“Don’t think I tried this on for you,” I say as I grasp for composure.
“Oh, sure. I know that,” he says. I see him grinning in the mirror. “Anyway, I was only five blocks away when I got your email.”
“I probably could have done it myself . . . eventually,” I say while thinking that Henry has taken off my clothes a hundred times. He must have been thinking the same thing.
“Yeah, but I know what I’m doing here,” he says. “I’m familiar with the territory.”
“There’s more terrain now,” I say.
“Slight changes in topography,” he quips. “A real improvement, if you ask me.”
Women who have children really like being told they still have a nice body. I feel a rush of happiness flow to my heart while Henry’s hands linger for a moment at the nape of my neck.
When I look in the mirror, he looks like he’s still in his twenties, like we’re the couple who once went to Australia. The flush of exertion or embarrassment in my cheeks makes me look better too.
“I was just wondering if it fit,” I say weakly, still sniffing a little.
“And did it?” he asks as he unhooks the last eye, releasing me from my bondage and letting me take a whole breath of air again. I tug myself out of the sleeves and hold the dress up in front of me, grasping for modesty.
“It did not,” I finally answer.
“And”—Henry fake-coughs to hide the fact that he’s now laughing—“what have we learned from this lesson?”
I don’t know if I’m laughing or crying and breathing is a little hard again. I fall back onto the tulle-filled floor, my dress falls forward, and I sit there in my matching black lacy bra and panties that somehow found themselves on my body at the same moment of the same day and, in this trick lighting, make the person in the mirror look borderline stupendous. And there’s Henry in this perfect light, pulling the dress from under me, holding it in front of him, hanging it carefully on the four-inch-wide hanger, holding his hand out to me, lifting me from the floor, holding my hands up, pulling my work skirt over my head, zipping it back onto me, buttoning my blouse up, kissing me deeply on the cheek, and leaving.
CHAPTER 30
The Misery Index
I GET HOME from my dresscapade to find that Bruce has left the place like a crime scene. His message seems to be, “I’m leaving every overturned sippy cup, every empty wine bottle in exactly the position it was left in. I want you to see what you missed and then I want you to clean it up.”
I sit in the dark for a long time, trying hard to regulate my breath and to stop gasping. Something is smothering me with what feels like giant gobs of felt in my throat. I try some feeble form of meditation to calm myself and get this imagined gauzy film off my face and out of my nostrils. I need air. The only visual I can focus on, the only thing that my heart will listen to, is the scene where Henry’s hands are on my neck, unhooking that fish dress, releasing it from my skin an hour before. His fingers were so manlike, he was so in charge and responsible when things didn’t go as planned. With Henry I didn’t have to be the only one doing everything, all the time. What would that be like with a family? It’s the first time I think that I would be happier, that it would be easier to be with someone like him. It’s the first time I have let my thoughts go to a dangerous place.
My heart starts to slow. I have to fix this. I have to reclaim control of the situation that is my life. The obvious place to start is the chaos in my living room. I have to kill this thing that threatens to smother me and I’m going to do it with Pine-Sol.
Fumbling in the low light, I remove my shoes and methodically begin picking up raisins, rice crackers, and bits of masticated apple. My stocking feet stick in some half-dried liquid and I raise the lights a bit and thrash and fluff at the pillows. I spray a vinegar/water combo on every wood surface and clean with an assured, angry energy. It’s all I can do to not vacuum and wake everyone up. In ninety minutes the place sparkles and in the morning I hope Bruce will never even mention the lost night.
I unpack and then repack my bag for my trip and print out the schedule for everyone for the next two days. I put out cash for Caregiver and playdate notes for Brigid. I don gloves and sanitize the hamster cage that smells like the end car of the 6 train and I let the rodents run wild in their exercise balls the entire time. I lay out clothing for all three kids in three sections for school, play, and night. I chop up apples and raw carrots and bag them in fifteen little snack bags because I do not forget I am Healthy Snack Mom for Brigid’s class tomorrow. I wake Woof Woof and shampoo him while he looks at me with questioning eyes. I do not forget anything. I just can’t get to everything the exact moment the world says I have to.
