Rosie Ipecac: The Paris Years

By Janet McMahon

Buffalo bombshell Rosie Ipecac makes a hasty marriage to hotshot lawyer Johnny Moran when he is suddenly assigned to Paris. Rosie hasn't a clue to what either Paris or her new husband are all about. Thanks to a clairvoyant, an eccentric fashionista and Inspector Maigret, she finds out more than she wanted to know. Along the way she shows us a Paris you've never seen before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janet McMahon
• Release date: Sep 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301879342

Janet McMahon

Janet McMahon is an American writer who has lived in France for 24 years, working as a translator, dubbing supervisor and photographer. Before that she lived in Greece for three years, working as a newspaper columnist and English teacher. She grew up in New York and also worked as a reporter and photographer in Virginia.

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Rosie Ipecac: The Paris Years

By Janet McMahon

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Janet McMahon 2011

All Rights Reserved.

Cover photo by George Goode

to George

Chapter One

I IMAGINED arriving like movie stars back in the stylish days, prancing down the steps of the airplane (or was it a ship?), both of us in smart suits, me in open-toed heels and a little hat, and then calling for a porter, who would take care of our trunks and hatboxes. We’d jump into a cab and speed along the Seine to a vast pastel suite overlooking the Eiffel Tower where we’d wear satin bathrobes and have endless room service and all sorts of amusing telephone calls and unexpected visitors.

But then what did I know, five years out of Buffalo, where my favorite activity was leaning on cars.

I still wouldn’t call myself a citizen of the world. But ten years ago I was practically an embryo. What are you supposed to know, anyway, when you’ve grown up with everything you need and most of what you want, facing adversity only in the form of a rival clique or football team or at best a minor run-in with the local cops? When you’ve been used to living for clothes, pizza, music, movies and boys?

Yet here I was, little Rosie Ipecac, with my beautiful new important husband on the way to what I called my Paris Years.

People will tell you with a perfectly straight face that Paris will always be Paris. And I guess it’s true, Paris is Paris in a way that, say, Buffalo is not Buffalo. As it turned out, my Paris years really were a time like no other. But it was the strangeness and newness rather than the glory and grandeur of the place that made Paris a fitting place to begin my adulthood. It could just as well have been my Istanbul Years.

I was already twenty-five. John was twenty-nine. But what I didn’t know was that despite being all grown up and on our own, despite the ring and the license, we were basically still dating, we weren’t married. Not only did I know nothing about the world and only a little about myself, I didn’t have a clue as to who this guy was I had hooked up with. It happened to be in Paris, where I had all the time in the world, and thanks to two clairvoyants, a clochard, and Inspector Maigret, that I found out.

• • •

Anyhow we did fly first class. Rivers of champagne, miniature design-food, excellent clientele and all the comforts of home. I only got edgy after the movie when everyone turned out their lights and went to sleep, leaving me alone in the dark, wired as hell.

I made a list:

Beowulf

the Big Bang (astronomical, financial)

the Bork affair

camp

subordinated debentures

the EEC

dorm

glasnost and perestroika

Catherine of Aragon

Reaganomics

sororities

Aristotle

the resurrection of the body

leather pants

Then I looked at the airline magazine, pretending I had my choice of any of the duty-free items. I was torn between a bottle of Whiplash for myself and a fabulously expensive scarf for Mama depicting the history of rail transportation. What would she want with that. Get her a beautiful fountain pen. Let’s see, barf bag, do we want this for later? Safety instructions, don’t even think about it. What happens to the dogs downstairs? Do their oxygen masks drop down? Don’t even think about it. Johnny will laugh at me if I take the free slippers, but they’re just going to throw them away if I don’t. The blanket they’ll dry clean, you can feel the chemicals.

A French guy who had bored his companion into a state of catatonia in the row behind us was wandering back from the toilet. He smirked at me as he passed. Yet here I was in a thousand-dollar outfit, whereas he had on white socks.

