The Medium of Desire Read online

  “Have you seen his stuff?” the other guy asked. “That’s how he got it in there.”

  Brett smiled. “I think I’m going to jump,” Brett said, pointing to the tree, its leaves shimmering in the breeze. “It’s going to haunt me if I don’t.”

  “Go for it, man.”

  Brett pried Lizzie off his arm, starting up the crooked tree, climbing out underneath the canopy, hovering over the tributary. He climbed halfway between the ground and the spot where the last guy had jumped. He hadn’t realized the tree was so tall, and if he had he probably would have sought a less hazardous escape from Lizzie. He couldn’t jump from where he clung, he wasn’t out far enough over the tributary, and now that he was up there, he realized the only safe place to jump from was the highest point on the trunk, the place where it splintered into a comb of thin limbs. His heart thudded in his chest. He looked down and noticed a dozen or so people watching him. “Brett Bale,” he heard his name passed around the crowd below. Great. The last thing he needed was for a bunch of kids gossiping that he was banging a patron’s daughter and was a pussy, too. With his luck, he’d mash his right hand on a shallow rock and never paint again. He started feeling dizzy and gripped the trunk tighter, despite rubbing blisters into his palms.

  “Everybody stay right where you are,” an authoritative voice yelled.

  Brett looked far over his shoulder to see two policemen dressed in bicycle shorts and helmets. Kids flicked lit cigs everywhere, Mad Dog 20/20 bottles were skillfully shuffled under book bags, less subtle kids pitched beer cans into the tributary, adding a littering offense to their open container violations.

  “You, get out of that tree,” the cop ordered, motioning for Brett to get down.

  More than he loathed his own fear, Brett hated authority, hated art critics, teachers with a penchant for discipline, and especially cops who busted secluded parties. Whatever happened to the time-honored tradition of letting kids drink and smoke in the woods? Brett didn’t have any patience for these cops, didn’t have any desire to be led out of the woods handcuffed to Lizzie. He couldn’t risk being locked alone in a cell with her for some unknowable amount of time. He surveyed the length of the river. From here to Belle Isle might be a third of a mile in a swift current. He could possibly swim it, if he took a break on the interspersed rocks. He scrambled up the tree, to the point where he had seen the last guy jump.

  “I said get out of that tree,” a cop commanded.

  Rather than jump, he let go. Falling through the air, he was glad he had worn his tennis shoes, so he wouldn’t have to walk home barefoot.

  Chapter 2

  Leaving her apartment for work, Olivia had a swagger in her step. Despite feeling run down from pulling another all-nighter, her mood was lighter than helium at the knowledge of the twenty-eight-page spreadsheet and PowerPoint presentation she had saved on her laptop, the weight of which hung from her shoulder in her Louis Vuitton bag. Three months of unrelenting work, following a Master’s degree and four years of experience at her prestigious hedge fund job in Manhattan at McCann & Co., and she finally had something of value to show for it. Lost in those thoughts, she made her way to the subway on autopilot and boarded, still fixated on her file, her brilliance. She had finally built and tested an algorithm that tracked the volatility in treasury rates and currency fluctuations, along with a grading system for the significance of major news events, to predict the direction of trading in the S&P 500. After a month of testing and tweaking, she had honed the model until it was sixty-seven percent effective. She sought perfection, but in a world where there was no such thing, she was excited to take her work to her bosses.

  At a minimum, she expected a bonus, but was set on holding out for a promotion. No woman at the firm had ever been promoted from senior analyst to vice president, but she wasn’t one to let history dictate her future. The great women in history never had: Rosa Parks didn’t give up her seat, and Angela Merkel doesn’t take shit from anybody.

  She arrived at work and settled into her cubicle, fired up her laptop and began rehearsing her presentation. Doubts rose as she ran through her notes. Sure, she had worked a lot and sacrificed three out of four weekends for the last three months to craft this algorithm, and she would have waited even longer to make her presentation, but it was a rare day because all of the directors were in town: men from San Francisco, Sydney, London and Hong Kong. It was a day to stand up and be noticed.

