The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund
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9
Lady Astor: Sir, if you were my husband, I would poison your drink. Winston Churchill: Madam, if you were my wife, I would drink it.
“Uh-oh ... Bingo.” Kiki looked up at me, gripping a nondescript manila envelope.
“This is exactly what I was looking for.” She held it up, looking almost dismayed by her eureka moment, a discovery she had wanted to make but was then unhappy to unearth, like someone whose job it is to deep-sea dive for dead bodies. You’re successful when you locate one, but the find is extremely unpleasant.
I got up and staggered across the room to see what she was holding. Nothing special. The return address was GTP Mortgage, LLP, on Oakdale Avenue, Suite 4300, in MacLean, Virginia. So what? I stared at her blankly.
“See this? Looks boring and tedious, right? Some dumb financial packet you put aside for Tim?”
“Yeah. . . .” We got tons of stuff like that. I never cracked them. I never dealt with the finances. When tax return time came, I just signed on the dotted line where the yellow stickers with red arrows told me to.
“This is how Hal did it, look—” She opened the envelope to reveal a packet with two CDs. The discs appeared to be normal, unmarked in their jewel cases.
Huh?
“See, this is how they mail them. Top secret, in an unmarked envelope. Like Ticketmaster, since they don’t want people to swipe concert tickets. You know, they send them from some P.O. box in Iowa or something?”
I nodded, vaguely recalling how in college I had chucked some Smashing Pumpkins tickets by accident, thinking the envelope was some junk-mail solicitation for a magazine subscription or political campaign.
“These hedge fund guys, they order these kits. It’s how to plot your exit. They cost like a thousand dollars and this guy instructs you how to start laying the groundwork.”
I still had no idea what she was talking about. Kiki walked over to Tim’s Bose CD player by his desk and popped one in.
“Hello,” a man’s voice spoke crisply. “This is Lachlan McDonald. And with these divorce secrets for high-net-worth men, you’ll be ahead of the game. These guidelines will instruct you how, over a one- to two-year period, you can be armed with information on arranging finances and understanding the reality of the divorce process. Back in the day, a caveman would simply kick his wife out of the cave. Now, the woman gets half the cave. . . .”
Mr. Lachlan McDonald droned on as I started panting. Harder and harder. I meandered back to the couch, where I melted down completely. So it wasn’t some trashy whore; it was phase one of Operation Leave Holly. My hands shook. Kiki came over and hugged me as I wept in silence, a silent hysterical cry like toddlers in the moment before the air comes back out of their tiny lungs accompanied by an unbridled piercing wail. All we could hear over my retinal faucet were McDonald’s introductory tips:
DIVORCE RULES
1. All’s fair in Divorce. It is a War.
2. NEVER forget that the root of the word “uterus” is the Greek root uster, which means “hysterical.” Women, fueled by their uncontrollable emotions, will want revenge when you leave them, so you must be prepared.
3. You must start by selling major assets like your home; rent something smaller so that her lifestyle is diminished.
4. Dissipate proceeds from asset sales and borrow money to create marital debt, which will also be her obligation to repay.
Blah blah blah. On and on and on it went, a tricky litany of fox-like ways to hide money, a dizzying verbal collage of words like “offshore” and “deferred compensation.”
“You see,” Kiki said soberly, putting her hand on my knee. “These bastards planned it. Yes, I kissed that guy, I filed the papers, but I found Hal’s computer cache with Web sites like mensdivorcesecrets.com and divorceprep.com—he was already thinking about bailing, so I bolted before he could take the year or two this asshole tells them to plan.”
Could that possibly be true? I staggered toward Tim’s desk, which I previously couldn’t bear to look at. I looked at the closed drawers, potential keepers of more secrets, a dormant volcano that could spew the lava of hot lies were I to explore them. And yet with Kiki beside me, I exhaled and got on the floor and opened them.
At first, it was the usual boring taxes, investment research information, and other yawn-inducing legal and financial documents. As I sifted through the files, I started to think maybe this was a fluke, a whim on Tim’s part. Once we talked about this, I’d discover it was some onetime thing. Maybe she was a high-class hooker? He loved our family! Maybe he was just getting his rocks off. . . .
But then I saw a brochure for a Relais & Chateau spa in Oregon. Huh?
“What’s that?” Kiki said, as my brow furrowed.
“Tim was just in Oregon. But he said he was at some huge convention hotel. This looks awfully romantic and luxurious for a business meeting.”
Kiki grabbed it and perused the high-gloss photos of body wraps, massages, mahogany four-poster beds, and couples dining by candlelight.
“This was not business. It was bidniss,” she scoffed, clearly nauseated. “Monkey business.”
I sifted through folders, envelopes, Pendaflex files—each containing mystery receipts—La Petite Coquette, a lingerie store on University Place. One If by Land, Two If by Sea, a romantic restaurant where one would never do business, on a MasterCard I’d never seen before. My head spun, my tongue dried, my gag reflex triggered.