Yes it’s me, I said with my eyes. Rosie Ipecac, a flagrant red from Château Misdemeanor. The one who ordered the anchovies on the pizza. I dot my i’s with little circles, what of it. My Harley’s around the corner, I drink beer out of the can, I’m allergic to smoked salmon, and you should live so long. White socks, for God’s sake.

I was so agitated I couldn’t sit still, forget reading or doing a crossword. Finally I took my make-up bag to the bathroom and did my whole face over, from cleanser, eye-make-up remover and beauty mask all the way back through moisturizer, translucent color and eye make-up, to Dewdrops and Fairy Dust, finishing touches still being tested in the Hera Corp. laboratories.

When I returned it was daylight over Europe, everyone was bustling around and Johnny was awake, examining my list. He turned it over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Leather pants? he said, with a big yawn and stretch.

I’m uncomfortable even with the concept.

Me too, he said.

I know. I wanted to have one thing on there that might be on your list.

Don’t worry, Rosieola, said Johnny, still soft from his nap. Just enjoy yourself. You can’t go through life being insecure about what you didn’t learn in school.

What if somebody asks me about Reaganomics.

Say what you said to me, you thought it was a strip in the Sunday comics.

I’m serious.

I am, too. And why do you have to know about Catherine of Aragon, for pete’s sake?

My point exactly.

Look, he said. I have something for you. He got up and fished around in the overhead compartment. Then he handed me a leatherbound book. It’s for your journal. You can write down your thoughts, your fears, your lists, your recipes.

Oh, Johnny, I can’t write in this, I said, opening the book slowly and stroking the velvety pages. It’s too nice. I’d have to write poetry or something in a book like this. The theory of relativity, maybe.

That’s ridiculous. Look, it’s a new marriage, a new country, a new language — in a couple of months it will be a new decade, he said. The perfect time to start a journal.

I guess so.

You’ll be glad ten, twenty years from now, that you recorded your impressions of Paris. I will, too, because I’m not going to have any time to see it.

But I’m not calling it a journal, I said, warming to the idea. I’m calling it a diary.

At the airport I didn’t see any porters, and we had to load our luggage in carts like all the other refugees, but there was a car and driver waiting to take us to a swanky hotel not far from the Arc de Triomphe. Not vast or pastel, but with complimentary bathrobes which we took the trouble not to steal. Johnny got a couple of amusing phone calls and I called for room service whether I wanted it or not. No unexpected visitors, but we were in Paris for two years, so anything could happen.

Diary, October 1989

I wrote it without thinking, at the front of this diary: Rosie Ipecac. I don’t even go by Ipecac any more, I go by Moran. Yet in my private life, let us say when I’m tweezing my eyebrows, I remain Ipecac.

Plus I haven’t even been married one month.

It is my second diary. The first one was about my high school boyfriend Vinnie DiRuba. I made it into a novel for senior English, it was called Vincent: A Man and his Motorcycle. The teacher thought it was great, she sent it in, as Mama put it. Nothing ever came of it except Vinnie got mad and Mama had the thing printed with a laminated cover and kept it on the coffee table next to the peppermints until I made her take it away.

So I know how to write, even if I didn’t go to college. I breezed through my Regents exams and I was in honors English and honors French — it was the second thing Mama told people after the fact that my little brother Alex was a confirmed musical genius.

Alex went to a conservatory, which to Mama was as good as going to Harvard. He became a local role model because he had once been in a rock band but was now a classical violist (which I’m afraid means ‘rapist’ in French, but let’s not tell him). Mama said a novena of thanks and Daddy was constantly going around with a photo of Alex and his chamber group saying See? See? What’d I tell you? And nobody knew what it was he’d told them in the first place except maybe that Alex and his music were gonna end up in jail some day.

I didn’t go to a real college. Even a year of community college didn’t take, it’s just as well I ended up at Katie Gibbs. Despite my brilliant high school career I’m no raving intellect, as I once heard a very well-bred friend of Johnny’s say, a friend who himself is I’m sure quite a raving intellect despite the fact that he refers to women as it and that.

Didn’t take, in the sense that all I like to do is read novels. Math I’m no good at, science gives me a pain, history is okay, but — well I guess I’m just lazy. My best subject was always languages, maybe because I grew up with a little Italian from my mother and grandmother. At school they put me in French in seventh grade.

