Carpool Confidential (13 page)

“Not to divert from your journey of self-discovery,” Jen said, “but BlackBerries have to be worse than pagers, they're like the new post-sex cigarette.”

I flashed back on my conversation with Charlotte. “Post-sex if you're lucky. I used to tell Rick that investment bankers are not ER doctors—they don't have middle-of-the-night emergencies.”

Jen shook her head. “Nora has a belt clip—it's like the thing is holstered.”

“Nora
is
a doctor,” Randy pointed out.

Jen raised a perfectly threaded brow. “Cosmetic surgeons don't have emergencies either.”

“Josh threatens to throw mine into the wash pretty much every day,” Randy admitted.

“Would that actually kill the thing?” Jen looked interested.

“Sadly, they're replaceable,” I muttered. “I used to hate Rick's with a passion, but I don't seem to feel that about anything anymore. It's like I'm paralyzed with grief and depression.” I was fighting the tears.

“That's understandable, but you need to start taking steps to make sure your and the boys' interests are protected,” Randy said.

“Do you think the whole stifled creativity thing's bullshit? If he was going to lie, why not make one up that's believable instead of just bizarre?”

“I don't know.” Randy tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. Her equivalent, I knew, of rolling up her sleeves. “It's hard for me to envision him lying, for sure, but it's equally hard to envision him doing what he did. And if there's one thing you learn as a lawyer, it's that just because a story sounds too unbelievable to be made up doesn't mean it's not made up.”

“And it seems sort of pointless to try to figure him out,” Jen said. “You need to figure you out. Are you financially protected?”

“I know I sound like an idiot, but Rick would never screw the boys financially.” And I meant that.

“Face it, Cass. Whether temporarily or permanently, he isn't the person you knew or believed him to be. He's someone else. You don't really know what's going on with him except that he's capable of doing one awful thing, and again professionally speaking, once people have done one awful thing they often find it easier to move on to the next.” Randy looked unnervingly serious.

“Listen to yourselves,” I said. “It's like you're both assuming that because he put on the suit every morning, it's his money to do with as he wants. Me staying home was by mutual agreement. We always considered it our money. Not his,
ours
.”

Randy shook her head. “I don't consider it his money. I'm worried he does.”

Randy made more money than Josh, but Jen was in the same position I was, so I looked at her. “Are you financially protected? If your relationship with Nora fell apart, would finances be the first thing on your mind?”

“Of course not, but we have an agreement, like a pre-nup, and I have a separate account.”

“I feel like a moron,” I said. “It never occurred to me. I trust—trusted Rick.”

“Trust or not, don't you at least want to know where he is and what he's doing?” Jen asked. “Is he using credit cards to buy post-rehearsal sloe gin fizzes for the gang? Is he shacked up in a suite at the W?”

“He doesn't like the W,” I said. “No bidets. But I have to say that my fear of what I'm going to find out has so far outweighed my desire to find out.”

Randy nodded. “Don't ask a question if you don't want the answer. I get that, Cass, honest, and I've understood it this far. The problem is that I think you need to start wanting the answer.”

“As a journalist,” Jen persisted, “don't you want to investigate?”

“I don't know that I really think of myself as a journalist any more. Do you still consider yourself a doctor?”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “As far as I'm concerned it's part of the fabric even though I'm not doing it right now. I'd have said the same for you.”

“I don't know, deep down I pretty much feel like a housewife, not even a trendy SAHM or domestic engineer, a housewife.”

“What a horribly reductive way to think,” Jen said.

I stared at her. “But what about you? You entertain like Carolyn Roehme. You make fois gras pate from scratch. You knit. You drive children around all day long. You bring Nora's stuff to the dry cleaner. You may be in a nontraditional relationship, but that's what you are, too. I mean, come on, let's call a spade a spade.”

