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‘Okay, John, but once I have a so-called social network, then can we try again for a baby?’
‘Whatever you want, Marcy.’
‘Then I guess we have a deal,’ I said.
‘That’s my girl.’
‘I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?’
Oh, if only I’d known.
FOUR The Worst Hedge Fund Wife on the Planet (#ulink_22f36d29-a5a4-5280-8b1d-bea30d8dbb44)
Heaving myself out of bed, I guzzled down the rest of my glass of water and threw on an old T-shirt and a pair of John’s boxers. Sunlight poured through a gap in our curtains, illuminating a wedge of vanilla carpet where my outfit from the previous night lay in a sad little heap. I picked it up and tossed it in the little hamper we used to collect our dry cleaning, then retrieved my shoes, a pair of leg-lengthening, bank-breaking black pumps, and my quilted black satin clutch, both from Chanel, both carelessly scattered around the room. I shelved them in their appropriate tissue-lined boxes while at the same time eyeing the floor for my stockings and Spanx.
Oh right, I’d left those at the club.
Along with my self-respect.
Nice.
I needed coffee, lots of it. Without it, I knew I would be unable to function for the entire day, not that I had anything in particular to do, but still. I slipped on my fleece slippers and padded over to the kitchen, where I sloshed some milk in a saucepan, ground some coffee beans and dumped the entire grinder’s worth of grounds into the liner. Once it was brewed, I poured a couple cups of the coffee into the saucepan with the warmed milk and then emptied the whole mixture into the red-and-white snowflake mug I’d used since high school. If there was one thing I had down to a science, it was making coffee just the way I liked it.
Taking my first gulp of the hot, dark liquid, I peered inside the refrigerator, where I found the signs of a drunken, middle-of-the-night food binge—the pumpkin pie I had made two days earlier was almost entirely eaten and one of my earrings was nestled in between a halfeaten round of Camembert and a carton of orange juice that had been full when we had left for the Partridges but was now mostly gone. Feeling even more disgusted with myself, I closed the door of the fridge and looked down at my stomach. It was bloated and distended.
Gross.
My head pounded behind my left eye socket, and without thinking I reached up to apply pressure on it, causing a thunderbolt of pain to rip through my head as soon as my fingers made contact. I stooped down to check my reflection in the mirrored backsplash, only to have my fears confirmed: I had the beginnings of a black eye. A real, Oscar-de-la-Hoya-worthy shiner. It was gonna be ugly.
Gulping down another mouthful of coffee, I started trying to piece together the previous night’s timeline. There had been three glasses of champagne, which I had downed in rapid succession. Not advisable, obviously, but I always drink quickly when I’m nervous, and that night, surrounded by John’s hyperwealthy colleagues and their expensively maintained wives, I certainly had cause to be. You see, it was pretty clear that most of the other wives at the Partridges’ party grew up with nannies and private school kilts hemmed just so, while I had carried a house key around my neck on a dingy white shoelace and braved the Minnesota winters in multigenerational hand-me-downs. Even last night, wearing a new designer dress and multiple coats of a new mascara the woman behind the cosmetics counter swore was what all the movie stars use, I still felt like a prairie girl among princesses.
However, for John, I put on a brave face. He seemed to be reveling in our transition into a higher tax bracket and new city as much as I was floundering in it. Since being recruited by Zenith from his desk at the Merc, John had been completely obsessed with his work. His job as a specialist in trading energy derivatives required him to, for example, predict, hopefully correctly, how much the price of a barrel of oil was going to rise over the next quarter and why. It was all tremendously complicated, time-consuming, and stressful, but it turned out that John was really good at it, and in the span of less than a year, he’d managed to make the fund an obscene amount of money, which had in turn made us wealthier than we’d ever dared to dream.
