The Underwriting Page 3

  The girl’s head snapped up. Wait for it . . . Yes. There was the blush. Ten points for the day. Or maybe nine and a half—Tara was attractive, but not quite a two-pointer. Definitely borderline. When you broke down her attributes, she wasn’t that hot: great legs and a tight little waist, but no curves; her ass was flat and she couldn’t be more than a B-cup. And her brown eyes were a little too close together, though whatever she was doing with her makeup helped. But her chin was still too sharp—nothing you could do about that. Still, there was something about it all together that was attractive. What the hell, give her two points. He was feeling generous.

  Tara smirked and said nothing, returning to her BlackBerry.

  Chad kept talking: “Heard you guys had a big night last night, eh? Just ran into Lou downstairs. Boy, did he look like hell. Said he didn’t go to bed till sunrise.”

  Every other month Lou Reynolds organized drinks for the 2004 analyst class, of whom twelve of the eighty were still at the bank. The guys weren’t nearly as cool as Todd’s outside-of-work crew, but he knew his presence meant a lot to Lou and that Lou would pay it back with loyalty someday when Todd was running things. “Ha. I left early.”

  Chad elbowed him knowingly. “I heard you bailed, but wasn’t exactly to go to sleep. Old girlfriend?”

  “Yes,” Todd lied, weirded out, but also flattered, that these guys paid so much attention to his sex life.

  Todd tried to catch Tara’s reaction in his periphery and was grateful when Chad stepped off on the next floor and he could turn to her and laugh. “Men.”

  “Yep!” Tara smiled closed-lipped before returning to her e-mail.

  They’d slept together twice during his senior spring at Stanford, when she was a freshman. The first time was at a Pi Phi–SAE Redneck Racing pledge event. It was a frat favorite because all the girls showed up in their best Jessica Simpson–in–Dukes of Hazzard short-shorts, spray-tanned and made-up to the hilt. Except Tara, who arrived in overalls with fake teeth that would have made Gisele Bündchen ugly. Todd was manning the bar and joked with Tara about the teeth, but she, pretty drunk by that point, insisted they were real and feigned offense. They bantered for a bit and he spent his next half hour on keg duty devising something clever to say, which he delivered when he found her on the dance floor with SAE’s token gay pledge, Corey.

  “Excuse me, Tara, but I still think those teeth are fake, and I’d like to prove it by removing them for you, preferably with my tongue.”

  She’d laughed and turned to Corey, saying in a voice loud enough that Todd could hear, “The very popular Todd Kent wants to hook up with me, Corey. I guess I should probably go with him, right?” and, with Corey’s overwhelming approval (who said gays weren’t good for the frat?), turned back to Todd: “Oh, fine. Let’s go. But I’m leaving the teeth in.”

  And she had, the whole time they drunkenly fumbled through sex while the music pounded outside his frat room. When he woke up she was gone, but had left the teeth on his desk, with a note that said: Souvenir.

  He’d expected to hear from her, but didn’t. He stopped by Pi Phi for lunch with his friend Nicole the next week, but when he saw her she pretended not to notice him. Finally he got a casual “Hi there!” when he followed her to the soda fountain. “Diet Coke, eh?” He’d gestured to the glass she was filling at the tap. “Original, huh?” she’d offered, returning to her seat.

  That night he’d gotten drunk and showed up at her dorm room.

  She’d opened the door in checkered pajamas, but Todd didn’t remember much beyond that. He’d woken up in her twin bed, her long, naked body squeezed between his own and the wall. There was a condom wrapper on the side table. His head had pounded as he gently sat up to take a sip of water, knocking a worn teddy bear off the bed as he did so.

  “Morning,” Tara had said, sitting up and pulling a T-shirt from under the covers over her head.

  He’d thrown the stuffed animal at her playfully. “Nice teddy bear, freshman.”

  “Ha. Thanks. It was my sister’s.”

  “She give it to you as a going-to-college present?” he’d teased.

  “Nah. She’s dead.”

