The Ultimate Exit Strategy, page 4
I had been watching Starr D’nofrio let her eyes follow and fix; her gaze stroked Justin covetously as he took his seat. He was a fine looking man, if you liked that sort of thing – tall, solid, blond and mostly retaining his hair at thirty-five or whatever he was (I thought maybe older around the eyes). Since her promotion and makeover, Starr had frequented attention on Justin who, beside me, continued to shudder at. Winslow’s unfortunate choice of tie – his own sense of style unassailable in a shiny, moss green, double breasted suit, and crocodile embossed loafers thin enough to be confused in some less sophisticated venues with house slippers.
That afternoon the new, improved Starr had been tasked with taking meeting notes on a steno pad, but on the occasions that her eyes left Justin, it was to cast a green-eyed glare at me – either for sitting next to him or for throwing water on her dress during that afternoon’s dispute with Camille.
They fought daily over one thing or another since Camille’s demotion to work for me. This time, it was ostensibly Starr’s dismantlement of Camille’s beloved filing system. I’d discovered them, body slamming each other off the white, metal stalls of the 25th floor powder room, while an ever expanding crowd of middle-aged ladies hung back by the sinks egging them on. A cup of cold water down the back of Starr’s dress had been enough to redirect the hostilities. So, whether because of Justin or Camille, Starr kept up her malevolent staring at me until Winslow made a sign for her to dim the lights.
As the first slide appeared on a large projection screen behind him, Wes was clearing his throat and pulling the microphone stand upward to accommodate his height. Whytebread had been on a downward slide since the crash of 1987, nothing really precipitous, but our earnings were undeniably sluggish during a period when the money management industry was exploding. No one could deny that Whytebread needed something. Gold Rush Investments would bring new blood – and, not the least, much needed equity capital, since Winslow’s Uncle Maddy had leveraged the business to the hilt, so high that the money he’d borrowed in the junk bond boom was starting to hurt the bottom line, the interest payments cutting into the cash freebies for the Winslows and Madsens.
Wes’s Monteblanc pen cast a fat, authoritative shadow across the screen, outlining the downward slope of Whytebread’s profitability line. “Well, I’m sure our past performance isn’t news to anyone here. The question is, what are we going to do about our futures and our security?”
In the rented conference room that afternoon, the air seemed to throb with the thrill of greed and possibility.
Winslow went on: “At Whytebread and Greese we’ve been managing other people’s money since 1893. I think it’s about time we start managing our own.” An appreciative murmur rose from the room.
“Where did he get that accent?” Justin was whispering much too loudly for my comfort as Wes nattered on in that just-us-folks way that played so well in Peoria, about “Us” and “Our” and “We” when even if I got the pile of money he was promising me, I couldn’t buy a house in his exclusively WASPy neighborhood, which I imagined was just the way he liked it. “It sounds like he ought to be shoveling manure somewhere downstate.”
“Why should he,” said Price who was seated behind us, “when it’s so darn convenient to shovel it right here.”
“Shush.” I said and Price tittered.
Marty Goodman turned in his seat. “Do you folks mind? I’ve got two kids in college.”
In the front of the room, Hal Hobert was growling, “Come on. You want to keep it down, people,” as if someone had suddenly elected him Sergeant at Arms.
The next slide showed the value of Whytebread under different scenarios in two thick blocks – one black, one red. The smaller, red one was the current valuation of our shares in Whytebread. The much bigger, black rectangle showed our value in Gold Rush shares. The difference between them was the benefit of the buy-out, a huge positive number that laid down a blanket of silent awe across the room. We were, all of us, counting.
Who knew what a bag full of bucks from the corporate lottery could buy?
Justin had laughed when I’d asked him what he would do with the money. “I’m going to cancel my Journal subscription – check out for a while,” he said, “enjoy life,” although I didn’t believe that story for a minute.
He loved the thrill of the game too much to sit by the sidelines – the self-important print of your name on the business card, the dizzying proximity to other people’s money. I was hooked as well – on Whytebread and my genteel marginalization. Sure, my nose was bloody from all that bumping up against the hard, glass ceiling, but all the time I was loving the view.
