Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  Gael takes a sharp, shallow breath and comes right up to Harper, as if to deliver a slap. ‘Take a type of debt, like a mortgage. Investment banks look at debt and see products. Once upon a time, they decided to buy mortgages in bulk from lenders and to group that debt with other loans into little tradable clusterfucks. Then, they sold those collateralized debt obligations – bunches of mortgages – to investors who couldn’t be fucked to look beyond the sexy interest rates. They sold so many CDOs they ran out of debt to chuck in the silo. So to continue their spree, they gave mortgages to people who really shouldn’t have them. “With all this demand, you’ll make free money when your house price leaps by twenty per cent against the teaser interest rates, which aren’t fixed but don’t concern yourselves with that.” Meanwhile, the investor’s licking his lips at the loopholes the investment banks are designing with rating agencies, whose job it is to say: Well done, Morgan. You got a triple A in accounting. But there’s not enough As to go round. So when they start running out of safe triple A-rated CDOs, they figure out how to wave their dick wands and turn BBBs into eighty percent AAAs. AKA: shitty mortgages went through a rigged calculator and became safe ones. Abracadaver. Traders were making more G than they could stuff down their hookers’ thongs in commissions while, on the side, they took out insurance against it all, for good measure. You could get insurance on CDOs called credit default swaps, because there’s always a Congress-sucking insurer willing to make money off Armageddon. AIG took the flipside of the bet. The quarterly premiums from the credit default swaps gave them shedloads of cash to pay themselves bonuses, because Armageddon almost never happens. Speculators could buy credit default swaps too and did, by the billion. Deep down they knew you could take money both ways and, if it was fucked, so was the economy and no one needed to lose sleep over it because bankers aren’t friends with the plebs who’d get kicked out of their homes, and their AIG friends would survive with their hands in the government’s pockets because there’s more than lint in those chinos. What are you going to do? Let the planes fall out of the sky? Besides, all the newly homeless people who’d been robbed of everything they owned probably needed to learn how to live within their means.’

  Harper’s gaze has been going from Gael’s mouth to her eyes and back again, as if trying to catch the subtitles without missing the action. Gael adjusts the scarf on Harper’s dress the way old movie wives adjusts their husbands’ ties in the morning before they go breadwinning. She points to the Bank of America sign nested high in the building before them. ‘Your dad’s on the board.’

  ‘Oh great. I’m a son of a cunt.’

  Gael nods slowly. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh sure.’ Harper takes her time. ‘Pop’s got a big old stake in this place. And we were brought up vegan, so I’m not talking sirloin.’

  ‘Sterling,’ Gael says, smiling finally.

  ‘You bet your ass.’

  They can take their liquor. They’ve been practising by keeping up drink for drink with the characters of Mad Men while sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, watching Gael’s laptop blearily like sunrise after an all-nighter. These glasses are heavier than the tahini jars they’re used to drinking from. The spirits are smoother. The granite bartop doesn’t need wiping, though Harper unconsciously does so every time she rests her elbow on it. She’s listening to Gael listening to the trio of suits next to them the way a cub listens to the movement of the mother lion’s body for signs of a prize. The bar is quieter now than it would have been earlier. It’s a post-work sterilizer kind of place: Copper pendant lights on dimmers. Reflective surfaces. Synthetic music whispering sweet ‘n’ sour nothings.

  Gael, Harper and the three suits are the only ones at the bar. All the round tables are occupied. Gael doesn’t have to say much to be heard. She’s speaking a language Harper isn’t versed in, but Harper leans in and involves herself like a customer. ‘It’s risky post-crash, now they know the tranch engineering’s titanic,’ Gael says. ‘It comes down to how quickly they’ll act. Student fees are set to double next year, if not triple.’ She goes on like this. ‘Right,’ Harper says, then indicates (by pointing longingly at her groin) that she has to pee. ‘But Gael,’ she adds, in what she thinks is a whisper, ‘I’m sitting here like an extra, in it for the snack bar. When I get back, my part’s gotta get interesting. For a start, you could call me Ginzel?’

  Gael waves her off. This day has to arrive somewhere, in the end; grant her some access. Perhaps bringing Harper was a mistake. She won’t be made a wingwoman. She’s too inflexibly, unreservedly herself.

