The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund

by Jill Kargman

  Elliot got up and I signaled one minute, but he smiled and mouthed out that I should take my time. He went into the kitchen while I talked to Miles, sang him a lullaby, and tucked him in over the phone.

  “Okay, pull up the covers,” I instructed.

  “I did it!” he seemed to like this.

  “Twinkle, twinkle, little star . . .”

  I sang to him, and when I was done, he quietly said, “Good night, Mom.”

  “Good night, sweetie, I love you.”

  While I didn’t want him to be a total mama’s boy, I did love that he needed me and thought of me all the way out in snowy Colorado. Thank goodness Elliot and I had ended up at my place. He came back in with some hot chocolate I didn’t even know I had, and in T-shirts and underwear, we cuddled like married people.

  “This is good,” he said. “But you know what’s even better?”

  “What?”

  “Machine hot chocolate. It is the best thing.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “TOTALLY! I love machine hot chocolate! All my friends teased me in college because I’d make them go to the Cumberland Farms to get some everyday!”

  “Same. My friend and I were so addicted that we made friends with a guy in the kitchen and during the summer he smuggled us a machine and we had it in our house.”

  “Oh, my God, that’s my dream! Except I’d probably drink myself into a Roseanne Barr state.”

  “Then there’d be more of you to love.”

  He turned out the light and kissed me good night. Once he fell asleep, I was dying to surprise him by climbing on him naked, but we had our sex date for the following night. I lay there watching him (thank God he didn’t snore) and thought about Tim. Of course I knew Tim so much better than Elliot—I had been with him for so many years. But looking at Elliot’s cute face, and knowing how much I loved kissing him and how much I wanted to know him more, I realized that I was a truly different person now. The biggest shock is when you look back on a relationship and understand for the first time that even if you did try and go back to each other, it wouldn’t be like before, because you’re completely changed. The agonizing first months apart and the suffering and the heartbreak sculpt you into a new person, and that was the Holly that Elliot was curled up next to.

  40

  “It’s not true that married people live longer than single people . . . it only seems longer.”

  The next morning we woke up at around noon and I immediately snuck to the bathroom to degrease my face. Looking in the mirror, I could have sworn you could fry an egg on my T-zone. While I was brushing my teeth I felt a hunger pain in my stomach; I was dying for anything, and I had nothing in the fridge since Miles was away. I came back to bed (hair brushed, teeth minty) and flopped on Elliot, who smiled and hugged me like a little bear cub. I felt so happy and needed and couldn’t believe how easy it was to wake up with him or that it was our first time waking up together. It felt so normal.

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  “Feed me, Seymour, feel me AWL night long,” I sang from Little Shop of Horrors.

  He laughed and looked up at me and patted my face.

  “Do you want to go out for a big yummy brunch?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “Well, I hate to tell you this, but I’m not some pancake-flipping Betty Crocker type.”

  “That’s okay. I am.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Do you have pancake mix?”

  “No. I have nothing. I have mustard.”

  “Mustard, huh. Looks we’re going to order in.”

  “I have a single girl’s fridge.”

  “I don’t think you’re a single girl anymore.” Did that mean he was my . . . boyfriend? I thought so. My heart did a Nadia Comaneci. I excitedly scampered to get my little pail of menus. There were hundreds.

  “Holy shit, what did you do, go through Zagats and demand menus from every place in town?”

  “Kind of.”

  “You are very organized.”

  “I know: Martha Junior.”

  “This looks good to me,” he said, producing a big one with a sun. “The smiley yellow guy is telling me this is our place.”

  I dialed and Elliot kept yelling out more stuff to add until finally I put my hand over the receiver and said, “Yo, this could feed a family of four!”

  By the time I had hung up, we had ordered a quasi buffet. We smooched in front of cartoons for a while (Miles had left my TV on Nickelodeon), and I learned that Elliot was a massive SpongeBob fan even though he had no kids. Odd-slash-cute. We smooched and watched until my buzzer rang.