It never occurred to Ceily and Basil to send me to college. The guidance counselor asked me senior year where had I applied, I said nowhere. She went crazy. Then I went home and told my parents I was supposed to go to college, Daddy went crazy. Tad didn’t go to college, you think we’re sending you to college? Of course Tad is generally considered to be mental, but I was too tactful to mention this key detail.

Johnny calls it a journal. I wonder if he’ll sneak a look. Probably. Hi, John!

Diary, October 1989

Touring with Johnny is a snap. You don’t have to do anything, he does it all for you. Look here, look there, look down this street, oh, that’s nice but wait ‘til you see this. Note the wrought iron. Think of the cobblestones as weapons. Feast your eyes on the pastries. Consider the gargoyle. I was in a blissful fog. It was like seeing Paris at naptime from a comfy seat in a speeding train.

Johnny wanted to take me someplace special for what he called my first café experience, but I had my heart set on a place near the hotel on a traffic circle with a fountain in the middle. But what’s so great about this? Johnny said, looking around with his hands on his hips.

Nothing. That’s the point, I said, selecting a table in the sun. I couldn’t quite put into words the fact that I liked the waiter striding around with a tray in his black vest and his long white apron. I liked the two swarthy customers maybe discussing their gambling operation, seated next to a couple of diet-ravaged shopaholics in gorgeous little suits with clangy accessories, maybe discussing who said what to who. I liked the fact that there was a church across the circle, and a metro opening right in front of the café from which something typically French might emerge. I liked the fact it was no big deal.

But I wanted to show you where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir hung out, Johnny said.

We have all day, I said. And I drink a lot of coffee, especially when I’ve been up all night.

Johnny was keyed up like a kid. He had a minuscule French newspaper and I had an English-language tabloid called I Love Paris, but we were both too excited to read.

Name one way in which Paris is not what you expected, said Johnny, folding the paper and stuffing it in my bag.

Is this ‘Exposure and Discovery?

No, it’s a new game, it’s called, ‘Speculation on the Part of the Witness.’ So. Name one way in which Paris is not what you expected.

But I’ve hardly seen anything.

I know. I’m just talking about your first impression.

I don’t want to go on record yet because I’ll change my mind in half an hour. Then I’ll change it again every five minutes.

It doesn’t matter, he said.

And then you’ll hold me to my first impression and nail me with it later. Plus I’m too mixed up. I’m badgered.

Come on, he said, and his voice was so tense it was almost a whine.

Okay, okay. Um, let’s see…I thought all the men would wear berets.

"Come on."

Oh, God. I don’t know. I thought it would be smaller, quieter. More different than it actually is. Quainter, maybe. I think I was unduly influenced by Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron. Or Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.

Well, we haven’t really gotten to the quaint part yet.

See what I mean?

Okay, okay.

"What about you, do you remember how you felt the first time you came to Paris?

I remember being bummed out because the Eiffel Tower was brown.

Brown? I said. I thought it was gray, or silver.

So did I! But it’s brown. Like that, he said, pointing at the coffee that had just arrived. The smell of that coffee under its brown layer of foam wafted up to my face like a cobra out of an Indian turban, and I was in heaven. There was my first impression.

Diary, October 1989

I can’t get over the apartment. From the street you go through an enormous double door and past an actual concierge into a secret passage leading to a rear elevator. Up four floors to chez nous, a three-bedroom, fully furnished apartment, my dear, with separate dining room and a grown-up kitchen with washer, dryer and dishwasher. The ceilings are up in the stratosphere and there is intricate molding all over. Oh, yes, three fireplaces with enormous gilt-framed mirrors over them. The apartment is on two different courtyards, one with a tree and one without. After my place in N.Y. the view is like Central Park. I took one sprint around, I said, Johnny, this is high-end to die for.

He had his hands in his coat pockets, watching me. You don’t think it’s a little… gloomy? he said.

No, it’s fine. You don’t need to light a lamp in the daytime, that’s good enough.