“I-I don’t know what to say,” I sputtered, zoned in my pile of piecemeal clues that the man with whom I’d shared a bed literally was leading a double life.
“Say you’ll call the lawyers. Two can play at this game, Holl.”
I wanted to die. I obviously wasn’t truly suicidal and could never leave Miles mommyless, but I got it into my head that if Tim came home and found my dead body, he’d be sorry and would weep to the gods for atonement. There were more than a few Upper East Side suicides that were legendary, and often were caused by husbands upgrading to trophy wives or losses of fortune.
I gathered what strength I had to pick up Miles. Seeing him almost made me dissolve again into tears, but I summoned every last ounce of energy I had to hold it together and take him to Dylan’s Candy Bar on Third Avenue. I had heard kids of divorce are more spoiled; I guess this was part one of indulgent sugarfests to come. He beamed as he got his crystal Baggie and started scooping pieces from the various bins with the tiny shovels. Kids with backpacks from all the different schools crammed the aisle, eyes ablaze, mouths watering, as mommies and nannies reined in the small-handed grabbers and gobblers. The Wonka-esque megastore was a candied kaleidoscope of lollipops, chocolates, every jelly bean shade in the color spectrum. And yet through my new eyes, it was all slates, grays, and blacks and whites.
10
“Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.”
—Oscar Wilde
“Mommy, thanks for the PEZ. I love you!”
“I love you, too, sweetness. But Milesie, you
should love me even if I don’t buy you the PEZ. We have to love each other no matter what.”
“I know. Can we read Frog and Toad?”
“Sure, lovely.” We curled in his bed with a pile of books as I choked back tears. The innocent words of friendship and simple values buoyed me as I got through the final pages, kissed his forehead, turned on his dinosaur night-light, and closed the door. His little noggin would soon be matted with the sweat of sleep, peaceful and restorative. I wondered if I’d ever slumber that like again in my life.
Kiki had offered to come over and be with me, but I was so wrecked I just wanted to crawl into bed. As I lay there, not even twelve hours after my life-altering revelation, I started going back. I thought of each and every business trip. It was then that I first had a Keyser Söze flashback of my own: recollections of his “day trip” to Cincinnati, or that supposed conference in Utah. Was there even a board meeting in Wichita, Kansas? Or that boat ride with no cell reception with a
client in Nassau? It was all lies. Like Chazz Palminteri, I mentally dropped that teacup—my heart, my happiness, my history—and it shattered to the floor in scattered pieces I couldn’t even begin to sift through.
Just then, the phone rang. I sprang into action, pouncing like a puma to the caller ID screen. Tim. No way was I going to pick it up. I let it go to voice mail, which I furiously dialed a minute later. The computer voice alerted me to my One. New. Message.
“Hey, Holly, it’s Tim. I miss you guys. Chicago’s busy and really warm. Looking out my window now at the Sears Tower. I’ll be back tomorrow night, can’t wait. Love you guys. Call me if you’re up, but I’m pretty pooped from these meetings all day and might crash. Love you.”
Fucking liar. In all my years, I was never a curse-word kind of gal. But this whole debacle morphed my tongue into Kiki times ten. That fucking assholic, deviant serpent had packed countless lies into probably every voice mail he’d ever left me. In St. Louis: “I’ll say hi to the Arch for you.” In San Francisco: “I’m looking at the sun setting over the Golden Gate Bridge.” The Eiffel Tower. Big Ben. That was his stupid modus operandi: drop details of his surroundings. He probably even checked the paper and saw it was unseasonably warm in the so-called Windy City. I bet he was lying naked with that slutbag and winking at her while he uttered those patent falsehoods into the receiver. “I’m pretty pooped from meetings.” Yeah, how about pooped from porking your skank? I oscillated from frothing vitriol to self-pitying grief and back again every second. What would I do? How could I cope? For years I had looked at my few single friends through a lens of pity and relief that it wasn’t me. And now it was.
I thought of my childhood friend Natasha in Boston who had gone through this, but she had no kids. I had baggage. Not just baggage, Vuitton trunks of baggage: what will probably be a messy divorce, a kid, and the clichéd anger of a woman scorned. I opened my e-mail account and looked back to find Natasha’s e-mail detailing her meltdown. A choice excerpt:
“It’s like they say, Holly: Infidelity isn’t the cause of a split, it’s a symptom something is wrong.”
Of course all I could think of was When Harry Met Sally and Billy Crystal’s response to the same line: “Yeah, well, that symptom is fucking my wife.” I had no idea what was wrong with our marriage. We had occasional sexual dry spells compared to how we used to be, sure, but nothing was “wrong.” I read on.
