The Underwriting (23 page)

“The business school is much different from undergrad. Much more competitive, for one thing.” He was looking in the mirror behind her, studying the other people in the restaurant.

“It's annoying out here because everyone thinks Stanford Business School is the only place to go for entrepreneurship,” he went on, “but statistically more companies come out of Wharton. And our average GMAT scores are higher than theirs. I met some girl from there the other day who got a 670. I couldn't believe it. Like, I know standards are lower for women because they need to keep numbers up, but that's absurd. They're clearly losing their edge.”

Amanda took a deep breath and sipped her wine. Maybe she was asking the wrong questions.

“Will you hold on a second?” He stood up without waiting for her to respond and she watched him go to the table he'd been studying and confront a man and a woman on what looked like a date.

The waiter arrived with their food and she nibbled at the roasted eggplant, then finished it altogether, watching him stand and chuckle at the table.

Next she went for the meatballs, watching as Ben Loftis's perfection melted while he stood at the table, rocking on his heels with one hand in the pocket of his bright blue fleece vest. Who wore a fleece vest to a restaurant like this? His fat face got red as he laughed a fake laugh at something the seated guy said. He took a sip of the wine they were drinking and puckered, evidently using his thirty hours of wine training expertise to criticize whatever they'd ordered.

She watched and chewed without tasting. Had he asked her a single question this entire dinner? Oh yes, he asked what she wanted to drink. And Penn undergrad most definitely was as competitive as Wharton. And definitely more competitive than . . . Where had he gone? Duke?

But he gave you flowers
, she defended him to herself.

“Here, babe.” She turned to the voice. A woman at the table next to her slid a shot of tequila in front of her. “You need this more than Tara does.”

Amanda looked up: the woman's face was Asian and flushed from drinking, and she smiled comically while the woman she sat with giggled helplessly.

Amanda felt herself puff up defensively, realizing the pair had been observing her date. She glanced at their fingers: no rings. How dare some bitter, older girls mock her when . . . she looked over at Ben, then back at the women.

The woman nodded, following Amanda's thoughts. “I'm telling you, honey, it's as good as it gets out here.”

“But I came out here to find better men.”

The woman shrugged but laughed, saying, “Didn't we all,” then indicated the tequila shot. “Drink up.”

Amanda downed the shot as Ben Loftis returned. “Sorry,” he said. “Old girlfriend.”

“Oh?” Amanda puckered her lips, swallowing the tequila taste.

“Poor girl ended up with that private equity loser. I have no respect for men who just make money off other people's work.” He looked at the food. “Did you eat all the meatballs?”

“Yeah.” She noticed the clear plate. “I was starving.”

“Oh.” His eyes darted back and forth, trying to decide what to do, then he gestured for the waiter. “Can we have more meatballs, Marc? Guess you won't need any dessert, then,” he said, turning back to her.

The women at the next table paid the check and gave a good luck sign as they left the restaurant. Amanda chugged the wine in front of her while Ben continued to talk about himself and the things on his résumé.

She didn't even pretend to offer to pay when the bill came.

“I'm going to get a cab to Pac Heights,” he said. “I can drop you off.”

“That would be great,” she said, and the gesture made her think maybe she should give him another chance.

He signed the bill and she followed him outside.

“You know, I've actually been thinking about starting my own company,” she said as they got into the car. “Like, I've realized in law there isn't really a good system for people who aren't pro bono but can't pay the big legal fees for firms like Crowley—”

“Sorry.” He put a finger up. “Do you mind if we watch this?” He gestured to the tiny TV screen in the cab. “I love this clip.” He laughed as Jimmy Kimmel came on. She sat back and crossed her arms. The cab arrived at her door as the clip finished.

“Well, it's been fun.” She opened the door.

“Hey, listen,” he stopped her. “I'm sorry.”

She turned, hopeful. “About what?” Maybe the ex-girlfriend had been serious, had broken his heart and made it difficult to sit through dinner.

“I should have cut this off before dinner,” he said.

“Why?” she asked kindly, waiting for him to say he was still heartbroken, wasn't ready for a new relationship.

“The flowers,” he said. “It was just so thoughtless the way you left them on the table. I bought those for you, and now they're probably dead, when all you had to do was take a minute to put them in water with the flower food I gave you instead of disrespecting my effort.”

“What?” Her face squinted. Was he joking?

“J. C. Penney had this test that he wouldn't hire anyone who salted his food before tasting it. The flowers were my test. I can't be with a girl who treats my thoughtfulness so flippantly.”