Yeah, but, I mean, there’s no street, it’s all like…walls out there.

But the walls aren’t that close, the neighbors aren’t really in your face.

I was following Johnny while he strolled around kicking the tires of the apartment. He stepped on a squeaky floorboard and then stepped on it again, and again. He flipped a light switch or two. He looked at the ceiling in the corner of the kitchen where the paint was bubbled. He opened and closed the door of a built-in armoire and then smiled a little as though he felt sorry for it. Then he went into the living room, where he plopped down on a champagne-colored damask couch, throwing his arm over the back and crossing his legs. He wanted to put the apartment in its place, tell it who was boss.

John’s a natural leader, or even a natural-born pol. (Daddy said watch out, Mama loudly said nothing.) He walks in and takes charge, makes you feel like everything’s all right. Sometimes he speaks in phrases suitable for a gigantic political rally where there’s an echo in the loudspeaker system. Like, he’ll say: Miss. Ipecac. You. Are the girl. Of my (big breath) dreams. And then there could be music, or applause.

They want to do the right thing, he said, summing up the surroundings, but at the same time they want to show me I’m just. A bit. Junior. Vic’s apartment has eleven rooms including a living room the size of Newark Airport, plus maid’s quarters on the top floor plus what you call your professional kitchen.

What in the world would we do with eleven rooms? We’ll never fill up these. I count three bedrooms.

Maybe we’ll have to start a family.

"Get out of here. Then there’s the dining room, you could get fourteen covers in there. And this salon, ooh la la. Regarde, a multitude of conversation groups." I lay down in his lap like a guitar.

What do you mean, ‘Get out of here?’ he said.

Johnny.

It’s not like we can’t afford it.

Johnny, we agreed.

Yes, that’s right, we agreed. He heaved a big sigh. It surprised me. Then, changing tone: Furniture’s a little cheesy, wouldn’t you say?

No, Johnny, not cheesy, just a little unsure of itself. Not taking any risks. Rental.

It’s rental, he agreed in a nasal voice, screwing up his face and putting it right on top of mine. He reminded me of Alex when he was twelve: a contender one minute, a little snot-nose the next.

Diary, November 1989

I write his name: ‘John Moran.’ And I still feel that flutter, like when I used to write ‘Vinnie’ in my looseleaf notebook. I would sit there in class and take my pen and slowly caress the page with it: Vinnie. Then I would look at the name, all scrolly and curlicued: Vinnie. And that would be Vinnie, the name on the page. The feeling I had writing the name, that was Vinnie. The way I and only I elaborated the letters of the name, that was Vinnie. I did this over and over, I became hypnotized by the word Vinnie. I changed it to Vincent. I changed it to V.A.D for Vincent Anthony DiRuba. I wrote that over and over, in several styles ranging from gothic to Chinese. Then I wrote R.M.D. for Rose Maria DiRuba. R.I.D. for Rose Ipecac DiRuba. Then I started all over again with Vinnie. Vinnie in ballpoint, Vinnie in pencil, Vinnie in ink. This was my idea of planning my future. It’s true I’m no raving intellect.

Johnny was the shark lawyer who came in with the team from Erstwhile, Heartsick, Chopper and Bong to protect Hera Cosmetics against a hostile acquisition. He got off the elevator I said, Oh boy, this is heaven or hell and nothing in between, this is either fifth gear or back to the pizza parlor, because this was a big tall solid Italian-cut pinstripe with a boyish swagger and tousled hair and naughty brown eyes that got naughtier when they got a load of me at the prow of Hera International, not that he was rude or oily but when he said he was there for a meeting in the conference room I felt the back of my neck weakening and my eye sockets dampening like I’d just eaten a spoonful of Chinese mustard and I wondered if the suit I was wearing was good enough for dinner at Le Cirque and decided we should sleep at my apartment not his because I didn’t want to wear it again the next day because I had a date for the movies the following night, yet what would he think of my rotten little studio on 47th Street which until that moment was just fine, even for the bastard of an accountant who frankly was nothing but a social climber whereas there was something of the genuine article about this shark lawyer, something that said good schools or good family or good prospects, there was something decadent, true, but at least there was something or other solid to decay, and more to the point there was some kind of solid man inside that navy pinstripe suit with the hand-turned lapels, something more accustomed to jeans and a T-shirt, with strong capable arms hanging out the sleeves and hands grabbing a football or a monkey wrench but meantime those hands under the white cuffs wanted me and I wanted those hands and at the same time I wanted to run away shrieking like I’d just seen a rat.

