by Jill Kargman
6
“Women might be able to fake orgasms, but men can fake whole relationships.”
—Sharon Stone
A few weeks later, in February, Tim and I were going on our weekly date night. Well, it had been weekly originally, but in the last year it had devolved into monthly, since Tim was traveling so much for work. I got my hair done and went to meet him for a drink first at the Knickerbocker Club.
But when I got there, I found him seated in a club chair by the fire with none other than Mark Webb, his UVA buddy from St. Anthony, their quasi frat. Mark was now the ultimate hedge fund guy, and when I walked in, he was showing Tim his new watch. Everything about Mark, from his tie to his custom shoes, was, in a word, slickster. He was unbelievably attractive, but in that exaggerated way that was too manly man, too chiseled, like Gaston in Beauty and the Beast. He had the cocksure swagger of some kind of superhero (Hey, darlin’: Snow Queen Vodka, rocks, no fruit), but he was just, quite simply, rich. Filthy rich. Thirty-nine, he had never married, but bragged incessantly of his conquests and sexploits. Stewardesses on private jets, his trainer at E2 (the ten-grand-a-year fitness club), and countless slashies—models- slash-actresses. Slash-waitresses.
“So the new 650 series is what you have to get—” pronounced Mark.
“Are we looking for a new car, honey?” I probed.
“Not this second, no, but Mark always knows the latest on it all.”
He sure did. Here’s the thing about the hedgie guys—there’s always the newest, greatest, must-have new thing. Down to cuff links.
For Mark’s thirty-fifth birthday, he had rented out the Puck Building and had an over-the-top black-tie meltdown. Caviar and champagne were everywhere, exotic dancers with feathered headdresses that rivaled Vegas, the DJ from Studio 54, Tiffany party favors, and cringe-inducing lap dances from the New York Knicks cheerleaders.
As a married woman, I sometimes found it vaguely threatening how much he spoke to Tim about his colorful sex life. It went beyond the obnoxious observations everywhere we went (“Holy shit, look at the cleave on that chick, that’s a fucking cup-holder between those babies! I could stash my Corona in there! Or somethin’ else, heh-heh.”). It was a general toxic pull away from the domestic tranquility of marriage. Even when it wasn’t about T ’n’ A (which was rare), it was always something about jetting off to JazzFest in New Orleans, or Vegas for the weekend, or his wild adventures, such as bungee jumping off cliffs in rural Peru—escapades that I knew Tim missed since we’d had Miles.
“So, Holly,” Mark said, leaning in conspiratorially. “You got any hot friends for me?”
“Well, my friends are all married now—”
“Oh, come on, none? What about that chick Frances? She was smoking.”
“She’s engaged.”
“Bummer, man! Hey—guess who I just saw on the street coming over here?” asked Mark with a glint in his eye. “Heidi Klum. Man, what a fucking fox.”
“Yeah, she’s gorgeous,” I added in agreement. “She’s had three kids and she looks amazing!”
“THREE kids?” said Mark, with a horrified grimace. “Oh, well, fuck that, she’s ruined, man. Doing her would be like throwing a hot dog down a hallway.”
I was ill.
Tim laughed at the visual, but I was insulted and disgusted. No doubt I was clearly a “hallway,” too.
“It . . . isn’t really like that,” I countered defensively.
“Whatever. That poor, scarred dude. Seal. Three kids through there? No matter how well he’s hung, that’s like putting a Tic Tac in a whale.”
This would have been a moment, on behalf of not only the stunning Heidi Klum but all “ruined” mothers everywhere, when I would have very much liked to take the sterling tray of snacks and bash his cheekboney face to a bloody pulp.
Next, he started dumping on their “friend” Sly Fisher’s plane.
“It’s so lame, we went to Lester Hamm’s private island—got some serious poontang down there, holy smokes—but the jet is so old now, maybe his returns aren’t what he says.”
He went on and on about this and that model of private jet, essentially counting everyone’s money, which my mother always said was something one should never do. By the time he finished his incessant spiel, I could pretty much figure out the hierarchy of flying in his elitist eyes:
“WHEELS UP” HIERARCHY, ACCORDING TO MARK
My only way out was to pull the ejector seat.
“Oh, sweetie, look at the time! Our reservation at Nello is in five minutes, so we should probably go.”
Tim looked down at his, yes, Rolex. “Oh, yeah, Mark, care to join?”
Huh?
