Opening Belle (16 page)

When she rattled off a great suggestion without a pause, he asked her to join them, she said she already had plans. The second guy asked where the shoeshine man went, and the third wanted to know where she got yesterday's outfit 'cause he'd like to get that for his wife. The wife line is used a lot. The mossy gray carpet that leads to her desk is wearing thin.

The Glass Ceiling Club stands divided on the subject of Tiffany and the distraction she causes.

“Look, she is a woman with a gorgeous body,” Amy says. “To say something to her is jealous and petty.”

We are in the French bistro La Goulue, where the heavy-paned glass doors are thrown open despite the February date. It's warm and the “ladies who lunch” crowd is everywhere, pressing small shopping bags containing thoughtful gifts into each other's hands while air-kissing against a background of winter white flowers. They wear perfectly tailored Chanel suits, which, despite the four-figure price tags, look like uniforms here. I note how differently the Lunch Ladies and the Working Ladies treat their purses. The Lunch Ladies carry expensive-looking, monogrammed, and buckled units that seem to hold very little. They place these bags delicately on their tables, touching handle to handle and forming an almost perfect X for a centerpiece. When the owner needs to retrieve something from the bag she slips a moisturized hand in and behold, the card, lipstick, or cell phone is pulled out effortlessly. Working women treat their purse as baggage. Ours lie on the floor, bulked out with papers, business cards, electronic gadgetry, and in my case the occasional Lego block. When we need something from our bags we heave the bulk of the contents one way or the other and shuffle through it all. If we had placed them on the fine linen tablecloths of La Goulue they would leave dirt marks.

Alice Harlington, the quiet analyst, says, “Tiffany gives women a bad name. Who can take an employee seriously who walks around with a slit like that?” She is referring to today's outfit, a vampy, to-the-floor black dress with three-inch stilettos peeking from below. When she turns sideways the dress reveals a slit cut to within six inches of her panty line, displaying her beautiful legs.

While we summon up that vision, Amanda enters, hollering to us when she is only halfway across the dining floor.

“Great! You're all here.”

The Lunch Ladies turn in unison and confer like surprised birds. They have an artful ability to look displeased without contorting skin into unflattering countenances.

“Badoit with gas,” Amanda hollers to the waiter, three tables away, meaning she wants carbonated water. Lately she's been stepping up her Brooklyn shtick to practically wave the flag for the new-moneyed set, even though she has yet to share in the spoils. I may have been raised in the Bronx but I learned from the cradle to leave the accent in the borough. Amanda embraces it, for which I adore her.

“That black halter dress?” she says, rolling her eyes while she refers to Tiffany. “What up with that?”

“Bullshit,” Amy says. “If we all spent as much time as Tiffany at the gym instead of under fluorescent lights, we'd be proudly strutting it too. I have a real problem with women telling other women how to dress. I guarantee you the one complaining is always the less fair one looking in the mirror—Snow White and all.”

“My vote is to turn up the trading floor air conditioning and force her into some survivalist mode of covering up.” I say hopefully.

“Okay, but what about the softball game outfits?” Amanda asks. “Aren't we done with them?”

Each year when autumn leaves have almost all fallen, Simon Greene sponsors a softball game pitting the investment bankers (nerds) against the research, sales, and trading group. It's a “mandatory fun” event, meaning your attendance is required. Central Park would be the likely venue to play softball and have a picnic for three hundred people working twenty blocks away, but instead we carpool through Hedgistan, the area between New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut, where most hedge fund managers live. There, everyone can gasp at the sight of Simon's waterfront compound, and imagine the amount of merchandise they need to trade and banking deals they must close before they too can own such a place.

The Greene compound is regal, with probably fifteen acres of manicured lawn overlooking the Long Island Sound. Two ten-thousand-square-foot white-shingled homes bookend the English-country gardens: one for Simon and his mysterious wife, and the other for his mother. Jewish guys take good care of their moms. A swimming pool in the distance, which remains open until the month of October, seems to melt into the water of the Sound. Despite the beauty of the place, the message is purely museum. We have never been invited to go inside these homes. We eat ham and butter sandwiches for hors d'oeuvres and a fried chicken dinner out of Styrofoam boxes.

