Ordinary Hazards

by Anna Bruno

  They had that kind of history. By her late twenties, Angela’s feelings for Lucas were abundantly clear. For his part, he liked the attention, the text messages with heart emojis, the constant prattling on about celebrity chefs and recipes, the certainty that he had someone who would always be in love with him. He insisted there was nothing romantic between them. He told me, again and again and again, what they were: Just. Good. Friends.

  Eventually, I found out he’d slept with her a few times right after college.

  Cal knew this. There were people at the bar who knew things about Lucas I would never know because they’d been around for all the years when I had not. They’d seen Lucas bring women here, and they’d seen them replaced. All of us, myself included, had these kinds of histories, but I’d grown up in Connecticut, graduated from Harvard, moved to San Francisco for five years, then back to Harvard for my MBA, then Manhattan, which is the place that instantly felt like home.

  Lucas never liked being told what to do, so Cal didn’t tell him what to do. He asked him what he wanted. And Lucas told Cal he wanted me. And Cal told him that if he wanted me, he’d have to let his friend Angela go. There was no way around it.

  Cal didn’t do this for me. He did it for Lucas. I think he understood that keeping one foot in a relationship created a kind of stasis. Still, when I found out he gave Lucas this advice, I felt like he had my back, and feelings are more powerful than facts.

  * * *

  EVERYONE SEEMS CONTENT TO be at the bar now, and nowhere else. There is a shared easiness, almost an audible sigh. The day is done. Bring on the night.

  Cal and Fancy Pete are still talking about Jimmy’s culinary experiment.

  “So Jimmy wants to put tapioca and foam on salmon and charge me thirty dollars for it?” Cal says.

  “It’s a texture thing,” I say. “I’d try it.”

  “Of course you’d try it. You and Lucas would line up at the door for that crap.” Cal sees me frown. “I mean, separately—you’d line up separately.” A necessary clarification.

  “Talk to your ex-wife about it, Cal,” I say. “Tell her you know all about molecular gastronomy. It might turn her on.”

  “Shoot, I’m open to suggestions. I haven’t gotten laid in two months”—Cal looks at Fancy Pete—“and the blow jobs stop after you have a kid together.” A warning.

  “I hear the street vendors in New York are putting mustard soy lecithin foam on hot dogs,” I say.

  Fancy Pete takes the bait. “Foodies are like Forrest Gump with a box of chocolates. They think food should have a plot.”

  “They tweet about it until a pipeline diverts their attention,” Cal says. “All pipelines are objectionable.” He calls out to Summer, “We’ll take French’s over foam any day, right, Beautybelle?”

  She puts a little thumb up. The gesture seems so grown-up, an acknowledgment and a sarcastic dismissal of the stupidity of the conversation all at once.

  I pretend to gag. “Yellow mustard peaked in the nineties.”

  “Your face peaked in the nineties, honey,” Cal says. I walked right into it.

  I ignore him and look at Fancy Pete. “Who’d Jimmy make salmon for, anyway?”

  “Himself, I guess,” Fancy Pete says. “He’s always trying stuff out in the kitchen.”

  I can picture that—a midnight meal at the diner. He should invite a woman to join him next time.

  “I tell you what,” Cal says. “Making a plate of salmon at midnight and owning a restaurant are two entirely different things.” He looks at me because I am the only one at the bar who makes more money than he does, and for that reason, he respects me.

  “So what?” I say. “Sounds to me like he’s living his dream whenever he finds the time.”

  I place a coaster on top of my drink and excuse myself.

  * * *

  THE BATHROOM SMELLS LIKE fake pine needles. Normally these types of smells—factory scents—make me nauseous, but somehow I don’t mind it here. The ladies’ room is always clean enough. There are no drips of piss on the toilet seat or scraps of paper on the floor. The lighting is dim. I look great in the mirror: milky, clear skin, absent the weariness—ashen pallor accented by reddish, under-eye puffiness—revealed elsewhere by fluorescent bulbs. There is wood paneling next to the toilet, which has become a canvas for old carvings. I trace my finger over one that I made some time ago: HERE WE FIND HAVEN AND HAUNT. Under it: EMMA+LUCAS and a tiny heart, gouged deep in the wood, permanent.

