Opening Belle (12 page)

I think about this for a moment. She didn't really just ask that, did she? These guys just use their firm's name as their own handle? Really? Who the hell is in there from Lehman? I suddenly don't feel shy to go inside. I'm crazed with curiosity.

“Oh, it's Mr. Dixon. Has to be him. Maybe I can go get him?” I ask. I've got to see the inside of this place.

Ms. Eastern Bloc has already turned and is trotting into the restaurant. She waves her arm at me, indicating that I'm to wait. So I do, not wanting to make her mad. I climb back into the backseat of the car and in only three minutes Gibbs comes out into the sunshine, not so much as a cuff link out of place, an overnight bag grasped importantly in his hand, a little lift in his step. He looks like a guy just leaving the gym. He pauses for just a moment, looking for me, then heads right to the car, waving to the driver to not bother getting out and opening the door for him. He slips into the backseat next to me, smelling freshly showered.

“Isabelle!” he exclaims. “You look swell, babe. Do you have the handouts for our meeting tonight?”

I'm so mad at him and so relieved for myself that I sound a little incoherent.

“Well, yes, for maybe the past hour or so.”

“Good. Also is your account handling the lunch expenses for this trip? I think so, right?”

He pulls out a leather folder and takes out a crisp bill and credit card receipt.

“Lunch for Six—Warburg Pincus” he has written across the top of his expense report. The amount? $1,800.

He or rather I'm about to expense his time with an escort. Can that be right? The bill appears as if the charge was from the restaurant, this restaurant, this place that couldn't possibly cook up that much tamarind and curry on their best day.

“Let's pick up something at the airport,” he says. “I'm not eating any airplane food.”

E
XITING THE PLANE
, I practically climb over the small children and people blocking my path with their wheelie bags. I have to keep Gibbs in sight. He charmed his way into first class, something our profit-seeking bank doesn't pay for, while I sat back in coach. This gave him the natural exit advantage and the possibility of escaping me when those cabin doors opened.

“Mom, she stepped on my toe,” one little boy with a Power Rangers Zeo shirt whines. He glares at me, along with every adult around him.

“Where there is evil, beware,” I say, in my best Power Rangery voice, trying to not have him hate me too much. “It's Morphin time!” I continue as I hurdle past him. His face turns to a look of awe.

He raises his arm. “May the power protect you,” he shouts as I catch Gibbs. I look back to see him standing with that clenched fist. He thinks he's just seen a superhero and I think,
I miss my Kevin.

Gibbs has stopped to tap the bottom of a Dunhill cigarette box and pops one in his mouth in this nonsmoking airport, while checking the emails on his phone.

“Did you read this, Belle?” he asks me, as we start a semi-sprint to the exit. He is desperate to light up.

“Read?” I race after him.

“This girly memo. This thing about girls getting grabbed.”

We exit to the outside and I use his lighting-a-cigarette moment to see what he's talking about.

To:
All Employees

From:
Metis

Subject:
Octopus Hands

Please note that touching, hugging, and caressing other employees, unless specifically permitted, is a breach of one's own personal space. Regardless of how things have been done in the past, regardless of this being tribal knowledge, employees need to know that just like in preschool, hands are to stay by one's side until recess.

Who was stupid enough to send this? I'm infuriated. It will be so easy to trace this email to this “Metis” even though the sender is using some obscure ISP that I don't recognize. Who would crash her career like this? I instantly think of Amanda. She means so well but is so naïve.

“About time your girls are getting organized. It's nuts the stuff you put up with,” Gibbs says as he saunters ahead of me, and I, because I'm afraid to lose him, toss my phone in my purse and run after him. “So you actually notice this stuff?”

“How could anyone not notice? I mean, it could be worse. You could be in venture cap, where a whopping two percent of directors are women.”

I'm practically hyperventilating. “I didn't think men were all that aware.”

“People are aware, Belle. I'm an analyst, for Chrissake, I observe stuff, crunch numbers, watch for trends, but I'm not an activist. I don't actually
do
anything about the stuff I observe. Glad to see someone doing something. Clever.”

