Never Enough (13 page)

AS OCTOBER BEGAN, NANCY’S CALLS TO DEL PRIORE BECAME
more frequent. Usually, she’d be crying when he answered. Almost always, she’d start by saying that she and Rob had just had a terrible fight and that he’d beaten her and that she was scared.

“I wish I’d never come back,” she said. “I wish I’d stayed with you in Vermont. He’s having me followed, I
know
he is. And he told me not to bother thinking about taking the kids with me and flying to New York, because he’d locked their passports in a safe.”

Del Priore asked her how bad the abuse was. “You don’t want to know” was all she’d say. She began to call three or four times a day. She sounded increasingly fearful and more prone to hysteria.

“I don’t have any friends here,” she said. “I’ve got no one to talk to. And if I said something now—if I started to talk about how he’s beating me, and for how long it’s been going on—people would think I was loony for not saying something sooner.” She told him that she’d started putting small doses of sleep medication in Rob’s drinks, hoping he’d pass out before he tried to force her to have sex. Often, she said, she’d have to lock herself in the bathroom while she waited for the drugs to take effect.

Rob had reached the point where he’d drink nothing but previously unopened bottles of mineral water at home. He felt tired all the time. The emotional strain of not knowing what to think or how to feel about his wife, combined with the extra stress of trying to make up for all the time he’d lost at work and the lingering aftereffects of spinal surgery, were taking pounds off him that he didn’t need to lose and engraving dark circles under his eyes.

He
was
hounding her about Del Priore. He didn’t believe her when she insisted that everything between them was over. For one thing, after her seemingly spontaneous visit to his office, she’d gone right back to treating him the way she had ever since he’d come back to Hong Kong. When he was home, she stayed as far from him as possible, closing herself inside her home office for hours at a time, leaving him to care for the children, with Connie’s help. He didn’t know what else he could say to her so he said nothing, which seemed the better part of valor given the way her face froze into an expression of contempt at the sound of his voice.

At the same time, he felt guilty for not trusting her. He told himself he was being unfair. He sought to keep matters in perspective. What had the affair been, really? A brief summer fling with a workman during a period of enforced isolation. It had been an indiscretion, not a true affair. He’d seen Del Priore, he’d talked to the man, he knew for himself that such a trailer-park slug could have nothing of substance to offer Nancy.

As for the insubstantial? There may have been the quick thrill of illicit sex. Distasteful, but hardly uncommon. Expat life was a minefield that few married partners crossed without triggering at least one such explosion. Desires, not all of them licit, could be satisfied with ease while living the imperial life in service to the capitalist raj.

The expat lifestyle was redolent with implicit suggestion: you
can
have it all, you can have it all
now,
and you can have it exactly the way you want it. Moreover, you
should
have it all, because you are a higher form of the species—not tethered to the commonplace, not burdened by the humdrum, not bound by the pedestrian rules that constricted the life of the commoner.

Expat men burned themselves into cinders, working five hundred hours a month to keep the earnings stream flowing—the earnings stream that was the lifeblood of the family. If, on occasion, they enjoyed some of the unspoken fringe benefits of expat life, so be it. As for the women, all that free time and all that free money were overlaid atop a sense of entitlement they wore like Chanel. What was the point of having it all if you couldn’t indulge in a bit of white mischief?

It was remarkable, really, how many members of Hong Kong’s expat elite who had no time for their own wives managed to find time for the wife of a neighbor or colleague. Less remarkable, perhaps, was how many wives went the way of Nancy: fleshing out their rough-trade fantasies through dalliance with social inferiors, seeking the tingle that had animated Lady Chatterley when she’d heard gamekeeper Mellors say, “Let’s live for summat else. Let’s not live ter make money.”

It could be great fun to play on the other side of the tracks as long as you knew you’d never have to live there. So why wouldn’t Nancy glory in her dream? “The least little bit o’ money’ll really do,” Mellors the gamekeeper told Lady Chatterley. “Just make up your mind to it, an’ you’ve got out o’ th’ mess.”

But Nancy was cut from a different cloth than Constance Chatterley. Even as she keened over her lost youth and freedom, she could not help but embrace her chains. “When you come right down to it,” she told one Hong Kong acquaintance, “there’s really nothing in the world as good as money.”

Then Rob took that away from her, or at least took away her ability to spend it freely. In early October, he examined bank charges for September. There were repeated ATM withdrawals of $1,500 and $1,000. Nancy had converted the cash to checks that she sent to Del Priore to compensate him for having lost his job because of her.

“What’s this?” he asked Nancy. “Why were you withdrawing that much cash?”

“I don’t know. I remember I gave Connie some to buy groceries. And I think I had lunch somewhere that didn’t take credit cards. I tipped some of the staff at the Marina Club.
Listen, goddamn it, I can’t remember!
Why are you giving me a hard time?”

“You’re sending money to Del Priore, aren’t you?”

“You’re crazy, do you know that? Do you think you can insult me that way?”

She ran at him and tried to punch him. He grabbed her arm and spun her into a wall.

Her face went white. “Oh, boy, you’ve just made a
big
mistake. I’m not going to let you live
this
down. You’ll pay for this, you bastard. And I want my credit cards back.”

Rob cut the credit cards up and left the pieces in a pile on her desk. Before leaving for work the next morning, he said, “Here’s the way it’s going to work: every morning from now on, you’re going to tell me exactly what you need for household expenses and I’ll give you exactly that much in cash. And at the end of the day I want to see the receipts.”

“Fuck you,” she said, in front of Connie and the children.