Amanda stared at him, mouth open, trying to figure out whether this was actually happening or she'd just had too much wine. “I understand,” she finally said, getting out of the cab and shutting the door.

The cab drove off while she was still fumbling with the keys in the damp chill that had settled into the night. She shut the door behind her, picked up the flowers, and chucked them in the garbage.

JUAN

F
RIDAY
, A
PRIL
11; S
AN
F
RANCISCO
, C
ALIFORNIA

“Now you're thinking about it,” Josh laughed at Juan when the concert ended and they followed the crowds down the stairs, his lips spread to reveal pink gums. Juan hadn't seen Josh smile without closed lips since the early days of Hook; it made him look younger, innocent and a bit naive. “Get trusts in place so you don't have to pay taxes,” he coached.

“But who cares?” Juan said. “Even if they take half I still don't know what to do with a hundred million dollars.”

“It's not about the money, it's about the principle. Why should guys like you and me, who fund the innovation that fuels this country,
also
be expected to prop up a bureaucratic government that's going to squander it all on inefficient programs that don't work?”

“But then who helps poor people?”

“Private foundations,” Josh said, “which I'm sure you'll have.”

Juan blushed: that was a great idea.

“Don't you think, though, that if all support switches to private foundations, only the causes rich people care about get any attention?” He'd use his to help kids in East Palo Alto, but all the rich guys he knew were programmers who only cared about video games,
Lord of the Rings
and the occasional rare turtle species.

“You think it isn't like that now? What do you think lobbyists are for? Private foundations are just more efficient.”

“Are you Republican?” Juan didn't think he'd ever met a Republican before.

“Libertarian.”

“What's that?”

“What you'll be as soon as you have money.”

“Are you going to have a foundation?”

“No,” he said. “I'm going to start another company. I'm using the money to pay for it myself so I don't have to deal with dickhead venture capitalists.”

“You don't like Phil Dalton?”

“All he cares about is his return. He's watering down the vision.”

“What's the vision?”

“Of Hook?” Josh's head twitched. “To make social interactions more efficient. Sex is a human necessity, and it's ridiculous how much time is wasted trying to fulfill the need. Hook uses technology to fix that. There are a million other applications of that logic, but Phil doesn't see them.”

Juan didn't say anything. He was thinking about Kelly again. Making things more efficient wasn't a crime. Even if she had been killed, which they didn't even know for sure, at the very, very absolute worst Hook had only helped make it more efficient. It hadn't
caused
her to get killed. And that wasn't worth risking the IPO over, especially if the IPO meant he'd have money to maybe help transform East Palo Alto.

TARA

W
EDNESDAY
, A
PRIL
16; S
AN
F
RANCISCO
, C
ALIFORNIA

“Get in the car,” Tara said sternly from the driver's seat.

Neha crossed her arms and didn't budge.

“Get in the
fucking
car or I'll get you fired so fast they won't buy your plane ticket home.”

Neha relented, slamming the door behind her and keeping her arms folded as she stared out the window. Of all the things Tara had prepared for leading up to today's meeting with the sales syndicate, waking up to discover that Neha had never reformatted the sales deck she'd sent her four weeks ago was not one of them. The slides weren't in the order she'd asked for, the fonts were different between sections, and the margins were entirely inconsistent. The deck looked like a bad first draft by a bad summer intern.

And of all the things that could hold Tara back right now, an arrogant analyst who'd never met a hairbrush wasn't going to be it.

“It's not a big deal,” Neha muttered.

“The fonts aren't even the same, Neha. We just spent twenty-five hundred dollars printing decks we can't use,” Tara said as calmly as she could.

“Twenty-five hundred dollars is nothing for L.Cecil.”

“That's not the point.”

Tara drove down Mission Street from the St. Regis and turned onto the Embarcadero, without stopping at Hook's building.

“Where are we going?” Neha asked, sitting forward in the car seat.

“I need a manicure,” Tara said, “and I'm assuming you do, too.”

“But the syndicate meeting—”

“Starts at three o'clock.”

“But I've got to reformat—”

“Juan's taking care of it.”

“Juan?” Neha's face went white. “Does he know I messed up?”

“I told him the file got corrupted and your changes were erased,” she said. Tara was furious, but there was no need to bad-mouth the girl to her only friend.

She pulled the car into a parking spot, and Neha followed her reluctantly into the nail salon, where Tara asked in Vietnamese for two manicures.

“You speak Chinese?” Neha asked, surprised.

