minutes after nine if you worked out your day in a single time zone; the day continuing without beginning or end, this side of the world or the other side, for myself and others who laboured in the global financial markets.
The sidewalks thinned by the wind-chill and final curtain of rush hour. I trudged across the concrete plaza between the office towers of the Toronto Dominion Centre. Despite running late, I persevered with my morning ritual of taking the stairs from the underground parking lot into the lobby of the tower opposite my office, and then walking outdoors across the plaza to my building, rather than flashing up in the elevator directly from my car to my office suite.
The controlled environments within the sealed glass office towers precluded me from touching the true rhythms of the day. Inside, I would be muffled by stale heat, re-chilled air, false, fluorescent light; insulated by my synthetic manipulation of money from an immense distance through computer impulse and intangible telephone words; never meeting the people I was dealing with or seeing the money I was trading. Without this exposure to a legitimate atmosphere, it was easier for me to get swept along in the frantic momentum of the markets; it was easier for my world, always seductive, always urgent, to lie to me.
The stiff wind tugged at me. I squinted, tucked my chin, glanced to both sides as I walked, trying to keep my eyes shielded from the blasts of grit. Noticed that, with the exception of a single kamikaze bike courier and a handful of shivering smokers hugging the revolving doors, I was alone on the concrete squares of the plaza. To someone looking down from the upper floors of the towers, I must have seemed like some forgotten chess piece struggling to cross the wind-blown board after the game had already been abandoned.
In my final steps to the doors, I pulled the metallic cold through my nostrils sharply. Searching for the part of the air that was genuine.
* * *
Michelle, our receptionist, shaggy blonde bangs, her thirties nearly spent and her excessive weight haplessly cloaked in a pleated top, looked up from her computer keyboard through blue-rimmed designer bifocals and broke into a cheerful smile. Huge hoop earrings dancing against her round apple face, she reached to a shelf at the side of her station where snapshots of her cat and her nieces clung with yellowing Scotch tape, and lifted a clutch of pink message slips. “Morning, morning, morning. These are all for you from yesterday.”
She bunched her florid cheeks into a conspiratorial grin and whispered a warning. “You-know-who is looking for you. And he’s pissed. He’s been bellowing around here for the last half hour.”
I grinned back at her. Cardinal rule of deal-making: be nice to the receptionists and secretaries because they were the gatekeepers who got you in the door and they always knew the gossip and the score. But I also had a special relationship with Michelle, garnered from having her work late over the past several months to run the mountains of word processing from an unruly stack of contracts that always required urgent overnight revision for sending back to Singapore. Slugging it out four or five hours after closing to process the endless email between our attorneys and the Singapore attorneys, she had become close enough to be trusted without being so close that she was a threat.
I shrugged. “What else is new?”
“One more week until my vacation starts is what’s new.”
“And you have something sinful planned, I hope.”
“Next weekend my girlfriend and I fly to Miami and hit that cruise ship. And we’re gonna go wild.”
I played along, made a face of scandalized goofiness. “I’ll watch for the coverage on CNN.”
That brought a giggle from her, a puff of glee that melted as soon as it hit the air.
On its tender ripple, I launched myself past her.
Several times at the weary finish of our late evenings I had taken her to dinner in appreciation of her dogged commitment. Each time I had carried away a sadness that would not wash away from how fiercely she generated her cheerfulness over margaritas, telling of evenings soaked up with watching her favourite television programs, talking on the phone for hours to her girlfriends. And then also her oblique references to nights when she had gone home with men, knowing they would never stay an extra hour or call the next day. Listening to her, I had felt in her voice how their silence settled on her like cold rain, and I had struggled to conceal my artless pity for how hurtful it must be for her to live in the loneliness left over from men who rejected her because she was overweight. That sadness, safely arms-length from my own, was one of the few emotions I had allowed myself to trust, let myself feel. Now, every time I saw her, I felt guilty that, beneath my listening to her dinner chatter, I had borrowed her emotions, spending them like some counterfeit currency to sustain myself through the gaps in my own life.
Walking, I stuffed the message slips in my pocket, shucked my overcoat, tossed it onto a chair through the open door of my office as I passed. Conserving my energy by avoiding the endless detours of catching up to telephone calls, faxes, and emails. Heading determinedly to the end of the hall, walking unannounced into the end office.
I paved my entrance with, “Morning, Kyle.”
“Paris,” Kyle acknowledged tightly. “Nice of you to show up.”
“I was here until midnight most of last week. I needed a day to catch up. Left you a voice memo.”
“I’m not talking about the hours.”
“Neither am I.”
“Don’t I fuckin’ know it.” Dropping his reaction, unclothed by any qualification or pretence, into the several feet that separated us, was Kyle exercising his implicit licence of senior partner. Politeness reserved for valuable clients; competence our focus here. Kyle bounced his pen against a sheaf of loose correspondence and computer reports fanned across his desk. Chafing.
I fingered Kyle’s favourite tactic: launch an uncomfortable and expectant silence, then seek to gain advantage by out-waiting me so any comment or explanation I offered could be immediately attacked and criticized.
I held back, letting the mounting seconds worm into him.
I watched him slide forward in his chair to close the distance between us; his lips pulled tight, the sparse grey wires of hair brushed against his receded hairline. I began to feel pinched in by his aggression.
In the grinding stillness, I studied Kyle warily, hoping to pluck some leverage for my defence from any careless body language; yet I was unable to come up with anything except, as usual, how poorly his suit jacket puckered around his shoulders and elbows. I was reminded that Kyle, staring down sixty, pumped weights for an hour a day at his health club with a personal trainer kept on the firm’s payroll; regularly competing in the masters division of power-lifting contests even though he was often the shortest man at any business meeting or conference table. The lone un-retired founding partner of the firm, his authority and his emotional intensity, like his physical prowess, were lumped in his bulky upper body. His business and political power was hoarded in an untidy Rolodex, daubed and dog-eared and mulishly preserved in an age of computer databases, guarding a hefty roster of influential people he had accumulated and cultivated over several decades.
Under Kyle’s fixed and unblinking stare, I made a display of leaning in the doorway casually, knowing from experience that much of my own competence emanated from projecting an illusion that I possessed a limitless reservoir of confidence.
Kyle broke first. “Where the hell were you when everything started to