“No.” The light bounced off her rings. “I'm a doctor. I'm five foot ten. I have blond hair, a crown on my first molar, and two children I'd die for. My biggest regret is not going for the Olympic trials in downhill skiing when I had the chance. I couldn't finish
Love in the Time of Cholera
no matter how many times I tried. I'm a lesbian. I believe the Iraq war is morally wrong. I despise kiwis, love Nora, Laura Mercier tinted moisturizer, and coriander. Unjustness in any form makes me burn and I see plenty of it. I think green apple martinis are a ridiculous invention, I sometimes read
People
when I should be reading
The New Yorker
and I sometimes read
The New Yorker
when I should be listening to Nora tell me about her golf game. I know I'm a hypocrite because I feel guilty about the emissions from my SUV but I won't get rid of it. I believe the lack of affordable medical care in this country is a disaster, and when I go back to work that's where my energy will be focused. I get headaches from white wine, a cruise is my idea of hell on earth, and I lose at least three cell phones a year. I think Giorgio Armani is a seriously overrated designer. I'd like to someday buy a farm in Idaho like the one I grew up on and spend part of the year there, but I never want to live full-time out of a major city again. Nora and I don't see eye to eye on that one, but I'm resigned to the fact we have our differences there. All those things are who I am. A housewife is where I am. It doesn't define me, and deep down it doesn't define you either.”

We both stared at Jen. “Wow,” I said.

“So that's me, Cass. The challenge is, can you do the same for yourself?”

I looked at Randy and then back to Jen. “Honestly, I don't know. Can I just be you instead? No offense to you, Ran, but Jen's apartment is nicer.”

“So true. I'd be her, too, although you do know that
I'm
a natural blond, right? Note that she said blond, not natural blond. So,” Randy said as she finished her coffee and stood up, “next Monday at nine-thirty, Cass, we'll hear all about you. Right?”

“Why don't you go next week? I'm feeling magnanimous.”

She smiled. “Nah. I'll take the week after. Next week is all yours.”

I took a drink of my cold coffee. “No problem.” I looked up at her. “I can hardly wait.”

“I'm confident,” Randy said, “that between starting your fabulous blog and tracking Rick down, the time between now and then will fly by.”

It should have been easy. It
seemed
like it was going to be easy. Until I actually tried it. Aside from the obvious, like the physical and the kids I'd die for, and the shaming fact that I kind of like green apple martinis, I just couldn't get it to work for me. Everything I could think of to say about myself was actually defined by or revolved around someone else. Which I guessed made it not about myself at all. I couldn't even come up with an idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Other than Jen, that is.

“When are you supposed to have the blog in?” Randy asked me when she called. “Maybe starting that will give you a boost.”

“By the end of the week. Hard to imagine that writing about losing my Brazilian waxing virginity is going to answer any cosmic questions about who I am.”

“You have to start somewhere. Oh, by the way, my secretary called all the numbers, nothing. They were either nothing or just rang.”

“Which one just rang?”

“Hang on”—I heard her scrabble around—“the 307 one, which is Wyoming. Do you know anyone in Wyoming?”

“Not off the top of my head. And I don't know anyone period without an answering machine.”

“Come on, Cass, let me get you a PI. I know some good ones from work. You said yourself the boys are hurting. Time for the gloves to come off.”

“I know.” I sat down. “I really just wanted to give him a chance to do it himself. Give me a day or two to figure out if I can even afford it, OK?”

I sat down and looked at all our bank statements. Things weren't dire. There was money for day-to-day. The problems were that nothing was coming in except, as happens in life, major bills. And when I went online to move money from the Merrill Lynch account to checking, there was nothing in it to transfer. This had always been an account with a nice cushiony number of zeros. I called the accountant.

“Goldsmith, Schmidt & Kelly.” The receptionist managed to convey in those three words the fact that she had never been in the position of having been dumped for Barry Manilow and having to scrabble around town looking for her own money.

“Cassie!” Murray-the-Accountant sounded very hearty. “I haven't seen you since my annual cookies-and-punch It's a Fiscal New Year party.” (A thrilling event every time.) “How are you?”

“Not great. So…” I wished I'd thought this conversation out better.
How much money do I have?
seemed like sort of a pathetic question. And, yet, when you got down to it, it was what I really needed to know. “How much money do I have?”

Infinitesimal pause. “Why don't you come on in this afternoon, Cassie?”

This did not sound comforting. I more or less forced Maria to agree to bring Noah to his tennis lesson, arranged a playdate for Jared, got myself dressed in decent clothes, and headed across the Brooklyn Bridge and up to Midtown.