  I yank up my jeans, wash my hands, and look hard at the woman in the mirror. If I concentrate on the fake pine needle smell, really let it in, I can see her for a moment, the woman I used to be.

  Thirteen unanswered text messages cascade across my phone. The content of the messages is pleading, urgent. My business partner, Grace Hu, isn’t worried about work; she’s worried about me. But I don’t want to do anything tonight. I swipe left to dismiss the most recent one: CALL ME.

  * * *

  MANY OF MY DECISIONS, big and small, that led me here trace back to my friendship with Grace. Grace: head of private wealth solutions at a bulge bracket bank by the age of thirty-three. Grace: one of Fortune’s 40 Under 40. Grace: devoted wife and mother. Grace has always been special, and, in her orbit, I wanted to be special too.

  I noticed Grace for the first time in my statistics class, freshman year at Harvard. From my vantage in the back of the lecture hall, I observed her sitting in the front row. She wore sweaters with the shoulders cut out and, one day, appeared sporting a buzz cut, which only she could pull off. Her hair has grown out since then, thick and jet-black, usually pulled into a loose braid. She has the mind of a fox, the elongated neck of a swan, and the focus of a bird of prey.

  Born into a working-class family in Ohio, Grace was both valedictorian and captain of her high school track team, and this was what drew me to her: her otherness. I called her Ohio, a term of endearment. She stayed in Boston after graduation, only trekking home to the Midwest for Christmas holidays. Eventually, the nickname fizzled out.

  In college, we ran together often, typically at night, ending on the empty, lit track, where we did crunches and leg lifts and discussed our dreams. Married by twenty-eight. Kids by thirty-two. True for Grace but not for me. Corporate jobs in New York or Boston. I studied economics and Grace studied applied mathematics. We didn’t know it at the time but we were learning how to use money to make money, which was both hardwired into my DNA and a consequence of Grace’s roots.

  Senior year, I took Grace home over spring break. The timing of our visit to Connecticut was less than ideal. Unbeknownst to me, my mother had discovered my father’s infidelity just days prior. While he hid out in his condo in Manhattan, my mom lorded over the vast, empty house, eating only saltines and pickled herring, the food my dad hated most, and washing it all down with Connecticut’s finest gin.

  When Grace stopped gawking at the marble staircase and messing around with the intercom system, she insisted the place had an echo, which wasn’t true, but it was so big and empty it probably seemed that way. She kept saying, “Echo, echo, echo…” softer each time. We had a good laugh. I promptly raided the liquor cabinet, which was fully stocked because Mom was on her way to becoming a raging alcoholic. At my insistence, we holed ourselves up in my bedroom all day, passing around a bottle of vodka and popping pills I’d bought from some douchebag at a frat party before we’d left campus.

  We left my room only when we heard Mom yelling at the pizza guy for banging on the front door. “I don’t eat pizza, you ape!” Mom shrieked through the intercom.

  The pizza guy didn’t know to push and hold down the button when he spoke, so his muffled voice called back through the door. “Extra-large pepperoni mushroom for Emma.”

  “Emma!” Mom yelled. Her voice rang loud across the intercom. Even drunk out of her gourd, she knew which button to push.

  “Calm down, Mom. We got it,” I said. Grace and I slid across the marble floor of the atrium in our socks. I sh
oved precounted cash into the hands of the pizza guy, grabbed the pie, and said sorry before slamming the door in his face.

  My plan was to whip back upstairs, as fast as we’d descended, but my mom said, “Emma, why don’t you and your friend eat in the kitchen?”

  Mom wore one of her designer outfits—a knee-length skirt and sweater cut like a jacket—St. John by the looks of it. She’d left off her rock and stacked thick gold rings on both hands. The clothes and jewelry were a charade—she wasn’t going anywhere. The tip-off? Her stocking feet. Either she’d kicked off her heels hours prior when she poured her first drink, or she’d never put them on in the first place.

