by Jill Kargman
A jolt surged through my body. I had previously told Tim I didn’t need a thing and not to bid as he’d already given a generous donation. But then I looked at Kiki instantly grinning—bingo, that was my all-time favorite show. Tim knew that during his extensive travels, I often just settled in for the night, hanging in the courtroom with Jack McCoy and the gang. No one—not the dork bloggers, or people with crushes on Chris Noth—no one, loved L&O more than I. I knew every plot. Memorized so much about the law that actual lawyers thought I was a judge. Was in tears when Jerry Orbach died. I bit my lower lip and smiled at Tim, and he knew immediately that I would love to be that corpse.
We walked back to our table, and there was Tim, paddle raised.
“Fifty thousand! Do I hear fifty-five?”
The bids rocketed skyward, and finally, at one twenty-five, I leaned in. “Tim, honey, it’s okay. I don’t need it.”
“No, I’m getting this, Holly. It’s the perfect gift for you, hon!” He raised his paddle. I knew it was for charity and probably tax deductible in some way, but it was all so outrageous.
Milton Summers from MajesticMount, a rival hedge fund to Comet Capital, shot Tim a look and raised his paddle. Sheesh. Now it really was a penis-measuring contest.
“Honey, seriously—I don’t even need to be—”
“Holly, hon, quiet,” he said, while staring down Milton. I hated it when Tim got competitive. The entire ballroom, in their decked-out luxe lace gowns and custom-Tom Ford penguin suits, were now watching the paddles with anticipation. But I knew, as did everyone, that poor Milton had had a year from hell. Not financially, of course, as his company’s continued windfall landed him in the Times Business Section almost weekly.
But his wife, Lola, very humiliatingly had left him for the pilot of their private jet. Talk about giving new meaning to the word “cockpit.” She was a prominent socialite-about-town who had once been an actress. Some had whispered that “actress” was code for stripper and that they’d met when she was on the pole, but it turned out that was a rumor and she’d just been waitressing in the financial district and had served the right guy his latte. He was smitten instantly. Poor schnook.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars! Do I have two seventy-five?”
The crowd was hushed, with baited breath, and turned their diamond-covered necks back and forth between jumping bids. This was all to show Milton Summers he didn’t give a damn about hemorrhaging money.
Finally Milton dropped out. He looked over at me and smiled and shrugged as Tim pumped his fist in victory and high-fived Hal. Nice. My husband’s unstoppable paddle-wagging had resulted in his cool parting with half a mill. Tim believed in the Golden Rule. Though that has changed in the last generation or two. When I was growing up, it was that Do Unto Others thing. But now it’s shifted a bit. So that it’s He Who Has the Most Gold, Rules.
“Timmy, you did not have to do that—” I said, stunned.
“Anything for you, hon,” he said, giving me a kiss on the cheek.
It was a very hefty gift to the charity, and I must say, I was secretly ecstatic. Buffett Schmuffet—this was the best lot by far. There I’d be: amidst the staccato, menacing doink-doink sound, which I’d read was originally designed to echo a jail cell slamming shut. Camera crews would shut down a city block for the shoot as a makeup person would make me look extra-pallid and cadavery. It would be the coolest cameo ever. But in the midst of my prime-time reverie of trench-coated detectives hovering over me with the flashes of faux-forensic photographers, I had to wonder: Had Tim been generous so that his beloved wife could be a chalk outline on national television, or so he could beat out MajesticMount? Tim loved a lot of things. I knew he loved me. But he also loved being number one.
3
“My husband and I separated for religious reasons. He thought he was God and I didn’t.”
“What do you mean you met someone?” I bellowed, not even a month after our lunch at Sant Ambroeus. I blurted it out so loud in Orsay that I had to re-ask in a low-key murmur, as if taking back my bellowed indignation.
“Shhhh! Holl, Jesus! Why don’t you broadcast to the whole fucking place? I think those anorexic moms sharing one tea sandwich over there didn’t hear you! My God.”
“Sorry.”
“Listen, you know we had issues for so long now and I was bursting. We met a few months ago. I almost told you at the Lancelot auction last month, but it was too crazy. I had hit my breaking point in a loveless marriage. And now there’s no turning back because I knew I wouldn’t have the balls to leave Hal unless I left him with my body. I didn’t sleep with this guy before I filed the papers, I swear. We just kissed. But I knew that if I betrayed Hal, there would be zero possibility of reconciliation on his end, and I would be free.”
