She tried not to let these things bother her. Isabel was her best friend.
“Look,” she said, “I fold, okay? I didn’t come over to congratulate myself on the fact that my daughter’s healthier than her neurotic roommate. I came to see if you need anything.”
“We’re fine, Mina. Truly.”
“Isabel, I don’t know much, but I do know that Tom has been working—so far as I can tell—quite literally around the clock for a week. So I assume Bob has been in hell.”
Isabel laughed: a small, bitter sound. “That seems a safe assumption, yes.”
“Have you spoken to him today?”
“No.”
“Well, how did he sound yesterday?”
“You’d have to ask someone who spoke to him yesterday, Min.”
“You two didn’t talk?”
“Well, he’s got his secretary—I don’t know—running interference, so I haven’t had the opportunity.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t mean it,” Mina said, shivering at the scorn in Isabel’s voice, as if she herself were the secretary in question. “I’m sure she’s just frightened.”
“That assumes she even knows where he is at any given moment,” Isabel said. “For all I know he’s in some bunker somewhere. She might not even actually be lying.”
“You really think it’s that bad?”
With a quick, unexpected motion, Isabel removed her sunglasses and tossed them down, letting them clatter on the table.
“What are we doing here, Mina? I assume you’ve been watching all the same cable news shows I’ve been watching. I’m sure you have every single piece of information I have, so why are you even asking me the questions? Hasn’t everyone already decided?”
They sat in silence and Mina watched one single basil leaf, now fully drenched, begin its fluttering descent to the bottom of her glass.
“I didn’t know that,” she said. “I wasn’t being insincere. I didn’t know you hadn’t heard from him.”
“Well,” Isabel said, fanning her hands out in an inclusive, welcoming gesture that encompassed the pool and the entire deck around them, even the woods at their backs. “Now you know.”
“You know,” Mina began, cautious, “that this is all mysterious to me. I understand that Weiss is in trouble. But if anyone can power through that, it’s Bob, right? What does he say about it?”
“You’re not listening to me. I don’t know. He hasn’t told me anything.”
“I don’t mean this week. I mean what has he been saying. The summer, and everything.”
Isabel looked at her, her eyes settling on Mina’s face as if she’d just noticed there was a second person at the table.
“Mina,” she said, “my husband has not, in any significant way, told me anything about his bank for months and months. I swear to you.”
The late-summer humidity hung in the air beyond the house, a palpable weight pressing down on the afternoon. Somewhere, beyond the trees, Mina heard an industrial lawn mower. She imagined it moving across an indulgent expanse of green, leaving neat trails of exposed, cut grass in its wake. This was the sound of the afternoon, one of the sounds that, together, mapped her adult life as a wife, a mother, a woman inside her house in Connecticut. A woman waiting for her family to come home.
“Okay,” she said. “But from what I’ve seen—I mean, they’re still looking for a buyer, right? I mean it’s much more likely that he’ll sell the bank than that they’ll just let it—I mean, bankruptcy would be a big decision to make. The government will step in, right?”
She was all too aware that she sounded like a teenager who hadn’t done the reading. These were words Mina had gathered from cable news, in recent days, but not necessarily words whose significance she understood. Bob was considering selling the bank, Weiss & Partners, to the Koreans. This she knew. If the Koreans weren’t interested, other U.S. banks were being convened to discuss the possibility of another buyer. This would include Goldman, Tom’s bank. She knew this because Tom’s boss’s boss had been summoned to the Fed that weekend for a meeting with the other CEOs. She hadn’t even known, until now, that the Fed was an actual location in Manhattan; she’d thought it was just another faceless government entity. She had, of course, kept that to herself when speaking with Tom.
But these were the broad strokes; she barely even had a hold on what it was Bob had done wrong, what missteps, exactly, had Tom and his friends shaking their heads in feigned sympathy six months ago. Back then they’d had to twist their mouths to conceal ill-disguised grins; now, when his failure was impending rather than hypothetical, they were all fearful themselves, ashen and underslept.
