The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund

by Jill Kargman

  “Congrats,” I said meekly. I looked at her husband, who was totally tuned out and could clearly not give a rat’s ass about Penny’s ponies.

  “Well, this horse is just spectacular. One of Penny’s classmates at Spence actually helped us find him. We’re flying down to Argentina next week for another horse auction.”

  “Wow, so how many horses do you guys have?” asked Kiki, kicking me under the table with the pointy winkle-picker toe of her black boot.

  “Five, soon-to-be six. Diamond Horseshoe, Shining Starburst, Gideon’s Rainbow, Flaming Rubies, and Mike.”

  Kiki spat out her red wine. “MIKE?”

  Millicent looked completely unfazed. “Yes. After Shining Starburst’s late massage therapist.”

  I squirmed in my seat as I truly thought Kiki would lose it. Please don’t say anything. Please don’t say anything. Please don’t say anything.

  No such luck.

  “I’m sorry, did you just say, your HORSE has a MASSAGE THERAPIST?” Kiki blurted. She was hysterical. “No fucking way! Your horse gets massages?”

  “Well, yes . . . they work very hard.”

  “Holy shit, Equus has a better life than me!” Kiki yelped, holding up her wine. “Go, Starburst Rainbow! Awesome.”

  Teddy Logan smiled, “That’s what I tell Millie all the time!” he scoffed. “The bills for Diamond Horseshoe’s rehabilitation alone are astronomical!”

  “Rehab?” Kiki asked, laughing out loud. “For horses? What, was he addicted to horse tranquilizers?”

  Great. Now Mr. Hedgie was in cahoots with Kiki to mock Millicent’s posh Mr. Ed.

  “It was physical rehabilitation after he tripped,” corrected Millicent, aghast.

  “Maybe we should order,” said Mary, clearly trying to separate the two tables.

  “Yes, let’s,” added Millicent. She opened the menu over her face.

  “You should try the horse patties, they’re sublime,” said Kiki, revealing that she had drunk too much vino.

  The husbands laughed, but I remained poker-faced, knowing I’d pay for this all when school started again next week.

  I have never been happier to see a rodent. One scurried across the cobblestones on Bond Street, but I was too elated to finally exit the restaurant and our awkward accidental dinner partners to care.

  “Kiki, how could you do that to me? I have to see these people every day!”

  “Oh, come on, chill out,” she said, laughing. “God, those pathetic women have such sticks up their butts! What lame-o’s.

  They act so old! They’re what, like, late thirties? They look like they’re collecting Social Security with all that St. John knitwear crap.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I have to see those people, and they clearly weren’t amused by your commentary.”

  “The husbands were,” she said with a wink.

  “Yeah, well, that’s part of the problem.”

  “They totally couldn’t hear what I was saying,” she offered defensively.

  “Kiki, I have news for you. Martians on the red planet can hear your so-called whisper.”

  “It’s not like I even said anything bad!”

  “Really? When you overheard Teddy Logan say he’d dropped out of University of Colorado at Boulder, I think his wife clearly heard you tell me how appropriate that was, considering he ‘had the personality of a boulder.’ ”

  “Well he does. Igneous rock is more interesting than he is.”

  Kiki. A handful, but I loved her. Sometimes I wished I had a designer muzzle for her like those Burberry SARS masks, but I knew her candor was a gift that enhanced my life, even though sometimes I wanted to press the pause button on her vociferous rantings.

  We walked several blocks north, up to Mermaid Inn, in silence, where Nick was the sous chef. The place was empty except for some loud raucous party in the back, so we just sat at the bar to wait until they closed up shop.

  “Sorry,” said Kiki, putting her hand on my arm as we sat side by side on upholstered stools. “I guess I go off and you’re the one who has to face the music later. The boring classical music, that is.”

  I smiled, forgiving her.

  A waiter came up to us and offered us dessert.

  “We have a special tonight, called Jamaican Me Crazy,” he said earnestly. “It’s a pineapple custard with candied orange rind and coconut parfait.”

  “Uh, no, thank you,” said Kiki. “We’re all set.” After the guy walked away, she said, “They should call that dessert Jamaican Me Sick.”

