—Anne Carson, “Little Racket”
I give you fourteen years of earnings. I have one bad quarter. This is how you respond?
—Richard Fuld, former CEO, Lehman Brothers
THIRTY-FOUR
Isabel sat at the mirror in her bathroom, slowly applying her evening face. Behind her, out the window, the sky was only just now beginning to seep into something darker. The clock had jumped forward the previous weekend, and now they were all waiting in that deadened space between seasons.
All of her children were elsewhere. The twins were at a birthday party in town, that Japanese hibachi place all the little boys loved, and Madison was apparently having dinner with Zoë Barker, of all people. Isabel had never taken her daughter for someone who’d fall under the sway of Alexandra Barker’s spawn, but she couldn’t very well say anything about it now. Madison had come to her, in those first weeks after it all began, but Isabel hadn’t been ready yet. She hadn’t had a plan in place; it had been too soon for her to start setting aside energy to comfort her children. She’d left the twins to Lily and she’d avoided Madison’s questions. She’d still needed all of her own resources, back in the fall. And even at Christmas, she’d done the best she could. She’d had Bob walking around in an actual Santa’s hat, she’d tried to make things cozy. It had not been, all things considered, such a terrible holiday.
When Madison came back, Isabel would be ready. She’d find something to say. But for now, her daughter was going elsewhere for comfort, and she had to respect that.
Isabel knew many women would have chosen a different tack, in September, would have clutched a daughter closer rather than leaving her, largely, to wade through it all on her own. Crawled into bed with her when you were both awake and heard each other wandering the house. Lavished her with compliments. Immediately gotten out of the bathtub, on that one night, and rubbed her back, brushed her hair, told her everything was absolutely fine.
It had been so obvious, really, how little she might have offered Madison, how meager the reassurance her daughter needed to feel safe. But Isabel had balked at those moments. She’d never been that kind of mother, and it seemed insincere to try to become one now.
SHE WAS DOING HERSELF UP tonight for dinner with Mina, who had called in a frenzy about something as yet unexplained. It was always tricky to locate the source of Mina’s most immediate panic, since she lived her life in a state of constant apology. Apologies for any remaining traces of the girl she’d once been, apologies for the child her daughter didn’t turn out to be, for what she hadn’t been able to contribute to the world she found herself living in. Mina was hardly the only wife out here who’d come from Long Island, Redondo Beach, even the Jersey shore. But Mina was the only one who seemed to think treachery awaited her if she couldn’t conceal every trace of that former self.
Still, Mina had been endlessly helpful this year. Many times since Christmas, she’d stepped in when Lily hesitated. Isabel could go to dinner with her, could reassure her that they were still friends. Remind her that even if Isabel chose to confide in no one, at the very least there was no one she’d be confiding in before Mina.
Isabel had known, as soon as her phone buzzed, that her hopes for a quiet evening had been futile. The house was empty, and it might have been nice. No one would have needed even a second of her time. Lily was still, whenever possible, hiding from her, just as she had been since that night in December when Madison had staged her faux escape to the city. In a way, it was a relief. Because Isabel had not fired Lily that afternoon, had never even spoken of it again, the nanny had been forced to put a stop to her constant, smug expressions of unspoken disapproval. Lily had never been one for these, not before. She’d never inserted all those little barbs into daily life in the house, the sorts of tiny power struggles Isabel had always found so petty, so sad, when other women described them. Housekeepers who reorganized pantry shelves and other corners of the house in which they had no real business, just to prove to you that they knew the lay of the land better than you did. Nannies who issued orders to your children that directly contradicted the things you had told them earlier, or at least the implicit understandings you relied on in your dealings with them.
But Lily had spent the fall implying, with her every raised eyebrow or disregard for Isabel’s orders, that her boss was bobbling the fragile, breakable thing she held in her hand. That she wasn’t the woman her family needed right now.
By all means, Isabel thought. She dipped a finger into a pot of under-eye concealer, tilting her head away from the mirror so that the light fell on the hollow just above her left cheekbone. Find me that woman. Find the woman this family needs, and let her set up a war room downstairs. She can sleep in one of the guest rooms. Our treat.
But Isabel missed the old Lily, she did. It seemed laughable in retrospect, like the cartoon version of some old rich lady, but Isabel had always taken some measure of private pride in the fact that Lily seemed to like her. More than she liked Bob, yes, but even without that qualification. They’d liked each other; they’d gotten along.
This couldn’t have been the desired endgame, being a nanny. But Lily never breathed a word of complaint, never even put a disgruntled edge at the end of a question. She’d been a force, with the kids. She made the breakfasts. She planned the weekly playdates. She’d known the family rhythms, this alleged outsider, just as well as she must know to blink her eye whenever something painful lodged itself there. She’d become one more element of the life Isabel had brought into being because it was what her husband told her they should want.
