The Futures(72)

“Did you check your wallet before she left? Or maybe you just paid her up front. I know some of them won’t have it any other way.”

“Fuck you, man. I’m not washed up like you. I don’t have to pay for ass.”

“Bullshit. What about Vegas?”

“That’s different. That’s Vegas. Even Evan was paying for it in Vegas.”

Chuck raised an eyebrow. “Evan?”

“Our first night there. He didn’t come home until the morning.”

Chuck threw his head back and laughed. “You think our little Evan was out with a prostitute?”

I felt the heat rising under my collar. I should have said something, changed the subject. But in the previous few weeks, I’d learned it was better not to draw attention to myself.

“Well, where was he, then?” Roger was acting like I wasn’t right there.

“He crashed on our couch that night, in my and Brad’s room. After you and your hooker locked him out.”

Brad, sitting across the table, glanced up at his name. He froze, thumbs hovering above his BlackBerry keyboard. He looked at Chuck, but Chuck had already moved on. Then Brad shifted his gaze to me. I could see the rapid realization in his stare.

The room went quiet. Roger’s knee stopped jiggling. “Finally,” Chuck muttered, spinning around to face the table.

“Morning, everyone,” Michael said, and the room murmured in response. He took his seat at the head of the table. “Steve, why don’t you start us off?” Steve nodded and launched into an update, doing his best to make the macro group’s weak results sound palatable. Michael watched him with his hands steepled together, like a villain out of a movie. He did look the part: steely gray hair, a face carved with deep wrinkles, a skeptical squint. People still feared Michael, as they always had, but now the fear was earned. He was in charge; he’d saved the company. Things were going exactly as planned on the WestCorp deal. The rest of the world had noticed WestCorp’s growing exports, and their stock was rising rapidly, just as predicted. There were whispers that Kleinman was going to stay in DC and angle for the top job at Treasury in the new administration. That would mean Michael was permanently in charge, and that my trajectory at Spire could continue unchecked. Michael hinted at a raise and a promotion on the horizon. I couldn’t really believe how lucky I was.

But I had miscalculated what would happen after the deal went live. The rest of Spire didn’t want to see that the firm’s survival hinged on this one specific deal. The only thing they saw was their exclusion from it. We were the competition. Roger confirmed it for me a few days earlier. I bumped into him as I was leaving Michael’s office. “Shit, sorry,” I said, bending down to help gather the papers he’d dropped. While we were crouched, our faces close, Roger snarled: “You think you’re real hot shit, don’t you?” People stared at me pointedly in the hallways—others, not just Roger, had noticed how much the newly powerful Michael had taken me under his wing.

I thought they’d be happy about the success. I thought I had finally proved that I belonged in this world, too. But I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

A parallel had become clear to me. For a long time I’d hoped that things would get better, at home and at work. That the small daily miseries—jealous glares from coworkers, stiff silences from Julia—would eventually prove temporary, if I worked hard enough. But it was Julia, the previous weekend, who finally made me understand. I’d been hurrying out the door on Saturday morning, and Julia was sitting on the stoop, her eyes red and puffy. She told me that she’d been fired. I felt a pulse of sympathy for her, and then—nothing. I was struck less by the news than by my own lack of reaction. It was like hearing about a minor plane crash in a distant country. Sad, but not sad for me. On the way to work, I wondered whether it was a delayed response. Maybe the feeling would come later, the feeling of watching a loved one suffer. But it never did. I didn’t love her anymore: that was the answer. Simple and clear. I was relieved to realize this, actually—it was about time. I shouldn’t have kept loving Julia for so long after things had turned so bad. And I shouldn’t have expected that Roger and the others at Spire would see me as anything but the competition. It wasn’t worth it, caring about people who didn’t care about you.

The droning at the front of the conference room stopped. Wanda was waiting for Michael in the doorway. He gestured at the person talking to continue. On the other side of the glass wall, Wanda fluttered her hands as they spoke. She looked nervous.

Michael stuck his head back in. “I have to take this,” he said to the room. “Finish without me.”

In the silence, Steve cleared his throat, said we might as well keep going. But I wasn’t listening anymore. I leaned back to watch Michael and Wanda retreating down the hall toward his office. Michael was walking so fast that Wanda had to run to keep up.

Around noon, I passed by Michael’s office for the umpteenth time that day. The door was still closed. Wanda’s chair was empty. I turned my back, pretending to examine the papers in my hands. The hallway was quiet, and I strained to hear something, anything, through the door.

“Excuse me,” a woman said, pushing past me. It was our head of PR, a woman in a bright green dress and a crisp bob, her bracelets jangling as she knocked hurriedly on Michael’s door. Her perfume had a distinctive musky scent, a trail she left whenever she barreled through the hallways to put out a fire. A smell I had come to associate with panic. She opened the door without waiting for a response. A loud conversation erupted through the opening before she slammed it shut again.