“He ain’t Shakespeare,” Frank said. “But ‘another day closer’ is not good. Anything funny with your drinks?”
“I took your advice. No scotch at night. But now the coffee in the morning is doing a job. I practically fall asleep at the wheel on my way to the office, and as soon as I get there all I want to do is lie down on my couch and take a nap.”
“How much life insurance do you have?”
“About ten million.”
“And she’s the beneficiary?”
“That’s right.”
There was a pause. Frank looked deep in concentration. Rob took a long draw on his cigar.
“You might want to change the beneficiary and make sure she knows that you’ve done it.”
“I don’t know, Frank. I think that would raise her suspicions.”
“Her suspicions? About what? That you know the affair is still going on? I think it might be a wake-up call.”
“Do you really think I need to worry?”
“Let’s review the bidding, Rob. She gets ten million dollars if you die. She’s still secretly in touch with her lover. She brings home a bottle of sleeping pills from a doctor you didn’t even know she was going to see. And she’s on the Web looking for drugs that can kill somebody without leaving a trace. Analyze that.”
“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound good.”
From New York the following week, Frank e-mailed Rob asking him to send hair and urine samples for laboratory analysis. “We will need sample of liquid in glass or rubber vial. Hair closely shaved from underarm or head, 2” long and pencil thick in group. I am getting another opinion on amount tomorrow from another lab we use for hair samples.”
Rob replied: “Strange development at home. Nancy has made a 180 degree turn and wants to stay together. A bit of a roller coaster, I have to say. I am going to send the stuff anyway…”
When nothing had arrived three days later, Frank got back in touch: “Just following up on my last e-mail about getting the test and forwarding a sample of the liquid.”
Rob replied: “I got it. Thanks! Been crazy busy. I am going to send it out today. Kind of in denial, too.”
At this point, had this been a movie, the audience would have been shouting to Rob: “Send the samples!” But it wasn’t a movie. There wasn’t any audience, and Rob never sent the samples. Instead, to take his mind off his troubles, he went out and bought a new Porsche. On September 25, he e-mailed Bryna O’Shea:
Hey…I have been crazy busy. Have not gotten home before 11pm for the last couple of nights. We just got approved on a US$100mm deal in korea. First of its kind for Merrill.
Since Nancy came to my office last Tuesday (16th), things have been going along fairly well. We are talking about things and about life, and enjoying each others company, with a little bit of restraint on both sides. I am able to focus on business, and also enjoy the kids…. She is taking it slow on the physical side, and that part feels kind of ironic given the circumstances, but I am being patient about this…
The car is AWESOME, and I haven’t come that close to killing myself.
I am having dinner on Oct. 8th with ex-president Bush in HK…
xoxo
Rob
He followed the e-mail with a phone call to Bryna in which he said that he and Nancy had gone to a counseling session on Monday, September 15, and that it had deteriorated when Nancy had jumped up and said, “I want a divorce!” and then had sat down again and had refused to speak further.
But she came to his office the next day, he said—the first time in all the years they’d been in Hong Kong that she’d ever come to his office—and cleared a space on his desk and sat on it and leaned forward and said, “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean what I said in therapy. I don’t want a divorce. I really love you.”
“So maybe the worst is over,” Rob said to Bryna.
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know. I think she’s confused. I don’t think she knows what she wants. At least she’s with me and not with him. On the other hand, she might be trying to kill me.”
“What?”
He told her how he’d had to stop drinking his own scotch and had stopped drinking the coffee Nancy made for him, and about how Frank Shea wanted him to have a lab analyze blood, urine, and hair samples, as well as samples of any drink he thought she’d doctored. He also told her about the Internet searches and the sites to which the results had led Nancy.
“They’re dark, creepy, all about drugs and death. Do you think she’s trying to kill me?”
“Oh, please,” she said. She knew Nancy well enough to be able to laugh that one off. “Hey, Rob. If you think she is, make sure you remember me in your will.”
Rob didn’t laugh. Instead, he said, “Promise me that if anything happens you’ll make sure my kids are okay.”
By the end of September, Rob and Nancy were like intelligence agents operating under deep cover on behalf of warring superpowers. Neither admitted to having a hidden agenda, but each was trying to unearth the other’s most closely guarded secrets.
Nancy rifled through the summer’s Hong Kong phone bills and found that in June and July Rob had made repeated calls to three different numbers on Long Island. She called Del Priore on her secret cell phone and told him to check the numbers. He called back to say that one of them belonged to an investigation agency named Alpha Group.
“I told you!” she said. “I told you he hired a private detective. I told you he was having me followed, didn’t I? Didn’t I say he’d stop at nothing? God knows what he’s doing now—tapping the phones, bugging my car so he can hear everything I say while I’m driving…Michael, he’s probably tapping your phone, too. He’s probably listening to us talking right now! That fucking son of a bitch. Do you see what I mean? Do you see how he’s always in my face? We can’t trust him, Michael. There’s no telling what he might do.”
