The Black & The White (4 page)

Then he turned to Kim. “You see, Kim,
Isabelle just offered to pay her portion. Maybe this girl has more
to teach you than you have to teach her!” He gave her a big mock
smile.

“
Go fuck yourself, Zach,”
Kim said, laughing. She was starting to lighten up after her phone
call.

Outside the restaurant, several black
town cars waited for us.

“
You guys ride in that.”
Zach pointed to a black Cadillac. “I take this.” Zach pulled at my
arm, toward a Mercedes S-class. “Isabelle, you’re riding in the
V.I.P. car with me.” I looked behind me to make sure Kim was
following.

The cars dropped us off outside a club
called Lotus, in front of which a long queue of eager club-goers
extended the length of an entire city block. Four burly, bald
bouncers dressed in black stood guard behind the red velvet rope.
They could have been wrestlers or American football players. A
fashionably robed girl with a pen in her mouth and a clipboard at
her hand was the gatekeeper between those “in the know” and the
plain commoner.

“
Getting in here is probably
harder than valuing an Internet company. Fuck, it’s like getting a
job at Goldman Sachs!” Zach informed me. “But don’t worry, you’re
with me, and I’m a rock star,” he said with a confident
sarcasm.

The velvet rope was lifted and we were
guided through the doors, skipping the queue. “Thanks, Etienne,”
Zach said as he slipped the doorman a one-hundred-dollar
bill.

Zach was escorted to an empty table
against the sidewall. The section was roped off and slightly
elevated from the dance floor where everyone else was dancing. We
all followed. The table was already adorned with a bucket of ice, a
bottle of vodka, a bottle of champagne and glasses to accompany. It
was clear they expected us.

Scantily clad women were clumsily
gyrating their hips on the dance floor below. Slowly, a few of
these women trickled their way behind our velvet rope only after
Zack pointed and beckoned each one of them to join us.

“
You know these people,
Kim?” I asked.

“
No way, baby. But they’re
hot, so they get in! It’s all transactional, sweetheart,” Kim
explained. “See that girl?” Kim pointed to a tall blonde kissing
Zach’s neck. “That’s Elana, Zach’s girl. She gets his money, and he
has her as arm candy. Everyone’s happy.”

“
Get’s his
money?”

“
Drugs. Clubs. Vodka.
They’re all currency in some capacity,” she smiled as she sipped
her champagne and swayed her hips to the music.

“
That’s a fair trade.” I
laughed.

“
Exactly, baby! Everybody
wins. Now let’s dance and get drunk!”

As I made my way around the club, I
spotted several famous faces. I couldn’t believe I was having a
night like this. It had only been my first day in New York, and
already I loved it. I couldn’t wait to tell Dani about all of
it.

I
stayed in Kim’s apartment for a month before I found one of my
own. With three people in a small one bedroom, I joked that living
with Kim was like being in an Asian refugee camp.

Finding an apartment in New
York was just as competitive as everything else. Kim tipped me off
to going online at noon for
The Village
Voice’s
real estate postings to get a head
start. “Those who know, go online. Those who don’t, read print,”
she explained.

The apartment I finally took was in
Astoria, Queens, a neighborhood of mostly Greek Americans. It was
on the second floor of a Greek family’s four-story brick row house
on a tree-lined street. The owner was pedantic about sweeping blown
leaves from his property. Weekends were filled with loud Greek
music reverberating through the thin walls, the smell of sweet
pastries, and the occasional cries of grandchildren. It was an old
house but well maintained. The windowsills and doors looked as if
it had received a fresh coat of paint. Even the iron hand rail
glistened from the high gloss. My rented apartment had its own
entrance up the driveway attached to the side of the family house,
obviously created for rental income.

I shared the apartment with two men in
their late twenties, Vitaly and Griff, who had been college
roommates and now worked at the same boutique investment bank doing
the same thing – Back office Operations reconciling failed foreign
exchange trades.

Vitaly and Griff bickered throughout
my apartment tour. They fought about everything from dishes being
left unwashed in the sink to who had the better hair conditioner. I
couldn’t help but giggle through it all. I decided then that living
with these two seemingly gay men would be harmless, if not
amusing.

My bedroom, a small cubicle, had once
been an office. The space was large enough for a twin bed, an
upright cardboard box doubling as a dresser, a small rotating fan,
a black metallic desk lamp, and one metallic foldable chair. The
apartment was anything but cute or comfortable. It was cheap. And
cheap was all I could afford on the $45,000 entry-level salary I
was earning at my new job.

I’d gotten the job thanks to Kim, who
had put me in touch with several of her friends who had passed my
resume on to their friends. “It’s all about who you know in this
industry,” she said. Fortunately, I knew her. She knew everyone
else.

After nearly a month of interviewing
for various jobs, I finally landed one at a large brokerage house
called “Bridge Capital,” very much like Morgan Stanley. I started
as a trading assistant for a trader at the U.S. government desk. I
had, I thought, the benefit of working for a nice, low-key boss
named Andrew, who immediately struck me as much kinder than most of
the other men I had interviewed with.

During my interview, I took note of
the pictures of his wife and kids on his desk and how his eyes lit
up when he spoke of them. When I first started working there, I saw
that he went straight home to his family every evening.

“
I make a lot of money, and
that gets you a lot of respect around here,” Andrew told me at my
interview. “I only trade size. And size is what matters. Right?”
Trading size means trading large quantities, which often bears
significant risk.

Andrew assured me he got his way most
of the time and that his bottom-line results justified it. In an
industry where worth was determined by profits, Andrew was
king.

