“Maybe if I were in your situation, I could ask you for the same,” Ella said. She reasoned that if Casey were like Ted—an argument based on exchange principles might be persuasive.
“You’d never be in this situation, Ella.”
Ella narrowed her eyes, confounded by Casey’s reply. “You are so arrogant, Casey. Anyone could be in your situation.” She said this calmly. “Anyone at all.”
Casey examined Ella’s fine and rare features. There was a strength there she hadn’t noticed before. It was the way she held her head erect, as if she had eyes in the back of her head as well and those eyes looked straight out to the other side of the steakhouse. Casey had been wrong about her. And she’d been envious of a good person who’d wished her well.
“After lunch,” Ella said, “we can go and check you out of the hotel. You can come stay with me. I would love that.” Ella borrowed Ted’s assurance and the finality of his gestures—his convincing use of charisma and simple words.
Casey nodded. Today, she would have followed Maud the salesperson home.
Ella asked for the bill and paid it.
5 BOND
ADOZEN YEARS OF BALLET LESSONS had given Ella Shim ideal posture. She was seated on a deeply cushioned sofa in her bright living room—her back pin-straight, her head bent slightly as she reviewed a recipe for lamb. There were four cookbooks tabbed with rack of lamb recipes on top of the coffee table and a thick one spread open on her lap. The following week was Ted’s thirty-first birthday, and she wanted to re-create the dish that Ted had liked so much at Bouley, but she didn’t have the exact recipe.
Ella was an accomplished cook. She loved to read cookbooks and food magazines. In high school, she’d enjoyed planning special menus for her father, who encouraged her interest by buying her Mauviel copper pots and installing wooden dowels in the kitchen walls so she could dry her hand-cut pasta. When church guests visited the Shim household in Forest Hills, Ella offered them her dense orange-flavored pound cake, candied rhubarb scones with Irish butter procured from Dean & DeLuca, or Dr. Shim’s favorite: pate à choux cream puffs with hong cha. At Wellesley, Ella had missed her windowed kitchen in Queens. Her current two-bedroom Upper East Side apartment, which her father had purchased for her after graduation and where she and Ted intended to live after they got married, had a nice-size kitchen with enough counter space to roll pie crust and to put up kimchi.
At the moment, she was absorbed in the taste memory of the lamb she’d eaten with Ted at the French restaurant on Duane Street. She felt she could create a dish close to it.
Seated near her on the wing chair upholstered with crewelwork, Ted was checking the movie schedule in the Times. He was annoyed at having agreed to see a foreign film that Ella’s houseguest had recommended. From the living room, they could hear the sound of running water from the guest bathroom. It was Friday night, and Casey was getting ready to meet friends at the Princeton Club for Virginia’s send-off to Italy.
Ella drafted a list of ingredients and cooking instructions in her loopy girls’ school cursive. She was also trying to figure out how to convince Ted to help Casey get a job. His buddies from HBS dispensed favors for one another all the time.
“Ted, can’t you help her?” Ella didn’t look up from the orange-and-white-checkered cookbook.
Ted snapped the newspaper shut. But the sight of his pretty fiancée bent over her cookbooks made him smile. He was smitten with her delicacy.
“My dear Ella,” he said, making his face stern, “your friend. . .” He paused. Ella had never mentioned Casey until she’d moved in. And now this so-called friend who had quite a mouth on her had been camping out at Ella’s place for four weeks. “Casey isn’t the least bit interested in finance,” Ted continued. “I doubt she knows the difference between debt and equity.”
“But. . . Ted, you didn’t always know the difference, either.” Ella looked earnestly at him. “People have to learn things. And they have to be taught. Right?”
“Your friend already interviewed on campus with the Kearn Davis investment banking program in the spring,” he said.
“And?”
“And she was dinged.” Ted rolled his eyes. “What was she thinking? Your friend applied to one firm. What balls.”
He’d applied to eight banks in his senior year at Harvard and was invited to join seven. After working for four years at Pearson Crowell, a bulge bracket investment bank, as an analyst and later as senior associate, he got into Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. Then he chose Kearn Davis, the sole securities firm that had rejected him as an undergraduate. In four years, Ted was made an executive director, and he was slated for managing director in January. He was two years ahead of his own plan.