Ordinary Hazards

by Anna Bruno

  We read about it in the papers the next day. Walter Randolph was allegedly the kingpin in Connecticut’s largest sports bookmaking operation of all time. Randolph and his associates were purportedly netting nearly five million dollars a month.

  Pamela looked out the window while I wrapped my mind around these details. I couldn’t tell if she knew how much I knew until she smiled.

  “Lucky for your old man, my dad used code names in all his ledgers,” she said. “Lucky for me, your dad was grateful.”

  “And lucky for me, you are grateful?” I said. In my mind, I was mocking her but it rang earnest.

  “No one here knows,” she said. “It wouldn’t look good for the firm: daughter of a bookmaker. Compliance would take issue.”

  “Why keep Randolph as your middle name?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Number one: it’s a common enough name. Number two: no one in this business cares about your family unless they care about your family.” She said this matter-of-factly. She had my dad’s recommendation and the Harvard pedigree, which was quite enough for anyone around here. After fifteen minutes with her, I could tell she was one of those people who work their butts off—eighty-, ninety-, sometimes hundred-hour weeks. The bleach in her hair covered up the premature grays, but despite its roundness, her face looked older than it should have, more weathered. I had to remind myself she was only in her early thirties, midlife crisis still distant on the horizon.

  The idea that she’d kept the name because it was common was her lie, though—I could tell. She was either proud of where she came from or she loved her father (or some combination of the two), and though she’d taken Walsh because she did what was expected of her, she was unwilling or unable to part with what she was: a Randolph, daughter of a bookmaker.

  She looked at the clock on the wall. “The market opens in thirty. I need to cut this short,” and then added glibly, “Best of luck to you, Emma.”

  “Thanks,” I said, thinking, What a gal!

  “Look, I’m not here to help you. That’s not my job. Your dad did something for me because my dad did something for him. Even Steven. I can promise you that I won’t get in your way.” Investment bankers do mentorship like deadbeat dads do parenting.

  I tried to picture myself in her shoes, and I was, almost literally, wearing them already. Her experience, not within these walls, but outside them: waking up in the morning, checking her phone on the nightstand for something, anything, that happened in the five hours that had ticked by since the last time she checked, before she allowed herself some semblance of sleep, and then—in the absence of a firestorm, which she would have known about already because some young analyst would have called and woken her—letting the rush of warm water from her fancy showerhead run over her face. This would be her last calm moment of the day. This was what I cared about. I did not care about the male colleague who said she was hot enough to want to be around but not too hot to distract him, just the right amount of hot. I wasn’t concerned with some wide-eyed notion of doing good in the world, something beyond moving money around, making the rich richer. I actually looked forward to the boozy, coked-out nights, clubs and strippers, house music and bottle service. But none of this mattered to me as much as the experience of waking up as Pamela Randolph Walsh. The waking up with myself in this life was the unbearable part.

  She had a high tolerance for pain. I did not. She went back for more. I did not. That was the difference between her and me.

  Pamela swiveled her chair away from the table, stood up, and walked out without looking back. She didn’t smile or shake my hand. From behind, she was perfect. I had the feeling I was watching an actress playing her as she walked away. Through her silk blouse I could see the curvature of her back, which was slightly concave at her waist, accentuating her round ass. Her fitted skirt extended just past her knees but there was a slit in the back, revealing the smallest glimpse of her thigh as she walked. And she walked like a company woman, which is to say, hard footed, assured, the kind of woman you did not want living above you in an apartment building.

  As she moved away from me, I had a premonition: Pamela Randolph Walsh would be a captain of industry one day.

  In fact, she would eventually become the CFO of the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States. On her ascent, her name would not only catch up with her but propel her forward. The daughter of a bookmaker would be branded Wall Street’s moral compass. She’d rub elbows with senators and congressmen, and she would be adored not in spite of her story, but because of it. Tough dad; tougher daughter.

  Observing Pamela walk away down the hall threw me back into myself, my slouched posture, the way I was touching my face, picking a piece of loose skin from my lip, the position of my leather bag on the floor, hastily dropped. Pamela and I had come from the same neighborhood and gone to the same business school but we were creatures of a different kind. As fate granted, I had arrived at her house. I’d put on the clothes and taken the subway and sucked down the coffee, but I didn’t have her middle name and I didn’t have her stamina.

  Immediately after the meeting, I quit. I simply took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out. It may have been the shortest amount of time anyone has ever lasted on Wall Street: about an hour.

  Subway to Ninety-Sixth, three blocks to Ninety-Ninth, trade the heels and nylons for cutoffs and flip-flops, check to make sure soul remains intact, leave boyfriend a note: Headed upstate, XOXO—Emma.

  Upstate New York seemed like a cross between Brooklyn and Appalachia, grunge meets hillbilly with a dash of locally sourced food—heirloom tomatoes, foraged mushrooms, free-range everything—to an urbanite, better than the real thing, like oral sex. Back then, I thought I was trapped between towers, not of concrete but of desire, and Upstate seemed like a void, so I was willing to trade one wasteland for another.

