The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund

by Jill Kargman

  Kiki, on the other hand, loved her work and could never quit. And she was very successful, with all kinds of high-profile accounts from fashion houses to car companies, each one trying to penetrate the young, cool scene in New York. Even before she married Hal, Kiki was a name around town, known for her lavish parties, for being a muse to Zac Posen, even for a fling with Christian Slater in the nineties. A high-profile marriage only added to her omnipresence in the party picture pages. So now in the foaming wake of the divorce, the press was lapping up every detail about lawyers, possible prenups, and the epic battle that would ensue. One reporter had even called me at home, but per Tim’s instructions, I simply answered, “No comment,” then apologized (not in Tim’s instructions) before hanging up.

  It wasn’t until I met Kiki for one of our secret lunches that I realized how dark and dirty Tim’s family would play it. Kiki had a college friend from her U. Penn sorority who was in New York for a day of meetings. As she ran around town, the friend started noticing the same guy in a brown suit cropping up at various points throughout the day. Paranoid, she took the train to SoHo, always looking in store windows’ reflections to see if he was still there. He was. Finally, in the middle of West Broadway and scores of people, she spun around and came face-to-face with the man, demanding to know why he was following her. Surprisingly, he admitted he was a private investigator and said he was sorry but was just doing his job, tracking Kiki and trailing her pal for added due diligence.

  Upon hearing this, back at her apartment, Kiki paused and had a Keyser Söze-style flashback of various people watching her around her neighborhood. There was a guy buying fruit next to her at Gourmet Garage who showed up at Barneys, which was odd since it was by the Goyard corner, where men didn’t often lurk, and then he was even walking by the Lexington Avenue window of Simadi, the hair salon where she got weekly blow-outs. The pieces fell into place, and she realized the Talbotts had hired a sleuth to dig up dirt on her.

  “So I’ve put the brakes on with Gustave and any other guys, for now,” she told me just before Christmas at La Goulue, looking both ways at the preened yummy mummies slurping their liquid lunches. “I could give a shit what the papers say, but it’s this freaky investigator shit that wigs me out. I feel like Sherry Von has called in the CIA.”

  “Listen, there’s nothing they can say. You haven’t done anything wrong; you’re separated and you’ve filed for divorce.”

  “But it’s such a double standard. I have to be very discreet. I finally got out of a frigid marriage and I still can’t see anybody or they’ll label me a whore. But I’m no gold-digging slut. I work, and I just so happen to be kicking ass. I just hired Ellen Barkin’s attorney. Two can play hardball.”

  And hardball she played. She landed a fair settlement, won the acrid, unhinged, fiery fury of Sherry Von Hapsburg Talbott, and got herself a fresh new start.

  5

  “An ex-spouse is like an inflamed appendix. It causes a lot of pain and suffering, and when it’s removed, you realize you didn’t need it, anyway.”

  In January, just after Kiki and Hal’s divorce was finalized, I exhaustedly trekked home after a particularly chilly day in the park (though I am one of those people who is always cold, as in sweatshirt-on-the-beach cold) watching Miles in his Super Soccer Stars class. We ordered in a pizza, as I was too lazy to cook (read: heat up Citarella takeout). One of the good things about marrying the son of Sherry Von is that he never expected me to whip up some insane dinner in full apron mode, 1950s style—the only thing in her life his mother ever made for dinner was reservations.

  Tim was away yet again, this time in Oregon at some giant convention center-slash-hotel, so I was in a pattern of tucking Miles into bed and then facing the question of what to do with myself from 8:00 until midnight, when I fell asleep. I had already booked our sitter just in case I wanted to escape and have one of those luxurious dinners alone at Etats-Unis wine bar, something I occasionally treated myself to when Tim was out of town. So when Posey called me and asked me to join the other hedge fund conference widows for dinner at Sette Mezzo, I was game.

  When I got to the restaurant, our normal window table was full with Trish, with her trademark bright red shoulder-length hair and strand of pearls; Emilia, dressed to the nines; raven-haired Mary; and smiling Posey, who waved through the window as I approached. Once we all kissed hello and ordered, the sport of choice commenced: killer people-watching. It was like golf for women.

