Opening Belle (24 page)

I am referring to Kiera Goodfriend, a wiz accounting analyst who sits rigidly, staring into space.

I continue, “There isn't a person in this whole firm who has been so consistently recognized by the outside world as her, yet she still hasn't been promoted to partner.”

Kiera twists her very styled hair and looks away, letting it be known that she too is separating herself from anything I say.

“And Kathryn, how is it that you're a director on the mortgage desk and have no say in the portfolio holdings in our subprime packages? There are no women on our risk committee, no women on the executive board. These bonds come with ratings we tell our clients are triple-A but the holdings look like crap. How are they getting these ratings? Who will take the fall for these when they crash? Do you know how much risk that puts all of us in?”

A few quiet seconds pass and I start to look around the room. Everyone is frozen. It's as if I'm at an intervention for a dysfunctional family, all squirming with pain but unable to find any words. Whatever sisterhood thing I was feeling is not being felt both ways. It's not just a lack of love that I'm picking up on, I'm feeling downright disowned. The individual shuffling, the electrical glances they exchange with each other say it all. Nobody wants to be associated with me. In just minutes I've switched from being a golden girl just like them to an ugly, ranting, contagious disease. I stuck my neck out for these women and I don't even like them.

“Look, when I was pregnant here,” I start to softly explain, “I would cover my stomach when someone downstairs dropped too many f-bombs on me. I had to laugh with King when he mooed at the sight of my breast pump. I ignored the time someone taped torn panties on my screen when I came back from my honeymoon. I'm just depleted from all of this. I don't want to hear slut jokes all day long. I don't want to work in a frat house. I want to be paid equally. I want my input on abnormal rates of risk we take to be heard. I want this place to live up to its potential.

“This is the same environment your daughters will work in, getting her ass pinched like it's a 1960s advertising agency, unless we do something to fix our broken culture.”

The women in the room aren't moving. They look like they're desperate to hear more yet know they should leave. I can almost hear them trying to control themselves from speaking.

Keep going
, I say to myself, so I do.

“Most of you came here from business school. You thought you'd run a division of this place or lead this bank in some meaningful way. I know women like you because I'm just like you. By now you get the joke. We aren't going anywhere. This is it for us. No women are in truly senior positions that matter. We all have fancy titles that are worth as much as Feagin Dixon stock is going to be worth once this mortgage façade cracks.”

I can see Kathryn looking upset under all of that hair. I think she really wants to join in; she's obviously weighing the consequences.

“Look, you're all exceptional women who get paid to be creative and smart. Why are you able to turn that off, to act stupid and submissive when it comes to things that matter?” I ask.

They won't make eye contact with each other or me. They act like frightened children who've been yelled at. They can't wait for the adult to leave. Everything depends on the next move.

Everything.

A full minute passes. It's as if we've been told to freeze while someone paints a portrait of us to capture a significant moment before everything will change. But the change doesn't come.

A waiter walks into the room and stops abruptly, sensing that something has just happened. Someone sighs. Another looks at her watch, then rises slowly. Another clears her throat and walks over to Blythe to shake her hand good-bye. I look down at my plate while the rest start filtering gratefully toward the door. Nobody says anything as they all try to exit as quietly and fast as possible. I'm left alone in a room of amped-up microphones to record voices that don't speak.

B
ACK IN
1996, when I was first hired here, I noticed a woman straining to keep her skirt zippers up and her belly sucked in. She didn't tell anyone she was pregnant until she had what appeared to be a watermelon under her dress. She returned from maternity leave to find her accounts ransacked, and because there was not much of a job left for her, she quit. When I anticipated the same happening to me with the birth of my first child, I got ready. I made myself as irreplaceable to my accounts as possible. I made promises to clients that I was coming back in a short amount of time and I did. I only lost two small accounts.

I paid attention as other banks were accused of this same practice along with the harassment-as-usual environment. I watched lawsuits filed against Smith Barney and their “boom-boom room,” watched as a Citibank boss was accused of noting which women “liked to blow.” When Nomura was sued after their traders apparently told female colleagues they belonged at home cleaning, I was sure something would come of it. The lawsuit was thrown out. Then a British bank, HBOS, was sued with X-rated details that I was sure would sound scarily familiar to Feagin Dixon and force a change, but again the suit was thrown out.

