Chapter Text
Eddie Kaspbrak
I had thought about taking a klonopin, but I didn’t want to show up for my first day of work groggy, so I settled for a quick puff on my inhaler before walking into the building – 225 Broadway, tell the doorman you’re at Gardner, McDowell, and Lambert, take the elevator to the 22nd floor, give your name to the receptionist and ask for Cheryl. Cheryl helped me fill out the paperwork and gave me the sexual harassment spiel – not that anyone was ever going to harass her – and led me back into the bullpen or whatever they called it.
“You’ll be working with the Leisure, Hospitality, and Travel fund,” Cheryl informed me, as though I hadn’t been told that in the interview, before rapping on the corner of one of the cubicles like she was knocking on a door. “Jason? This is our new risk analyst.”
The cubicle’s occupant stood up and shook my hand. He had a firm handshake, a toothy grin, and the build of a college athlete gone slightly to seed. “Jason Gardner, nice to meet you.” I made a mental note that Gardner was the first name on the partnership, but didn’t say anything aloud. I just smiled back.
“Eddie Kaspbrak.”
“And this is my partner in crime, Henry Jennings.”
Henry Jennings walked in from the next cubicle over, and shook my hand. He was a little slimmer, like he’d taken better care of himself after his playing days were over than Gardner. His tie was a little straighter, too. “Jason and I are the associates on the LHT team, so you’ll be working with us most of the time. Cheryl says you just graduated from Wharton?”
“Yeah, accounting major.”
“Did you know a Tommy Herman? He would have been a couple of years ahead of you.”
“Um…” the name conjured up less than pleasant memories of a perpetually hungover frat boy/hockey player from my Tax Policy class… “the name rings a bell.”
“He was on the St. Edwards hockey team a few years behind us. Really great guy.”
I was vaguely aware of St. Edwards as one of the fancy prep schools whose alumni all seemed to know each other once they got to Penn. If Jason and Henry had played hockey together there, I suspected that Jason had put in a good word for Henry with Daddy.
“You guys played hockey?”
“Yeah. Henry was team captain our senior year – we won the division for the first time since 1917.”
“Wow,” I pretended to be impressed.
“You play?”
“Not really, but I grew up in Maine, so pond hockey was the big weekend activity from December to March.”
“No way!” Jason said, “We summer in Kennebunkport.” I assumed he meant his family, not him and Henry, although who knew.
“I’m from Derry. It’s a couple hours north of there.”
Henry dragged the conversation back on track, “So, why don’t we get you set up with what you’ll be working on.” He showed me to an empty cubicle and helped me get my desktop set up, then dropped a binder on the desk. “This,” he explained, “is Expedia.com.”
“What do they do?”
“Online travel booking. You know any travel agents?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“Well, if you ever meet one, tell them to update their resume. When this company takes off, they’re going to be out on the street.” He said it with a little more relish than I thought was really appropriate for talking about somebody losing their job, but I wasn’t about to contradict him. “You can book your whole vacation on the world wide web – plane tickets, hotel reservations, the works. There’s no one trying to upsell you or book you on a package they get kickbacks from and no overhead for office space. It’s going to revolutionize the entire industry…assuming the accounting checks out.”
“It’s all in here?” I asked
“Yep. We’d like a report completed by Friday so we can take it to the MD for approval.”
Jennings and Gardner left me alone to get to work on examining the company’s accounting statements for any sign of irregularities, until 12:00 exactly when they showed up and announced that they were taking me out to lunch. I walked with them out of the building and to a sandwich place a couple of blocks north of the office. Gardner ordered fried chicken and a mojito, Jennings had shrimp and a beer, and I had the house salad and ice water, feeling somewhat guilty that the egg salad sandwich Myra had lovingly packed for me was wasting away in the office refrigerator and that I’d turned off my cell phone because I knew Mom was going to call me on my lunch break. I decided to discreetly dump the sandwich in a trash can on the way home, so that she wouldn’t see it and get upset.