“I can’t believe this . . . ,” I trailed off, staring at the cookie plate but too paralyzed to reach for one.
“Why? I mean, it’s not like I’m even in love with Gustave or gonna marry him or anything.”
“Gustave?” I asked. “You cheated on Hal with a guy named Gustave? What, is he a poet? Massage therapist? His name might as well be Thor! I can’t believe our family is splintering. . . .”
“Hello? It was just a kiss! And if I wanted judgments, I’d have laid this on Sherry Von.”
She was right. I shouldn’t judge her. While they were extremely close brothers, Hal and Tim were not the same person, and I had no idea what Kiki and Hal had gone through behind closed doors.
Sherry was Sherry Von Hapsburg Talbott and we called her Sherry Von because she always used her whole name, lest plebians forget she was of aristocratic ilk on the Continent, whence her illustrious crested-blazer ancestry hailed. Even her weekend L.L. Bean bag was monogrammed “S. Von H. T.” I mean, everything was Von this, Von that, Von yawn. She was a raging ice queen and made family gatherings so unbearable with her snobbish yammering and pronouncements from on high that one begged for an ejector seat, Dr. Evil-style, that would suck her through the Oriental rug into the chasms of darkness. Was I being harsh? No. She really was that bad. Her sons tuned it out, talking business the whole time, while Kiki and I were stuck with her running commentary on everything from “unsightly” Oscar dresses to those “godawful Democrats.” Being with her was like having that incessant crawl at the bottom of your TV screen. But in an oversized font. In fluorescent yellow.
It was Kiki who got me through every family dinner we had to endure. Selfishly, my first thought now was how I could possibly handle Sherry Von without Kiki by my side. And while I’d sometimes feel bad for Sherry Von, who was widowed at fifty-three when Tim’s dad, Chuck, died in a heliskiing accident, she always managed to take my sympathy and warp it into a complete lack of understanding of how someone could be so cold. Granted, her marriage was not exactly the warm, loving nest my parents had; Tim had always told me his father was this larger-than-life Wall Street legend, world-class athlete, and the consummate charmer, while his reserved wife never doted on him or their children the way my mother always had. Despite all her family wealth, and as the ultimate hedge fund wife, Sherry Von was a fundamentally unhappy soul, a malcontent who never nurtured and probably never was nurtured.
“You just know that bitch is popping Dom corks right now,” Kiki said, probably correctly. When Kiki and Hal began their firestorm romance, Sherry vented to Tim and me that Kiki was “not our kind,” i.e., Jewy Jewstein from Five Towns in Long Island (or, as Kiki’s hilarious and equally colorful dad, a Jacuzzi salesman in Ronkonkoma, would pronounce it, “Lawn Gyland”). In fact, Sherry Von previously had referred to all Jews as “Canadians” when she needed to employ codespeak. And now Kiki had given Sherry just want she wanted: validation.
“I think the second best thing about this is that I don’t have to see that evil vitriolic slag anymore.” Kiki laughed, sipping her wine. “Though I do feel bad leaving you in that fucking Locust Valley quagmire alone.”
I tried to keep up my end of the conversation, but I
was reeling with devastation and shock that Kiki was really and truly moving on and there was 0.00 percent chance of a reconciliation. See, being with Kiki was like having a pocket stand-up comedian. Her every observation was geniusly funny, and acutely accurate. My heart suddenly felt like it was ten pounds of lead as she blithely spoke of Gustave and all the sex she had missed for years with frigid Hal but would now be free to have. I simply sat, trembling. I knew the Talbott family was cultlike in its team quality of sticking together and that Kiki would be on the outs and big-time. And because there was no glue of a child to keep her somewhat in our orbit, I was certain that Sherry Von’s pronouncement from on high would be that Kiki was dead to us.
4
“FOR SALE: Wedding Dress. Size 6. Worn once by mistake.”