“Mina,” Isabel said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to the rest of you, okay? My husband isn’t here, is he? Do you see him here, enlisting me as his confidante? He’s in the city. He’s been there for weeks. He flew home from Shelter in August. I don’t know what’s going to happen to the rest of you. I can barely figure out what’s going to happen to me.”
They sat in silence once more. Tiny waves appeared on the surface of the swimming pool and the water lapped at the filter, making delicate sucking sounds. Mina had to believe that this finality, this resolve, from Isabel, was merely cloaked panic. That it was not really relevant, not to this situation. That they’d based their own lives, their children’s futures, on something more substantial than sheer forward momentum, the unheeded enthusiasm with which those children had once built their sand castles at rented houses in the Hamptons, far too close to the returning waves.
“That isn’t what I meant,” Mina said. “You know that.”
Isabel reached over to her, taking Mina’s hand and spreading her own so that their fingers could interlace.
“Of course it’s what you meant. I don’t blame you. We’re all allowed, right? My father used to say that no one would be afraid of an apocalypse as long as he knew there’d be enough canned food left to feed his own tribe.”
Isabel laughed, and Mina smiled, too.
“That sounds about right. I mean, I wouldn’t know. But based on the stories you’ve told me.”
“I keep thinking about him, you know? He always acted like Bob’s success was all imaginary. Like I was such a fool to take it at face value. While we were building this house, for those last few months when we were still in the city full-time, he used to call me up late at night and just . . . rant into my ear for an hour, sometimes. And I’d be alone with Madison, sitting in the apartment with the lights off, feeling the way I used to feel when I was a teenager and he’d come home and I’d lock myself up in my part of the house and he’d yell at me through my bedroom door.”
Mina considered saying nothing; Isabel was speaking as if in a dream, and Mina did not want to recall her to where they were, how they usually spoke to each other.
“It’s not imaginary, Isabel,” she said finally. “I mean, whatever happens, it’s not that.”
And then Isabel looked up at her, her face wiped clean in the way that you’d sometimes see news anchors freeze in place when their audio feed failed to deliver the other half of the conversation.
“Oh,” Isabel said, her voice so low it sounded more like an inhalation than speech.
Mina watched, over Isabel’s shoulder, as Lily’s head bobbed in and out of the lower corner of the kitchen window. She couldn’t possibly be doing the dishes, could she? Surely no one had eaten since breakfast in this house. What did this girl spend her days doing, then? Mina knew there were others, even though Isabel’s staff was relatively small, compared to the committees that ran some of their friends’ homes. They had that expressionless Russian woman—was she Russian?—who always seemed to disapprove of whatever greeting Mina tried on her. And that woman had a small team of equally expressionless but younger and more buxom blondes from Eastern Europe who scurried around corners and disappeared from any room Mina entered. So what did Lily do all day?
Mina wondered this, often, about her own employees. The woman she ha
d in charge of the house issued their marching orders, and as far as Mina could tell, every task was completed with efficiency and nearly invisible exertion. And still she sometimes felt like the inactive center of a clicking machine, divorced entirely from the muffled frenzy all around her. She hadn’t known, when she was twenty-four, what it meant to run a household. Sometimes it occurred to her with clammy anxiety that she didn’t know much more about it now, either. And if she hadn’t learned by now, then surely—
“I miss my mother,” Isabel said. “She would know. She’d know what to do.”
“There’s nothing you can do, not yet. Nothing’s certain, right?”
“Not yet, no.”