  After a few minutes, in walked a nervous Millie Lange. After a quick smile and greeting by our table, she walked with an older woman—who I guessed was her mom or aunt—to the back of the restaurant. All the women swooped like hungry vultures on the bloody carcass of poor Millie, a mom whose sons were in the second and fourth grades in our school, who had just gotten divorced due to her husband’s excessive cocaine use, which even stints at Promises, Paradise, Passages, and Cirque Lodge couldn’t remedy.

  “Poor thing. Ugh, I mean, who’s gonna go for her now?” scoffed Emilia, hand through her coiffed mane. “She has her sons, thank goodness, but what guy would want that baggage?”

  “Well, maybe she could get some older guy,” offered Mary, with a look of concern across her freckled, black-Irish complexion. “You know, some rich gray-hair type in his fifties or sixties, and then thirty-seven will seem young to him!” I knew that Mary, like Posey and me, hoped Millie would land on her feet. But New York is a tricky town for women d’un certain âge, as Sherry Von likes to say.

  Posey had testified that Millie Lange came from a very powerful old-New York family and that luckily she would have plenty of money and enough influence to maintain her social standing.

  “Her father was a huge ad guy. Like CEO of one of the big agencies. He invented the Energizer Bunny.”

  “Come on,” I said, snorting up my Sprite.

  “Seriously,” said Trish. “And it’s still going and going and going, that rodent.”

  “It’s so funny,” I mused. “Who would have thought a rabbit with Corey Hart sunglasses banging a big drum would become an icon?”

  “There’s no accounting for random successes,” said Posey. “Just look at Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I mean, how bizarre is that? Billions.”

  “Oh, check it out, Cassidy Freedkin is sitting in the corner.” Emilia subtly gestured, sipping her Chianti.

  “I heard she’s chairing the NACHO benefit at the Waldorf this year,” said Trish. “She just hired two publicists to get herself more ‘out there,’ she told me.”

  “It’s so weird,” whispered Mary. “I assumed that since she’s so obsessed with New Yorkers Against Childhood Obesity, her daughter would be, like, rolling into the room à la Violet Beau-regard! But she’s the skinniest one at Ballet Academy East! Her mom won’t let her NEAR that vending machine. Instead she buys her ten-packs of shiny stickers to distract her from the Nutter Butters.”

  “I know, I mean I could rake the leaves at my farm with her kid!” Trish laughed.

  “Meanwhile, Cassidy looks great,” remarked Posey.

  “Yeah,” agreed Emilia, looking disappointed. “What’s she doing, South Beach? Atkins? Macrobiotic?”

  “I heard she’s big on the Two Finger Diet,” whispered Mary.

  There were a few more sightings: Kincaid and Peach Saunders loudly ordering risotto with “a double helping of white truffles” for everyone at their table of eight; Chip Berlin and his wife,

  Patty, sitting mute, not speaking for their entire dinner; and Mac McMonigle and Kent Quick and their decked-out wives going through four bottles of wine and laughing way too loudly.

  “So sad,” said Emilia, leaning in. “I hear Chip Berlin has a standing high-priced hooker at the Ritz-Carlton every Thursday afternoon!”

  “I heard that, too!” exclaimed Mary, flushed with gossip high.

  “How does she not know?” asked Trish, eyes aflame.

  “Ostrich syndrome, just denial,” said Posey. “Or maybe she does know and doesn’t c
are. She gets her lifestyle. . . .”

  “Yeah, I mean, where’s she gonna go?” said Emilia.

  “You always know everything,” I told Mary, who beamed.

  “Well, I’ll admit I am privy to a ton of scoop. But let me tell you girls this: For all the stuff that’s going down in this town, we don’t have a thing on the Greenwich hedge fund scene. That place appears perfect, with the lawns and the four blond kids and the golden retrievers, but we were out there this weekend and let me tell you, some of these gals were doing lines in the changing room at Round Hill!”

  “No!” gasped Posey, hand over mouth.

  “Yes,” continued Mary, leaning in. “And in the bathroom at Polpo, too. The DEA could do a full-on raid, I swear! You know that guy Burke Lockhart from Triton Partners?”

  “Wait, the guy who has five daughters and won’t let his wife stop until he gets a boy?” asked Trish.

  “Yes. And while he’s making her into a baby factory, he’s in his Ferrari getting BJs from the wife of Kent Colgate from SaturnRings Capital!”

  “You lie,” I said, stunned.