That was in February. In November I was Madame Moran on rue de Longchamp, Paris, France. If you could die of good luck.

In New York I lived sort of nowhere, it just worked out that way. A friend of my cousin’s had a rent-control smack in the middle of Diamond Row, off Times Square, that went for a hundred dollars a month, I’m not kidding. And it wasn’t too bad if you ignored the shower, the kitchen and the earthshaking radiators. It was a fourth-floor walkup, a big square studio with a fire-escape balcony, no light but pretty quiet and with nice people, except for my upstairs neighbor, who was the kind of person with friends who called him up and let the phone ring seventy-five times before giving up.

Anyway my cousin’s friend got married and wanted to sublet her place as a hedge because her new husband was a jerk, and my cousin was dying for me to move to New York. Rosie, you’re gonna take this town by storm, that’s the way Philomena talks, she said Rosie, you’re gonna take this town by storm. Which I didn’t in all honesty, I only got hired by Baumgarten and Drek, a Big Eight accounting firm.

In the end I liked my neighborhood because it was so not-obvious. On purpose I’d tell people I lived around Broadway, and they’d say West Broadway? and I’d say no, Diamond Row. They’d be like, What? People actually live there? I wanted to say, not only that, people live in Buffalo, too. Because to my mind New Yorkers are the most provincial people on earth. They think there’s nowhere else real in the world besides New York, and they can barely imagine a neighborhood, much less a borough or a whole other city, different from their own. Johnny says you can’t say New Yorkers are provincial, because provincial means from the provinces. But I thought New Yorkers were provincial and I suspected Parisians were, too.

I ended up at the peak of my career with a good job as a receptionist at Hera Cosmetics, whose products I could no more afford than the man in the moon. They paid me a good salary to do very little except sit literally at the head of the operation. They used to call me the figurehead because the building was sort of V-shaped like a boat, and when you got out of the elevator on the top floor at the bottom of the V, you had a choice of left to legal and corporate or right to chairman and CEO, but first thing you saw was me, Rose Maria Ipecac, behind the pastel space-aged desk, and I would have made up my face to specification— much less gook than they tell you in the magazines, just the most transparent foundation which I diluted with rosewater, some pinky-gold powdered blush, dark peach lipstick watered down with gloss, mascara and a thin artistic swish of green on the eyelids.

My hair was the killer, because my hair at the time was sort of a pale gold and it was fixed in luxurious curls, and they had a little filtered light behind me that shone through the ends and made a slight halo. So that what you saw as you stepped off the elevator was the glowing picture of health and youth and beauty, and that was me, Rosie.

The strange thing is I don’t have the Hera face, there’s no way they’d use me for a model. My face is not stylish, it’s old fashioned. No international lips, not much in the way of cheekbones.

I might look Eastern European— because my father, Basil Ipecac, is half Polish half Hungarian— were it not for my Italian mother, Cecilia Deligianni Ipecac. From my mother I do not get the intelligent little rat face my little brother got. Nor did I get his unbelievable musical ability. From my mother I do get a nice smile and good teeth, what John calls a sensational body, and lots of wavy hair, which thanks to Basil is reddish brown instead of blue-black. Basil is also responsible for the blue eyes. In fact, says John, I look as Irish as Paddy’s pig, what a thrill, and by the way you never saw an Irish girl stuff a hundred tortellini an hour. From Basil I also do not get, thank God, the bulk or the rage inherited by my older brother, who fits right in at the maximum-security prison.