By 1 a.m. I attack the last item on my mental list: I need to amp up my husband’s happiness. He doesn’t get to be angry with me for things I can’t control. While he isn’t exactly lighting my fire and what I really want is to sleep, I force myself to want the guy. I find a bottle of Victoria’s Secret bubble bath, crusty and hard at the top but still usable. I pour the whole thing in the tub and take a bath that makes me smell like a French hooker. I shave my legs, my armpits, and put on some Italian lacy thing that still has the price tag on. Not bothering to snip it off, I jump on my angry husband’s sleeping body. He smells like body odor and alcohol.
“What?” he asks, squinting at me and not being sure he likes what he sees.
“Queek, before za wife ees back in zee haus,” I say, going with what I imagine works for Rudolph Gibbs, Eastern European.
His hair stands straight up and he has a fuzzy hangover face on. It isn’t sexy but I force myself to think it is.
“Ugh, I have a headache,” he says.
“Zas ees a line for dee ladies, not for real man,” I return.
“C’mon, Belle.”
“Eees impordant to know I also a doctor?” I say. “Specialty ees vee fix dee headache for free and also vee do, how you say, house calls. Eees your night of the luck.” I keep kissing my way down his body.
“You think everything gets repaired by screwing. It doesn’t work that way.” Bruce speaks to the ceiling and makes no eye contact.
“Screwing fixes many sings,” I chirp as I kiss him behind his knees. His body is getting ridiculously perfect from all his gym time. He appears to have no body fat left at all.
“Stop,” he says, pushing me away from his shoulder. “Stop.” He really means it.
I flop over next to him and try to tear the price tag that’s digging into my side. Instead I manage to tear a huge hole in the corset.
“Dammit,” I say, waiting and hoping for him to mimic one of our kids and say in a pretend baby voice that Mommy made a swearword, or anything that’ll make this moment funny.
He rubs at his head like he’s thinking of just the right thing to say. I don’t want some heavy discussion right now and Bruce has never, ever refused sex. It’s the one thing that hits our reset button every time and it’s not working. I have no more remedies in my doctor bag. I look at the ceiling too.
“Don’t you want to save this tenuous thing we have together?” I ask softly, surprising myself with what I just said. Mentioning a troubled relationship is a tough thought to put back in a drawer. This is the part where I expect him to say that we’re fine, that he’s just tired, that he needs a day to recover from hosting a bunch of strange ladies and their wild offspring. But he doesn’t.
“I don’t do guilt sex,” he mutters, and turns away.
CHAPTER 31
Chasing Returns
GUESS YOU’RE not working today?” I had asked Bruce gently, two days ago. He hasn’t spoken to me since. Bruce has mastered the silent treatment that’s big with the four-year-old set.
Regardless of Bruce’s limited earnings power, he used to be a man who got off the couch and rolled up his sleeves but now seems like a boy to me, careless with responsibility and fixated on his appearance. The search engine history on our home computer lists all self-improvement
sites, and he buys protein shakes by the case. I don’t mind the low-earning-working-guy thing, but the deadbeat dad from a bad sitcom, who flexes his muscles in every mirror he passes, does nothing for my libido. I desperately want to know what’s up with him but every word out of my mouth is taken as an insult. We are roommates who barely tolerate each other.
Before I left the apartment this morning, I came upon a scene of mismatched pajamas, kid hair that seemed whipped in a wind tunnel, and my husband doing a Sunday-morning-chef routine with no regard for time management. It was clear they’d all be late for school.
Eminem songs rapped in the background. Plates containing eggs and pancakes were placed around a vat of syrup that Owen was drinking from with a straw. Bacon, hash browns, and fresh-squeezed orange juice were spread about while Kevin lay sprawled across the banquet with his hands down his pants. Brigid dabbed syrup from Owen’s hair with a wet paper towel and nobody was actually eating anything.
