Friday, October 7, 2016 — Manhattan
* * *
I saw him twenty minutes before he spoke to me, and I hated that I noticed.
I was in the middle of explaining to David Farber — Farber Capital, $1.2 billion AUM, breath like stale coffee and a handshake like a wet sponge — why his biotech short thesis was going to blow up in his face, and my eyes drifted over his shoulder to a man standing alone near the east windows of the Pierre ballroom, and something in my chest did a thing it hadn’t done since I was sixteen and Tommy Hirsch showed up to Rosh Hashanah dinner with shoulders.
He was tall.
Six two or six three, hard to tell from across the room.
Dark hair, cropped short and clean.
A jaw that looked like it had been designed by someone who hated softness.
He was wearing a tuxedo — Tom Ford, I was almost sure, the cut was too good for anything off the rack — and it fit him the way tuxedos are supposed to fit and almost never do: like the fabric was grateful to be there.
His shoulders were broad and square and the jacket lay across them without a wrinkle, which meant the body underneath was doing all the work.
His forearms, where he’d pushed the shirt cuffs back a quarter inch, were corded with muscle and veins.
He was holding a glass of red wine and he wasn’t drinking it.
He was watching the room the way I watched a market — not socialising, not performing, just reading.
Taking in data.
Processing.
Deciding.
I looked away.
Finished my sentence to Farber.
Smiled at something the Goldman associate — Kyle, Kevin, I’d already forgotten — said about the election.
Touched my collarbone the way I do when I’m listening, which is a tell I’ve never been able to break and which my father says is why I’ll never play poker.
I looked back.
He was looking at me.
Not at the room.
Not at the Goldman cluster.
At me.
His eyes were the colour of wet stone and they didn’t move when I caught them.
Most men look away when you catch them staring.
It’s a reflex — the guilt of being seen wanting.
He didn’t look away.
He looked at me the way you look at something you’ve already decided to buy, and the negotiation is just a formality.
I felt heat climb my neck.
Which was ridiculous.
I’m Eliana Roth.
I’ve been looked at by men since I grew breasts at thirteen — by boys at Dalton, by frat brothers at Wharton, by managing directors and portfolio managers and a real estate developer who turned out to be looking at a model in Tribeca at the same time.
I know what a man’s gaze feels like.
It feels like currency being offered.
This felt like currency being counted.
I excused myself from Farber’s circle and walked toward the second bar.
Not toward the man — toward the bar, which happened to be in his direction, which was a coincidence I was aware I was engineering.
My gold Versace moved with me — the slit opening over my right leg, the cowl neckline shifting against my breasts, the fabric brushing my bare skin underneath.
I’d chosen this gown because it made me feel like a weapon.
The plunging cowl showed the inner curves of both my breasts almost to the areola, and when I turned, the draping at the side fell away to show the full side of my left breast, bare, no bra, just skin and silk and the knowledge that every man in the room was doing the math on how much fabric stood between him and seeing everything.
My body was an asset.
I’d understood that since puberty.
My breasts — full, high, round, heavy enough that they moved when I walked and held their shape when I stood still.
My waist, narrow, the curve into my hips dramatic enough that tailors charged me extra.
My ass — firm and round and high, the kind that made men look twice when I walked away, and I always knew when they were looking because I could feel it.
My legs — long, bare, toned, the reason I wore heels even when I didn’t need the height, because heels made my calves flex and my thighs tighten and the slit of whatever I was wearing fall open to show what I wanted to show.
I was twenty-eight and I looked like this and I ran four hundred million dollars and every man in this room wanted something from me and I was walking toward a stranger because he was the first man in eight months who looked like he might have something I wanted.
I stopped near the end of the bar to finish a text — a response to my COO about a position we were building in a logistics company, nothing that couldn’t wait but I needed thirty seconds to settle my pulse, which was elevated, which annoyed me.
I pocketed my phone.
Looked up.
He was four feet away.
Leaning against the marble bar.
One hand in his pocket.
Drinking water.
Water.
At a charity gala at the Pierre.
While holding a glass of Barolo he’d apparently abandoned.
He was looking at me again.
At my eyes this time — not at my breasts, not at the slit, not at the six inches of bare skin between the cowl neckline and where my nipples would have been if the fabric slipped another centimetre.
At my eyes.
My body registered the eye contact before my brain processed it.
A flush.
A tightening low in my stomach that I hadn’t felt since — no.
I wasn’t going to finish that thought.
“You’re blocking the Macallan,” I said.
Because I needed to say something and I’d be damned if it was going to be hi.
His voice was low.
Unhurried.
The kind of voice that made you lean in and then made you angry that you’d leaned in.
He pointed out what I was drinking.
I said I might switch to scotch.
He told me I wouldn’t — and then he laid out exactly why I’d chosen the Ruinart, down to the social calculus behind matching the hostess’s glass.
As if he’d been standing inside my head when I’d made the choice.
I went very still.
He was right.
I hate champagne.
The bubbles give me acid reflux and the taste reminds me of my sister’s wedding.
I’d ordered it because Helen Harrington had been holding a flute when I arrived and I’d wanted to open a conversation about the Harrington Foundation’s healthcare portfolio, and matching someone’s drink is the oldest rapport hack in the book, and this man — this stranger with the jaw and the tuxedo that fit like a declaration of war — had just read my strategy from across a ballroom.
