The Black & The White (7 page)

When I got off the phone with Kim, I
called Dani.

We had been inseparable at school. We
did everything together, from laundry to eating to doing homework
to going to bars, even when I was underage. During the last year,
we lived together and hardly spent any time apart, except while I
was at class. I would even go to his engineering lab just to keep
him company. During the summers, I would take classes just to be
near him.

When my father died of lung cancer,
Dani became my rock. His support enabled me to be strong for my
mom. I had almost quit school to help my mother pay off my father’s
large gambling debts. Dani convinced me to stay in school then he
helped me obtain school loans—a lot of them.

Dani was supportive about
everything I did. When I told Dani I was not ready to live in New
York, he had still encouraged me to go. “Don’t be scared. I’ll be
there for you,
haeti
.”

That night, when I heard his voice, I
felt the reassurance of the friend I fell in love with, yet aware
that the jittery feeling of romance had waned. We talked for a
while about his dissertation and his frustration with his doctorate
advisor. I feigned interest whilst I filed my neglected nails. I
then realized the inevitable. What I had feared was true: Dani now
bored me.

I felt suffocated by the ordinary but
was torn by my loyalty to Dani. Just before we hung up, I told him
I loved him, but it felt forced and strange.

I called Kim again. I needed her
sisterly opinion.

“
Well, love…it happens. New
York is really tough on relationships. Why do you think I always
fuck mine up?” Kim asked. “You’re seeing more than Dani. You’re
experiencing more and probably learning more about what you want.”
She then paused. “What is it that you want, baby?”

“
I want someone who is
romantic. Someone unpredictable. Maybe someone who loves to travel.
Someone who reads Neruda and thinks ‘Wow, this poem reminds me of
this one Impressionist painting I once saw at the MOMA and then
thinks of an opera song in his head that disturbs him for a week,
which then reminds him of this one book he read while sitting on
the banks of the Ganges.”

I paused. Kim waited for me to
continue.

“
I don’t know. I guess I
want someone who thinks about a bunch of things in one minute,
someone who thinks a million, bazillion things in a nanosecond, in
whacked out, eccentric, genius thoughts. I mean, I just want
someone who is able to connect all the dots even when there is no
apparent connection. Does that make sense? I want someone who can
expand my world beyond the things that I know.”

“
Are you done yet?” Kim
asked. “I think you just answered your own question.”

By the end of that conversation, I
knew I had to break up with Dani.

T
hree nights later, I called Dani from the trading
desk.

“
There’s no good reason for
me to come to visit you this weekend, Isabelle. Face it, I’m a
burden to you,” Dani said. I had actually forgotten about the
planned visit. “Are we breaking up,
habibi
? Talk to me.”

“
What do you mean?” I knew
what he meant, but I asked anyway scared of the reality I knew
would come after my question.

“
Don’t worry, Isabelle.
You’ll be fine without me. You want me out of your life and I don’t
want to hold you back.”

I cried into my arm, bent over at my
desk. He had made up his mind. I knew convincing him would be
futile and yet I allowed him to walk away.

“
Just don’t lose
yourself,
haeti
.”

Carin, a woman who worked at the
fixed-income research desk, stopped by to ask if I wanted to order
dinner in with her. She saw me crying.

“
Hey, you okay? Want a
drink? Let’s grab a bottle or two of wine. Or you could finish this
thing here. What is it?”

I looked up at Carin, who was looking
puzzled as she inspected my misshapen candy bar.

“
It’s my Snickers. I ate the
chocolate around it.” I smiled. She comforted me by rubbing my
back. Feeling better, I began to separate the blue pens from the
black ones on my desk while tears dribbled from my eyes. Carin took
from out of my mouth the pen top that I was rabidly chewing
on.

“
Need help?” she
asked.

“
Yeah, I am getting stressed
trying to understand Gamma and Options.” She knew that something
else bothered me but did not probe which I was thankful for. I was
already embarrassed for showing tears on the trading floor, an
indication of weakness to the alpha males around. Thankfully, Carin
understood.

Carin and I had become friends over
the previous couple of months in the course of often working late
together. She knew the business and was always answering my
questions, especially ones related to options.

The name said it all. Options are
contracts that give you the option to either buy or sell an
underlying security for a given time, security, and price. These
derivatives had an exchange market of their own.

“
And Gamma sometimes is
referred to as the curvature of an option. It’s the rate at which
an option’s delta changes as the price of the underlying changes,”
Carin explained. “If an option has a gamma of five, for each point
rise in the price of the underlying, the option will gain five
deltas. Make sense?”

It did.

“
So, gamma is a measure of
how fast the option changes direction, right?”

“
Exactly!” Carin exclaimed.
She then started to jot something down on a piece of paper. “This
is your cheat sheet for trading options. Use it and impress your
boss.” I started to feel better. Work took my mind off
Dani.

If your delta is +, you want
underlying contract to rise in price. If delta -, you want
underlying contract to fall in price.

If your theta position is +, the
passage of time will generally increase the value of your position.
If Theta position is -, the passage of time will decrease the value
of your position.

If your rho position is +, you
want interest rates to rise. If your rho position is -, you want
interest rates to fall.

Carin handed me my cheat sheet. “Now,
if only I had answers to your love problems, I’d be a genius. What
am I talking about?! If only I had answers to my own love
problems.”