For years, allegations have been settled in arbitration and the quiet exodus of women in banking has remained hushed and steady. Merrill Lynch had fifty complainants that increased to almost nine hundred by the time their class-action suit was filed. An arbitration panel found there was a pattern of bias against female brokers. As the winning lawyer explained, “The essence of the finding is the standard operating procedure at Merrill was to discriminate against women.” That cost them $39 million. Feeling emboldened that same year, some women from Morgan Stanley opted out of arbitration and filed for class action status. The members of the GCC all waited to hear if their details were similar to ours. The night before the story was to be told in a public courtroom, the women settled for $54 million and the details remained private.

A few months ago a prominent banker at another big bank was sued for relentlessly commenting on women's breast size. The female executive settled for $1.3 million. I have twelve years of boob comments under my bra, a relative treasure trove in current litigation dollars, but the idea of suing Feagin Dixon seems absurd to me. Dixon is my firm. I'd be suing myself.

The Glass Ceiling Club gave me a frosty reception after my unsuccessful performance at the Gruss lunch. Amanda, Amy, and Violette were in a private conference room when I got back downstairs so I joined them there to tell them everything.

“That's it?” Amy asked, thinking that I was kidding. “Nothing?”

“I would have crushed that damn cigar in his lettuce,” Amanda ripped. She was walking in circles around the table.

“My guess is that Belle handled it like a reporter, like you presented it as thoughts that maybe other women had, maybe like they were thoughts that you didn't share,” Violette said. “That way you managed to protect yourself as always.”

“Why do you dislike me so much?” I asked Violette. “Those women sat like statues. Like they didn't even know how I got to the table. They acted like I was a freak.”

My hands were shaking.

Amy stood. “This was such a stupid idea in the first place. I'm going back to work.”

The other two followed close behind. I just sat staring into space, wondering how I should tell this story to Bruce. How could I have done anything differently?

Clarisse poked her twitchy face into the room. “Heard you're getting all antiestablishment on us?”

I rolled my eyes at her.

“Thanks for leaving more room at the top for me, Belle,” she gushed, and she really meant it.

That afternoon what would be the final Metis memo arrived:

To:
All Employees

From:
Metis

Subject:
White Flag

I'm done warning you people. You seem to want to continue on this miserable path. You don't ever want to move forward. You've made your beds so go sleep on them. Enjoy your unflippable mattress.

Stone left a yellow Post-it on my screen. “Did you get writer's cramp? Did you girls break up?”

I'd never met such an entitled empty suit in my life, a kid who just seems itching to be fired.

“Stone, very glad you signed this thing. It's going in my memory book. The one I use when your next employer calls for a recommendation.”

He smirked and pulled up his Facebook page, posting something that undoubtedly pertains to me. I've heard he does this regularly.

When I tried to thank Lisa for allying herself with me at the Gruss lunch, she acted indifferent, as though she couldn't remember it ever happening, and when I relayed the details of the lunch to Bruce, he looked at me with something bordering on contempt. He's suddenly so removed again and I can't help but think that I've let him down too.

A few days after the lunch some of the attendees sent me emails that could almost be considered supportive. While they never apologized for not speaking up or adding anything at all to the conversation, they thanked me for saying what I did. As one put it, “Thanks for putting into words what we all think and experience, yet never say.” She sent it from an untraceable IP address and I was too angry to respond.

I forwarded it to the GCC and it was finally Amy who replied all, “Enough with this stuff. It's time we all get back to our jobs. Take me off this email list.” In just a few moments everyone else had done the same. The club I had been practically begged to join dumped me. I'm so exposed now and want to see this thing through. I'm fully out of ideas and very much alone.

T
HIS AFTERNOON,
the noise from the dais sounds like a World Cup soccer match, and it is distracting the whole trading floor. A young trader has returned from Europe bearing the spoils of a scavenger hunt. He had been given forty-eight hours to find the items on the list, many of which were found on another continent. From the noise level it seems he has been successful. He enters, victorious and dragging behind him a wheelie bag containing what promises to be a corpse, but is instead a collection of the world's most noted performance enhancers—not trading performance but vitality-in-the-sack performance. This trader they call New Guy gets a full standing ovation. He's all of twenty-two, blushing a scarlet hue but filled with bravado. The guys have a folding table snapped open right in front of the dais. A tablecloth is handed to New Guy, which he brandishes like a matador before carefully placing it on the table. The traders keep cheering as he unzips the bag.

I type an email to Amy with the exact wording from the Merrill Lynch lawsuit.

“ ‘Environment that is hostile and offensive.' Is this offensive enough for you?”

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.

O
N 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.