“I guess subconsciously I knew divorce was coming. . . . I could smell it in the marriage. Cliff started plotting and planning, I could just sense it. And you’re living and sleeping with your enemy. It is like a bad movie-of-the-week on Lifetime. You check his wallet for receipts belonging to a secret credit card. You watch his fingers as he checks his cell voice mail to figure out his password. . . . You check his voice mail with the password and hear girls calling. . . . I wanted to catch him cheating, so I had a girlfriend of mine call him and ask him out. Cassie called him and pretended she was a one-night hookup who was calling for more action. He bit. I flipped.”
But the strange thing was, I never felt like I was sleeping with the enemy. I had confessed a few months back to my father that I sometimes felt a growing void between Tim and me, but it had since passed.
“You and Mom had good moments and bad moments, right?”
“I’m not going to lie to you,” my dad had said. “Not really. It was always wonderful. The whole marriage. That’s not to say there weren’t times we were tired or maybe had disagreements here and there, sure. But it was never work with Mom. I hear people say marriage is work, but Mom never made it feel that way.”
I heard his voice drift off. Even though it had been seven years since she’d passed away, I knew his voice could crack at any moment. My father was such a sensitive, kind, and gentle man that I knew when he lost her that in some ways, he’d never recover. I know people can deify those they’ve buried and that my dad was still and always would be in love with her, but after thirty years, I had assumed that, like all marriages, theirs had had peaks and valleys.
And while I knew some of our valleys were definitely deeper within the last year as what I thought was Tim’s work had intensified, I never, ever clued in about the plotting—the CDs, the affairs, the fake phone calls, bogus business trips, and lame alibis. I was the dumbest, most clueless woman on the planet, or Tim deserved an Academy effing Award. Either way, I had been duped. As someone who always thought she was so damn smart, that realization made me cry the most that night.
11
“I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage.
They’ve experienced pain and bought jewelry.”
—Rita Rudner
The next day, I awoke dreading the confrontation. In anticipation of Tim’s arrival home, I got my hair done and looked like a million bucks. Okay, maybe a thousand. Pesos. But in my fractured and weary state, it was the best I could do, and I needed to feel put together to face off with the man who I thought was my partner but was in fact a complete and total stranger.
I had been distracted all day, running errands in zoned-out autopilot mode, grocery shopping and making dinner with Miles, and after tuck-in and bedtime, I waited. He was probably jamming in one more shag pre-return home. Via the Brooklyn Bridge, not LaGuardia. As I sat there, flipping through the daily pile of catalogs, I felt newly distant from the shiny smiling families who wore matching pajamas, each page marked at the bottom with a 1-800 number you could call to order up their synchronized sleepwear and a slice of their familial bliss. For some reason, even if the stuff was not my taste, or was even outwardly hideous, I loved getting in bed at the end of the day with catalogs.
Once in a while I’d order something, but usually it was the bedtime equivalent of the morning’s snooze button—a way to wind down slowly and zone out in front of monogrammed towels or key fobs or knapsacks, toted by perfect all-American children and their carpooling parents. I wondered if as a single mom I’d find the same brainless bliss in those colorful pages, or if I’d chuck the catalog into the trash. I turned the page and found a picture with the dad kissing the mom’s head while she cuddled with the two kids, all four swathed in matchy-matchy huggable fleece.
Tim hadn’t cuddled me like that in a while, I supposed, but when did that stop? Here you are, a team, and then you just have completely separate lives? I know fatigue and travel and busy schedules all accelerate the slow drifting apart, but when I looked back it seemed like a blink-of-an-eye mutation. This is the man who fathered my child, kissed my belly as it grew swollen with a flesh union of our marriage, and watched our son come out of my vagina. I know it sounds gross and graphic, but that’s what marriage is: the real deal. Unedited. The stuff after the sunset: the screaming baby at 3:00 a.m. It’s bonding through not just the rush of cheek-flushing romance but the viscerally human times, the ugly, the sick—the things beyond the white wedding—the stuff that starts Monday morning. The sharp betrayal gutted me so thoroughly that I threw up a little in my mouth when I heard the jingle of Tim’s keys outside the front door.
He walked in, complete with rolling T. Anthony suitcase, and found me on the couch.
“Hiiiii, honey!”
Normally, I would have leaped up and hugged him, his cute floppy hair a welcome sight after a few lonely nights. I always marveled over how gorgeous he was, especially when he returned home from a trip and I had missed him.
A meek “hi” was all I could muster, shakily.
He unzipped his bag and pulled out a teddy bear wearing a Chicago Cubs jersey for Miles. Such genius planning, I thought. He always came back with various city-emblazoned souvenirs.
“Milesie asleep?” he asked.
“Mm-hmm,” I answered.
“What’s wrong?”
Where to begin? I couldn’t look at Tim, so I looked at the huge brown eyes of the teddy bear.
“So, what, do you have your assistant order the local teddy bear online and ship it so that you have a gift to bring home?”
“Come on, Tim. That’s what all the culprits on Murder She Wrote and Law & Order say when they are first confronted. Don’t say, ‘What are you talking about?’ Don’t insult me. I may have been an idiot for however long, but I’ve caught on now.”