Rough Trade

Jeff.
    “Wasn’t there some famous coach who said, ‘It ain’t over till it’s over’?”
    “That was Yogi Berra,” replied Jeff, “and he was talking about baseball.”
     
    By the time I got back to Chicago, there were two dark green shopping bags waiting for me on top of my desk. I had wanted to stop at my apartment and change clothes on my way to the office, but when I’d called Cheryl from the car, she’d informed me that the porno brothers had just arrived and were closeted in the conference room with Stuart Eisenstadt, eagerly awaiting my arrival. With a groan I told her to scare up something for me to wear, find me a bag of M&M’s, and put on a fresh pot of coffee. It was turning out to be one hell of a day.
    Drawn as much by curiosity as the necessity of bringing me coffee, Cheryl followed me into my office to see what the personal shopper had sent over this time. As one of eight children, she’d grown up in a household where anything new was cause for excitement. Besides, most of my emergency purchases ended up in her closet anyway. By the time she graduated, Cheryl was going to be the best dressed first-year associate in the city.
    “Stuart just buzzed to say that they’re still waiting for you in the north conference room,” she said, setting my coffee on the corner of my desk and standing on tiptoe to peer eagerly into the bags. She had a heart-shaped face, a cap of blond hair, and the kind of ferocious intelligence that is prized in any profession. I could not imagine what my life was going to be like without her.
    “Have we heard anything from the SEC today?” I asked, pulling a black jacket from the bag and freeing it from a cocoon of tissue.
    “I talked to Janice right after I got off the phone with you,” she reported. Janice was the secretary of the SEC administrator assigned to Avco, and from the very first, Cheryl had cultivated a phone friendship with her. They spoke three or four times a day. Cheryl knew everything about Janice—about her crazy mother-in-law and her husband who was finishing up a three-year hitch in the navy. She was also able to pick up a stunning amount of information about where Avco stood in the regulatory process at any given moment. “She says they’ve accepted our latest answer and that it looks like they won’t be sending us another comment letter.”
    “Yessss!” I said, making one of those gestures of victory that we’ve all learned from watching pro athletes on TV. “Any idea how long it will take to get final approval?”
    “It’ll be four or five days before everyone who has to has signed off on it.”
    “When this deal closes, I’m sending you to Bermuda for a week,” I said. “You can take Janice with you.”
    I pulled the skirt out of the bag and held it up to my waist with a frown. The hem hit me somewhere between midthigh and scandal. They say that skirts go up with the stock market—the stronger the market, the shorter the skirts. I thought about sitting down, getting in and out of taxis, and walking outside in the cold and found myself fervently wishing for an economic downturn.
    “Oh, good,” I observed, “now I’ll have something to wear in case I ever have to go to a funeral for a hooker.”
    “Don’t worry,” replied my secretary over her shoulder as she headed for the door. “I guarantee you don’t have anything the porno brothers haven’t seen already.”
     
    Most men may lead lives of quiet desperation, but there was certainly nothing quiet about Avery and Colin Brandt. For one thing there were two of them, and while identical twins might be adorable when they’re below the age of five, there’s something distinctly creepy about two adults who are exact duplicates of each other, especially when they’re two middle-aged men who look like Marv Albert clones complete with gold chains and bad toupees. It didn’t help that they both had heavy tanning salon habits, so that even in the dead of the Chicago winter they both looked like they’d been dipped in cocoa.
    “Ah, finally, the woman we’ve been waiting for!” declared Avery in his weird pan-Atlantic accent as I pushed open the conference room doors. You couldn’t tell them apart until they spoke. Colin, the one who handled the financial side of the business, had the softer voice—also a slight lisp.
    “I’m so sorry to have kept you gentlemen waiting,” I said, giving the bottom of my skirt a quick tug in the hopes of miraculously making it