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ONE

If the phone rings one more time I will literally pull it out of the wall and chuck it into the next cubicle. Poor ginger-haired Justin. I imagine his innocent blue eyes transforming into cartoon X’s as the phone collides with the side of his head.

I know I should feel bad for possibly inflicting permanent damage but a small part of me wouldn’t mind. Lately, I haven’t been able to stomach his usual unfounded sense of superiority. Last week I used “there” instead of “their” in an email and was made to sit through seven cruel and unusual minutes of his monotonic ranting about work excellence.

Despite that, he is still sublimely fun to mess with in a juvenile sort of way. Today, I have proudly rearranged all the tacks on his wall into stars. I seriously have tiny gleeful heart palpitations every time he discovers the unsolicited rearrangement of his office supplies.

Impatiently, the phone rings again.

“Sherman & Latham Fund Management,” I say with feigned enthusiasm. “This is Helen.”

“Can someone explain why my portfolio is down 35%?” a voice bellows over the phone.

It’s Mr. Weissman who has been calling everyday around 4 P.M. to scream at any unsuspecting victim who answers the phone. So far, I’ve been ambushed about five times this week. I should start billing him for being his emotional punching bag.

“Get Brian on the goddamned phone,” he demands. “Or I swear to God I’m withdrawing my entire fucking investment.”

I picture a thought bubble forming above my head. And imagine saying, “Come now, Mr. Weissman. You and God haven’t been on speaking terms since you accidentally told Rabbi Finklestein to suck it during Shabbat dinner.”

Instead I go through the usual routine of trying to calm him down.

“Mr. Weissman, I understand your frustration,” I say calmly. “However, Brian is currently on a plane to Zurich. Can I take a message so he can call you once he lands?”

“What kind of fucked up operation are you fucking people running here?” Mr. Weissman says with exasperation.

The drive-by expletives are just another unfortunate consequence of the global financial meltdown. Honestly, if anyone spoke to me like that outside of work they’d better be prepared for a thuggish ass-kicking because “homie don’t play that.”

I can understand the fear and anxiety everyone must be feeling. Funds have been closing left and right. No one knew when he might be let go or when the stock market was going to finally bottom out. One thing is for sure, there’s nothing like an unprecedented recession to draw those out for blood.

“Stephanie,” Mr. Weissman says.

“Sir, that’s not...actually that’s nowhere near my name,” I say.

“Do you think I give a shit?” he says. “Leave him this message.”

There’s no response as the dial tone comes on.

“Oh no he didn’t!” I think cuing in my inner diva. The bastard hung up on me. Honestly, if the phone rings one more time I will most certainly pull it out the wall.

RING.

“Sherman & Latham Fund Management,” I say robotically. “This is Helen.”

“Helen, it’s me,” a male voice says. “Don’t they have caller ID?”

The voice sounds familiar but my ears are buzzing. I look at the number on the screen of my super corporate phone.

“Oh god,” I say.

“Not quite God,” he replies.

“Mark,” I whisper. “I’ll have to call you back.”

My voice is lowered to a hush that befits taking a private call at work. I look at the clock and it’s almost 8 P.M. When I applied for the Analyst position at Sherman & Latham in Los Angeles the job posting said “Market Hours.” That lasted for a week.

Not only do I work all hours they also have me playing secretary since I am the fund’s token female. I should have known the first day when they introduced our operations manager Dale Zarin as our one-man human resources department.

Apparently, Dale thinks I have a great set of Christmas hams. All I can say is thank god he’s Jewish and Christmas never comes. L’Chaim!

I could set my bra on fire in protest over the clear violation of my rights as a woman but all I’d gain is a singed nipple. No bueno.

“Justin, I got to get out of here,” I whisper over my cubicle wall.

I debate on whether to explain that my best friend’s wedding rehearsal dinner started thirty minutes ago. I decide against it and begin to quietly pack up.

“You know it’s career suicide, right?” Justin dispassionately lectures.

Ever since investment giant Lehman Brothers shockingly dissolved, leaving before 9 P.M. has been enough to get you blacklisted as a bad employee. At least the worse is over for those that have been laid off. Recently, I have been catching myself holding my breath trying to contain the nauseating feeling I get every single time I try to convince myself that I should be thankful for a job I hate.

“Justin, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say. “I’m coming in early.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says while typing away lazily.

The elevator opens as I call Mark on my cell phone. I know in about ten floors I’ll lose my reception but I think to myself at least I can talk for ten floors. For the past five years, I have gradually transformed into that girl that would lose consciousness if her cell phone weren’t permanently attached to her ear. The lady in the Ralph Lauren pantsuit next to me looks me up and down out of the corner of her eye.

“Mark, I’m leaving now,” I sigh.

“Well, I’m parking the car now,” he says. “What do you want me to tell Sophie?”

I can tell he’s maneuvering his black Toyota into a parallel parking spot. He vehemently mistrusts the valet after that one night his two hundred and fifty dollar GPS magically vanished from his glove compartment. I have to say he has never fully recovered.

