Mr. Glaser clicked on the remote control and looked up at the screen in front of us. “The government offers government exhibit 201.” It was a picture of our home.
“Objection!” Mr. Kenner yelled.
“Overruled,” Judge Cote stated wistfully.
“Mr. Carl, do you recognize government exhibit 201?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you tell us what it is?”
“It is the photograph of a home.”
“Whose home?”
“Mr. Prousalis’s home, sir.” There was a look of shame across Bernie’s face. Then he looked at my father as if to say “I’m sorry.”
My initial reaction to seeing our home plastered on the screen in front of us was one of confusion. How was showing a picture of our home to the jury relevant in a securities fraud case? I had yet to understand that showing it to the jury would imply we were greedy, that we must be bad people. The trial was no longer about technicalities in legal filings. I was right about one thing. The prosecutors didn’t believe the jury would understand it either. So they made it easy. They made it about greed. But I didn’t know about class warfare just yet, that the toes of my patent leather party shoes were tipping over the edge before our fall into the underbelly of society. All I knew then was that a seed of shame had been planted underneath the violation I felt by the very institution I thought was there to protect me.
It was 1989, and that morning, my father had piled us into the Volvo station wagon to see our soon-to-be new home.
“Marco!”
In the distance, I could hear the pitter-patter of Mara’s feet running through the hallway, the echo of her voice boomeranging off unfinished walls.
“Polo!” I ran up the back staircase with a Hello Kitty beach towel wrapped around my shoulders. We were playing Marco Polo, but instead of in a swimming pool, we were running through our new seventy-five-hundred-square-foot mansion, getting lost amid dirt and plywood, the smell of cedar and paint as it was still under construction.
“Dad, look at my cape!” I cried, twirling around as I followed Mara into the kitchen. My father took out a scroll of floor plans and unrolled it on the granite countertop, while my mother stood next to him, bouncing baby Chloe on her hip. He was showing us his plans for the limestone plaque that would be placed in the center brick wall that adjoined the double staircases descending from the back balcony down toward the swimming pool. On the plaque he would have Prousalis engraved in Greek letters with the date 1989 in roman numerals below it. I could see my mother’s eyes light up. She had never been inside a house that big before, let alone dreamed of living in one.
“Wait a minute,” my father said, looking at me. “You’re forgetting something very important, Bambina.” He picked up a round rack over the new gas stove, kneeled down, and placed it on top of my head. “Your crown!” Then he turned around and crowned Mara too, to make it fair.
“I’m a princess! I’m a princess!” I cried, holding the rack in place over my head.
In our stovetop crowns, Mara and I giggled while we danced through the black-and-white marble loggia. Behind us, a dozen French doors looked out onto the limestone balcony where the engraved plaque would rest and where weeping willows grew in the distance.
“Mr. Carl, during this time period, the 2000 time period, did you visit Mr. Prousalis’s homes?”
“Yes.”
“Were you familiar with where his homes were?”
“Yes, I was.”
“And where did Mr. Prousalis have homes during that period?”
“He had a home in McLean, Virginia, right outside of Washington, DC, and on the island of Nantucket.”
“Mr. Carl, are you testifying here today pursuant to a subpoena?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you want to testify against Mr. Prousalis?”
“No, sir.”
I was about to lose it. My mother shook her head and put a finger up to her lips, indicating for me to remain silent. Chloe was crying. She turned red, and my mother tried to console her, whispering, “It’s okay,” while rocking her in her arms. Mara tried to remain as quiet as possible, but her breath became erratic, and the tears wouldn’t stop until she had to leave the courtroom.
“It is five o’clock. We are going to break here today. Ladies and gentlemen, you have just seen images of some houses. You may not use evidence of a person’s wealth or lack of wealth for any improper purpose. Specifically, it would be wrong for you to use evidence of wealth or poverty or financial need to conclude that a person, for instance, has bad character or is not entitled to the protection of the law or has done something wrong. Simply put, it would be wrong to be biased or prejudice for or against an individual simply because an individual has wealth or, conversely, lives in financial distress. Any evidence of wealth or poverty may only be considered by you for a relevant or proper purpose. If you decide it is relevant to the task you have before you, that is to decide whether the government has carried its burden of proving the defendant guilty beyond reasonable doubt with the crimes with which he is charged, if you decide for fulfilling that task that it is helpful for you to consider or understand a person’s—specifically the defendant’s—motive or purpose in acting a certain way, then you may use evidence of wealth or, on the other hand, financial distress or basically the defendant’s financial circumstances to the extent that you find those financial circumstances cast light on his motive or intent. Remember, do not discuss the case. See you tomorrow,” Judge Cote said.
“All rise.”
The next day, Mara, Chloe, and I were pulled into a private waiting room next to the main entrance of the courtroom. We were told, “Wait here, quietly.” The room was empty except for a table, a few chairs, and fluorescent lights. The three of us sat alone but together, in silence. Waiting.
A few minutes later, my mother walked in first. She was crying. Her eyes were bloodshot. She sat down next to Chloe and took her hand and wrapped it in hers.
Then my father walked in with Mr. Kenner and took a seat.
