The Black & The White (33 page)

“
I told you, girl, these
guys on Wall Street have too much money to be single all of the
time. You see it already. Stephen, Andrew, Anson, M.D, Dover, who
else? I mean, come on. They get everything so easy, including
girls. They don’t want to get serious with anyone, they have wives
for that.”

Hearing the list of all of those men
made me feel terrible. Hearing her story made me feel
guiltier.

S
ince the incident at The Four Seasons, I began spending more
time with Jeffrey, to avoid Stephen. If Stephen was going to be
unavailable, so was I.

The more time I spent with Jeffrey,
the more I saw what an amazing, sweet, and overall good guy he
was.

Meanwhile, at the urging of both Carin
and Kim, I also started to go on dates with David.

Kim said, “Come on. Do it for cache,
baby! I want to live vicariously through you. I want to see you on
the pages of the magazines. Please, baby!”

I told her I would. I, too, was
curious to know how it would be to date a celebrity.

After several weeks of my not
answering his phone calls, Stephen showed up at our
office.

“
Close the spreadsheets.
Stephen is on his way up,” Andrew said, just minutes before Stephen
arrived.

Our trading book was now up $19
million, while our other books were down $75 million. “Rack it up
to size” was his response to the increased loss. Management
meetings, back-office phone calls, and risk-management alerts were
more common. I had to fax confirmations nearly twice as often
now.

“
Hey, guys! I just wanted to
say hi to my favorite people,” Stephen said as he handed each of us
a cup of Starbucks coffee.

Several people from our trading group
stood up to greet Stephen. It was though he was a celebrity. In
finance, he was.

I did not acknowledge Stephen’s
presence. After about fifteen minutes, he finally tapped me on my
shoulder while I was on the phone making plans with Jeffrey. My
heart raced. Was it because I was excited? Cocaine? I couldn’t
tell, but I felt as though I was in high school, seeing my crush,
the captain of the football team, again.

“
Who are you on the phone
with? Is that your boyfriend, David?” Stephen said, teasing. I
rolled my eyes.

“
No, it’s my friend
Jeffrey.”

“
Oh, that loser at the
restaurant?”

“
They’re all losers to
you.”

“
You’re right!”

Several hours later, Stephen was still
in the office, chatting away, forcing me to talk to him. I wanted
to remain mad, but he made me laugh.

When I finished working, Stephen asked
me out for a drink. I reluctantly agreed.

At the bar, he apologized for the
evening at the hotel.

“
It’s complicated, Isabelle.
But trust that I care about you…a lot.” I believed him. He seemed
sincere. His reassurances and proclamations began to cause the wall
I’d built to protect myself against him to crumble. I finally let
my guard down. Once again, I was able to laugh with him, like the
best of friends.

I recounted what Carin had told me
about Andrew. Hearing myself tell the story again made me laugh, as
though it was my first time hearing it. I knew Carin wouldn’t mind
me saying anything to Stephen.

“
Let’s have a pact?” Stephen
offered.

“
And that is?”

“
We meet every Tuesdays and
Thursdays?”

I agreed.

He gave me a hug and kissed my cheek.
“I’m sorry, again” he whispered.

It was hard to juggle three men, but
it was also fun. I wanted all of the men to want me. I wanted to be
needed, to be liked. I enjoyed different things from each of
them.

I liked the passionate sex I had while
I was high with Stephen. I appreciated the comfort of Jeffrey. I
liked the novelty and attention of being wanted by a celebrity from
David. I wanted it all.

I hadn’t slept with David. We were
more like friends, although I knew he wanted more. We’d go for
coffee in the back of a café in SoHo, away from the peering eyes of
paparazzi. We talked about work. I talked to him about New York,
about Kim and Carin. But each time I was with him, I would think of
either Stephen or Jeffrey.

I spoke candidly about my
relationships with both David and Jeffrey to Stephen. Stephen was
slightly jealous of my attachment to Jeffrey, but simultaneously
happy for me. “He can offer you something I can’t,” he once
explained as we were lying in bed one afternoon.

After work and before we went home,
Stephen and I spent countless hours together in his Manhattan
apartment.

“
Isabelle, don’t get
attached to me. I’m a married man. I know sometimes it’s easy to
forget,” Stephen said, as we lay naked in bed on a Tuesday evening
while Jeffrey was away visiting his mother in Boston. I was gently
stroking his face with my index finger, kissing him periodically on
the lips. He loved to stare at my body as I lay there, limbs
languid and out of breath. I paid attention to how the hair on his
eyebrows grew in all directions.

“
Don’t worry. That’s an easy
ask,” I said. It was sleeping with a client that I was cheating
which was difficult. I wasn’t sure if I was reassuring him or tying
to convince myself. It was worse than anything I could have
imagined before I had entered this world. That was my reality. I
then recalled what Stephen had told me at the Kirchner exhibit that
“
Glamour and decadence can really be
lonely and dangerous.
” I understood that
now.

My relationship with Stephen was not
only passionate but also secretive. It had to be. When we would be
at a dinner with a group of people, Stephen would hold my hand
under the table, massage my feet during dinner, or offer gentle
kisses during restroom rendezvous. Other times, in an
uncontrollable lustful urge, we would meet in a bathroom stall and
have sex. Many times, it proved to be difficult. Yet, we managed
our way around the stall, contorting in every form, trying to move
limbs to accommodate two bodies around the toilet and
sink.

I did drugs in secrecy. I had affairs
in secrecy. I lied to everyone. Everything was a secret. Work and
love. I grew to be a masterful storyteller. My life was becoming
one sordid, lecherous tale after another.