Hera chose me for receptionist-figurehead because actual human people— ad people, suppliers, consultants, buyers, auditors and shark lawyers— would right away like me and would right away be slightly confused because I wasn’t a six-foot anorexic but instead someone you could trust— and who, if you were a man, you might want to pinch, even just on the cheek. Some ad guy figured this all out when he saw me in accounting, where I worked for a few months after getting fired from Baumgarten & Drek. He said people would see me and begin their dealings at Hera with a good attitude. They might not retain that attitude but then when they left they’d see me again and they at least wouldn’t go away homicidal.

Visiting men asked me to lunch every second, I told them sorry, I had a novena, and they were just as happy. But slick defensive girl employees, they liked me too, once they got to know me a little. My mother warned me a long time ago the other girls would be jealous, and I’ve learned to cut through their fear — because I think that’s what it boils down to— by liking them before they have to like me.

So I think I did better than all right by Hera considering I rarely did any work and usually could be found reading library books under my desk.

My cousin said Rosie, they are using you, they are exploiting you, you could do better. Yet here she was typing away at Booz-Allen, brown bagging it on the concrete at noon and fighting the criminal element on the way back to Flatbush every night, all for the privilege of happy hour and a second-rate club twice a month. I said Philomena, we are all of us being used, let’s get that straight right off the bat. If my looks were my best quality I would be only too happy to be used for my looks, since it was not given me to be Albert Einstein. But luckily I am being used not only for my looks but also for my better qualities, namely my kindness and my quickness and my honesty. What else should anyone use me for? I could roll out pizza dough, true. I could wait tables. If necessary I could do real labor. Like Aunt Rose, I could do tailoring and dry cleaning. Or like my father’s family, I could work in a coalmine. Or on a farm. I could pull a plow. In a way these would all be good honest things to do. But I’m in Manhattan for some reason, I’m a secretarial school graduate and Hera is using me for my kindness and my quickness and my honesty— and my looks. This I prefer to any of the aforementioned.

That’s what I told my cousin. She always thought they were brainwashing me. I gave her free samples, that made her feel better. But we never really hit it off like she thought we should — single girls tearing up New York — and I think it made her mad.

• • •

I had a good time in New York, walking north to south, south to north, eating raw squid if I wanted or else falafel. Learning to look before sitting, learning how to protect myself, learning how to earn a crumb of respect from people my mother would have sprayed with Black Flag before even talking to them. Trailing around the Public Library, browsing at the Metropolitan or careening through the Guggenheim, shopping the flea markets and decorating my apartment every two minutes. Guys took me to clubs, I danced like crazy, maybe drank a little too much. Cocaine I found redundant, it was like using a Chippendale cabinet to feed a forest fire. Guys took me to the movies, the theater, dinner, I can’t say I didn’t have a social life. But basically, I found out, I’m a one-man woman. And I never could find the one man.

Before Hera my talents were largely wasted at Baumgarten & Drek except that I had an affair with one of the partners, who I taught how to pronounce French and how to samba, too. He taught me the art of clever conversation (meaning whose column to read in the newspaper), and not to wear a velvet cat suit to an Upper East Side cocktail gathering. He taught me to say film or picture— not movie. He taught me people like you better if you buy your clothes at Bendel’s or Charivari. He taught me to appreciate wine that cost more than the outfit I had selected to drink it in. He taught me I was too soft and needed to harden up my muscles. He taught me if I was going to indulge in bad taste I at least ought to call it kitsch or camp. He taught me so many things, and I had so little to offer in return, that one day I gave him a good slap in the face and told him to take his red suspenders elsewhere or my big brother would come and break him in two like a matchstick.

What a surprise: I soon lost my job.

Heartbreak was everywhere that winter. The pavement cracked and the garbage flew. Rain and sleet melted the cardboard huts on the sidewalk. Taunters and harassers followed you from doorstep to doorstep. Wild animals mauled and murdered for the sake of clothing from Bendel’s. Boys got thin like death-camp victims, then disappeared. Children shot their friends with real live guns. Men who thought they’d seen everything had their feet amputated. Cashmere ladies wept as they picked up their skirts around the scavengers and wino harpies.

