rest of the team shook their heads at my request, but Sarah made her opinion clear. Even in an office where most men had their shoes shined, their backs waxed, their suits tailored and their personal trainers on speed-dial, my obsessive culinary peccadilloes made me a disgrace to feminists everywhere.
“It’s not easy being you, is it?” she said, pouting in my direction.
Peter, a fellow Associate, looked up from his copy of TheEconomist; Denny, a lowly Analyst, swallowed half of a jelly doughnut and Wade, the eager Intern, stopped midsip of his coffee. All eyes around the conference table focused on me, but before I could respond the overhead lights flickered off. Everyone glanced up at the ceiling, and the lights flickered back on for a second, before f lashing out again. The digital wall-clock followed suit, as did the Bloomberg terminal.
Dropping my honey-glazed, I swung the door open and stepped into a darkened office. To my surprise, my otherwise narcissistically-hyper-functioning, Type-A-personality colleagues stood dumbfounded, searching one another’s faces for answers. United in temporary paralysis because of the loss of our Internet connection, we huddled around a secretary’s CB radio. That’s when the crackling voice of a lone CNN reporter explained that through a series of technological mishaps at grid centers across the northeastern United States, the juice had been sucked out of the region.
Within minutes we were headed for the darkened stairwell, since elevators are not an option when someone turns out the lights in New York City. We made our way down each f light single file, relying solely on the sounds of each other’s footsteps to avoid a collision. As my forehead began beading over with sweat, I swallowed hard and chose to rely on the Closeted Claustrophobes’ mantra to keep my mind in focus: Check for exits, Close your eyes, Count to ten, Calm your nerves, Center yourself. My team’s co-managing director, Alan, walked before me, and my partner Peter followed close behind. With our palms on the walls and railings, we made it down the first twelve floors without incident. Clearly, it was too good to last. Thanks to my batlike auditory skills and my nearly four-inch alligator pumps, it was the tenth-floor landing that did me in. I must have miscounted the stairs because my right leg stopped short and sent me doubling over. Knees buckled and back bent, I thrust my arms out before me and grabbed instinctively for something that might break my fall. I won’t mention which part of Alan’s lower anatomy did the trick, but I will say, Thank God I didn’t squeeze any tighter.
That blackout was proof positive that New Yorkers cannot be trusted in the dark. They’re almost as mischievous as Australians are in the light. Once we made it outside, I apologized profusely for sexually harassing my own boss, who refused to make eye contact with me.
“Ahem…Never mind, Vina…Let’s just forget about it, okay?” Alan mumbled, before disappearing into the hordes surrounding our building.
I waded through thousands of ornery businesspeople boiling in their suits and trekked the five avenues and ten blocks toward my apartment. Along the way, I arrived at the surprising conclusion that an alligator pump is in fact the most appropriate shoe for a crisis situation in this city. Because the most effective way to express your discontent when someone gropes you in a crowd is to jam your heel into that person’s foot as hard as you possibly can and twist it, like you’re putting out a cigarette.
It took all of my strength to complete the final stretch: the ten-flight hike up an unlit stairwell to my place. It wasn’t until I stood before the comfort of my front door that the mounting tension in my neck began to drain out of me; here I would be safe. As soon as I was through the door, I wrenched off my shoes and I promptly f lung them across the room. That was the moment I remembered my little houseguest, because I nailed him right between the eyes. Booboo let out a squeal that made me wonder whether there wasn’t a small child hiding in all that fur, and darted straight under my bed.
I spent the next half hour lying on my belly, peering under my bed and pleading with Booboo to come out. He stared at me maliciously, blinking away the dust bunnies, and yawning or repositioning himself occasionally on top of my shoes. Eventually, I gave up on the niceties and decided to make a grab for him. Taking a deep breath to prepare for what should have been an elegant gesture, I lunged at him. I shoved my entire arm in his direction, until my head banged against the bed frame.
“Raaaaaargh!!!!” He growled what I could only imagine was Booboo in cat-speak, and scratched my forearm.
“Shit!” I yelled, and recoiled from the bed, with my eyes watering.
This was the problem with being Super Woman’s only daughter. With thirty months to spare until age thirty, my mother had fine-tuned the balance of home and career, secured the illusion of waking up with meticulous makeup, and mastered the art of willing my pancakes down off the kitchen ceiling mere moments after I threw them up there. I, on the other hand, at the same point in my life, was reverse-sexually-harassing my way out of a career I didn’t honestly enjoy and while swooning over one homosexual man, was failing miserably in my attempt to win the affections of the wheezing, fifteen-pound cat of another. Honestly, it was a wonder that I could even feed myself.
Whether or not I look the part, I hail from a long line of loan sharks. My father has planned to make this one of his sound bytes when the New York Times interviews him in ten years, for a two-page spread about his daughter, the globe-trotting financier. Betel-chewing, bindi-wearing, and almost always below five feet tall, most of the women in my ancestral tree had arrived at their careers in high (or more accurately, low) finance by way of necessity, rather than choice. Practicality rules when you are widowed young in parts of Punjab where remarriage is as much of an option as a sex change. The tradition was to borrow against what little land their husbands had left them, and then loan to the poorer of their villages at three times the banks’ normal rates. Pragmatism is what we know. So it was probably less than incredible that, despite my skant affection for the industry, I had managed to thrive on Wall Street.
Most people in my life had no idea what I actually did for a living; nor did they care to find out. And I didn’t blame them. They were better off clinging to some airbrushed notion of what my days as an investment banker were really like. Essentially, I did the research that helped my bosses decide which stocks to invest in, and when. Sometimes it involved speaking with the management of public companies, who either eyed me like an Omaha Steak or dismissed me entirely. At other times it involved combing through mountains of reports on an industry to develop a reasonable opinion about where it was headed.
Typically, I would spend a week researching before I presented a conclusion to my bosses, who often patted me on the back, or otherwise told me the reasons why they believed that I was wrong, if they felt like explaining themselves. Soon thereafter, the market would always prove them right. Apparently, this was good training for the day when, if I was lucky, I would become one of them. It wasn’t being corrected that bothered me so much as it was being wrong. Regardless, my plan was to stick with the job, act like I enjoyed it and apply to business school within a few years.
After earning my MBA, I could start thinking about what I really wanted to do with my life. I would have been a supermodel, but the six-inch heels I’d need just to reach up to the average model’s elbow ended that fantasy. Thanks to the same genes, I was far better suited for sneaking under turnstiles than for strutting across runways.
And I would have been a novelist, but there were other genetic predispositions to consider. My father hadn’t come to this country with eleven dollars in his pocket thirty years ago, mopped floors at a supermarket, begged for an entry-level engineer’s position, tolerated racism and ignorance and decades of struggle, started a business and saved enough to send his daughter to an Ivy League college, only to watch her give up a career of which he could only have dreamed all those years ago.
Another reason why I survived in investment banking was because early on I had learned