It was never me, Isabel thought. It wasn’t. And look, this year had been proof. The house didn’t need her. It would exist long after she was gone, this house she’d built. And wasn’t that for the best? Who knew how much longer she’d even be permitted to live here.
She did not think: how much longer her husband would be allowed to live in a world that did not include orange jumpsuits, barbed wire, bitter phone calls through thick glass. She was not prepared to think this way, still. Not yet. No matter how many times she was chided by the lawyers. They weren’t there just yet.
THE MEETING TODAY had been an intervention, of sorts. The entire legal team had been present, had combined forces to explain to her, respectfully, that they could not wait any longer for her husband to decide to join them.
She’d been meeting them alone, thus far. Many of these men had known her since she was a teenager. They were either Buck’s former lieutenants, or men who had been trained by members of Buck’s generation. She’d hesitated, at first, to start making these calls herself. It seemed prudent, for a while, to follow all the same codes Bob had always insisted on. This was a matter to be dealt with entirely within the family. This family, the one they had made together. The ghost of her father had no place in this matter.
She’d been utterly willing to extend Bob this courtesy until the night when she had to drag him back across this threshold, bring him bawling back from the apartment where he’d chosen to barricade himself. The apartment, the one place he knew would pierce her. The home of all the unspokens that resided at the very bottom of their marriage, like a teeming ocean floor. The things beneath their days together, the things they’d always agreed not to scrutinize.
At that point, she’d figured, just—screw it. If he didn’t want to let her in right now, if he wasn’t going to explain himself yet, that was his prerogative. But she’d called up some old friends of her father’s.
And it had been unexpected, the sheer pleasure she drew from these meetings. From leaning on her father’s reputation, on the relationships he’d left waiting for her. She understood why Bob hated these reminders. That he always felt like he was scrabbling uphill, and that he knew down to the soles of his feet that his wife didn’t know that feeling, its bite.
But you didn’t fritter away resources, not when you were teetering on an edge. That was her decision, and so this process, their recovery, or whatever it would become: thi
s process had been hers.
The first meeting in October had been a turning point. It was the marker, in her memory, between the oppressive standstill of those first few weeks and the flurry of action that had consumed her these past few months. At first, she’d just been waiting to hear the results of his choices. But soon, she’d realized that she could fill the vacuum he’d left. By the time he woke up to it, the system would be in motion.
She trusted the lawyers, the accountants, the consultants. It was their job to remain several steps ahead of her, not because they were smarter than she was but because, for them, it was only a paper crisis. They could snap the briefcase, descend the elevator, go home to fix a drink. They’d be taking their cut, of course, but that cut dictated the borders of their own interest.
One of them had pulled her aside after one contentious hour in November to declare his admiration for how she hadn’t once cried, hadn’t bad-mouthed her husband at all. He’d probably just been angling, curious as to how far the rich guy’s trophy wife had actually fallen, but it was flattering nonetheless. From the others, there were looks sometimes. The faces so blank and impassive that the judgment was fully visible. The metallic silences, from time to time, after a specific decision of Bob’s was discussed.
And what could she say to them? She couldn’t very well tell them, look, he’s rude and he’s arrogant but he knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t screw anything up so badly that someone like me, like us, can’t fix it. He’s embarrassed, he knows that in this year I’ve seen him right down through to his bones. He’s ashamed, and he needs a few months to shore up his pride. Trust me, when I say that I trust him—not for everything, not for the small indiscretions, but for something of this magnitude. Trust me when I tell you that, eventually, he’ll barge in here as his old self.
The lawyers were very careful, always, not to pity her. Even when she’d learned in an early meeting that the Greenwich house was now in her name, transferred last year for only a dollar, her signature faked on the papers. Even then, as she watched these men scan her face for clues, she’d felt no pity from them. Impatience, yes, distaste for how little she’d understood at the time. But no pity. They’d never asked a single question about what she’d known at this time a year ago.
She knew everyone must want to. Just look what they were doing to the Madoff sons, poor bastards. The older one had restored his farmhouse out here not so long ago, just a few years. A few years ago, Isabel thought, Greenwich would have looked very different to him.
She set down her eyeliner, a tacit acknowledgment that her hands were trembling.
It was so hard to know how her father would have handled all of this. That’s what she wanted from these men, really. For them to speak in her father’s voice. She knew he would disagree with her about Bob, about giving him time to recover, but surely he would approve of her ultimate strategy. The focus on her children, their futures. Those were the cards she had to play, as well as the ante she’d already left on the table.
Isabel shook her head, gathered herself. Mina would be here in another fifteen minutes, and she couldn’t very well be crying when the car pulled up.
Through the window she could see the darkening treetops, mounded against one another like clouds, framed by the warm yellow rectangle of the window’s light. Back in September, when it all first happened, she sat at this window smoking a cigarette and watched the sun rise, many times. She stayed up late, just like she had on those mornings years and years ago, the summer she met Bob. When she was working at the club and getting home just before sunrise.
