by Megan Goldin
‘I can’t believe the lady counts tomatoes,’ I muttered as I carried her plate into the kitchen.
‘If she wants to count baby tomatoes then that’s fine by me,’ Leo barked. ‘The customer is always right!’
‘Why are you lecturing me, Leo? Talk to the kitchen guys. I just bring the food out.’
He looked at me for a moment longer than necessary, as if he wasn’t sure how to answer. ‘The problem with you, Sara, is that you should smile more,’ he said. ‘If a customer wants more tomatoes in her salad, put a smile on your face and ask how many more tomatoes she would like. Mario will find you tomatoes. We have plenty of tomatoes. We have so many fucking tomatoes that our trash cans are overflowing with them by the end of the day.’
I knew how Mario found extra tomatoes. It usually involved picking them out of the unfinished meals collected from tables, or taking them out of those same trash cans Leo mentioned. I shut up. I didn’t want to get on Leo’s bad side. He was already annoyed with me as it was. Rent was due soon and I needed the extra shifts.
‘And Sara, if you want better tips, take my advice: wear a shorter skirt,’ Leo advised sagely.
I looked down at my black skirt. It seemed short enough to me. It was well above my knees.
‘I thought this was a family restaurant?’ I said sweetly.
‘It is.’ He nodded. ‘But a bit of leg never hurt anyone. It definitely would be good for tips.’
‘I’ll remember that, Leo.’ I made no effort to hide my sarcasm. Everything was getting to me that night. The tomato lady. Leo. The customers who’d taken up one of my tables for two hours and left me spare change instead of a proper tip. My roommate, Stacey, who left another sinkful of dirty dishes in our apartment for me to take care of.
Being taken to task over tomatoes and the length of my skirt was not the career that I’d envisaged when I graduated top of my MBA class. I headed back to the restaurant floor, feeling lousy, when my phone vibrated in my back pocket.
A woman with frizzy red hair waved her hand in the air to signal to me that she was ready to order. I pretended not to see her as I beelined towards the restrooms. I answered my phone as I went into a stall so that Leo wouldn’t give me a hard time about taking personal calls.
It was the recruitment manager from Stanhope and Sons. I’d spoken to her a few times when she’d arranged the flight and hotel for the interviews with Vincent and his team. ‘I’m about to send you an email but I wanted to call to explain first.’
I felt suddenly sick. She was calling to tell me that I didn’t get the job.
‘Explain what?’ I asked in a thin voice.
‘I’m pleased to tell you that we’d like to offer you a job with the firm. It would be an analyst role, which is a great starting position. The only issue is that we need an answer within twenty-four hours and we’d need you to start next week. Vincent is hoping that might be possible.’
‘Sure, that’s definitely possible.’ Someone flushed a toilet and I hurriedly cupped my hand around the phone’s microphone to block the sound.
‘Great,’ she said. ‘Congratulations. I’ll email you the formal offer now. I need you to sign it and email it back by tomorrow.’
Her message arrived a minute later. I opened the attachment while still in the toilet stall. The salary alone made me weak in the knees. They were starting me at $130 000, not including an annual bonus if I met certain targets. If that wasn’t enough, they were paying me $30 000 as a sign on bonus, and they would cover my moving costs.
I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. I wanted to walk into the damn restaurant and buy every customer a drink. Even the crazy tomato lady, who’d been glaring at me ever since I served her the salad.
Instead I did what I’d dreamt of doing since the day I graduated. I took off my Rob Roy apron and threw it in the trash and left without a word to Leo, Mario or anyone else. I walked out of the place a free woman.
That same night, I gave notice to Stacey, as she and Gary noisily slurped Chinese noodles in takeout containers while watching TV.
‘You’ll have to pay the rent until I can find someone else to move in,’ Stacey told me with her eyes fixed on the television screen.
‘No, I won’t,’ I responded. ‘The contract says I have to give you two weeks’ written notice.’