  I spread out all the goods for us, which made me feel like I was preparing something for him by peeling off the tinfoil on his egg and cheese on toast and flopping it onto a plate. So domestic! Mrs. Brady, dream wife. Okay, maybe not. But at least I made everything look nice. I even found a tray my mom gave me and laid everything on it with OJ poured into glasses and coffee in mugs and brought it to him in bed.

  “Wow, lucky me; look at this spread you made!”

  We ate and watched the screen, a trance of dancing starfish and choruses of underwater weeds, corals, and bubbles. The funny voices made him smile and I saw in his zone-out that he was still like a little kid in there, which I loved. Just as long as he didn’t start hanging with the Culkin brothers and buying an amusement park and elephant-man bones. After an hour more of lounging, I hauled out of bed to draw the blinds. I gasped.

  “Come look at this!’

  Sometime between midnight and noon, the city had been covered in a blanket of sparkling snow. There was a full-scale blizzard in progress, with wind and flakes whipping the window, making our bedside perch even more romantic. We basically spent the whole day in bed, as one eighties movie rolled into another, and the next thing we knew, it was dark again around 4:00 p.m.

  I went to hop in the shower, and as the hot water fell on me, I secretly fantasized that he’d surprise me by coming in and joining me. But he didn’t, so I got dressed in a soft cashmere sweater and skirt and plopped beside him and asked what he wanted to do.

  He didn’t say anything; he just looked at me. He sat up and reached for me, kissing me gently at first, then more and more intensely as we got lost in each other’s embrace to the point of dizziness. He calmly unbuttoned the cardigan I’d thrown on; his slow, methodical motions made me practically swoon. He kissed my chest above my bra and back to my mouth with vigor. But just as he’d ratchet up the hotness factor, he’d slow down and be calmly doting again. He delicately pulled one bra strap down, kissing my shoulder where the strap had been. He kissed across my collarbone to the other bra strap, which fell beside my elbow as he kissed my shoulder and unhooked my bra. The surge of need for him pulled through my entire body as he slid a hand under my skirt, up my thigh. I gasped when he touched me, feeling at once total freedom and unbridled anticipation. While he had the appetite and fervor that John had, I saw something more in Elliot, like an emotional need, like he really was deeply into the moment, body and soul, as opposed to just trying to get off. I took his T-shirt off over his head and rubbed my hands along his chest and stomach, kissing him as we lay against each other. Having sex with him at this point was something I was even more excited for because he had prolonged my cravings. Although I have to admit, I oscillated between a) wanting him to want me so badly that he couldn’t help but throw me across the bed and climb on me, and b) wanting to keep the wait going so that we’d relish it all even more.

  I knew this time would be it, and while my heart was racing, my mind was calm. He stopped kissing me and took the rubber band out of my hair and ran his hand through it, bringing his lips to mine again. I could feel chills down my arms and back, and as he unzipped my skirt I felt like the perfect combination of a swooning schoolgirl and a complete va-va-voom woman being seduced. He slid off my panties and looked into my eyes.

  “It’s not quite evening yet but I figured you’d give me a green light,” he said
, holding my hands.

  “Green.”

  I laughed, and when he kissed me again, I knew this was as right as anything was ever going to be. He seemed to carry me in one of his arms as he moved my comforter down with the other, always making me feel like a total goddess. But he wasn’t some too-gentle “lover” type that was all about snail-paced makin’ love—he started out slow and lovingly, but then the sex parabola spiked and he grabbed me harder so I knew he had his own needs, which gave me even more of a kick. I put my arms around him, and he looked into my eyes, then kissed me as we moved together in a perfect rhythm as my hands moved down his back. As he moved, he held me in one of his strong arms and wasn’t scared to show he was enjoying it; he was quiet but breathy, and as his inhalation quickened he held my hand in his and squeezed it hard. I was so turned on by his being turned on that I thought I would melt into the sheets.