For anyone without an intimate understanding of what hedge funds do, in a nutshell they invest other people’s money. We’re talking super-wealthy individuals who have the five to twenty million dollars you need to play ball with these funds just lying around, gathering dust, twiddling their little green thumbs. If everything goes right, the investors get back whatever profit (or return) is made, minus twenty percent and two percent of the total investment that the fund keeps as compensation. (A few managers take a full fifty percent of the profits, but they’re more the exception than the rule.)
For a long stretch of time everything did go right—the rich got richer and a bunch of guys in the right place at the right time minted huge fortunes virtually overnight. And then the economy tanked, and the party was suddenly over.
John and I were a total anomaly. While we were upgrading our furniture and researching luxury vacations, the rest of Wall Street was taking it on the chin. The banks had all underestimated their exposure to the subprime mortgage industry meltdown and had been forced to write off billions of dollars. As they started reining in on the amount of loans they were making to small and large businesses, deal flow slowed and with fewer deals in the pipeline, profits dipped. Soon thereafter pink slips started to fly. The Federal Reserve intervened to save the banks from going under, but at the expense of the dollar, which sank even lower in value. To make matters worse, the boost U.S. exports received as a result of the weak dollar was far smaller than previously anticipated or hoped for, and the president’s pro-ethanol policy was making the cost of all food higher as Midwestern farmers ditched less profitable crops in order to grow corn. To top it all off the Saudis were once again raising the price of crude, mainly because of the weakening dollar. The long run of American prosperity was coming to an end.
But not for us. Ours was just starting.
Although we were lucky, I didn’t feel like it. Moving to New York had been difficult for me. Okay, gut wrenching. Shortly after our relocation, I had gotten pregnant. A dream, since we’d spent a year trying before it finally happened. You could say that I was—and am
- totally obsessed with babies. I love the way they smell, the sounds they make when they eat, their tiny little hands making angry little fists when they cry. It hadn’t mattered to me that I vomited five times a day and could only stomach Saltines and cheese sandwiches for the duration of the whole first trimester. I’d watch those Gerber baby commercials on television and just melt with happiness. I was going to be a mom.
Everything was going great until I hit the twenty-week mark and started bleeding. First it was just some spotting, but when the flow got heavier, my doctor put me on monitored bed rest in the hospital and they shot me full of drugs that were supposed to help. But it was too late. I miscarried. It wasn’t meant to be, the doctor said. We’d try again, John said. A lot of people said a lot of things, but nothing could allay the pain. My world was black. I couldn’t stop crying. For weeks, all I did was cry. Cry and eat cheese—Burrata, fresh off the plane from Tuscany, weeping with moisture, and Stilton from England, massive slabs of the salty, piquant stuff. John brought me only the best, unpasteurized, illegal cheese. I could eat it now: I wasn’t pregnant anymore. There was no danger of ingesting a piece of Listeria-laden fromage and losing the baby.
I had sat on our new couch, my misery wrapped around me like a blanket, and thought of my baby. I wondered what he would have looked like, whether he would have inherited John’s blondish hair or my dark locks, John’s lean, athletic build, or my softer, shorter one. Would he have been popular? Bookish? Funny? Preferred pancakes to waffles, bacon to sausages? I’d never know. All I could do was imagine. Imagine and then weep. I told John that I wanted us to move back to Chicago. New York held only unhappiness for me. I missed our old lives and I missed our friends.
‘We’ll make more,’ he assured me.
Now in the kitchen, I considered the empty seat at the breakfast table and silently cursed John for making me go to the Partridges. I had wanted to stay home and watch an episode of Lost, but he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I promise, once you have a glass of wine and start talking to people, you’ll be glad you’re there,’ he’d argued, and when I still refused to budge from our big comfy couch, he pulled out the heavy artillery: ‘My bosses will be there. It won’t look good if you’re not with me.’
I harrumphed, unimpressed.
‘We haven’t been out in months. Don’t I deserve a night out with my wife every once in a while?’