I leaned over and wrote on her restaurant napkin ‘I hereby give two weeks’ notice that I will be moving out.’ I signed and dated it. ‘Here you go,’ I said, tossing the napkin into her lap.
I went into my bedroom to pack. I was sure that Stacey was secretly relieved I’d be leaving. She had wanted Gary to move in permanently without any change to the way we divided our rent. I’d resisted. Gary was a pig and our apartment wasn’t big enough for three people. Also, the two of them had the loudest sex I’d ever heard. There was no way I could cope with Gary as a permanent fixture in my life.
My closest friends threw me a small farewell party. I’d hardly seen them for weeks with all the extra shifts I’d been working. We all became teary when they brought out a bottle of champagne to toast me.
‘To the most determined, tenacious person I’ve ever met,’ said Jill. She had been my best friend all through high school and was herself moving to Seattle to live with her fiancé. ‘I know more than anyone how hard you’ve worked for this, Sara. You deserve every bit of your success.’
‘Sara,’ said Lisa, over a glass of orange juice. She was three months pregnant and wasn’t drinking alcohol. ‘You have some nerve moving cities just as I’m about to have twins. I was counting on you to babysit!’ We all laughed. ‘But seriously. You’ve always been an amazingly generous friend. You had a box of kleenex and a pint of my favourite cookies-and-cream ice-cream whenever I had a bad breakup. You never ever complained, even though I know you secretly hated cookies-and-cream,’ she said, laughing as she wiped her wet eyes. ‘And especially when things were tough for you. You’re an inspiration, and I’m so happy for you – I could just scream!’
I burst into tears when I unwrapped the gift they gave me. It was a silver-framed photograph of us as teenagers alongside a recent photo of us together at Lisa’s wedding reception. The party broke up with long hugs and promises to stay in touch. Always.
For the two days before I was due to fly to New York I moved into my parents’ place. I wanted to spend a longer stretch of time with them. I hadn’t done that since leaving for college. Things had changed so much since then. I was no longer their little girl. And they’d become more reliant on me than ever before as they became old and sickly almost before my eyes. Sometimes I felt as if our roles in the family had reversed without any of us noticing. My parents were thrilled about the new job, although I sensed an unspoken anxiety that their only child would be living so far away. My dad was on dialysis and it would be hard for him to travel all the way to New York.
As I climbed into the cab for the airport I promised to come back and visit regularly. I felt enormously sad as I watched them wave to me from the kerb with their arms interlinked as if to prop each other up. Saying goodbye to my folks was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
The firm flew me business class. That was another first. As I drank a glass of chilled French chablis and ate a salmon frittata, I marvelled at the surreal change in my fortunes. I had gone from taking the train to New York and getting splattered by a guy with sleep apnoea to reclining on a leather seat while leisurely selecting cheese and dessert from a business-class lunch menu.
When the plane landed at LaGuardia, I was met by a liveried driver holding a sign with my name printed in thick black letters. He drove me to another five-star hotel, this time with a view of the city skyline and a bedroom the size of the entire apartment that I’d shared with Stacey. On the desk was a fruit bowl and a box of chocolates courtesy of Stanhope.
I took a selfie of myself standing by my living-room window, against the Manhattan skyline, biting into a red apple. ‘Living the dream,’ I captioned the photo.
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nbsp; The thin beams of light from their phones turned the elevator a hazy grey. It was enough for them to see one another’s uneasy expressions as they waited for the escape room to give up its secrets. They looked toward the television screen for another clue. It was blank.
They’d received no instructions on what to do with the anagram they’d solved, spelling out Sara Hall’s name. They didn’t even know what they were looking for. Were they supposed to find a code? And if they did, where were they supposed to key it in? They had no idea what puzzle they were supposed to solve, and they were stumped about where to find the next clue.
‘It could be anywhere,’ said Sam. ‘A post-it note. Anything.’
