Opening Belle (21 page)

“Where the hell have you been?” he rants as he entwines his giant fingers around each other. “You have some presentation to do and some trader keeps coming over here looking for you.” He picks up the phone at his turret, reconsiders, then hurls the phone so hard the receiver cracks in half. Yes, he's definitely losing money. And then it hits me: Ballsbridge has been dabbling in this dicey mortgage market for his own account.

•  •  •

That night I need to keep talking about this. As I speak to Bruce, he tosses loaded diapers into the Diaper Genie across the room, nailing that tiny opening every time. He gets some surge of joy from the act and waits until Owen gives him a pailful of ammo. He tells me it's like a carnival game to him, one of his surprising daddy pleasures.

“What are your other daddy pleasures?” I ask. “I mean, you're so lucky you get to go on playdates and get to see our kids so much.”

“Um, have you seen me go on playdates?” he asks as he thunks another load in the Genie.

“Well, I mean I know you and Owen go to the park a lot.”

“That's right, the park, and then if he's playing with other kids and all the moms go off to lunch or nap at someone's house, it's not exactly like they include us.”

“What? You aren't included?”

“Belle, think about it.”
Thunk.
“Oh, Daddy, come on over to my apartment where we can be alone while our kids nap. It's just weird.”

I had never thought about this and feel protective of my husband, like he's the excluded kid in the lunchroom. “What do the other stay-at-home dads do?” I ask.

“That's what I am now? A stay-at-home dad? A SAD dad. I haven't stopped working, Belle, not entirely. I have other stuff going on.”

I think about this and wonder about the other stuff but know not to ask. “Why didn't you ever tell me about the playdate shut-out thing?” I ask.

“ 'Cause you hardly ask anything about what goes on here all day.”

I sit watching him for a moment, letting it sink in that he sees himself in a different role than I see him in and that probably explains why he still thinks we should split domestic tasks, or that I need to thank him every time he empties a dishwasher with the same enthusiasm he would thank me for an Emergent Biosolutions or CeeV trade.

I start to say something but he puts his diaper-hands on my lips and shushes me. “It's a little lonelier for dads who work out of the home, that's all,” he says gruffly, and I think I hear his voice twitch.

I have a sudden urge to bed this man, germ-hands and all. When he starts throwing again, I start to fill the silences, to blab to him, telling him about work, about the finicky mortgage market, and I'm glad the kids are preoccupied with the slide in the living room. When he's finished pitching practice he drops to the floor and begins doing push-ups. Grunting and talking is not sexy business and he only acts like this when he's bothered by the subject matter.

“Belle, I know nothing except this. The guy who cuts my hair?” He exhales. “He has a weekend place in Miami. Our babysitter . . . humph—”

“Childcare provider,” I interrupt softly as I watch his undershorts sag below his belly, depressing me slightly. I still haven't replaced those for him and he's too cute to be dressing like this.

“Yeah. Whatever.” He does three more push-ups before continuing, “Our childcare provider put a down payment on her own apartment in Brooklyn and we're not overpaying her. Do you know what her down payment was?” He heaves. “Three thousand dollars.”

“That's it?”

“A balloon mortgage. She'll pay close to five thousand dollars a month in only one year and I'm not anticipating her getting a massive raise. She just can't afford to buy a place and yet a bank gave her a mortgage. She doesn't know better.”

“What the hell kind of bank would make that loan?”

Bruce twists his face in an accusing way. “One that's going to repackage and resell it with a shiny triple-A rating.”

Drops of sweat fall onto our cream-colored carpet and I resist the urge to put a towel under him and break his rhythm. I'm not going to Kathryn-ize this moment.

I'm so happy to be connecting with my husband, even if it's just to talk about this stuff, even if it's with someone who doesn't quite understand it. “It feels like everyone is comfortable with debt up to their chins,” I say. “They think everything will go up in price and that the home they're buying is an investment. They think they're going to get rich.”

“You're not seeing humans as individuals,” he tells me. “You're lumping everyone into categories. You keep saying ‘they.' ”

“I'm not.”

“You just said”—he huffs as he does some sort of triceps dip—“
they
think they're going to get rich. ‘They' meaning who? The rest of America who wants to buy a house? It's not the fault of the buyer that they want a piece of the dream. They're being told they can afford things they probably can't and it's the
banks
' responsibility to not make the loan in the first place. The guys who went to business school are educated in analyzing that stuff, not the airline pilot, the sanitation worker, the beautician, the dog-walker. They haven't taken mortgage-lending classes. It's up to the banks to be honest. But they don't want to be honest 'cause they get to take the money and eventually the home too.”