  “I’m telling you, we city rats are tame next to those preppy country mice.”

  “Here’s to staying in the city!” said Posey, raising her glass. We all clinked glasses and cheered our sometimes odd but definitely fun urban existence.

  “Oh, and speaking of BJs, get this,” said, Mary, eyes ablaze. “Corbett walked in yesterday after school and said, ‘Mom, Richie Frank told me where babies come from.’ So I asked him where Richie said babies come from, and he said, ‘The daddy sticks his penis in the mommy’s mouth.’ I said, no, darling, that’s where jewelry comes from!”

  We were all howling. All in all, it was a great (if a bit raunchy) night.

  I got home and flipped on the television. My other husband was David Letterman, but he wouldn’t be on air in forever. And the barrage of depressing reality TV was too much to bear. I hit the guide button and scrolled down to find—YES!—Sixteen Candles . Jackpot. It was amazing to me that I was now more than double these kids’ age and yet in my head they were still the same age as, or even older than, me, as if frozen in time from when I first saw them in fifth grade. And, oooh, Jake Ryan. Someone spatula me off the carpet now. That last scene, with the cars scooting away in every direction leaving only his red chariot, chills. So many teen movies nowadays have just fast-paced zingers, insta-comebacks, and Teflon-skinned bad-asses who never let anything get to them.

  What I loved about the John Hughes movies was the characters’ vulnerability, that everything got to them. Like real teenagers. The beauty was in them not knowing what to say—they didn’t even dream of zapping out the pithy one-liner. It was the biting of the lower lip, the anxiety of wrong-side-of-the-tracks-ness, and the palpable insecurity that was so real to me. Not because zitty teenagehood was finally a distant memory, but because in some ways it never goes away.

  Basically . . . I married a John Hughes hottie.

  But instead of the kiss over flickering candles, frozen in a snapshot of happily ever after, I still sometimes felt like an outsider in Tim’s world. When I was single I was hardly a party girl, but I loved being at music venues, seeing rock bands, and just feeling part of this huge giant city I’d moved to. Tim’s world was way more rarefied, sort of a homogenous, preppy, athletic petri dish within this bubbling cauldron of diversity. In a way it’s kind of amazing we even intersected at all, seeing as how I was writing about music and more drawn to nerdy musicians and writers and he was in what I considered to be the more robotic world of finance. But that’s the magic of New York: You can go through any revolving door and you never know who you’ll bump into on the other side.

  This is how we met: a Wall Street party in the financial district.

  When I first saw Tim, I was living with my roommate, my best college friend, Jeannie, who has since moved home to Boston. Even though we were smart and educated, we talked about boys all the time and primped together for Saturday odysseys around town. We were always up for anything. If we weren’t going out to see a band, we’d all hit the phones and call around to see what was going on, and one particular night we ended up at a random party in what’s now called SoChiTo (South of Chinatown, not to be confused with WeWa, West of Wall). New York had so many newly gentrified ghetto-to-gold neighborhoods, I couldn’t keep track. But I remember having to look the address up on my map, as it was the first time I’d ever been there and the rental building was the first of its kind in that then-creepsville area. The space was big and boxy, the music was good (some trendy DJ “spinnin’ it”), and the skyscraping view was twinkly and mesmerizing. But it was one of those parties where all the good ingredients still made up a crappy stew. Plus, I didn’t feel well at all—my chunder was mid-esophagus and rising. Unlike the anonymity of, say, a bar or a music venue, parties were often bizarre two-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon social Venn diagrams where you bumped into random people you knew tangentially and you couldn’t just be free to listen to songs or dance; there was too much small talk, too much “how do you know so-and-so?”

  Did I have some kind of social anxiety disorder like the people on that drug commercial with all the warped, stretched-out faces? Why did I occasionally get nervous at parties? Sometimes I could have a blast, of course, but the newness—that feeling of starting over—always haunted me until I grew at ease with my surroundings. The elevator door opened and there were two signs, for apartments A to H and J to P, but we heard the din of music, voices, a breaking glass, and a collage of muffled whooping, “heys,” and “what-ups” before we could remember which letter we were looking for. Back then, there was always this excitement turning the corner into a party; even with the best of friends at your side, there was a nervousness of anticipation. And the anticipation turned to sheer dread when I beheld the scene: I detested this kind of crowd. It was mostly carbon-copied Wall Street dudes chugging beers in their fleece’n’khakis and girls named Muffy and Steph with blond bobs, black velvet headbands, and tragic Lilly Pulitzer-meets-Ann Taylor concoctions, slumming it on their first night downtown in eons. There were cashmere Ralph Lauren sweaters spanning the spectrum of punch to celadon. There was so much cable knit in the room, they could have started a branch of Time Warner.