  She considered emailing the spreadsheets to a supervisor, but she couldn’t take the slightest chance someone else would claim credit for her work, even in a supporting role. She would rather fall flat on her face in a room filled with sparkling minds than lose out on milking her full reward.

  Her friend Cleo arrived a half hour after her, bags under her eyes too, but more likely from partying the night before, as was her colleague’s custom, than having been up late crunching numbers to get ahead. For Cleo, having a job at the firm was ahead.

  “You’re killing yourself,” Cleo said.

  “So are you.”

  “I’m living. Living to work isn’t living at all. You know, I don’t feel like a dick saying you’re never going to get ahead around here. You’ve seen the bios of the directors on the website. How many women do you count? Because I count none.”

  “A defeatist attitude is defeating.”

  “You should just accept your role, come out and live a little, meet a nice man, make a pretty little girl, and work hard to make sure she’s in the same place you are now. Maybe the next generation has a chance.”

  “I’m not living for the next generation.”

  “That’s socially irresponsible.”

  “I don’t know if there’s going to be another generation. I don’t know that I’m ever going to get married or have a girl, but I do know what I’m capable of and I’m not going to let some historical bullshit get between me and the top.”

  “After you flame out here, you should write a book for motivated women on the virtues of self-interest.”

  “Writing books is for losers. All those hours hunched over a computer typing away for something that’s done six million times a year? No thanks.”

  “You sure draw a big distinction between losers hunched over Word and losers hunched over Excel.”

  “Bite me, Cleo.”

  Cleo laughed, and Olivia was glad. She feared she was often harsher than she meant to be, especially when she was focused on the task at hand, her concentration blunting her sensitivities to the rest of the world.

  Her boss’s secretary hovered over her cubicle, meaning the time had arrived, but she wanted to finish a final lap through her notes before going into the board room.

  “Olivia, they’re ready for you.”

  Olivia ejected her USB card, smoothed out her wrinkle-free jacket and followed the secretary down the hall. If there were other things happening around her – co-workers conversing, a groaning air conditioner, the struggle of a copy machine, an intern having a panic attack in the bathroom – she heard none of them. She moved mechanically, but her thoughts were still, her mind on the play button to her presentation.

  The secretary knocked on a set of hardwood French doors. “Come in,” a voice admonished from inside. The secretary opened the door. Eight men sat around the oval conference table. They represented seventeen Ivy-League degrees and a combined net worth greater than many small countries.

  “Everyone, this is Olivia Martin. She graduated from NYU Stern four years ago and has been with us since. She’s a senior analyst,” her immediate boss, Matthew Weiss said.

  She hated to hear him talk, because when he opened his mouth he was usually coming on to her. Thankfully, he had a professional aura about him today, probably because the big bosses were in town. He was a first-rate ass kisser.

  Olivia walked over to a projector-connected laptop, plugged in her USB card and opened her file. She surveyed the room. Everyone’s full attention was on her. How silly was she to think she could impress th
is sophisticated and battle-hardened group of men? They were going to laugh her out of their boardroom, or more likely offer her a short, condescending thank you for the presentation, then not so subtly suggest she leave the room. All the hopes she had for her little show-and-tale project crushed. Her fate to serve a life sentence as a senior analyst was about to be sealed.

  “Olivia, any time you’re ready,” Matthew said.

  Frozen, gazing out at all the expectant eyes gazing back, she remembered spring break in Cancun her senior year of undergrad, standing on top of a bungee tower, evaluating the variables that could go wrong, savoring the anticipation, scared to jump. Standing on that tower, she couldn’t just abandon her thoughts, because then she might get tangled in the cord or otherwise do something stupid to get herself hurt. She had to hang on to a modicum of self-regulation. What she had needed was a thought, something to propel her, something tangible, something that would permit her to fling herself from that platform into a 100-foot free-fall. So that’s what she did. She put her trust into the thin diameter of bungee cable, speculating about the scientists’ combined educational attainment and hundreds of years of experience, and flung herself from the bone-chilling precipice.

