Casey drew her hand away from the phone. Sabine hadn’t invited Unu to dinner. What was he to do on a Saturday night? They were supposed to have spaghetti and rent a video. Poor Unu was still out of work and, as to be expected, not feeling so terrific. But Sabine thought he was a loser and had told Casey as much on more than one occasion. Unu had never once been asked to dinner at Sabine’s apartment. Sometimes Casey thought Sabine hated Korean men.
“Casey?. . . Oh, Casey?”
Casey picked up the receiver. “Hi, sorry about that. A customer.”
“No sale?”
“Nope.”
“What time is it, honey?” Sabine asked.
Casey looked at her watch. The Rolex stared back at her. “Eleven-twelve.”
“Do you have a lot of homework this weekend?”
“I do.” An ugly accounting project was due on Tuesday.
“Maybe you can do some during your lunch break. You can use my office.”
Casey closed her eyes.
“Dinner won’t take long, baby girl. Tell Sabine what you’d like to eat.”
And that was that. Casey phoned home, but Unu wasn’t there. She left a message on the machine saying she had to go to Sabine’s for dinner. Financially, things were rotten for her and Unu. As usual, Casey was perennially in hock, and Unu, who’d spent his severance, was looking for work, trading occasionally on his own account, and mostly gambling to pay the bills. Her mother had taught her that a woman should never make a man feel bad about money. In her experience as a salesgirl, she’d also observed that men across the board were vulnerable about two issues: money and hair loss. Unu was in a bad way at the moment, and she believed that if she said anything about their money situation or his gambling, he’d disintegrate from the shame. She could imagine him vaporizing like a figure in a science fiction movie—Unu breaking up into a billion particles. Whoosh. She also had no right to talk when it came to personal finances. Zero.
To cut expenses, she’d stopped taking her classes at FIT. The tuition was negligible compared with what she’d paid at Princeton and NYU Stern, but it was still a month’s worth of groceries. She’d also calculated how much it cost to see her friends after class for drinks. Beer and bar snacks added up, not to mention carfare when it got late. The brown cocktail hat was the last one she’d made to sell. At night when she lay in bed with the down comforter pulled up to her chin, Casey found herself praying for one thing—that she hadn’t made another incredibly expensive mistake with her life by going back to school. The spot on the summer associate program was, she hoped, the answer to her doubts.
At school, outside of classes, all she ever heard was this distillation of the truth: The whole point of business school for those specializing in finance was to get a summer associate position at an investment bank; at the end of the summer, you were supposed to score an offer to return to the Wall Street firm after graduation; in the beginning of your second year, you could even try to leverage your permanent offer into an upgrade if you were gutsy enough; if all went well, you started the big fat job upon graduation. With those jumbo bonus checks you earned postgraduation, you were supposed to pay off your student loans in two years—the same number it took you to incur the aforesaid debt. Obviously, the only jobs that could help you reduce your debit line with this kind of speed were top investment banks in the only street that mattered. Of all the areas of specialty at Stern, Casey had chosen finance—where the top money went.
Four years had passed since Casey had graduated from college, and this was what she had figured out: She did not want to fail anymore either privately or publicly. More than any other woman Casey had ever known, she admired Sabine, a self-made woman and pioneer in her field. When Casey chose NYU Stern without asking her and Isaac for help to get off the waiting list at Columbia （not that there was any guarantee of her admission, as Sabine periodically implied, merely because Isaac was a trustee or because his help had in fact gotten Jay Currie into Columbia）， and when she refused Sabine’s offer to pay for school, Casey had bought a kind of autonomy that had a possibly titanic downside—an ocean of humiliation if she didn’t land a premium job on her own. And as for her parents, when she deferred away Columbia Law and moved in with a divorced guy who had no intention of marrying her, there was hardly any room for redemption. Her younger sister was married to a nice Korean doctor-to-be and had given birth to a son. No contest. Only this month, she had violated her own sense of propriety and asked Hugh Underhill for help, and now, if she failed to get a permanent offer from the banking program after the summer ended, she would look colossally stupid in front of her friend. She was up to nearly two packs a day and drank a lot of Diet Cokes. She had trouble sleeping at night.