“Just tell her I’m coming and that I’m so sorry,” I say. “Mark?”

“Fuck!” he shouts in the distance. “I dropped the phone.”

“What happened?” I ask knowing he can’t hear me.

Mark can be a terrible drive, like stereotypical Asian woman bad. He chronically misjudges that amount of space between him and other vehicles while driving. I usually grab onto anything when he brakes hard, which is often.

“Helen, I can’t hear a word you’re saying,” he shouts again. “I’ll just see you inside.”

Mark and I have been dating for five years. Well no, close to six. I just say five to avoid those looks of “Wow, that’s a long-ass time” when I say six.

We first met at my first real job at Quantum Research Solutions or “QRS.” The name and the abbreviation are deceivingly ostentatious. In essence, I just entered data all day while watching videos online. He actually is my first and only serious boyfriend since I moved to Los Angeles over a decade ago.

I’m originally from Northern California and moved down for college. Where I grew up life is much slower and people are less “fake.” I guess before moving I was your typical jeans, t-shirt and North Face fleece sweater type of gal. My brown mousy hair was always swept up in a ponytail. I never wore any makeup to cover my fair skin and my deep brown eyes always seemed a little too large for my delicate face.

I’ve changed quite a bit in the past ten years. Now my hair is always nicely blown out and dyed “Power Girl Brown No. 1094” every two weeks at a Beverly Hills salon. I’ve learned a thing or two about the wonders a little bronzer, mascara and lip-gloss can achieve. Meanwhile designer clothes and shoes have replaced the fleece sweaters and normally-priced jeans. Los Angeles has a way of sucking you in.

I suppose my taste in men has also changed. Initially, Mark wasn’t physically my type. He is thin, has broadly set black eyes and a pointed nose set above a strong handsome almost borderline angular jaw line. Mark isn’t your typical man’s man nor is he gay. He falls in this new category of male that I’m sure Los Angeles or Miami has pioneered called “The Metrosexual.” I think I actually might have thrown up in my mouth a little when he and I went to our first happy hour outside of work in civilian clothing. Truthfully, if it weren’t for the fact that I already knew him and liked his personality I would have written him off as a classic guy from Los Angeles. He went to UCLA, has a job in finance and wears gold-leafed shirts with Ed Hardy scrawled immodestly on the back. In an ironic twist, he makes me feel safe like no one ever has made me feel.

I guess I’ve learned to take the good with the bad, even with my career.

It was interesting that I ended up working at QRS since my passion had always been writing. I was the Editor-in-Chief of my high school newspaper, a Journalism major and an enthusiastic intern at two local newspapers. However three months after graduation and fruitless job searching in writing, I decided to look for something else that had more money-making potential.

I was twenty-three when I first started QRS. To be honest, I didn’t think too much about the job but I was earning a decent and consistent salary. I think it was a struggle switching from English to Finance. I wish I could have taken to finance like my best friend Sophie takes to a sale at Bloomingdale’s. Still over the years, I’ve concluded that even if I wasn’t great at my job I wasn’t terrible. I did what I could to get by. I traded in words for numbers and the independence has made the sacrifice worth it- at least on the surface.

I do have fond memories of my first year as a real adult. My co-workers were around my age and we’d get happy hour after work at a bar in downtown Culver City and inevitably get hammered if it was a Friday. On weekends, I would pillage IKEA for cool yet affordable home furnishings. I don’t know anyone that hasn’t owned a twenty-dollar LACK coffee table at one point in his or her life. God bless the Swedes and ninety-nine cent meatballs.

Despite paying a grand a month for my four hundred and something square foot studio in a questionable part of West LA, I loved my first place. Mark hated it partly because it smelled like a hodge-podge of curried Indian food and sour Kimchi. He also hated it in part because I lived right above the parking garage. You could hear the rusted gate rumbling open and close whenever a car came through, which oddly enough occurred with the most frequency at four-thirty on Sunday mornings.

It was all going to work out. We would cohabitate for a year, get married and I would become very successful and important in the next three years.

That was the plan until I realized how much the government, property management and simply keeping myself alive were taking away from my newfound independence. It seems as if it’s the reality all twenty-somethings must inevitably face and accept.

After just one year at QRS, I got it in my head that I was too good for the place. I convinced myself I needed a serious financial job since I wanted to be a serious career woman. That was going to be the key to my happiness. Then Sherman & Latham came along with the cache of working for one of the few hedge funds on the West Coast. It didn’t hurt that the office was on the eighteenth floor overlooking the Pacific Ocean and furnished with fine glass and marble.

I quit QRS for what I thought were more profitable and prestigious pastures. So for the past five years I’ve dedicated my life to Sherman & Latham and I have to say although it sucks balls at times it still supports the Southern California lifestyle I’ve grown accustomed to. Although things haven’t panned out exactly how I’ve planned I think I’m still content.

As the elevator reaches the parking deck with a ping, I quickly dart out and scurry across the parking deck in my heels towards my white BMW. If it wasn’t for the soul sucking traffic down Wilshire Boulevard I could be at the restaurant in twenty minutes.

