(She saw, now, that she had never asked, different how?)
The life your parents chose for themselves, babe, the life we used to talk about at the beginning, that won’t always fit. Can’t always be tailored to fit the life I have in mind for us now, Iz. The things your parents choose to display, the things they choose to keep close to their vests. That’s fine for them, but things change, people change. Money has changed. It means something different now, can’t you see that? Just trust me.
She’d let him tear down the old house; she’d let him buy that new apartment before they’d even put the old one on the market. “Let him,” as if she had any say. All he wanted when he asked her permission to do something was the reassurance that it wouldn’t be held against him. And all she’d asked in return, the one thing she’d ever asked from him, was that he not do anything in his own life, away from her, that would jeopardize their life here. This fucking backwater, this land of women with whom she had not a single thing in common.
Or so she’d always thought.
It had felt smart, to make sure that the other women out here knew they weren’t really her friends. It had seemed wiser to know, from the start, that these people were not rooting for her. But she couldn’t say, just now, what that wisdom was. What she’d gained from that distance, these past few months. She’d leveraged so much in her marriage against . . . what? The bet had been so big, when she married him, so big that it dwarfed caution, made it feel inconceivable that she’d ever be punished for taking that risk. She hadn’t left so much of Isabel Berkeley behind that it seemed plausible the new Isabel, this new married person she’d decided to be, could ever end up on the wrong side of fortune. Not really on the wrong side, not in the final tally.
That was his real transgression. He’d taken all the steps that led her to a room tonight in which Jim McGinniss could stand up in front of Isabel’s own child and call her husband a man who cheated on his wife. The fact that he’d allowed that meant that Bob had called her every tactic—every single thing she assumed he’d married her for—into question.
It was funny, she thought, but she’d never imagined the others would look anything like Erica Leary. She’d imagined many women in residence at the old apartment, women who were rounder, or louder. Darker hair, maybe, or more doting. Younger than her, without question. But never really a small, harsher version of herself.
She could feel Lily watching her from the other side of the kitchen. Isabel was sitting at the breakfast nook, running her hands over the table’s surface. She fought the urge to lay her cheek down to that precious reclaimed wood, its knots and slants. She crossed her arms over her stomach instead, digging her elbows into her flesh. She held the pose until the pain passed. Lily looked away.
Madison had been so little, the first time. The weekend Isabel drove out to Shelter by herself, with her baby daughter. They’d taken his car out of the garage in the city; this was before the boys, just after they’d bought in Greenwich but before she moved out full-time. It was still early in the season, too early for the summer people to be out in full force, and besides, Shelter Island had been quieter in the nineties. Everyone who was there in April was someone like Isabel’s mother, someone whose forebears had bought the house decades earlier.
She took the ferry and parked the car. She carried Madison into the house, surprising her mother, who was baking. Her mother was delighted; she held Isabel’s hand for a moment to express her pleasure. There was the usual clucking over the baby. And then Isabel told her mother about the envelope that had come to the apartment.
It had been addressed to him, but something caught her eye, some aspect of the thick cream-colored paper, the feminine lettering, the Audrey Hepburn stamp. The photographs were tucked inside, so careless and unadorned in their intimacy. Explicit pictures, but goofy ones. Silly, for lack of a better word. The woman’s handwriting on the sheet of paper so much more vicious and jagged than the loops and swirls on the envelope itself.
The letter had clearly been sent out of pure spite and rage, the howling anger of an animal with its leg caught in a trap. But what trap is she caught in? Isabel thought. I’m the one trapped. She sent these and that’s it, she can move on. I’m the one trapped. It wasn’t even two years at that point since their wedding, since Bob had insisted on a much bigger party than she’d wanted. Since he had suggested she buy a new dress rather than wear her mother’s, that she permit a Times reporter to follow her around on the day of, asking niggling questions about every last aesthetic touch. Since he had told her he wanted her to be good and pregnant by the end of the honeymoon, when she’d already said many times that she wanted to wait until thirty for kids. She’d been pregnant four months after the wedding.
She would have wanted to get married on Shelter, right out behind the house. With the Petonic behind them. But they couldn’t get the attention they deserved if they did it at her parents’ place, he’d said.
Is this it, now? The attention we deserve? She almost said it out loud, to Lily, but she didn’t want to have to explain herself.
She should have known, back then. That whatever he said, what he actually wanted was a wife like Kiki McGinniss or Suzanne Welsh. She should have known he wouldn’t want the reminders of everything that had, at one time at least, mattered to him.
“But I can’t just give up now,” she’d said to her mother, who held Madison on her lap, the baby’s feet pedaling away in the air.
“No,” her mother agreed. “We aren’t those kind of people.”
“What would you do?” Isabel asked. And her mother looked up at her, quizzical, genuinely confused by the question.
“Isabel,” her mother said. “As I would think you’d know, I would never have opened the envelope.”
That was it. They strolled to town, avoided speaking of Buck, who was abroad that spring. They walked along the windy beach just below the house. Her mother held the baby, played with her endlessly, touched her cheeks and cupped her little chin.