“Do I know you?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know what I drink?”
What came next was the most precisely aimed thirty seconds of conversation I’d experienced in my professional life, and I had spent four years at Goldman Sachs before business school.
He listed my trades.
Not the public filings — the timing, the sizing, the logic behind each one.
He’d read my quarterly letters, which meant he had a contact at one of my LPs, which meant he’d been doing homework on me specifically, and the homework was A-plus.
Then he pivoted from my portfolio to my bathroom mirror.
My skincare routine, unchanged in three years.
The wax I was four days overdue for.
The fine lines at my eyes that bothered me more than any drawdown.
My mouth opened.
I felt air cross my tongue.
No sound came out.
He’d just listed three things I’d thought in my bathroom mirror that morning.
The La Mer that wasn’t doing what it used to.
The wax appointment I’d pushed from Tuesday to Monday because I had a board call.
The two fine lines at my right eye — barely there, invisible to anyone who wasn’t me, but I was me, and I saw them every morning, and they bothered me more than they should because I was twenty-eight and they made me feel like twenty-eight was the beginning of something I couldn’t short.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Lukas.”
I waited.
A surname.
A firm.
A fund.
Something I could enter into a terminal and pull up a profile on.
He gave me three seconds of silence instead.
I counted.
Three seconds is a very long time when a man with those eyes is looking at you like he’s reading a prospectus and you’re the investment.
“Enjoy the gala, Eliana.”
He buttoned his jacket.
One-handed, the left hand, and I watched his fingers — long, precise, a dull grey ring on his ring finger that didn’t look like any metal I’d seen — and he walked away from me.
Away from me.
I watched him cross the ballroom.
He didn’t look back.
He walked through two hundred people and none of them spoke to him and he didn’t speak to any of them and the crowd parted for him the way the crowd parts for a man who has decided where he’s going and doesn’t care who’s in the path.
The elevator doors closed on him.
I stood at the bar holding a glass of champagne I hated, my pulse in my ears, and realised I was shaking.
Not from fear.
From adrenaline.
The same thing I felt when a position moved my direction and I knew — knew, in my blood — that I’d been right and the market was about to prove it.
Kyle-or-Kevin appeared at my elbow.
“Eliana?
You okay?”
“Fine.
Who was that man?
Tall, dark hair, Tom Ford tux.
He was just here.”
Kevin blinked.
“I didn’t see anyone.”
Of course he didn’t.
I spent the next forty-five minutes working the room on autopilot — shaking hands, talking about the fund, smiling at Helen Harrington and making a $25,000 pledge to the foundation that I’d forget about by Monday — and the entire time I was scanning.
Every tall man.
Every dark head.
Every tuxedo.
He wasn’t there.
He’d come to a charity gala at the Pierre Hotel, spoken to me for ninety seconds, turned me inside out, and left.
I got into my car at eleven.
My driver pulled onto Fifth Avenue and I sat in the back seat and pulled up my phone and typed Lukas into Google.
Then Lukas and investor.
Then Lukas and Manhattan.
Then Lukas and hedge fund.
Then Lukas and biotech.
Nothing.
Nothing useful, nothing relevant, nothing that matched the man who’d just walked away from me like I was the one who was supposed to follow.
I put my phone down and looked at the city through the window.
My face was reflected in the glass — the blonde waves, the jaw my mother gave me, the blue-grey eyes that had been staring down portfolio managers since I was twenty-three.
The fine lines at the corner of my right eye.
He’d seen them.
He’d seen things about me that no one saw, and he’d told me, and then he’d left, and the leaving was the part that burned.
Because men don’t leave me.
I leave them.
I left the Goldman MD who proposed after three months.
I left the Columbia professor who couldn’t keep up.
I left Jake — the developer, the Tribeca model, the second phone he swore was for work — and I left him standing in his own apartment at 2 a.m.
with the ring box he’d been hiding in his sock drawer still in his pocket.
Men don’t walk away from Eliana Roth.
This one did.
And standing in the back of a black car on Fifth Avenue, wearing a ten-thousand-dollar gown with the side of my breast exposed to nobody, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
I felt hunted.
I went home to my brownstone on East 71st.
Hung the Versace.
Stood in my bathroom in my La Perla thong and nothing else and looked at myself in the full-length mirror.
My breasts — full, high, the nipples rose-pink and drawn tight from the cold air.
My waist, pulling in from my ribs.
My hips flaring out.
My ass — I turned — round and firm, the cheeks sitting high, the crease beneath them tight.
My legs, long, bare.
I looked down between my legs: the neat blonde strip I kept trimmed, the smooth waxed skin on either side, four days overdue.
He’d known.
I ran my hand over my face.
The glow of the gala fading, the bathroom light honest and flat.
My skin was good — it had always been good, thank you, Scandinavian mother — but he was right about the routine.
The La Mer sat on my counter like a two-hundred-dollar lie.
My pores were visible at my nose.
The lines at my right eye were there, faint, traitorous.
I was twenty-eight and I was the best-looking woman at any party I walked into and a man had just told me things about my body that I’d never said out loud, and then he’d disappeared, and I didn’t have his last name.
I brushed my teeth.
I washed my face.
I got into bed in a T-shirt and nothing else and stared at the ceiling.
I turned off the light and lay in the dark and listened to the city outside and tried to remember the last time a man had walked away from me first.
I couldn’t.