Like Justin had said, “You’d be surprised what people really want when it comes right down to it.”
Before Wes could even finish asking for questions, Cal Fraiser threw a hand up in the air. “Where exactly is Gold Rush stock trading these days?” Cal was the shill in the Winslow traveling medicine show, teeing up a question for the answer Wes was just dying to give.
“I believe Gold Rush was at thirty-five and a quarter as of the close of market today.” It slid out of Winslow’s mouth like a pat of warm butter; and if the P.T. Barnum sideshow quality of this whole display embarrassed him at all, Winslow wasn’t letting on. He ran a hand through his wispy hair, smiling a big, wide, used car salesman’s smile. “Next question, anyone?”
Allison Price stood up behind us asking about the pension plan. From his expression it wasn’t the question Winslow would have liked but he was wading in, smooth-voiced, like a late night radio disc jockey on the mellow, mellow station: “The Gold Rush offer presents a great value for the current and future prospects of Whytebread. To tie a new owner’s hands by committing them to a retirement program such as is no longer seen in this industry or any other limits that value. In addition, with the change to a cash balance plan, Whytebread will be instituting a 401k plan with 3% matching for those not yet drawing retirement.”
“Blah, blah, blah, blah,” Justin whispered in my ear.
“For those of you vested, your benefits will continue to accrue under the new plan.” Wes ended smiling hopefully, but changing the pension now cut off the lucrative tail-end cash in the payout calculation. Whytebread’s under-funded pension plan was transformed into a trust that Winslow could reasonably assume he would never have to feed again, but Price would have to work maybe five or ten years longer to achieve her current benefit.
“So, I’m shit-out-of-luck, huh, Wes.” She had her bottom lip pushed out, braying like the rube who has just discovered the milk bottles at the carnival baseball toss are weighted “SOL. That would be the short answer, huh?”
A troubled expression had driven Winslow’s forehead into his receding hairline so he looked like an emotionally wounded Shar-pei dog. “I can’t see there’s any need for profanity, here.” He had begun to back pedal masterfully. “Even if you do not perceive these arrangements to be sufficient for your needs, I can at least assure you that these are the best opportunities available.”
“Oh, no.” Price was shaking her head. “I get it, Wes, SOL.”
In the face of this obstinacy, the crease that had come up between Winslow’s small, blue eyes grew deeper, relaxing only when Price sat down, freeing Wes to call for friendlier inquires. Conveniently, Cal Fraiser had jumping-jacked his arm up in the air.
“How soon can we get our money out, Wes?”
“Why, almost right away, Cal.” With this answer, Winslow had brightened. We all had brightened, recovered from Price’s ugly intimation that there was going to be no free lunch.
“That’s the beauty of this opportunity. We don’t have to hold the Gold Rush stock, of course. All of us here have a great deal of our personal wealth or our retirement savings bound up in the fortunes of this company. I think it’s time that we take our own good advice and diversify now that we have the chance.” Winslow was showing all his big square teeth, smiling into our great collective lowing, the sound of bankers looking forward to becoming fatter, dumber, and happier, my own voice loud among them.
Just then, The Irishman lifted himself up out of his chair to heckle: “Diversify me out of a job will you, Wes. WHAT ABOUT THE LIST?” Jon Patel and Hal Hobert were pushing down the center aisle like riot cops before he’d even gotten it out.
Winslow had momentarily paused in his sales patter to stare at Tom along with the rest of us in silent astonishment. Justin rolled his eyes, mouthing a pretty passable Betty Davis. “Fasten your seatbelts –”
“YEAH THE LIST, YOU MOTHERFUCKING FAGGOT BASTARD.” The Irishman boomed, but rather than answer the commotion at the back of the room, Wes had decided to press on: “One of the prime comforts you can take in the sale of our company is that now regardless of what happens here at Whytebread in the future, we are financially secure in our retirements.” Wes was seemingly unshakable in his mission to do what was best for us. “This sale will create much needed diversity and liquidity in our personal portfolios.”