Not that it was all new. But suddenly it was all my eyes would see, the sorrow and the dirt. Don’t encourage them, people would say if you handed out a dollar. Don’t encourage them. And I asked myself, who is the they that’s telling me not to encourage them? And who’s the us? Me, Rose Maria Ipecac? Don’t make me laugh.

I had no pep for dancing, but I went anyway, for the company. My mother said, Don’t you dare cry one tear for that bastard, and I didn’t. But rent control or no, it’s lonely on Diamond Row, and here I was in principle such a bombshell. Talk about your bushel basket. At the same time I looked ahead — I was 23 at the time — and I asked myself, Where’s all this leading? Are you going to be having fun all your life?

Then I answered an ad for a secretary in the accounting department at Hera and the rest is history.

• • •

The shark lawyers and investment bankers arrived that morning with what they called the White Knights who were going to save Hera from the hostile takeover. They all holed up with the Hera elite, there must have been twenty people. After a couple of hours, they emerged from the conference room in their shirtsleeves. Security was so tight Hera was afraid of hidden tape recorders on the visitors, and asked them to remove their jackets. The Hera side, to show some good faith, took their jackets off, too. So there was this sea of people walking around conferring in their white and blue shirts. The 37th floor looked like a hospital.

None of the visitors wanted to use a phone because they were afraid they’d be accused of leaking information. A couple of them asked me to make phone calls for them, and my instructions were to keep a discreet and meticulous record of everything I was asked to say.

The good-looking one, the one who was bound to change my life, wandered over and pulled out his address book. Hello, he said, with this goofy smile on his face. Then he just stood there.

Would you like me to make a call for you? I asked.

There, you see? he said softly. She has a pretty voice, too. I bet she can sing.

Before I could demonstrate, he was called away. John, I heard them say.

Now, I had been in and out of love as much as the next girl. I knew the signs of physical desire, I didn’t mind being flattered and I liked a good-looking specimen. But this was different. This was like being hit over the head with a frying pan. Physical desire was out the window because I had no sense of touch, I think my nerve endings were temporarily disconnected.

He was good-looking, but not necessarily to make you swoon. (Me, yes. You, no.) Built like a baseball pitcher, not an action hero. But I seemed to be seeing a whole lifetime in his eyes. I could see him as a little boy. I could see him as a tired old paunchy man. Or so I thought. I had an overpowering sense of inevitability, like I no longer had any choice in the matter. Plus, if I thought I could read him, I felt that he was doing an even better job of reading me. What did he see? What did he ultimately want from me?

Soon after, he said that what attracted him to me was my nostrils. He said I had the nostrils of a princess. I told him what attracted me to him was the lock of hair that flopped down over his forehead like Raggedy Andy. This was not true, any more than his nostril story was. We said these things because we were overwhelmed.

The planning and dealmaking about the takeover were so intense I only went out with him three times in two months, and when I saw him in the office he looked tense and pale, as they all did. Sometimes he was so agitated he barely noticed me. But he called me every morning and he appeared at my door a few times around midnight. He was appalled by my address. This isn’t a safe place for a woman, he said. You’ve got prostitutes, pimps, junkies, you’ve got crackheads going in and out of the Kung Fu movies—

Ah, but you’re facing in the wrong direction, I told him. Face east and all you see are Ivana Trump and Jackie Onassis. But his indignation thrilled me, I melted under his sense of territory.

He told me his job was professional bullshitter. It was our second real date, and we were sitting in a big corner banquette at an Italian restaurant I always liked for its king-sized ravioli and soft, pink lighting. The combination I found very conducive.

I majored in English at Princeton, he said. Thought I’d go into journalism, write these brilliant essays that would alter civilization as we know it. Then my father bribed me to go to law school. I figured I was so smart, I’d breeze through and use the degree to broaden my writing possibilities. I’d do international-business reporting, maybe even ease into politics. But then I ruled out politics, because I’d eventually have to live in Washington, which I can’t stand — plus I realized the markets control politics, no matter how you slice it. I mean, a 25-year-old trader has more power than the average congressman, and he makes twice as much. Plus he doesn’t have constituents.

How did your father bribe you? I asked, trying unsuccessfully to keep my fingers off his apparel.