  I could feel my orgasm coming in the distance, like waiting on a platform and seeing the train approaching from far away. It grew closer and closer and rose until I knew it would roar next to me, and when it did, after all I’d been through, it felt like a miracle. Elliot was beyond hot in bed. But it was way more than that. I felt bound to him like we were the same unit, those conjoined twins attached at the heart. Except not tragic. We had taken such different paths but somehow gotten to this moment together, our parallel roads finally converging. It was a big emotional salad of pleasure and relief and love and wanting to squeeze him just short of bruising his skin, Angelina and Billy Bob-style, minus vials of blood.

  Even some of the most satisfying “thunder under the covers,” as Sir Elton put it, can lead to nervous post-coital interaction, but luckily we shared no heinous silent pauses post-rumpus. Instead, Elliot grabbed me and kissed me quickly several times on the lips, and then my cheeks and forehead. It was crazy but it almost felt like he was already family. I was so into him that I was afraid I was getting ahead of him in my vision of us as a couple—it took every fiber of my being not to yell out “I love you!” I truly wanted to scream it out, though obviously I would never. I beat down the urge with a reach for the glass of water on my bedside table and swallowed away the need to confess that I was head over heels, besotted, utterly smitten. I stared at his flushed, gorgeous face and could not believe this perfect creature was somehow with me. Then came the inevitable question that I tended to ask out of fear of post-first-sex silence, which instantly made me into every woman in New York.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  Loser. Bad. Dumb.

  “I’m thinking . . . that you are very . . .” He paused.

  Gorgeous? Sexy? Fabulous? “. . . Yes . . .”

  “Familiar.”

  I smiled.

  “Seriously, you feel like . . . I’ve known you all my life or something. It’s weird,” he said. I looked at him and rubbed his side. “In a good way, weird,” he added. He moved a strand of hair out of my eyes and looked at me before kissing me again.

  My alarm clock sounded the next morning for my first day of work; Randy wanted me to get my feet wet during the crickets period of the holidays, when no one was around and I could ease in, and Elliot and I could barely move we were so wearied from the mad passion of the weekend. The sheets were in a tightly knotted ball and there was raw mattress beneath me.

  “Wow, we must have really done some damage; there’s exposed mattress.” He smiled and, shocker of all shockers, started to make the bed. As IF Tim would have ever lifted a finger; it was always me running around to the other side and back again, flattening out every last crease so you could bounce a quarter off it. With two pairs of hands, it was so much easier! And really having two people, not just feigning couplehood and then truly feeling alone. As the white sheet billowed above the bed before we matted it down, I had to blink back tears in my eyes. Sherry Von was wrong—I did find someone. Someone who seemed perfect for me. And even if he dumped me, he was proof that I was capable of falling in love again. I just hoped he wouldn’t shatter my heart into a trillion tiny shards.

  41

  “Why is divorce so expensive? Because it’s worth every penny.”

  After we got dressed in a hurried frenzy and walked out onto Fifth Avenue, Elliot’s pager started going off. “Jeez, I thought the art folk don’t rise until noon! Kiki said Lyle’s always still asleep when she leaves his apartment at ten!” I stuck my arm out, praying I’d get lucky enough to find a taxi.

  “Holly, wait one sec—I have to talk to you about something—”

  Suddenly a cab pulled up next to a mound of snow and a woman hopped out. I thanked her, which I always did, and then wondered why I always thanked people when they were simply getting out at their destination.

  “Yay! Free cab! That was easy.” I turned to kiss Elliot good-bye. “Wait, did you want to tell me something?”

  “Come on, lady!” shouted the driver in a thick Middle Eastern accent. He followed his command by leaning on his horn. Nice.

  “Go ahead,” Elliot said, kissing me on the cheek. “We’ll talk later.”

  On the ride downtown I was so elated from the magical blur of the last forty-eight hours that I wasn’t even nervous about beginning work.

  When I arrived I did get a sudden minisurge of anxiety about the unknown new chapter and hoped my audition press release for the job wasn’t the only good one I could pull out. Tristin came out to greet me, wearing a Band-Aid for a skirt, then gave me the grand tour, including the coffee machine, which was very key due to the weekend with Elliot, which had netted me probably four hours of sleep a night. That’s the thing about dating: you’re trying to not snore, not even breathe, or God forbid fart. I drank three cups to get out of my comatose state. Half the people weren’t even there, and as I walked by Randy’s office, my wave to her was greeted with a brisk smile while she talked on the phone.