“Wait up.” I'm not sure what I want to say first. “Venture cap professionals are ninety-eight percent male?”

“And ninety-two percent of venture cap funds have no professional women working for them at all.”

“So assuming most men in the venture cap world are numbers guys, how do you think they justify the fact that the opinion of half the human race simply doesn't matter? That women who probably outshone them in business school, who control eighty-six percent of consumer decisions in this country, have nothing worthwhile to add? It's the same with us. Our board has no women. Compensation committee? Zilch. Risk committee? None.”

“Yes, I would say that's a big mistake. But again, I'm a market analyst, not a sociologist, but if I were a sociologist, I'd agree with Metis and call this tribal knowledge. Everyone's aware it goes on but we never address it. It's like a family secret, and maybe this Metis, this memo writer, is trying to have some sort of intervention, so good for her.”

I've forgotten how mad I was with Gibbs.

After dinner I slip to the restroom to call Amanda on her home phone.

“Is this Metis?” I ask sarcastically.

“Wasn't that funny?” she responds lightly.

“A little juvenile and not something that won't have retribution,” I answer. “Why'd you do that?”

“What? I didn't do it,” she says.

“Was it Amy?”

“Belle, it wasn't any of us. We've all spoken to each other. It was someone else. We aren't the only women in the place who are tired of this stuff.”

I shut off my phone and head back to the table. I'm so sure it's one of them.

By 11 p.m. I'm finally checking into the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach. The enormous buckets of elaborate flower arrangements make me mentally genuflect. The opulent lobby is filled with what appears to be South American drug lords, Russian tourists who buy clothing right from the runway, and an army of Wall Streeters wearing the casual-Friday uniform of khakis and golf shirts. I just want to get past the bar without someone asking me to get a drink. I want to take a bath in a clean tub.

It's been a full evening with Gibbs as he charmed commission dollars out of every manager we met with. They hung on his charismatic and whip-smart words and then made golfing plans that I know Gibbs won't keep. I supplied all the stock ideas that would benefit from Gibbs's economic and market theories. Lower oil prices? Buy some airline stock. Strong holiday sales of luxury good items? Buy some Tiffany stock. He and I make a great team, yet all evening I mostly focused on not losing him. Each time he went to the bathroom, I watched the front doors. When I filled the car with gas, I locked him inside. Substance abuse rumors swirl about him and I feel like I have a front-row seat to a guy at the tipping point between having it all and crashing and I don't know how to help.

It's here in the hotel lobby that I reluctantly spring Gibbs free, releasing him smack in the middle of the land of temptation. We hug and I sigh and say, “Please take care of yourself.”

“It's hard,” he says, knowing exactly what I mean, but he's already looking over my shoulder, seeing someone he knows, someone to have a drink with, and I'm not even on the elevator before he's circled by people wanting a piece of his magic.

•  •  •

The hotel is the antithesis of our disordered apartment and its unrelenting smell of spilt milk. I feel a one-second guilt pang for being happy to be away from Bruce and our chaos tonight but I push that into some other place.

Opening the door to my room, I see my message light already flashing, but since my family and office have my cell number, I'm not concerned as I listen. Two calls are from Henry, who is also here for tomorrow's panel, and two are hang-ups.

“Belle, what's the number for your technology analyst?” he asks in some efficient monotone, as if I'm the means to an end. Since our lunch I've been dealing with him curtly. I've convinced myself this relationship will be tolerable because it has to be. In his second call I recognize a sweeter voice, a voice I used to know.

“Hey, Belle, it's getting late here. Would love a chance to talk to both you and your analyst about CeeV-TV. Think I want to do something on the opening bell tomorrow. Okay, hon, when you get a chance, please call or at least text me. By the way, great idea, and why am I not surprised?”

For a minute I try my hardest to remember that I don't like him. Some muscle memory still won't release the good stuff about Henry and I have to actively think of our lunch disaster to remember that I despise him. But I don't and I wonder why I don't. I want to think of him the way he thought of me at our lunch, just a new business associate and not some guy I'm grateful didn't wind up torturing me until death parted us.