Rows in front of me, Rupert Dean was bouncing his big, dopey jug-head up and down agreeably as if he were one of those Noddy Dogs riding in the rear window of a big American car, but the rest of the room didn’t look nearly so sure about the buyout anymore. Winslow hadn’t even acknowledged the existence of his Layoff List, the rumors of which hovered at the edges of every conversation lately. At Whytebread rumors were always true.
This one I knew for sure, because Ellen Borgia had The List. She’d showed it to me, or rather a copy of it, four weeks before. Waving me into her office like a car-trunk hustler, and grinning so hard I thought her face might break from the strain. One look at the typewritten page, she’d put between us on the desktop, and I was sure this was the secret List, The List of Winslow’s recommendations – who would be kept on at Whytebread after the merger and who would be sacked.
All the names were there. Some names had stars beside them denoting in the footnote that Wes was recommending special incentive option packages. I could only imagine that Starr D’nofrio must have contracted a virulent case of disregard for her continued employment if she had leaked this information to anyone – let alone Ellen Borgia – but it was a relief to see that I would still have a job after the merger. Amazingly so would Ellen Borgia. But Zemluski, Allison Price, and Amy Whitacre along with a number of others would not. Even if the stock options and incentive packages had been reserved for Rupert, Jonathon Krause, Justin Collier and the boys’ club, I still felt that odd near-miss-on-the-highway rush of euphoria at the discovery I would be kept on. The strength of the feeling surprised me, the relief wasn’t so much at not having to leave – I could go somewhere else, I’d had my offers. Rather it was more that I would not have the arduous undertaking of proving myself all over again at another firm, wouldn’t have to jockey for a place in the stack that owing to my racial and gender demographic would not likely be much better than the one I had here. Perhaps it would be less good because at Whytebread I had Justin at least. I sighed heavily before I could stop myself.
“Notice anything else?” The sound of my understandable relief seemed to piss Ellen off. “Why don’t you just look at the names again,” and I was obliged to give The List a second and even a third read, before I was allowed to give up hunting for the extraordinary.
“White boys rule.” I shook my head, but Ellen kept smiling, an almost savage display of teeth and gums.
“What if I told you women make up twelve percent of this firm’s professionals and there’s not one woman on that list for options. What if I said that 60.23% percent of the people Winslow proposes to cut are female?”
I was starting to understand. For years Ellen’s threats and complaints about her unfair treatment had been going nowhere, but with The List, maybe that could change. “You’re talking class action?” It was the obvious answer.
“I’ve got my lawyer working on a letter right now.” Ellen threw her stocking feet up over her desk, sounding as if just to say the word lawyer made her feel a little breathless. “Did you know, you’re a class all by yourself, Virginia?” There was a hole in the heel of her nylons.
I said I heard that all the time.
“No. Seriously,” Ellen was insisting, “you’re the only Black woman in this firm,” as if this were news, as if I were Anastasia, lost heir to the Romanoff dynasty. “You are your very own class.”
Not that the thought of suing Whytebread hadn’t crossed my mind occasionally over the years. I’d considered it almost seriously for a few weeks after I’d found out that The Irishman had split some unallocated bonus pool money between Rupert Dean and Kevin Cavanaugh.
“Those guys needed the cash,” Tom told me, implying, with his June-and-Ward-Cleaver-logic, that I didn’t, at least not as much as those pleasant white men with stay-at-home wives and recent, squalling family additions. From each according to his ability; to each according to his need. Old news that job performance is like sex, in large part subjectively critiqued – not so much on what you do, but how you do it.
“Look, it’s all water over the dam, now.” The Irishman met me with the face men reserve for hysterical women. “Just you and your cat; and you’re making more money than either of them, Virginia. They’ve got wives and kids.” The Irishman was painting me greedy for wanting, not just the cake, but the icing too.
I was mad for sure. But sue Whytebread and I’d be coloring the gray out of my hair before I got a court date. When I did, gag order or no, news traveled like lightening through the downtown gyms and suburban country clubs. Sue Whytebread and I’d never hawk stocks again in this town or any other.