The irony here was that Isabel was by far the most literate of them all when it came to their husbands’ work. Mina remembered a lunch at the club this past summer, their kids nearby, drinks sweating on the table. Tennis balls popping softly in the background like a summertime lullaby. A few other women sat with them. Suzanne Welsh was there, and Jim McGinniss’s wife, Kiki, who would only have been there by Isabel’s invitation, since she lived primarily on Long Island. Someone had complained about a husband slipping into bed at 4 A.M., for once not even smelling of scotch, and Isabel had nodded, tilting her head up to the sun, shifting her chair out from beneath the forest green table umbrella and stretching her browned legs in front of her. The last time I saw them like this was when we were first married. You guys remember that, the whole yield burning nightmare? And they were all so terrified for those few months? I don’t know how they do it, when things bottom out like that. They don’t sleep for days at a time.
There had been utter silence at their table. Suzanne Welsh had scrutinized her hands in her lap so closely that it looked like she was trying to see through them to her own veins. And Mina would admit it, too—that something in her stomach had solidified, some free-floating unease she’d always felt had gathered itself into some final, defined shape. Not jealousy, but fear. And fear of what? What did any of them care if Isabel understood what was going on, if she knew the language, the right phrases? She’d probably give anything, at this moment, to be ignorant. To not understand.
The day after that afternoon at the tennis courts, Mina had driven to the library. To Stamford, rather than their local library. She’d checked out ten books on finance—some just general nonfiction, social histories she guessed you’d call them, some memoirs by former Wall Streeters. She hadn’t read any of them in the end. If Tom left her for another woman, it wasn’t going to be because that girl understood his work. The nuances of whatever it was that he did to make her spending money. That much was clear to Mina. She might not be a brain trust, she might not be his equal, but she knew her husband.
Isabel let her hands fall to the table, her wedding ring scraping the glass.
“I just wonder,” she said. “My husband has never failed in his life. I doubt he’s heard the word no from anyone but me in decades. He’s built up such a little cult of personality over there, from what I see on this end of things.”
“Do you ever wonder,” Mina murmured, “I mean—you should see Tom, when we run into the Weiss partners somewhere in the city, or something. Not Bob, of course. Bob’s our friend. And, you know, him being so far Tom’s superior.”
Years of practice, here, meant that she could say that last phrase without wincing, without having to widen her eyes as she spoke.
“With Bob, it’s irrelevant. But the other Weiss partners. We saw several of them at a wedding last year. And they won’t even say hello, Isabel. Acknowledge each other’s presence. Any single success they have at Weiss—I think Tom really does feel that this leaves less for us. I mean, not Tom. Goldman. All of them. It’s like middle school with the firm’s balance sheet. And sometimes I just wonder, if they looped us in more, if things like that might improve. If the summer might have been a bit less chaotic.”
Tom didn’t even like that she and Isabel were so friendly. How many times had he explained it to her, the firms’ rivalry? Many times, she would reply. Many times, Tom. I know. I know.
“Maybe,” Isabel said. “Maybe. Jesus, that was a long summer. I thought if we could just get to September. When Jim had to resign, when they had to fire the new CFO, that Erica woman. I really thought that might kill him. But then it was done, and I thought the worst was over.”
“Poor Kiki.” Mina knew how it must have killed, that Post cover with Jim stumbling out of the Weiss lobby, “MY GOODNESS, MCGINNISS” splashed across his face. His mouth gaping, his face like a lumpy cushion someone had slit open.
And if Mina hadn’t had to sit through the preamble to one ladies-only dinner party where Kiki McGinniss had strong-armed them all into a tour of the walk-in closet she’d built for her shoes, if they hadn’t seen (because Kiki had picked up individual shoes and made sure they’d all see) how many of the high heels had never once been worn, she might have been able to reach deep within herself and find the small place that felt sympathy for Kiki’s humiliation. For what Jim surely felt was a betrayal from Bob, his oldest friend in the building.
