The Underwriting Read Online Free PDF Page B

up his phone as an indication the meeting was finished.
    Todd stood, feeling like he’d won more points than Harvey but somehow still lost the game. Harvey was such a dick; he couldn’t wait to blow this deal out of the park and put the old man in his place.
    TARA
    W EDNESDAY , M ARCH 5; N EW Y ORK , N EW Y ORK
    â€œOh my god, can you believe George E is dating that, like, total peasant? Like, on the one hand it’s totally awesome that he, you know, is worth a gazillion dollars and dates normal people? But on the other hand, oh my god she’s like totally busted. I mean, like, le-gi-ti-mate-ly not attractive.” Meagan talked like someone addicted to the sensation of vocalizing.
    Tara stopped typing and waited, helplessly, for her colleague’s voice to stop.
    â€œLet me see.” She heard Julian, the eager-to-please associate, roll his chair over to see Meagan’s screen, fulfilling his duty as a junior colleague of making VPs feel good about themselves.
    â€œRight?” Meagan asked.
    â€œDo you think his stuff is really that good?”
    â€œOf course it’s that good: his last piece sold for seventeen million dollars.”
    â€œBut is it, like, good art?” Julian asked.
    â€œJulian, the value of art cannot be measured objectively—it’s like what I taught you about public equity markets: perception creates reality. Is Facebook worth fifty dollars a share? What does that even
mean
? The market says it is, and therefore it must be so. And the market says George E should be with someone
way
hotter than this girl.”
    Tara sighed. What she wouldn’t give for a scandal. The firm’s current trading violations were news, but all they led to was an excuse for senior management to cut associate bonuses. What she needed was a bankruptcy or a Ponzi scheme or a massive round of layoffs to make life more interesting. She’d been at L.Cecil since she graduated from Stanford in 2007, back when markets were good and everyone with a 3.9 GPA from a top-tier university fought to get into investment banking or management consulting.
    But that was seven years ago. The financial crisis had drained the adrenaline from Wall Street, as well as promotions and retire-at-thirty bonuses. Now the path that was supposed to be the right one felt . . . static. Tara did everything right: she worked out every morning; she showed up to the office on time and was never the first to leave; she avoided gluten, limited her dairy and didn’t eat after nine p.m.; she called her parents once a week and contributed to her 401(k); she exfoliated her skin but not too often, cut her cuticles but not too close, waxed down there but not all the way; she read
The New Yorker
and
supported NPR; and she always remembered to drink a glass of water for every glass of wine. So why did she still feel unfulfilled? What self-help book had she missed?
    Maybe she should call her doctor to up her Celexa prescription.
    The office mail clerk arrived with a box, and Tara looked up hopefully for she-wasn’t-sure-what, and sighed when the package was for Meagan.
    â€œOh, perfect,” Meagan said, taking the box.
    Tara refocused on the status report she’d spent the last hour typing, taking her shoes off under her desk and spreading her toes on the carpet to ease her mind from existential crisis. She wondered what had happened to that girl Lori Pratt—the one who had left L.Cecil to become a writer—was she any happier?
    â€œWhat’s that?” Julian asked Meagan.
    â€œIt’s my cleanse,” Meagan said, clearly pleased that he’d asked. “I’m juicing for five days starting tomorrow. I’ve
got
to lose six pounds before my Miami trip next weekend.”
    â€œYeah, totally,” Julian said.
    â€œWhat?” Meagan’s jaw dropped. Tara turned just enough to see. Meagan had wanted Julian to tell her she didn’t need to lose weight, even though