  One of the men is Australian, on a jolly. He has skin the colour and grain of mature cheddar, light-brown hair and a goatee in the shape of a beer-can pull-tab. The can’s open. He watches Harper dismount her bar stool as if she’s a waitress managing a tray, impressively for that sort of thing. His stance is impractically wide. But it’s the guy closest to Gael who’s been listening to them. He’s turned to the barman, to settle the tab. As he takes his credit card back, Gael can see it doesn’t belong to him. It’s not platinum. Lowly gold. A company card probably. His jazz-hands splay of straw-textured, straw-coloured hair signals a kind of disarray that would never have been tolerated in the financial district a few years back. Now, reckless abandon is a good look. He has an accidental time-traveller air, in a tucked-in navy polo shirt, a Hilfiger cardigan with navy piping, chequered trousers and tidy leather sports shoes that so perfectly match his belt they might have come in a set.

  ‘I’ll bet you our bar tab that’s a golf glove in your pocket,’ Gael says, without glancing again at the bulge.

  He only flashes his veneers for a brief moment, in place of eye contact. Then he lines the bottom row of his big-ticket teeth with the top and makes a small whistle, directed at the barman, holding the credit card out between his index and middle fingers, like a cigarette. The barman feigns confusion, buying himself time to control his anger before deigning to pluck the card from the golfer’s neatly cuticled fingers that show no sign of a tip. The golfer jolts his head to his right and says, ‘The ladies’ beverages.’ (Pronounced ‘behfridges.’)

  Gael resists giving the barman a sympathetic look. The whole part, nothing but.

  ‘I have a client who loves to knock one off on Saturdays at dawn. Then he likes to play golf.’ He shakes his left wrist so that his watch hangs loose as a bracelet. He checks it. ‘Plenty of time to drink enough to make his defeat a near miss and not the total fucking disgrace it would be were I to play sober.’

  ‘What’s your handicap?’ Gael asks.

  ‘Single malt. Ten or so.’

  She smiles, a little.

  ‘Let’s just say I catch the occasional birdie.’ He smiles, a lot. ‘No. In all seriousness, I’m decidedly average. But my client’s diabolical, so it’s a picnic. Are you here on business?’

  ‘Are you asking if I’m an escort?’

  ‘Should I be?’ He puts his hand in his pocket and takes out what was, in fact, a handkerchief.

  Gael considers it. Who carries a handkerchief ? She draws her hair from her right temple and across, so that it’s after-hours hair, which trickles back into place.

  ‘Allergies,’ he says, in an accent so posh Gael takes a moment to translate it and is reminded of her interview.

  ‘I was giving a presentation,’ she says.

  ‘A pre-sentation? That’s vague. What symptoms were you presenting with?’

  Gael takes a deep breath. ‘Oh, ennui mostly.’

  The golfer makes a disgusted face. ‘Sounds ghastly. By the way, your American friend, she’s loud. Are you doing her a favour?’

  Gael lets out something like a pant. ‘If you think she’s loud, you shouldn’t compete. Not in here. Her dad’s the chief.’ Gael sticks her thumb up to the ceiling.

  The golfer curls his lip. ‘The chief what? The chief philistine? The Almighty Chief ?’

  Gael shakes her head, dismounts the chair.

  Returning to the bar,
Harper veers a little, eyeing up the white baby grand in the corner. She delivers her purse to Gael (as if to fix up), looks right through the golfer and addresses the barman: ‘Is this one of those bars with no licence to play music?’

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am?’

  ‘Like, what’s it, Weatherfork? Can’t play tunes.’

  The barman sucks his lower lip and raises his brows. It’s not his night. ‘There’s music playing, ma’am.’

  ‘Not that I hear,’ Harper says.

  ‘Is it too quiet? I’d turn it up …’

  ‘Turning it up won’t make it music.’

  Harper walks over to the piano and lands on the chair. Now the golfer, the Aussie and the other sharp-suited one are, all at once, her audience. De-du-de-du-de-du-deh-deh-deh. ‘Für Elise’, right hand index finger only. The barman shifts his weight and dries his brow with the towel he’s been polishing glasses with. De-deh-deh, de-deh-deh. Harper moves her feet onto the pedals and adds the left hand, remembering how it goes. With each second, she picks up pace and fluency until the music is recognizable, until its rendition is adequate, then more so. De-du-de-du-de-du … De-de-de-de dedl-dedl-deh-deh, de-de-de-de dedldedl-deh. Mozart’s ‘Turkish March’ for a few bars, then she moves back to ‘Für Elise’, as if she’s forgotten what she was playing. But no, she’s alternating between them. ‘A Für Elise–Turkish March’ mash-up, then something by Chopin, expertly woven in. She plays with precision in place of musicality. She doesn’t sway forward or close her eyes. She sits up perfectly straight and watches whichever hand has the hardest part. Sive would never hire her, but Gael would. All the conversations in the bar have stopped and a few people get up from their seats to move closer, mouths agape in delight. Then Harper halts in the middle of a phrase and stands. She looks at the barman. ‘This thing needs tuning. It’s flat as Uncle Avery’s EKG.’ She closes the lid.

