by Hazel Parker
With a flash of a smile, he then ducked out of the doorway. A few seconds later, the door swung open. No one said a word until it shut, but as soon as it did, hell broke loose.
“We are not fucking doing a thing with him!” Uncle roared.
“We are not making any decisions right now!” Marcel yelled.
“Kiss my ass, Marcel, this is my investment, and I am not giving you money so you can then turn around and give it to some California hippie.”
“We don’t really have much choice in the matter, now do we?” Marcel yelled. “You heard him. I saw the email. I’ve done my research, Uncle.”
“And you think I haven’t, you shithead?”
Shit, things are unraveling. Bad, bad, bad.
“You think I’d just blindly give you money? You may be family, and I may look out for you, but if I knew you were going to take that money and buy a shitload of heroin, you’d never see a penny from me!”
“As if that’s the same thing as this!”
“Everyone, shut up!”
I couldn’t believe I’d spoken. Uncle glared at me.
“Where did this side of Fitz come from?” Biggie said, trying to crack a joke.
No one even looked at him, let alone laughed at him.
“We have two weeks to decide, right?” I said. “The rule of deadlines is you never make a decision until the last possible moment. Deadlines spur action, but not until the moment of truth. We have two weeks. If something changes in between now and then, then we can hasten our decision. But we act now, we won’t give time for all the info to come out.”
Uncle ran his hands over his head.
“You say the right things, Fitz,” he said. “But you gotta know your fucking place.”
“I put money into this club too—”
“Not as much as me,” Uncle said, but at least he was calming down. He turned to his nephew. “You don’t give a fucking dime to those hippies until we’ve come to a conclusion. If they try to say you need to pay upfront to keep the window open, you punch them in the fucking skull. I don’t care what it takes, but we are not paying their asses unless everyone at this table comes to that conclusion. And it’s going to take an awful lot of drinking to convince me that’s a good idea.”
Marcel took a few deep breaths, closed his eyes, and exhaled slowly.
“I fucking hate that guy,” he said. “But if we have two weeks, we’re going to use them. In the meantime, let’s call it a night. Nothing else is as important as this.”
He got up without another word and went out of the room. He opened the door to the outside, but when nothing happened, we assumed that the Las Vegas Saints had gone their own way. Biggie and Niner rose and followed Marcel, leaving just Uncle and me.
“Biggie did raise a good point,” Uncle said with a slight smirk. “Where the hell did this side of you come from? I had never seen it before.”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know that it’s a new side of me or not,” I said. “I just saw the situation unraveling, and—”
“Fitz, don’t give me that bullshit,” he said. “You may be able to call it a false assumption on a spreadsheet, but you’re not going to challenge Marcel or myself unless something drastic happened. So I’ll ask it again. Where did this side of you come from?”
Fuck it. Things are so raw here, might as well put it all out there.
“I just want to feel like a legit member of this club, you know?” I said. “I don’t want to be seen as some rich dude who got brought along just because of his bank account. I want to be someone who can actually be called upon on runs and in this clubhouse. I am not a token, nor am I an investor. I want to be a member, damnit.”
Uncle pursed his lips, chuckled, and sighed.
“How many of us do you think have killed someone here?”
“Sorry?”
“I know what I said. How many of us do you think have killed someone? Us being the five officers.”
“I...I don’t know, Niner?”
“Exactly,” Uncle said, a wry smile forming on his face. “Niner, as a cop, has almost certainly shot people. You’ll never get him to admit it—good luck getting him to admit anything—but he probably has. The rest of us? We’re just figuring it out as we go. Marcel and Biggie have been in jail, but never for anything violent. You and I haven’t.”
“So—”
“So we’re all trying to learn what it means to be a member,” Uncle said. “All I give a shit about is that you contribute to the club and you do what you need to do. If you do that, then you’re a legit member.”
Contribute to the club and do what you need to do. Do what you need to do. Do what you need to do…
“Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, yeah, I do,” I said, and a wry smile formed on my face. “Sorry. I’ll make sure I’m a better member.”
“I know you will,” Uncle said.
Funny thing about that, I thought. I don’t think you quite do, actually.
Chapter 8: Amelia
The trip to Shanghai absolutely sucked ass.
The thing about trips like that was that if you told someone who wasn’t in banking, they would picture you doing business from morning until sunset, having a group business dinner, and then you’d finally have the chance to do your own thing. Maybe you’d even get a day or two to yourself.
That never, ever fucking happened.
In fact, the time-suck was even worse than it was in New York City because you were expected to make as strong an impression as possible on the client. At least in Manhattan, I could easily find an excuse to escape the doldrums of the day by taking a quick coffee break or retreating to a private meeting room.
But in Shanghai, I had no time to recover from jet lag. I didn’t get the time to review all of the slides as I wanted to, which meant a significant portion of my presentation was made on the fly. And the dinner and drinks after the workday ended, while not technically mandatory, were essentially that considering that I still wanted to become an executive director.