  “Olivia,” Matthew said, his voice bristled with frustration.

  She stepped forward, all eyes on her, and launched into her presentation. “Everyone generally knows the sort of events that move the equity markets: fluctuations in treasury rates, currency fluctuations, international news events. Firms trade on gut; firms trade by pre-established quantitative methods.”

  Olivia cleared her throat before opening her PowerPoint to the first slide, which was the formula of her algorithm: there were seven rows of esoteric mathematical symbols pulled from the various disciplines of finance, calculus, structural engineering and astrophysics.

  “I built this algorithm to quantify the correlation between the volatility of treasury rates, currency fluctuations, and to assign a numerical value to international news events. Based on a set of embedded formulas that take all of this information into account, I have a model that can predict the movement of the S&P 500 with a 67% degree of accuracy,” Olivia said.

  “Let me interrupt there, when you say 67% degree of accuracy, over what period are you measuring?” a director asked.

  “By the trading day,” Olivia said.

  “How do you limit your analysis to only these three variables? What about the movement of the equity markets themselves? Shouldn’t you take forward or reverse momentum into account as well?”

  “My initial model incorporated historical market movements from various periods into the model, but the results were negative because the information was circular. I discovered that it’s sufficient to incorporate equity market data into the model when equity market movements are significant enough to be news in and of themselves, but irrelevant on a day-to-day basis, when movements are trivial,” Olivia said.

  “67% is an astounding claim. Over how many trading days have you tested your model?”

  “I tested it throughout the month of June, so 21 trading days,” Olivia said.

  “I’d like to see your results.”

  “So would I,” another director chimed in.

  Olivia spent another quarter-hour explaining how to use her model, how the feeding of current market data can be automated, how to correct glitches in the sheet when there was an error, and further expounding the theories underpinning her process for financial alchemy.

  “Are there any further questions?” Olivia asked, overcome by a feeling of satisfaction as the directors variously scratched out notes and held gleeful side conversations.

  “I think that’s perfect,” the chairman said. “We’ll need time to let our chief of finance review, but assuming his comments come back positive, I think I speak for everyone in the room when I say we would be eager to put such a tool to use. Great work, Miss Martin.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Olivia said.

  Buttoning his jacket, Matthew propped open the door with his foot, her cue to leave. She expected to be alone when the door closed, but Matthew followed her into the hallway.

  “Impressed?” Olivia asked. She normally wouldn’t be so transparent with the asshole, but she was riding high and wanted to reap her praise.

  “I think you’ve given the directors something to consider,” Matthew said, reservedly.

  Olivia poured herself a cup of tap from the faucet. Matthew took a bottle of San Pellegrino from the refrigerator and took a big drink.

  “So you’re probably considering giving me a bonus.”

  Water erupted from Matthew’s nose, followed by laughter.

  “A bonus? You’re lucky you still have a job. How does a woman as frigid as you get anywhere in this world?”

  “Screw you,” she said.

  “Exactly. If you screwed me, then you could hope to get a bonus.”

  “You’re such a jackass.”

  “You’re really telling me off just as the directors are considering giving you a promotion? You really are a woman. No tact. Your minds just aren’t wired for it. You may know how to monkey around with numbers, but you’ve got no skill for maneuvering around people. What you don’t realize is there are a million quants with your talent, but they never get anywhere because they’re always holed away staring at screens, testing theories, and not out in the real world, watching how it all works. Your betters aren’t smarter than you at numbers, Olivia, we’re smarter at keeping you doing what you’re doing so we can live off the fat of your work. Don’t you understand that? But of course not, I don’t even know why I’m wasting my breath. Get back to your cubicle and run my quarterly projections.”

  “You’ve had those since Monday.”

  “I need you to run a Monte Carlo analysis on our current portfolio for a two-week period.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said no.”

