The End of Normal

by Stephanie Madoff Mack

  “Because this show was just such a part of us,” he replied ruefully.

  Mark had once grabbed my black running shorts instead of his own while packing for a business trip, then decided to squeeze into them for a workout when he arrived, reasoning that no one else would be using the hotel gym at ten in the morning. He was mortified when he strutted in wearing his girl shorts only to find his TV hero, 24 star Kiefer Sutherland, staring back from a treadmill.

  “Did you say anything to him?” I wanted to know.

  “No,” Mark admitted. “I was too embarrassed.”

  “You should’ve said you were wearing your wife’s running shorts!” I teased.

  Neither Mark nor I liked to dress up, and the only exception we were likely to make to our jeans-or-gym-clothes routine in the off-hours was for a mandatory charity dinner or auction to support cancer research. This had become a cause for the family since Andy’s battle with lymphoma and the death from leukemia of Roger Madoff, the only son of Bernie’s younger brother, Peter. Another young Madoff cousin was a cancer survivor, too. (I remember being at one of those silent auctions and Ruth wanted to buy me something. “Just pick something. Anything!” she urged. “C’mon, I need to find some way to enjoy this disease!”)

  Most evenings, Mark and I had dinner at some favorite neighborhood haunt, occasionally trying a new place Mark had noticed in a restaurant review. Despite his considerable resources, he hated to spend money unnecessarily and didn’t have lavish tastes. He got his hair cut at the local barber, often flew coach unless we were vacationing with his parents and hitching a ride on their private jet, and bought cool but inexpensive bohemian-chic jewelry for me.

  He wasn’t a cheapskate by any means, and didn’t believe in setting a household allowance, but I always consulted him before making any purchase over a few hundred dollars. If it was something major, like an antique or a dress for a special occasion, he would never refuse, but would always urge me to carefully think about it first. I had no problem with that. I wasn’t a big shopper, anyway.

  Eating out and going to the theater—Mark’s deepest passion—were our biggest extravagances. Mark would see anything and everything onstage, including fringe productions where I would be snorting back a giggling fit in the front row during some overwrought monologue while he elbowed me in the ribs, urging me to stop. When he was being courted for the board of the Public Theater, we attended a dinner for the new creative director. Everyone was in earnest conversation about Billy Crystal’s new one-man show, 700 Sundays. I had fallen asleep during the acclaimed performance. “Stephanie,” Mark had whispered, “he can see you! You have to stay awake!”

  “So, Stephanie,” one of the board members politely asked me, “what’s some theater that you like?”

  “My favorite play is Billy Joel’s Movin’ Out,” I answered honestly. One of the things I loved most about Mark was his utter lack of pretension. He never expected me to perform, and he never tried to be anything other than his true self. Authenticity was more important to him than adulation. “Mr. Fun,” he called himself in joking reference to his straight-arrow reputation.

  Mark was an early riser, usually out of bed by five thirty a.m., instantly and thoroughly awake. He relished that quiet dawn hour or so to himself, and his routine never varied. He would brew whatever coffee had intrigued him at Starbucks that week, and the delicious aroma would waft through the apartment while he settled in to read the papers and e-mail articles he thought might be interesting to friends or family members—not financial news, but theater reviews, human interest pieces, travel stories, and such. He was an avid reader, and if he read a book he thought a friend might enjoy, he would send them a copy.

  Once he was done with the morning news, Mark would make the same revolting smoothie for breakfast every single morning: yogurt, orange juice, frozen berries or mangoes, and prunes. I dozed through the whir of the blender out of self-defense; I had politely tried a sip or two of the “shit shake” to please him while we were dating, but once we were married, there was no way my stomach was making that sacrifice again. I would get up while he was showering, and he would greet me with eager plans for the evening. “Let me have a sip of coffee before you start asking where we should go for dinner,” I would invariably protest. He’d kiss me good-bye and be out the door and on his way to the subway at seven thirty, the scent of his Old Spice lingering after he left. He wore that aftershave for as long as I knew him. I think he must have been seduced by the nautical theme. I loved the way he smelled.