“I was wondering when I'd hear from you.” Murray leaned forward across his desk, clicking the top onto his pen.

“Oh.” I sat, clutching a cappuccino on a saucer and feeling awkward. “Do you know where he is?”

“What do you mean?” He looked so sincerely baffled that I felt a little better. It hadn't seemed right for my accountant to know I was getting dumped before I did.

“He just left me. No warning, nothing. I have no idea where he's gone.”

I saw him go from baffled to shocked. “You're kidding me! Rick?”

“I wish I was.”

He was still shaking his head. “I knew he was getting ready to leave his job, but no, I had no idea about the rest.”

“So where do things stand?”

He looked at me over his half-glasses. It's odd the things you notice in the space between waiting for bad news and getting it. For example: Murray's eyebrows needed to spend some serious time with a tweezers. If I were Mrs. Irma Goldsmith of Scars-dale, I definitely would have been insisting on that. “To put it bluntly, you're not destitute, but there's not an awful lot of extra. I think you're looking at some serious lifestyle…adjustments.”

Lifestyle adjustments
. Those had been Rick's words exactly. “Meaning?”

Murray put his pen down, tilted back in his Aeron chair, and placed his glasses on top of his head so it looked like he had a pair of frog eyes on top of his bald patch. “Rick has liquidated substantial assets over the past two years.”

My hands suddenly felt so weak that I was afraid I was going to drop my cup and saucer. I put them down on his desk. “What's going on?”

He looked at one of the charts on his desk. “And he stopped putting money into the joint accounts about a year and a half ago.”

I felt that now-familiar flair of heat and light-headedness that shock seemed to bring on.
A year and a half ago?
“How can that be?” I looked at Murray. “You work for both of us. Your responsibility is to both of us.”

He looked serious. “Yes. With the funds entrusted to me in joint accounts. For accounts solely in Rick's name, my responsibility is to him. For accounts solely in yours, to you.”

“But I don't have any solely in my name, and he—” I looked at Murray's expression. The foundation was being eroded, stone by stone. “—does. I see. How long has he had those?”

He loosened his collar. “As long as I've been doing your accounts.”

Since we were married. Another stone, gone. “So where does this leave me?”

“I wish I had better news.” He handed me some sheets covered in numbers. Numbers aren't my strength. This wasn't that different from handing me a scroll in Ancient Urdu. I stared at it, trying to make some sense of the various brackets and columns. It didn't appear we were about to starve or lose the apartment.

I can't mention a figure—my mother always said that was bad manners. Well, actually, she didn't. She was never much one for observing social graces, seeing them as absurd conventions, but I managed to figure them out anyway, and I know mentioning exact amounts of money is a big, fat, tacky no. But I will say that according to this we could have afforded that Aston Martin Rick liked, after all. Plus a Jag, and a Ferrari, and maybe a Porsche. We could even have afforded to garage them in our neighborhood.

“I think you're looking at the wrong column.” Murray leaned across the desk and pointed at a column. “Those numbers in brackets are debits, I'm afraid—negatives. That's what Rick took out. And some of those, like this one”—he moved his finger down—“are more technically loans. Here, for example, he's taken money from a 401(k), and even though it's your money, because it's been taxed as 401(k) funds, you can only borrow, not liquidate it outright.”

I looked at the bracketed number and was grateful I hadn't eaten that day, because it all would have come back up. “A loan as in, it has to be paid back?”

“The repayment schedule is fairly forgiving.”

“It can't possibly be forgiving enough.” I looked up at him. “What else?”

“The good news.” He pointed again. “This is what you do have.”

Big difference in the zeros from what I didn't have but apparently used to, back when I was too stupid and naïve to appreciate it. “OK. This isn't so bad, is it?”

“No, no,” he said hurriedly. “It's a good amount. Of course, you do need to set aside for end-of-year taxes from this, since Rick wasn't paying the full quarterly estimated payments, which means that not only do you have to make up the difference at tax time but there can be penalties.” He shook his head. “I warned him about that. For example”—I followed his finger over to another incomprehensible jumble of figures—“this is my estimate of your federal taxes. If he'd paid the estimated New York State by the deadline, you would have received credit against your fed, but he opted not to. Very unlike him to be so fiscally irresponsible.”