When I arrived at my new office on the
thirty-ninth floor at 8:30 a.m. on my first day of work, Andrew
greeted me at the reception desk. He had been there since 7:15,
catching up on the overnight trading positions in Europe and Asia
before sending out his daily market reports to his clients. He
dropped me off at the human resources department, saying, “When
you’re done, we’ll go and grab lunch. You’ve got a lot of shit to
go through in that binder.”

I opened the folder. It was filled
with fifteen Sign Here stickers.

I was then left to watch several
videos on compliance-related matters such as sexual harassment,
equal opportunity, policies of the firm, and integrity in the work
place. It was all very boring.

After nearly four hours, Andrew came
to my rescue at noon. “Shouldn’t I finish this video?” I asked,
hoping he would say no. There were several times I had found myself
nodding off.

“
That’s all bullshit!”
Andrew pointed at the video. “What you have to learn you will learn
from me, so pack up and let’s go!”

I told him I was a little nervous
about breaking the rules, especially on the first day.

“
I’ll sign off that you
watched it all, if that makes you feel better,” he said. It
did.

He took me to a seafood restaurant he
liked. “Best sushi in town. You’ll love it.”

Over lunch, he briefed me on office
politics—whom to know and whom not to, what they did and didn’t do,
who made money and who didn’t.

“
You eat like a left-hander.
Are you a lefty?” Andrew asked during lunch. I shook my head. It
was habitual that I used a fork on the right hand, knife on the
left hand. Growing up, I had always eaten with a spoon and a fork
rather than a knife and fork. I tried to eat in Western fashion,
but my habits were deeply ingrained.

“
It’s okay,” Andrew said
gently. “It’s cute. It’s your quirk.”

“
I have a lot of them,” I
said with a smile.

The next morning, on my first day of
actual work, Andrew met me at the reception desk again. He had
noticeable sweat circles under his armpits. I was excited to be his
trading assistant but feared I would prove inadequate.

“
First day jitters,” I
confessed.

“
Don’t worry. Let me show
you around.”

He walked me around the trading room.
I was immediately impressed by the power the room contained. The
intensity was palpable. I felt all eyes staring at the new girl in
the room. There were very few women, apart from the
secretaries.

Row upon row of computers lined the
room. Each screen was filled with graphs, numbers, and equations.
Phones rang from every direction.

I wasn’t there long before the floor
was in an uproar.

“
Jesus Christ!” someone
yelled. A fortyish man suddenly stood up and aggressively shoved
his chair back at his desk. He walked, red-faced, into a
glass-walled office much like Andrew’s.

“
Who’s that guy?” I
asked.

“
No one important to know,”
Andrew said.

On my second day, Andrew gave me a
rudimentary crash course in trading. He taught me about bids,
offers, tick and basis points, lifting versus hitting.

On the fourth day, Andrew handed me a
1,200-page book. “Study this. You’re going to have to know what the
‘term structure of interest rates’ is in order to be successful in
this business.” He smiled. “Or just listen to me. But the book
helps.”

For several weeks, I spoke to very few
people in the office other than Andrew. We worked closely together.
While I was looking at movements of the US Government bond markets
go up and down while it flashed on the screen, Andrew was busy with
two phones to his ears. I shadowed Andrew, watching precisely how
he traded.

In the beginning, I had no idea what
was going on, but I admired Andrew’s take-charge attitude. His
voice was commanding and certain. “You can’t trade with your heart
Isabelle,” he once said. “You trade with your balls.” Trading was
an action-oriented, no-hesitation type of business.

Andrew and I had a total of nine
computer screens. Each had two to three applications per screen,
all of which were various financial tools to help in trade
execution. We had four handsets, two phone turrets with hundreds of
direct links and a Blackberry. Andrew’s use of computer screens and
electric gadgetry paled in comparison to some others, particularly
the forex (foreign exchange) trading desk.

Numbers flashed on these monitors, in
no apparent pattern, and I hoped that soon these numbers would have
some meaning to me.

A week into the new job, I had learned
to calculate our Profit and Loss for the day and to make sure our
trades were reconciled. Unlike the equities market, the bond market
traded in fractions that needed to be converted into
dollars.

Andrew’s phone rang and it lit up
“Liberty Brokerage”. Andrew had stepped away to the bathroom. I
picked up. “I have a 25 bid on the current CTD. One hundred,” the
man on the other end said. I panicked. Luckily, Andrew had just
returned.

“
Um, I think this is for
you,” I said to Andrew.

When he got off the phone, he
explained the difference between an onscreen broker and an
off-the-screen broker.

“
We’re not brokers?” I
asked.

“
We are brokers to hedge
funds. We are market makers. Guess what we make? Markets. We are
clients to the brokers who just called. Guess what they’re called?
Brokers’ brokers.”

I took a deep breath. I had a lot to
learn.

Each phone line was designated to a
specific trader of a bank. There were often ten lines per trader on
the trading desk. At no point was there a pause from the rings.
Most everyone screamed and cross-talked at each other. Andrew’s
volume tended to be on the softer side and calmest amongst
all.

And then there were the drugs that
seemed to be par for the course. Kim had warned me about traders
and drugs.

“
Traders need it to stay
alert. It’s a bad habit, baby,” she explained to me soon after I
told her about my new job. “Don’t get yourself sucked in to that
kind of naughty.”

That was an easy enough order for me
to follow. I had never done drugs in my life, never even smoked a
cigarette.

After I’d been on the job for about a
month, from out of the blue, a trader from across the room yelled,
“I told you to fucking hit that bid, and you sit on your ass, you
fucking moron!” He was screaming into his handset.

I looked at Andrew. I was not used to
people yelling like this. Growing up, it was a rare occasion that
my mother would yell. She would be livid but never raised her
voice.