The end result was that when my flight landed in New York City at about midnight on Sunday and Ben told me I had to be in the office by eight the next morning, I was as close as I’d ever come to having a nervous breakdown.
Fortunately, I could pull from prior experience and rally around a shitload of coffee and the promise of an early bedtime Monday night. I would still have to work quite a bit that week, but if I just managed to get to bed by seven on Monday night, I could sleep for about eleven hours, more or less catching up on my sleep enough that I could avoid the worst.
I just hoped Fitz didn’t see me in this state.
But then again, I didn’t know why I worried about Fitz seeing me in this state. We’d kept up sporadic communication since our abomination of an attempted date, but I just felt like Fitz didn’t see any potential. I was probably self-sabotaging it to make it easier for me—it’s not like Fitz was anything other than his usual friendly, low-key self when we met in the cafeteria. But even if I wasn’t…
Well, this was the life choice I’d made. I had chosen the insane working lifestyle at the sacrifice of my family. Such was how it went.
All went well for the most part when I got into the office. I managed to sneak a nap in my lunch break, choosing to order Seamless delivery up to my office for lunch. I got to six and prepared to wrap up for the day when Ben called me into his office.
Fuck, please let this be quick.
I marched over to Ben’s office, barely holding myself together. I felt good at the moment, but it would only take one thing for Ben to say to piss me off enough for me to lose my mind. I entered the room as soon as he motioned for me to come in.
“How are you feeling, Amelia?”
“Fine.”
No one ever said “tired.” Much of the deal of working in banking was giving the appearance that you could handle the worst of it and face up to the challenges the job presented. If you couldn�
��t, then you didn’t get promoted. And right now, I had to give the appearance that not even two cross-global flights in the span of three days could make me tired.
“Good,” Ben said.
He’s struggling as much as I am, I thought as I noticed the bags under his eyes and how he seemed to have added a little bit of weight in the past month.
“Because we need you to finish something,” he said.
My mind went blank. Finish something? But I just got home. I just got home. You wanted me to rest…
Ben kept talking, and I saw his mouth moving, but I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. It was like my brain had suddenly turned to mush, and I could no longer make any sense of what was up and what was down. My head began to spin.
“…understood, Amelia? Amelia?”
“Yeah, sure, sure,” I said, starting to mumble to myself. “Sure, sure.”
“Amelia?”
“I’m fine!” I snapped, way too strongly to suggest that that was true in the slightest sense.
Ben leaned back into his chair.
“I, umm, I’ll give this to some of your associates. They could use the chance to prove themselves a bit.”
He had taken the work back, but the damage had already been done. I left his office in a zombie-like trance, unable to handle the stress. I had finally cracked. Sure, the work had been removed for tonight, but tomorrow? The day after? It would never end. Never, ever end.
That was the nature of working in investment banking. We had to get more, more, and more. Banks didn’t exist to invest. I didn’t have a job to help people get funding. I had a job so I could maximize profit for the corporate entity known as Rothenberg Banking. I worked an average of eighty hours a week since I’d graduated Princeton purely so I could add a few million dollars to the bottom line at Rothenberg.
I wasn’t saving the world. I wasn’t doing anything I said I wanted to do at eighteen. I wasn’t helping people.
I was just working at a job that people would claim to be impressed by with a bank account that barely kept past my spending in a city that never slept.
What the fuck was wrong with me? How the fuck had I let my life get to this point?
I walked out of the office, grabbed my suitcase, and headed for the elevator. One other analyst looked at me—an analyst that Ben was going to give the work to.
“Amelia?” he said. “Do you—”
“Go see Ben, now.”
I had no emotion in my voice. I think I scared the poor soul into moving as quickly as he could, skittering to Ben’s office like a cockroach underneath a stage light. The doors opened up, and the worst thing possible on the other side awaited.
“Fitz,” I said.
“Amelia, are you OK?” he said as I turned around and faced the doors. I didn’t want him to see my eyes, which couldn’t focus on anything, they were so tired. “Amelia?”
“I’m fine, Fitz,” I said. “I am fine. I am very fine.”
“You don’t sound—”
“I don’t need your fucking pity, OK? I don’t need anyone’s fucking pity!”
I kept my eyes ahead, but this time, it was because I was starting to feel emotional. And I did not do emotional. I especially did not do emotional when I was in the middle of my office, trying to keep it together in front of the rest of my peers.
“Amelia, you need to go home for a bit,” Fitz said as if giving me advice that I didn’t fucking know already. “You’re probably exhausted from jet lag. It’ll be—”
“Yeah? You gonna take me there on your motorcycle?”
Fitz bit his lip. I realized I’d gone too far.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice wavering. “I’m sorry. I…”
I took a deep breath, but I didn’t say anything more. The more I talked, the closer I got to crying, like a weakling, in the Rothenberg Banking building. If I cried, I needed to do so far away from this golden prison. I needed to do it at home, alone, where no one could bother me. Not even Fitz.
“Amelia, we can—”
“No, Fitz, I need to go home,” I said.
I took a risk. I turned and faced him. The reaction on his face said it all.