  The golfer takes out his phone and car keys. He talks to the receiver: ‘Siri, call the club.’ The automaton responds: ‘Phoning the club.’ He puts the phone to his ear. ‘Charlie. We’ve picked up a couple of strays. Jules plus four … Just so.’ He hangs up and tells Gael, ‘You and Ludwig come with us.’

  ‘She’s called Ginzel,’ Gael says.

  Harper arrives in time to hear this and beams at Gael, taking back her purse.

  Jules says, ‘She’s Gin, you’re Tonic, I’m parched.’

  His car is parked around the corner. A silver convertible Alfa Romeo 8C Spider. 2010. Harper and Gael sit in the back with the Australian. Miller, they call him. Jules drives, moving the group through its gears. The most serious of them is in the passenger seat, with a set of golf clubs between his legs. His wet soil hair is hoed backward in a Germanic style, circa 1940. His suit is postcoital slick. His name’s Aaron, based on what’s coming out of Jules’s mouth, which doesn’t once address Gael or Harper for the fifteen-minute ride across town. Miller helps himself to a little stash of coke from his shirt pocket. Gael considers asking for some to rub into the sores of her feet. It would burn like an electric eel and make the skin numb, she imagines. It seems an appropriate request. But Miller passes the sachet to Aaron, who sniffs straight from the plastic, grunts, closes the zip lock and pockets it. Miller opens the window. He bites his nails and spits the slivers out. Gael clenches her pelvic muscles at the jagged bitten remains.

  ‘Miller,’ Jules warns.

  Miller closes the window. His right leg jigs. He stares now at Harper’s knee, the contours of which are sheathed by the grey dress and a stocking beneath. She’s sitting in the middle, with her seat belt on. As if it’s a square of chocolate he might break off and eat, he reaches out and traces the outline of her patella. He takes it in his pincers and squeezes.

  Barely keeping it together, Harper asks Gael: ‘What’s the acronym for this situation?’

  Miller lets go and says in an accent that makes his tongue sound half-swallowed, ‘You’ve got large kneecaps. Laaage.’

  Harper lifts her purse to her lap as a shield. ‘All the better to knee you with.’

  Miller tightens his lips, which makes the pull-tab goatee warp. He bucks forward and grabs the driver’s seat by its headrest. ‘Will those fuckwits from Lloyds be in Zurich?’

  The women are dismissed. Harper makes an Are you kidding me face. Then: I can’t even. She hates herself for being in this car. It must bring back high school traumas, where the boys could break your spirit with half a sentence. Gael’s grateful for her half-arsed single-sex schooling. She takes Harper’s hand, knitting her fingers through. ‘They can be so kneedy.’

  Harper watches Gael’s hand in hers, feels the weight of it on her lap. Two hands are disproportionately weightier than one. ‘I always wanted to do a car-door jump and roll,’ Harper says. She glances at the door handle, then at Gael, who is meeting Aaron’s challenge in the mirror of the lowered passenger sun visor. He suspects her.

  ‘Doku kuwaba sara made,’ Gael responds, and holds firm, staring ahead. ‘Japanese proverb. If you’re going to eat poison, include the plate.’

  At first, Harper was aroused by the three layers of plum velvet curtains in the ladies’ club entrance, which had had the façade of a multistorey early-to-bed Victorian town house and no sign outside to let the public know it was there. And what a quirk that behind the third curtain, a tuxedo-clad lady waited to take not only their coats but their bags – this was a place where people had all they needed in their pocket or on their tongue – and gave them merely a nod in place of a ticket. Harper made a scene of fishing out her poker chips before she would hand over her purse. This behaviour was treated as admirably demanding. So far so good. But then she caught sight of the clientele. Sherry-suckling Tory champions. Mute blonde globe-boobed beings who survived on liquids and preferred pin-striped laps over seats as if they were kitty-cats. Bartenders who had been to finishing school, had had their certificates framed, who weren’t even ‘really actors’.