After spending an hour picking at my salad and listening to Jennings and Gardner tell stories about their hockey-playing days (both had gone to Dartmouth after St. Edwards), I was introduced to the rest of the team, including Mr. Walter, the managing director for the fund, at a team meeting. It turned out that they had these meetings every Monday. Then I was left alone again with the Expedia accounting. It was, to my relief, pretty straightforward, just like the case studies I’d done in school, and there didn’t seem to be anything suspicious in their accounts. I told Myra all about it when I finally got home.
“That’s good,” she smiled, “they’ll be happy if you tell them what they want, right?”
“Well, I think they want me to catch any problems before they put money in, but if there aren’t any problems, yeah, they’ll be happy.”
“Good, I left you some dinner.”
The one nice thing about being with Myra is that I knew I’d never go hungry. I went into the kitchen and microwaved my plate of spaghetti. I could hear the Friends theme song playing from the bedroom and thought about going in to watch with her, but I was more of a Seinfeld guy. Myra and I didn’t really have much in common. I’d started dating her sophomore year of college more or less as a beard, and she was either too desperate or too naïve to ever realize I was a closet case. Or maybe she was secretly a lesbian and we were actually perfectly matched. She wasn’t terrible to get along with. She could be a bit controlling, but it was nothing compared to the way my mother was, and after a couple of excruciatingly awkward attempts had stopped bothering me for sex. I had no desire to actually have sex with a man – my immune system was fucked up enough without HIV, thank you very much, and I knew that I would probably need a female significant other to get ahead in the company, for networking, and to make sure they never realized I was gay.
I turned out to be right. Friday afternoon Jennings caught me coming out of the conference room after I had presented my analysis of Expedia.
“Nice work in there.”
“Thanks.” I assumed he was buttering me up because I’d come through on the deal he wanted me to make.
“So, a bunch of the guys go out every Friday after work. You in?”
“Sure, just let me call my girlfriend and tell her I’ll be late.”
I stepped outside and dialed Myra’s number on the cell phone Mom had gotten me as a graduation present.
“Eddie, is everything alright?”
“Everything’s fine, babe. It’s just that I’m going to be a little late getting home. Some people in the office want to grab drinks after work.”
“You’d rather go out drinking with them than come home to me?”
“No, sweetie, of course not. But I need to make a good impression. We talked about this remember?”
Myra sighed heavily. “I remember. But don’t stay out too late, and remember that alcohol interacts with your antihistamine.”
“I’ll try to be back by midnight. You should see if Melissa wants to catch a movie or something.” Melissa was a friend from college now in law school at NYU, one of the few members of our friend group who was closer to Myra than me.
“Alright. Love you.”
“Love you, too. Bye.”
I hung up and went back in the building, even though I didn’t have much to do after wrapping up the Expedia report. There was an informal norm of staying in the office until 7:00 regardless of whether you actually have any work to do, and then everyone on the team went out to the bar at the Soho Grand to drink overpriced whisky and hit on the women across the bar. I ordered a martini and sat awkwardly at the end of the bar and pretended I was having fun. Jennings at least made an effort to include me in the conversation, but these were the kind of people who when they got off work couldn’t think of anything to talk about other than sports and work. Chip Lambert, another associate with relations in the C-suite, was hyping up a deal he’d scouted.
“You know how they devalued the ruble?”
Jennings was skeptical. “We’re in PE, Chip, not currency trading.”
“Yeah, but all their state-owned companies are desperate for cash now to meet their expenses and the retail investors are scared to touch them, so we can force them to sell us shares for less than the true value. There’s this company called Intourist, they ran the tourism industry during the Soviet era and they still have a de facto monopoly on tourism.”
“Tourism? In Russia? Who the hell wants to go there?”
“That’s what they were saying about Prague ten years ago.”
“Jesus, Chip. If you’re making us get in bed with the Russkies, I’m going to need another drink.”