  It took all of five minutes for Mom to start in on Dad. Her skin was grayish and dull, and when she raged, her wrinkles deepened. Somehow she still possessed weatherworn beauty, the kind of beauty that photographs well, the sad kind. I wanted to spare Grace the worst of it, but I’d brought her under this roof. We were stuck. The look on her face screamed, Is this what it’s like to be rich?

  “You know, she’s twenty-one,” Mom said. “Younger than you girls. And look at you! Children! She didn’t even bother with college. Two years of fashion school and straight to letting her boss fuck her in the ass. Did you know he always wanted to do that?” This was a new kind of vulgarity from my mom’s lips. She’d never have uttered these words sober. She considered herself a dignified woman.

  I tried to steer the conversation. “Mom, Grace is my roommate. We met in stats class freshman year—”

  “I’ve heard so much about you—” Interrupting herself midthought, Mom asked, “Are your parents still together?”

  Grace said, “Yes, but my mom’s been in Taiwan for the last six months.” When Mom didn’t respond, she added, “Taking care of her mother.”

  In her present state, my mom didn’t care about Grace, her mother, or her mother’s mother. She perseverated like a crazy person. “Can you believe him? The louse. It’s disgusting, picturing him with a twenty-one-year-old. Taking Cialis to keep it up. That bastard is going to embarrass the family. You watch. The girl will end up suing him for sexual harassment.”

  This seemed like a reasonable prediction at the time, though over the years my mom would be proven wrong. That twenty-one-year-old secretary stuck by the man she’d stolen—she’s with him even today, thirteen years later.

  I wanted to tell Grace this wasn’t my mom. She was a proper woman who didn’t cuss or talk about anal sex. It was just the gin talking. But Grace was a smart girl and would have known that was only a partial truth. Whatever meanness ran deep in Mom’s arteries ran also in mine. I judged my father harshly too, and words escaped my lips that were every bit as unkind.

  The three of us gorged ourselves, and when we were done, Mom insisted we try a proper gin and tonic with a curled strip of lemon zest and three juniper berries. I never invited Grace to Wilton again after that.

  Back then, neither of us predicted we’d go into business together but in hindsight it feels inevitable, in the way romantic relationships seem fated unless you catalog every intention and step along the way, reminding yourself it was all your doing: you chose this life.

  * * *

  I SETTLE BACK ONTO my stool and remove the coaster from the top of my glass. Then I text Grace back a lie: Driving home from the city. Let’s talk before the markets open in the a.m.

  She could call me out on the fact that I routinely take calls on the road but she won’t.

  Grace and I run a hedge fund. We have two hundred million dollars under management, and Grace is pushing hard to raise more capital. If the universe had whispered some version of this future in my ear in my early twenties, I would have believed it but there’s no way I’d have predicted my circuitous route, the sweat and tears and pain, the good luck and bad—all the ways I love Grace and how much I resent her.

  Three dots appear on my screen. Whatever she’s typing is taking too long, which means the message will annoy me.

  After college and before grad school, I spent five years working in California. I commuted from a shared apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco down the peninsula to my Silicon Valley office. One afternoon I dipped out early to have beers with friends on Baker Beach. As I drove back into the city on the 101, I noticed several dead birds alongside the highway, big black birds. There weren’t thousands of them or anything but there were enough to notice. I remember thinking to myself, We’re gonna have an earthquake tonight. It wasn’t that I thought dead birds were some fantastical, ominous sign. It was simply that these birds were dead because they’d been disoriented. They’d flown into traffic. And they were disoriented because they were more in tune with the natural world than we were.

  There was a minor earthquake that night. We felt it when we were sitting on the beach. I hadn’t told anyone about the birds, but when the earth shook, I understood.

  For some reason, the dots on my phone make me think of those dead birds.

  Grace writes, Will you be available by 9 p.m.?

  No further explanation. If she set up a conference call at nine, it must be with Singapore. We have an investor there, a dot-com billionaire. Grace can handle the call herself. I turn vibrate off and place my phone facedown on the bar.

  The Yankees are playing, and though I can tell no one really cares too much about it, we all look toward the TVs when there is a lull in the conversation, which is most of the time.

