One of my young analysts resigned today. He came to me around five o'clock with his hands clasped, nervous, staring at his shoes. "I'm giving two weeks notice..." he mumbled.
I set my hand on his shoulder, pulled him in. "What's up, Bran?"
"It's the business plan," he said. "I don't think its right."
"Well Ban, what don't you like about our business plan? We're up 15% this quarter, it's running well, the feeds are smooth..."
"It's unethical. And pessimistic. We're betting that things do poorly then cashing in options."
"Those are tools to manage risk and correct the market. Ethics doesn't come into it."
"Jeff, just this past week I ran one of our DeepDive investigations. We hired a private eye to follow around Ruben Goldstein because you had suspicions he was cheating on his Senator wife, then we anonymously submitted incriminating photos to People and NY Post. The stock is still plummeting."
"But see! Ethics got in the way of doing good business. Goldstein's behavior outside the boardroom is irrelevant to the performance of his hedge fund."
"Jeff," he said, blinking. "It'll catch up to you. It's fine to play the market. But you're manipulating the media, inventing false speculation to drive up prices. If the FCC got wind of this..."
"Bran, remember the NDA you signed. If you're feeling weak kneed and want to go ply the mail room at Goldman Sachs, be my guest." I pulled him closer. Whispering, "Bonuses are in a month."
That got him to hesitate.
"Now if you'd like," I continued, "I'll set you up in a new group. No more DeepDives. Nothing to do with the media branch, PR flacks."
"Propaganda," he said. I could have slapped him.
"No, how about quant? You know Black-Sholes well enough, put on your code monkey goggles for a few months. How's that sound?"
"Well..."
"Bran, my man, come on. You're in at the ground, boy, in at the ground. You know what that means. Keep your chin up."
He shrugged, turned and shuffled back to his cube.
I fired of a quick email to his immediate supervisor, wondering if we had any dirt on Bran. Few minutes later the response. Solid worker, steady 60-hour weeks, only spent a third of his vacation days. Ah. Back a few moths ago he pulled up a few pornographic websites from a company laptop on an overnight trip up to Connecticut. Possible bittorrent downloads as well, given the bandwidth and port connections.
December 14. That would be his last work date - a Friday. I'd let him work a few more weeks, put the pressure on with that big bonus carrot dangled, have him hack out some of the new phD quant analysis work. Then I'd have to let him go for breaking Information Security policy. Once these guys start to get doubts you can never change their minds. Those thoughts fester, spread through the quality people. Can't let that happen to the resources.
***
I had Sherri set up a dinner reservation at the new molecular gastronomy place in East Village, had her call the gallery to notify Bea we had reservations. I let her fill in the details, the requirements for car service and petty gifts, maybe some earrings from one of the new SoHo boutiques that pop up like spring flowers and die just as quick. Sherri's good at that kind of thing, fastidious like a chipmunk. I think of her like that, a cute little rodent, petite brown suits and blonde hair, upturned nose, raccoon eye shadow.
I'm not a details guy. I was back in the early years, low level accountant, and when I did it then I kicked so much ass that I was bumped up and didn't have to do it anymore. I'm a big picture guy, outside the box guy, synergistic integration guy. A buzzwords guy, charisma guy. I'm the kind of guy that runs the world.
Sure, there are others that play a part. Lots of them smarter and more dedicated than me. The engineers and the scientists and what not, crafting together this big clanking machine full of cogs and gears, pistons and levers. But they leave it sitting there, dead.
It takes a guy like me with the balls to switch it on. See what pops out.
Bea's the same way with the art world. All these artists, most of them insane self-absorbed types, so odd you can barely finish a drink at the damn gallery with them. Their broken brains can churn out some interesting spectacles, but it takes someone like Bea to capture that natural human curiosity and harness it, trap and cage it, market it to the people with the money to afford it. Because when you think about it, what are the costs to these artists? It's negligible. Running water, alcohol of choice, the monthly check on a rent-stabilized loft. Chump change.
Where does the value in their craft get generated? Some would say when the paint hits the canvas and their brilliance is forever recorded. I'd call bullshit. It's Bea and her celebrity-choked gallery openings that generate the value. The buzz. It's not the messy splotch of orange acrylic on canvas that's worth 1.5 million. It's being labeled the hero of the auction attended by the city's social elite, the man to toast for the evening. That's the privilege you're buying, the value injected into the "art".
***
I'm wondering how many calories are going into the meal tonight, some chemical wizardry of foams and molds, and juggle the timing of a quick cardio in the office gym. I haven't worked out in two days and my shoulders are finally losing their post-barbell tension.
I knock out a block on the intra-web calendar and dig through my closet for a set of warm-up pants. Sherri peeks in through the sliding divider, and when I turn her mousy little face is scrunched up in surprise.