Thus reminded that I, baby or no baby, still had some wifely responsibilities to perform, I pried myself off the couch and let him prod me into our bedroom in the direction of our walk-in closet, where I squirmed into my trusty Spanx, a pair of stockings, and that stupid dress. And although I had resigned myself to spending the night quietly sipping champagne in a corner, hoping that no one noticed what a big, friendless loser I was, I actually ended up having a good time.
The highlight of the evening had been—no, not the tequila—but meeting Gigi Ambrose, the well-known caterer, cookbook author, and frequent Today Show guest. With masses of auburn hair, Jessica Rabbit curves, and enough Southern sass for a whole cotillion’s worth of debutantes, she was the kind of woman you want to hate, but can’t. She was too charming, and on top of that, her recipes had always served me well in the kitchen. Even so it had taken me half an hour to work up the nerve to walk up to her and introduce myself.
‘I love the kumquat glazed chicken skewers,’ I’d said in reference to one of the hors d’oeuvres being passed around on silver trays that evening. There had also been caviar-topped quail eggs, blue cheese and candied fig tartlets, not to mention grilled polenta squares and seared tuna bites. But the chicken skewers had been my favorite, and as a conversation opener I had asked Gigi if she’d included the recipe for them in her next book, a home entertaining guide she’d already started promoting on her Today Show segments.
‘Oh, I’m not catering tonight,’ Gigi had drawled in response. Her voice was deep and warm, and she smelled of vanilla and rosewood. ‘Ainsley went with another company, which is more than fine by me. I’m here with my husband.’
‘I am, too,’ I said just as a woman in a chinchilla coat clomped through the doorway on five-inch platform heels. She had raven hair, large, probably surgically enhanced breasts, and a thin gold phone pressed to her ear. She was barking something in Russian into it. Later I would learn from Gigi that the fembot’s name was Irina and she called herself a matchmaker, but most believed her to be a madam. Irina set up pretty Russian girls, many just off the plane, with rich old men who wanted hot young things to take to dinner—and then home to bed. Eliot Spitzer was rumored to have been one of her better customers.
‘Darling, hello. I haven’t seen you in a while. It’s so nice to see you,’ Irina purred, leaning down—she stood six feet two in her heels—to give Gigi a double air kiss salutation.
‘Have you met Marcy Emerson?’ Gigi asked, putting her arm around my waist and giving it a reassuring squeeze.
Irina shifted her eyes, a pair of icy blue slits rimmed in heavy black liner, to me.
She was intimidating all right, and I had fumbled for my words, finally sputtering something like ’its cold out there, isn’t it?’ thinking that I’d be safe talking about the weather.
But I’d thought wrong.
‘In Russia we have a saying,’ Irina said, her voice as frosty as her glare. ‘There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes.’ She had made a show of looking me up and down before stomping off into the living room.
‘Umm, is it my imagination or did she just sneer at me?’ I asked Gigi.
‘Not your imagination.’
‘Well, then, what a friendly lady. I’m so glad I came.’
Gigi laughed. ‘You couldn’t get out of tonight, either, could you?’
‘Is it that obvious?’ I replied, and for the next ten minutes Gigi and I swapped our bullet-point biographies. She was originally from North Carolina, recently married her husband, one Jeremy Cohen, an ex-Goldman Sachs banker who’d originally made his money trading junk bonds (à la Michael Milken, minus the jail time). His particular knack was distressed investment, which meant that he bought and sold stock in troubled corporations. He’d started his first vulture fund in the late nineties following the International Monetary Fund crisis in Asia. After making a killing flipping undervalued companies in South Korea, Jeremy launched another fund and amassed yet another fortune buying securities in a string of utility companies across Texas. Immediately after Gigi married Jeremy, she got pregnant with a girl, now six months old and named Chloe, and moved into Jeremy’s gargantuan, feng shui-ed apartment in a newly refurbished luxury condo/hotel on Central Park South. I told her that I’d grown up in a suburb of Minneapolis, went to college in Chicago, where I worked post graduation at an investment bank, most recently as a relationship officer for the bank’s wealthy clients, and met John, whom I had been married to for five years.