“Dad, what’s going on?” Mara asked.
“Girls, your dad has agreed to a plea agreement with the government,” he stated.
“What does that mean?” I asked, wanting him to speak faster.
“It means your dad pleads guilty, even though he isn’t guilty, so there’s no risk having the book thrown at us if we continue the trial and lose.” My father always spoke of himself in the third person, as if he were speaking of someone else: a character in a novel, someone separate and untouched, distancing himself from any kind of reality, it seemed—as we did too on our way up to New York.
“What do you mean, ‘the book’?” My frustration was growing.
“If we were to continue with the trial, the government is ready to put a very bad man on the witness stand, which could hurt our chances of winning. If we lose, your dad could face up to fifteen years behind bars, whatever the book of the law says for the nefarious accusations made against me. So it is in our best interest that even though your dad is innocent, we tell the government your dad is guilty in exchange for less time, you understand?”
The “man” my father was referring to was Jordan Belfort, the “Wolf of Wall Street,” the founder of Stratton Oakmont. Jordan Belfort had become a rat, cooperating with the federal government, testifying against all of his former friends and business associates in exchange for less time in prison. In the mid- to late nineties, before BusyBox, my father had been involved in taking several companies public with Stratton Oakmont, even after Belfort had been barred from the securities industry. Mr. Glaser flew Jordan Belfort from prison in California to New York to testify against him. He was waiting in a jail cell at the courthouse, ready to take the stand unless my father took the plea deal.
“How is that legal? How is this the law?” I cried.
“It’s the federal government, Christina,” my father said. “They can do anything they want.”
“So you’re goin
g to prison?” Mara asked.
There was a long pause. The room filled with defeat. He never said yes, because we already knew the answer.
“So what happens now?” Chloe asked, scared.
“You girls are going to help me pack up the house,” my mother said.
We were going to lose everything.
-4-
Ostracism
The bank would be coming in just a few months to take the house. At nineteen, I didn’t understand banks and mortgages and how everything worked. I thought when you owned a home it meant that you owned it. And by “own,” I mean that no one could take it from you. But it wasn’t the truth. We didn’t own it. We never did. The bank owned the mortgage, and we paid the mortgage, and if we didn’t pay the mortgage, then the bank would take our home. And that’s what was happening. Everything was happening so fast when we got home from the trial, there wasn’t much time to say good-bye. When I walked into my bedroom one night, there was a note at the foot of my bed from my mother. Handwritten on her embossed stationery. She was always leaving little notes on my bed when I got home from school:
“Want to go to Saks with me this weekend? Homecoming is around the corner! XX Mom.”
“I left more lamb’s wool for your ballet slippers in your dresser, top drawer! XX Mom.” “New Julia Roberts movie opening this weekend! Shall we go see it, movie star? XX Mom.”
Each note was evidence of a girl who lived a happy and privileged life. But this note was different.
Christina Bambina,
Let me know what you do not want to let go of. Make a list. Okay, honey? So we can set it aside. Everything goes up for auction next week.
XX
Mom
What I don’t want to let go of? I don’t want to let go of any of it, I thought as I looked around at my yellow Laura Ashley balloon curtains, where I used to hide my cigarettes, Andrew’s love letters, and the occasional bag of weed. My hand-painted MacKenzie-Childs desk, where I spent countless hours crying over chemistry assignments. My bulletin board that carried all my dried-up corsages from prom and homecoming. And my collection of bumper stickers: “Diva!” “Almost Famous!” “Skinny Little Bitch!” (Which I found stuck to my locker one day after first period. I took it as a compliment.) The bookshelf. Fine, but that was it. That was all I was willing to let go of. Everything else would be shipped to California; my entire bedroom set. I would take it all with me. If the bank was coming to take the house, then I would keep my bedroom, everything in it, and drag it along with me no matter how absurd it would look, no matter what anyone would think. I wanted my possessions to cocoon me, wrap me up, and keep me safe from a world that was trying to rip it all away. It would become my way of holding on, believing someday I could put it all back the way that it was and the way that it felt when I walked inside my bedroom that night. Because I would never get the chance to say good-bye before it was already gone.
At the time, I didn’t know the exact day the bank would be taking the house. I still didn’t understand it or how it worked. My parents had stopped communicating with us aside from the occasional note. They were too busy settling their affairs, packing up the house and figuring out where we were going to live.
It would be six more months before my father would surrender to prison, but my mother had warned us that ostracism happened slowly and was often very insidious. More family friends started disappearing. We were no longer wanted in Washington, DC—shunned, excommunicated, expelled. My parents’ plan was to pull Chloe out of Langley High School and follow me back to California. Once Mara finished school, she would meet us there as well. I would be leaving to go back to California in just a few days.