Rob called Bryna to tell her what had happened.

“Be careful, Rob,” she said. “Now you’ve stripped away her dignity. You take away her credit cards, you take away her sense of self. She’s not going to accept that lying down.”

The Bank of Taiwan planned to honor former president George H. W. Bush at a banquet on October 8. Rob and Nancy had been invited not only to the banquet, but also to the much more exclusive cocktail reception before the dinner.

Rob had become a Republican almost as soon as he’d become an investment banker—two sides of the same coin was how he viewed it—and he held the entire Bush family in high esteem. The Bushes knew how to make money and they knew how to spend it to buy power, two of the skills he most admired. In addition, Prescott Sheldon Bush, father of George H. W. Bush and grandfather of current president George W. Bush, had been a significant investment banker in his time.

And Rob wasn’t the sort of Jew who fretted about the foundation of the Bush fortune. As a director of both Brown Brothers Harriman and the Union Banking Company, whose assets were seized by the United States government in 1942 under a trafficking with the enemy law, Prescott S. Bush had invested both for and in German companies known to be aiding and abetting the Nazi Party.

As the British newspaper
The Guardian
put it, “even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power…the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.”

Like politics, investment banking was not work for the morally squeamish.

Nancy’s concern was her dress. Obviously, it had to be new. It also had to be both expensive and attention-getting. Paying for it would not be a problem, even without her credit cards. Like all bankers’ wives in Hong Kong, she knew dress shops eager to have milady open a personal charge account.

As the big night grew near, Nancy began to glow with excitement. Proximity to a former Republican president of the United States, no matter how brief, would give her massive social cred in tower 17. She followed her sense of adventure in buying her banquet dress.

Other than Nancy, no one but Rob, Connie, and the salesperson who sold it to her ever saw the dress. Later, Connie shied from attempting to describe it. All she would say was that it had permitted Nancy to showcase the new tattoos on her shoulder and that it had triggered a furious fight.

Nancy later claimed Rob had physically torn the dress from her body. Connie didn’t see that, but she later told Bryna that the argument had lasted so long that—after Nancy retreated to her closet to put on something less outrageous—they were so late leaving that they missed the reception.

It threatened to be the worst social catastrophe of their stay in Hong Kong, but Nancy wasn’t the sort to let opportunity slip entirely from her hands. In the middle of the banquet, she left the table at which she and Rob were seated and approached the ex-president. In fact, she tapped him on the shoulder as he ate.

“My husband is a great fan of yours,” she said. “Would you mind if he talks to you?”

Bush, ever the gentleman, obliged. He excused himself from his table, stood, and walked with Nancy to meet Rob. He even posed for a picture with them both.

The next day Nancy e-mailed Bryna. She made no mention of having had her credit cards taken away or of meeting George Bush or of having any quarrel about a dress. She was thinking about her body. She was thinking about making it look better for Michael. She was thinking about how she could get to the United States to see Michael. She knew Rob would never let her go to New York. But if she had a reason to go to San Francisco…“Things here on the home front are really terrific…I wanna talk to you on the phone…these past few mornings for me have been so hectic…then all of a sudden its 4 in the afternoon…midnight for you…I miss u!!!!!”

Two days later, she told Rob, “Guess what. I’m going to San Francisco for a boob job.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think. Bryna and I are going to have boob jobs together. She’s already made the appointment.”

Rob called Bryna. “I think she’s using you as an excuse,” he said. “I think she’s going to see Del Priore.”

“I don’t know, Rob. The day after a boob job isn’t the best time for a clandestine meeting with your lover.”

“Think about it: why else would she have it done in San Francisco? Why not do it right here?”

“A: she doesn’t trust Chinese doctors. B: I’m still her best friend and she thinks it’ll be fun to have it done together.”

“This time, I think
you’re
being naïve.”

He found the phone bills the next day. He’d been searching obsessively for proof that she was still in touch with Del Priore. One shred of evidence that she was still lying to him and he could stop the charade, put an end to the anguish of uncertainty, call Sharon Ser at Hampton, Winter and Glynn and move ahead with the divorce.

She’d left her handbag lying on a side table in the dining room, right next to the lead statuette. He opened it and there were two months of bills for a cell phone he’d known nothing about, addressed to Nancy care of the Hong Kong International School. They showed more than a dozen calls to Del Priore in late August, forty-eight calls to him in September, and more than thirty calls to him during the first week of October—almost a hundred calls to the man with whom she’d claimed that she was no longer having an affair. Everything she’d said and done since early June had been a lie. He felt sick.

He did not confront her. There was no point. There was no point in anything to do with her anymore. For perhaps the first time in his life, this driven, relentlessly competitive man was forced to admit defeat. He’d lost his true love to the stereo guy. Except for custody of the children, the rest was just arithmetic.

He did not confront her, but when he found the cell phone itself hidden beneath her underwear in a bedroom dresser drawer, he took it. As he drove to work the next day he threw it out his Porsche window.

He told Bryna about it. He said he’d give Nancy anything she wanted except the children. “I won’t let her move back to New York or Vermont with the kids. I’ll be based in Tokyo, and I’ll fly back here and see them on weekends. I’ll get my own apartment in Parkview. Connie can live there and work for me. I’m not going to fight her. As far as I’m concerned, she can even bring Del Priore to Hong Kong. All I care about is being able to see my kids.”

“Maybe you’re not going to fight,” Bryna said, “but she is. Think about it. She’ll be losing a lot and she’s not going to let it go without a battle.”

“Losing what? She won’t be losing anything except me. And she’s not going to consider that a loss.”