That dinner out in Bridgehampton, when Kiki had shown them the shoe closet, surely wouldn’t have included Mina if not for Isabel. She remembered that, as they’d left the closet tour, Isabel had taken her hand, held it just long enough so Mina knew they were supposed to hang back from the trail of women filing back out to the main part of the house. And Mina had lingered with Isabel, expecting some sharp comment about the shoes, the whole thing. But that had been it; Isabel had just wanted them to walk slowly, to keep themselves just a bit behind the group. Not to follow Kiki with everyone else.
It was in moments like those that Mina wondered how many other tiny sore spots Isabel noticed, how many things she saw about the other wives. Mina liked to think she herself wasn’t entirely transparent, at this point, that she covered her constant fear that she’d forget all she’d learned when she got married. But Isabel always seemed to see her, seemed to know when Mina might need some unacknowledged warmth the most.
“Please,” Isabel said, “please don’t ask me to worry about poor Kiki.”
They were quiet for a minute, maybe more.
“He’s not very likable,” Isabel murmured. Mina sat up straighter.
“Jim McGinniss?”
“No, no. My husband. He’s not very likable, to most people but me. Plenty of people have been waiting for him to trip up and make an example of himself for years. Be a cautionary tale.”
“Well, that seems a bit premature,” Mina began, even though she knew Isabel wasn’t talking to her.
“He’s not,” Isabel said. “He’s not always likable. And if he can’t fix this—I’m not a monster. I can see that it will involve much more likable people. Everywhere, I mean. Nobody’s going to be worried about my husband’s pain.”
She trailed off on the final sentence, and Mina could think of nothing to say. Isabel sighed and spoke again.
“I really thought that if we survived the summer, that would be the worst of it,” Isabel said, again. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. Her eyelids were a pale blue, nearly translucent. “I’ve got to get the kids soon. I should pick them up, I don’t want to send Lily. Madison’s at a football game. Doing God knows what.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Mina said, “go upstairs. Take a bath. Or a nap. I’ll pick them up.”
Isabel nodded, but they sat there together for another half hour, and Mina couldn’t bring herself to rupture the silence by standing up and walking inside, couldn’t stand to leave Isabel alone out here by the pool.
WHEN MINA ROARED into the Greenwich Prep senior parking lot, the one closest to the gym, it was after seven o’clock and on its way to full dark. She saw Madison standing, her feet turned uncertainly inward, a tall boy’s shape slinking away toward the other corner of the lot. Mina squinted through the lowering gloom but couldn’t see who it was, and then Madison was opening the door and that was the more pressing thing.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Mina said. Immediately, she felt, her tone was wrong. She couldn’t very well speak to Bob’s daughter as though rumor were forecast, as though the time had already come for pity and delicacy. He still might pull the rabbit out of the hat, after all. And if he did fix things, if it had all been just the nighttime anxiety that accompanied that particularly humid summer’s fever dream, then there would be absolute hell to pay for anyone who’d shown even the slightest condescension toward his girls. For anyone who’d questioned the dominance of Bob “Silverback” D’Amico.
God, what kind of man let himself pick up that nickname? What kind of man encouraged it?
Madison was heaving her Vineyard Vines bag into the backseat, climbing into the front. Her kneecaps poked out like tennis balls crammed into tube socks. Her limbs had grown before she had, giving her that quality you saw only in teenagers or in young horses: the sense that they might trip over their own unfamiliar height at any given moment.
“Hi,” Madison said. “Is there a reason you’re picking me up?”
“Oh, well.” Mina waved one hand in the air. “I stopped by to see your mom earlier and she was feeling a bit under the weather. I’m sure,” she said, and here she allowed her eyes to slide from the road to Madison’s profile, “I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
The child next to her remained so still that she might have been sitting for a portrait.
“I haven’t, actually. She seemed fine at breakfast this morning.”
Mina cupped her hands around the steering wheel and hesitated, wondering whether she should speak. She kept silent through most of the drive, through excruciating minutes, but then couldn’t wait any longer. Why was it so treacherously easy to speak to teenage girls in the car? So many indiscreet revelations she’d made to her own Jaime had come about this way.
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