  His heart had dropped. “Fuck, I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” she’d said simply, pulling her long legs out from the covers to step over him and re-dress her lower half. She’d noticed his concern and added, for his benefit, “I’ve still got one.”

  She’d grabbed her shower caddy and a towel and headed for the door, told him she had to study but didn’t mind if he kept sleeping. He hadn’t known what to do, unaccustomed to being left in bed and under the impression that all girls liked cuddling. So he’d left before she got back from the shower, and that was it. The next week he’d graduated and moved to New York and five years later they’d been reintroduced by Lillian Dumas, an MD in Equity Capital Markets who’d had it out for him ever since he’d rejected her advances at a holiday party in favor of Suzie Tebow from Investor Relations. He’d hardly recognized Tara in a fitted suit and Longchamp bag and makeup to match the New York working-girl uniform, and he’d felt a pinch of sadness that she, too, had become a cliché.

  “After you.” Todd held the elevator door open, wondering whether she still slept with the teddy bear.

  “Thanks.” She swept past, heading right as he turned left.

  Harvey’s assistant had Todd wait for twenty minutes outside the plush office where the senior vice chairman was laughing into his phone’s earpiece. The forty-second floor was only fifteen up from where Todd sat, but it felt like a different universe, with expensive art on the walls and massive offices that wrapped around the perimeter, looking out over the bustling city below.

  “Sorry for the wait,” Harvey said when Todd was finally permitted entry into the spacious corner office. His handshake was stronger than his five-foot-seven frame might have led a person to expect. “My real estate broker.” Harvey shook his head with a congenial I-know-you-don’t-know-but-trust-me-on-this-one look. “I’m buying a new place in East Hampton. Southampton’s gotten overrun. You wouldn’t believe the kind of people they’re letting into the Meadow Club.”

  “Sounds like a wise decision,” Todd said neutrally.

  “Please, sit,” Harvey offered, and Todd followed the instruction. Harvey leaned back in his chair, tapping his thumbs together in his lap and staring into Todd’s eyes, studying. Todd could feel the muscles in his neck tense down through his shoulders, the way they used to before a water polo match when he saw the opposing team.

  “Hmph,” Harvey finally grunted, shifting his weight in his chair, setting his arms on the desk between them, as if he’d uncovered all he needed to know about Todd.

  “When I was your age,” he started, “I was in the navy. I was stationed in the Pacific, in command of a crew of a hundred twenty, most of whom were older than me. It was right after the war and we were there to reingratiate ourselves with the Vietnamese.”

  Todd held his breath. He hated when old guys talked about their military days.

  “A lot of the guys liked going into town to visit the whorehouses. It was cheap entertainment and helped them relax, so I didn’t mind.”

  Harvey’s silver-blond hair was combed over his always-tanned skin; he wore an Ermenegildo Zegna suit over a starched white shirt and Cartier cuff links. Old school slick dick.

  “But then this one guy, Pete, started getting tired of going into town. He picked his favorite whore and had her come back to the barracks.” Harvey shook his head, laughing as he thought about it.

  “He was from Princeton and thought he was pretty smart, and she was just a dumb whore who didn’t speak much English. But then one night I came into my office and she was there, rifling through my files.”

  Todd glanced out the window. The slightest bit of snow was starting to fall from the gray clouds.

  “So I killed her,” Har
vey said. Todd’s eyes snapped back and Harvey pressed his lips into a calm, amused smile. “The authorities arrested Pete for it and, given it was his fault the whole thing had happened in the first place, I let justice take its course.”

  Todd shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  “You see, Todd, what Pete didn’t understand is that there are things you can’t see. There are systems you can’t see, but they’re there, and they’re bigger than you.”

  Todd held his breath, his irritation returning: what was the point of all this?

  “And to the system”—Harvey sat forward—“you are nothing.” He paused, like a self-important prick, then sat back. “Now, who’s going to be on your team?”

  Todd willed his eyes not to roll. “Neha Patel will be the analyst, she’s the best in the group and—”

  “I’ll let you have Beau as your associate,” Harvey interrupted.