With money, of course.

And what happened to altering civilization as we know it?

He took my hand gently and looked not at it, but through it. Another bribe, he said. I don’t know, things changed. My friends in school were guaranteed a hundred and fifty grand in their second year, they were already planning their second homes before they had their first, they knew they were going to get rich — and they did, by the way. And then I got recruited by the firm, they waved dollars in my face, and it wasn’t Wall Street but it was good money, with better money to come, and a chance to be in on the nuts and bolts of dealmaking instead of just trading or reporting. Like now, defending Hera against a bust-up raid, I hate to say it’s like a Monopoly game, but really, there’s so much money involved you can’t believe it really exists. In fact the beauty of it is, the money doesn’t exist, it’s all speculation, everybody’s betting on their own ability to create money out of bullshit. It’s the ultimate game.

He took a deep breath, like the subject was over.

Why did your parents bribe you to go to law school? I asked.

Now he began pulling petals off the flowers in the vase. My father, not my parents. My father’s the kind of guy who would punch out a Little League umpire for not calling a strike at 3 and 2 when I was pitching and there were two men on base. I’m talking about a ten-year-old pitcher. The men on base were third graders. He smiled bitterly down at the naked flower. My father’s got all his money on me. His grandfather was a farmer. His father was a railroad worker. He sells insurance. We’re supposed to be moving up the ladder, you see? Turning from caterpillars to butterflies. It’s about evolution. Survival of the one with the most money. Survival of the one with the most expensive suit.

Johnny, you’re wrecking the decor there on the table.

Excuse me. But it’s not only the money, it’s not only the suit, it’s not only the car. No, my dear Ms. Ipecac, because a 25-year-old bond trader can have those things, as we have recently established. Any former car salesman who is now a United States Senator working for gun and insurance lobbyists can have that. My mother’s father, who ran a candy store until he hit the jackpot importing Japanese cars back in the ‘6Os, can have that. This is not. Good. Enough. He slapped the table three times to punctuate his words. What we need in addition to piles of money is respectability. Education. Culture. We. Need. A law degree!

I get it. But —

Now. You may say, ‘But John, many of America’s major crooks have law degrees.’ And I would be forced, with some chagrin, to concede your point. But Pater doesn’t see it that way. Pater, who is as you will recall a puncher of volunteer umpires, guys who give up their Saturdays to help sticky little boys feel like sports heroes, Pater thinks a law degree is a free ticket for the whole family. You might say I am Pater’s designated runner.

He leaned back and smiled a little. I think he was embarrassed.

Family values, I said weakly.

Family values, he repeated, taking my hand again. And what is your favorite family value?

Um, separate TVs, I said. What’s yours?

Divorce.

But he said it so sweetly.

Johnny, I’m kind of embarrassed to ask, I said, to change the subject: What is a bust-up raid, actually?

Actually? Let’s see, a bust-up… He studied my decolletage. I admit you could see through the blouse, that was the whole point.

Very amusing, Mr. Moran, I opined.

He gave me his boyish smile. A bust-up is like if I decide to buy this restaurant but all I really want to keep is the stove, and I sell off everything else in lots.

Why didn’t you buy just the stove?

Because it wasn’t for sale individually. Plus, I want the money from the sell-off to pay down my debt. In this case, Stanley Nubuck just wants Hera’s cosmetics core, and he’s already got junk-bond financing for the other companies that make up the corporation.

How can they do this to Mr. Hera’s company?

It isn’t Hera’s. It’s a public company. It’s owned by the stockholders.

But most of the stockholders are loyal to Mr. Hera, aren’t they?

Most of the stockholders are loyal to their money. They’ll go with whoever makes them the best offer for their shares.

Not me, I’m loyal to Mr. Hera.

Are you a stockholder, Ms. Ipecac? He leaned over close to me.

I got ten shares for Christmas.

Well, he whispered like it was a big secret, they’re worth about four hundred dollars right now. What if someone offered you six hundred for them?

Right. I see. I’ll stick with Mr. Hera, but I wouldn’t if I had a thousand shares.

Mind you, he said in his sexy voice