Opening Belle

by Maureen Sherry

  “Losing my dad and you all in a few months—” My voice caught, I wiped my face on the back of his shirt but was determined to finish saying what I had to say. “You and I never even had what humans call a conversation, an admission that it wasn’t going to work out. We never had the scene where we ask who gets the toaster or where I accuse you of stealing my tennis racquet.” I was sniffling into his back but wouldn’t let him turn toward me. I didn’t want this to lead to kissing. I wanted to just speak.

  Henry leaned forward and put his head in his hands. His back started heaving. In all our time together, I never once saw Henry Wilkins cry. “It was too painful to break up with you because I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted.”

  “So let’s say that today.” I snort-laughed. “Let’s break up, ten years after we stopped seeing each other. We’ve got six kids between us with other people, it’s hot time we ditched this thing!” This thought was suddenly hilarious to me, so freeing that I couldn’t stop talking. I’d made a giant soggy spot on the back of his shirt. I started to pat it, to clean up my mess. I suddenly found everything to be funny. “Let’s break up because you never shut up when I drive or because you dress like a golfer from Nantucket or because I hate the way you sing Beatles songs,” I gurgled.

  But Henry wasn’t laughing. He just looked sad. He hadn’t taken his head from his hands. Trysting away at odd moments in this beautiful place would be so fun until it wasn’t. Then it would have done irreparable damage to everyone else in our lives, and relationships aren’t inert. It would have to go somewhere and any scenario I thought of ended in tears and broken promises. There was nothing I could do to help him with whatever it was he really wanted. I wasn’t his.

  I held on to his giant body, inhaling every bit of his tight form and following his waves of sadness. It was my last time to hold him, to know what he felt like and know why I was letting it go. It felt good that this was my choice. Henry could never have saved me. It would be up to me to do that.

  • • •

  We are now first in line for takeoff. Stuart Little has driven off in his shiny little sports car to find Margalo, the bird. Henry is taking the family to their ski house in Jackson Hole on their Gulfstream IV and Bruce is sleeping with his mouth open in coach and snoring very softly. Owen has removed the old woman’s headphones and she’s actually playing with him. I begin to talk to her and find she’s a sweet French grandmother who doesn’t laugh at my terrible French. I feel an overpowering love at that moment for United Airlines and their ability to finally get things moving, for my kids, who still seem to like me despite myself, for my imperfect situation, and for my imperfect family that somehow suits me very well.

  CHAPTER 36

  Crash

  A LARGE BLOCK of snow has found its way into the top of my boot. I feel it melting, sliding down over my ankle and surprising my foot. Why am I wearing bulky, suede, and impractical UGGs on a tiny portion of the majestic Mont Blanc? I’m the equivalent of the North Dakota tourist showing up in Times Square wearing five-inch stilettos to fit in with the presumed natives, only to discover that New York is a walking city and that her shoes start squinching her toes five blocks into walking and nobody is noticing her fabulously chic footwear. Not a soul admires my fat boots, not even the ladies in their fur-trimmed ski jackets, making their way toward the Aiguille du Midi, the main ski lift, wearing gold-rimmed sunglasses and speaking Russian. Only Russian women get away with walking uphill in thousand-dollar ski outfits while puffing on a cigarette.

  I’m currently the helmswoman on a handmade toboggan that looks like it belongs in a sledding museum. My focus is solely on victory. My team consists of Brigid, Kevin, and myself and we’ve been having trouble steering this alpine artifact. My sister’s kids are regular lugers and we city people have been eating their snow all afternoon. Repeatedly they whiz by us and some sibling competitive feeling that exists between Carron and me roars, and I’m answering the call.

  I need a strategy to win and I need a team behind me. I turn to my now eight-year-old.

  “Kev, I’m the heaviest and I should be in the back,” I say. He’s wearing a ski helmet that Bruce made him put on.

  “But I need to be in the back,” he says, hovering between earnestness and whining.

  “Why do you need to be in the back?”

