Jake & Mimi (7 page)

Mr. Stein nods. “After thirty years.” He’s silent again, his eyes leaving us for a French watercolor on the wall, resting
on it a second, then coming back. “Mimi, you made a stronger impression on our legacy than he did on you.”

“I did?”

“He’s asked that you be assigned to his account.”

“I only met him for a second.”

“Yes. Well, he’s requested you, and when we can, we try to keep our legacies happy.”

He pauses again, and now leans forward. Here comes the hammer.

“Brice wants a crash course in modern money management,” Mr. Stein says. He pulls a note card from the thin folder, then looks
over it at us. “Money markets, Treasury bonds, mutual funds, commodities, derivatives — the history and prospects of each.”

Christ. Why not physics and space travel, too? Mr. Stein looks at me. “Now you know why
you’re
here, Mr. Teller.”

The man read my résumé. Actually
read
it. Under “Specialties” I listed “financial instruments.” A bit of a stretch, as my only exposure to them was a three-week
winter-term course my senior year at Ham Tech. Jeremy was my roommate at the time, and my coursemate, too, and thanks to a
torrid stretch at the dice cup, I spent my mornings sleeping off the winter-term parties while he trudged through the snow
to class, notebook in hand. I don’t think I made it to three of them. As for the notes, I have a clear image of standing in
back of the frat house the night of finals, dropping them onto the bonfire.

“He wants five investment scenarios,” says Mr. Stein, “With estimated exposure and rates of return on each — for both bull
and bear markets. I’ll need all of this on my desk the morning of the first—ten days from today.” He looks at us. “You can
manage this?”

Mimi nods. “I’m sure we can,” she says. He looks at me, and I nod, too.

“At least you’ll be spared lunch. Largesse is another quality Andrew failed to inherit from his father. Last year, if I recall,
it was a sandwich and a tonic water at the Carnegie Deli.” He leans forward with the two account folders. “I don’t know what
we can expect from Brice — nothing, maybe. But his account’s been a nonperformer for thirty years. It’s worth a shot.”

We each take a folder.

“That’s it, you two. Thank you.”

We stand and walk together out of the office. Mimi closes the door behind us and looks at me, smiling.

“Are you as swamped as I am?” she asks as we walk down the hall toward Reception. Her perfume is light, alluring.

“Two weeks here and this is as far as I’ve made it from my desk.”

She laughs. “I know the feeling. We’ll have to do this at night, won’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Tonight’s out — the send-off party for Diane Silio. Will you be there?”

“I will,” I say.

“Shall we work out a schedule then?”

“Sure.”

We’re both quiet a second. “All right, then,” she says, as we walk from Reception into the north wing. “Back to the salt mines.
See you tonight, Jake.”

She smiles and walks off toward her office. I watch her turn the corner. Ten seconds pass and still I’m standing in the hallway,
staring at the far wall.

After my parents died, I was raised by my grandfather. “You won’t see it coming, Jake,” he told me once. “And you won’t be
able to explain it. But you’ll know.” I walk slowly back to my office and sit down at my desk. I reach for the phone. Jeremy
answers on the second ring.

“Jeremy Nascent.”

“Jeremy, it’s Jake. How would you like to see the Knicks next week? With me and Pardo. Third row.”

“Wow,” he says, but I hear the note of nervousness that I’m always bringing out in him. “What do you need, Jake?”

“Two things. I need you to look over a client file for me. And I need a crash course in financial instruments.”

“What for?”

“To impress a girl.”

He laughs. “You’ll be sure to credit me, right?”

“If it ever comes up.”

“Okay, Jake. Come over tonight with the file.”

“How about tomorrow at lunch?”

“Fine.”

I hang up the phone and spin slowly in my chair to face the window. I look out at the bright Manhattan sky. Tomorrow I’ll
learn about financial instruments and the investment needs of Andrew Brice. Tonight is the farewell party for Diane Silio.
Everyone in the firm will be there. Including Mimi Lessing.

See you tonight, Jake
, she said. I close my eyes.

Yes, she will. And she’ll see me in action.

•     •     •

Diane Silio gave her notice the day I joined the firm. This night has been coming ever since.

