Am I wrong for sitting back down next to her when she clearly wanted me to leave?
I (50M) was eating lunch in Riverside Park yesterday – same bench I’ve used for probably six years, right by the fountain – when I saw a woman going through the trash can nearby.
I recognized her immediately.
Diane Marsh. She was a VP at our firm when I was a junior analyst. This was 2008, right before everything collapsed. She wore Armani. She had an assistant named Kevin who carried her coffee. She gave a keynote at our company conference in front of four hundred people and not one of them looked at their phone the whole time she was talking.
She was digging through a trash can in a park.
I froze. She hadn’t seen me yet. I could have left. I almost did – I had my bag in my hand and everything.
But I sat back down. I don’t know why. Some part of me needed her to know that someone recognized her. That someone remembered.
She turned around and saw my face and I watched hers go completely still.
She said, “I don’t want anything from you.”
I said, “I know. I just – Diane, it’s Marcus. Marcus Webb. I worked under Kowalski’s team.”
She looked at me for a long time. Then she sat down at the far end of the bench.
We talked for almost forty minutes. She told me some of it – not all. The crash took her savings. A bad marriage took the rest. She’d been on the street, off and on, for three years. She said she’d had a shelter bed but lost it last month.
I asked if I could do anything.
She said, “No.”
I asked if she’d let me get her lunch at least.
She said, “You want to do something for ME or do you want to feel like a good person for an hour?”
I didn’t say anything.
My friends are split on this – half say I should have walked away when she asked, that staying was about my own guilt. The other half say leaving would have been worse, like pretending she didn’t exist.
I went back to the office and I couldn’t think about anything else. I kept seeing her face in the elevator, in the conference room, everywhere. I pulled up her name that night.
What I found when I searched her name – I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it now.
The Woman I Remembered
Here’s what you have to understand about Diane Marsh in 2008.
She wasn’t just competent. She was the kind of person who made competence look like something you were born with or weren’t. She’d come up through fixed income at two different firms before landing at ours, and by the time I showed up as a junior analyst she already had the whole floor calibrated to her frequency. People adjusted when she walked in. Not because they were scared of her, exactly. More like she had a gravitational thing.
I was twenty-seven. I’d been there eight months. I sat four rows back from her glass-walled office and I watched her run a meeting once where she disagreed with three managing directors simultaneously and did it so cleanly that two of them thanked her afterward. I asked a guy named Phil Greer what her deal was and he said, “Webb, that woman was going to be CFO somewhere by fifty. It’s basically already decided.”
Phil said that in March of 2008.
By October, the floor looked like a crime scene. Not literally. But you know what I mean. People clearing out desks. Whispered calls. The particular silence of a building where everyone’s doing math in their heads about whether they’re next.
Diane held on longer than most. She was one of the ones who tried to stay and manage the wreckage. I left for another firm in early ’09 and I lost track of her. You do. You’re just trying to keep your own footing.
I hadn’t thought about her in years. Maybe thought about her once, when some anniversary piece about the crash ran and I skimmed it on my phone at the airport. Her name wasn’t in it.
And then yesterday. The park. The trash can.
What She Looked Like
I want to be careful here because I don’t want to write something that turns her into a symbol of something.
She looked like herself. That’s the part that got me. Thinner. Her clothes were wrong – not dirty, exactly, but mismatched in a way the Diane I knew never would have tolerated. She had a canvas bag over one shoulder. Her hair was cut short, not stylishly, just short. But her posture was the same. Straight back. Chin level.
Even going through a trash can she looked like she was doing it on purpose.
When she sat down at the far end of the bench she kept the bag in her lap with both hands on it. She didn’t look at me right away. She looked at the fountain for a while. There’s a kid who usually rides his bike around the fountain path on weekday afternoons and he was there, going in circles, and we both watched him for a minute without saying anything.
Then she said, “Kowalski’s team. You were the one who did the Harmon presentation.”
I almost laughed. I’d completely forgotten the Harmon presentation. It was a forty-slide deck I’d pulled two all-nighters on and she’d walked past my desk once while I was working on it and said something like, “Lose the third chart on slide nineteen, it’s doing nothing.” She’d been right. I’d never spoken directly to her before or after.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was me.”
“It was a good presentation,” she said. “Except slide nineteen.”
The Forty Minutes
She didn’t tell me everything. She made that clear up front – “I’m not doing a whole thing here, Marcus” – and I said okay and meant it.
What she gave me was an outline. The crash wiped out a chunk of savings she’d had outside her retirement accounts, money she’d been moving around trying to stay liquid during the panic. Bad timing, bad calls, the kind of thing that happens to people who know exactly what they’re doing and still get it wrong because the whole system was wrong. Then the job market for her level, in that climate, was basically a wall. She consulted for a while. That dried up.