  “It makes me feel safe to hold on to you,” he whispers.

  “No. I need to be in the back,” I respond firmly. “We can’t let these pseudo-French dropouts beat us.”

  Kevin looks puzzled and tries to understand whatever it is that I’ve just said. I turn to Brigid, who is now off the sled, making snow angels and really burning my rubber.

  “Come on, Brig, I want to beat them just once.”

  “Mommy is whining,” she says, and points her finger to an imaginary friend in the sky, making certain that supreme beings know this about her mother.

  “Get on the sled,” I say firmly. “And stop that dreaming stuff.”

  My sister rolls her eyes at me and points to Kevin, who seems to have adhered his backside to the last seat in the toboggan, also known as my seat. His snow pants are sodden and heavy and his lips appear bruised, having turned a purplish shade of blue. We’re riding that thin line between having fun and not having any fun.

  “Don’t you want to win?” I practically beg of my kid while wondering to myself, what sort of a kid doesn’t want to win?

  Kevin also looks upward toward the crystal-blue sky with round, thoughtful eyes. He appears to really consider the question before turning his gaze toward me to say, “No.”

  “What do you mean ‘no’?” I’ve never met anyone who didn’t want to win, have I?

  “Isn’t he his father’s son?” My sister laughs as she straddles herself onto the last seat of their extended Flexible Flyer, pulling her long legs in with the ease of a teenager. Their team shoves off and showers us with shredded shards of snow.

  For the past three days this form of transportation has consumed my children. Bruce usually opts to stay indoors doing planks and watching Owen nap while my sister and I take the six other children out on the mountain. I love seeing their cheeks get red and their bodies winded, something that doesn’t happen often in New York.

  Last night we did something we haven’t done since we were all on this earth together. We slept as if we had no fear. There were eight solid hours where neither child nor adult made a disruptive sound, no boogeyman came to visit Owen, and no financial markets melted my dreams. When I woke up, Bruce joked that I had gotten a face-lift during the night. A simple compliment to me and I filled with hope again, hope that our marital train wreck was just hitting track bumps, that maybe it was all just job stress that was making me so mad at him.

  After the sledding Carron and I drive into Chamonix, a town torn from a page of a fairy tale. Weathered farmers have set up stalls in the main square where we go to shop for food. With so many growing bodies, the hunt for sustenance is constant and my kids’ newfound appetite for these slowly cooked and lovingly prepared meals is notable.

  My sister is a younger, hipper version of me: prettier, more fun, and always bouncing on the front of her feet while she tells you about the next big adventure she’s going to have. Her career has always involved skis, first as a champion racer and then as a product promoter for certain brands. Sprung from Bronx apartment dwellers, champion skier was a less predictable career path than even mine. Carron never got the capitalistic itch the way I did. Her existence has always been about living her life, rather than planning her life. But I see her in this town with her healthy tribe of girls and her marriage that seems solid enough and I’m wondering, what’s she faking? I’ve never seen such an uncomplicated life.

  As we walk amid the stalls, men lift their tankards of beer to us asking “Êtes-vous des jumeaux?” or, “Are you twins?” I feel the glow that only the French can reflect. Carron flits around as if she’s in the place she’s meant to be and I wonder what that feels like. She
showers petals of compliments on each shopkeeper and they appear to swoon over this “Anglais,” as they keep calling her.

  “American,” she keeps correcting them in her lilting, beautiful French and they all wave and wink as if to imply she is far too cool to be from anyplace real.

  Carron is the only human I can share the bizarre Henry saga with. I feel like my chest will implode if I don’t tell someone what happened.

  I take a deep breath. “So I cover Henry,” I say simply enough, but Carron stops moving. She’s holding a bag of clementines.

  “Cover? Like, you have his account?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “You mean Henry, right? Like, from . . . our life?” She puts down the bag and gives me her full attention.

  “Henry is dead to us,” Carron says, drawing her hand across her throat. “Do you hear me?”

  “Yeah. Except he works for my biggest client, therefore he is my biggest client.”

