Sunday, October 30, 2016 — Manhattan
* * *
I spent Sunday trying to build a model and failing because every input circled back to a variable I couldn’t quantify.
Him.
I sat at my home office — a room on the second floor of the brownstone, south-facing, a walnut desk I’d bought at auction and a Bloomberg terminal I ran from home on weekends.
Outside, the trees on East 71st were turning.
Inside, I had a spreadsheet open with columns for market sizing, product margin, regulatory timeline, distribution channels, brand positioning.
The market sizing column said: $532 billion global beauty and personal care.
Addressable for a product that actually reverses aging at the cellular level: conservatively, $200 billion.
The margin column said: if the cost of goods is what I think it is — raw materials plus his formulation process, no massive clinical trial overhead, no FDA drug classification if positioned as cosmetic — then margins north of 85%.
The regulatory column said: cosmetic classification avoids the FDA approval gauntlet, but the claims would need to be carefully worded to stay on the right side of the FTC.
The distribution column said: direct to consumer first, prestige retail second, global licensing third.
The brand positioning column was blank because I didn’t have enough information to price the brand without understanding the source.
The source.
The thing he wouldn’t tell me.
The advantage he’d mentioned in the car — I had an advantage they don’t — the gap between foundation and application where something lived that he’d shown me the output of but not the input.
I’d seen the lab.
I’d seen the equipment, the notebooks, the molecular diagrams in his handwriting.
I’d seen the data — the before-and-afters, the stability curves, the bioavailability numbers.
All of it was consistent with a world-class formulation chemist working at the bleeding edge of dermal science.
But the timeline didn’t work.
Six months.
He’d left Stanford in 2015.
His published papers were the foundation — collagen remodelling, follicular inhibition, structural tissue engineering.
Good papers, original papers, the kind that got cited by people who were doing the real work.
But the gap between those papers and the products sitting on my bathroom counter was the kind of gap that pharmaceutical companies spent ten years and two billion dollars trying to cross.
He’d crossed it in six months.
Alone.
In a barn.
Either he was lying about the timeline or he had something that nobody else had, and I didn’t think he was lying because the products were on my body and they worked and you couldn’t fake what I saw in my mirror every morning.
I closed the spreadsheet and went for a run.
Central Park on a Sunday in late October — the reservoir loop, three point eight miles, the trees a blaze of red and gold, the runners thinning as the temperature dropped.
I wore black Lululemon leggings that sat high on my waist and hugged my legs and ass, a fitted Nike tank over a sports bra that my breasts were starting to strain against because the firming compound was rebuilding them and my old 34D sports bra was becoming snug.
My hair in a high ponytail, bouncing behind me, thicker and heavier than it had been a month ago.
I ran the loop in twenty-eight minutes.
My legs felt strong, my wind was good, my body was — I was aware of this in a way I hadn’t been before the products — more mine than it had ever been.
Smoother, tighter, more defined.
The Lululemon leggings on my bare legs — completely bare, no stubble, no razor burn, no anything — felt like a second skin.
My calves were taut, my thighs firm, the skin on my inner thighs smooth as a pear.
I stopped at the water fountain near the 90th Street entrance.
Bent over, drank, stood up, wiped my mouth.
He was across the path.
Not in the park — on the street, outside, walking south on Fifth Avenue with a paper bag from a deli.
Grey T-shirt, dark joggers, sneakers.
His arms bare from the short sleeves, the forearms thick with veins, the shoulders stretching the cotton.
He was walking with the economy of a man who didn’t waste movement, his stride long, his posture straight, the grey ring on his left hand catching the late-morning light.
He hadn’t seen me.
He was looking at his phone.
A woman on the sidewalk — late twenties, brunette, yoga mat under her arm, the body of someone who spent real time in a gym — slowed as she passed him.
Not subtly.
She slowed, turned her head, looked at his arms, his chest, the line of his jaw, and kept looking as he walked past.
Her chin turned over her shoulder.
She watched him for four full seconds.
I felt something clench in my stomach.
It wasn’t jealousy.
I didn’t get jealous.
Jealousy was an emotion for women who didn’t know their own value, and I knew mine — I ran four hundred million dollars and I looked like this and every man who saw me wanted something and I was the one who decided whether they got it.
But watching a stranger watch him — watching her eyes track his body the way a scanner tracks a barcode, reading the data, pricing the asset — something clenched.
Something territorial.
Something I didn’t like and couldn’t dismiss.
He was not mine.
We had not touched.
We had not kissed.
We had shared five dinners, one car ride, one lab tour, and a matte black box of products that were transforming my body.
He was a potential business partner.
He was a man I was evaluating the way I evaluated any investment thesis: on the data, on the track record, on the risk-adjusted return.
He was not mine.
But the woman with the yoga mat was still looking, and the thing in my stomach was still clenching, and I stood at the edge of Central Park in my sweaty Lululemon with my thick blonde ponytail and my glowing skin and watched her watch him and thought: Back off.
Which was insane.
Which was the kind of thing I’d never thought about any man, including the Goldman MD who’d proposed and the Columbia professor who’d written me a sonnet and the developer with the second phone.
I turned and walked south toward the 72nd Street exit.
My ponytail bounced against my back.
My legs were bare and smooth and the breeze touched them and there was nothing to catch on — no stubble, no hair, just skin and air.
He hadn’t seen me.
Good.
I walked home.
Showered.
Stood in the mirror and looked at the body he was rebuilding without ever having touched it.
My skin glowing.
My breasts high and full.
My body smooth and bare.
My hair a heavy, lustrous curtain.
I was becoming something I hadn’t been before, and the man responsible didn’t know I’d just watched a woman undress him with her eyes on Fifth Avenue, and the feeling in my stomach was not jealousy because I did not get jealous.
I got dressed and went back to the spreadsheet and stared at the blank column where the brand positioning should be and felt the clenching fade into something quieter and more dangerous.
I typed a number into the margin column and watched the model recalculate and the feeling didn’t go away.