  “What?” Beau Buckley was Harvey’s business manager, a notoriously useless associate who owed his ironclad employment to the fact that his billionaire father was one of the firm’s largest clients. Everyone knew he was being groomed for an executive role at the firm, which meant he spent all his time networking without touching any actual work.

  “I’ve talked to Beau. He knows the application well and has an interest in technology. It’ll be good experience for him to get exposure to a deal of this magnitude,” Harvey said, not leaving any room for discussion.

  “All due respect, Beau has no experience and, with Josh wanting to keep the team small—”

  “Lillian Dumas will be your point for Equity Capital Markets,” Harvey continued, ignoring Todd’s protest. “She’s been helping me with our Silicon Valley strategy.”

  “Absolutely not.” Todd put his hands up. Not only did Lillian hate him for blowing off her advances three years ago, she was as high maintenance as women came: she was a female slick dick.

  “Why not?” Harvey said calmly but firmly.

  “Because she’s a bitch—” Todd started, then corrected. “She’ll make Josh uncomfortable.”

  “You’re selling the value of an online-dating site to a mostly male sales force. You need a girl on the team.”

  “We’ve got Neha.”

  “Is she pretty?” Harvey asked bluntly.

  Todd paused. “Tara,” he heard himself say. “Tara Taylor can do it.”

  Harvey studied Todd’s face. “Fine. That’s the team, then.”

  “Fine,” Todd said, processing what he’d just said. Tara was a good idea, right?

  “We need this to go out in time for second quarter earnings.”

  Todd lifted a brow. “It’s March. To make it into Q2 earnings it would have to be out by mid-May. You know this will take at least three and a half—”

  “L.Cecil goes before the federal court the last week in May. I need this deal before then to counteract negative press.”

  “You can’t decide an IPO based on press reports.”

  Harvey calmly crossed his hands on the desk, waiting.

  “Fine,” Todd said. “We’ll move as fast as we can.”

  “When do you meet with the team?”

  “Friday.”

  “I’ll look forward to your status report.”

  “I don’t have time for—” Todd stopped, knowing this wasn’t worth his anger—he could have Neha do it. “Sure,” he finally said.

  “Good,” Harvey said, picking up his phone as an indication the meeting was finished.

  Todd stood, feeling like he’d won more points than Harvey but somehow still lost the game. Harvey was such a dick; he couldn’t wait to blow this deal out of the park and put the old man in his place.

  TARA

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5; NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  “Oh my god, can you believe George E is dating that, like, total peasant? Like, on the one hand it’s totally awesome that he, you know, is worth a gazillion dollars and dates normal people? But on the other hand, oh my god she’s like totally busted. I mean, like, le-gi-ti-mate-ly not attractive.” Meagan talked like someone addicted to the sensation of vocalizing.

  Tara stopped typing and waited, helplessly, for her colleague’s voice to stop.

  “Let me see.” She heard Julian, the eager-to-please associate, roll his chair over to see Meagan’s screen, fulfilling his duty as a junior colleague of making VPs feel good about themselves.

  “Right?” Meagan asked.

  “Do you think his stuff is really that good?”

  “Of course it’s that good: his last piece sold for seventeen million dollars.”

  “But is it, like, good art?” Julian asked.

  “Julian, the value of art cannot be measured objectively—it’s like what I taught you about public equity markets: perception creates reality. Is Facebook worth fifty dollars a share? What does that even mean? The market says it is, and therefore it must be so. And the market says George E should be with someone way hotter than this girl.”

  Tara sighed. What she wouldn’t give for a scandal. The firm’s current trading violations were news, but all they led to was an excuse for senior management to cut associate bonuses. What she needed was a bankruptcy or a Ponzi scheme or a massive round of layoffs to make life more interesting. She’d been at L.Cecil since she graduated from Stanford in 2007, back when markets were good and everyone with a 3.9 GPA from a top-tier university fought to get into investment banking or management consulting.