"It's your wife Jeff. She doesn't want to do anything that strange for dinner. She just wants Italian." Whispering, "I think her stomach is acting up."
Annoying. "Tell her I'll have Sergio prepare something special. Not to worry her pretty little head."
The warm-up pants are some new poly blend and feel like silk on my legs. Sherri notices me moving my thighs together and her eyebrows crease, mouth pursed. "Will do, Jeff." She ducks back out and I remember the one time I got her drunk after hours and fucked her on my desk. She still hasn't brought it up and I wonder what she'd say if I broached the subject the right way.
There's a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and I'm not just talking about the rational, logical side of things. There's the personal. Always the personal. Behind the numbers and charts and math models are people.
That's where we work, people like me, in the currency of relationships. Behind every twenty million dollar firm is a man who just wants to play a better game of golf, get his wife to go down on him again. Behind every widget-puking Fortune 500 is a bored vice president of marketing dying to spill his guts for an invite to the Mayor's Christmas ball, a seat at some 3-Star Michelin table, a vintage Bordeaux, an Italian sports car. Because they think there's two sides of their life - the abstract world of numbers and Power Point, and the visceral external of fine wines and beautiful women.
But sorry, at my level, the game I play, those are one and the same. My office is carved in polished mahogany. My paperweight is a pair of 5000-year-old Incan cherubs fellating each other. My satin curtains split open on a geometrical view of Central Park's rectangle in the smoggy cold north.
I'm not a peon, a worker in the wheel, a cog in the gears. Damn straight. I was meant for this, one of the guys who can stare down shirtless at the silent city below, the middle of the workday, holding my calls, arms folded on the detritus in the street blowing like dead leaves. A thousand feet in the sky looking down at my domain, my kingdom, grinding out the machine it is. My luxury is to watch.
At the gym Luke recommends I up the grams of protein in my morning shake if I want to get a better curve on my pectorals. Bench press won't sculpt them, he says, for that you need slow resistance training. Yoga, Pilates, pushup on a rubber ball. Sign me up, lock and load.
In the shower as I rinse I realize I haven't fucked a fresh girl in over a week.
***
Bea looks bored.
She picks through her pasta, a creamy white sauce with white truffles, shavings of aged imported parmesan. She mutilated the Foie gras with her fork and it annoys me that she's so callous.
"Try some of this," I offer, raising an orange cube draped in green cobwebs. She opens her mouth, accepts the chopsticks, chews.
"Spinach salad and mandarin oranges," she says. "That's some Willy Wonka food." Her eyes glaze over and she stares out the frosted window. "This modernist decor is revolting. It's so cold."
"The place is named after an industrial lubricant," I offer. "It's not so bad. We had the same designer do our bathroom in Vegas, remember? The concrete matrix tiles, the chrome fixtures."
"I slipped and bruised my knee in there," she says. "These damn East German designers bred on cruelty, androgynous amenities. There's no warmth, no pampering. No wonder you tycoons are in love with them, all the phallic motifs..."
"Hush, Bea."
"Whatever, Jeff. I want to go somewhere warm. My boots are last season and I'm too tired to shop and it's going to rain all week."
"I can fly you out to LA."
She waves a hand, disgusted. "Forget LA. The vanity. I'm thinking Brazil. Cuba."
"It's done. I'll have Sherri set something up for you tomorrow."
She darkens at the mention of the name. I'd forgotten there was still a bit of jealousy ever since the drunken Christmas party a few years back, Bea stumbling in, Sherri providing some very personal assistance.
"I can't believe you haven't fired that little slut. What is she, your most senior employee?"
"No."
The fact I can make her jealous is a good thing. At least she still has something invested in me, enough to care. To feel some possessiveness.
But it'd be good to get her out of the city for a few weeks. All the extra me time.
I expense the meal and we ride in the black sedan back to the apartment. Bea doesn't speak again till I rip her evening gown from her shoulders, the door still open. Only then does she complain, but I silence her voice with my mouth and I wonder if I could devour her.
***
I rarely walk the streets alone. But at times - the cloudy afternoon when the tourists are thin and the evening commute has not yet begun - I enjoy the occasional stroll.
I try to get out of midtown with its commercialized replicas, corporate logos and lights. Not because I don't appreciate those things. I love Midtown. But it's already been done. It's been conquered. The rich residential neighborhoods too, Upper West with the bank chains inching out the Jewish bagel shops and quaint bakeries. Amsterdam a swarm of dirty college pubs and sports bars. Maybe I'll stick to the quiet rows of brownstones, the cobblestones against the stone wall buttressing the deep of the park.
It's nice to take in some nature once in a while, and Central Park is just about perfect. Tamed, enclosed in a proper wall, run through with roads and walking paths, trim trees and mown grass. It's not Discovery Channel, but the perfect bite size chunk to consume on a weekday afternoon.
