The Black & The White (2 page)

Before getting into the shower, I
stopped to scrub the grime from the bathroom door mirror that had
been layered on for months. When I had done as much I could, I
stood back and I stared at my body, into the mirror.

I weighed 103 pounds, maybe. I prodded
my chest. I saw visible lines of my sternum. I turned left and
right. My pelvic bones protruded. I turned around and to see if the
outline of my spine was discernible. I’d had an anorexic roommate
in college. I knew the signs. I was just never hungry.

I glared at my face. I looked like
shit. My mascara was all over my cheeks and around my eyes. The
lipstick had worn off, and only remnants of the lip liner remained.
I tugged at my olive skin and noticed fine red lines of broken
blood vessels on my cheeks. My normally almond-shaped eyes were
swollen and round. My long, dark hair was a tangled mess. Mucous
had started to drip from my nose.

I licked my gums. They were still numb
from my last line.

A
merica celebrated the 150th anniversary of California’s Gold
Rush by creating a rush of hopefuls to the gold fields of Wall
Street lured by the fever of the liquid gold that was found in the
“dot com” world. It was a portentous era creating an unprecedented
amount of young millionaires.

America had never been so wealthy. And
I, having just graduated a semester early from the University of
Pennsylvania, was making nothing. I wanted to be part of that
ever-expanding group of young millionaires in the new and exciting
“dotcom” world. Everyone talked of going to Wall Street and making
it big. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I thought
making it big with them sounded great.

It was January, and with a dual degree
in Economics and Finance in hand, I thought Wall Street seemed like
a natural destination for me. Since I had been a summer intern at
Morgan Stanley the previous summer, I knew it wouldn’t be too
difficult to find a job. My boyfriend, Dani, was still in school
working on his doctorate, but he had approved of my decision to
leave. A week later, I bought a one-way bus ticket to New York
City, the epicenter of capitalism. I was en route to being a part
of the moneyed lot.

Dani drove me to the bus station and
kissed me goodbye.

“
Call me when you get
there.” His voice quivered with sadness. I was about to start my
career, and he was still years away from starting his.

“
See you this weekend,” I
whispered in his ear as I cried on his shoulder. I had done the
similar journey during my internship, but something about this trip
seemed different. From the grimy window of the Greyhound bus, I
waved goodbye.

When I stepped out of the bus two
hours later, a cloud of heat from the exhaust overcame me. “Yo,
lady, I think this is yours.” The bus driver handed me my borrowed
luggage, and off I went.

Kim, my designated mentor at the bank
I had interned for one summer in New York, had told me, “Leaving
New York is great, but coming home to it is even better. It’s New
York City. There’s nothing that can compare.” She had also said,
“New York forces you to grow up very quickly.”

It was January but Port Authority was
hot. The air in the station smelled of stale urine and exhaust from
the taxis that lined the avenues. Coming from a small town near
Scranton, Pennsylvania, I found the terminal overwhelming, filled
as it was with commuters and travelers of all sorts, along with
pickpockets, pimps, drug traffickers, and panhandlers. I figured I
ought to follow people who seem to know what they are doing. I was
bumped, nudged, and pushed in all directions.

With no home, no job, and a student’s
bank account, I had to figure out what I needed to do quickly. I
decided to start with my one point of contact, Kim. I shuffled
through the pink, patent leather purse Dani had bought me the
previous Christmas in search of my black book of contacts. There
were exactly five names in it.

“
Morgan Stanley, Kim
speaking.” It was a relief to hear my friend’s voice with her
Singaporean accent.

“
Hey, sweetheart, it’s
Isabelle.” The public payphone smelled of urine. I hoped the
conversation would be short. I tried not to imagine how many germs
I was touching.

“
Hey, baby, are you in New
York yet?” She began to explain how I could get to see
her.

But it was difficult for me to hear
her over the din of sirens, car horns, and angry locals.

“
Okay, just meet me at my
office,” she said. “By the way, I’ve passed your resume around
here. We’ll help you get a job soon. I also have friends for you to
talk to. But first things first, let’s get you settled. And work
talk only after your first week here. You’re all mine this week!
Comprende?” After I hung up the public payphone, I still felt the
grime on my fingers, feeling my fingers stick to each other as I
made my way to Kim’s offices.

Morgan Stanley’s global headquarters
was in New York City. It was just a few blocks away from Port
Authority, in the heart of Times Square, so I walked. The building
was more impressive than I remembered.

Three electronic ticker tapes wrapped
around the sides of the building in a display of continuously
flowing red or green digitized letters and numbers indicating
current stock prices. News blurbs flashed periodically on the
television screens attached to the building. A large world map ran
up the sides of the building, with white horizontal lines running
down the map delineating world time zones. The abundant red specks
of light indicated where Morgan Stanley had their international
offices.

It was nearly lunchtime when I stood
outside waiting outside Kim’s office, surrounded by swarms of
blue-suited men entering and leaving the Morgan Stanley building. I
imagined some of them headed to their martini lunches talking of
multi-million dollar deals and signing contracts. That thought
excited me.

Kim strutted through the glass
revolving door, wearing a beige suit, nude fishnet stockings, and
conservative black closed-toe pumps.

“
Baby, I’m so happy you’re
here! Welcome!” Kim hugged me. I had missed her very
much.

“
Oh, my gosh, we’ll have so
much fun. M.D. made reservations at some Moroccan restaurant in
SoHo. Dinner at nine with some of his work friends. They’re smart
and they’re rich!”

