Under the Stars and Stripes (Under Him)

In a way, it was a decent demonstration of Darwinian theory. It was generally the smartest and most creative who fared the best. Like when Van Patten traded in his Lincoln for a Mini Cooper. He still had his Aston Martin for weekend racing excursions.

Finding a gap no one would have thought to take, mostly because it was too small, I climbed out of the window and up into the fog of my car. Then, it was merely a matter of strolling down the back windshield and hopping off the trunk. The eight years of ballet school my parents subjected me to suddenly seemed like quite a good investment in my future.

And at least I had made it to work on time. Or, almost at time, which was about as good as it got, with me.

Chapter Two - Ada

It really could have been closer. The up and ups had chauffeur services to ferry them from the parking garage to the office building. Then again, they were the types to literally light their cigars with twenty-dollar bills. I also had it on good authority that most of them were sporting $85 pure silk boxer shorts under their tailored suits. Just for a point of comparison, my underwear was cotton and obtained at $10 for a pack of 3.

I never really thought that marble had a smell. Then I walked into the lobby of Smith & Smyth Investments, the third largest investment firm in the state, which was working very hard at becoming number one. $185 Billion was just not quite enough when it came to New York wealth. Just as ‘absolutely stunning’ fell sadly short in terms of a way to describe New York Beauty, by which standards I was maybe a 6 on a good day.

It really was difficult to tell them apart. Outnumbering the females of the species by about five to one, the men of Smith & Smyth, junior traders all, were victims of fashion.

They all wore the same brands, except for Van Patten drove the same cars, wore the same style of glasses which maybe a quarter of them actually needed, and they even went to the same barber. They ended up with the same semi-crewcut sported by the senior partners, which likely started in the 1960s when it was still genuinely fashionable.

I dressed for war, in tweed, from shoulders to shins. It was better than Kevlar in most situations, particularly when it was cold enough for me to button up my jacket. It looked a little funny in the summer, but I was mostly spared the attention of my colleagues, which I really wasn’t interested in anyway. There was only one man I could ever love, and I hadn’t seen him in nearly a decade.

“Lookin’ good today, Ms. Babbage,” Macy said, taking my tweed suit jacket and hanging it up on the hook in the outer office.

“Thank you, Macy, you’re not so bad yourself.”

This was an understatement. Macy was beautiful by any measure. She was 21 and working her way through grad school. She had the looks and intelligence to rule a sizable chunk of the city if she ever chose to. Though, I somehow doubted that she would.

It wasn’t that she lacked ambition. It was just that her particular brand of ambition didn’t include the accumulation of power and domination.

“How late am I?” I asked her.

“Ten minutes?” Macy said, glancing at the ten-dollar watch she always wore.

I had gotten her a Rolex for Christmas the year before as a thank you for all her hard work and a symbol of what I liked to think of as our friendship. She sold it, donating the money she made to various worthy causes, including a children’s hospital and an animal rescue.

When I asked why she had done it, more curious than anything else, she said that she was ‘paying it forward.’ I would have hugged her if it wasn’t a strict breach of protocol.

I was twelve minutes late when I got to the meeting. I slipped in quiet as a mouse, a skill I had learned in college, and took the only available seat near the door.

“How was it?” Macy asked, the glass still rattling in my office door.

The sound that came out of me was somewhere between a dolphin and a very pissed off velociraptor.

“That bad?’

“It was like The Stepford Guys!”

“I thought it was The Stepford Wives,” Macy said, in purest innocence.

“I modernized it. Gotta be inclusive, you know.”

“Oh, like making Alexander Hamilton black.”

“Exactly.”

“Any plans for lunch?”

“Indeed,” I said, unable to keep from grinning.

It was something I generally tried to avoid, not only because I looked like a goof but because my teeth were far from straight. All were present and accounted for and in a clear row, but the furthest thing from symmetrical.

I should have had braces as a kid, but my parents really couldn’t afford them. We couldn’t afford much of anything, which was why we lived in Park Slope. Even after entering the distinguished world of investment, I was living in a cold-water walk up on the Lower East side, which had become devastatingly fashionable in the past few years.