The fallout from Kiki’s affair was, indeed, nuclear. The first time I saw Sherry Von post-divorce was a few months later at Thanksgiving, in Locust Valley, at Hillendale, the family manor, which was not unlike the Cleary compound in Wedding Crashers, though I wish there had been some fun goth brother or drunken grandma to liven stuff up. The only remotely quirky or interesting presence was Hubert, Sherry Von’s devoted gay southern assistant-slash-driver-slash-chief of staff. He worshipped the ground she walked on, despite being treated like crap by her, and tended to her every whim, whether shipping her Louboutin heels to have the laces fixed, booking her at-home pedicure (God forbid she be spied with her feet naked IN PUBLIC!), or simply fastening a ruby necklace. Hubert was immaculate: French cuffs; a quiet, soothing aura; and only kind things to say. Every other word out of his mouth was “divine,” and I loved him. My crappy Banana Republic dress? “Divine.” Miles’s vocabulary? Divine. I wondered how on earth he put up with Sherry Von’s moods and barked orders.
Hubert had overseen the dining room’s divine décor for the evening: Over pumpkin pie served by Sherry Von’s staff (who wore full antiquated outfits with the frilly white aprons and caps like the ones you get in a prepackaged “French Maid” Halloween costume), sterling Puiforcat utensils clinked against fine Baccarat china, and fine wine was quietly sipped from Yeoward crystal. The table was immaculate. The food: impeccable. The flowers: richly arranged in subtle hues, their fragrance filling the air. The vibe: filled with the bitter flavor of rage. As soon as Miles went into the den to watch The Wizard of Oz on TV, Sherry Von unleashed her own flying monkeys of wrath. Finally, after a dramatic drawn-out silence, Sherry Von spoke.
“I always knew she was garbage,” she pronounced.
I felt my stomach drop.
“Mother, please, let’s just enjoy dessert,” Tim interrupted.
“NO. I won’t be quiet for Holland’s sake.”
I always hated when the spotlight was on me. I got instantly toasty on the back on my neck, cringing from her gaze. And Sherry Von always called me Holland, my real given name, which was my mom, Lillian Holland’s, maiden name. I could tell that for Sherry Von, the more sedate “Holland,” versus the staccato “Kiki,” seemed less playful and more fancypants. Even after years together, with everyone on planet Earth calling me Holly, I was only Holland to Sherry Von. Which would be fine since I loved my name, but I just knew her shady motivation for clinging to it was reinforcement that I came from what she considered to be an acceptable family versus Kiki’s. The Silversteins, meanwhile, were a fun, spirited, hilarious crew. Kiki and her two brothers would never call their mom “Mother” the way Tim and Hal did. Which was another reason I felt a kinship with her from the start: I knew she hailed from a more affectionate, caring family, like mine, despite Sherry Von’s nose in the air about her clan’s stature or lack therof.
“You were thick as thieves, you two,” Sherry Von said, pointing a skinny, bejeweled finger at me across the grand table as Hubert quietly refilled her wineglass. “You fought for her acceptance, and now look! DISGRACE! She cheated on our Hal. She brought filth into their bed.”
I looked at my lap, shuddering. “There was no ‘bed.’ They just kissed,” I began in her defense.
“Cheating,” pronounced Sherry, “cheating is a MORTAL SIN, in my book, Holland. After all those vows that courtesan pledged at that tacky wedding with that horrible chair dance, after all those oaths before our friends, she HUMILIATES us. And she has the GALL to challenge the prenup!”
Said prenup was signed by both my ex-sister-in-law as well as yours truly. It was a Stone Age-style offering of a million dollars, with more depending on years spent together and number of children. Since Kiki’s number of offspring was zero, she was to take the mil and walk. Kiki didn’t want to milk Hal, but she wanted to buy an apartment and move on, so she challenged for a little more. Most women go for half the fortune (which was probably around $100 million), but Kiki just wanted the whole thing done with pronto.
“It’s not all black-and-white,” I feebly ventured. “Sometimes things don’t work, and there are always two sides—”
The fiercest hurricanes could not temper Sherry Von’s meteorological reaction.
“NOT. IN. THIS. FAMILY. HOLLAND. TALBOTT!” She always spoke with full stops between words, for effect, not unlike an earsplitting trumpet blaring short bursts; I had actually noticed Tim grifting off this pattern of speech of late as well, and I did not enjoy any like-mother-like-son parallels. It was Sherry Von’s trademark punctuation vehicle in which to fully deliver her accentuated fits of ire. Her frail framed quivered and boiled with fury as she cleared her throat and narrowed her eyes, glaring at me as if I were committing high treason.