  We arrived at my desk, which was against a huge window and right next to Tristin’s. My giant clear iMac was such a vision of joy, I almost hugged it—I almost didn’t trust people who preferred PCs. After I pounded the java, we hit the supply room. Move over, Staples. I got excited just looking at the reams of colored paper, notebooks, pens galore, tape, even Magic Markers. I got so much loot, it took three trips up the aluminum staircase to get it to my desk. And on the last journey, I could not fit by the guy who was heading down as I headed up.

  “You must be Holly Talbott,” he said in a serious tone, all business. “Sean Greene.”

  “Yes, hi, nice to meet you,” I said, managing to shake his hand, despite the piles of stuff in my arms. “I’m so sorry, I’m raiding your supply closet, it’s like the first day of school.”

  “Let me help you,” he said, relieving me of three boxes of rainbow paper clips, fluorescent Post-Its, and a desk calendar.

  “Thank you so much, you are such a rock star,” I said, suddenly feeling dumb. “I guess I have to stop saying that as a substitute for ‘you’re the best’ now, since you actually know real rock stars.”

  We landed at my desk and plopped my loot on the table. He smiled at me, said, “See you around,” and walked down the hall.

  “Holly, we have our staff meeting now and you’re gonna get all your artists including The Saints, that new hot hot hot Brooklyn band,” said Tristin. “You are gonna love love love them.”

  After the meeting, which seemed to last an eternity, I left with the files and stacks of demos for my three new bands and hit the phones, calling all the managers to introduce myself and make appointments to meet them for lunch. I also phoned all the tour managers to get dates for New York shows so I could invite all my editor friends and get the ball rolling.

  Just then, Noah Greene, el presidente and cofounder of the label with Sean, walked by me and stopped to look me over.

  “Soooo, you’re the new Dartmouth chick we hired. I thought it was a barnyard up there in New Hampshire! Who knew a smartypants could be so cute?” He walked off before I could say a word. I was in a state of shock. I think that w
as some form of un-kosher sexual harassment or at the very least extremely unprofessional behavior, but since I hadn’t heard talk of a pube in his Coke or whatever Clarence Thomas did, I went back to work, semi-weirded out, but also flattered. I drafted a release for The Saints, whose album was “dropping” in three months but who already had a rising hit leaked on the Internet, making my job cake. The day flew by and I called my friend Maggie, who had been in production with me at Paper and was now at Spin.

  “Mag-dogs!”

  “Holland? Holy shit, how are you?”

  “I’m in PR for Celestial.”

  “No way!”

  “Way. I switched to the other side. I know it’s like D.A.s who sell out and go defend rapists. But not.”

  “No, I meant no way that you’re working at all. Didn’t you marry some hedge fund dude?”

  “Um . . . yeah, well, we actually split up. My son’s in school, so I thought I’d get back to work. It’s just three days, so it’s really great.”

  “Awesome! But wait—how are the creepy Greene brothers?”

  “They may be slimeballs, but they have a killer ear.”

  We ended up talking for thirty minutes, and by the wrap-up, she had agreed to run a piece. Success!

  I came home exhausted to find gorgeous flowers waiting.

  “I miss you already. I’ll call you when I’m back from the red state. Dinner on Friday? Or Saturday? Or both? Elliot.”

  I smiled, elated. Despite my insanely busy day, whenever I had a nanosecond of downtime, I’d think of him and get that incredible jolt all over again. It was so much fun to remember and re-remember those moments, drawing from a memory bank of something better than gold bars. I was so enamored I couldn’t wait to refill my stash of Elliot memories by making new ones that weekend.

  Before bed, Miles called again for a chat, long-distance tuck-in, and songs.

  “You sound happy, Mom!” I was amazed he could notice a change in me through the phone wire. Maybe I’d been too mopey before.