“The cave dwellers,” my mother explained, “those are the worst. The one’s who’ve dropped like flies.” The term cave dweller was coined for the Washington, DC, native. It’s those whose old money and manner lurk through the cobblestone streets of Georgetown and Capitol Hill. Cave dwellers are at the top of Washington’s social hierarchy. They’re members of exclusive clubs like the Alibi gentlemen’s club for presidents, senators, and diplomats, or the Sulgrave Club for women, or the Chevy Chase Club for the white Protestant family. They’re also in what’s called The Green Book, a social list that was started in 1930 by Helen Ray Hagner, the niece of Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt’s White House social secretary. The Green Book lists different social sectors and the names of those “very important people.” My mother and father were part of a sector called the social A-list: lawyers, businessmen, bankers, and media moguls, and their philanthropist wives. You make this list based on which social events you attend, how much money you have, and how much money you give away. The cave dwellers and A-listers mingle, but the A-listers have started pushing cave dwellers farther underground. For cave dwellers, it’s about politics and class. For A-listers, it’s about money. And money trumps all. Then there are the other sectors like the media, reporters and journalists, who associate with the politicians, who have their own social pecking order revolving every four to eight years. Everyone in The Green Book is wealthy, everyone is a member of the 1 percent, and everyone has a reputation to protect.
In addition to Joan, Bernie’s wife, who threw chic book parties and events at the French Embassy, my mother’s friend Faye also stopped returning her calls. Faye was an A-lister, also married to a financier. In high school, I would often come home to find Faye standing at our kitchen island with a glass of Chardonnay in her hand and wearing an aerobics outfit. I’d see that Mercedes parked out front, and before opening the front door, I’d make sure my nose was powdered and that when I stood in front of her my feet were spread ever so wide apart so that my thighs didn’t touch. And so that she would see this and, in return, adore me.
Faye liked to gossip, but not about other parents; she liked to gossip about their children. “Did you see how fat so-and-so got?” she’d tsk-tsk, always making sure to note how poorly this reflected on said parents. It was a strange form of cruelty. When our Nantucket house went into foreclosure, Faye bought all of our furniture, reupholstered it, and placed it in her Nantucket home just a mile down the street; the ultimate power move in a competitive friendship, and all too frequent within the world of social hierarchy. A few weeks later, Chloe went to Nantucket to visit one of her friends and Faye’s daughter invited Chloe to a party at their house. When she walked in, Faye stumbled over drunk, yelling, “We don’t allow criminals in our household!” while Chloe stood between our refurbished toile chairs and family game table. It was a Game of Thrones for the desperate housewife.
Back in California, I felt free from the wreckage at home. I had managed to leave Washington, DC, unscathed from any outward ostracism. I was sleeping on an air mattress in an apartment in Brentwood with a few friends I’d stayed in touch with from college. I shared a room for $350 and managed to pay my rent when I auditioned and got the part of “girlfriend” in the Jimmy Eat World music video for the song “Pain.” It was the greatest distraction from everything going on at home, and it gave me something to brag about when I spoke to friends, deflecting any attention my father was getting. But when word spread about his trial, Ethan and Abby, two of my best friends from high school, flew out to Los Angeles to visit. I had broken up with Blake, believing I could get myself on track. My life had split in two, and I would forever associate him with reckless abandon, a time that, even though it was only a few weeks behind me, felt like a century ago. I wanted to be close to the friends I felt I could turn to, whom I was comfortable with, who knew my father and my family well, who just might believe me if I told them it was just one big misunderstanding. At nineteen, we were still young enough that the social hierarchy was fast asleep in our subconscious minds. No one had a high-pressure job yet or was a board member of a fancy charity. No reputation was at stake while everyone still danced upon Mom and Dad’s credit cards.
When Ethan and Abby arrived, I took them and my roommate Marcie down to my family’s beach club in San Diego for the day. The S
panish villa rests on the shores of La Jolla, an exclusive and wealthy beach town. Families stay in suites on the sand, play croquet and tennis and swim, and then dine along the peninsula extending out above the Pacific.
I leaned my head toward the direct sunlight, listening to the rhythmic sound of the waves. Ethan was lying next to me, the book Writings on an Ethical Life by Peter Singer was resting on his stomach. He had recently become a vegetarian and spent an hour on the drive down lecturing us on his decision. Marcie was on the other side of Ethan, sitting cross-legged and unscrewing mini whiskey bottles we’d bought with her fake ID. And Abby, with her pale skin and long, dark curls, was on her back tanning.
“Voilà!” Marcie said in her southern drawl. Marcie was from southern royalty, the equivalent to cave-dweller status but from Montgomery, Alabama, with long blond hair and tan, and she loved to drink expensive bottles of red wine while she wrote English term papers. She held out two red paper cups. Ethan and Abby sat up to take one and I took the other.
We held up our cups—“To friendship!”—and then chugged our drinks. I twisted my cup into the sand so it wouldn’t fall over. Then Ethan and Abby turned to me. They were waiting for me to speak, as if I had something to say.
“What?” I asked.
They looked at each other, and then back to me.
“What, you guys? Stop being weird.”
“Really, Christina?” Ethan asked.
“Really, Ethan. What?”
“There isn’t anything you want to talk about?”
“Um, no?” What did they want from me? I had already given them a few details about my father’s trial. I didn’t think there was anything left to talk about.
“Do you know what’s going on with your dad?” Ethan asked.
After Perfect Page 4