“Nah, I’m hooking up with some guys from ThunderPoint Capital downtown at this new restaurant, Midas.” Phew.
“Next time, man—”
I was furious with Tim for even offering to include Mark in our date-night dinner, so we walked around the corner to Madison in silence as I thought about how much I actively loathed Mark Webb. He was everything I detested: devoid of values, voraciously materialistic, and loathsome to all thinking women. He was a huge partyer, a male slut type. But not all hedge fund guys were like that. I’d studied the scene up close, and Kiki and I had decided that there was a link between the style of the guy and the type of hedge fund he worked in.
For example, at quantitative-style funds, where mathematical formulas and computer software helped determine investments, at the helm was a nice, power-nerd type, who loved his wife and kids and didn’t care about “the scene.” Contrastingly, both the “global macro” type firms (who put their wedding rings in their pockets on Boondoggles) and the equity hedge funds (preppy white-shoe types, including scattered “Tiger cubs” from the once all-powerful Tiger Management) were way more life-in-the-fast-lane: jets, cars, wine, women, and song—the works.
Mark was the worst. And he was one of Tim’s best friends on earth. Granted, their relationship wasn’t close to what I had with Kiki: It was more about bonding through partying. Many of Tim’s friendships were just about having fun or showing off and spending money on boy toys and adventures.
The excesses of the cultural moment made everything seem ripe for the picking; the money made everyone around me feel like they had a complete carte blanche of moral elasticity, and like their AmEx Black cards, the sky was the limit as to what they could pull off. Or should I say the lowest rung of Hell’s circles was the limit—there was no sin they couldn’t get away with. New York was a bacchanal of the rich and obnoxious, a Falstaffian brew of hedonism and material excess: no boundaries, no breaks—just high octane, high speed, all the time. I knew the economic law of gravity held that what goes up would inevitably come down—for every boom there would be bust—that’s why it’s called a business cycle. But on the horizon, despite forecasted downturns that we were headed for Bearland from Bull, there was no sign of humility or fear or slowing down for these hedgie boys. I only hoped that the world in which Tim rolled, especially given his friendship with assholic Mark, wouldn’t be a bad influence.
7
“My husband and I were happy for twenty-five years . . . then we met.”
A few weeks later, a production assistant from Law & Order finally called regarding my small-screen debut, but my excitement would have to be on hold, as they wouldn’t shoot my glamorous rigor mortis self for almost a year. As winter’s chill started to thaw, Miles and I took a fun trip to Disney World over April break while Tim was at a management directors conference in Duluth. It was something I’d sworn I’d never do, but it was actually fun. I’d never felt so thin. Everywhere I looked people were eating fried cotton candy. Like regular ol’ cotton candy was too healthy. They would dunk the pink plumes into vats of boiling oil, then dredge it out with tongs: hot fried sugar. Only in America. You could almost hear the people getting fatter.
When we came home from our vacation, Miles started extended sports after school—two hours longer than the former school day. I ha
d such a lump in my throat watching him board the bus at 7:55 a.m., knowing that I wouldn’t see him again until 5:00 p.m., and I needed wild horses to not be a loser mom who runs to the window and puts my hand on his tiny paw through the glass. I was going to be on my own now more than ever. It would be a season of working out, eating right, and feeling good. It was going to be a spring of Me Time.
I blithely lied to Tim about my whereabouts whenever I wanted to see Kiki, which was every week. It was actually getting easier and easier to lie to him because he was traveling so much. When he’d check in on the phone, we’d talk mostly about Miles’s cute comments about school or how Tim’s meetings went, or which errands I’d run. So when he was in Chicago for two days, it was perfect timing for me to help Kiki move in to her brand-new loft in TriBeCa and get settled.
She’d decided to swap her temporary uptown digs for a hipper new space, the physical move echoing her mental turning of a corner, the crisp white paint like a big, open, three-thousand-square-foot clean slate. It was younger, fresher, and far away from what she called “the reversible name, roman numeral set” uptown.
“Those fucking gray flannel drones on the Upper East Side, I won’t miss those,” she said, raising her glass at Bubby’s after we’d unpacked the last of her gazillion boxes. “Stiff everywhere except their cocks.”
I almost spat out my cheese grits (a last-hurrah pre-diet) but contained myself, looking both ways for eavesdroppers to her comments. “It’s like Kim Cattrall said on Sex and the City,” she continued. “ ‘The higher the roman numeral after their name, the worse they are in bed.’ ”
“Nice, Keeks,” I said, semihorrified by a potential septuagenarian listener nearby. Kiki seemed to have a microphone implanted in her larynx. And while I loved her brashness, quiet lunches were kind of impossible.