Gigi and I finished our glasses of champagne and agreed it was time to join the others in the living room; our husbands were probably wondering if we’d left without them. Gigi suggested we take the long way back, through the Partridges’ dining room, where we gawked at a china hutch full of plates etched with two fancifully entwined P’s and an A.
‘Monogrammed tablewear,’ Gigi whispered, rolling her eyes. I giggled and she leaned in close to my ear to dispense a torrent of insider information, the importance of which I would realize only later, once it was too late.
‘I actually shouldn’t be making fun of poor Ainsley. Jeremy told me earlier tonight that Peter’s closing his fund. He started it three years ago and it never reached critical mass.’
I nodded. Critical mass in private-equity-speak referred to the amount of capital he had been able to raise. It was a common death knell for hundreds of startup funds.
‘Plus he cleared all his trades through Bear Stearns,’ Gigi continued.
In the aftermath of the subprime lending debacle, Bear Stearns, once one of the most venerable banks on Wall Street, was forced to sell itself to JP Morgan for less than it was worth. Much of its well-paid staff, including several of Peter’s friends, had been laid off, leaving Peter to scramble to forge relationships with new brokers.
‘And to top it all off, Peter was personally heavily invested in Bear stock. He’d worked there for ten years before he left to do his own thing. When Bear sold to JP Morgan for a pittance, the Partridges lost just about everything they had. Lord knows why they’re throwing this party. They really can’t afford it.’
‘I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose so much so quickly.’
‘Hey, this is New York. Fortunes are made and lost every day, especially in a market as volatile as this one.’
This, I knew to be true. John and I, for example, had profited from fluctuations in the energy markets. We were overnight success stories, but we were the exception. Far more had lost their shirts. No one could have anticipated that Greenwich, Connecticut, aka hedgefundlandia, would become rife with home foreclosures.
‘Hey, let’s have lunch next week, my treat. Do you like Nello?’ Gigi asked, mentioning the name of a popular Italian restaurant on Madison Avenue.
‘I’ve never been, but John has and he tells me it’s good.’
‘It is. The pasta is incredible. Tuesday at noon work for you?’
‘Absolutely,’ I’d said, and for the first time since the miscarriage, I actually had something to look forward to.
Gigi handed me her card in case I had to cancel—which I promised her I wouldn’t, my agenda being completely empty and all—and we walked back toward the living room, where the party was just starting to pick up steam. The music had gotten louder and drinks stiffer. At around eleven, Gigi bade us all goodbye—she’d promised her babysitter it wouldn’t be a late night—but before she left she introduced me to Peter Partridge, who immediately plunked a pair of felt antlers on my head and asked me to pose with Ainsley in front of their fifteen-foot Christmas tree.
Clad in a strapless chartreuse mini, her hair tumbling in her trademark flaxen waves over a pair of lightly tanned shoulders, Ainsley was every inch the Woman About Town. She had the kind of haughty aura that is particular to people accustomed to being at the center of attention anywhere they went. Ainsley’s parents were upper middle class, but socially ambitious enough to know that by sending their daughter to Exeter in Massachusetts for boarding school and then to Rollins in Florida for college, they would be giving her an opportunity to join the ranks of high society. They were right: Ainsley met Peter at a charity benefit while she was working as a summer intern for House & Home, however it wasn’t until she bumped into Peter two summers later at Piping Rock that the pair began to date. They were married a year and a half later (a picture appeared in Town & Country magazine), and Ainsley gave up her job working in Vogue’s fabled fashion closet to dedicate herself to charitable works full time, or so she told the New York Times Vows columnist at the time.
For several subsequent years, Ainsley and Peter were considered New York’s golden couple. She had beauty and charm, he, pedigree and (it was assumed) tons of old money—still the best kind. They were photographed at parties, written about in all the newspapers, celebrated everywhere. I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t thrilling to be momentarily allowed into their inner circle, even if Ainsley had kept calling me by the wrong name. (Where she got Tricia from Marcy, I’ll never know.)