Diane is the first thing I see when I step off the elevator each morning, a coffee-eyed girl from the Brooklyn avenues, her
snowy skin a cool come-on amidst the dark leathers of the reception area. She was hired out of high school seven years ago,
back when our partners could still get away with choosing a receptionist for her ass. She’s kept it, and a lot more, and yet
is that rare Brooklyn looker who slips through the neighborhood gauntlet of cops and plumbers right out onto the open market.
She’s been an asset here, I’m sure, inspired to efficiency each day by the aura of money that soaks this place, but careful,
too, to wear her slit skirts cut at the knee and her blouses open at the throat, letting her trim legs and creamy swell work
on the guys here the way candy at the corner store tempts from beneath the glass.

There’s been current between us from the first. We haven’t said a hundred words in my two weeks here, but her calm eyes hold
mine an extra quarter second each time I bring her a latte from downstairs, and her voice, crisp and distant when she puts
through calls to the other accountants, is close, even warm when she puts them through to me. Part of it is pure good luck,
catching her in the flush of her last days, her mind lulled already by the black sand of Maui, by the two weeks of tropical
drinks and free license that she will escape to with a girlfriend tomorrow, before easing into her new and better life as
a legal secretary uptown.

There’s more to it than luck, though. The ten other guy associates here are steady, wire-rimmed plodders who read the Tax
Code in their free time and might have three dates and one score between them in the past year. They may all make partner
before I do, but none has what it takes to stir the blood of Miss Silio, and none would dare dream of cashing in on her giddy
last day.

I was hired as much for being a regular guy as for any magic I’ll ever work with a tax return. I earned a third-team all-NESCAC
selection in hoops up at Ham Tech. As a basketball honor, all that means is that I could hold my own with any white kid under
six-three between Albany and Buffalo, but in the interview room here at Hyson, Levay, that and my proud admission to being
a TDXer put me over the top. Sol Levine, the hiring partner, knows the money business. He knows that the best accountants
are grinders, and he’s packed the firm with a dogged crew of them. But he knows the search for capital is still half the game,
and he sensed that I might be able to go beer for beer with the goyim jocks and frat boys that this firm needs to bring aboard
if its financial ship is to sail as tall in the new century as it did in the old.

Part of my job is to go after these guys, my classmates of five short years ago. Chi Psis and Psi Us who staggered across
the stage at graduation, talking through their hangovers about Jamaica, Antigua, St. Martin, about the three months of sun
and spleefs that would wipe out whatever scrap of their liberal education had managed to survive senior week and enable them
to start fresh and ruthless at big Wall Street firms in the fall. Some of them are pulling down serious bucks now, and a few
times a month I’ll be expected to treat one to our floor seats at the Garden or to eighteen holes out on Amagansett or even,
if he’s that kind of guy, to a night at Scores, the thinking being that down the line, when they decide they need someone
to count their money for them, they’ll remember Sprewell dunking over Shaq or the three-wood they blasted to the green or
the blond angel with the schoolgirl smile who rocked back on her golden ass, uncrossed her high-heeled ankles, and offered
them a long, sweet look at heaven. They’ll remember, and they’ll reach for the phone and give us a call.

That’s the theory, anyway. We’ll see. And if it costs me? If I go so high and no higher, and watch as the grinders march past
on their way to partner? So be it. Because right now all those grinders are staring into the dull green glow of the spreadsheets
they took home with them for the weekend, and I’m watching from a limo as Diane Silio steps from a bar doorway into the soft
light of a streetlamp, the wind tugging at the open collar of her blouse as she gives our secretaries a last hug good-bye
and now walks, taut and lithe, away from her old life and toward a night she hasn’t begun to imagine.

It is the custom of the firm, on the last day of one of its own, to fete them at the Porterfield, in the financial district,
an immaculate homage to gentleman culture and a favorite of the partners. At five o’clock the secretaries and some of us junior
associates took Diane over, and for two hours she sat in our center along the gleaming brass bar, sipping Kahlua and cream,
her legs crossed demurely on the rung of a barstool. Her eyes found mine more than once, even after the partners started dropping
in, each staying long enough for a martini or an old-fashioned and then each invoking clients or family, handing Diane a gold-edged
parting envelope, accepting the hug they’d waited seven years for, and leaving for their garages and cars and Connecticut
weekends.