I'm listening and I'm trying not to agree, trying not to think that my husband is a beautiful and smart human being and that sometimes I marginalize his opinions.

Bruce can't stop talking now. “It's okay to say no, that the reality is a housekeeper probably has insufficient income to buy a big house. It's not okay to say sure she can afford it, knowing she can't. Once they've bankrupted her and she has to surrender the house, her family will get to go live in her car while her bank takes the house, an asset they've made money on. It's a crime.” Bruce rolls onto his back.

“The stuff I sell?” I say defensively. “They're put into
pools
of mortgages, Bruce. They're bunched together, good and bad.”

“That's what I mean. Stop thinking in sweeping bunches of money and think of the human being, singular, on the other side of the trade, when that trade goes bad. There's a guy who drives a dump truck who can't handle his payments any longer, there's a low-paid teacher in Minnesota struggling to hang on to her house because she lost her job. Little does she know that by borrowing and begging and getting herself whole on her mortgage, she's also buying someone like King more chilled champagne. And if she doesn't get herself whole? It's not gonna hurt King's wine cellar one bit. She's taking all the risk. He's taking all the money.”

Bruce entwines his fingers behind his head and starts doing sit-ups. He's done speaking but now it's me who is agitated. There are glimmers of something that deep down I've already known to be true about my line of work. It's something I'd rather not think about and now I have to. I lie next to him and we synchronize our sit-ups. Brigid comes and sits on my middle to help. We go up and down without speaking, just thinking. Woof starts licking the salt off Bruce's face. Together we grunt, contracting our soft bellies in uncomfortable crunches and exhaling with temporary relief. We do this over and over while we both wonder what is real and what is not. Do I have a great job or am I wrecking people's lives? Do we have a great marriage or are we just getting by? We overflow with questions we can neither ask of each other nor answer ourselves.

T
HE NEXT DAY
a letter arrives via interoffice mail. Jarrod, a heavily tattooed and improbably lovable ex-con, who with much personal comment delivers mail to the five thousand people in our office, drops it off.

“Belle Bottom!” he shouts. “HELLS BELLE!” he goes on, despite my being on the telephone. “Better open this one . . . FAST!”

I glance down at the ivory-colored envelope he dropped on my desk after he showed it to Marcus. It's Cartier stationery, the heaviest stock they make, with a wax seal that says “BG” on the back. This is no memo and there's only one BG (B. Gruss II), a man so old-school that he handwrites everything. He receives but doesn't send email, doesn't use a cellular phone, and doesn't seem to like having his title of chairman. When he attends a meeting, he sits with the CEO and King McPherson and when he speaks, it's short and fueled by caffeinated drinks. If he isn't the one speaking, he doesn't seem interested. Still, he weighs in heavily on any discussions regarding the direction of the firm or bonus decisions. If any department slacks off, it's Gruss who will address them publicly.

Nobody brings in as much banking business as Gruss, and of the 487 out of 500 male CEOs in the S&P 500, there are hardly any he hasn't played golf or gone drinking with. He has the reputation of printing money for the firm as he sits alone in a glareless black-walled office with no papers visible to those who come to visit. He stabs at a row of twinkling telephone lights, reaching out to his fellow universe masters with a “Well how the hell have YOU been?” which he inevitably follows with “I called you today because the moment has come, my friend, to take some real cash out of that company of yours and put it in your pocket. Let's sell more stock of yours to the public!” Then he will inevitably disappear on some pharmaceutically enhanced bender, usually near some oceanfront golf course.

In his late sixties, BG remains macho-handsome despite a shiny bald head, and a tendency to wear copious amounts of cologne and monogrammed velour slipperlike shoes. He isn't accountable to anyone yet we are all accountable to him. He brings in massive banking deals, takes a piece of the action for himself, and enjoys a first-class life that Feagin Dixon pays for.

To this day I've had only one conversation with him, the day of my last promotion. He sent one of the four beautiful women who administratively assist him to retrieve me from the trading floor and buzz me into his office. There I stood, taking in the screens mounted on every wall, each depicting either a news headline or a financial market somewhere in the world. The only thing on his desk was an ashtray, a deck of cards, a Red Bull, and an unlit cigar. He never got up when I walked in, just creased up his always-in-the sun forehead and appeared to look me up and down while rubbing his head.

“You the one with the high-yield piece?” he asked, referring to the interdepartment investment paper I wrote each week.

“Yes,” I said, wondering if I'd made a mistake.

“And you got promoted?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You should be.”

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.