After work today, she’d just wanted to go back to the Wilcox Box and get some sleep, but her boss had insisted on a double date to soak in the accomplishment. It was a much tamer closing dinner than the open-bar iniquity back in New York, and Rae was glad for this.
Stu let out a whistle. “That’s my girl,” he said, as they all clinked glasses.
“It was a team effort,” Rae said, though it wasn’t really true.
“None of this modesty bullshit,” her boss said. “Take credit where you deserve it, otherwise someone else will take it for you.”
“Now there’s some good advice,” Stu said, thumping Rae’s boss on the back. Her boss had taken an immediate liking to Stu, declaring him a breath of fresh air from the usual corporate crowd.
“Keep it up at this rate, and you’ll be the youngest woman partner in the firm’s history,” her boss said.
Rae didn’t like how he used “woman” as a qualifier—an adjective rather than a noun. It felt like it diminished the accomplishment, but she didn’t point that out, just let herself take it as the compliment she knew it was intended as.
“I’m going to make sure Harold knows how much the clients lean on you,” her boss went on. Harold was his boss, one of the head honchos based back in the Manhattan headquarters.
“Thanks, Bill,” Rae replied. She had a throbbing impulse to record the conversation so she could send a voice memo to her dad. Though she told herself she’d stopped trying to impress him, she knew she’d never stop hoping he was proud of her.
Her boss’s wife, Linda, spoke. They’d met briefly at a couple of work events, and Rae liked her down-to-earth demeanor and how she and Bill had been married thirty-five years. “I’ve just got to tell you, Raelynn, it’s an encouraging thing to see a young woman like you holding your own in this industry,” she said. “I worked on Wall Street after college but didn’t even last two years. I married Bill and stayed home to raise the kids, and I don’t regret those things for one second, but I just wish I’d felt like I could’ve made it in the finance world if I’d wanted to. Like it had been a real option.”
Rae had never known any of this. She’d foolishly assumed Linda hadn’t had big career aspirations, that being a full-time wife and mom had always been her goal.
“And there was this poem in theNew York Timesearlier this year,” Linda continued. “Not sure if you saw it, but it was all about sexism in finance, and I told Bill—didn’t I, Bill? I said now this is thetruest thing I’ve read in years, so you make sure you look out for Raelynn, because she’s got to be feeling some of that herself. It’s impossible for men to ever understand how women feel like the ‘other,’ but you’ve at least got to try to understand, put yourself in her shoes and feel how damn difficult it is to walk in heels.”
Rae sat there, stunned in the very best way. This woman she hardly knew, a generation older than her, had seen herself in Rae’s words. And she’d seen Rae in them too. It was an exquisite type of power, knowing her own writing had enabled this anonymous-but-intimate type of human connection.
She wanted to excuse herself to the bathroom and start in on a new poem now, something else that might shift even one person’s perspective, but her brain was so deadened by deals that the creative valve was sealed shut.
From beside her, she could feel Stu bursting to reveal that Rae was the poet behind that very piece. She gave his shin a firm kick under the table, and he managed to stay quiet by stuffing an entire bread roll in his mouth.
“Your husband is the best boss I’ve ever had,” was all Rae ended up saying, with genuine gratitude. “He could teach a thing or two to the guys in New York.” She didn’t go into any details, but she felt Linda’s understanding in the way she gave Rae’s hand a maternal squeeze.
The conversation continued, but Rae was wrapped up in her own cocoon, mulling more over Linda’s truncated Wall Street career and all the times she herself had nearly quit. During her first few years as an investment banker, Rae had thought she hated the job because the hours were bad and the work was pointless. But perhaps the biggest reason she’d struggled as a junior member of the team was because she didn’t actually feel like part of the team—and certainly not someone who might lead that team one day.
There were no women in the senior ranks, no one above her who looked like her, and how could you be what you couldn’t see? Inhindsight, she could observe how she’d nearly self-selected out of the boys’ club not because she couldn’t put in the long hours but because she didn’t think she’d ever truly belong. She thought, too, of how TB and GQ hadn’t seen themselves either, and so they’d left.
She’d reflected on these things before, but they’d never crystallized in this way, never allowed her to recognize corporate prejudice on such a macro and a micro level.
Now, for the first time in her whole life, she let herself picture herself as CEO of an investment bank, a role model for young girls to look up to. Maybe then her scraping fear would go away, her fear that nothing she did mattered at all, that it was all just noise so she wouldn’t have to sit in the silence and observe how her own hopes, her own heart, had stopped making any sound.
But if she was being honest with herself, she didn’t know if she could genuinely encourage those little girls to follow in her footsteps. She didn’t want any child with bright, splatter-paint dreams to have her spirit broken in the kind of way required to grind to the top of a profit-obsessed bureaucracy, to end up like this, clinking champagne flutes for something as meaningless as shifting money around, siphoning fees for profits. If she really wanted to be a role model, she should insist they cling to their passions at all costs. And she should take her own advice and break out of the golden handcuffs that kept her chained to this joyless job year after year.
But it wasn’t that simple, not for her. She’d already made it this high, so she might as well keep going and break the glass ceiling, or at least put a few cracks in it. And it wasn’t like she was that passionate about her passions anymore, even writing. Aside from theNew York Timespiece, all the poems she wrote came from deliberate planning, not zealous abandonment. She hadn’t managed to write anything new since that one had been published, and she was certain she was a one-hit wonder.
She had the time to write now but not the inspiration. Everything in her life was even keeled and comfortable. There was none ofthe drama or emotional extremes that had compelled her to heave the words off of her chest, scrawl them with the ink of her own bleeding heart before they suffocated her. That’s why the best poets always had messed-up lives, she’d decided. They channeled their angst into art. If she had to choose between writing well and living well, she chose living. But there was a restless feeling deep inside that made her wonder if there was another world, a parallel universe that she’d nearly been born into, where those two objectives might align.
Bill and Linda headed out after the main course so they could stop by to see their grandchildren before the kids went to bed, but Rae, alert from her new-yet-old revelation, said that she and Stu would stay for dessert.
“How wild was that?” Stu said, once they were alone. “I guess you were right about that poem after all.”
Stu had quickly apologized for his poor reaction to Rae’s sexism poem, but she’d felt he’d still never quite believed it was doing much good.
“Who would’ve thought?” Rae said dryly, and they both laughed at themselves.
“I wonder if Linda has read your love poems too,” Stu said.
“Maybe,” Rae said, not particularly interested in knowing the answer. Those poems didn’t stir much within her own heart, and she knew by that barometer that they didn’t stir much in other people’s hearts either.
“I still think romantic rhymes change the world more than political rants,” Stu said.