As they took their turns with her, I looked toward the door and saw Mimi Lessing come through it. She shook her long hair
once, softly, and walked toward the group. I ordered a glass of white wine from the bartender and held it out to her as she
reached us.

“Jake Teller,” she said, smiling. “Why, thank you.”

“To life after tax season,” I said, touching my glass to hers.

“Amen.” In the soft light of the bar her dark hair shimmered, and again my eyes went to the smooth skin beneath her camisole.
“My last glass till April first,” she said. She took a sip. “So, you’ve been with us two weeks?”

“Yes.”

“What brought you?”

“The odds. Two hundred associates at Grant Thornton and eight partners.”

She laughed. “Here it’s twelve and four. Well, you picked a fine time to start.” Mimi’s eyes looked past me a second. She
lowered her voice. “You must know Diane well,” she said.

“Why?”

“She’s watching you.”

She was. The last of the partners had gone by then, and everyone had relaxed. Diane, warmed by the two drinks, the attention,
the dark outline of the crisp hundreds in the envelopes on her lap, had pulled the clip from her smooth hair and leaned into
the last hour of her special night. “Who’s been to Maui?” she asked, her eyes on mine, and when I said a buddy of mine had
gone last year and come back certain that at twenty-six the two best weeks of his life were behind him, she moved aside so
I could get next to her at the bar. “Excuse me,” I said to Mimi, who tipped her wineglass to me. I caught the barest trace
of rose in Diane’s perfume as I slid next to her, counted six buttons on her cream blouse before it disappeared into her gray
skirt. “What did he like best?” she asked, and her brown eyes, soft as a teen queen’s, filled with life as I told her of the
warm ash she could wade in in the open mouths of the volcanoes and of the trained dolphins that would swim with the guests
in the hotel coves. Her crossed legs started to bob gently. A minute later I looked at my watch.

“That’s it for me,” I said.

“Already?”

“I’m meeting friends uptown.”

Her eyes stayed on mine, suggesting, as clearly as if she’d said it aloud, that the others would all have to leave soon and
that if I could wait them out, this night might not have to end in a bar.

“You’ll come by the firm when you get back?” I asked. Diane looked down, then back, the offer in her eyes dimming, then gone.

“With pictures,” she said, holding out her slim white hand. I shook it and then said my good-byes to the others. On my way
through the group I stopped at Mimi.

“Tomorrow night?” I said.

She nodded. “Eight o’clock in the conference room?”

“Okay.”

“I’ll bring the caffeine,” she said. “Have fun with your friends, Jake.”

“I will.”

I walked out into the street. Through the Twin Towers I could just see the red sun dipping into the water. The night, with
all its promise, would be here in minutes. I walked up the block to the black limo that waited at the corner, the familiar
star insignia of Orion Car Service on its side. Thanks to the long hours of tax season, I knew all ten of their drivers. At
the wheel tonight sat Rudy, his big arm on the open window, the
Post
spread out in his lap.

“Rudy.”

“Jake.”

“Diane Silio’s car?”

He nodded. I opened the door, climbed in, and sat back in the leather seat. Through the open partition I met Rudy’s eyes in
the rearview mirror.

“You dog,” he said.

“We’ll see.”

And here I am. Night is on us now, and the financial district is quiet. The skyscrapers have spit out the last of their money-men
and stand like sentries all down Wall Street. Through the floor of the limo I can feel the low rumble of the Broadway local.
It rolls off, its fading clatter giving way to silence and now to the magic click, click, click of Diane Silio’s heels. “Bye,”
she calls out behind her, and then the limo door opens and I see a gray skirt and, where it divides along its slit, a trim
stockinged thigh, then a flash of blouse, and suddenly Diane’s brown eyes, as shocked as a victim’s but recovering in the
same instant. She is half in the car, her wrist on the seat, her eyes on mine, on mine, on mine still.

She slides inside.

“Seven fifteen Clermont,” she says, looking straight ahead as she pulls the door closed. “At De Kalb.”

No man who makes do with a steady, or even pays for sex, will ever know the charge of this moment. The electricity. We pull
away from the curb, accelerating smoothly through a yellow light, then up the curving bridge ramp, then easing into the streaming
lights that flow together, away from the perfect skyline of Manhattan and toward the broken waterfront of Brooklyn. I lean
forward and slide the partition closed; we are alone, three feet of smooth black leather between us in the cool dark.