  Nick emerged looking beyond adorable in his white chef’s jacket. “It’ll just be one more minute,” he said. “There’s a table of drunk banker guys who are hassling our hostess and we just want to make sure she’s okay to close up.”

  “Yuck,” said Kiki, peeking around the corner to spy into the private room. She quickly darted back into the main dining room. Too late.

  “No WAY! Kiki Talbott, was that you?” a voice bellowed out. Busted. Mark Webb staggered out of the room, shitfaced.

  “And hey hey hey, it’s Holly, too! Whoa, this is craaaazy.”

  “You know these guys?” Nick whispered.

  “Sort of,” I replied, wanting to bolt.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Kiki pronounced, heading away from Mark, who had been joined by two fellow Rolex-sporting revelers.

  “Me, too—” I said, walking toward her.

  But Mark grabbed my arm.

  “What’re you doing here, Holllllllllllly?”

  I pulled my wrist out of his hand. “Just seeing some friends.”

  “Ahh, you doin’ okay now? I miss you.” He drunkenly leaned in, the smell of wine on his breath accosting my nose. But not just any wine, as he’d soon inform me.

  “Come have a drink with us,” he asked. “I have a bottle of Petrus, five thou a bottle,” he bragged.

  “No, thanks,” I said, turning to the bathroom.

  “Holly, you know I always kinda had a thing for you . . . ,” he said with a sideways smile topped off with a wink.

  “I thought my ex-husband was your best friend,” I said, stepping back. “Anyway, you have a thing for a lot of people.”

  “Ouch!” he said, in mock-wounded tone. Then “Rrrrear!” he purred, miming scratchy cat claws. Gross.

  Kiki came out of the bathroom and took my hand.

  “We’re out of here.”

  Nick came out of the kitchen with his coat and followed us to the front door.

  We went to Marion’s to hang out for a bit, and then, amid the din, Nick leaned in. “What do you say we get out of here?”

  Ah, the your-place-or-mine moment. My place, alas, felt off limits. At least for now; it was the apartment I had shared with Tim, the building with neighbors who would whisper, doormen who’d judge.

  I ended up in Chinatown hiking to a sixth-floor walk-up above a restaurant that had dead Peking ducks dangling upside down by their webbed feet. I think I spied a dead suckling pig as well, but I had turned my head away from the neon-lit row of bodies too quickly to confirm snout sighting. The stench was disgusting beyond measure. I’m not a snob. I’m not a snob.

  After I felt I’d merited a medal by my Everest-esque vertical hike behind Nick, with periodic breathless nods that I was, in fact, not going to drop dead (he asked if I was okay after every flight, as my panting clearly was that of a clinically obese person), we arrived at his door.

  “My roommate’s not here, so we have the joint to ourselves,” he said, opening the door. When he flicked on the lights, I spied a roach running across the floor that was not unlike the size of a Honda Civic.

  “AHHHHH!” I screamed, grabbing Nick.

  “Oh, don’t worry, it can’t hurt you.”

  Ooooh. Not a good answer.

  “I know it can’t hurt me. But it can gross me out.”

  “Don’t worry! It’s more afraid of you than you are of it.”

  And with that, he stomped on it with his boot. I could hear the crunch o
f its exoskeleton under his sole. Vile. I scoured the living room for signs of others. With insects, if there was one, there were probably a million. But no sign. Just a Sex Pistols poster, Urban Outfitters-y chair and couch, TV set, empty wine bottle, and various scattered shoes.

  “Come here,” he said, reaching for me.

  I kissed him as we fell onto the couch. His hands went through my hair and over my chest. As he moved on top of me, I fully sensed the six years that separated us. It felt cougar-iffic to have this younger guy moving over my body and groping for an older bod like mine with an urgency I’d thought would be reserved for some sexpot on the pole. He clearly seemed into it, though, I must admit, he hadn’t yet spied the white stretch marks of childbirth on my upper thighs. Unlike Kiki, who had the sickest body this side of the Playboy Mansion, I was more worn out, not just by pregnancy but also by life. But the next thing I knew, my alice+olivia sweater was coming off over my head, so I’d be exposed in the Crate and Barrel lamplight.

