Making friends in America was so easy. You could meet a stranger at a bus stop and be their best friend three days later. But in London, it was different. People were much more guarded. So, before I made any true friends, I got to know everybody in my neighborhood and all the employees at the places where I shopped. I became best friends with the guy who worked at the Floris counter at Peter Jones. I would wave to the fishmonger in Chelsea Square whenever I passed by, and the butcher at Partridges knew me by name. This, by the way, is still something I do today. I get to know my community, and I value my community.
The first real friend I made in London was a woman named Anne. One night, Ralph and I were out walking and he pointed to a house and said, “My boss lives there. He runs all of Lehman London.” Since he knew what I was thinking, he added, “Do not go knocking on that door tomorrow.”
Well, the very next day, can you guess what I did? I knocked on the door. I was curious and lonely and wanted to believe I could make a connection with another American expat. The fact that Anne lived in my neighborhood made it feel necessary. I wasn’t going to walk by her house every day knowing a potential friend lived there!
Anne, immediately, was a breath of fresh air in my life. Like me, she was a little against the grain. When you put us next to the other Lehman wives, we didn’t quite fit in. Anne felt isolated like I did, and we hit it off instantly. If you can believe it, Anne was actually the first person who ever gave Hannah a bath. And Hannah, even now, calls her Auntie Anne. Later, Anne and I both ended up back in New York, but I’ll tell you more about that later.
Another important early friend of mine in London was Heather Kerzner, whom I met at a Junior League meeting. While scanning the room to see if I knew anyone or if there was anyone there I wanted to know, I caught sight of this wacky gorgeous woman in Kenzo pants who was carrying a straw bag with a broken handle. Heather and I fell in love immediately, and we’ve been friends for almost thirty years.
Things were going well. I didn’t have a ton of friends, but I had a few, and I loved Ralph so much. The great thing about him was that he always saw me as an integral part of our partnership. We were equals and I had an important role to play in our success. Ralph never referred to it as his success, but always our success. Ralph would go to work, and I would take care of the home and the finances. Like my mother, I controlled the bank accounts. I reconciled the statements at the end of the month. If I can give you a piece of advice, it’s this: Know where your money is going. If your partner is making the income, then track it. If you’re making the income, then track it. If you want to be financially successful in any capacity, you need to understand where you’re spending your money and how to manage it. I shopped a lot, but I didn’t spend more than what we could afford.
Lehman not only got us an apartment but they also made sure we knew what to do with it. I went to etiquette classes at the British School of Etiquette. This was in the early nineties, post-Thatcher, when everything in London was very formal. The reason to go to the school was not only to learn how to set the table beautifully for Ralph’s colleagues when they came over for dinner. It was also to get acclimated to the way things were done in London. As an American, I was totally unfamiliar.
The school included various classes that all focused on teaching us about the culture of Britain. I learned how to set the table and how to write a good thank-you card and a good invitation. I learned how to be a good hostess and a good guest and which fork and knife go where and how far apart they should be on a place mat. I literally learned how to use a ruler to measure the distance between the cutlery and the plate. The classes helped me understand the culture of my new country in a fuller way, and they helped me to feel like I belonged there. I loved how formal it was, and I still use what I learned to this day.
Entertaining became a big and very rewarding part of my life (as it still is), and I took my role as a dinner party host very seriously. I bought The Silver Palate Cookbook, which was considered quintessential back then, and it became my new bible. I would study it intensely and choose dishes based on how impressive they sounded. Chicken with a sweet white wine sauce and dried apricots? Yes. Spaghetti sauce made with champagne? Yes! After choosing which dishes to cook, I would write out my menus with vigor—at noon, because preparation is everything.
I know what you’re thinking. It’s old-fashioned and sort of sexist to assume that all women should care about how to set a dinner table, but that was part of the job that I’d signed up for and, quite frankly, learning how to host in my twenties served me well for all the years that came after. It’s important to understand these things, not just for your husband but for yourself. Let’s face it, when you’re on a date or at a work dinner and someone is holding their fork and knife like a tennis racket and hitting their food around their plate like a ball it’s a turnoff. Like, where’s the modern-day video for how to hold your cutlery? Now there’s a TikTok I would watch.
At first, I loved everything about my London life, but after the initial high wore off, I was lonely again. I had the wooden hangers and the fragranced candles and the Chanel, but what was the point if I had no one to talk to all day? In the beginning, I would cook Ralph elaborate dinners for when he came home from work, but then he was working later and later, so I stopped. Ralph got up at 5:30 in the morning and wouldn’t come home until late.
When I’d envisioned spending my life with someone, I’d seen us hanging out and having fun and growing old together, which was turning out to be unrealistic. The reality of Ralph’s intense job didn’t allow for that, and I didn’t feel comfortable complaining about it to my friends back home, who were still getting their nails done on Second Avenue and going to happy hour at Coconut Grill. Now that I had everything I’d ever wanted, I couldn’t help but miss what I had left behind.
