scan the room thinking someone here must be too young to even know what steno is, but no, I at almost thirty-seven am close to the youngest. “So let me now throw the podium your way and let anyone discuss anything she’d like.”
An uncomfortable pause follows, which he uses to pick up his cigar and inhale the contents deeply. His fingers roll it around with absentminded affection while we wait.
“I’d just like to say,” pipes up the woman from corporate communications, “that Feagin has been such a wonderful experience for me and I’d like to tell other women how great it is here.”
I take a hard look at this woman, whose job includes spinning everything and who doesn’t work for a profit center of the bank. Her sprawling Upper East Side apartment is dependent on smooth relations everywhere and she will be of no help to me today and I start to wonder if she’s been invited here for that very reason.
“And the meritocracy here,” boasts a British banker. “I’d have never gotten this far had I stayed at my other bank.”