“Motherfucker!” I scream at the driver who rapidly cuts into the almost nonexistent space in front of me. I make a rather offensive and exasperated hand gesture at him and he pretends to not notice. “At least a fucking courtesy wave! Courtesy wave!”

After forty-five minutes of traffic hell, I pull into the valet and make my way into the Euro-Vietnamese restaurant in Beverly Hills. The restaurant is famous for its “Walk on Water” entrance – a serpentine aquarium that winds through the cocktail lounge. I’m way too underdressed for the occasion when I see Sophie in eight hundred dollar Christian Louboutin’s, a black Chanel dress and Harry Winston diamond earrings. I always feel underdressed around her.

“Sophie, I’m so sorry,” I say genuinely frustrated and sad.

Lately, I was finding that work was cutting into more of my personal time than I would have liked. Possibly it’s a marker of success? Aren’t busy people always more successful?

“Helen!” Sophie says as she climbs over her guests to hug me. “We saved you some cake.”

I give her a weak and apologetic smile as I move to my seat next to Mark and Sophie’s aunt.

“This is my second marriage so it’s really no big deal,” she whispers in my ear. “I’m just glad to see you.”

Like me, my best friend Sophie Meyer is twenty-nine. We met during freshman year of college where she lived across the hall from me. I remember being so entirely in awe of her and thinking that if all the girls in Los Angeles looked like this, I definitely wasn’t going to fit in. Within the first week, the entire male population in our dorm was in love with her high cheekbones, long tanned legs and striking bluish-green eyes.

Being half Dutch and half Brazilian, Sophie is without question stunningly beautiful. She has a je ne sais quo about her so that if she was sitting alone in a café you knew it was by her own choice.

Sophie was a rare breed. Besides being outwardly attractive, Sophie also has a genuine heart of gold. I remember during Finals Week I came down with some hellish combination of the flu, strep throat and the hives. My body had decided to cluster fuck me in the most gross and contagious way possible. As my roommate ran for the hills and left me for dead, Sophie took me to the student health center and brought me chicken soup from the cafeteria every meal to nurse me back to health. I maintain that she is the reason why I literally survived Spring Quarter freshman year.

After college, Sophie became a successful real estate agent with listings in Bel Air and Malibu and got prematurely married to her boss who is now her ex-husband. She left him citing irreconcilable differences. He is a Taurus and she is a Gemini, which oddly enough is a viable cause for divorce. Those that are in the sign of Taurus are grounded and practical and Sophie is none of those things.

Following the divorce and the splitting of their assets, Sophie swore she was done with men and would focus on her career. Of course, it wasn’t long before she met and fell in love with her fiancé Michael Steinhardt. Michael is twenty years older, a wildly successful real estate investor and just as beautiful. He has two kids and two divorces under his belt. And from what I hear that’s not the only thing the silver fox has under his belt. For lack of a better word, it’s monstrous.

Stereotypes aside, she says she has never been happier or at least that’s the way she feels now. Sophie has mood swings that are just about as wild and random as she is. It is another one of her Gemini traits that I have come to love and hate.

“You know my hydrangeas are blooming so big this season,” Sophie’s elderly aunt sitting next to me starts to say vacantly. “Do you grow any flowers?”

“No,” I reply. “But I would love to if I had the time.”

The last thing I wanted to do was talk about goddamned flowers. Mark has yet to look up at me. He is engrossed in whatever email has come through on his Blackberry. I was feeling sad on the drive here but I had thought it was just because of the traffic.

I’m halfway through my huge slice of cake and another meaningless dinner conversation when I start to get teary-eyed. It has to be my contacts again. Damn it, I will get my eyes lasered this year. I continue to swear at my unfortunate dry-eye condition for wreaking havoc on my vision. However as a tear trickles down my face I have a feeling that it might be something more. Thank god for dim lighting.

I excuse myself to the restroom and once safely inside the stall I let the relentless suffocating feeling overtake me and tears start to stream uncontrollably down my face. Shit, it can’t happen now. Look how Zen the bathroom is. There’s fucking fountain with a granite Buddha sitting on top of it. Think Zen. Be the Buddha. No Buddha’s fat. Okay, be a skinny Buddha.

This emotional breakdown that I’ve been anticipating can’t happen in a public restroom. Fuck, it can’t happen period. And what’s worse is I’ve left my makeup in the car. Damn it. I just can’t win today.

My shoulders start to shudder and tears start splattering out uncontrollably. I was exhausted.

I pull out my Blackberry to text Sophie that I was leaving and before I could hit send I realized I had three emails from my portfolio manager Brian all containing a creative assortment of curse words. I’m sure he hasn’t even made it out of customs yet.

After retrieving my car from the valet I drive off without saying goodbye to anyone. I can feel the hot tears spilling from my eyes and my vision becomes so blurred that I’m forced to park on the side of La Cienga Boulevard where I bury my head in my arms and start sobbing.