“We. Stick. To. Gether!” (table pounded on “gether”) she continued. “And if some disgusting earthworm of a whore crawls into our homes and deceives us, we turn our backs on that worm FOR. GOOD. She is FINISHED in this town, finished! No clubs, no boards, nothing. You BETTER not allege that there are ‘sides’ here! There is ONE side! The. Family’s.” And with that, she threw her hand-stitched monogrammed linen napkin on the table and stormed off.
Sheesh. The way she spoke it was as if we were the Corleones.
“Holy shit, Holly, why don’t you just FedEx my mother to the cardiologist,” Tim said as he bent to finish his pie.
“Sweetie, I’m sorry, but she’s insane. That whole ‘mortal sin’ crap. It’s not so cut-and-dried—”
“Yes, it is.” Tim took his arm off my chair. “I know you guys were close, but she cheated. That’s the point of no return. My mom’s right, Holl; there aren’t ‘two sides’ to every story. No matter what Hal did, she shouldn’t have crossed that line. I hope you think about that if she tries to reach out to you.”
Little did my unsuspecting husband know, I’d been talking to her almost every day. In the wake of press coverage swarming buzzard-like over the gutted antelope of their marriage, Kiki needed to vent about what the gossips were writing. As the family is high profile—Sherry Von sits on almost every major board in the city: MoMA, Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, New York Hospital (which had changed its name so many times, it currently had, like, seven words on its letterhead)—Page Six of the Post had picked the scoop right up, complete with the bold headline SPLITSVILLE FOR HEDGE FUND PRINCE. Kiki, who had been kind of a high-profile party girl herself pre-Hal, was still working as a publicist, having started her own firm in her mid-twenties pre-marriage, and was now doing better than ever, so her being photographed by Patrick McMullan out and about made the family even more pissed than before. See, publicist is not an acceptable hedge fund wife job. Example profession charticle:
HEDGE FUND WIVES’ CAREERS
*Note: even column A careers cannot be too successful lest they threaten the husband and the ability to be present as arm candy at countless hedgie events.
** Unless she’s won a major award (Oscar, Emmy) and stopped working, i.e., Grace Kelly saying her best role was that of a mother caring for her children.
Publicists court press and attention, which WASPy matriarchs, like Sherry Von, avoid. Kiki and Hal’s wedding had gotten a ton of press, much to Sherry Von’s chagrin, as she
pronounced sending wedding photos to magazines uncouth. She believed your announcement should only be in the Times, and then you should never appear in the papers again until it’s your obituary.
There was some leeway for the occasional cameo on Bill Cunningham’s charity party page in the Sunday Styles section, but that was it. Before I got married, I worked at two monthly women’s magazines covering music and writing features on musicians. It was far more acceptable than Kiki’s party-and-flashbulb-centric milieu, but hardly Sherry Von’s world, either, and the second I got pregnant, I was encouraged to quit. It’s not like I was obsessed with my daily grind, so I happily threw myself into motherhood and never looked back. Okay: Sometimes I’ve looked back. For one, I always used to see bands. I knew every new act, hot track, and trend. Now I was out of touch; when I tune in to the MTV Video Music Awards I don’t recognize half the names, whereas I used to know everyone who cleared their throats by a microphone. I have a very eclectic musical spectrum, loving hard rock and Broadway show tunes and a little in between. Tim loves classic rock, which I abhor; he favors the Eagles most of all, and their music is like a cheese grater to my ear. Plus, aside from seeing new hot bands, I also missed interviewing illustrious people—I’d written about indie rock bands and British invasion groups, and had done cover stories on everyone from Gwen Stefani to countless bubblegum teen pop idols. I always secretly dreamed of one of them asking me to write their biography. I found profiling people fascinating, and sometimes wished I had kept a toe in the work pool rather than cut bait altogether; sometimes deep down when I was with all the other moms or volunteering or doing tours at Miles’s school I was dying to scream, But I’m not just a mom, I’m cool! I used to see bands three nights a week! I don’t play “Baby Beluga” for my kid, I play vintage R.E.M.! But I had no regrets.