The mirrored walls shimmered as they shone their phones around to look for clues. They found nothing. Aside from the walls, there was nowhere to look. They were in an elevator. Sterile, spotless and empty. Where could one hide a clue in an elevator?
They shifted about restlessly, frustrated by the fruitlessness of the exercise. They’d been in the escape room for five minutes and they’d already hit an impasse.
‘What’s this then?’ Vincent picked up a small piece of crumpled paper from the floor. It was a chewing-gum wrapper. Cinnamon flavour, judging from the smell. ‘There’s writing on the inside.’
‘The Latin word for nephew,’ he read out loud, ‘is the origin of an English word for gaining an advantage. Someone you know has benefited from this practice. Find their name, which is two characters longer than that English word, and you shall be one step closer.’
‘You have got to be kidding me. Latin?’ Sylvie snatched the paper out of Vincent’s hand to read it herself. She crumpled it up in disgust. ‘Who knows Latin in this day and age? It’s ridiculous.’
‘Not as ridiculous as you might think,’ said Vincent. ‘I learned Latin at school. In Holland, it’s compulsory. I have three years of Latin. It’s been a while, but …’
Sylvie crossed her arms as they waited for Vincent to recall his high school Latin lessons. She’d known him for so long that she sometimes forgot that Vincent was born and raised in Holland. Rotterdam, then The Hague. He’d served in the Dutch army before completing his undergraduate degree in London and moving to Boston for his MBA.
‘It’s nepos,’ said Vincent. ‘The Latin word for nephew is nepos.’
‘The clue says we need to find an English word,’ Jules pointed out.
‘Yes, thank you stating the obvious, Jules,’ said Vincent. ‘Nepos is the origin of the English word “nepotism”. The question is who do we know who has benefited from nepotism.’
‘Where do you even start in this industry,’ groaned Sylvie. ‘We’re spoilt for choice.’
‘Let’s start at the firm,’ said Sam. ‘After all, the clue says that we know the person in question.’
‘It also says the person’s name is two characters longer than our answer,’ Sylvie pointed out. ‘Nepotism is eight characters. That means we need to think of someone we all know whose name is ten characters long.’
‘That’s easy then,’ said Jules. ‘Eric Miles is the most obvious candidate and his name is ten characters, if you count the space.’
Eric Miles was the nephew of a board member and the great-grandson of one of the original Stanhope family founders. He’d joined Stanhope straight out of graduate school by virtue of those family connections. He wasn’t much of a student – he certainly wasn’t much of an investment banker.
Word was that his family gave a large endowment to get Eric accepted into his Ivy League business school, where he’d made it through with the help of handsomely paid tutors who ghostwrote his papers and drilled him to within an inch of his life before exams.
Eric’s rise at Stanhope was nothing short of meteoric. And completely undeserved. Vincent considered him to be as sharp as a doorknob, a somewhat generous assessment. But within three years of being hired, Eric’s job grade and salary were above that of Jules, Sam and Sylvie even though they’d all started a few years before he joined the firm and were considerably more talented.
It wasn’t just that Eric was borderline incompetent, he was downright mean. He had a nasty streak a mile wide. He was rude to the support staff, and had a reputation for wandering hands. The admin staff knew to be wary of Eric, especially when he drank at parties.
He was at his most lecherous when they were pulled into group photos. Eric’s hands would inevitably wander south; from over a female colleague’s shoulder, to down her back, to squeezing her ass. One time he hiked up a woman’s skirt from behind and splayed his hands inside her lace underwear.
Eric seemed to take a special satisfaction in being crude around women. One story that did the rounds came from a woman who’d been riding up in an elevator with Eric and a male colleague. Without batting an eyelid, Eric turned to his male colleague and loudly said: ‘Jenny gave me a blowjob last night. That tells me one thing.’
‘What?’ his friend prompted.
‘That I have to check my Amex account.’
That summed up Eric. He was lazy, arrogant and sleazy. Despite his many flaws, nobody ever complained. Eric was untouchable. He was able to get away with murder, and didn’t he just know it.