“Vietnamese,” she corrected. “They're Vietnamese.”

“Why do you speak Vietnamese?”

“I spent two summers there teaching English when I was in college.”

“What? Why?”

“I wanted to help people.”

“I didn't know that,” Neha said.

“There's a lot you don't know about me, Neha,” Tara said, not caring how rude it sounded.

They took their seats and Tara picked a dark gray polish, then remembered the meeting today and exchanged it for a dull, neutral pink. Neha looked at the polishes, flustered, and selected the same.

“Why did you bring me here?” the analyst finally asked as the women put their hands in warm water. “You already fixed the problem.”

“I wanted to ask why you never updated the presentation,” Tara said evenly, watching the woman in front of her cut her cuticles.

“If you haven't noticed, I'm the only analyst on this deal,” Neha said rudely. “I've got a lot going on, Tara, and frankly, I think making sure all the numbers are perfect is a lot more important than making sure the slides are perfectly formatted.”

Tara turned to face the girl. Her skin was oily, her eyebrows were bushy, her glasses were outdated. She had the potential to be pretty; she just didn't make any effort.

“Unfortunately, that isn't true,” Tara said. “No one will look at your numbers—no matter how perfect they are—if they aren't presented in an appealing way.”

“Then people should know better,” Neha said.

Tara studied the girl, wondering whether she recognized the weight of what she'd just said. “What's your goal, Neha?”

“To be the best.” The girl didn't hesitate.

“The best what?”

“The best whatever-I-am.”

“And you want to be an associate, right?”

“Yes.” Neha sat up. “And I'm sure I'm going to get the promotion, especially after this deal. Everyone knows I'm the best analyst in the group.”

“They're not promoting you,” Tara said, turning her gaze back to her nails. She'd seen the list last week: Neha wasn't even up for consideration.

“What?” Neha asked uneasily, then said with more assertion, “Did you tell them something?”

“No,” Tara replied. “I just know what they're looking for, and it isn't you.”

“Bullshit. I've been on more deals and—”

“Gotten all the numbers right,” she said. “At the expense of presentation, which is what matters to this firm.”

“But Larry said I'm the best analyst he's ever seen.”

“Exactly. Which is not the same thing as being good at anything else. Analysts sit in the back crunching numbers. Associates do some of that, but spend more time figuring out how to package it; by the time you get to VP your job is to work with people, and people care a lot more about what you're like to be around than how precise your numbers are.”

“What are you saying?”

“That you're unpleasant to be around,” Tara said bluntly.

“Are you saying I'm ugly?”

“No,” Tara replied automatically, “I'm saying you're unpleasant to be around.” But as she repeated the words, she got the feeling she was lying. Were the two synonymous? What was she trying to say? “I'm saying you need to pay more attention to presentation,” she finally said, “if you want to grow in the firm.”

The two women sat in silence as the women across painted their nails. Tara's brain felt heavy with the truth of what she'd just said. Was Wall Street really like that: more interested in appearances than fact? Were people really like that? Is that what Josh Hart had been saying?

“Why did you decide to work on Wall Street, Neha?” Tara asked, finally breaking the silence.

“To prove I could,” the girl said without looking up.

“To who?”

“Parker Hughes.”

“Who's Parker Hughes?”

“He went to my high school. He got dropped off in a black car every morning, all the way from the Upper East Side, and acted like he was doing us a favor by going to Brooklyn Latin instead of some boarding school.” Neha's voice was bitter.

“Where did you grow up?”

“Astoria. I took the subway to school.”

“And Parker's parents worked on Wall Street?”

“Both of them. And he acted like that made them special, like it made him better than me because my parents didn't. But I was smarter than him, and better than him at everything, and,” she concluded, “I'm proving it.”

“Where is Parker now?”

“At Goldman.”

“Do you ever see him?”

“Not since we graduated from high school.”

“Has it been worth it?”

“It will be.”

“When?”

“When my kids are dropped off in black cars.”

Tara thought about Lauren Wiley, puking in the bathroom at the Frick, her mother still at the office. She'd probably gotten dropped off at school in a black car.

“Do you really think I won't get promoted?” Neha's voice softened.

Tara didn't want to tell her, not now. “I don't know, Neha,” she lied.

“So what should I do?” the girl asked.

Tara looked at her again: Was it really just that she needed to fix her appearance? And could Tara really tell her that? “I don't know,” she repeated, quietly, then looked at her watch. “We better go.”