She never saw him on the nights she worked. She kept those for herself, alone. She’d take the cab home, have it let her off on York just before her corner so that she could duck into her favorite bodega, the Koreans rather than the Turkish man across the avenue. She’d buy snacks, because the girls weren’t allowed to eat during shifts at the club, but she didn’t choose her food like an actual hungry person. It was always scattered and indulgent, exotic and nonsensical. Copious amounts of string cheese and two cartons of sliced pineapple, or something really mismatched, like a carton of chocolate milk to wash down a plastic tub of kimchi. Even now, on those rare trips into the city when she might duck into a bodega, needing bottled water for the boys, the smell would remind her. That swirling mix of tortilla chips and cleaning fluids and sizzling peppers and onions at the sandwich station, it always reminded her of herself, those nights when the younger Isabel would emerge back out into the dawning street. Off the clock, her bare legs chicken flesh, knowing she was headed home to curl up in her own crappy apartment to eat her own bizarre food. There would always be a scrawled message from her roommate on the pad by the phone, her disapproval evident from the fact that the notes never mentioned Bob by name: call for you (from office) at eleven, told him you’re at work like you are every Thurs, ANOTHER call again at one am. Always, Bob would have called. He was always tracking her down, that summer.
But she’d been free, she thought now. Her father never ceased reminding her that he held the strings, but she got that hostess job for herself. Bob tried to tie her down right away, but she played around with him for fun.
The man who owned that bodega always laughed at her. She began to think of choosing her food as a performance for him, something he could rely on. He’d always know that at the end of the graveyard shift, the white girl from around the corner would stop in to buy a morning meal that would make him laugh, her fingers looped through the straps of the high heels she’d swapped for flip-flops in the cab. Her eating habits were the only things he knew about her.
Well, Isabel thought. Now, if he’s got a good memory for faces, if he still runs that store and stocks the Post, he knows another thing about me.
But it had all been only a performance, back then. Hadn’t it? If she hadn’t made her rent, at the end of that summer, nothing would have happened. She’d been in no real danger at all.
She’d had freedom and safety, and she’d been too idiotic and young to appreciate how rare it was that she had both. But Bob must have known. He’d brought her in with him, hadn’t he?
SHE’D TAKEN THE NIGHT SHIFT at the club, a few months after moving to the city, because she wanted to know for sure that she could pay for her own life. It was hard to say why she’d thought this was any way to prove anything to anyone, but that had been the reasoning. Her father found it hilarious.
She was working at a gallery uptown, and it barely paid enough to cover her rent, let alone utilities. And then her friend Binnie, from Smith, mentioned her new job as the coat check girl at a club near Isabel’s apartment. She claimed she’d made three hundred dollars that first night, folded bills the men would pass to her on their way out. They’re looking for a new hostess, Binnie said. You won’t actually have to carry a tray.
Isabel knew without question that she could easily spend her weekend nights flattering the type of man who pays to ensure that he’s got a beautiful woman near him from the second he steps into the club. At the coat check, as he’s walked to his table, when he orders the bottle. She’d been training for that job since childhood, hadn’t she?
And she hadn’t been wrong; it was easy. Other than having to stand on her feet all night, needing to soak them in salt baths after her first few shifts, it was a piece of cake.
She’d been most surprised by the waitresses, how tough they were and how glamorous. It wasn’t what her mother had taught her to think of as beauty, the makeup hadn’t exactly been applied so that it disappeared on your skin. You could get fired if you showed up without a manicure. But their targeted competence, those girls, the way they moved through the crowd on a Saturday at 2 A.M., holding the trays high above their heads, balanced on their fingertips. She loved to watch them. She knew she never could have waitressed there. She would have been fired after one shift. She could handle the straying hands, the sour breath in her face as some summer associate asked for her number and hiccupped in her ear. But hers was a different kind of
steel. She would have looked tender and exposed out there on the floor, next to those girls.
Some of the men came in three or four times a week. The junior analysts from certain banks had the place designated as their last (or sometimes first) stop when clients were in town. They came in loud and cocky at midnight and left in the raw sunlight, six or eight hundred dollars lighter, smelling of scotch and sweat and, usually, vomit. She knew many of the waitresses were hoping to snag a fiancé here, had worked their way up to this place for that very reason, but that was another difference between them and her.
On the night Bob came in, he said nothing at first. His friends were much drunker. They all kept pulling at one another’s sleeves and howling. But he was the one who asked her to sit down, to join them for a glass of champagne.
“What do you want to bet they’ll allow it,” he said, when she reminded him she was on the clock. He had a nice smile; even at the very beginning, when she still thought all she wanted was to escape his table, she could give him that. And even now, it was still true, Isabel thought, staring at herself in the mirror, at the lines in her face that had been such a distant possibility when she was still the girl in this story. From that very first night, right up to now, she’d liked the way her husband looked. The broad cheekbones and the angular jaw, its severity even when he smiled.
Our Little Racket Page 34