Eric was well on the road to another major promotion when, just before Christmas, he abruptly left the firm. Before he resigned, he told a few people in the London office that he’d been forced to stay in England longer than expected because he perforated an ear drum, rendering him unable fly.
But gossip from the London office suggested that the real reason was that Scotland Yard had advised him not to leave the country until they finished investigating allegations that he’d sexually assaulted a graduate at the firm.
It transpired that the woman who’d made the allegation changed her mind, refusing to cooperate with police. The investigation was closed. But Eric returned home weakened politically, enough for some of his enemies in the firm, such as Vincent, to finally get rid of him.
At least that was the version Jules had heard. He’d also heard that Eric had sworn he’d get even with Vincent. ‘I’ll cut Vincent’s balls off. It could be next week. It could be a year from now. He won’t see me coming until it’s too late,’ were Eric’s exact words, according to a secretary Jules was sleeping with at the time.
The internal communications team published a note in the weekly newsletter. ‘It is with regret that we advise that Eric Miles has left the firm to work as Managing Director at the Miles-Newton Venture Capital Fund. We wish Eric great success in his new role.’ It sounded impressive to anyone who didn’t know that fund was owned by his family and the job was nothing more than a gesture to save face. Eric had for all intents and purposes been fired.
‘Let’s assume that clue number two is Eric Miles, who surely must go down as the king of nepotism in an industry that’s turned it into an art form,’ said Sam. ‘That means we have Sara Hall for clue number one and Eric Miles for the second clue.’
He paused to consider the implications. One colleague was dead; the other had recently been fired. ‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ he said, ‘but I’m not sure I like where this is going. They’re not exactly standard escape room clues. They seem very … well, personal.’
The night before my first day I tossed and turned for hours, until I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. I woke to the furious ring of my alarm and blundered into the shower, still groggy from sleep. It took me ages to fix my hair and makeup and then dress in the clothes that I’d laid out the night before.
I’d blown a good chunk of my sign-on bonus buying a new wardrobe, with the help of an instore fashion consultant who claimed to know everything there was to know about how Wall Street women should dress.
‘Men barely need to think about what to wear to the office. They throw on a Ferragamo suit and tie and they’re instantly classy. Women have it tougher. We have to be feminine and yet professional. Fashionable yet conservative. It’s hard to navigate all the contradictions.’ As she spoke, she pulled out
items for me to try on from racks of designer suits with prices that made my eyes water.
I left the store carrying eleven shopping bags, including five suits and five pairs of shoes. I can’t bring myself to say how much it all cost. Let’s just say that I earned enough frequent-flyer points on my credit card for a return flight to Tokyo.
I arrived at the Wall Street office by taxi, flustered by the slow, gridlocked journey downtown. Entering the building’s opulent lobby I had first-day-at-work butterflies in my tummy. I was directed by a concierge to an express elevator that went directly to the Stanhope office on the 90th floor.
Two men followed me into the elevator, deep in conversation. ‘There’s no way that I’m getting married until I’m forty. Between you and me, my future wife is probably still in elementary school,’ said the guy with short blond hair, while looking at my ass as if he was analysing a financial chart.
‘I wish I’d held out. I don’t have time for all this wedding shit. Everything about getting married is an argument,’ his friend complained. ‘Lisa wants a church wedding – I think her parents are behind it. I told her, “No fucking way. I don’t believe in God.”’
‘The only thing that you worship is your investment portfolio,’ the other laughed. ‘You’d think she’d know that by now.’
‘Exactly. I pointed to the fucking rock on her finger and told her that investment bankers don’t need religion. We don’t need to wait for the next life to enjoy paradise, not with the money we make.’
My first taste of that paradise began when I stepped out of the elevator into Stanhope and Son’s reception. A human-resources assistant met me and took me to the room where the week-long induction was being held. Her curls bounced on her shoulders as she led me up a central balustrade staircase to the exclusive luxury of the executive floor.