There are eyesores. The hunched dirty men in tarps and scavenged bags, sprawled out on the perfect slice of green lawn. One scratches his crotch, monkeylike. Another fouling a perfectly fine bench, bent over double like a hunchback, grimy sweatpants pulled to his knees, his calves wrapped in what looks to be tape. Two large cardboard signs share his seat, scrawled in black lettering - a long diatribe against the cruelties that befell him, something about infections in his blood, his relatives dead or in another country. Hungry and in need of medicine. Almost too over the top to be believable.
He must have seen my suit because he called me sir, averted his eyes like a sniveling wretch, and he held out a ratty mesh cap, jingling a few quarters.
Now I give to charities. I'm usually one of the top donors at all the events the society throws. Bea's incessant we're on the Met's President's Circle list.
But the plight of the homeless seems a lost cause to me. They're not going to go away, no matter how much money you throw at them. So why contribute to their decrepit existence? We should give them a bit of tough love, see if they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, become prospering members of the community. At least if we weren't dropping bills in his hat he'd have to go out and pour some concrete or something, work a factory line. At the very least move to a cheaper neighborhood - up here, his evening bottle of rotgut probably still ends up Grey Goose.
But there was something about this guy that made me pause. He was genuinely miserable. It wasn't an act. He was in real honest pain, and it wasn't just an annoyance he could solve with a trip down to the pharmacy, a personal physician visit. He was in pain, and he was afraid. There was something about him that had the feel of fine art. It was very beautiful.
I dropped a few crisp twenties in his hat. "Get some of the good stuff," I said.
***
I'm on a conference call with Sherri between my legs but I can't focus on either the numbers or the pleasure, but about what an old college buddy said to me the other night. He emailed and said he was in town and would I like to catch up over a beer. Nothing upscale, dressed down in a West Village pub, jeans and sweaters and loafers. I could have turned him down easily, picked some flashy social event off my calendar, my choice of international models or curvy B-listers. But something told me to call and say hi, let him know we were on.
He was a doctor in some up and coming suburb of Kentucky or Charlotte or Atlanta. Warm, big lawns, smiling kids and soccer moms, laid back life. He looked good. There was vibrancy behind his eyes.
We talked trash for a bit, surface stuff, sports and real estate, and he was a bit shy about his family.
But then he said, "You know, we're 99.9% richer then everyone who's ever lived. Think about that."
"Well, we've earned it," I stammered. "Right?"
"That's probably what Louis XVI thought. And what did they do to him? Chopped his head off."
"That was a revolution," I said. "A long time ago. That's history.”
"We're living in a gilded age," he said, finishing his beer. He paid the tab and walked out, his back to me.
I should have been mad. No one does that kind of thing and gets way with it. I could break his private practice, sink his daughter's college investment portfolio. But instead I was still. Cold.
Sherri finishes when the call's ending and I croak out my farewell through flushing cheeks, fingers through her knotted ponytail. She cleans up and there's still three hours of the workday left. The market's down and there's not much to do but ride it out until something shifts and the coffers fill.
I pull on my silky workout pants and look out north, the rectangle of trees growing brown, dying down.
Seasons, how they sneak up on us.
I'm already jogging when the elevator sets down, a ding at the lobby and I'm off at the gate, a trio of late-lunching underlings looking on, confused. Through the revolving brass doors, security guard doffing his hat, into the misty exhaust of the sidewalk, the thousand marching workers, trench coats dancing.
Yellow cabs make way cause here I am, running without escort, through the blinking orange hand, around the onyx statue, the general and his rearing horse, drooping willows and sad beeches opening up to the snaking path.
A steady clip, good breathing and footwork and I start to feel a bit of joy, happiness in my chest, the blood pumping. No melody to drive me, just the rhythm of heartbeat in my ears.
The path is scrolling smooth and the world around moves in time, choreographed, the spandex bikers, purebred dog walkers, nannies and bratty kids, ducks floating, squirrels chattering upside down on shagged bark, leaves spiraling, clouds burbling, reflected in a pool of reed filled glass. The facades of a dozen iconic buildings perfecting the vision. All in concert, a grand invisible composer for the benefit of my run, the cogs of the city in place. Churning with an endless clicking noise, ratcheting along.
I run hard two miles in under thirteen minutes, decide to jog up another ten blocks to Strawberry Fields, the quiet cobblestones along the stone wall, overhanging yellow leaves draping cozy low.
I slow when I come to a perfectly fine bench, newly painted. There's a flat piece of cardboard marked up with black letters. A curved cane propped against the green slats. But the man, with his sad eyes and drooping mustache, hiked sweatpants and taped legs - nowhere to be seen. The words in sharpie: "Thanks New York for your generosity!"
I walk out under the trees, the leaves pressing low and brown and dead but not yet fallen. Thinking.
Then I stop before a seal on the ground, a mosaic of colored stone that spells out "IMAGINE."
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