  But that was seven years ago. The financial crisis had drained the adrenaline from Wall Street, as well as promotions and retire-at-thirty bonuses. Now the path that was supposed to be the right one felt . . . static. Tara did everything right: she worked out every morning; she showed up to the office on time and was never the first to leave; she avoided gluten, limited her dairy and didn’t eat after nine p.m.; she called her parents once a week and contributed to her 401(k); she exfoliated her skin but not too often, cut her cuticles but not too close, waxed down there but not all the way; she read The New Yorker and supported NPR; and she always remembered to drink a glass of water for every glass of wine. So why did she still feel unfulfilled? What self-help book had she missed?

  Maybe she should call her doctor to up her Celexa prescription.

  The office mail clerk arrived with a box, and Tara looked up hopefully for she-wasn’t-sure-what, and sighed when the package was for Meagan.

  “Oh, perfect,” Meagan said, taking the box.

  Tara refocused on the status report she’d spent the last hour typing, taking her shoes off under her desk and spreading her toes on the carpet to ease her mind from existential crisis. She wondered what had happened to that girl Lori Pratt—the one who had left L.Cecil to become a writer—was she any happier?

  “What’s that?” Julian asked Meagan.

  “It’s my cleanse,” Meagan said, clearly pleased that he’d asked. “I’m juicing for five days starting tomorrow. I’ve got to lose six pounds before my Miami trip next weekend.”

  “Yeah, totally,” Julian said.

  “What?” Meagan’s jaw dropped. Tara turned just enough to see. Meagan had wanted Julian to tell her she didn’t need to lose weight, even though she really did need to drop a few pounds. Already prone to jelly bean binges, being on the same floor as the on-average-15-percent-below-healthy-body-weight public relations team had caused Meagan to pack two dress sizes onto her five-foot-four frame in fits of Luna Bar gorges. “Are you calling me fat?”

  Julian’s hands jumped in front of him to backpedal. “No, no, no—I just meant—those girls in Miami are just, like, so ridiculously skinny that I could understand why—”

  “Please go get me a coffee,” Meagan interrupted, assigning the associate his punishment. “Two-pump sugar-free vanilla skinny latte, three Splendas. Tara, you want anything?”

  “No, thanks.” Tara turned in her chair an
d smiled politely.

  “Hey, by the way, do you know whether Kelly Jacobson accepted her offer?”

  “I’m actually talking to her tonight,” Tara explained. Kelly was their top pick from last summer’s intern class—a cheerful and bright Stanford senior whom Tara had been assigned to “convince to accept her offer” on account of their shared alma mater.

  “Who is she deciding between?”

  “Us and Google, I think.”

  “Ugh.” Meagan made a face. “Why would you work at Google? Everyone gets totally fat there.”

  “I’ll be sure to mention that,” Tara said.

  “I’m serious, Tara.” Meagan didn’t appreciate the sarcasm. “You know I’m in charge of the summer intern recruiting committee. If she doesn’t accept the position I’m going to look totally retarded.”

  “Of course,” Tara demurred, turning back to her computer, pleased to find an instant message on her screen.

  TERRENCE: OMG I can hear her from here.

  Tara looked over to Terrence, who sat three cubicle-blocks away. He was the best-looking and most intelligent person Tara knew at L.Cecil but, as a half-black gay man, was a perpetual outsider. He had landed in Investor Relations because the firm felt the best way he could serve the company was by showing his face to the press and investors who might, seeing it, believe the company was committed to diversity.

  He was also one of Tara’s closest friends. They would have been friends under any circumstances, but being depressed in their jobs had helped to solidify the deal.

  Tara smiled at Terrence across the room and typed back.

  TARA: Will I go to hell if I tell this Kelly girl she should come work here over Google?

  TERRENCE: At least the men are better looking here.

  TERRENCE: Even if they are douchebags.

  TARA: Speaking of . . . Todd Kent encounter in the elevator this morning.

  TERRENCE: Didn’t you used to sleep with him?

  Tara blushed . . . Had she told him that?