I think Bruce has made some decision to be at home, to be with the kids and maybe just let me earn the money. I’m fine with that but wish I had been consulted. Am I really fine with that? I’m not sure. I think I like telling people my husband has a job only because I also have a caregiver, a dog walker, and an occasional housekeeper, so I need to know what his role is. The stay-at-home-dad scene this morning should have warmed my somewhat frozen heart but lately I’m in a semipermanent state of anxiousness and Bruce isn’t helping that at all.
Looking at that kitchen scene, I wanted to be the cool mom, a relaxed, fun lady who throws up her hands and shakes her booty along to repulsive lyrics no three-year-old has any business listening to. I wanted to be the hip-bumping wife who high-fives everyone, kisses their foreheads, and boogies on out the door. But instead I frothed over the immaturity of a husband pushing forty years old. It made my heart race and my mouth want to say things I’d regret. I swallowed my comments like acid and silently turned and walked out.
Henry has been distant ever since the night of the mermaid dress and I blame the slowing mortgage market. He owns a tremendous amount of inventory that has few buyers. He has sent me exactly zero flirty emails and dozens of business ones. I’d like to say this relieves me but mostly what I feel is loneliness. He seems troubled and aloof but I can’t exactly reach out to him without crossing that zone of intimacy.
Over the past three weeks, I’ve met Henry four times at his office, a sleek forty-ninth-floor corner of a building built of glass and chrome. His personal office looks over Madison Square Park to the north and the Hudson River to the west through floor-to-ceiling glass. His two interior walls are made of cerused oak and have paintings hanging on them that even I, not a terribly cultured person, recognize. Henry’s office has professional photographs of his children, all taken on beaches with everyone in the family wearing white and pale blue. Nothing is left to visual chance and everything is perfect. The sole photo of his wife stands tastefully on a low shelf. She’s coyly looking away from the camera in her wedding dress, as if dreaming of her future life with Henry. She sits wrapped in silk and satin in some version of a fairy tale that I could never have pulled off.
Henry has a small wine cooler in his office, a private bathroom, and fresh flowers in the corner. Spending most of my day in trading chaos, I inhale the order here, the small stack of aligned papers on his desk and the three large screens that scream the details of markets overseas. When I peek at his holdings screen, it lists the symbols for CeeV-TV, Emergent Biosolutions, and so many names I’ve helped put in his portfolio. I feel grateful to Henry. Maybe he couldn’t be faithful to me as a boyfriend, but as a client he seems to only trade with me.
We meet this morning so I can help him pare down his mortgage holdings. We painstakingly review his inventory the logical way, the way most investment banks don’t bother to do in their efforts to move merchandise at sparking speed. We dissect the real humans on the other side of the trade and try to guess the probability of their paying a loan back, and the likelihood that Henry will or will not get screwed on his investments. Henry has given up on Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, who have slapped triple-A ratings on bonds that appear to be junk. I’ve been leaving these meetings with plenty of sell orders and never a buy.
In the afternoon, I will bring the sell orders for unloved mortgages to my trading desk and the traders will try to find a buyer for them at any price. Most likely it will be our own desk that will buy them.
On this Wednesday morning, I’ve brushed past Henry’s secretary, who never ceases to have a bitchy comment for me.
“Again?” she asked while rolling her eyes. She is a stick-thin, model-like woman with long black hair and skin that seems to have never met an ultraviolet ray. Her name is Opal and even though we’ve spoken almost daily, she always pauses in an attempt to recall who I am. I went right into Henry’s office and sat in my usual seat, a tightly pulled crème chenille chair. In front of me hangs a real Roy Lichtenstein painting on the wall. Tim Boylan decorates Cheetah’s walls with his personal art collection that he rotates from his home. The Lichtenstein wasn’t here a week ago. Opal follows me in and asks in some affected way, “Might you enjoy some sparkling water?”
“No, but can you tell me when Henry will be here? I only have two hours this morning.”
“Mr. Wilkins shall return in ten minutes.” Opal places a hand on the small of her back, adjusts her hips forward, and catwalks back to her desk.