But she heard what her mother really meant. She’d chosen to marry someone who was not their kind of person, and now she had to devise a way to work within the new system.
But I did, she thought that night, sitting in the kitchen with Lily. I did, I did. She had explained to him very clearly, that weekend of the photographs, after the drive back from Shelter Island. And he understood, or he told her that he did. He promised her it would never happen again.
He made her all these promises, but the truth was that he could break any promise he wanted, there had never been any sword hanging over his head. She’d been as helpless as her mother before her, as helpless as Madison was now.
Even as helpless as all these other women who told themselves they hardly needed to understand what their husbands did. That it couldn’t matter less whether they knew the difference between a hedge fund and a bond shop, if they understood why insider trading was illegal. The difference between a margin call and a collateral call.
Isabel knew that most of these women would ride it out, the rest of this shimmering, soap bubble year, without ever fully understanding the underlying structure of a credit-default swap, what role the naked shorts had played, what mortgage-backed securities even were. They’d tell themselves that an idiot in Ohio, who should have known he couldn’t afford to own a home, had no bearing on their husbands or their work, their families. They’d wait for the rest of the world to lose interest, which would happen. Bob would go down, like a ship sinking beneath black waves far from land, and the rest of them would wait for the whirlpool to consume itself, and resume swimming.
“I’m going to make some coffee,” Lily said, breaking the reverie. Isabel nodded. She wanted to tell Lily to go to sleep, but she knew Madison might come home and choose to speak only to one of them. And she had no reason to believe it would be her, and not Lily.
“Yes,” she said, “please do.”
She couldn’t fault these other women, could she? They were just hewing to the deals th
ey’d struck. If her husband had done the same, she wouldn’t be here now. And besides, Isabel Berkeley had always prided herself on understanding his career. On knowing the lingo, dropping the terms. But what good had that done? Where’s the solace in understanding every single phrase of what’s being said when your husband is on a television screen, seated before Congress, looking like it’s all he can do to keep from upturning the table itself and strangling the men looking down on him?
All these years I’ve told myself that he’s fierce, that he doesn’t just love the nickname because it makes him feel big. But tonight, he left his daughter standing there, alone. She had to spit at him to get him even to look her in the eye.
That was when the phone rang, and Teddy told her that he had a “squirrely looking” boy down at the gate, a boy who had driven her daughter home.
WHEN MADISON CAME IN through the mud room, she was a woman on fire. Her hair was wild, her makeup trailing away from the corners of her eyes in rivulets. She still had everything, Isabel noted: her shoes, her purse, every piece of clothing. But she looked, somehow, destroyed.
She stared at Isabel.
“You had the security guy question him?” she said.
“I didn’t have anyone do anything,” Isabel said. “You showed up with a stranger, of course they questioned him.”
“Well, that’s great,” Madison said. “Fantastic. He already can barely even pretend he’s interested in me for more than one reason, but this is great. This is just my final humiliation.”
“Okay, let’s—” Lily said, rising from the table, but Madison moved back suddenly, as if the two women in the kitchen were predators.
“Why are you both up,” she said.
“Because we were worried,” Isabel said.
Isabel knew that she was a bad mother in one way: she rarely hugged her daughter. For some reason, it always felt so much thornier than it did with the twins. The twins, she would kiss and cuddle and lovingly maul with abandon. Their embraces were so unquestioned, so simple. But with Madison, it always felt insincere. Like she was hugging her daughter to prove that she loved her, when so many other things she did every day were much more straightforward displays of her obvious love for Madison.
As far as Isabel could remember, Madison’s grandmother had been much the same. They had not been a demonstrative pair when Isabel was growing up, and so it had been all the more surprising when her mother had taken to Madison, the first grandchild, with such gleeful, explosive affection. She’d still been herself. She hadn’t become a more casual woman, not in the slightest. But it no longer seemed to stiffen her shoulders, the idea of embracing another person.
Isabel could remember one night out on Shelter, a visit shortly before her mother died, when Madison had been angry. They’d had some fight, not even a fight, surely it had been minor. Madison dropped a glass while clearing the table, or left the suede ballet flats she’d begged for all summer outside during an afternoon thunderstorm. Something like that. And Isabel had responded, she felt certain, with an appropriate level of censure. She’d yelled at her daughter, yes, but nothing out of line.
A few hours later she’d been upstairs, calling the city from the hall phone. She looked down and saw her mother out by the pool, walking to its far end. Madison was on the edge, her feet in the water. Her shoulders were shaking. And Isabel’s mother walked right over, without pause, and slipped her feet out of their kitten heels. She sat down next to her granddaughter, put one hand to her back, and just left it there while Madison shook with sobs. She stayed there until Madison folded, until she allowed her grandmother to wrap her in both arms, kissing the very top of her head.