  Nick kissed my neck and chest. It tickled. I liked it. I laughed as he kissed my clavicle, my skin still so unused to the new man’s style of foreplay. I felt another tickle across my chest—wow, he had a light touch!—and giggled as he kept kissing me, until . . . I realized the feeling felt . . . not like fingers. I opened my eyes and lifted my head back upward and glanced down. It wasn’t delicate fingers on my left breast but A COCKROACH.

  With shrieks so loud, you’d think a) the building was on fire, or b) one of the Peking ducks had resurrected from its greasy grave and started flying around the restaurant downstairs, I ran from the couch, seized by utter hysteria. I felt like they were crawling all over me. I kept swatting at my body, convinced one had wriggled down my bra, but my flailing limbs had apparently gotten rid of the multilegged creature, which was currently at large on the shag carpeting or in the crevices of the wooly couch.

  “Calm down, calm down, it’s okay—” said Nick, in a fashion so utterly calm, I understood at once that this was a frequent occurrence he met with the casual swagger of, say, a dust bunny that materialized from under a chair.

  “It’s not okay, I—I,” I had to get out of there. “I really like you, I do, I just, have to go, I’m—sorry.”

  And with that, with the speed of mercury’s winged feet, I pulled the sweater over my head (not before shaking it vigorously) and bolted into the freezing night, in search of a cab amid the smell of steamy soy sauce filling the night air.

  30

  “The only difference between marriage and prison is that a prisoner gets to finish a sentence.”

  For the next few days, Kiki had been MIA with work, and when I finally got ahold of her, I gave her the roach-on-boob play-by-play.

  “So what you’re saying is you broke up because of an insect.”

  “Multiple ones. And we weren’t together, so we couldn’t break up—”

  “You know what I mean. So, when’s Tim coming to get Miles?”

  “An hour.”

  I was a wreck. They always say the holidays have the highest suicide rates. And while I wasn’t planning on roping up a noose, the knowledge that my child and ex-husband would be spending Thanksgiving break together had resulted in a profound stomach pit. Not that I really wanted to be at Sherry Von’s Locust Valley nightmare, with food prepared entirely by her staff, no soul, no warmth except that created by Hubert’s beautiful votives and flower arrangements—but I wanted to be with my son, and that wasn’t going to happen. I honestly couldn’t even recall a time when I was on my own for Thanksgiving. My dad was on a cruise, my friends were all with their in-laws or extended families, and Kiki and I were going to go somewhere fun and do our own thing, until she threw me for a loop.

  “So, about Thanksgiving . . . ,” she said, in a funny tone I hadn’t heard from her. “How about we do something different, spice up our plan of action?”

  “Okay, like what?”

  “Well . . . the other night I walk in from the office at, like, ten o’clock, and my phone’s ringing. Lyle Spence.”

  “NO! What is he, like, a total stalker?”

  “Actually, no. At first I tried to shake him while I flipped through the channels. But there was nothing on TV, not even Skinemax, so I just started talking to him. For three hours.”

  “What? Are you serious?”

  “Holly: He’s a riot. I couldn’t believe it. He’s really cool,” she remarked in a coy, almost shy tone. (Kiki? Shy? Never!) “So we met up the next night and we had the best time. . . . I slept with him. It was amazing. And I really like him.”

  “No—”

  “Yes! I’m as surprised as you are—I mean, he’s a complete stranger and yet, I’m . . . into him. I asked him all about the crazy art world, his insane hedge fund clients, everything, it was . . . really fun.”

  She never spoke with such tenderness. “AND?”

  “And he lives on Central Park West, right on the parade route—he says Garfield’s nose bumps on his window, for Chrissake—and he has people over every year. He says it’s a really fun group—friends, clients, about fifty people, and he invited us to come!”

  “Really?” That could be fun, I mused. I did love watching the parade on TV with Miles every year. It would be depressing to watch Matt Lauer alone when I could have full view of the action in person. “Okay, let’s do it.”