  * * *

  THE LAW OF NEPOTISM dictated I had a job on Wall Street waiting for me when I finished business school. I moved to New York with an MBA from Harvard and a chip on my shoulder. Back then, I was dating an artist who lived at Ninety-Ninth and Lex, right around the time when people stopped saying, “You don’t want to go above Ninety-Sixth.” Rich white people still said it.

  Labeling him an artist was generous, I’ll admit, analogous to calling a guy a garbage man because he empties the can in the kitchen once a week at his wife’s behest. Trash duty isn’t a job he gets paid for, and it isn’t a hobby, because hobbies are activities people enjoy. But nevertheless, he takes out the garbage so he’s a garbage man. My artist boyfriend’s relationship to art was similar. He dabbled in installation art, creating lopsided structures and telling everyone who would listen, “My medium is gravity!” He claimed to be working on his magnum opus but he wouldn’t show it to anyone and complained when people didn’t take him seriously. He also slept on a queen-size air mattress because he was a hypochondriac, deathly afraid of bedbugs.

  Naturally, I figured it was a good idea to crash with him for a few weeks as I got my bearings.

  On my first day, I made my way to the Ninety-Sixth Street subway station in heels and a pencil skirt, turned a blind eye to the rats, willfully tolerated the smell of piss and garbage, and emerged at ten minutes ’til eight to find a tower in the financial district that was to become my home for eighty-plus hours a week.

  My father had set up a meeting with the woman who was supposed to be my mentor. He told me I should get to know someone who’d “done well for herself in a man’s world.” I was shown to a conference room on the thirty-seventh floor.

  The view was, as one might expect, a glimpse through other towers. I pushed my chair up to the window and looked down at the street below: black suits, heels, shoulder bags. There was rhythm in the monotony.

  The woman—her name was Pamela—entered the room and we made small talk. She’d found her way to banking because she saw a job posting that included the word research. After three years in research, she’d become an analyst, and after that a VP.

  She drank coffee like it was a job requirement. At one end of the room, there was a service table with coffee and pastries. There were two pots of coffee, one regular, one decaf, which the staff periodically refilled, and five rows of cups, four deep. The room did not seat twenty people. At the time, I saw this merely as an incongruity. Only after I met Lucas did I assign the smallest extravagances to a category of corporate buffoonery.

&
nbsp; Pamela picked up the pot of regular and brought it over to the conference table, placing it directly in front of her. She filled her cup and emptied three packets of artificial sweetener into it. Instead of taking one or two sips and setting the cup down on the table, she sipped rapidly, in intervals of four or five. She put the cup to her lips and held it there: sip, sip, sip, sip, sip. Then she put it down for a beat, half the cup depleted. Before the cup was completely empty, she refilled it to the brim, dropped in three more packets of sweetener, and repeated.

  In a profile, which I came across much later, I read she was abstinent from alcohol. This made sense because if she drank booze anything like she drank coffee, she’d end up parking her car on her lawn or drinking gin out of her coffee mug at ten o’clock in the morning.

  Something struck me. She looked like me, though her bone structure was dissimilar. She had a round face and a small nose—men would have found her cute when she was younger. My cheekbones were more prominent and my chin had a slight cleft. My hair was long and dark and hers was dyed blond and cropped short. And yet, we were sisters. We were two women in an office that was 74 percent men, 89 percent not counting reception. We wore black skirts and black nylons and black heels. The feeling I had, the je ne sais quoi, wasn’t our features or what we were wearing, though. It was where we came from.

  “My father worked with your father for many years,” she said. “Your dad wrote my recommendation for Harvard Business School.”

  Her name was Pamela Randolph Walsh. Maiden name: Randolph. Pamela had grown up in the same neighborhood as me in Wilton, Connecticut. She was maybe five or six years older so I didn’t know her in school, but I’d heard the name Randolph. It had been in the news. When I was about twelve—Pamela would have been a junior or senior in high school—the police raided the Randolphs’ cul-de-sac mansion. I rode my bike over to see the spectacle. There were about ten police cars on the circle and in the long driveway, and one or two on the lawn. By the time I rolled up, they’d already entered the house. A neighborhood kid told me they’d had the place surrounded, guns drawn.