I had been sitting on the couch for a while, pretending to listen to John and one of his colleagues discuss the latest round of firings at an investment bank downtown, when Peter suggested that we all do a round of shots, which, when they arrived, turned out to be closer in size to tumblers, filled close to the brim with tequila. Everyone threw theirs back in one, and I, not wanting to stand out in the crowd, followed suit. It was a bad move. The quails’ eggs and tiny tartlets might have been delicious, but they hadn’t provided much in the way of stomach lining. I was immediately drunk.
I found John in the hallway between the kitchen and dining room, talking to Ainsley. Tugging lightly on his shirt, I tried to get his attention.
He didn’t notice, so I tugged harder. ‘Honey, I’m going to get my coat,’ I said.
‘Really?’ he asked, looking at his watch.
I nodded and swayed, and John moved to steady me. But Ainsley moved faster. Clasping a skinny, sinewy arm around my waist, she pouted prettily and said in a surprisingly husky voice that I simply could not go, that she was just getting to know me. (Err, Tricia?)
‘C’mon, Marce, let’s stay a little longer,’ John seconded.
I agreed—stupid me—and whiled away some time thumbing through a stack of coffee table books (most of which featured Ainsley in some way or another) in front of the fake fireplace in the Partridges’ living room. Three-quarters of an hour later, I was no longer tipsy but tired and truly ready to go home. But when I went to find John, I stumbled into Peter, who somehow talked me into accepting a glass of Montrachet from him in the kitchen. He’d just opened the bottle, the last in a case he’d won at a charity auction and said it would be a shame not to drink it. Okay, okay, I relented. And, yes, I could have declined Peter’s offer and left the party, slipping out into the foyer and through the front door without anyone noticing, but the thing is that I really felt like it would have been rude to turn down the guy. He’d just lost his business and the majority of his savings. The least I could do was share a bottle of Montrachet with him.
From then on my recollection of events starts to get blurry. I do remember that all of us piled into a couple of cabs and headed downtown to the Gramercy Park Hotel, where there was a velvet rope that Peter and Ainsley had no trouble transcending, and inside the music was great, the vibe electric. Bottles of champagne, tequila, fresh orange juice, pomegranate juice, and soda crowded every square inch of our table. Once we were all settled, Peter handed me another drink, a tequila mixed with the pomegranate juice, and I honestly don’t remember anything of what happened after finishing it—no idea how or why I’d disrobed in front of a room full of the city’s most sophisticated, well-connected movers and shakers, or started a fight with a girl whose face and name I cannot, for the life of me, remember even to this day.
FIVE Becoming a Rules Girl (#ulink_03e5983e-5588-5a69-9c32-ea407e83d58c)
‘Honey, all of us hedge fund wives have to put up with the same Goddamn quid pro quo,’ said Gigi Ambrose.
Gigi and I were having lunch at Nello, home of the fifty-dollar plate of pasta. No joke. The smoked salmon ravioli actually costs fifty-five dollars. But despite the exorbitant prices—or maybe because of them—and the fact that Christmas was a mere three days away, the place was packed, buzzing with the kind of excitement such extravagance tends to generate. You feel the same thing walking into Bergdorf’s shoe salon, but there it’s overpriced platform heels that get everyone salivating, while at Nello, it’s the overpriced veal chops.
‘What quid pro quo?’ I asked, craning my head forward with interest.
‘Your husband may make tons of money, but you never get to see him.’
I laughed. ‘Too true.’
I took a bite of my penne rigate, which I must admit tasted like heaven—the hot and sweet sausages somehow managed to be both delicate and hearty—and surveyed the room. There was a maitre d’ hovering by the bar, nervously keeping an eye on all the tables. Waiters in black vests and white aprons tied at the waist were zipping around, taking orders, delivering plates of aromatic delicacies—artichokes drizzled in white truffle oil, pan roasted veal chops with sautéed wild mushrooms, and Chilean sea bass cooked in a lobster, saffron velouté. On one side of me a pair of older women with shopping bags at their feet pushed forty-two dollar tuna tartares around their plate; on the other side, a foursome of men, all devouring the veal and wearing wedding bands, openly ogled the lithesome young girls seated at the table next to theirs.