  Mark and I would chat by e-mail throughout the day; he was always sending me quick love notes or quotes (“Love is what makes two people sit in the middle of a bench when there’s plenty of room at both ends”). He would usually try to slip away from his desk for a quick workout during the day; I was an exercise buff, too, but he was more focused on overall health than I was, and our different approaches were always laughably visible when it came to food. I would run ten miles on the treadmill and devour a big steak at dinner; Mark would have fish. Waiters were constantly mixing up our orders, assuming he was the one with the longshoreman’s appetite.

  Mark himself was a great chef, but cooking was something we liked to do on weekends, as an activity we could share. He was intuitive in the kitchen; I was a die-hard follower of recipes, once diligently following the “Chili for a Crowd” recipe in my Silver Palate Cookbook because it sounded so good, never mind the fact that I had a lobster pot full of chili for fifty people at the end of the day. “Why not cut the recipe?” Mark had suggested. I adamantly refused to change course, and true to his keep-the-peace nature, Mark backed down even though he knew he was right. We filled Tupperware containers with the leftovers, and he took them to work for his staff the next day. Food always disappeared fast on the trading floor. Twice a year, the company would host White Castle eat-offs, ordering five hundred burgers for the staff and then holding a contest to see who could eat the most in the least amount of time. Mark loved it purely as a spectator sport; he was too health-conscious to join in. His uncle Peter usually won.

  There was a consistency and predictability to Mark that I found both reassuring and endearing. I’d dated my fair share of scumbags, cheats, and overgrown adolescents interspersed with some keepers, and I knew immediately that Mark was different from them all. From the very beginning, I didn’t have to worry about any game-playing or secret agendas with Mark; he was honest and straightforward, to a fault at times. I knew he would never do anything to hurt me. There was a clarity to him, cool and clean as water. Mark Madoff would never be the life of the party, but you would enjoy having him there.

  I think my occasional unpredictability appealed to him as much as his predictability did to me. My sense of humor and adventure was wackier and more impulsive than his, and I loved him all the more for not trying to mold me into some rich socialite wifey-wife. We always celebrated the anniversary of our first blind date, returning to the same restaurant where we had met that night. When I started talking about getting a tattoo around the anniversary of our Casimir date in 2007, Mark called me all excited. “You’re not going to believe this, but the coolest tattoo parlor just opened next to Casimir,” he reported. “Why don’t we get your tattoo there after dinner?” We marched into the tattoo parlor as soon as we’d finished our meal that night.

  “We’re about to close,” the tattoo guy said.

  “I just want the outline of a star,” I explained, pointing to my forearm.

  “Okay,” he agreed, “I guess I could do it, but I’m tired and I was out drinking all last night . . .”

  We passed. The next morning, Mark woke up and the first thing he said was, “How bummed are you? You could’ve woken up with a tattoo!”

  “I know!” I pouted.

  I was still psyched to do it; I wanted to wear proof that I had that kind of courage, to flaunt it. After Mark left for work, I called the tatt
oo parlor and booked an appointment. When I arrived that afternoon, the proprietor appeared. His name was Alex. Every visible inch of his skin—and presumably what wasn’t visible—was covered with tattoos, and his lobes had those big peg-hole piercings in them that make them droop like basset hound ears. He was bald, but not in a friendly-neighborhood-deli-guy bald way. He looked scary and mean and I sat there shaking all over. Another patron turned to me. He was about to endure a four-hour session to decorate the entire side of his torso, from armpit to hip.

  “First time?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’re you getting done?”

  “Just an outline of a star.”

  “Oh, that’ll take less than five minutes. Nothing to it. You bring an iPod?”

  “No.”

  “You bring something to chew on while they’re needling you?”