“Hey, what time does Miles come home today? Why don’t you come with me to Williamsburg? I’m looking at this Tauba Auerbach drawing for the living room at Pierogi Gallery. Will you come with? Pleeeease?” She begged like a seven-year-old wanting ice cream, her blue eyes yearning and her beautiful face tilted to the side. I could often see why men fell at her feet when she switched on the charm and went from vixen PR viper to innocent pouty pretty girl; they were snowed by her confidence and power but then loved that she played the vulnerable beauty card for them.
I looked at my watch. I had three hours. “I can come, but . . . how will I get home?” I wondered aloud.
“Holly, news flash: It’s Brooklyn, not Mars. You said you used to go there and see bands all the time! What happened? Now it’s like you and Tim fucking think you’ll burst into flames if you cross a bridge! Trust me, they have oxygen over there, you’ll be fine.”
I know, I was lame. But when you don’t normally make the trek, even if it’s geographically close, it feels like oceans away. I didn’t want to disappoint her, though. “Okay, okay, I’ll come,” I conceded. “I always loved Williamsburg.”
“Me, too. The guys are so damn hot,” she purred. “Last week, I screwed this guy I met at Lux, and when I woke up I was so disoriented, I needed a fucking compass. I went to go to the bathroom and saw the Manhattan skyline out the window and almost fainted. But I started walking and got my bearings and, I’m telling you: the restaurants, the galleries, the clothing boutiques—all amazing. I’m obsessed.”
“So why didn’t you move there instead of TriBeCa?” I asked, semireeling over her roll in the hay with some random dude.
“I’m not that obsessed,” she said. “I like somewhat gentrified. Not edgy-now, nice-in-ten-years. I’m thirty-two; it’s too late for that grunge shit.”
An easy fifteen-minute ride on the train later, we hopped out onto Bedford Avenue. And Kiki was right. The energy was palpable. The people all seemed a decade younger. Even those in their thirties looked like kids, thanks to hip outfits, various facial piercings, and tattoos aplenty. I suddenly felt like one of those uptown crones Kiki spoke of, but I was excited by the whole new world. I watched a bunch of guys carrying their guitars up some stairs to a practice space, and a crew of miniskirt-wearing girls with funky-colored hair and bloodred lips popping in and out of stores. I remembered having the same feeling when I went to Kings Road in London in 1983. It felt cool and raw, and even though I was a tourist passing through, I got excited that there were people doing something punky and different. This time, though, instead of looking up at them as older, cooler people portending my adulthood, it was more of a bittersweet looking back. I was the older one, and they held all the promise of becoming artists and musicians or prostitutes, who knows. But they sure did look amazing.
“It’s up here,” Kiki said, gesturing as we walked around the corner toward the gallery. “I think it’s like two blocks down on the left—” She froze. Halted in her Manolo Blahnik’d tracks.
Uh-oh, great. I couldn’t entirely keep the whine out of my voice. “Please tell me we’re not lost, Kiki. Because I have to be home to get Miles in a couple—”
She silenced me by calmly putting her hand on my arm and squeezing firmly.
“Ow!” Her grasp clenched my wrist. “Holy sugar! That hurts!”
“Shhh,” she commanded in a mute daze, grabbing me even harder.
I was about to complain again when I noticed her huge, widened eyes staring in a forty-five-degree angle across the street. What? Was there a mugging in progress? Slowly I turned my head to follow her fixed gaze as she pulled me back into the shadow of a parked van. My eyes landed on what she had beheld, the sight that had made Kiki, the most talkative person on planet Earth, silent, the vision that had caused the most nonstop, kinetic, ants-in-her-pants live wire stop cold, turned her normally warm hand to ice on my wrist: It was my husband making out with another woman.
8
“When I meet a guy, I think, Is this the man I want my children
to spend their weekends with?”
—Rita Rudner
Fog. I have heard people say they’ve been trapped in one, mired in a cloudy, gray state of catatonic mumbling and grief. It’s usually people who have just buried a parent or gone through some horribly traumatic phase. They look back and can barely decipher what they experienced: It was all a tumultuous, blurred frenzy of tear-splattered cheeks and zombie-esque marching through life, detached from the humdrum of the world around them.