‘Rule Number Two,’ Gigi continued, snapping me back to attention with a flick of her hand, the same hand that happened to be sporting nine carats of flawless, colorless diamonds (Grade: F, Color: D, for those in the know). I was learning that one diamond wasn’t good enough for a Hedge Fund Bride; nothing less than three would do. Take Gigi’s engagement ring for example. There was the center stone, an emerald cut stunner that was, to my untrained eye, at least five carats, and then two triangle-shaped stones, each about two carats, flanking it. In Chicago, my three-carat engagement ring was considered flashy; here, it was barely worth flashing.
She had made it her mission that day to school me in the art of hedge fund wifehood and I, having been the ignorant newcomer I was, was most grateful for the lesson.
‘Never ask him about work. If he wants to talk about it, he will. And make sure you keep people who want stock tips, or in John’s case, predictions about fluctuations in the price of crude far away from him at social functions. There’s nothing that grates on Jeremy more than someone who wants free market advice.’
‘Is that Rule Number Three?’ I asked, trying to keep up.
‘No, three is to never talk about your own problems, especially any that might be work related, if you do happen to have a job.’
I opened my mouth to comment, but Gigi pressed on. ‘Rule Four,’ she said. ‘Keep the baby talk to a minimum. Children should never be a disturbance, especially at night.’
With that, Gigi bent her head in concentration over her fettuccine al funghi, and I couldn’t tell if she was a) focusing on the flavors, trying to discern the ingredients; b) trying not to get any of the rich mushroom and cream sauce on her ruffled silk blouse, which I assumed was made by a famous designer, and therefore wildly expensive; or c) thinking about the last thing she said, the thing about keeping children off the conversational menu.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t observed Rule Four over the previous six months. In fact, I had f lagrantly violated rules one through four. I was a fantastically shitty hedge fund wife. I didn’t fit the mold at all, but for that matter, neither did Gigi. She seemed too outspoken and vivacious, and she had her own thriving career. Plus she clearly loved talking about her daughter Chloe. She had spoken of nothing else during the first half of our lunch.
As Gigi expertly twirled her pasta around the tines of her fork, using the bowl of a spoon to anchor the pasta, I took the opportunity to continue studying her face. She had wide-set eyes, a straight nose, and full lips, but in the sunlight I could see that she was wearing a thick layer of foundation and that there were wrinkles creeping out from around her eyes and lips. She looked older and less sprightly than she did on television or on the cover of her book jackets, but she was still arrestingly beautiful.
When we were finished with our entrées, Gigi ordered a bowl of gelato for us to share and spooning the creamy, cold ice cream into my mouth, I was reminded of my childhood in Minnesota. Whenever my sister and I did well on our report cards, my father would take us for ice cream at Byerly’s, an upscale grocery store in the suburb where we lived. This happened pretty infrequently since Annalise rarely studied—she was too busy with boys and cheerleading practice—so more often than not my father would take just me. We usually went on Friday nights when Annalise had a game to cheer, so she wouldn’t feel bad about her academic shortcomings, or at least that’s what my father said. Now, in hindsight, I think Dad was more concerned about making me feel better. After all, I was the one stuck at home on a Friday night when most kids were out with their friends, partying and whatnot.
Gigi wanted to know about my sister, so I told her that she had been the popular one and I the smart one. ‘A family of two daughters usually gets one of each,’ I said, adding that Annalise wasn’t exactly prettier than I was, but she had a better figure—larger breasts, longer legs—and had been the recipient of braces (whereas my parents, in their infinite wisdom, had decided I could go without) that had given her the killer smile that would eventually grace our local Dayton’s department store newspaper advertisements for its annual three-day back-to-school sale. Annalise, considered a minor celebrity in our high school thanks to those ads, was named Homecoming Queen her senior year. She had a string of boyfriends, tons of friends.
