Jennifer Sturman - The Jinx

Sara was waiting for my reply. “I remember him slightly,” I hedged. “I didn’t really know him very well.”

“To complicate matters more, Gabrielle has a massive crush on him. As far as I’m concerned, she’s welcome to him, but he won’t give her the time of day. And she seems to be taking her frustration out on me. She’s barely said two words to me since we got back from winter break.”

“That must make for fun times back at the dorm,” I said sympathetically.

Sara shrugged in response.

“How’s your other roommate-Edie, right?”

“Edie Michaels. She’s from L.A., and she wants to go back there and work in entertainment after graduation, so she’s not all caught up in the Hell Week hysteria, like Gabrielle. It’s nice to have at least one sane voice in the suite. Anyhow, enough about me. What’s going on with you? How’s Peter?”

“Peter’s wonderful.” I couldn’t keep the grin off my face. “Absolutely wonderful. In fact, he’s meeting me here tonight. He has a conference to go to this week in Boston.”

“How convenient,” Sara said dryly but with a smile. “I hope I get to meet him.”

“I hope so, too.” It was getting late so I signaled for the check and handed my credit card to the waitress. “Are you still rowing?” I asked. Sara was passionate about the sport, and she worked out regularly on the Charles River in her single-person scull.

“Every morning, before class. Fortunately the river hasn’t frozen over yet. Usually it has by this time of year.”

“It must be really cold. And dark.” The entire proposition sounded unpleasant to me. Exercise was bad enough at a gym, with music and television and the option to skip the treadmill and go straight for a post-workout massage.

“It feels good. I think I’m addicted.”

“Better you than me.”

“You should try it. You might like it.”

“I might like beating myself over the head with a blunt object, too, but I don’t think I’ll try that, either.”

She laughed. “Well, if you put it like that…”

I signed the bill, and we retrieved our coats and walked out into the cold night. I accompanied Sara along JFK Street toward the bridge that led across the Charles to the business school campus. A bitter wind was blowing off the river. When we reached Eliot Street, where I would turn to go to the hotel, I gave her another hug. “Try not to worry,” I said. “I’ll look into what’s happening with the stock. And I’ll talk to Barbara.”

“Thank you, Rachel. I really appreciate it.”

“No problem. Sleep well.”

I watched for a moment as she walked quickly toward the bridge, a lonely dark figure wrapped in a long wool coat.

T he hotel lobby looked like an advertisement for Brooks Brothers, thronged with men in dark suits and silk ties, their hair cut conservatively short and accessorized with briefcases and cell phones. Here and there I spotted a token woman or minority in the forest of navy. I’d been so distracted by my conversation with Sara that I’d forgotten to steel myself for the jungle that was the Charles Hotel during Hell Week. It was the preferred venue for recruiting, and most people stayed at night in the rooms that they would use for interviews during the day. Hence the Yuppie invasion.

I retrieved my bag and briefcase from the bell desk and threaded my way through the crowd toward reception, catching snippets of people’s conversations as I passed. A group of large men with loud ties was debating in even louder voices about which bar to start their evening. I guessed that they were probably traders, generally acknowledged as the most uncouth employees of investment banks and treated by those in corporate finance as a necessary evil, even during years when they contributed the bulk of their firms’ profits. Traders were the ones who spent most of their time yelling “buy” and “sell” into the phone with cigars clamped between their teeth. At the Winslow, Brown Christmas party in December a fight had broken out between a renegade group of traders from the Latin American arbitrage desk and their counterparts in corporate finance. Security had arrived before any real damage was done, but my money had been on the traders, hands down.

A Calvin Klein-clad woman was questioning someone intently over her cell phone as she made her way to the elevator. “Did you double-check all the numbers?” she asked anxiously, smoothing the knot in her Hermès scarf. “I want you to check them again, and then rerun the model using the higher discount rates. Fax me here when you’re done.” Somewhere a novice banker had just been sentenced to a sleepless night.

I checked in, collecting a pile of faxes and a packet from Winslow, Brown’s recruiting administrator that was waiting for me. The man at reception gave me an apologetic look. “We’re booked so full that all we have left is a suite. I hope you won’t mind.”

I assured him I wouldn’t, trying to hide my jubilant smile. Four nights in an expense-account hotel room with Peter was enough of a treat; four nights in a suite was more than I could have dreamed of. Sharing a hotel room with a boyfriend always made me think of Love in the Afternoon, one of my favorite movies (aside from bad teen flicks from the eighties). Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier, champagne and gypsies playing “Fascination.” Nothing could be more romantic. Of course, with my red hair, I was no Audrey Hepburn, and Peter was a couple of decades younger than Gary Cooper, and we would both be swamped with work during all of our afternoons here, and it would probably be hard to find a band of gypsy violinists for hire in Cambridge, but knowing all this did little to dim my anticipation. I found myself unconsciously humming “Fascination” under my breath as I headed for the elevator.

On the way, I ran into two separate acquaintances from business school who were also here to recruit fresh blood for their respective firms. I paused to exchange news and gossip and took some good-natured teasing about the Fortune cover. It was nearly ten by the time I’d shut the door of the suite behind me, happily taking in the cozy living room and nice big bed, all furnished with the Shaker furniture and blue-and-white fabrics that were the Charles’s trademark décor. I made quick work of kicking off my shoes and hanging up the clothes in my suitcase. There was no message from Peter, but he was probably still in transit. If all went according to schedule, he’d arrive by eleven. I ran a bath and poured a glass of wine from the well-stocked minibar before undressing and lowering myself into the steaming water, taking care not to splash the faxes I’d brought with me to review.

One of them was from Jessica, my assistant, who had kindly transcribed the voice mails that had piled up for me that afternoon and noted which calls she had already responded to on my behalf.

I scanned the list. Jessica had grouped the calls by subject matter and urgency. Fortunately, nothing seemed to demand immediate attention. Her last notation made me laugh.

No messages from the Caped Avenger. He’s been strangely quiet. Can we hope that he’s transferred his affections elsewhere?

As if. The Caped Avenger’s real name was Whitaker Jamieson, and there was nothing I’d like better than to see him transfer his affections, but I held out little hope. I sighed and took a healthy sip from my wineglass. Whitaker was the bane of my existence. Or, at least, one among many. He was an old chum of Stan Winslow (Stan seemed to know a lot of people with last names for first names) and was known in the business as a “high net-worth individual.” This was a polite way of saying that he was loaded. Generations of inbreeding among extremely wealthy families had culminated in the production of Whitaker more than seventy years ago. He had a personal fortune of several hundred million, much of which was invested with Winslow, Brown’s asset-management group.