  I wish I could say I chose this town—the place that would establish my life’s trajectory—for a good reason, but I can’t. Within a year of moving here, I would fall deeply in love with the man who would become my husband and the father of my son. But I didn’t know that then. I moved north to escape. Simple as that. I moved to the middle of nowhere because I didn’t want to be anywhere—not New York City, not San Francisco, not Boston. I had one friend here, and some extended family on my dad’s side who lived over two hours away, west of Albany, family I didn’t know and had no plans to see.

  I hopped a train to Poughkeepsie. From there, I called Samantha, who’d grown up with me in Wilton. She worked in admissions at the U., a college that was, at least in my head, so far upstate it might as well have been in Canada. She told me that their business school was hiring a lecturer for business communication and that, with an MBA from Harvard and my father’s last name, I was a shoo-in. I bought a one-way ticket on a Greyhound bus.

  Perhaps I should have known back then that finance would eventually suck me back in—not the money, not the darling life, but how it feels to succeed in a way that is so immediately and perfectly measurable. Unrealized gain/loss in dollars and percent. Right there in black ink on the holdings sheet.

  * * *

  “HAVEN’T SEEN YOU IN here before,” I say to a stranger to my left, not with the inflection of a young woman but an old man: friendly, warm.

  I take the last sip of whiskey in my glass. Amelia offers me another and I nod.

  Whiskey: I like the way it makes me feel. It’s obvious to most people that gin and vodka and tequila and whiskey taste different, but drinkers, real drinkers, know that they feel different. Gin and vodka feel crisp and cool, operating on the upper fifth, shoulders to head. Tequila and whiskey are diffuse and warm—even if sipped cold—hitting the gut and rising through the stomach to the chest and eventually expanding upward to the head, slow and steady. As far as I can tell, both whiskey and tequila feel this way, but tequila hurts more going down, and people ’round these parts don’t like the taste. Sipping tequila is not a thing here at The Final Final. Don Julio is the
best on the shelf, and the only time anyone drinks it is when some guy from out of town comes in and wants to do a shot. A few years back, kids from the U. occasionally bought shots of Cuervo, but that’s pretty much out of fashion these days. Now they are more inclined to go with the house shot or spin the wheel. Whiskey doesn’t need to be top shelf. I like Maker’s, but Jim Beam works just the same. Old Charter and Heaven Hill are good, affordable options. Whiskey is like a down comforter on a cold night. Climb in and adjust, let it warm your body as your body warms it. But know: the longer you stay in, the harder it is to get out. It just feels good. I really can’t describe it any better than that. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. Go ahead, have another.

  Like breakfast cereal, people begin consuming alcohol at a particular time of life. For cereal, that’s when people are kids, when times are simple and failure hasn’t yet choked out life’s possibilities. This is why you see forty-year-old single men buying Frosted Flakes at the grocery store. They might have lost their taste for it long ago, but they still eat it because nostalgia operates on the brain like a narcotic. Of course, some people turn to liquor during the bad times, but I began ordering whiskey when I moved to Upstate New York. Here, I met Lucas, and he drank whiskey too, and together we drank even more whiskey because we spent more hours at the bar. These were some of the best days of my life. So maybe I like whiskey because of the way it feels, or maybe I like it for the same reason some people like Frosted Flakes.

  My fingers touch, tip to tip, forming an igloo. I let them drop into each other and roll my thumbs, once, twice.

  If only I could experience my hands with the wonder of an innocent babe. Mesmerizing to watch. Heavenly to feel. Skin soft as silk, grip strong as a vise, holding on and letting go. But I can’t. When I look at my hands, I see the story I tell myself again and again.

  I’m not married. The woman I used to be, she was.

  Everyone always wants to know why relationships fail. It’s a spiteful curiosity thing, schadenfreude, but also a self-preservation thing. People want to understand how to avoid the fall.

  The answer is complicated. There isn’t one reason, one event. It has something to do with smoking cigarettes and drinking all night. It takes into account thousands of hours of labor on a small house, projects finished and unfinished. It is late-night conversations and inside jokes and making love and having a child. The answer is wrapped up, shrouded, and ensconced in prioritization, ambition, and work. Caring about these things is not the problem. Not caring about them is death.

  6PM

  ADELAIDE IS AT MY apartment now, waiting for me. Her name ricochets in my mind. It sounds ancestral, like it was passed down from a great aunt. I never call her by her formal name. She’s a blue heeler, named for the region from which she hails. I call her Addie or Addiecakes or just Cakes, or sometimes Dog when she misbehaves. Lucas used to call her Addie, but when he said it, he’d always emphasize the first syllable and draw out the last—Ad-deeee. It had a ring to it. She smells like a dog, but in a good way. She has the hardest head you’ll ever touch, designed to withstand the hooves of cattle. I’ve seen her bash her head into the coffee table and not so much as flinch. I’ve seen her run straight into a signpost, distracted by a rabbit, and barely break stride. She shows love by pushing her hard head into my head and holding it there—hard dog head against soft human head. Lucas taught her this. When she does it, I always want her to hold the position just a little bit longer because the combination of the hardness of her skull and the warmth of her fur feels so good. She can’t help herself, though. She always goes in for the lick when she’s close to my face, and I shriek, “No face licks!” and the moment passes by.