She knew about Dani and our problems,
and she complained often about her long-term boyfriend. He was an
investment banker named Blake, and she hardly got to see him. She
had gotten into finance because her parents had put a lot of
pressure on her to make money.

I thought maybe that was the reason I
had ended up in finance. My mother was making only a meager salary
as a seamstress, but that wasn’t enough to cover all of my late
father’s debts. She was getting old and suffered from carpel tunnel
syndrome. Life’s stresses had added years to her face and body.
Although the thought was unspoken, I knew my mother considered me
to be her retirement plan. It was my filial duty to care for her
now.

Carin was plain-looking. She had pale
skin, blue eyes, long, straight blond hair, and bad posture. She
wore the same basic ensemble every day, which consisted of grey
slacks, a black top, and black chunky heels she had bought on the
sale rack of a discount store. Carin was eight years older than me,
but we had become friends quickly.

Carin passed the traders on the night
desk to comfort me. There was nothing going on in the markets that
night. CNBC and ESPN played on the televisions mounted to the walls
throughout the room. Some night traders watched TV while others
played catch with a foam soccer ball.

Carin rubbed my back again and I
turned around and gave her a hug. Several traders looked at us
awkwardly.

“
Beavers,” I overheard
someone say.

Carin led me into the restroom for
privacy.

“
No one’s going to like me.
I am not good at meeting guys. Who am I going to be with now?” I
said. I had never been good at dating.

Later that night, I called Kim for
solace. “Come on, baby. If you want fucking company, get a damn
cat!” Kim said. I was hoping for more tenderness, but her bluntness
was effective.

“
Listen, love. You’ll meet a
guy. No question. Tomorrow we’ll go out and have fun. You need a
real man. College boyfriends are just temporary and are meant to be
left in college.”

The next day, I got to work nearly
forty-five minutes late. My eyes were swollen from crying into my
pillow and a sleepless night. I had neither showered nor brushed my
hair that morning.

Andrew did not ask me questions about
the market or talk to me at great length that morning. I knew that
someone on the night desk had told him I’d had an emotional
outburst the night before.

I caught glimpses of Andrew looking at
me and I was aware that he let me scroll through my old emails with
Dani.

At one point, I walked into the
women’s room and cried into my palms, trying to remain as quiet in
the stalls as I could.

When I got back to my desk, I saw that
there was an email from Stephen.

“
I hear you need a drink?
All OK? Want a friend to talk to?”

I wrote back. “I do have friends. I am
meeting them later. Yes. Bad day, but life moves on. Going to see
mom this weekend which should be good.”

Stephen wrote back: “If your plans
change, let me know. If not, take me home to meet mom.”

I didn’t respond to Stephen’s email.
The last thing I needed was flirtatious banter.

I left work early that afternoon after
settling some trades and allocating them to different accounts, a
responsibility Andrew had recently given me.

“
Before you leave, just let
me see what you did. We can’t afford to make a mistake at this
point.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that
statement, but I was too engrossed in my own thoughts to bother
analyzing. Andrew sat over me as I reiterated my account links,
paying particular attention to the fact that the accounts were all
linked to our master account.

“
The best executed price
goes into this account. The largest size into this one, and the
balance goes here.”

I managed to maneuver my way through
an Excel spreadsheet with greater ease.

As I was neatly organizing my desk,
Stephen wrote again.

“
If you need a drink, you
know I am your guy.”

“
Word travels fast,” I said
to Andrew, who looked at me quizzically. “Stephen. He wrote me. I
guess he knows my boyfriend and I broke up.”

Andrew smiled devilishly, clearly
guilty. “I told you nothing’s a secret on the trading
floor.”

Right then, Stephen wrote
again.

“
I told you that he doesn’t
deserve you.”

I wrote, “Thanks. Take care. Am off
for the night.” I pressed Send, and within minutes Stephen called
on the direct line that was specifically allocated to
him.

I looked at Andrew. “If it’s for me, I
don’t have the energy to talk, please.”

I listened to Andrew talk on the phone
as I walked past him, waving goodbye.

“
She just left,” he
said.

I gave Andrew a thumbs-up and headed
out. He winked to indicate his goodbye.

I went to Kim’s office a few blocks
away, and we decided to get a treat at a café across the
street.

“
So what’s the deal with
Eric? Or is it M.D.? What does he go by these days?” I asked. I
needed to talk about something other than myself.

“
I like him. What can I do,
though? I mean, he’s married! We just have fun.”

I wished I had Kim’s ability to just
have fun, without considering the consequences. Her spontaneity was
admirable.

“
I mean, I really like M.D.,
but sometimes he goes home and I’m left alone. A girl needs to be
held too, you know.”

I started to think of how I was when I
went home to my small Astoria apartment. I thought of Dani. I
missed being held by him every night at school.

“
But I mean, you knew he was
married. You knew what you were getting into, right?”

When Kim had first begun seeing M.D.,
she had emailed me telling me she had just stayed over at the SoHo
Grand, a trendy boutique hotel, for several nights.

“
How was I supposed to know
he was married? He wasn’t wearing a ring. Come to think of it, what
married guy on Wall Street do you know who wears a ring?” she
asked.

I thought about her question. Andrew
didn’t wear a ring either, I realized, nor did Stephen.

Kim placed her coffee down and stared
blankly. Clearly, she had a lot to think about.

“
It just seems wrong. He is
married and has a wife and kids to feed at home,” I
said.