I don't return the call.

I glance at the clock—11:20 p.m. The chitchat on the plane, the prep for the panel tomorrow, the weird “Octopus Hands” memo, and the stock-market dinner chatter with Gibbs have worn me out. I'll call Henry tomorrow when I'll have more brain cells firing. Instead, I call Bruce's cell. Even though it's on, nobody answers. I call again. Not only does he pick up, this time I hear the background sound of energy: high-pitched preschool voices that will not wait.

“What?” he snaps.

“You're up?” I begin cautiously.

“Owen had a nightmare and has been hollering for an hour. I almost had him asleep until the phone rang . . . and then rang again.”

“Sorry. My dinner ran really late. What happened in the nightmare?” I'm always looking for details of my kids' dreams, seeking clues about their future adult issues. Which child will hate me the most? Who is feeling the most abandoned?

“Like you care,” Bruce positively snorts at me. “Monsters, malfunctioning superheroes, the usual. Just go conferencing and enjoy the clean sheets,” he says before hanging up, and I remember I didn't confirm the sheets needed changing when the housekeeping service was in our apartment today. It's stuff like that, stuff Bruce is very capable of handling himself, that I take on because he simply will not. It's some pride thing that I know is territory to not unearth. He's the same with playdates. He told me once he can't exactly set up playdates with other moms, that it's weird to be in their apartments all filled with beds and privacy and kids who take naps. If he doesn't meet the moms on the playground or if it's a rainy day, he's on his own. He never talks about his manhood slipping away but I once gave him a
New York Times
article stating that 40 percent of American households with children now have women being the primary breadwinner and that he really isn't alone. He bunched it up without reading it and threw it into the basketball hoop hanging on the back of the kitchen door. It lay on the ground afterward with both of us refusing to touch it.

Self-inflicted guilt is one thing, but guilt thrown my way from Bruce is not allowed, and hanging up on each other is something that Bruce and I just don't do. It's like swearing: it's what I do when I'm not articulate enough to say something clever. So instead of feeling hurt or angry, or even guilty, I feel just a little bit sad.

I dump an entire container of bath salts into the bathwater. I scrape a chair across the floor next to the tub and prop open my computer to flick through my in-box while I soak the lower half of my body. I slip into water that is too hot, loving the punishing heat, and feel a frantic race to relax, wishing I could get that part of my day finished too.

My in-box pings open. I see not the 30 or so expected messages, but 370. And the subject line of each is something about CeeV-TV. I open the first message, something congratulatory, the next asks for some balance sheet information, the next simply a thank-you for the idea . . . and so on. I google, I read, I swallow. Suds are getting up to my shoulders and I lean farther out of the tub. I notice my hands are shaking and I hastily shut off the jets and stop the water. CeeV-TV has an offer on the table to be purchased by YouTube, which is really a part of Google. It must have happened while I was on the airplane, and by late afternoon my BlackBerry was dead and my iPhone sat unchecked at the bottom of my briefcase. CeeV had about a $900 million market valuation when we first had talked of it, which is simply the number of shares outstanding (90MM) multiplied by the stock price of $10 per share. When I mentioned it to a few hedge fund clients, they were able to buy it around that level. The amount agreed upon in this deal is $30/share, meaning clients who bought it when I told them to would have tripled their money in only two months. And it wasn't a Feagin Dixon deal—it wasn't a banking deal at all—it was an Isabelle McElroy idea: something that made sense back when Bruce told me he liked their platform and thought they were unique. I simply looked up their financials and made just a few phone calls to people in that industry and spoke about it casually to my clients. A few got as excited as I did and bought some. Tomorrow they'll be ecstatic with me.

Even better, since FD wasn't the banker for CeeV, I was able to invest for myself and put quite a bit of our personal savings account into the stock. How much? I can't exactly remember but it was a lot. I can't breathe: it's a big car, it's a different nanny—or it's no nanny, it's sitting with the PA Ladies at preschool chapel, it's something close to $3 million. I redial Bruce. He lifts the phone and hangs up on me again.