how to be gracious. They also tend to only want to talk about shopping, their last session with the physical trainer (whom you get the sneaking suspicion they might be having an affair with), or their last trip to the dermatologist’s office (ditto). They have kids, but you never hear about them unless they’re referencing a plastic surgery procedure, as in, ‘I had the breast lift six months after I gave birth to fill-in-the-blank Junior.’ Stephanie Seymour wives take the whole yummy mummy thing to another level, make that universe.
Without a doubt, Caroline Reinhardt was a prime example.
The third kind of HFW, the Former Secretary, is self-explanatory. Their husbands were too lazy or busy (or both) to go look for a wife, so they simply married the first girl who did a decent enough job organizing their lives at the office. They also never talk back and give surprisingly good blow jobs. Former Secretaries are often the snobbiest of all HFWs because they feel so insecure about their lowly backgrounds, and tend to be the most protective of their territory (i.e., husbands) because they have the most to lose. Unlike the Stephanie Seymours, they don’t have good looks to fall back on, and since they aren’t terribly charming, they also don’t have many friends who would side with them in a big city divorce battle. After hearing this description, it shocked me when Jill said that none other than Dahlia Kemp was this cat-egory’s reigning queen.
‘That’s the point, you’re not supposed to be able to spot them. Their whole raison d’être is to blend in with the other HFWs,’ Jill said.
The fourth category of wife, the Socialite, cares about one thing and one thing only: social status. She’s as vain as the Stephanie Seymour, as connected as the Westminster, as cutthroat as the Former Secretary, but has a past as cloudy as the East River. Even the ones that come from upper-middle-class backgrounds, like Ainsley Partridge, have skeletons bursting out of their closets, which, it should be noted, are stuffed with borrowed dresses they just ‘happened’ to forget to return. The Socialite, Jill said, was a shameless cheapskate and never paid for anything—not her clothes, her hair, her makeup, her transportation, her gym membership, or her meals. The list goes on and on. In fact, if there is one way to tell a Socialite from the rest of the HFWs it’s that she will stick you with the bill for lunch while the other four won’t even let you see it.
The Workaholic, on the other hand, will inform you that you’ll be splitting the bill even before the waiter takes your drink order—and even though both of you know she’ll be expensing it, along with the black town car hovering outside the restaurant’s front door and the holiday gift—a crate of halfway decent California cabernet—she’ll be sending you in December. Like her husband, the Workaholic is married firstly to her high-powered, although not-quite-so-lucrative job as a magazine publisher/interior decorator/real-estate broker/corporate lawyer. She has no children and has talked herself into believing that she’ll be able to easily reproduce up until the age of fifty. But before you start feeling too sorry for the Workaholic, remember that she has a closet full of perfectly tailored Akris suits and Manolo Blahnik heels, takes pleasure in tearing her workplace underlings to shreds, and has a seven-figure bank account in the Cayman Islands that even her husband doesn’t know exists. ‘What’s his is mine and what’s mine is mine,’ is her motto. Welcome to the hedge fund wives’ version of women’s lib.
Of course, the Workaholic’s exact opposite, the Breeder, is hardly a poster child for the feminist movement either. Of all the hedge fund wives, the Breeder is the easiest to identify. She’s often sporting a big, pregnant belly and either carrying a new tot in a shearling-lined Louis Vuitton baby carrier or pushing one in a Bugaboo stroller. And in case you happen to catch her without one of her three, four, or five children, she wears their baubleequivalents—little enamel and gold shoes—on a chain around her neck.
By the time Jill had finished schooling me on the seven types of hedge fund wives, the cake plates had been cleared and Caroline had opened all of her gifts (I’d never seen so much Tiffany silver in my life). Jill walked me down to the entry foyer, where we were both given our gift bags and stood waiting for our coats when Ainsley sidled up to Jill to ask her if she was coming to her annual holiday party. ‘I can’t come. Glenn’s parents are expecting us in Oyster Bay that weekend,’ she said.
‘Oh really, that’s too bad,’ Ainsley pouted.
‘Why don’t you invite Marcy and her husband John?’ Jill suggested.
Ainsley protested, stammering through a half-cooked explanation that it was really just a small get-together and her husband Peter was already complaining about the number of people she’d invited. Jill pointed out that since she wasn’t coming, it wasn’t like John and I would be adding to the final number of guests. I felt stupid standing there as the girls argued about me, but I’d also visited the champagne fountain enough times over the course of the afternoon to dull my sense of shame and self-pity.
‘I suppose two more isn’t a big deal,’ Ainsley finally growled at Jill, tossing a handful of her long, pale blond hair behind her back. She turned to face me. ‘The party is in two weeks, Jill can fill you in on the rest,’ she said. Then she grabbed her fur from a patiently waiting maid and stomped outside.
‘Now you get to see Ainsley’s apartment and meet some of the other wives who weren’t here today,’ Jill said. She was quite pleased with herself, having exercised her considerable social power for seemingly good use.
‘I know. I can’t wait, I just wish that you were going to be there.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ she said before wafting outdoors into the brilliant sunshine, ‘as long as you don’t wear that coat.’
THREE Missing Spanx and Other Morning-after Anxieties
Two weeks later, on the morning after the Partridge’s annual Christmas party, I woke up with a lethal case of cottonmouth, throbbing head, and little memory of what had happened after half-past one the night before. Plus I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d done something really life-altering embarrassing, like maybe-I-need-to-move-to-Dubai-now embarrassing. Then the phone rang, punctuating the merciful silence of my darkened, cool bedroom with a sound so shrill, so loud, it made my brain feel like it was imploding on itself, and I lunged for the bedside table to snap it up, if only to prevent it from ringing again.
‘Hello?’ I croaked.
‘Good morning.’ It was John, my husband, who was predictably at work even though it was a Sunday, and according to the clock on my bedside table, not even nine o’clock.
‘Oh, I get it—you’re being ironic,’ I said.
I quickly calculated: The man had had at most four hours’ sleep the previous night. How and for God’s sake why he had made it into work when his appearance wasn’t required was beyond me. Was he in a bad mood because he felt just as hung over as I did or because of something else? Something involving me and the bottle of tequila with which I had spent the better portion of last night familiarizing myself ?
‘How are you feeling?’ John asked humorlessly.
‘About as bad as I sound, maybe worse,’ I said. ‘What happened last night anyway? I don’t remember anything after we ordered that second bottle of Patron.’
‘So you don’t remember the incident?’ he asked.
‘Incident? What incident?’ I didn’t like the sound of that word. It sounded like something that required the involvement of the police and lawyers, documents and affidavits, judges and juries. This couldn’t be good.
‘There was an altercation at the bar,’ John continued.
‘With who?’
‘With whom,’ he corrected me.
My husband, the grammar nut. I blamed his pedantry on his mother, a former middle school English teacher