Murray looked away, at the attempt at modern art on his wall, while I counted zeros. “I'm sorry,” he said, apparently to the picture, “but I do have to point out that you have been leading a very expensive lifestyle.”

Between a very expensive apartment, very expensive private school tuition, very expensive useless domestic help, a very expensive rarely used second house, a very expensive caretaker for rarely used second house, and a very expensive pool and lawn guys for even more rarely used pool at rarely used second house, this wasn't exactly a shrewd analysis.

This was bad news. So bad, my face felt numb. It was either shock or I was having a stroke. I debated the odds of having a stroke right at the very moment you were finding out you'd been screwed in about five different ways. Possible, definitely possible. Did stress bring on strokes? Had I had one of those warning sign headaches? Flashing lights? No, that was a detached retina—

“Cassie?” Murray looked worried. Well, what was he fucking expecting? “Can I get you something? Water? Another cappuccino?”

A Xanax, maybe
. “No, thanks. Nothing.” I forced myself to breathe. “Can I sell the house on Nantucket?” We barely used it, and it had to be worth a fortune.

“Sure,” Murray said jovially. “No problem. If it was in your name. Obviously in a divorce, if there is a divorce, you'd be granted half of the proceeds, but—”

“I need to find him first.”

“Or wait seven years to have him declared legally dead.”

“I could arrange physically dead well before seven years.” I might even enjoy it.

“It's a shame about the maintenance on the apartment,” Murray said.

Our apartment was in one of the few prewar doorman buildings in Brooklyn Heights. The sprawling apartments were in so much demand that the co-op board had been able to get away with only accepting people who could buy with eighty percent cash up front, so our mortgage was relatively small. The problem was that the monthly fees on the apartment were huge— bigger than any mortgage I'd ever had, that was for sure. So while I could probably make the mortgage payments, there was no way I could carry the maintenance on my own for any significant period of time unless something drastically financially fortuitous happened.

“Can I sell it?” Even as I asked it, I knew it was the same thing as the house on Nantucket—a joint property. If it hadn't been he would undoubtedly have already sold it out from under us.

“Sorry. And the other thing is that not all of those funds reflected in that figure are available.” Murray sounded like he wanted to get through this part quickly. “As I started to say before, some are in accounts that would have substantial—”

Everything felt like it was spinning. “OK. Murray, I need to get this straight. Not only did Rick stop putting money into existing accounts a year and a half ago, he started draining them. He had his own accounts that are—what's the status of those?”

“Closed. Emptied.”

I took a breath. “And I can't liquidate any of our sadly depleted joint assets, including real estate. Did I leave anything out?”

“He, um, failed to pay taxes.”

“Right,” I said. “Forgot that. I owe taxes. How could he have done this without my permission?”

He spread his hands, palms up, and shrugged. “I'm just a finance guy, Cassie, I'm the wrong person to ask about what motivates people.”

“I meant
legally
how could he do that?”

“Well.” Murray, back on comfortable terra firma, perched his reading glasses back on his nose and picked up one of the sheets in front of him. He took his glasses off again and put them down before looking at me. “He didn't do anything against the law. Morally and ethically, it's not pretty, but it was legal. As of now, there are two problems here,” he said. “No. Three.”

I had my own ideas, and they added up to a lot more than three, but as I've said, I'm not a numbers person, so I was curious about his.

“One. You have no money currently coming in.” On my list, too. “And as I mentioned, you're supporting a very expensive lifestyle. Two”—he held up two fingers in case I'd lost count— “you can use money from the joint accounts, but everything of real substance is either tied up so you can't get to it or invested in ways that will result in you losing substantial amounts by liquidating early. And three, should you do that, not only will you lose in penalties, you'll have to pay hefty taxes on what you do liquidate. Oh, and let's not forget that request for a donation from the government.” He laughed uneasily. I was guessing that joke never went over well.

I fought a new wave of dizziness. “College?” I croaked.

“Haven't you already been?” When I goggled at him, he broke into a chuckle. “Just a little humor. There are accounts that have significant amounts in them, but you're going to need to add quite a bit more. Take it from an old hand”—his children were college-aged—“it's the most expensive eight to ten years of your life.”

Even less funny than the donation request from the government joke. “So how fucked am I?”