  R.E.M. blared, and there was a keg and towers of those red and blue plastic cups with the white insides. I never could stomach a beer—the taste conjured cow pee, not that I’ve tried bovine urine, but one can imagine. So I always opted for wine, no matter how cheap. So there I was as usual, all dressed up, sipping Gallo, looking around an all-white cookie-cutter apartment punched in the face by Pier 1, on husband safari. Jeannie and I might as well have had binoculars to scope the prey—we weren’t that subtle. My laser beams were honed to cut through the masses of fleece-covered former frat boys burning off steam from their Wall Street analyst jobs and in search of a non-wasted one who seemed more mysterious Jake Ryan than rowdy jock.

  Then in walked Mark Webb, the quintessential rowdy-jock-cum-date-rapist type, whom I had once met through a friend who’d gone to UVA with him. Mark was an analyst at Goldman Sachs who had a lust for money that rivaled his carnivorous sexual proclivities. How can I describe Mark Webb? Here’s a try:

  MARK MATH

  But alongside Mark was Tim. Gulp. He was . . . everything. I bit my lower lip and ran a hand through my blond hair, which was slightly too long at the time. He was gorgeous, with a bright smile that necessitated shades to behold. Not that he had huge Nancy Kerrigan Chiclet choppers, just superwhite teeth. And this was pre-Rembrandt, people. He screamed movie star. After circling each other throughout the night, we ended up meeting, and it was one of those conversations where an hour speeds by and soon enough your friends are standing behind him winking at you as your blush grows hotter.

  TIM MATH

  We hooked up that night (tonsil hockey only, no advanced bases), and the next day, with a spring in my step, I regaled the roomies with my re-lived lightning bolt of crushdom, d
elighting in every detail of his hand on the small of my back to putting me in a cab to the last kiss through the taxi window. I was twenty-four and he was twenty-nine—almost thirty!—a man.

  And now it was ten years later. Sam and Jake (Molly Ringwald and Michael Schoeffling) conveniently disappeared for the most part, so that we don’t have to know them all grown up; they are frozen in that idealized time of lower-lip biting and candlelit smooches. No diapers, work crunches, and business trips hovered in their romantic midst. Tim would be forty in two months, hotter than ever, but me? My forehead looked like Freddy Krueger had dragged his razor-edged claw across it—there were four deep grooves that I was strongly considering Restylane to remedy. Above my nose there were those creases they call the “elevens,” two vertical lines so deep, you could row a canoe down them. Why did guys get sexier when weathered?

  Most hedge fund wives were early adopters of line fillers, microderm, and photo-facials, and by thirty they were all going under for the little snips of saggage here and there. I, on the other hand, was way too freaked out by needles and photos of Jocelyn Wildenstein to even go that distance. And why should I care so much about staying young? I’d already socially kind of put myself out to pasture. It was funny: Tim was the total life of the party, greeted by hugs and high fives all around when he entered a room, just like Kiki. Hal was a bit more reserved, like me. I guess opposites attract. Sadly, the glue binding Kiki and Hal had dried up and worn off, and I wondered what the future held for Kiki. Poor thing. To be “out there” again, ugh: my nightmare. I hoped she didn’t have some rude awakening that all the guys our age now wanted twentysomethings; Kiki seemed so confident and excited about being free, but I couldn’t imagine anything worse. I loved being married. The only thing Tim and I ever fought about (aside from radio stations and my clandestine relationship with Kiki) was my desire for one more kid; he liked our small nest as is and I would have loved another nugget, but I felt blessed to have Miles and Tim—our little family cocoon was so safe. I couldn’t even fathom being back in the bar scene or at some Grolsch-stinking incubus of a party. I rarely, if ever, got nostalgic about those years. Maybe because I know I never missed any opportunities, and my life was pretty much right where I’d hoped it would be at thirty-four candles.