  “Um, no.”

  He opened his meaty fist and slapped a piece of grape Hubba Bubba gum in my hand.

  When it was over, I called Mark, exhilarated.

  “I did it, I did it!”

  “You’re kidding,” he said. He was surprised later to see that I’d opted to fill the star in instead of keeping it an outline (“The edges will round and blur,” the tattoo artist had warned me), but he still loved it. I was cool, and he was vicariously cool. I debuted my ink at his daughter’s bat mitzvah, and we both relished the Oh my gaaaaawd looks of horror on the faces of all the proper Connecticut wives there.

  Despite my sense of derring-do, Mark was the one who was so secure about who he was, so confident that he was doing what he was meant to do, fulfilling a destiny that was clearly his. I envied that so much. Becoming a Madoff made me rethink not just who I was, but who I wanted to be. Maybe it was because I no longer had to search for love that I was driven to search for purpose. I had wanted to become a doctor since third grade, when I went on my first deep-sea fishing trip with my folks and watched my stepfather fillet our catch on board, pointing out the fish’s organs to me as he worked. Biology fascinated me—science was my favorite subject throughout my school years. As an undergrad at Franklin & Marshall College, though, I majored in art and focused more on my social life than academics.

  My parents pressured me to find a job as soon as I graduated, and life seemed to flow forth with no particular direction or design on my part after that. One of my stepdad’s clients was John F. Kennedy Jr., and two weeks after I got my diploma, Marty was able to finagle an internship for me at George, the political lifestyle magazine John had just launched. It was all very hip and glamorous, and I managed to parlay the internship into a staff position, working my way through the junior ranks to associate photo editor. It was a young, tight-knit office that crackled with creative energy and high spirits—pranks were big, and the guys thought it was hilarious to lock me in the snack closet, which I would loudly protest but secretly look forward to.

  More than anything, though, my three-year stint at George showed me there was a difference between following ambition and pursuing a passion. I was surrounded by brilliant people who believed fervently in what they were doing and were driven by a sense of purpose. We worked hard and played hard together, and for the first time, I felt like I was part of something exciting.

  Despite his fame and the constant media attention, John was remarkably down-to-earth and approachable, the kind of boss who would bring back T-shirts or other little souvenirs for everyone on the staff whenever he returned from his latest trip to Vietnam or some other exotic place. The last time we saw him was at a routine staff meeting before he flew to Martha’s Vineyard for his cousin Rory’s wedding. When the small plane he was piloting disappeared that Friday night, we all clung to the hope that he had made it all up, that it was just some grand prank so he and Carolyn could escape the relentless paparazzi. We were heartbroken when searchers found the wreckage and then the bodies. George was quickly sold and went dark within a year. I bounced around a few women’s magazines before a friend recommended me for the job with Narciso Rodriguez. It was fun, but not fulfilling once I was engaged and had the rest of my adult life to think about. I quit just before my wedding.

  When we returned from our honeymoon in the Seychelles, I started casting about for something to do. I still desperately wanted to find my life’s calling. I wanted to be able to say, “I’m a . . . ,” but I didn’t know how to fill in that blank. I just knew that “I’m a wife” was never meant to be my final, complete answer.

  I remembered how much I had enjoyed a cake-decorating class I signed up for as a distraction years earlier after a boyfriend and I had broken up. Maybe I was the next Mrs. Fields and just needed to let my sweet tooth choose my life’s path. I dropped in at the Institute of Culinary Education to look at their degree programs. “I think I might like to become a pastry chef,” I told Mark that evening. I suspect, in hindsight, that it was really the idea of being in school—any school—that excited me. Now that I’m past the partying age, I could happily spend my life in college, pursuing degree after degree with no plans to graduate. Even buying school supplies gives me a rush. I wouldn’t have balked as much as I did about registering for wedding gifts if Staples and a lifetime supply of colored index cards had been an option.

