her hair tumbling in her trademark flaxen waves over a pair of lightly tanned shoulders, Ainsley was every inch the Woman About Town. She had the kind of haughty aura that is particular to people accustomed to being at the center of attention anywhere they went. Ainsley’s parents were upper middle class, but socially ambitious enough to know that by sending their daughter to Exeter in Massachusetts for boarding school and then to Rollins in Florida for college, they would be giving her an opportunity to join the ranks of high society. They were right: Ainsley met Peter at a charity benefit while she was working as a summer intern for House & Home, however it wasn’t until she bumped into Peter two summers later at Piping Rock that the pair began to date. They were married a year and a half later (a picture appeared in Town & Country magazine), and Ainsley gave up her job working in Vogue’s fabled fashion closet to dedicate herself to charitable works full time, or so she told the New York Times Vows columnist at the time.
For several subsequent years, Ainsley and Peter were considered New York’s golden couple. She had beauty and charm, he, pedigree and (it was assumed) tons of old money—still the best kind. They were photographed at parties, written about in all the newspapers, celebrated everywhere. I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t thrilling to be momentarily allowed into their inner circle, even if Ainsley had kept calling me by the wrong name. (Where she got Tricia from Marcy, I’ll never know.)
I had been sitting on the couch for a while, pretending to listen to John and one of his colleagues discuss the latest round of firings at an investment bank downtown, when Peter suggested that we all do a round of shots, which, when they arrived, turned out to be closer in size to tumblers, filled close to the brim with tequila. Everyone threw theirs back in one, and I, not wanting to stand out in the crowd, followed suit. It was a bad move. The quails’ eggs and tiny tartlets might have been delicious, but they hadn’t provided much in the way of stomach lining. I was immediately drunk.
I found John in the hallway between the kitchen and dining room, talking to Ainsley. Tugging lightly on his shirt, I tried to get his attention.
He didn’t notice, so I tugged harder. ‘Honey, I’m going to get my coat,’ I said.
‘Really?’ he asked, looking at his watch.
I nodded and swayed, and John moved to steady me. But Ainsley moved faster. Clasping a skinny, sinewy arm around my waist, she pouted prettily and said in a surprisingly husky voice that I simply could not go, that she was just getting to know me. (Err, Tricia?)
‘C’mon, Marce, let’s stay a little longer,’ John seconded.
I agreed—stupid me—and whiled away some time thumbing through a stack of coffee table books (most of which featured Ainsley in some way or another) in front of the fake fireplace in the Partridges’ living room. Three-quarters of an hour later, I was no longer tipsy but tired and truly ready to go home. But when I went to find John, I stumbled into Peter, who somehow talked me into accepting a glass of Montrachet from him in the kitchen. He’d just opened the bottle, the last in a case he’d won at a charity auction and said it would be a shame not to drink it. Okay, okay, I relented. And, yes, I could have declined Peter’s offer and left the party, slipping out into the foyer and through the front door without anyone noticing, but the thing is that I really felt like it would have been rude to turn down the guy. He’d just lost his business and the majority of his savings. The least I could do was share a bottle of Montrachet with him.
From then on my recollection of events starts to get blurry. I do remember that all of us piled into a couple of cabs and headed downtown to the Gramercy Park Hotel, where there was a velvet rope that Peter and Ainsley had no trouble transcending, and inside the music was great, the vibe electric. Bottles of champagne, tequila, fresh orange juice, pomegranate juice, and soda crowded every square inch of our table. Once we were all settled, Peter handed me another drink, a tequila mixed with the pomegranate juice, and I honestly don’t remember anything of what happened after finishing it—no idea how or why I’d disrobed in front of a room full of the city’s most sophisticated, well-connected movers and shakers, or started a fight with a girl whose face and name I cannot, for the life of me, remember even to this day.
‘Honey, all of us hedge fund wives have to put up with the same Goddamn quid pro quo,’ said Gigi Ambrose.
Gigi and I were having lunch at Nello, home of the fifty-dollar plate of pasta. No joke. The smoked salmon ravioli actually costs fifty-five dollars. But despite the exorbitant prices—or maybe because of them—and the fact that Christmas was a mere three days away, the place was packed, buzzing with the kind of excitement such extravagance tends to generate. You feel the same thing walking into Bergdorf’s shoe salon, but there it’s overpriced platform heels that get everyone salivating, while at Nello, it’s the overpriced veal chops.
‘What quid pro quo?’ I asked, craning my head forward with interest.
‘Your husband may make tons of money, but you never get to see him.’
I laughed. ‘Too true.’
I took a bite of my penne rigate, which I must admit tasted like heaven—the hot and sweet sausages somehow managed to be both delicate and hearty—and surveyed the room. There was a maitre d’ hovering by the bar, nervously keeping an eye on all the tables. Waiters in black vests and white aprons tied at the waist were zipping around, taking orders, delivering plates of aromatic delicacies—artichokes drizzled in white truffle oil, pan roasted veal chops with sautéed wild mushrooms, and Chilean sea bass cooked in a lobster, saffron velouté. On one side of me a pair of older women with shopping bags at their feet pushed forty-two dollar tuna tartares around their plate; on the other side, a foursome of men, all devouring the veal and wearing wedding bands, openly ogled the lithesome young girls seated at the table next to theirs.
‘Rule Number Two,’ Gigi continued, snapping me back to attention with a flick of her hand, the same hand that happened to be sporting nine carats of flawless, colorless diamonds (Grade: F, Color: D, for those in the know). I was learning that one diamond wasn’t good enough for a Hedge Fund Bride; nothing less than three would do. Take Gigi’s engagement ring for example. There was the center stone, an emerald cut stunner that was, to my untrained eye, at least five carats, and then two triangle-shaped stones, each about two carats, flanking it. In Chicago, my three-carat engagement ring was considered flashy; here, it was barely worth flashing.
She had made it her mission that day to school me in the art of hedge fund wifehood and I, having been the ignorant newcomer I was, was most grateful for the lesson.
‘Never ask him about work. If he wants to talk about it, he will. And make sure you keep people who want stock tips, or in John’s case, predictions about fluctuations in the price of crude far away from him at social functions. There’s nothing that grates on Jeremy more than someone who wants free market advice.’
‘Is that Rule Number Three?’ I asked, trying to keep up.
‘No, three is to never talk about your own problems, especially any that might be work related, if you do happen to have a job.’
I opened my mouth to comment, but Gigi pressed on. ‘Rule Four,’ she said. ‘Keep the baby talk to a minimum. Children should never be a disturbance, especially at night.’
With that, Gigi bent her head in concentration over her fettuccine al funghi, and I couldn’t tell if she was a) focusing on the flavors, trying to discern the ingredients; b) trying not to get any of the rich mushroom and cream sauce on her ruffled silk blouse, which I assumed was made by a famous designer, and therefore wildly expensive; or c) thinking about the last thing she said, the thing about keeping children off the conversational menu.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t observed Rule Four over the previous six months. In fact, I had f lagrantly violated rules one through four. I was a fantastically shitty hedge fund wife. I didn’t fit the mold at all, but for that matter,