I didn’t.
I imagined this was why she couldn’t believe that I had married ‘well’ and she hadn’t. She was stuck in a shabby two-bedroom house with a husband who spent too much time watching sports (hockey, football, you name it…) on television and drinking beer (from a can, ‘not even a bottle’ she once complained bitterly to my mother, who then told me, even though I had on several occasions made it clear to her that I had no desire to know the inner workings of my sister’s marriage). It was down to Annalise to raise their two rambunctious boys—Jack, five, and Trevor, three—and fix things up around the house. My beauty-queen sister had to empty the gutters, mow the lawn, rake the leaves, shovel the snow, and on top of that clean the house and cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a grocery budget so small that they sometimes had to have hot dogs for dinner—five nights in a row. She couldn’t help but compare her life to mine and wonder where she’d gone wrong. It’s like I had disturbed the correct order of things, and she resented me to no end for it.
I explained this all to Gigi, who told me that she had a sister who was married, too, who was always jealous of her big city life until the day that Gigi started dating a Greek shipping magnate. In the beginning he was romantic and sweet and incredibly generous—he took her to nice restaurants and on lavish trips, and bought her expensive shoes. He also liked to rub her feet.
A little too much.
After a few weeks of dating, Gigi started noticing that her Greek magnate was getting a little too much pleasure out of touching her feet, and liked doing it at inappropriate times, like when he was driving them home from dinner or to his beach house in Bridgehampton. ‘He’d get hard just from touching the soft skin on the underside of my arch,’ she said. ‘That was his favorite part.’
Still, he was kind to her and seemed serious about their relationship—‘he told me that he couldn’t wait to introduce me to his parents’—so she put up with his sexual quirk. But then, he got mean. A few months into their courtship he started criticizing her. ‘If one of my nails was chipped, he’d tell me that I looked like a mess.’ One day she told him that if he cared so much about her nails, then maybe he should pay for her manicures. His response was to call her a gold digger and cut their meal short. Around the same time he became controlling about what shoes she wore. Sometimes, Gigi said, she had to change them four or five times before they went out.
She told me a story about one of their last weeks together, when they planned on meeting some friends for brunch at Felix, a restaurant and bar in SoHo. It was a cold Sunday in February and there was ice and snow on the ground. Gigi chose a pair of flat boots to wear with her jeans and sweater, but her Greek boyfriend pointed out that she’d already worn the boots once that week. ‘So I changed into my other boots that happen to have a lot of buckles, and he freaked out. He said they would be too hard for him to get them off. He threw a tantrum,’ she said.
The next day, she dumped him, and being a short man with a massive Napoleonic complex, he didn’t handle his dismissal well. For six months following their break up, he harassed her with vulgar, cruel phone messages and emails, and told all of their friends that he had dumped her because he figured out she was only interested in him for his money. ‘All rich men end up saying that. Even Jeremy has and John, if he hasn’t already, probably will.’
Gigi suddenly looked stricken and covered her mouth with her hands. ‘What am I doing? I’ve broken the most important rule of all. Rule Number Five: Never talk bad about your husband.’
I assured her that I was not going to tell anyone. ‘Who would I tell? I have no friends in New York.’ I reached across the table to squeeze her hand reassuringly.
‘No, sugar, you’ve got me now,’ she said.
The waiter cleared the bowl of gelato and took our coffee orders. One espresso dopio for Gigi, who explained that she needed the caffeine because she had been up all night with the baby and had to go to a meeting at her publisher’s after lunch. I ordered a cappuccino, extra foam, and told her that she didn’t have to justify her coffee order to me. ‘I drink way more than I should, and I don’t have kids or a job to legitimize my caffeine addiction,’ I said.