  “If it’s something you really want to do, Steph, you should do it,” Mark said. “I just want you to do anything that makes you happy.” He wouldn’t even enjoy the fruits of my labor—he followed a gluten-free diet as a result of celiac disease, and his favorite dessert was sorbet. When he was courting me, he had totally charmed me by inviting me back to his place for dessert, which turned out to be a sorbet picnic on a blanket he spread in his living room, where he grandly arranged his little Häagen-Dazs tubs of orchard peach, mango, lemon, and strawberry.

  For better or for worse, once I get an idea in my head, I immediately want to take action. Before I knew it, I was wearing a white chef’s coat and learning everything you could possibly want to know about the molecular structure of a French baguette. My art degree came in handy when it came to decorating—I have proud memories and photographic evidence of perfect pink sugar roses and a whimsical white chocolate jellyfish with pulled-sugar tentacles—but my attention to detail didn’t extend to the more mundane tasks. Making batter in gigantic industrial mixers sort of scared me, and a lot of the fun goes out of baking a cake when you’re slamming out seventy of them in a single day.

  This blind spot in my commitment became clear one afternoon when we were paired in teams to bake cakes and I was in charge of mixing the ingredients. When I pulled our cake out of the oven, my teammate looked stricken. Our classmates gathered around to inspect it. “That’s a weird color,” people kept saying (and not, I might add, in a supportive way—culinary students, I had discovered, are strangely intense). I studied my cake. They were right. Something didn’t look right. We sliced it into samples for tasting, and everyone began spitting it out. As soon as I bit into my piece, I realized what I’d done: The recipe called for five cups of salt and ten cups of sugar; I’d reversed them.

  I finished the five-month program, but bailed on the internship that was required to get a degree. Stick a fork in me, I was done.

  Fortunately, I was able to put my identity crisis on hold temporarily, because finding a new place to live became a priority. Our apartment building had become one nightmare after another—management couldn’t seem to conquer the rat problem or fix the temperamental elevator, and the apartment above ours was like a nightclub with the loud parties that kept us awake every weekend, which was odd, since it was supposedly owned by Swiss bankers. When our realtor showed us a loft around the corner on Mercer Street, we both gave a thumbs-up to the location and the space, but we hated the layout—the previous owners had put up too many walls, carving the airy great room into choppier, smaller spaces. The place had great bones, though, so we took it, and I threw myself into supervising renovations. We
were halfway into the project when a slight redesign became necessary.

  We were going to need a nursery.

  I had known going into the relationship with Mark that there was a good possibility a divorced dad wouldn’t want to have more children, and the more I fell in love with him, the more I convinced myself that I was okay with that, because we were so happy together. He was enough. And while I’d grown up assuming I’d have kids someday, I hadn’t felt the physical baby-lust some of my friends had. The closest I’d come was when my puppy-clock went off and we ended up getting Grouper, right after the wedding.

  In a weird way, it was Bernie and Ruth who unknowingly changed my mind about motherhood. Seeing the way they adored Kate and Daniel, as well as Andy’s two daughters, I realized that I would never feel like we were a real family—or like I was a full-fledged member of theirs—without children of our own.

  When I broached the subject, though, Mark was ambivalent. His visits with Kate and Daniel were every other weekend by then, plus Tuesday nights, and he liked the freedom that gave us. Did we really want to be tied down by a baby? And he was already forty—would it be fair for our child to have an “old” father? Mark was a worrier by nature, and he wondered whether he would be tempting fate, too. “I already have two healthy children,” he would say, leaving the “what if” hanging out there darkly.

  I couldn’t disagree. We could move when and where we wanted, eat at great restaurants every day, and enjoy romantic weekends or vacations away. I had the perfect husband and the perfect life; I would have envied anyone who had what I had. But more and more of my friends were having kids, as well as the office wives I came to know casually through Mark’s work, and my feelings on the subject were getting stronger and stronger. I wanted to be a mom.