Jeffrey called me one day at work and
asked me to come over to his restaurant to talk. Immediately, I
thought he must have found out about Stephen. How about David?
Drugs? There were too many potentially problematic situations that
I had to keep track of.

Nervous, I decided to delay the
encounter until the evening when I had consumed enough toxins to
deal with his news. “Can it be after my client dinner?” I asked
lying that I had a previous engagement. He acquiesced.

Soon after, Stephen called on my
direct line. “Am I going to see you?” Andrew looked at me as he was
organizing his belongings to leave for a meeting with management,
again. I knew he was listening to my conversation. Stephen had been
calling me more often than he called Andrew of late.

“
Yeah, you want to meet up?
I need a bit of a mood booster,” I said. I had already had a bad
day dealing with Andrew’s continual sexual advancements. That,
coupled with the anticipation of what Jeffrey had to say, left me
slightly edgy.

“
What does he want?” Andrew
asked.

“
To meet up. To talk,” I
replied.

“
Talk about what?” Andrew
wondered. I reassured Andrew that I hadn’t spoken to anyone about
our trades. Surprisingly, work had been going well. Despite
Andrew’s effort to avert responsibility, people had started to rely
on me for trades.

“
If anyone calls for me,
tell them to call my voice mail, okay?” Andrew said before he went
off to a meeting.

An hour after Andrew left, several
people called and asked about a few pricing discrepancies in our
books. I urged them to call Andrew as per his suggestion. Momofoku
Securities had called again regarding a margin call. The frequency
of margin call remittances had increased. I looked through our
trading book and noticed that we were losing nearly $130 million.
My heart sank. I wasn’t sure how we were going to recoup the
losses. What reassured me was that since I was still only a junior
trader, the responsibility would be on my boss, not me.

I allocated our bad trades to our
losing book, as Andrew had taught me. The phone rang. I thought it
was Stephen.

“
Hey, babe,” I
answered.

“
How did you know it was
me?” asked David. I laughed.

“
Sorry, thought you were my
girlfriend, Kim. What’s up?”

David wanted to meet up for dinner. He
said he missed me. I smiled, wondering just how often he thought of
me.

“
Would love to but have a
client meeting tonight. It’s an important client dinner I can’t
miss.” I was lying. I needed to meet Jeffrey as promised. “Maybe
after?” But I knew the likelihood of my actually going to see him
right after being with Stephen was slim.

“
Okay, but I leave town
tomorrow for my screening this weekend in LA. Do you want to
go?”

I considered it but declined. I was
supposed to see Jeffrey over the weekend.

Stephen called shortly thereafter.
“You’re still there? Hurry here!”

“
Okay, okay, I am leaving
now,” I said.

As I walked toward the front door to
Stephen’s apartment building, I heard his footsteps running down
the stairs, leaping the wooden floorboards of the loft. I was
always excited to see him. He wrapped his arms around my body,
picked me up, and kissed me. His kisses tasted like
chemicals.

He held my face with one of his hands.
“Oh, baby, I missed you.”

I slid open the screen doors that led
directly into the kitchen.

“
Wait, wait, wait!” Stephen
said. “Just wait here for one second.” He kissed me before he went
inside. He was acting strangely.

I heard cupboards being rustled.
Faucets were turned on, then off. I heard drawers full of metal
open and then close.

Stephen then took my hand and led me
into the apartment. “You have to close your eyes first.”

I closed them until he told me it was
okay. When I opened my eyes, I saw on the kitchen counter a
long-stemmed red rose surrounded by pink and white carnations
inside a plastic pitcher of water.

“
I got you flowers and tea.
But I couldn’t find that Pimm’s tea you said you liked.”

I was flattered that he had
remembered.

“
You can put the flowers in
another vase when you go home if you want. Sorry I couldn’t find a
better one. I looked though.”

“
Baby, that’s super cute!
Thank you so much!” I wrapped my arms and legs around him and
kissed his pillowy lips.

“
You like them? I thought ‘I
have never done anything nice for Isabelle.’ I hope you like the
tea,” he said, excited to have surprised me. I jumped into his arms
and kissed him.

“
Yes, I love it,” I
said.

“
Yippee!” He said as he
awkwardly gyrated his hips from left to right in a failed attempt
to dance.

We spent the next few hours lying in
bed, talking, kissing, and having sex, sometimes doing a line from
the side table. I realized I was growing more and more relaxed and
happy with him. He was the only one who knew everything about me.
Every secret I had, he knew. Every emotion I felt, he picked up on.
With all of that information, he still liked me.

It was becoming more apparent to me
just how complicated Kim’s relationship was with M.D. I now
believed that falling in love with someone was not always a choice.
But how could I stop it now? When had this happened? I wished I
could go back in time and find that one day when I let myself fall
for Stephen so that I could change it.

Suddenly his phone rang and I jumped.
The personalized ring was distinguishable. Please don’t pick up, I
thought. But he did.

“
Can I call you back in a
sec?” he asked.

I knew from both the ring and the tone
of his voice that it was his wife. I thought I had become
accustomed to it, but at that precise moment, I felt the same way I
had at The Four Seasons—guilty and disgusted. Despite his efforts
to avoid talking to her in my presence, the reality—his reality—was
still there.

He lay back down and went to touch my
lips, but I thwarted his effort and reached for my phone. I called
Jeffrey.

“
Hey, love. Dinner finished
early. I’ll be there in an hour. Is that okay?”

Stephen rolled his eyes. “You just
don’t understand,” he said. But I didn’t care.

“
Anytime is good for me,
Isabelle. Seeing you would be the highlight of my night,” Jeffrey
said.

I was relieved. Jeffrey wasn’t mad. I
was still curious as to what he wanted to talk about. What was I
doing with a married man when I had this caring, sincere, patient
man waiting for me?