  ‘Good luck getting that back in the bottle,’ Harper told the cocktail waiter when she was charged ninety-two pounds for a shot of bourbon (which she had selected by pointing at the shapeliest bottle). ‘Just cuz I got cash don’t mean I’m gonna suck it.’

  Miller cocked his eye at the server in a tosh sort of way and took the bourbon from the bartop. He sniffed it luxuriantly, dipped his pinky finger into the glass, then wiped the finger behind Harper’s ear. She flinched. He leaned in and sniffed her. Then withdrew from slapping range. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Still cheap.’ He knocked the shot back, slid the tumbler across the counter and absconded to the cigar room, where the others sat in padded, high-backed chairs under hundred-thousand-pound paintings hanging casually as mistletoe. The place was lair after lair of opulence – private cocktail corridors that opened onto a dark disco basement with talcum powder pluming all around, a soundproofed Victorian drawing room, a library lounge, a billiards room with decorated leather walls. In the washrooms were alcoves with stools before floor-to-ceiling mirrors where daddy-long-legged women were struggling to find fault with their pores. There were heated towels and little perfume vials to slot within one’s cleavage. It wasn’t long before Gael realized that Harper would never ever serve as a prop.

  The only reason she hadn’t left was that she was enjoying cracking Gael up by practising the comebacks she could have used on Miller, had he been worth it. This place was nothing new to Harper. She had seen some equivalent of it before and, anyway, like most Americans, she said, she was happy to glean from movies that places and people like this exist. ‘We’re big old believers. Don’t have to peel back the bandage to know what’s infected.’ But Gael hadn’t been to a place like this before. And it was better to step into a world, however unwelcoming, than only to see it through a window.

  ‘There’s a taxi rank around the corner,’ Gael told Harper.

  ‘The lady’s seen the headlight! Halalooyah. Let’s get the heck out of here. Falafel kebabs on the way home? You’re reminding me of Kafka’s “Hunger Artist” ’.r />
  Gael looked down the corridor. She could see Jules’s golf shoes, crossed at the ankles. She’d lost the feeling in her feet, but didn’t budge. It finally dawned on Harper that she was being sent away, alone, and she stood there, stunned. She let her belly hang, the moderate swell that was in it. ‘I don’t get it. What are you planning–’

  ‘Please don’t make a scene,’ Gael said, finding it hard to meet Harper’s eye. ‘Just–’

  ‘Right. Sure. No. I’ll just hit up Craigslist or whatever. For a new roommate.’

  Gael took a deep breath. This was a reminder. ‘Honestly, this isn’t about you.’

  ‘Oh sure. That’s obvious.’ Harper shook her head and shoulders. ‘C U L.’ Harper made the letters with her fingers, then stuck her middle finger up and flushed. ‘Or not.’ She left. A minute later, she hustled back up the stairs – her chest and neck blooming like strawberries dropped in a flute of champagne – with the message: ‘If you let that drunk-driving golfer drive you anywhere, I’m never speaking to you again.’

  It would be some kind of relief to have told Harper. But she had already gone. He won’t be driving anywhere. Gael had left the passenger door open. Soon, she’d insist on their taxiing to his flat. Her dad died in a drink-driving accident, she’d say, when he got pushy. If the car hadn’t been stolen by morning for the clubs alone, its battery might well be flat as that baby grand. But no. She couldn’t have said that much. If she had, Harper would have needed to know why. She would have wanted to grasp the untouchable ins and outs of Gael’s devotions, as if, like the whole train carriage, she had a right to watch every contour of her intention – each and every girl give herself away.

  In the billiards room, Miller had been harassing Aaron about his ranking on April’s scoreboard for their little VP team game of clocking up the most expenses per month on their company cards. They get receipts from escort companies for laundry services (‘she’ll never get the stain out, gents’), they buy new suits as protective clothing (‘for rainy days, bankers need insolvent bibs’) and return flights to Fiji whenever their air points for any given airline are set to drop from Heroin to Platinum membership. The night reached peak backslapping when Jules used Gael as an excuse to recall the time they employed Citigroup’s teamwork ethos to book out the whole business cabin for a flight to JFK, which they knew had been the flight decided upon for an international Deutsche Bank conference. ‘Way to put the douchebag in Deutsche Bank,’ Gael muttered, filling in what Harper would have said and looking around for her reaction. Jules pulled a disappointed expression. ‘The lady’s getting grouchy. Had we best get you to bed?’ The image of all three of them surrounding her, gaffing about compounding interest rates, made her gag on her cognac.