Pineapple Street(24)
* * *
—
But you didn’t do anything wrong!” Darley cried indignantly. “Chuck was the leak! You had nothing to do with it!”
“I was unreachable,” Malcolm said with a grimace. “When the news broke, I was in the air with no wi-fi. The entire deal was crumbling and I was lying on a flatbed eating warm mixed nuts.”
“This is completely unfair,” Darley vented. “What about Brice? Is Brice being fired?”
“No, Brice is fine. While I was offline, Brice was on the ground managing the narrative. He protected himself.”
“Why? He was on the same team! He knew Chuck even before you did!”
“Brice has more friends in the organization than I do. He has the banking pedigree.” Malcolm kicked the leg of the chair.
“Brice should have fought for you too!”
“Well, he didn’t.”
“That little shit. They are both little shits,” Darley spat.
“I just can’t believe they all let me take the fall.” Malcolm shook his head.
“It’s their loss, Malcolm. We’ll be okay. You’ll make some calls and set up some interviews. You’ll be working again in no time.”
“Maybe.” Malcolm looked broken, like a dishonored gladiator in defeat.
“They’re idiots for letting you go.” Darley curled up in Malcolm’s lap and buried her face in his neck. It made her so upset that she wasn’t able to protect him. That the Brices of the world had scores of family friends to vouch for them and Malcolm didn’t have anyone. Sure, her father was connected in the real estate world, and if you wanted to throw a Moroccan-themed dinner for fifty at a moment’s notice her mother had the hookup for a caterer and a florist, but that wasn’t going to do Malcolm any good.
The whole thing reminded Darley of the time her high school friend Allen Yang applied to be a member of the Fiftieth Club. He had the sponsors, he had the letters, he certainly had the money, and when he went in for the faux-casual interview to drink scotch with the membership committee in the club lounge, he felt like he’d nailed it. Then his application was denied. Darley knew it was racism. There was no possible other reason. But nobody had explicitly said it, so Allen had to let it ride. How much of Malcolm’s ousting was because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and how much was because he wasn’t an old boy with a last name like Dimon, Moynihan, or Sloan? Nobody said, “We’re firing you because you don’t have a white dad to stick up for you,” but to Darley it was clear as day.
* * *
—
Malcolm spent the next few weeks inviting old business school friends to lunch, reaching out to colleagues from his early investment banking days, and taking meetings with anyone who’d see him. While Chuck Vanderbeer quickly failed up, his private equity father securing him an analyst position at Apollo, it was evident Malcolm’s name had been dragged in the dirt. As far as banking was concerned, Malcolm was radioactive. His friends and acquaintances would order their steak, always rare, and before even taking their first sip of iced tea asked, “What the hell happened with that Azul deal?” Everyone knew, and somehow they thought it was his fault. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t done anything wrong; he was tainted and was unceremoniously thrown out of the Masters of the Universe club.
When headhunters started calling, Darley was optimistic. “See, doll? Lots of people want you.”
But the positions they offered were at third-tier firms, horrible banks where he’d have no hope of getting back into aviation. Malcolm just couldn’t stomach the thought, couldn’t go from being a highflier to a serf. If he took one of these jobs, he’d be spending the majority of his days commuting to and from Midwestern industrial cities, connecting through Chicago, sitting in economy class, spending his nights in Red Roof Inns where the beds’ polyester linens were designed to hide stains.
Darley comforted him, pointing out how many bankers became briefly infamous for far worse—the twenty-six-year-old kid who lost his company $500 million in unauthorized trades only to do the same thing again a year later. He somehow still had a job. (It didn’t hurt that he was descended from several first families of Virginia.) The guy who hid $2.6 billion in losses on copper futures from his bank in Tokyo. The rogue trader who bankrupted Barings Bank in 1995.
“You’re not making me feel better,” Malcolm complained. “Those guys were idiots.”
“You’re the smartest person I know,” Darley told him. She meant it. “You’ll land a better job.”
“If I were so smart, I wouldn’t have missed Poppy and Hatcher’s childhood to make money for a bank that kicked me to the curb,” he said glumly.
* * *
When people asked Darley how she and Malcolm met, Darley simply said “at business school,” and that was enough for most people, but the truth was that she had sought Malcolm out, had wanted him before she’d even laid eyes on him. Darley had spent two years as an analyst at Morgan Stanley between Yale and Stanford. An associate had shown her Malcolm’s blog about airlines, and when she realized he was also going to be enrolled at Stanford too, she felt the way Kate Middleton must have felt when she realized that Prince William had switched from the University of Edinburgh to St Andrews. He would be hers. That was because Darley had a bit of a side gig of her own. Through perfectly legal means she had managed to figure out the algorithm for JetBlue ticketing and had been trading airline stocks based on their consumer volume year over year. Every month she bought a ticket at 12:01 on the first and then 11:59 on the thirtieth or thirty-first. Their numbering system was stupidly straightforward, and in that way she could figure out how many tickets they had sold. She wasn’t playing with big money; she was day-trading for fun and just to prove that she’d cracked it. When she confessed this to Malcolm over tacos and margaritas on their first date, it was as though she had told him she had been Bo Derek’s body double or could do a split, it was that sexy. She had already been factoring in the fluctuating costs of fuel, but with Malcolm they managed to also consider cost savings and expenditures based on routes and jets leased to other airlines. Although JetBlue changed their ticketing codes a year later and Darley’s loophole closed, the deal was done: Malcolm had met his equal, a partner for life who loved him for exactly who he was, and Darley had bagged her Prince William.