Kim was more than just my gateway into
the inner circle of finance. Kim was also a good friend. She had
emigrated at age eighteen from Malaysia to attend Boston College
under a student’s visa. With no family, she had been forced to be
self-reliant. She seemed to always get what she wanted, and most
importantly, she seemed like she always knew what that was. Her
guarded nature, she had told me, had grown out of emotional neglect
from her father. She had learned, at a very young age, how to be
independent, shielding her heart. She had cared for her depressed
mother after the divorce. Her youngest sister relied on Kim as
well. Kim looked after her sister like a mother. “Someone had to
take out the trash, cook meals and go to parent-teacher meetings,”
Kim once explained to me.

Kim was tough without being brusk.
During my internship, I saw that even the most venomous of bosses
was tamed by Kim’s grace.

To the men she worked with, Kim was a
sexy, sultry vixen primarily—smart, secondarily. Men described her
as “That girl.”

“
That girl is coming,” they
would whisper, though loud enough for her to hear. She would pass
by, pretending not to hear their comments.

“
Men on Wall Street are
sloppy, salivating sloths,” she later explained to me. “Their
crassness is contagious. You get one new guy here, and in a week,
he is infected by them.”

I would later learn a great deal about
the trading floor on which she worked. It was a man’s world, where
millions of dollars were wasted or earned. The frequently uttered
word fuck had many uses: verb, adjective or noun, depending on
intent. On a daily basis, phones and chairs were thrown long
distances and broken. Pounded keyboards were replaced
regularly.

Being attractive and a female, Kim
garnered the attention of everyone on the floor. Even women took
note. At first, she was unintentionally distracting. Later, she
learned to make use of her attractiveness, realizing the power that
this afforded her.

On the trading floor, Kim would
overhear comments that were contrary to Human Resources
policies.

“
Yeah, you could bounce a
quarter on that ass.”

“
They say Asian chicks get
freaky in bed.”

“
I’d hit that Yoko
Ono-style.”

“
Fuck, she doesn’t know what
I’d do to her.”

I never understood how Kim was able to
allow that type of language around her.

“
But if you don’t say
anything, aren’t you essentially endorsing it?” I had asked her
once.

“
What am I going to do,
baby, fight it and I lose?” she’d said as if she had resigned
herself to not being able to change the culture.

Now she handed me the keys to her
apartment. They were color-coded and labeled.

“
Make yourself comfortable.
I’ll be home around seven. I’m so excited to show you off to
everyone! They’ll love you.”

“
You can’t grab a coffee
with me?” I asked.

“
Wish I could, but I can’t.”
She sighed. “The managing director needs the pitch book by six p.m.
and I still haven’t gotten it back from the printers! Ugh, these
people are so incompetent!”

This was the nature of investment
banking, I would later learn. You could do nothing all day, and
within the hour someone would assign you to a project with a
“yesterday deadline.”

“
Just get a cab to my place,
and I promise I won’t be too long. I’ve got to run and get this
stuff done.” She checked the time on her cell phone.

I watched as Kim disappeared back into
the building amongst the swaths of blue suited men that entered and
left the building. She was petite. It was easy to lose her in a
crowd. I wiped her sticky lip gloss from my face and made my way
past the Cadillacs owned by car services lined up on 48th
Street.

I hailed the first yellow cab I saw
and gave him Kim’s address.

“
160 West 16th
Street.”

“
Cross street?” he asked in
an accent I couldn’t identify.

“
No, I said 16th Street,” I
said assertively.

“
Ma’am, where’s cross
street?”

“
I don’t know where Cross
Street is. You’re the cab driver.” I surprised myself with my
aggressiveness.

“
Forget it, I take you
there,” he said. I watched the back of his head shake back and
forth.

Kim lived in a small one-bedroom
walk-up apartment she shared with a friend. To save on rent, they
divided the living room using a curtain as their room separator.
Kim lived in the half of the living room; her roommate lived in the
bedroom.

“
I know it’s not lavish, but
it’s a good way to save rent money. I sleep at M.D.’s most of the
time anyway,” she had told me on the phone. M.D. was what she
called her married boyfriend, the initials for married
dude.

I drew the bamboo-and-fabric curtain
open and stepped into her “bedroom.” It looked the way I had
imagined, well kept and organized. Her bed was freshly made and her
Chinese-style apartment slippers were tucked neatly under her bed.
A Thai patchwork silk blanket lay folded in quarters at the end of
the mattress, and the ornate wooden chest at the foot of the bed
seemed to have been recently polished. A Thai Buddha statue stood
on top of the chest. Next to it was a string of praying beads and a
partially burned incense stick. There were ashes of incense that
had broken off from the stick. She must have prayed recently, I
thought.

I chuckled at myself recalling the
time Kim had first brought me back to her place the previous
summer. She had turned on the television for me and told me to make
myself comfortable while she had to do something. After fifteen
minutes of waiting, I peeked through her curtain doors and saw her
bowing down, hands and head to the floor, quietly chanting. Minutes
after prayer, she picked up a glass of wine. I had wanted to ask
her about praying, but since religion was so personal I asked
instead about her apartment.

“
Are all apartments in New
York this small?”

“
Some are smaller. I’d like
something bigger, but I can’t afford one just on my base salary
alone.” It was hard to imagine that she thought $65,000 was a
meager paycheck.

Kim was cautious with her money. I
knew that she sent money back to Malaysia to help her mother. But
she had told me that the bonus she was hoping to get would be all
hers. The year-end bonus was the carrot at the end of the stick. It
was “the hunt,” the reason people stayed on Wall Street, miserably
working long hours all year. Everyone she knew was going to spend
theirs lavishly—on new cars, fancy clothes, or exotic vacations.
Everyone knew that was what bonuses were for. There was even enough
money for strippers.