Meanwhile, Rob was searching obsessively through all of Nancy’s drawers and closets, her handbag and her wallet and the pockets of her clothes. He was looking for pills, for love letters, for mysterious receipts. He found nothing. So Rob thought that September had passed without Nancy having spoken to Del Priore. He didn’t know that she’d called him forty-eight times.
20. OCTOBER
AS OCTOBER BEGAN, NANCY’S CALLS TO DEL PRIORE BECAME more frequent. Usually, she’d be crying when he answered. Almost always, she’d start by saying that she and Rob had just had a terrible fight and that he’d beaten her and that she was scared.
“I wish I’d never come back,” she said. “I wish I’d stayed with you in Vermont. He’s having me followed, I know he is. And he told me not to bother thinking about taking the kids with me and flying to New York, because he’d locked their passports in a safe.”
Del Priore asked her how bad the abuse was. “You don’t want to know” was all she’d say. She began to call three or four times a day. She sounded increasingly fearful and more prone to hysteria.
“I don’t have any friends here,” she said. “I’ve got no one to talk to. And if I said something now—if I started to talk about how he’s beating me, and for how long it’s been going on—people would think I was loony for not saying something sooner.” She told him that she’d started putting small doses of sleep medication in Rob’s drinks, hoping he’d pass out before he tried to force her to have sex. Often, she said, she’d have to lock herself in the bathroom while she waited for the drugs to take effect.
Rob had reached the point where he’d drink nothing but previously unopened bottles of mineral water at home. He felt tired all the time. The emotional strain of not knowing what to think or how to feel about his wife, combined with the extra stress of trying to make up for all the time he’d lost at work and the lingering aftereffects of spinal surgery, were taking pounds off him that he didn’t need to lose and engraving dark circles under his eyes.
He was hounding her about Del Priore. He didn’t believe her when she in
sisted that everything between them was over. For one thing, after her seemingly spontaneous visit to his office, she’d gone right back to treating him the way she had ever since he’d come back to Hong Kong. When he was home, she stayed as far from him as possible, closing herself inside her home office for hours at a time, leaving him to care for the children, with Connie’s help. He didn’t know what else he could say to her so he said nothing, which seemed the better part of valor given the way her face froze into an expression of contempt at the sound of his voice.
At the same time, he felt guilty for not trusting her. He told himself he was being unfair. He sought to keep matters in perspective. What had the affair been, really? A brief summer fling with a workman during a period of enforced isolation. It had been an indiscretion, not a true affair. He’d seen Del Priore, he’d talked to the man, he knew for himself that such a trailer-park slug could have nothing of substance to offer Nancy.
As for the insubstantial? There may have been the quick thrill of illicit sex. Distasteful, but hardly uncommon. Expat life was a minefield that few married partners crossed without triggering at least one such explosion. Desires, not all of them licit, could be satisfied with ease while living the imperial life in service to the capitalist raj.
The expat lifestyle was redolent with implicit suggestion: you can have it all, you can have it all now, and you can have it exactly the way you want it. Moreover, you should have it all, because you are a higher form of the species—not tethered to the commonplace, not burdened by the humdrum, not bound by the pedestrian rules that constricted the life of the commoner.
Expat men burned themselves into cinders, working five hundred hours a month to keep the earnings stream flowing—the earnings stream that was the lifeblood of the family. If, on occasion, they enjoyed some of the unspoken fringe benefits of expat life, so be it. As for the women, all that free time and all that free money were overlaid atop a sense of entitlement they wore like Chanel. What was the point of having it all if you couldn’t indulge in a bit of white mischief?
It was remarkable, really, how many members of Hong Kong’s expat elite who had no time for their own wives managed to find time for the wife of a neighbor or colleague. Less remarkable, perhaps, was how many wives went the way of Nancy: fleshing out their rough-trade fantasies through dalliance with social inferiors, seeking the tingle that had animated Lady Chatterley when she’d heard gamekeeper Mellors say, “Let’s live for summat else. Let’s not live ter make money.”
It could be great fun to play on the other side of the tracks as long as you knew you’d never have to live there. So why wouldn’t Nancy glory in her dream? “The least little bit o’ money’ll really do,” Mellors the gamekeeper told Lady Chatterley. “Just make up your mind to it, an’ you’ve got out o’ th’ mess.”
But Nancy was cut from a different cloth than Constance Chatterley. Even as she keened over her lost youth and freedom, she could not help but embrace her chains. “When you come right down to it,” she told one Hong Kong acquaintance, “there’s really nothing in the world as good as money.”
Then Rob took that away from her, or at least took away her ability to spend it freely. In early October, he examined bank charges for September. There were repeated ATM withdrawals of $1,500 and $1,000. Nancy had converted the cash to checks that she sent to Del Priore to compensate him for having lost his job because of her.
“What’s this?” he asked Nancy. “Why were you withdrawing that much cash?”
“I don’t know. I remember I gave Connie some to buy groceries. And I think I had lunch somewhere that didn’t take credit cards. I tipped some of the staff at the Marina Club. Listen, goddamn it, I can’t remember! Why are you giving me a hard time?”
“You’re sending money to Del Priore, aren’t you?”
“You’re crazy, do you know that? Do you think you can insult me that way?”