“How much do you think its worth?” While I was looking at the run in Ellen’s nylons, I’d been working the math, independently. Whytebread, unlike its Wall Street counterparts, didn’t stipulate binding arbitration for the resolution of employee disputes. At Whytebread you could get a jury and punitive damages, driving the odds of a decent settlement way up.
But of course that begged the question: “How much do you think this is worth?”
She was rolling out the legal litany with a confidence I thought had no basis in reality. “– foregone benefits, and emotional distress, and punitive damages.” The only sure thing was what I would have gotten if not for the discrimination against my class. “Punitive damages – that’s where the big money is.” Rupert’s option incentive package was worth about a hundred thousand dollars, even with treble damages it wasn’t enough to retire on. “It’ll serve those bastards right,” Ellen kept babbling along, but I had begun to feel embarrassed for her, like a color blind boyfriend I’d had for a while in high school who went around in clothes that didn’t match because his mother had thought it was funny to lie to him about what he had on.
Ellen was promising that Gold Rush’s majority shareholder, a big Japanese bank, would want to settle. After the Mitsubishi case, sex discrimination was someplace they didn’t want to go. “They’ll have to settle if they want to do the deal and they’ll have to settle fast.”
What if they didn’t? I was asking mostly to hold up my end of the conversation; and her face tightened up like a spring – not a pretty thing to watch.
Ellen’s fingers had set to curling and uncurling the edge of the paper. “Look, we can’t lose even if they won’t settle.” Her voice had begun to gather volume as if this were a reasonable substitute for persuasion. “How can we lose? I have this List. I have these statistics now. And most important I have the fact that The List is the work of one guy, no committee, just Wesley Winslow and his illegal bigotries. I know him, Virginia. When Winslow is deposed, you listen to me, we’re going to have our smoking gun.”
I’d promised I would give some thought to the suit, both of us nodding grimly at the seriousness of my deliberation even though it was clear what the answer would be. I had waited a few days before I told Ellen that I needed my job at Whytebread or another one exactly like it even if the Gold Rush deal went through, because after taxes and considering retirement planning, a few million bucks just didn’t go as far as it used to.
“WHAT ABOUT THAT SECRET LIST?” The Irishman was growing redder by the second, far redder even than usual, looking, for all the world, like the beginnings of a heart attack. “I WAS WORKING BEFORE YOU WERE THOUGHT OF, BOY. I MADE THIS FIRM.” He sounded almost as though his feelings had been hurt. Jon and Hal propelled him steadily towards the doors; and his voice rose and cracked with a hiccupy quality. “You faggoty little PRICK. How much money are YOU getting out of this?”
“Hmmmm.” Beside me, Justin crossed and recrossed his legs uncomfortably as Wes’s complexion cycled the full range of indignant shades of red. Sure, the sale of Whytebread was going to leave Winslow much richer than the rest of us. He had started out richer, but until now no one had shown the poor manners to point it out.
We were holding our collective breaths waiting to hear what new, career-limiting statement would next issue from The Irishman. He had become a spectacle, that spinout, crash and burn at the speedway you had to watch. Only Herb was left, staring straight at the podium, ghostly gray, as if by ignoring the scene, he could make it go away, but by then, Winslow himself had stopped mid-sentence to listen.
After a few seconds of silence, Wes began his pitch again, this being that the Gold Rush pie was bigger than employment contracts, bigger than retirement annuities, big enough for everyone. “Diversity is the name of the game.” Gold Rush was so big that the size of Winslow’s personal piece didn’t matter. We were all waiting to hear him tell it, like that favorite childhood story where you knew all the words, but you just want it corroborated by an adult. Winslow was getting to the punch line when an uncharacteristic lot of sweat had come up on his forehead. Even as his voice carried on in its regular, measured way; sweat had started running in rivers down his face, wilting the collar of his crisp white shirt.
Wet spots were coming up under the arms of his gray suit jacket. I was wondering if anyone else had noticed Winslow’s apparent distress, but to look around the room meant to look away from Winslow and I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off the man.
