The young trader pulls a large feathered something from the big bag and the cheering turns to roars because the birthday boy, the person all this fuss was for, has entered the room. Monty. The fat, wheezing heffalump of a guy, the one who threatens to staple body parts together, has arrived.
They first sent New Guy to the British Isles to collect some phallic-looking wake-robin. Someone announces over the hoot ’n’ holler that it’s a root, taken from the ground only the day before. I search on the web to find it was used to stiffen Elizabethan neck ruffs among other things. New Guy then unwraps Greek orchid tubers, the name of which the master of ceremonies tells us derives from their resemblance to testicles. His trip then took him to Paris, where he got a French partridge, a live one. It’s supposed to be fluttering about but from where I sit the poor bird sacrificed its life for a bunch of morons. The bird is dead. New Guy leaves it there, dark shimmering feathers hanging off the end of the table, while he sets out the rest of his bag’s contents. There’s a big tray of raw oysters from the Oyster Bar, a local restaurant, a bowl of artichokes FedEx’d from some organic farm in California. It keeps coming: asparagus, dark chocolate, and a Dixie cup full of little blue pills—Viagra. New Guy puts on plastic gloves and pokes at the poor bird’s corpse until he gets blood to drip into a cup. Who knew that French partridge blood is supposed to make one virile? I feel sick yet have trouble looking away.
Monty’s gift is explained to him: the guys are giving him the biggest boner. Ever. The festivities will be topped off by a happy ending. I’m not sure who will provide the final act or where that’s happening. It seems Monty has been sharing his remorse about his diminishing sexual potency. In honor of his birthday, the guys decided to right this wrong in the form of a buffet lunch that would include remedies for impotence. I’m fixated on the fact that New Guy graduated last spring from Yale and now is sneaking through U.S. Customs with a dead bird.
The few women traders on Estrogen Row are not invited to Monty’s lunch and they’ve been left to complete every trade that comes in while the boys play. It’s a Friday afternoon and there’s a meeting upstairs I have to get to so I decide to take the women with me.
I turn to one, a tiny, nunlike woman in her fifties named Marie.
“Come to a learning session upstairs. We’re going to brainstorm about the volatile mortgage market,” I say. She doesn’t need to know much about them but needs to get out of here. She crinkles her forehead, about to tell me she doesn’t trade mortgages, but instead throws her headset on her desk.
“Fuck them,” she says.
She walks over to two other women, points to me, and I feel emboldened as they toss their headgear down too.
CHAPTER 28
It’s Because You Fit Me
ON A winter morning that feels like spring, I find myself walking down Park Avenue with Henry. We haven’t seen each other in a while and his emails have slowed to a trickle. Whatever weird blip in our lives that was, it’s fading away.
We’ve both just left an uneventful preschool chapel where everyone behaved. I was walking toward the office when Henry had his driver pull the Escalade over.
“Ride for Ms. Belle?” he asked with incredible sweetness. “Maybe even go get a coffee?” His angled face tilted up to grab the sunlight. He had such a huge smile on his face, making his mood contagious. I knew there wasn’t an overwhelming in-box pile to greet me at work this morning, and I didn’t resemble a packhorse with bags of papers. I even had on nice shoes, so why not keep walking to work and maybe even walk with Henry? But a coffee date? No, that’s off-limits.
“On this morning where the sun shines right on me?” I responded, referring to a song we’d just been singing in chapel. “Days like this you should be walking, not riding your lazy carcass around town,” I said, “and no coffee unless you have a cappuccino machine in that rig of yours.”
“You’re right,” he said, hitting his head as if a lightbulb had exploded in his brain. He opened the door, causing some stepping platform to slide from beneath the POLO-mobile, and stepped out.
“It’s good to walk rather than caffeinate,” he said, “but maybe we can do both.” With that he handed me a hot, foamy coffee in a porcelain cup.
“So you do have a cappuccino machine in there, of course.”
“No, Bells. Don’t be ridiculous. My driver picked these up when we were in chapel.”
“And just where do they serve takeout coffee in porcelain?” I ask.
“It’s a bring-your-own-porcelain kind of place. Can we just shut up and chug?”
Like we did with the vodka shots of our youth, we down the delicious drink and hand the glasses back to the nameless driver who never makes any eye contact.
“Do you have a dishwasher in there too?” I smirk as I walk away.