  I went into Miles’s room and sat beside him to pack his bag. That morning we had made chocolate chip pancakes together and traced our hands on some construction paper to make turkeys. I hung his up on the fridge and, while he zoned out during his weekend dose of Nickelodeon, took mine and wrote on it:

  My sweet Milesie,

  I miss you already, but know you’ll have a great Turkey

  Day. I love you so much and I’m so thankful for

  you, my little love. Xoxo Mom

  I tucked it into his bag and zipped it up, and when I heard the buzzer from the lobby, we went downstairs so I could stay with Miles right up until he pulled away in Tim’s car.

  But when we got downstairs, I saw Tim looking surprised to see me. I wasn’t quite sure why until I walked outside to load the duffel in the trunk. To my dismay, when said vehicle did approach our awning, there was someone in the passenger seat. Avery. Wrecker of homes. She quickly looked out the drizzle-covered windshield to avoid eye contact with the dreaded ex-wife, and I pretended not to notice her. While I knew she was very much in the picture, I guess I didn’t realize she’d be there for such a family-oriented holiday. I was going to be off at some random party with strangers as Kiki’s wingman, and poor Miles should at least be the focus of his father’s attention, not her. Okay, breathe. I tried to stay calm.

  “Hey, buddy!” Tim said, hugging Miles. “Ready for a great weekend?”

  Miles turned to me. I knelt down beside him, fighting tears. “Be a good boy, sweets,” I said, holding his face.

  “I love you, Mom. Happy Thanksgiving.” He bear-hugged me and I felt the tears begin to fry my retinas but blinked them back. As Miles turned to get in the car, Tim, who knew me so well, clearly saw my pink-hued eyes and leaned in.

  “Holly, I am so sorry. I thought I would come up to get him.”

  “It’s fine, whatever, honestly,” I said, praying I could force back the cataracts with an emotional Hoover Dam.

  “I know it must be hard. I feel . . . terrible seeing you hurt—”

  Great. Of all the burdens I’d dealt with emotionally, his pity was like a backpack filled with shot-put balls, too heavy to bear.

  “It’s okay, Tim. What’s done is done, right?” I could feel the waves mounting, pounding against the weakened resolve of my so-called dam. “Have a nice time,” I offered, genuinely, as Tim gave me a small smile. His eyes looked guilty, but as I walked away, he hopped in the car, hit the gas, and drove my son off into the evening. That feeling of loss, of Miles being transported away from me, would now be a rough horse pill I would simply have to get used to swallowing.

  I went back in the
slow-as-molasses elevator. When I got upstairs, I staggered home and flopped on the couch.

  A couple hours after I’d dozed off, the phone rang. It was John, wondering if I was free the following night. A random Tuesday, and as I had nothing planned, I agreed to see him. And after my roll in the hay-slash-roaches with Chef Boy, a grown-up man might be just what I needed: a mature antidote to my youthful dalliance.

  31

  “Many a man owes his success to his first wife and his second wife to success.”

  —Jim Backus

  The next day was freakishly warm for the season, so Kiki coaxed me out to the park for one of our “psycho walks,” which we used to take all the time when she lived uptown. Thrice around the reservoir or bridle path, followed by a lunch big enough to reinstall all the calories we’d burned off and more.

  “So I have an idea,” she said, face ablaze. “I think I found a job for you.”

  “Really?” I was happily surprised. “What is it?”

  “Back writing about music. But not for magazines: working with my friend Randy, who’s head of PR at Celestial Records, writing publicity stuff. You could do this in your sleep. And it’s fun!”

  “Whoa, Celestial Records. It’s those two brothers, Noah and Sean Greene?”

  “Totally. They’re the Weinsteins of the record industry. They built this all from nothing in the last five years and have won, like, a trillion Grammys and stuff.”

  “Wait, didn’t they have some, like, awful sexual harassment suit or something?”

  “Yeah, they’re gross, but they’re geniuses. Anyway, Randy is awesome but can’t write for shit. I told her about you and she needs someone part-time who can write the press releases, translate the sound into words.”

  “I could do that!”

  “Hello? I know! Plus, it’s only three days a week, so you could still do your tours for Miles’s school, leading those hedge fund drones around the hallowed halls. . . .”

  “Wow. That could really be just what I need,” I said, imagining a career outside of mommyhood.