Female investment bankers wear khakis from Brooks Brothers, cashmere sweater sets, and pearls. They don't play, just stand on the sidelines and sip white wine while chatting with someone strategic. The banker guys always wear the remnants of their suits from the day, no tie or jacket, but their banker slacks and a dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves. They keep their cell phones going, hovering under the magnificent weeping willows, one finger plugged into their free ear to drown out imagined noise. Occasionally they gesture with the plugged finger and we all imagine they're landing us yet another deal to sell.

The traders care nothing about fashion and wear cutoff shorts, golf gear, a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt from the 1980s, anything they have rummaged from their bottom drawer. They bring their own mitts. A few of our traders were professional athletes in a former life so it's never a fair match. While I'm being checked off in the grand attendance book of team players, I miss my children desperately. It's one thing to not be home because you have an important meeting. It's another to not be home because you're playing ball with adults rather than your own seven-year-old.

At the last game, our pitcher, a former NHL great, turned and conferred with the first baseman enough times to signal something was up. The two were bent in giggles, like naughty boys in church. Several times the pitcher would wind up his pitch but inexplicably stop. I finally saw the reason. Tiffany had just joined his team and was assigned to third base. With an earnest face, she stood bent at the waist, shifting from side to side, and waiting for action to come her way.
Interesting
, I thought.
Does she know that nothing is actually happening in the game right now?
But while she was bent over, the skintight Lycra shorts of hers (no question, no underwear) had ridden up her backside. But that was hardly the cause of the giggling. Above these shorts she wore a halter top, casually tied in a bow around her neck and dropping clear to her breastbone. Her astonishing shirt had no back. It simply dropped down, barely covering each breast, hanging teasingly in place. She either had bulk and spring in her chest to keep everything on or there was something hooking it together under her breasts. What nobody could figure out was without a back-tie, how did it not fly away?

“It was two-sided tape,” Amanda said.

“Some sort of elastic under the boob flap,” Amy guessed matter-of-factly.

From that point on it was impossible to get anyone to concentrate on the game. The pitcher threw Tiffany the ball a few times to try to get the damn shirt to move and nobody could look away. As I watched her positively strut across that compound, I thought about her courage. Tiffany had no self-conscious urge to either keep her chest covered or to pull the wedgie out of her shorts. She appeared to give no thought to the fact that the temperature was in the sixties. Tiffany knew everyone was watching her and she loved it.

By the time the game wound down, some of the wives started showing up, looking like they spent time getting ready to “drop by.” Their carefully applied makeup, bouncy-fresh hairdos, and iron creases in their pants acknowledged the pressure of the Y chromosome–charged workplace. They knew they had to look good because the herd would analyze them in the morning. I knew most of them and stood talking with Annika Hebert, the wife of our chemical analyst, Ryan.

“So, is this someone's friend?” she asked, pointing a jeweled finger at Tiffany.

“No, she works with us,” I said, noting the concern on Annika's face.

The stay-at-home wives can feel powerless about the vixens thrown into their husbands' paths. I could see it in their faces when they came to visit the trading floor. They'd register the many men penned up together, the proximity with which we sat, and the late nights of entertaining. It was not the ideal equation for even the most solid relationships. While their husbands moved millions of dollars around the globe, these women were driving their late-model SUVs between school, soccer practice, and spin class. It made for a strange balance of power, especially for someone like Annika, who had worked in our world before she exchanged it for that of the suburban housewife. I think the decision still tortured her.

“Don't worry, Annika, she supports the trading desk,” I said, referring to Tiffany. “She doesn't work with your husband.”

“Does she have a boyfriend?” she asked hopefully.

“Uncertain. She gets a lot of calls from guys, but she seems to be relatively single.”