At the time, I didn’t understand how hard it must have been on Ralph, who was twenty-seven years old with an enormous amount of responsibility on his shoulders. On Saturdays, I’d want him to get up and go out with me, but he was tired. My reactions to this weren’t perfect, to be honest.
“I want you to be home more! I want to go out to dinner! I want to go out dancing at Annabel’s!”
Ralph couldn’t understand why I was complaining and his inability to fix the situation overwhelmed him, especially because Ralph is a solution-oriented person. I didn’t need a solution, because I was well aware that there wasn’t one. I just wanted to talk about it, because that’s how I process. I can’t see what’s going on until I externalize it. The clarity that comes with speaking my thoughts out loud often is the solution for me.
Ralph always suggested that I spend more time with the other Lehman wives, but I didn’t ever feel like I fit in with them, and I didn’t feel like I’d been fully invited into their circle yet either. When I would go to their houses for tea, I always felt like I was on the periphery of a group—like there was a room within a room that I couldn’t see and wasn’t supposed to see. It never really crossed my mind whether I even wanted to be their friend or not. Something about them not letting me in made me want to try harder, which created a lot of insecurity.
My world was transforming, and I was especially aware of that whenever I would return to the United States to visit my friends and see my family. It made me miss my old life even more.
I decided that part of the issue in London was our neighborhood. Belgravia was a very traditional, old-world place in London, a place where everyone took everything very seriously. It was the kind of place where you were never really sure if anyone liked you or not. It all felt like a job interview. And on top of that, it was not very lively or fun.
There are two types of people in this world: the people who love to dance and the people who don’t love to dance. I wanted to find a place with people who loved to dance and didn’t take themselves too seriously—and that place was not Belgravia.
Where would Ralph and I move to? I remembered the fabulous Italians who had thrown the party
with the shrimp cocktail, and I decided that I was done with tea. I wanted shrimp. I wanted to live where the Italians lived.
So, we moved to the Boltons, where I found the most beautiful apartment, which I still think about to this day. The neighborhood was lively, filled with young parents and their children. Every room in the new apartment seemed to come with a bonus. It had two massive double doors that opened up to a garden. We had a beautiful dining room that was attached to a more formal sitting room. I loved it.
I immediately bonded with our upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Holland, who was a descendant of the famously gay and controversial poet Lord Alfred Douglas. She was very old and possibly the most eccentric person I’ve ever met. I love eccentric people, in case you haven’t put that together yet. When we moved in, she came downstairs and said, “I would like you to join me for tea on the first Wednesday of every month.”
Of course I agreed. I was still looking for friends. In fact, I’d even joined the Junior League and then the Knightsbridge Women’s Club looking for friends, but those people weren’t really my people. I wanted to make friends with Londoners—friends who weren’t expats and who weren’t, therefore, going to leave in a few years for their next corporate transfer. I wanted to become a sort of local myself. (Remember Ralph was a British citizen, so I thought we were never leaving.)
I quit both clubs shortly after I joined them. I was much happier going upstairs to hang out with Mrs. Holland, who would tell me the most fantastic stories of London in the old days. She lived in a beautiful apartment that was a mess of days gone by, with mosslike film growing in the bathtub and stacks of old London Times newspapers on the table. Her mantel was covered in crested invitations to events that had passed. I adored Mrs. Holland. On top of her head she always wore the tightest chignon. She was so much more interesting than the too-perfect cookie-cutter wives. A façade of perfection, at the end of the day, is just kind of boring.
I got to know all the vendors of the shops I liked in the Boltons and became a repeat customer. Eventually, the vendors became my friends, and after I had friends in the neighborhood it felt like my neighborhood. I continued to spend my days shopping and planning elaborate dinner parties and seeing the new friends I had made. I was going to church every week. In a nutshell, I was really beginning to carve out a life for myself in London.
I still missed working, though, and at some point I decided I should start teaching aerobics again. When I found out what a council flat was, I knew it would be the ideal venue. Council flats are basically subsidized housing communities full of working-class people. I found one in Wandsworth, just outside London, with a huge common space you could rent for 25 pounds an hour.
I rented the common space and put up a sign.
Aerobics! 3 pounds! 5 p.m. Tuesday!
Then, at 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, I showed up in my spandex with my Dyna-Bands and my boom box ready to go. The class was wildly successful. The women in Wandsworth had never seen anything like it. Back then, everything happened in America first and took three to five years to cross the pond, so aerobics wasn’t big in the UK yet, and it was especially foreign to this group of people.
I would give them a break halfway through the hour because they weren’t very good, and everybody would light up a cigarette. I thought it was hilarious. I’d yell, “Smoke break’s over!” and we’d move on to the second half. The husbands would be sitting on the sides drinking lager and cheering their wives on. I’m not sure if anyone in Wandsworth was serious about aerobics, but I know they loved my music.
Afterwards, I’d go over to their houses for tea and meet their kids. Even though London was only eight miles away, it might as well have been another world. This was definitely a stark contrast to my London life with Ralph, but I felt comfortable there. I loved it, and, as you know by now, I loved making my own money. I’d return home with bags filled with coins and then I’d go deposit them at my bank.