She ran at him and tried to punch him. He grabbed her arm and spun her into a wall.
Her face went white. “Oh, boy, you’ve just made a big mistake. I’m not going to let you live this down. You’ll pay for this, you bastard. And I want my credit cards back.”
Rob cut the credit cards up and left the pieces in a pile on her desk. Before leaving for work the next morning, he said, “Here’s the way it’s going to work: every morning from now on, you’re going to tell me exactly what you need for household expenses and I’ll give you exactly that much in cash. And at the end of the day I want to see the receipts.”
“Fuck you,” she said, in front of Connie and the children.
Rob called Bryna to tell her what had happened.
“Be careful, Rob,” she said. “Now you’ve stripped away her dignity. You take away her credit cards, you take away her sense of self. She’s not going to accept that lying down.”
The Bank of Taiwan planned to honor former president George H. W. Bush at a banquet on October 8. Rob and Nancy had been invited not only to the banquet, but also to the much more exclusive cocktail reception before the dinner.
Rob had become a Republican almost as soon as he’d become an investment banker—two sides of the same coin was how he viewed it—and he held the entire Bush family in high esteem. The Bushes knew how to make money and they knew how to spend it to buy power, two of the skills he most admired. In addition, Prescott Sheldon Bush, father of George H. W. Bush and grandfather of current president George W. Bush, had been a significant investment banker in his time.
And Rob wasn’t the sort of Jew who fretted about the foundation of the Bush fortune. As a director of both Brown Brothers Harriman and the Union Banking Company, whose assets were seized by the United States government in 1942 under a trafficking with the enemy law, Prescott S. Bush had invested both for and in German companies known to be aiding and abetting the Nazi Party.
As the British newspaper The Guardian put it, “even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power…the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.”
Like politics, investment banking was not work for the morally squeamish.
Nancy’s concern was her dress. Obviously, it had to be new. It also had to be both expensive and attention-getting. Paying for it would not be a problem, even without her credit cards. Like all bankers’ wives in Hong Kong, she knew dress shops eager to have milady open a personal charge account.
As the big night grew near, Nancy began to glow with excitement. Proximity to a former Republican president of the United States, no matter how brief, would give her massive social cred in tower 17. She followed her sense of adventure in buying her banquet dress.
Other than Nancy, no one but Rob, Connie, and the salesperson who sold it to her ever saw the dress. Later, Connie shied from attempting to describe it. All she would say was that it had permitted Nancy to showcase the new tattoos on her shoulder and that it had triggered a furious fight.
Nancy later claimed Rob had physically torn the dress from her body. Connie didn’t see that, but she later told Bryna that the argument had lasted so long that—after Nancy retreated to her closet to put on something less outrageous—they were so late leaving that they missed the reception.
It threatened to be the worst social catastrophe of their stay in Hong Kong, but Nancy wasn’t the sort to let opportunity slip entirely from her hands. In the middle of the banquet, she left the table at which she and Rob were seated and approached the ex-president. In fact, she tapped him on the shoulder as he ate.
“My husband is a great fan of yours,” she said. “Would you mind if he talks to you?”
Bush, ever the gentleman, obliged. He excused himself from his table, stood, and walked with Nancy to meet Rob. He even posed for a picture with them both.
The next day Nancy e-mai
led Bryna. She made no mention of having had her credit cards taken away or of meeting George Bush or of having any quarrel about a dress. She was thinking about her body. She was thinking about making it look better for Michael. She was thinking about how she could get to the United States to see Michael. She knew Rob would never let her go to New York. But if she had a reason to go to San Francisco…“Things here on the home front are really terrific…I wanna talk to you on the phone…these past few mornings for me have been so hectic…then all of a sudden its 4 in the afternoon…midnight for you…I miss u!!!!!”
Two days later, she told Rob, “Guess what. I’m going to San Francisco for a boob job.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It doesn’t matter what you think. Bryna and I are going to have boob jobs together. She’s already made the appointment.”
Rob called Bryna. “I think she’s using you as an excuse,” he said. “I think she’s going to see Del Priore.”
“I don’t know, Rob. The day after a boob job isn’t the best time for a clandestine meeting with your lover.”
“Think about it: why else would she have it done in San Francisco? Why not do it right here?”
“A: she doesn’t trust Chinese doctors. B: I’m still her best friend and she thinks it’ll be fun to have it done together.”
“This time, I think you’re being naïve.”
He found the phone bills the next day. He’d been searching obsessively for proof that she was still in touch with Del Priore. One shred of evidence that she was still lying to him and he could stop the charade, put an end to the anguish of uncertainty, call Sharon Ser at Hampton, Winter and Glynn and move ahead with the divorce.
She’d left her handbag lying on a side table in the dining room, right next to the lead statuette. He opened it and there were two months of bills for a cell phone he’d known nothing about, addressed to Nancy care of the Hong Kong International School. They showed more than a dozen calls to Del Priore in late August, forty-eight calls to him in September, and more than thirty calls to him during the first week of October—almost a hundred calls to the man with whom she’d claimed that she was no longer having an affair. Everything she’d said and done since early June had been a lie. He felt sick.
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