“Just let me go home. I have some thinking I need to do.”
The doors opened, and without another word to Fitz, I left. I didn’t bother waiting for an Uber. I just hailed the first cab that appeared and rode it home, fighting to stay awake long enough to get upstairs to my room before I fell asleep on the couch once again.
* * *
When I woke up, it was four in the morning. I tried like hell to go back to sleep, still feeling tired, but my body refused to let me. Apparently, I had adapted too well to functioning on less than six hours of sleep. At least I had gotten close to nine tonight, but I wouldn’t hit double digits, no matter how much I tried.
But the lack of sleep had done something to me that I could not sleep off.
It had made me realize that I had officially hit the breaking point. And now that I had hit the breaking point, I didn’t think there was any going back. Even if I turned around and repaired said breaking point, I’d still have the battle scars and wounds.
I stood up, headed to the bathroom, and splashed some water on my face. No matter how much I tried, I could not force myself to be energetic. It was like this job had not only cracked me; it had put a ceiling on my mood. I could not go above a certain level of energy.
“Come on, come on,” I said, muttering to myself. “Wake up, wake up!”
This was the deal you made. Get paid, get nothing else. Be lopsided in one area of your life, and nothing else.
I had always thought that “more” was the answer. More money. More responsibilities. More prestige.
And what, exactly, had that gotten me?
You have a moment like this at least once a year. Go lie down, watch some sports highlights if you have to. It’s not any different.
It might be this time.
No, no, it’s not.
Is this still part of the nervous breakdown?
I headed back to my room, dragging like a zombie through my empty apartment. I briefly pulled back the curtains and looked down. A couple of stray cars drove by, one of which stopped abruptly for some reason, undoubtedly honking its horn in frustration and fury. A couple of people walked by. It was impossible to tell their mood, but they didn’t look homeless. They looked...free.
You’re still employed. What are you going to do, quit your job? You really think because of one noticeably bad stretch at work, you want to quit? This happens annually.
I went back to my phone and read through any of the messages that I had missed. I had a couple from my parents asking me to call them. My mom, in particular, wanted to know if I had become partner at the firm yet. One step at a time, Mom, come on. My father wanted to know if I was eating enough.
I had a message from one of the few friends I had outside finance, Natasha, asking me what I wanted to do for my birthday. It had completely eluded me that my birthday was in just a month’s time; frankly, sometimes, if the weather were lukewarm enough, I would just lose track of what month it was.
And then I had a message from the only person who seemed to notice and care about my breakdown at work yesterday.
“I just want to check in and make sure everything is OK. If you need to take a work-from-home day, I can let Rothenberg know that you hurt yourself or something like that.”
I smiled at Fitz’s message. Getting away with something like that at Rothenberg wasn’t so easy. Unlike elementary school nurses, they required extensive proof before they handed out sick pay and the like. But to see that Fitz cared...I guess there was a pretty good reason that I liked him so much.
It made me even more pained to know that we weren’t going to be anything right now. And I sure couldn’t admit any weakness. Even though Fitz was a good guy, I couldn’t afford to look weak before anyone.
“I’m good, thank you, though,” was all that I wrote back.
<
br /> I hit send, put my phone on the bed, and went back to staring out the window. I didn’t really think of much of anything. I was content just to let the morning play out, the sky shifting from a dark blue to an ocean blue to a light blue to the early signs of sunrise. At six, I began my morning prep routine.
I got all the way to getting out the door when I looked at my phone again. Fitz had not been so inclined to let what I had done slip by.
“Are you sure? You didn’t seem fine at work yesterday. You can talk to me.”
I know. And that’s what makes it painful. If I do say something to you...how much are the floodgates going to open?
I ignored the message for a while. I did all that I could to not say anything to him. I went to the bagel shop, got myself a bacon, egg, and cheese, and headed for the lobby.
And then, in a bit of an impulsive moment, I stopped the elevator on the cafeteria floor.
I got off, went to the only fit person in the room, and sat beside him.
“Can I get the Business & Finance section?” I said.
Fitz dropped the paper, smiled, and reached in and grabbed it. I unfolded it and held it out in front of my face, making me anonymous to the rest of the room.
“I can’t believe you’re back,” Fitz said. “You didn’t look great yesterday.”
“And you’re surprised?” I said. “I’m obsessed with becoming executive director, Fitz. I can’t get that role if I take off for a mental day. I’m not some West Coast floozy.”
“True,” Fitz said. “But sometimes, a chance to reflect can be a good thing. You know?”
I’m afraid of what I’ll discover if I do take that day.
“When was the last time you took a day off?” I shot back.
“Me?” Fitz said with a laugh. “It’s been too long. But if you ask Gerald, he thinks I take every evening off. Besides, I have my motorcycle. It helps me stay centered and relaxed certain evenings.”
The motorcycle. I just assumed I’d never get to ride it. Maybe…
Maybe…
“Let me ask you something.”
“Hmm?”
“You said you ride your motorcycle in order to relax, right?”