It was just after we moved to the Boltons that Ralph and I decided to start trying for a baby. One month after we made this decision, I went to New York for the opening of the Royalton Hotel, where I drank a ton of champagne. I threw up during the entire flight back home, thinking it was the worst hangover I’d ever had in my life. I just felt terrible. Then it dawned on me that I might be pregnant.
And I was right.
Ralph couldn’t believe it. “What? We just started trying.”
Pregnant now, I continued teaching aerobics in Wandsworth. Often, when I would show up, there was a guy waiting for me in the parking lot, a local man in his early thirties who always seemed excited to see me and happy to help me bring my Dyna-Bands and my boom box into the hall before class. We would chat a little bit. I don’t remember anything we said to each other, and I had no idea who he was. I appreciated his kindness, but he kind of creeped me out. To be honest, he super creeped me out. Why was he always there waiting for me? It seemed like he definitely knew my schedule. I didn’t want to be alone with him, so I’d arrive just before the class started. After he helped me with my gear, he’d just sit on the sidelines in the hall and watch the class. It was weird. But not weird enough to do anything about it.
Then, one evening during class, Scotland Yard showed up and arrested him. Why? Because he was the Wandsworth Killer! The Wandsworth Killer was all over the news at the time, but I never made the connection. It seemed too crazy. The police told me they thought he might have been stalking me.
Ralph and I quickly put the kibosh on the aerobics thing after that—not only because I’d possibly almost been murdered but also because I was getting as big as a house and more uncomfortable each day.
Some women get pregnant elegantly. They’re still wearing their jeans in the third trimester. And their bikinis. They look flawless. They’re posing naked for black-and-white portraits. Their baby bumps are sexy. They go water-skiing like it’s no big deal.
This was the type of pregnant woman I wanted to be, but I was the opposite. I got huge. My feet swelled. I was miserable. After reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting, I thought I was only going to have morning sickness for three months. Well, mine lasted into my fifth month. I didn’t know what to wear, and there weren’t many maternity stores in London then, because fabulous Europeans got cute-pregnant, not size-of-a house pregnant. It got to the point that my ob-gyn, Mr Gillard (baby doctors in Britain go by “Mr,” not “Dr”), stopped weighing me, and when I asked why he responded that the baby had had enough food!
Can you imagine? But was I going to stop eating? Absolutely not. I went on eating everything in sight until the bitter end. I especially loved savory. Breakfast often consisted of cold Heinz baked beans on a baked potato. I loved cottage cheese and ramen noodles. I gained sixty-two pounds altogether. The average weight gain for a pregnant woman is about twenty-five to thirty-five pounds, just so you know.
On Boxing Day, which is a huge holiday in Britain the day after Christmas, when most people don’t go to work, Ralph went off to work. “If you’re having the baby, call me,” he said.
Well, I figured I would rather go to a party I was invited to than sit at home alone, so that’s what I did. So there I was at my friend’s luncheon, having a good time—until heartburn hit. It was the most intense heartburn I’d ever felt. My stomach was tightening up. I excused myself and went home, and that’s when I realized I was having contractions.
I called Ralph. “I think I’m having a baby.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“I’m over nine months pregnant. Yes, I’m sure!” They didn’t do inductions back then, so Hannah had been overcooking in the oven.
Ralph said he’d meet me at the hospital. I hobbled out of the apartment and got into a black taxi. The taxi driver was so worried about me having a baby on the way there that he told me to lie down. I did what he said. I lay on the floor of a cab on my way to the Portland Hospital in Mayfair, which, at the time, was where all the “it” women of London went to give birth. It was also known for
its specialization in pediatric intensive care. Little did I know how important this would become a few months later when my newborn, Hannah, needed to go back. All I knew was that on December 26, 1993, my best friend was born. I say this to Hannah every year.
To my daughter, Hannah:
I fell in love with you as a little seed,
I cherished you as a child,
and I am in awe of you as an adult.
Chapter Five AND THEN SHE LOOKED AT ME
In the hours before Hannah’s birth, I was totally unaware of how greatly she would impact my life. I thought I was going to give birth, have some lobster and champagne, then go home, hire a nanny, and continue my regular life with a new baby. The anticipation was not of Hannah, but of what Hannah would add to my life. She would be the punctuation mark at the end of a perfect sentence that I had written. As far as I was concerned, she was going to come out of the womb in a Bonpoint outfit.
But as I began to push, the experience started to change me. It was as though a piece of my soul was being drawn out of my body. They lifted her up, and I couldn’t help but feel that even though she was no longer inside me, there was an invisible cord attaching us that couldn’t be cut. They placed her head on my chest, and it landed beneath my shoulder like a puzzle piece. In an instant, her little body had pushed me to the deepest depths of myself and uncovered a love so profound that to call it love would be like describing pasta as salad. The feeling was big enough to upend the checklist I had centered my life around. On some level, that frightened me.
Make It Nice Page 7