Presumably, at some point when the hysteria had died down, they’d spoken. Isabel didn’t know. She had already walked away from the window by then. And it bothered her for days, the way this closeness had skipped a generation, until it occurred to her: the same thing that had revealed this painful truth had also suggested its salve. Someday, Madison would have a daughter, a girl Isabel might be able to draw close without question, without pause. It wasn’t too late for Isabel, not entirely.
She’d thought about that often, this year. How easy it might be, to hug Madison’s daughter one day.
But now, Madison was standing in the middle of the kitchen. She looked like an open wound. We were worried, Isabel had said.
She began to walk toward her daughter. Every part of Madison’s body recoiled from her approach, but still Isabel walked toward her.
“Are you okay?”
Madison stood completely still, and looked at no one.
“Are you all right,” Isabel repeated.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t mean that. I’m talking about Chip, Madison. Did anything else happen?”
“Oh,” Madison said. “Chip is great. Chip’s life will keep going and he’s not going to think about me ever again. I have had absolutely zero effect on anything Chip thinks about the world.”
“Madison, what—”
“I can’t believe him,” her daughter cried. “I can’t believe him.”
Madison bent at the waist, just as she had when she was a thick-armed toddler with a sharp pain in her stomach. She dropped her purse to the floor, crossed her arms over her breasts. She allowed herself to be pulled, with one arm, into her mother’s chest. She allowed herself to be held.
Lily looked at them, then looked back at the folders on the table.
“I’ll take them with me,” she murmured.
Isabel shook her head again. She bent her neck to speak directly into her daughter’s ear.
“Do you want Lily to stay?”
Madison buried her head more deeply in Isabel’s chest.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You can’t be proud like that, and act like you know better than every other idiot, and then also be a liar.”
“I know, sweetheart. I know. We can discuss this later.”
But her daughter barreled on.
“I thought I knew,” Madison said. “I thought I knew more—I thought I had all the pieces. He made it sound like he was telling me everything.”
“I know,” Isabel said. “I know how it must have seemed.”
“But it was going on the whole time?”
Isabel didn’t answer, and Madison erupted with a fresh sob.
“I thought I had all this inside information that other people were too stupid to see,” she said. “I thought people hated him because they were jealous. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”
It was the repetition, most of all, that made her seem so young, so lost, that seemed to shrink her before her mother’s very eyes. It was the senseless repetition of a useless phrase that stirred Isabel’s anger, like a cold object tossed into boiling water.
“I can take her upstairs,” Lily said.
“No,” Isabel said. “There’s nothing more to do, Lily. You should go to bed yourself.”
“But I can stay.” Lily looked again at the folders on the table.
“But we don’t need you to,” Isabel said, letting the chill creep into her voice. She could indulge this for a few minutes more, Lily’s desire to feel central to the solution, but after that she’d be issuing an order, not an invitation.
Lily was clearly angry, but she had no other choice, she knew that as well as Isabel did. She left through the mud room.
Isabel waited for Madison to gather herself, to wipe at her cheeks. She offered Madison her hand and they walked upstairs. Madison let herself be undressed, let her mother slide the white nightgown over her arms, sat still while Isabel wiped at her makeup with a moist washcloth. Isabel could see her capitulation, could see the relief flood her limbs, and felt a pang at having denied Madison something for which she clearly had such a hunger, such a need. Her daughter didn’t care that she was being comforted by someone equally furious. She just wanted the comfort itself.
Isabel turned off the light and crawled into bed beside Madison.
>
“Did Lily show you that stuff?” Madison asked, only once. Isabel nodded, pressed her lips to her daughter’s hair.
“Dad was lying to me, wasn’t he?” Madison continued. “That stuff doesn’t prove anything, does it? He lied to me. So many times, Mom, we talked about it. I asked him the exact question, and he lied to me so many times.”
“Go to sleep.”
“He kept acting like he didn’t deserve what was happening,” Madison said. “But nothing bad has even happened to him yet. He just wanted me to be on his side already, before anything happened. He just didn’t want to feel guilty.”
“Sleep, Madison,” Isabel said. “Just sleep on it, for tonight.”
Madison spoke only once more, her words wisps into the dark room, before she fell asleep.
“I thought I got to see this version of him no one else knew about,” she said.
Isabel stayed there until daylight was beginning to stain the sky just at the edges of the trees out back. She’d forgotten how pretty it was, the view from this bedroom. That was how long it had been, she thought with pain, since she’d come in here to be with her daughter.
In the end, Madison had been the one who’d taken best to life in Connecticut, wedged somewhere between city and country, between wildness and the manicured. Her daughter loved it there; it was her home.
That’s what we’re robbing her of, and it will come entirely as a shock to her. None of this was ever a gamble, for her. This was her home.
Isabel went back down to the kitchen. She sat at the table, with the papers, for nearly two more hours. She did not read everything, but she read a great deal. She understood most of it, not all. She recognized some of the names, some of the e-mail addresses, and others were unknown to her. There was nothing there that could remain a secret for long; that seemed clear. If he thought he could bury any of it, he was dreaming. It was just a question of timing, and proof. It was only a question of who would get this information, and how quickly.
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