  Lucas and I maintained a running gag where we’d jot down logical fallacies on scraps of paper. They all related to our lives in some way, topics that were important to us, or random or funny at the time. I wrote the date on each one and collected them in a shoebox. The oldest one is in Lucas’s handwriting:

  We made some food ^ Adelaide ate the food

  … Our food is dog food

  I spend my days at home with Addie, the only thing I love, and my nights here, at The Final Final, the only place that will have me.

  * * *

  BY SIX O’CLOCK, IT’S obvious that The Final Final is a townie bar. The place is full of craggy white guys who drink too much. They all know each other “from the bar.” Go ahead—ask them. No one is wearing anything they haven’t owned for ten years. An enormous, shimmering Old Style sign hangs to the left of the bar top. It’s a mechanical sign with glitches, white lines where there should be blue water. It features a huge mug of beer, as big as the mountains behind it, with a tremendous amount of head. The head alone is greater in volume than the waterfall. The text on it reads, BREWED WITH WATER FROM WHEN THE EARTH WAS PURE. If one of my students wrote this tagline, I would have ripped it to pieces. But I like the sign, especially all that’s wrong with it.

  When I started teaching Advanced Communications to MBAs at the U., I planned to do it for a year or two, just long enough to get investment banking out of my system, ditch the New York artist boyfriend, and figure out what to do with my life. I designed the course with a focus on storytelling. Students explore how to capture attention, appeal to logic and emotion, and deliver memorable conclusions. The entire class can be summed up in three concepts: beginnings, endings, and transitions. Master these, and the power and glory are yours, now and forever! Since my first year of teaching, my conviction in the importance of storytelling has become almost religious in nature. A good story can move a stock! A market! A good story is the difference between a cubicle and the C-suite.

  Turns out I like teaching. Having worked in the corporate world for some years—growing up in a world where money and power are fundamental elements like air and water—I recognize that teaching, or more specifically, the decision to teach, is pure stupidity. The fact that there are all these bright, capable people holed up in high schools and universities, making, in some cases, less than a living wage is irrational. It’s what people in finance call a market anomaly. It’s what economists call behavioral economics.

  The stranger to my left offers to buy me a drink.

  My glass is still full, but I’ve learned to accept these gestures. I offer a simple thank-you. Amelia acknowledges our exchange. My next drink will appear on the correct tab at the end of the night.

  Amelia refills my glass once or twice per hour, not too much if I only stay an hour or two. I will probably stay longer tonight.

  I flip my phone over. The texts from Grace stopped but I have three missed calls from Samantha. She usually doesn’t call in the evenings. She has three kids and a husband to worry about. I check the voicemail: Can you come over to my house later tonight? Say, nine o’clock? There’s someone she wants me to meet.

  I rack my brain for who she could possibly want to introduce me to. She’s not trying to set me up again, because she thinks I belong with Lucas. On a regular basis she calls him my soul mate, which drives me crazy, because if I ever had a soul, it’s gone dark, incapable of mating.

  Samantha and I were like sisters in high school. We’d take the train into Manhattan and spend weekends in my dad’s condo. Or we’d crash on the floor at my uncle Nic’s place. She went to college at NYU. I assumed she’d stay in the city forever because she always talked so much shit about Wilton. But right out of school, she fell for an oncologist who took a job at a hospital upstate, here at the U. So she left the city for good. In short order, they moved into their big house, and the rest is history.

  I think we’re the same people we were in high school, but back then we didn’t know who those people were yet. Friendship came easy. It’s more complicated now. But Samantha got me the job at the business school. Then she sent me Lucas, which is a debt I can never repay.

  I text her: Sorry, conference call with Singapore later tonight. This is another lie because I have no intention of joining any conference cal
l but I assume it will get Samantha off my back.

  This is important, she writes.

  Who is it? I ask.

  A friend from Boston. Grace is going to Skype in too.

  So it was no coincidence that they both wanted me at nine o’clock. Samantha and Grace have met exactly twice. They have no business being on Skype together.

  I turn my phone upside down again. I’m not in the mood to go to Samantha’s house tonight. By nine, she’ll have put her kids down for the night, but the oldest always wakes up and wants something frivolous, like an organic, locally sourced yogurt in a compostable cup.

  * * *

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER we met, Lucas took me out to the nicest restaurant in town, a small Italian joint owned by a first-generation immigrant named Angelo Antolini. Offhandedly, I pondered aloud how Antolini found his way here, from Italy to this town, in the middle of nowhere. The question was barely formed. There was nothing behind it. Then Lucas asked me why I was here.

  “You asked and I accepted,” I said.

  “Here in this town, smart-ass.”

  Antolini’s is small, like, twenty-tables small, mostly two-tops. That night, every table was taken, squeezed a bit closer together than usual, only far apart enough to slip a body through sideways. Lucas offered me the better seat, and I took it. I sat with my back to the wall, looking out at the restaurant. Another couple sat to my left, the woman on the inside as well. To serve her, our waitress had to stand between our tables, her butt inches from our water glasses. It was a nice butt, not a small butt but a firm, young butt: a dancer’s butt.