I snap open my laptop and place it on the far side of his sumptuous desk. Using a color-coded system, I begin to group Henry’s inventory into three columns, based on worthiness. After a few meetings like this, the enormity of the problem, the futility of trying to make worthless, make-believe mortgages turn into something of value, is apparent. Henry and I seem to be in some slow dance of doom. And because this is our job and because we’ve inherited this problem together, we go through these motions together.
Henry comes up quietly behind me and I smell him before I feel him look over my shoulder at the red splotches on his screen. He sighs and pulls his French cuffs farther down his wrist, twisting off each cuff link one by one and placing them next to my screen. He folds back his starched sleeves, revealing greatly defined forearms from years of sitting in front of a computer while choking the life out of a squeezy ball.
“Belle,” he says simply.
“Hmm. Hi,” I say softly, getting right to the point. “Look at this one.” I show him a basket of mortgages I’m particularly troubled by. I don’t turn around. “A two-hundred-forty-thousand-dollar vacation condo in Myrtle Beach. It’s not on the beach but on what appears to be a highway. Second home. B-minus rating. She’s a hairdresser.”
“Put it in the trash,” Henry sighs.
“Who wants a second home on the highway?”
“It’s your American dream,” Henry says softly. “You guys just want to own a lot of stuff.”
Sometimes when Henry isn’t thinking, he assigns us to different socioeconomic classes. He seems to forget his own simple roots, assuming the fancier childhood of his wife’s as his own. He leaves me behind in his calculation. I’m the beauty salon owner with a second home on the side of the highway. And maybe I am. The only difference between her and me was an education that taught me what I can really afford. How was she supposed to resist the offers from a slick mortgage broker selling her a dream home? It’s clear that the lenders preyed on the ignorant and the misinformed. How had I become involved in this?
“It’s a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar home in Nowhere, Nebraska,” I continue. “Both owners unemployed. Five dependents. I can just see the sheriff taking some crying babies out of the house.” My eyes well up and we sit there for a moment with something bordering wonder. I never saw things going this way. When I see Henry’s face, I don’t believe he thought this game all the way through. Or did he? To me, these mortgages were always lines on an Excel spreadsheet and I want to believe he saw it that way too. I want to believe he didn’t know what he was bu
ying when he filled his portfolio with baskets of greed and lies.
Henry gives up trying to lean over my shoulder to see what I see. He hikes up a pant leg and slips behind me, straddling me from behind and sharing the wide chair. It’s so hard to defamiliarize ourselves.
“You have to separate yourself from this. It’s not reality,” he says matter-of-factly.
“But it is reality,” I say. “The ride up was the unreality.”
“Nobody thought it through, Belle. Everyone had so much faith in our rating agencies, in the banks writing the loans, and in a government that encourages cheap money so everyone can own a home.”
He gently removes my hands from the keyboard and places them on my thighs. He lets his own hands ring the executioner’s bell, quickly dragging and dropping loans into red baskets, as if he were picking berries, but only the rotten ones. I watch him place the soon-to-be-homeless family from Nebraska into the red basket but at least I see a pause, a show of some deference.
“How can you do that?” I ask softly. “How can we do this over and over?”
“I’m tearing the Band-Aid off fast, and yes, I hate how sad this makes you.”
Henry thinks he has found happier news on the screen. “Triple-A, twenty-five-million-dollar Florida mansion that sold with three percent down.”
He puts it in black and I lean over and swoop it to red.
“Read the details,” I say. “A formerly rich guy in a desperate attempt to hang on to something. His personal credit rating sucks. Everyone knows Florida won’t take your house in a Chapter Eleven. He’s done and the loan is trash.”
I pull up the next one. “Dental practice in Wenatchee, Washington state, became overextended on their dental equipment purchases. They cater to the indigent,” I read.
“Excellent clientele to seek your fortune from,” Henry says sarcastically, pulling it to red. “Maybe migrant farm workers really didn’t want to purchase teeth laminates.”
Opening Belle Page 21