The marriage – she didn’t give me details. Just said it ended badly and that badly covered some financial ground too. I didn’t push.
She’d had an apartment in Astoria until about four years ago. Lost it. Couch-surfed for a while, which she described with this flat, factual tone, like she was reading from a report. Then the shelter system, which she described with the same tone. The shelter bed she’d lost last month was at a women’s facility in the Bronx. Some rule about consecutive nights, she’d missed a check-in, they’d given the bed to someone else.
“That’s how it works,” she said. Not bitterly. Just as information.
I asked if she had anyone. Family, friends, anyone.
She had a sister in Portland who she hadn’t spoken to in two years. “That’s its own thing,” she said, and left it there.
I sat with all of that for a second. The fountain. The kid on the bike.
Then I asked if I could do anything and she said no and I asked about lunch and she said the thing about whether I wanted to help her or feel like a good person.
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know the answer. Still don’t, honestly. Probably both. Probably you can’t fully separate them.
She didn’t wait for me to respond anyway. She said, “I don’t need you to feel bad about this, Marcus. It happened. It keeps happening. You sitting here doesn’t change the math.”
Then she stood up, adjusted the bag on her shoulder, and said, “It was good to see you. I mean that.”
And she walked away toward the west side of the park.
What I Found
I got back to my desk around two. I have a window office now – nothing glamorous, but a window – and I sat in front of my computer for probably twenty minutes not doing anything. Just staring at the screen.
Then I searched her name.
First page was old stuff. Her LinkedIn, which hadn’t been updated since 2011. A mention in a trade publication from 2009 about restructuring at the firm. A conference bio from 2010 where she was listed as an independent consultant.
Then I went to the second page.
There was a legal filing. Civil case, 2019. She’d sued a former business partner – someone named Garrett Foss – for $340,000. I don’t know the full story from the filing but the basics were there: she’d invested the money in some kind of consulting venture he was running, he’d dissolved the company, she alleged he’d taken the assets. The case was dismissed. Procedural issue with the filing, from what I could read. Not on the merits.
Three hundred and forty thousand dollars.
I don’t know if that was her last real money. I don’t know if she’d gotten it from somewhere, saved it, borrowed it. But the timing matched what she’d told me. And Garrett Foss, I looked him up. He’s running a different consulting firm now. Office in Midtown. Nice headshot on the website.
Then I found one more thing. A nonprofit in the city that does housing navigation for women who’ve been in the professional workforce – basically, it’s specifically for women who’ve fallen through the cracks in a way that the standard shelter system doesn’t account for. There was a quote from an intake coordinator about the specific problem of women whose former professional status makes them feel like they can’t access help, or makes case workers underestimate how bad things are.
The quote could have been about Diane specifically. Word for word.
The nonprofit has a contact form.
I have it open in a tab right now. I’ve had it open for sixteen hours. I’ve typed in the box twice and deleted it both times.
What I Keep Thinking About
She said, “You want to do something for ME or do you want to feel like a good person for an hour?”
The thing is, she’s not wrong to ask. She spent twenty years in finance. She knows how people use generosity as a transaction. She’s probably had a dozen people recognize her on the street in the last three years and do the whole routine – the stricken face, the twenty-dollar bill, the walking away feeling like they’d handled it. She can see the whole arc before it happens.
But here’s what I can’t stop thinking about. That legal filing. Garrett Foss and his nice headshot. The $340,000 that probably would have changed everything if she’d gotten it back.
She fought for that money. She went through the court system. And it got dismissed on a technicality.
I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know what, if anything, can be done about a dismissed civil case. But I know people. I’ve been in this industry for twenty-three years and I know people who know people who know things about how money moves and where it goes and what you can do when someone takes it.
I’m not saying I’d do anything. I’m not saying there’s anything to do.
But I have the tab open.
And I keep thinking about Phil Greer in March of 2008, saying it was basically already decided. That she was going to be CFO somewhere by fifty.
She’s fifty-four now. I did the math.
The fountain was going the whole time we sat there. I don’t think either of us heard it.
—
If this one’s staying with you, pass it on. Someone else probably needs to read it.
For more stories about unexpected encounters and family drama, check out My Son Folded His Drawing Back Up and Put It Away, and I Knew Exactly What That Meant, My Daughter Asked Why Brittany Talks to Me Like I’m Dumb. Derek Told Me to Sit Down., and My Son Showed Up at My Door After Nine Years. I Closed It in His Face..