  “Rather . . . inconvenient,” she says.

  “Well, it’s not a problem,” I say. “I mean, we get along fine.” I’m speaking so stiffly that she turns toward me.

  “Define ‘fine’?”

  “I mean, we do a lot of business together.” I feel my face redden and she stares, waiting for me to say more.

  “What sort of business?”

  “Not that sort of business.”

  “How can you and Henry be in the same room without fireworks?”

  “Easy. We grew up.”

  “Very hard to believe.”

  “Look. Some of us need a job that pays something,” I say a tad defensively and off-subject. I did not mean to imply that my sister lives hand to mouth and saves nothing but that’s what she has heard.

  “Oh, right. You have to keep that fabulous Manhattan lifestyle going. Yes. Got to get a board of directors seat at the Met. I forgot.”

  When she seems to be done ranting I say, “It’s just been really hard with Bruce. Like, crazy-hard, and I think the Henry reentry program . . .” My voice trails off. “It was just nice to see him again, that’s all.”

  She remains quiet for a moment before replying.

  “Yeah. Does he remember what he did? That filthy dippy-do?”

  “We all don’t have to hate him forever. I think nine years of abhorrence is about the correct penalty time.”

  Carron softens her tone. “Belle, you loved him so much. When he heart-slammed you, right before Daddy died? You just never recovered. That girl we all loved? She left. Went right out the door with Henry. Henry made me lose part of my sister.”

  Carron’s eyes are misting. “Henry made you all hard and businesslike. All you do is worry and plan and push yourself.”

  I feel some vile thing rising in my throat, some animal I should swallow back down but instead let it sneak out. “So easy for you to say. Have you ever had to work for anything? Just smile, swivel your genetically blessed hips, and doors open.”

  I want her to get mad at me, for us to have some sort of confrontation, but that’s not what we’ve ever done in our family, we just sort of take it. We were raised to be stoic; we’d rather swallow the acid of fight than let it out but I’ve been swallowing so much, it’s getting harder to breathe.

  “What?” she says. “I worked my ass off to get what I have. It may not look like much, Belle, but it’s enough for us. You never seemed to think anything was enough after Henry took off. He changed you. He made you want things you didn’t need to want. He put some desire in you to own things, to run things, to be the top, to win. And that makes you miserable and you can’t escape from it. I blame Henry for you becoming someone you really don’t like and so, no, I certainly don’t want to know about him or his stupid life.”

  “I didn’t change after Henry. People don’t really ever change,” I say softly. “You completely forget that I was always ambitious, that I always wanted big things. Henry just taught me how to get laser-focused.”

  “I would describe you as getting all man on us.” Carron flexes her muscles under her ski jacket, which just looks stupid.

  “I got man on you because I’m with a guy who isn’t so man, and I work in a place where you only get ahead by manning up. Someone has to be the responsible one.”

  “Bruce is responsible.”

  I sigh. “He is. It’s just at a different level.”

  “You just want more than him,” she says simply.

  “It’s not more as in more stuff, it’s a more equal sharing of responsibility. It’s me bringing home ninety-nine percent of our income and still having to do eighty percent of the non-caregiver kid stuff. It’s not the Aston Martin, the driver, or diamonds that I want. I just want real partnership. And yes, I want more from work too because I’ve followed all the rules for more. And if Bruce were following the husband/father rules he would know that he has to do more than work out and be a decent companion. He should be out there dragging that sled up the hill or helping buy the groceries.”

  “So you, Isabelle McElroy, are saying that you need help?”

  “I don’t need help. I need partnership. A helper is someone who does favors for you, someone you have to thank all the time. A partner is someone who’s in it with you.”

  Carron interrupts me. “Because if you say you don’t need help, why would anyone help you? If help is what you need and you ask Bruce for it and he doesn’t help, then you have the right to be mad but not before you ask and he says no. ’Cause if you asked, he’d probably say yes.”

  I roll my eyes at her and move on to the bean section of this produce bonanza, wondering why even my sister doesn’t get it.