“Are they dry?” Neha looked at her nails skeptically.

Tara lifted a brow. Was she serious? “It's shellac,” she said. Didn't everyone know about shellac?

Tara paid and they drove back to Hook in silence.

“Why did you decide to work on Wall Street?” Neha asked after several moments of silence.

Tara was quiet for a long time, thinking about the question. “I don't know,” she finally admitted. “I guess it seemed like the best option at the time.”

They got to the parking lot and Tara pulled the car into the space.

“Hey, Tara,” Neha said as they got out of the car, “I'm sorry about the presentation.”

“It's okay,” Tara said, and she meant it. “I know you're under a lot of pressure.”

“Yeah, but,” she said, “well, you can still trust me, you know? To take on more work?”

“I'll keep that in mind,” Tara said. “Just promise to be honest with me about what your priorities are.”

“Yeah, I will,” Neha said, adding, “And you could maybe put in a good word for me, too, with the promotion committee?”

“Sure, Neha,” Tara said, wondering if she actually had the heart to do it.

JUAN

W
EDNESDAY
, A
PRIL
16; S
AN
F
RANCISCO
, C
ALIFORNIA

“Is this seriously what you do all day and all night?” Juan asked as Neha took a seat next to him. “I actually think I want to kill myself.”

Juan had been formatting a PowerPoint presentation for the past four hours, making sure the graphs were flush against gridlines and all the footnotes were in the same-sized font.

“You okay?” Juan asked when Neha didn't respond.

“Yeah,” she said, shaking her head as if to get rid of whatever she was thinking about. “Sorry you have to do that.”

“It's cool,” he said. “It's kind of fun to see what you do. It makes me appreciate what I do a lot more.” He smiled. “Hey! Nice nails!”

She blushed and clenched her fists.

“Don't hide them,” he said. “They look really nice.” He meant it. He liked that Neha had thought about what she looked like: it made her seem like a real girl instead of a human workhorse.

“Thanks,” Neha said uncomfortably, uncurling her fingers.

“Okay,” he said, looking at the screen. “I think we're all set.”

“Did this put you totally behind?” Neha asked.

“Nah,” he said jovially. “I was just working on my community center.”

“What? What community center?”

“It's going to be called the Eduardo Ramirez Center, after my dad. It'll be like a hangout place for kids in my old neighborhood, to give them something to do instead of join gangs or deal drugs,” he told her.

Juan smiled at her. He hadn't officially told anyone, but he'd spent the past week researching how to start a community center in East Palo Alto, which is what he was going to do with a third of his money as soon as the employee lockup expired six months after the IPO and he could sell his Hook shares. Focusing on what he could do with his wealth had made him realize how foolish he'd been to stress about Kelly Jacobson: he had no idea whether that database was even accurate, but he knew for sure that his money could help kids in EPA.

“You're building a community center?” Neha asked.

“Yeah.” He loved the feeling of saying it. “It'll be a lot like Hook, actually—with free food and a basketball court and video game rooms and foosball tables. And every day there will be a different class, open to everyone. I already talked to our chef and he's going to come teach cooking classes, and Brad's going to do surf lessons.”

“But how do you pay for it?” She lifted an eyebrow.

Juan shrugged. “Turns out I've got a lot of Hook shares.”

“Are we ready?” Nick's voice asked, irritated, from behind his shoulder.

“Oh.” Juan turned, startled to see the CFO standing beside him.

“Yep, just sent the presentations to the printer. They're delivering them to the St. Regis at two o'clock.”

“Great,” Nick said, jittery. “I don't want you to talk to anyone in the meeting,” he instructed, “just sit in the back and I'll give you a signal.” He paused, thinking. “I'll go like this”—he pinched his earlobe—“if I need you to bring me any statistics.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Juan said. “I've got it all right here.” He indicated his laptop. Before the formatting fiasco, he had uploaded the Hook databases onto a laptop in order to calculate any user statistics if Nick got caught in a question he didn't know.

“Okay. Please be there forty-five minutes early,” Nick said, moving on.

“Wow,” Juan said, turning back to Neha. “He's even worse than normal.”

“It is a pretty big presentation.” Neha shrugged.

“Who is it with, again?” Juan asked. Nick hadn't bothered to explain any of it.

“It's with the sales syndicate,” Neha said. “They're the ones who sell to institutional investors at whatever price we set at the pricing call.”

“Who are institutional investors?”

“Big funds and certain individuals with enough money to buy a lot of shares.”

“I thought anyone could buy stock.”