“I don’t know where the hell he is,” she said softly. She played with the clasp of her gold watch. Her hands were small, and her nails were clipped short and unvarnished.
“How long have you worked with him?” She looked up at me and I noticed the lines around her eyes and mouth. I put her age at thirty-five.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” she said.
“It has to do with how well you know him, which has to do with how much help you might be to me.”
Pratt wrinkled her brow and the waitress came. I drank some ginger ale. Pratt drank her Bud from the bottle.
“I’ve worked for him since I got out of B-school- almost a dozen years,” she said. “And I guess I know him as well as anybody- better, maybe.”
“You knew him when he was married?”
She smiled sourly and nodded. “And during the divorce,” she said.
“You know his wife?”
Another sour smile. “The Brooklyn Frida Kahlo? I met her once or twice, before the bullets started flying.” She drank some more Bud and picked a nut from the bowl.
“Their breakup was ugly?”
Pratt laughed. “Like you wouldn’t believe.” She took another drink and shook her head. “I’m amazed they got through it without somebody being dead. ’Course, I’m amazed they got together in the first place, or ever had a kid.” Another drink and more head shaking. “I don’t know why people do it.” I wasn’t sure what it was exactly, but I didn’t ask. Her beer was gone, and I waved to the waitress for another.
“He fool around?”
She frowned. “Is that why you want to talk to me? You think we had something going?”
The thought had occurred to me, but I didn’t say so. The waitress brought another beer, another ginger ale, and a fresh bowl of nuts. Pratt took a swallow.
“Well, that’s bullshit,” she said. “Old bullshit, too. Jesus, I’d have to be crazy… His wife tried to make something out of that in the divorce, but it didn’t fly. And she had plenty more to sink her teeth into.”
“Meaning he did fool around?” Pratt nodded. “A lot?” Another nod. “With anyone in particular?”
“Back then? With no one in particular, and everyone he could.” She drank some more Bud and looked at the bottle and then at me. “Not that Greg was some kind of sex machine. In fact, I always thought there was something… I don’t know… kind of neutral about him- sexually, I mean.” Pratt picked another nut from the bowl. “But what the hell do I know? I guess what I’m saying is I think the fooling around was more an ego thing than a sex thing for him.”
I nodded. It usually is. Pratt hitched her chair closer to the table and put her bottle on the tabletop. It was nearly empty.
“Was the divorce rough on him?”
“Oh, yeah, it was a big ego bruise. Losing the kid, and a big pile of dough, and his wife- to another woman- he was a goddamn mess.”
Pratt sat back and crossed her ankle over her knee. A strand of hair had worked itself loose from her clip and fell across her cheek, and her eyes were unfocused behind their glasses. She looked young and bookish in the fading light. She had hold of a thread now, and I didn’t want her to lose it.
“Was he as bad then as he has been lately?” I asked.
She shook her head slowly. “No… that was different. That was just one thing- just one part of his life, I guess. And even though it pissed him off something fierce, the rest of his life- the work- was going fine. Better than fine. Now it’s all turned to shit.”
“I guess it’s been a rough few years for everyone in your department,” I said. I pushed the nut bowl toward her. She took a handful and looked over my shoulder at the crowds- heavier now- that passed along the sidewalks. The bar was packed, and the voices and the music and the traffic sounds ran together in a blur of white noise. The sun was all but gone, and sodium lamps and neon tinted the faces around us. Pratt killed the Bud, placed the bottle carefully on the table, and looked at me.
“A nightmare,” she said softly. “You wouldn’t-”
The words caught in her throat and she looked down and swallowed a couple of times. Our waitress spun by, and I motioned for another round. Pratt looked up at me.
“For a while there, you couldn’t escape the stories- in the papers, on TV, all over the Web- it was fucking open season on stock analysts.” A bitter smile crossed her face and faded to a grimace. “If you read enough of them, you’d think all we did was sit around and dream up lies to tell the widows and orphans- when we weren’t busy sucking up to CEOs and cashing our bonus checks, that is. They died down finally, the stories and the bad jokes, but it’s a different world now. The department’s not even half the size it used to be, and the pay…” Pratt shook her head and picked up her empty beer bottle and put it down again.
“Did they get those stories wrong?” I asked quietly.
“The press?” Pratt’s face was sour, and so was her voice. “They always get it at least half wrong.”
I had no argument with her there and I nodded. Pratt continued.
“I’ve been an analyst for nearly twelve years. Besides my MBA, I’ve got a BS in computer science and a master’s in electrical engineering. I’ve covered semiconductors, consumer electronics, the video game industry, and- modesty aside- I probably know as much about the companies I follow as the CEOs who run them.
“My average workday is fourteen hours- wall-to-wall, six days a week. And you know what I do when I get home at night, after I feed my fish and call my mom? I read: annual reports, quarterlies, mid-quarter updates, economic analyses, purchasing statistics, and you wouldn’t believe what else. I read the science journals for original research and the trade rags for gossip. I read about who’s hot and who’s not, whose project is over budget and whose got canceled and who just jumped from one ship to another. And of course, I read all the product profiles- the head-to-head comparisons, the top-ten lists, the focus groups…” Her voice wavered, and she coughed and shook her head. “I read reviews of video games, and hang out in fucking chat rooms- just to hear what the goddamn fourteen-year-olds think.
“And when I’m not reading, I’m crunching numbers- earnings projections, cost estimates, market share, financing costs, interest rate scenarios, cash flows… Jesus. It’s made me half blind.”
Our drinks came. Pratt took a long swallow and seemed to steady.
“You like those violins?” she asked. She laughed bitterly. “I’m not a fool, and I’m not looking for sympathy. I know plenty of people work hard, and hardly any of them get paid like I do. But my point is, I never phoned it in- not once. My point is…” She took another drink and put her bottle down. Her hands were wet with condensation, and she stared at them for a long moment and wiped them on her jeans. “I don’t know what the hell my point is.”
“You said the press got it only halfway right.”
Pratt sighed and shook her head. “My mom has never had a clue what I do for a living- just no idea at all. She used to ask about it the first few years I was in the business, and I used to try to explain, but it went in one ear and out the other, and after a while she quit asking. But you know what she said to me at the height of the frenzy, when those stories were running practically every day? She said, You just start writing what you think about those companies, honey, and don’t let anyone make you say anything different. You just start telling the truth- no one can blame you for that. Can you believe it? My own mother- and she assumes it’s all some kind of scam. She assumes that I’ve been lying.
“The press went on and on about conflict of interest and lack of independence like they’d discovered a new planet or something. Like it was a big secret that securities firms do business with the companies their analysts cover- like we were trying to hide something. Jesus, if that was a secret, it was the worst-kept one of all time.”
“I think it was news to some investors. And I think the horse-trading part of it- swapping buy recommendations and God knows what else for investment banking business- was a little hard for anyone to swallow.”
Pratt’s face reddened and her dark eyes shone. “Hey, I’m not saying there weren’t abuses. And if somebody decides the rule book was no good and we need a whole new edition, that’s fine by me. I lived by the old version and I’ll live by the new version too. But don’t turn me into a criminal retroactively, for chrissakes- just for playing the game the same way everyone else did.” Pratt wiped something from beneath her eye and drank some more beer.
