Marcy.’
‘Then I guess we have a deal,’ I said.
‘That’s my girl.’
‘I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?’
Oh, if only I’d known.
FOUR The Worst Hedge Fund Wife on the Planet
Heaving myself out of bed, I guzzled down the rest of my glass of water and threw on an old T-shirt and a pair of John’s boxers. Sunlight poured through a gap in our curtains, illuminating a wedge of vanilla carpet where my outfit from the previous night lay in a sad little heap. I picked it up and tossed it in the little hamper we used to collect our dry cleaning, then retrieved my shoes, a pair of leg-lengthening, bank-breaking black pumps, and my quilted black satin clutch, both from Chanel, both carelessly scattered around the room. I shelved them in their appropriate tissue-lined boxes while at the same time eyeing the floor for my stockings and Spanx.
Oh right, I’d left those at the club.
Along with my self-respect.
Nice.
I needed coffee, lots of it. Without it, I knew I would be unable to function for the entire day, not that I had anything in particular to do, but still. I slipped on my fleece slippers and padded over to the kitchen, where I sloshed some milk in a saucepan, ground some coffee beans and dumped the entire grinder’s worth of grounds into the liner. Once it was brewed, I poured a couple cups of the coffee into the saucepan with the warmed milk and then emptied the whole mixture into the red-and-white snowflake mug I’d used since high school. If there was one thing I had down to a science, it was making coffee just the way I liked it.
Taking my first gulp of the hot, dark liquid, I peered inside the refrigerator, where I found the signs of a drunken, middle-of-the-night food binge—the pumpkin pie I had made two days earlier was almost entirely eaten and one of my earrings was nestled in between a halfeaten round of Camembert and a carton of orange juice that had been full when we had left for the Partridges but was now mostly gone. Feeling even more disgusted with myself, I closed the door of the fridge and looked down at my stomach. It was bloated and distended.
Gross.
My head pounded behind my left eye socket, and without thinking I reached up to apply pressure on it, causing a thunderbolt of pain to rip through my head as soon as my fingers made contact. I stooped down to check my reflection in the mirrored backsplash, only to have my fears confirmed: I had the beginnings of a black eye. A real, Oscar-de-la-Hoya-worthy shiner. It was gonna be ugly.
Gulping down another mouthful of coffee, I started trying to piece together the previous night’s timeline. There had been three glasses of champagne, which I had downed in rapid succession. Not advisable, obviously, but I always drink quickly when I’m nervous, and that night, surrounded by John’s hyperwealthy colleagues and their expensively maintained wives, I certainly had cause to be. You see, it was pretty clear that most of the other wives at the Partridges’ party grew up with nannies and private school kilts hemmed just so, while I had carried a house key around my neck on a dingy white shoelace and braved the Minnesota winters in multigenerational hand-me-downs. Even last night, wearing a new designer dress and multiple coats of a new mascara the woman behind the cosmetics counter swore was what all the movie stars use, I still felt like a prairie girl among princesses.
However, for John, I put on a brave face. He seemed to be reveling in our transition into a higher tax bracket and new city as much as I was floundering in it. Since being recruited by Zenith from his desk at the Merc, John had been completely obsessed with his work. His job as a specialist in trading energy derivatives required him to, for example, predict, hopefully correctly, how much the price of a barrel of oil was going to rise over the next quarter and why. It was all tremendously complicated, time-consuming, and stressful, but it turned out that John was really good at it, and in the span of less than a year, he’d managed to make the fund an obscene amount of money, which had in turn made us wealthier than we’d ever dared to dream.
For anyone without an intimate understanding of what hedge funds do, in a nutshell they invest other people’s money. We’re talking super-wealthy individuals who have the five to twenty million dollars you need to play ball with these funds just lying around, gathering dust, twiddling their little green thumbs. If everything goes right, the investors get back whatever profit (or return) is made, minus twenty percent and two percent of the total investment that the fund keeps as compensation. (A few managers take a full fifty percent of the profits, but they’re more the exception than the rule.)
For a long stretch of time everything did go right—the rich got richer and a bunch of guys in the right place at the right time minted huge fortunes virtually overnight. And then the economy tanked, and the party was suddenly over.
John and I were a total anomaly. While we were upgrading our furniture and researching luxury vacations, the rest of Wall Street was taking it on the chin. The banks had all underestimated their exposure to the subprime mortgage industry meltdown and had been forced to write off billions of dollars. As they started reining in on the amount of loans they were making to small and large businesses, deal flow slowed and with fewer deals in the pipeline, profits dipped. Soon thereafter pink slips started to fly. The Federal Reserve intervened to save the banks from going under, but at the expense of the dollar, which sank even lower in value. To make matters worse, the boost U.S. exports received as a result of the weak dollar was far smaller than previously anticipated or hoped for, and the president’s pro-ethanol policy was making the cost of all food higher as Midwestern farmers ditched less profitable crops in order to grow corn. To top it all off the Saudis were once again raising the price of crude, mainly because of the weakening dollar. The long run of American prosperity was coming to an end.
But not for us. Ours was just starting.
Although we were lucky, I didn’t feel like it. Moving to New York had been difficult for me. Okay, gut wrenching. Shortly after our relocation, I had gotten pregnant. A dream, since we’d spent a year trying before it finally happened. You could say that I was—and am
- totally obsessed with babies. I love the way they smell, the sounds they make when they eat, their tiny little hands making angry little fists when they cry. It hadn’t mattered to me that I vomited five times a day and could only stomach Saltines and cheese sandwiches for the duration of the whole first trimester. I’d watch those Gerber baby commercials on television and just melt with happiness. I was going to be a mom.
Everything was going great until I hit the twenty-week mark and started bleeding. First it was just some spotting, but when the flow got heavier, my doctor put me on monitored bed rest in the hospital and they shot me full of drugs that were supposed to help. But it was too late. I miscarried. It wasn’t meant to be, the doctor said. We’d try again, John said. A lot of people said a lot of things, but nothing could allay the pain. My world was black. I couldn’t stop crying. For weeks, all I did was cry. Cry and eat cheese—Burrata, fresh off the plane from Tuscany, weeping with moisture, and Stilton from England, massive slabs of the salty, piquant stuff. John brought me only the best, unpasteurized, illegal cheese. I could eat it now: I wasn’t pregnant anymore. There was no danger of ingesting a piece of Listeria-laden fromage and losing the baby.
I had sat on our new couch, my misery wrapped around me like a blanket, and thought of my baby. I wondered what he would have looked like, whether he would have inherited John’s blondish hair or my dark locks, John’s lean, athletic build, or my softer, shorter one. Would he have been popular? Bookish? Funny? Preferred pancakes to waffles, bacon to sausages? I’d never know. All I could do was imagine. Imagine and then weep. I told John that I wanted us to move back to Chicago. New York held only unhappiness for me. I missed our old lives and I missed our friends.
‘We’ll make more,’ he assured me.
Now in the kitchen, I considered the empty seat at the breakfast table and silently cursed John for making me