Uh-oh. Here it comes. She knows what he’s about to say because he’s said it a hundred times already.
“The biggest thing is you got to let Beck come out.”
She breathes in deeply, pulling in the fetid and humid air that has filled the office ever since they turned off the air conditioners. As they always seem to, her grinding molars find the scar tissue inside her left cheek and the taste in her mouth changes. She’s bleeding.
“Why is everyone so concerned about Beck? Beck is fine. Beck is more than fine. He got promoted today. Or was it yesterday? He gets to be an MD, and do you know how long it took him? A year. I’ve been here six years and I’ve been up for MD the past four. Do you know who the biggest alpha generator around here is?”
“You?”
“For the past two years.”
“What’s an alpha?”
“Alpha generation…it’s just a way of showing who earns the most for the firm, who the best stock picker is, and it’s me. Do you know what they told me last year? ‘We can’t promote you because you’re too volatile. Everyone’s afraid of you.’ And the year before that? ‘We can’t promote you because you’re too quiet. No one ever knows what you’re thinking.’”
“Take it easy. I’m not trying to upset you. I’m trying to get you to think through this thing logically with me. People will be coming to work in a few hours. You and me, we have to be done and out of here by then.”
She takes a turn too fast and nearly bangs into the corner of Trevor’s desk. She uncrosses her arms and takes her fists from her armpits. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be strung along year after year, to get your hopes up and then get told…to have to sit and be told all the things that are wrong with you?”
“No, I don’t know what it’s like to be in your position-your work position or the one you’re in now. But I do know what it’s like to get passed over. I got passed over for this job six times.”
He’s saying all the right words. He’s saying he understands because that’s his job. But she hears it in his tone. You stupid bitch, he’s thinking. You had everything-the money, the Back Bay condo, the friggin’ horse farm in Millbrook. The shopping trips to London. And you do this? This is what you do? You stupid, spoiled rich little bitch.
She grabs the earpiece, holds it directly in front of her mouth. “I made two and a half million dollars last year. What did you make?” Hits the button to end the call, and just like that Jimmy Tarbox is out of her head.
But her head throbs. From the heat, maybe. Or dehydration. She pushes back against it with the heels of her hands against her eyes. She holds her jacket open and fans it, trying to air out. All night she’s resisted taking it off-she never takes her jacket off in public-but it has to come off. It’s too hard to breathe. What to do about Beck? She goes over and grabs the high back of his chair. It annoys her that he doesn’t flinch anymore when she approaches. She turns him to face the wall. He can stare at Trevor’s collection of golf photos.
Instead of gliding off, the jacket’s silk lining sticks to the damp insides of her elbows and she has to wrestle with it. Mother would be mortified. She settles it onto the hanger on the back of the door and stands with her arms wrapped around her. Spider-arms they used to call her, all the girls back at Monsignor Xavier Prep. She looks at Trevor’s face. What had high school been like for him back in Manchester or Sheffield or wherever he was from? Probably no one ever called him names, but she didn’t know. She didn’t know much of anything about Trevor.
Bony Sloany. That was another one. She had hated high school with every fiber in her bony body. Except for the stables. The horses and riding had saved her. These days, all that saves her is Rowan. She closes her eyes and tries to think of him. He can usually calm her down, but right now her head is too jammed.
When she opens her eyes, there is Beck. She should kill him. Put the gun to the back of his head, pull the trigger, and put him down, all without ever having to look upon his classically handsome face again. She’s already killed Trevor. Why not just do it now and let this end?
Because she hadn’t really thought it through with Trevor.
She’d caught him trying to sneak out of the building without talking to her. Not even sneaking. Just walking out as if she hadn’t been sitting in her office all day waiting for his call. As if she hadn’t skipped her daily caramel latte to cut down on trips to the bathroom. As if she hadn’t spent the long hours of the afternoon rocking back and forth at her desk, staring at the blinking cursor on her Bloomberg screen, and pleading with God not to let it happen again because she could feel it happening again. Falling and falling, waiting to hit the concrete, picking up speed with every second that ticked by with no call from Trevor. So she had prayed, asking God not to let her have anything else taken away.
And then she’d heard the vacuum cleaner, and the vacuum cleaner only ran on her floor after 7 o’clock in the evening. She’d come out of her office to find the entire floor abandoned except for the summer intern-Hailey? Hallie?-huddled over the printer. She’d moved toward Trevor’s office, slowing down as she went, not knowing if she was more afraid to find him there or gone. He was there, all right. Impossible to miss. Blustery blowhard Trevor holding forth. The voice on the other side of the conversation hadn’t been as loud, but she had recognized it. Trevor and Beck talking, voices brimming with excitement and manly good cheer. The tone had been clear, but the words were covered by the sound of the approaching vacuum. She’d thought they might be talking golf.
Her phone is singing again. She reaches for the earpiece and finds nothing but ear. Can’t remember taking the thing off. She follows the Bach and finds her cell on the conference table.
“Hello?”
“How you doing, kid?”
“Fine.”
“How’s Beck?”
“Same.”
“I have to ask you to stop hanging up on me. The bosses are getting sick of this thing. You’ve got bosses. You know what I’m sayin’, right?”
He’s skipping over the fact that her boss is a corpse in a $6,000 Brioni suit and a TAG Heuer watch and that she’s the one who made him that way. He’s acting as if she could surrender to him and then go home tonight, eat a banana for dinner, maybe walk over to Emack & Bolio’s for a scoop of fat-free vanilla yogurt in a cup. Make it last for an hour while she sits and watches the cool kids on Newbury Street smoking and laughing and texting. Then she could come in to work tomorrow, maybe wearing the dark blue Tahari, and show up at the morning meeting as if nothing had happened. Of course, Beck would be the new MD on the growth team, or maybe they would just slot him into Trevor’s job as CIO and promote some other strapping young boy from a fine business school to MD. Pick any of them-Justin, Peter, Shamir. She’d still be a senior portfolio manager. She would always be a senior portfolio manager, which was why she’d had no choice but to take the.22 out of her bag and shoot Trevor through the head.
“I have to ask you this to make sure,” Jimmy says. “Don’t get upset, but your father keeps calling from New York. Are you sure you don’t want to talk to him?”
She knows why Daddy is calling and she knows why Mother isn’t. Mother is lying perfectly still in some dark room with a damp cloth on her forehead and a few dozen milligrams of Percocet coursing through her veins. Daddy would be more worried than upset. Worried about his cash flow. “Doesn’t matter what they call you,” he always tells her, usually in front of her MD brothers, “as long as the bonuses keep rolling in.” Bo, James, and Danny were too smart or too selfish or both to keep investing in his hedge fund, which really meant tithing over some growing percentage of her annual bonus and calling it an investment so that Mother wouldn’t be humiliated by another of Daddy’s busted ventures. Eventually, Daddy had stopped asking her brothers for money. “They’re married,” he’d told her. “They have families of their own to feed.”