  “So is Henry cheating on that Barbie doll wife of his yet?” Carron asks.

  There’s nothing like a protective little sister. Her sarcasm makes me feel loved.

  “How should I know?” I say, thinking there is no way I’m telling her about the secret apartment. Now it’s Carron’s turn to roll her eyes at me.

  Across the square I notice the glowing lights of an Internet café and for a moment have a pang to check in with Stone. I’ve given my phone to Bruce to prove my commitment to this vacation endeavor.

  Like a junkie seeing her dealer across the square I allow myself to look but not touch. I remind myself I’m in recovery and that I don’t want to have to lie to Bruce should he ask if I’ve talked to my office. I tell Carron how jumpy it makes me to see those glowing computer screens from outside the café’s frosty window. Like a moth to light, I let myself walk over to the doorway and take in the sight of the familiar blue screens, each a potential portal to the financial markets everywhere. I let the shakes of withdrawal wave through me.

  Carron reaches for my arm. “We have a connection at home,” she says. “Bruce has been using it all day while you ski. I’m pretty sure he’s looking for a job, Belle. I think he wants to get something going and then surprise you.”

  “He’s looking for a job?”

  “I mean, he’s online all the time, so I asked, and that’s what he says he’s up to. Wants it to be a secret but I thought if you knew, you wouldn’t be so mad at him.”

  I feel something swell in me, something hopeful.

  “Anyway, why didn’t you just ask to use our computer if you miss work so much? You have to ask for what you need.”

  “Can’t, not allowed,” I sigh.

  “Okay, that’s weird.”

  “It’s not weird, it’s just that Bruce doesn’t think I can do it, thinks I’ll spend this week on the phone once I reattach the cord so I’m in some sort of banking detox here and seeing those computers makes me jittery.”

  “Well, I just think it’s weird that the U.S. markets are falling apart and Bruce isn’t allowing you to take care of your business. Aren’t you the breadwinner? Doesn’t that make it his business too?”

  “The markets aren’t really falling apart. They’re just weak.”

  “I don’t really get what you do, but with your company in the poubelle, it sounded like you wer
e out of business.”

  I’ve had one year of high school French, which is just enough vocabulary to know that poubelle means “garbage.” Feagin is in the garbage?

  “What do you mean about Feagin?” I ask. Who is she to be telling me this?

  “Something about them being sold for a buck or something. I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention but I thought you knew. Anyway, you can always get a job with us being a ski guide.” She laughs. “You’re really pretty good.”

  “Feagin didn’t fall apart. We just have problems with some of the products we’ve been selling and our stock price is getting slammed.”

  “No, I meant that thing that happened yesterday.”

  “Nothing happened yesterday,” I say, feeling panicked. “I can’t do this mountain girl act for another second.” I hand Carron my sack of produce and positively gallop into the café, almost pushing aside a teenager about to sit down.

  “Excusez-moi,” I say.

  “American,” the kid says, and rolls his eyes.

  My fingers tremble as I bring up my work screen in this place that smells like wet wool and smoky coffee. First I see my email in-box containing 2,303 messages. There are alerts for every stock I follow, meaning they’ve moved at least 5 percent in price and they’ve all been downward moves. There are countless requests to be present on a company conference call held this morning; it’s already over.

  I don’t even need to find the U.S. financial headlines, because those are the headlines everywhere. I learn that Bear Stearns was saved from bankruptcy by a $2-per-share offer from JPMorgan Chase, down from the $159 they traded at a year ago. They will be sold for less than the value of their worldwide office buildings. Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers stock both closed down 70 percent on the week. Both are rumored to be seeking either buyers or government intervention. Feagin Dixon has stopped trading and is rumored to be purchased by a midwestern bank. My $145-per-share stock looks to open at five dollars.

  Banks all over the world are considering the implications for themselves with the inevitable tighter lending and the slowing of growth that will follow. It seems that the time I was so afraid of, that time when everyone came calling at the same time, is right now.