  Olivia turned her back to Matthew, retreating to her cubicle, hunkering down behind the cheap partition in what, she was pretty sure, any normal person would interpret to be hiding.

  “Everything alright?” Cleo asked. “How was the presentation? You look like you blew it, but knowing you, you couldn’t have?”

  Olivia stared silently at her blank computer screen.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay.”

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want to go out.”

  “You never go out.”

  “I want to go out.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “What’s gotten into you?” Cleo asked. Olivia spun in her chair. Matthew stared at her from across the room, murder in his eyes.

  “Matthew.”

  “You let him get under your skin? You know he’s just jealous because you’re so much smarter than he is. He’s only here because of family connections or friends from school or something like that.”

  “It doesn’t stop him from being a prick to me.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “What? It’s 10 a.m.”

  “Let’s dip out. Matthew is always distracted when the directors are in town. No one will notice. If they do, I’m sure they’ll let us know. We’ll say we were out on an errand, and we’ll come back. Nothing’ll go wrong. We’re always here, working. We may be replaceable, but they aren’t going to replace us for one absence, especially on a day when they’re busy massaging each other’s egos.”

  Olivia’s heart raced. What if the directors wanted to see her again? She’d miss a golden opportunity to answer follow-up questions. Then again, they said they were going to put the matter to the Chief of Finance for review, so what were the chances they would descend from their lofty board meeting to pay a visit to her cubicle? They were in town for 24-hours. They had more important things to do than circle up with gra
sshoppers. Even if one of them did pay her a face-to-face visit, maybe her absence would make her seem all the more alluring. Either way, she was so pissed that she was more likely to have a meltdown in front of everyone than dazzle them again, especially with Matthew’s encyclopedic knowledge of her buttons and a fresh motive to push them.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Olivia said. “You know I haven’t taken a day off since I started working here.”

  Breathing in the fresh air, the warm sun a welcome contrast to the prevailingly frigid temperatures in their office, Olivia and Cleo walked the streets of Greenwich Village. They stopped in Three Lives and Company bookstore, where Olivia bought two novels. Both girls sipped bottled water as they walked towards Washington Square Park, Olivia’s purchases tucked under arm. On the streets, they were surrounded by bohemians, authenticity blooming from their refusal to adorn the standard issue clothing of corporate America: summer scarves, toboggans, long flowing beards, tank tops, an occasional set of bare feet, unfiltered words spoken freely, without that inhibiting second layer of analysis. No split identity, no wildly casual identity for home, and rigidly formal demeanor at work. People who, without constantly climbing, were content to just be. She thought she was catching stray gazes from the occasional passerby. They probably thought she was such a corporate slave in her pants suit. She had worn pretty much the same clothes out in public every day for the last four years, always trying to project the part, and now she felt embarrassed, sickened really by what she had let herself become. When was the last time she had even attempted a joke? Why hadn’t she ever compromised? Couldn’t she be a corporate professional and an individual, too?

  “Look, Minetta Tavern,” Cleo said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s like a Greenwich Village landmark, a restored speakeasy where Hemingway used to hang out. There’s a shot of it in the opening credits to Saturday Night Live.”

  Olivia didn’t know how to respond. Before moving to New York, she had thought she would spend long days cavorting around places like Greenwich Village and other enclaves of international culture, but today she couldn’t even recognize the landmarks. It was a brutal revelation, and she was still chewing on it when they parked at the bar and ordered cucumber martinis. Drinks at noon. She had let years pass without being acquainted with Minetta Tavern, with its light permanently suspended in the golden hour, the floor checkered black and white, comfortable large and round bar stools designed to be posted up on for hours. But so what? She imagined Hemmingway and Ezra Pound debating the finer points of literary expression, their conversation devolving into a drunken argument over nonsense until they were asked to suspend their conference until the following afternoon, after the low tide of their alcoholism had returned, momentarily resuming their conversation, fated to repeat the same cycle. She giggled at herself and the dreamy, instant effect of the martini.