I had experienced that thick, enveloping fog when my mother died eight years earlier. And here it beckoned again, enveloping me in its chilly, bleak clutch. I shook as Kiki propped me up. I was spinning in a vertiginous emotional free fall. I remembered the jolt of first meeting Tim and falling love with him—my head was spinning then, too, but with the elated, dizzied Tilt-A-Whirl fueled by the heart, infusing a buzzed high to my every breath. Now it was in reverse: The little tweety birds were flying around my head counterclockwise. Or better yet, kamikaze-style, into the ground. And that bouncy heart of mine? Pounding blood through me as if each vein carried the Orient Express. Was I dying? It felt like it.
The hours that followed were a pastiche of taxi, hyperventilation, bridge toll, Kiki’s hand rubbing my back, and the muffled sounds of her cursing. It was as if I were frantically drowning underwater, hearing her voice and muted honking horns through a thicket of waves. I don’t think I was even crying. Yet. Just glazed over. Like some of the pill-popping moms I’d seen on Park Avenue en route to Pilates.
My little dreamy family cocoon had cracked. And it wasn’t a beautiful, vibrant-hued butterfly that flew out. It was a sickly, wan, gray, fraying moth. Too bad my effing husband couldn’t keep his very hungry caterpillar in his pants. I shuddered with rage.
Kiki wanted me to lose my edit button? It was history now.
“I can’t believe he did this to me. That fucking asshole,” I squeaked as Kiki and I staggered into my apartment. She walked me down the hallway and positioned me in Tim’s office while she proceeded to ransack the contents of his desk as I quaked on the tufted leather cognac couch.
“What a
re you doing?” I asked, watching her rip through every drawer like the Tazmanian Devil.
“Tim told you he’d be in Chicago till tomorrow, right?”
“Uh-huh.” I slumped back into the couch, staring at framed pictures of Tim, Miles, and me in Italy a few years ago: in Venice on a gondola; in Pisa, pretending to hold up the Leaning Tower; by a monastery in Padua.
“Good. That means we have twenty-four hours to gather as much information as we can. He probably already has his money hidden, fucking bastard.”
“Wait, wait, Kiki—slow down. Maybe it was . . . a fling. Or—”
“Come on, Holly. I know this is so heinously painful, but you have to act now to self-protect. If he was banging Russian whores like Barbara Ceville’s husband, he wouldn’t concoct fake trips. You get action at lunchtime. This isn’t some courtesan doling out nooner blow jobs in the W Hotel. This is a mistress.”
A girlfriend? Like . . . a whole other relationship? No, no, no, no. He loved us!
“I’m giving you the List. Meg McSorley gave it to me—she was my friend’s friend who ended up being my divorce adviser. The woman who got me through. You have to call the twenty top lawyers in town—today—and make appointments. That way, he can’t hire them. It would be a conflict of interest if you’re already in their books as a potential client—”
“Hold on—Kiki, slow down. I’m really out if it right now, I . . . don’t know about d-d-d—” I couldn’t even say it. I could barely process what I’d just witnessed, let alone entertain the concept of divorce. My parents had been married for thirty years until my mom died of heart disease at age fifty-five. My dad lived in Florida and had wealthy widows throwing themselves at him, but he never bit; he loved the memory of my doting mom more than life itself. So how could I, coming from a perfect family, be headed for splitsville? It was too crazy! This was not my life. Maybe I’d confront him and he would freak and beg for me to stay. I had to at least see what this was all about before calling lawyers. The crazy part is that Tim was the person I’d call whenever something bad happened—I almost wanted to call him to cry about what I was going through. My body felt both heated, charged with boiling rage, and chilled with an icy grip of devastated sadness. I watched Kiki, who was cracking file cabinets and opening stacked boxes in a frenzied hunt for God knows what. My eyes focused behind her, on an eight-by-ten wedding photo, grainy and black-and-white, our faces smeared by the kinetic twirl on the dance floor, my veil wrapped around us in a gauzy ethereal sheath, binding us together. We were partially obscured by the white tissuey wave, but you could see our faces beaming through the delicate tulle. As I looked at the picture, which so captured the beauty and joy of that moment, my eyes gushed for the first time, recollecting the paralyzing vision on Wythe Avenue in Brooklyn. He was kissing that girl and holding her as he once had held me. Clearly what bound us together was not a wedding vow stronger than oak: Our bond now seemed as wispy as my veil, as fragile and transparent as its lace border.