“She has situated herself well,” Annika said evenly, squinting into the departing sunlight. She turned toward me and shrugged. “So my husband works with a woman who is an eleven out of ten. I'm okay with that,” she said.

“I work with her too,” I said unhelpfully.

“But I shouldn't worry because why?”

“Well, your husband's a nice guy and you're smarter than her, for one.”

“That's two.”

“It was a compound thought.”

“It's not Ryan I'm worried about.”

I knew what was coming next. Whenever I'm with the wives, they will eventually plug me for gossip. Their husbands don't tell them who is hooking up with whom and I've never once shared my inside knowledge on infidelity, but I appear to be the most likely person to let the information leak.

“I mean, does she dress like that at work?”

“Not exactly like that.” We both looked over to fully appreciate Tiffany's outfit once again.

“She's fine,” I said. “Really, um, confident.”

Annika shook her head. “Well, I'm confident . . . was confident . . . whatever.”

“You were never
that
confident.” And again I nodded toward Tiffany, which made Annika laugh, which made me laugh, which led to her saying, “Why are we both here?”

By the end of that evening Tiffany had won for herself the unenviable title of Naked Girl, and by the next day's opening bell this handle had stuck.

“Naked Girl on one!” kept reverberating behind my back.

That meant Tiffany should answer the first of her telephone lines, that there was a call for her. It wasn't meant to be hurtful, this nickname of hers, and Tiffany seemed to relish it. To her it was a title worth having, recognition in this sea of bland.

Amanda and Alice continue to lobby the GCC for intervention concerning Tiffany. They feel she reaffirms everything the old-boy network thinks about women—that we improve the landscape on the trading floor, but that the real work, the mega-trades and deals, is to be handled by the men. They see her as bait for clients, a tantalizing young thing to have at a client dinner, while the big boys discuss real things. She can sip her wine and toss her long, ring-curled hair from left to right while smiling at their jokes and arranging for their car service to bring them home.

“Can we at least agree to file a complaint with human resources?” Alice asks, visibly annoyed at our circular conversation. “Just some vague thing about enforcing the dress code.”

“That's just great. Women filing a complaint against other women,” Amy says. “Men love watching a catfight. No way.”

Amanda interrupts. “Maybe she deserves her own memo. Maybe she has no clue
how
to dress professionally.”

Something about Amanda using the word
memo
sparks a memory with me. “So it was you?” I ask. “You're the memo writer!”

Amanda laughs. “The hell I am. I had almost forgotten that Metis memo, but really, I think it was terrific, so whichever one of you gals here is too fraidy cat to out yourself, just know that your handiwork is fine with me. You should also know that Amanda thinks that—hello?—Naked Girl deserves her own memo.”

I look around the table. Violette Hawes, quiet as ever, blushes, but there's no way it's her. Amy is looking around too, so I don't think it's her. Alice is too humorless to tap into the tone of that memo, but sometimes it's the ones we least suspect. I stare at her until I realize that everyone else is staring at me.

“Are you kidding?” I explode. “It wasn't me!” They better be sure it's not me. There's no way I would do such a thing. “Maybe whoever Metis is, she should be the one to file the complaint about Naked Girl.”

“ ‘Metis was a goddess of wise counsel, cunning, craftiness, and wisdom,' ” reads Alice, who just searched the Internet for that piece of information. While she speaks she opens an email on her phone. “And the reason I believe Metis isn't one of us is because she's just sent another email.” While we're all sitting here getting nothing accomplished, Metis has been working.

Together we grab for our phones and find the Metis memo in our in-boxes. It reads our thoughts so completely, it is as if this Metis person was sitting with us the entire time.

To:
All Employees

From:
Metis

Subject:
Put some clothes on.

Your mother isn't around to tell you to lengthen your skirt or that cleavage is for hoochie mamas, so we will. You will never be taken seriously if you don't dress seriously. Boys and girls, listen up. Socks go with those loafers. Suits come with a jacket for a reason. And if you have an away game, do us all a favor and find yourself a change of clothes. We don't want to see your oversexed butt wearing the same clothes twice in two days.