Opening Belle (8 page)

“Call him,” he said. Bruce had thought of his answer for five milliseconds.

“What?”

“Clearly you can't have any feelings for that guy. He was so awful to you in the end and guys don't change. What's there to lose?”

“How about my pride?”

“How is this losing pride? Your life is a complete success, you're probably one of the thirty most successful women on Wall Street. You have three fantastically interesting, smart enough children. What exactly is the part that you are ashamed of ?”

A weird silence filled the room. We both pondered the question.

“Unless it's me,” he said, looking deep into my eyes.

“WHAT?”

“No, really, Belle, I can understand. He was a poor guy with a fancy name who became rich and got what he wanted and you married a formerly rich guy who's now poor. It's questionable you got what you wanted. I get it. You're like the people who don't go back to their high school reunions. They don't go back because they're embarrassed. If you don't call him, you're the girl who won't go to the reunion.”

I had to prove my love for Bruce by calling Henry? Fine. I called and didn't let my voice quiver once. In that weak moment I called the guy who cruelly broke my heart and left me for the society girl he was sleeping with when we were engaged (though that's not how the
New York Times
described her in their wedding announcement). I called him and begged to get my sloppy three-year-old kid into a preschool with a chapel day. A school named Fifth Avenue Preschool that isn't even on 5th Avenue.

To his credit, Henry was beyond helpful. His secretary passed me on to him after I meticulously spelled out my name. Twice. Our conversation was short and direct, like business associates who talk every day. He never even acted surprised to hear I was on the phone. Instead of asking me about my life he asked me the spelling of Kevin's name. (Spell
Kevin
? What was up with his office and the human spell-checking?) He asked me for my last name. (He really couldn't
not
know that, right?) “It's Cassidy,” I reminded him. “Not sure if you remember me, but I think we used to date?” I joked, but he didn't laugh.

“Belle?”

Here it comes, I thought, the big apology, the one where he admits to being the lowliest crapper on the earth and that now this favor would make us all good. I'd waited a long time for this one.

“Isabelle, it's nice that you still use Cassidy, I guess, but—”

“Well, yes, that is my name, Henry.”

“No. I mean you don't seem like the type to change your last name to your husband's, right?”

“I didn't know there was a type or that you had me pegged, but yes, I haven't changed it.”

“So maybe for this application we can call you Mrs. ummm . . .”

“McElroy? I can only apply to your school if I have my husband's last name?”

“Yes. Sounds weird, but okay. Can you spell that for me?”

And that's how my ex-fiancé changed my last name to my husband's.

In three days Kevin gained admission to a preschool so elite it had no name on the door, no website, no listing in the phone book. It was the beginning of a new legacy, allowing my other two kids to eventually go there too. Of course, payment for this favor is very severe. Besides being committed to paying $31,000 per year for a three-hour-per-day school, and fake changing my last name when I wasn't ready to do that, I had just groveled to the guy who left me on the sidewalk holding my wedding gown in the rain. Now I was committed to seeing either Henry or his silicone-enhanced wife each time I dropped a child at school. Snap.

•  •  •

This Thursday morning I'm feeling the love. Bruce took Kevin to his school, leaving enough time for Brigid, Owen, and me to walk to preschool. I feel the postholiday euphoria of not having to buy and wrap gifts, write cards, and drink every night. Even though I don't know what my bonus will be, the numbers are in and I can relax a little. January is my July.

Brigid is on her scooter, Owen in his stroller, and me in midsized heels, briefcase slung over the stroller handles, walking, not running, to chapel. The sun is shining and I'm the picture of the woman who has it all, all at the same time—the babies, the job, and the body that can still rock, though in dim light.

We seat ourselves in the back of the chapel room. I silence the electronics, breathe, and consider that all is right with the world. The very fact that we are early is a routine break, and kids like routine. Owen uses this mindful moment to decide he's done sitting in the back and wants to be closer to the music. I try to distract him with some pathetic bribe, murmuring a ridiculous story about the time that God made Superman. He isn't swayed in the least.

“Wanna sit in front,” he says, and not in his “inside” voice.

“Let's stay here and wait for your friend Riley,” I say. Riley is always ten minutes late and would be the perfect reason for staying put.

“No.”

Brigid likes Owen's idea. “Yes, we should sit in the front, Mama. We never go sit in front.” She seems to marvel at the fact she has never considered a different spot on the floor. Her brain just trips with the possibilities. “We SHOULD.”

With no further discussion Owen bolts for the front, and Brigid follows close behind, excited to do something she has never considered. My two assertive children plant themselves squarely behind the happy family of Henry.

I awkwardly step between tiny hands and crossed legs on high-heeled shoes, excusing my way to the front. Once there, I squat, suit and all, while giving an apologetic shrug to the PA Ladies in back of me. One gives a knowing half smile while the other clearly smirks. She smirks! Henry turns to give me a weirdly cheesy grin. As if to say,
Belle you are clearly overstepping the bounds of our agreement—you know, the unspoken truce where I get your motley family into preschool and you do not bond with my family in any way.

I've been really good about keeping this agreement we never made, and so has he. Besides Bruce, nobody at this place knows I even went to college with Henry, never mind lived with him. I'm no longer euphoric. Now my heart is seized with the anxiety of keeping two young children contained for forty minutes.

The music begins, a banjo riff, followed by a song about sowing seeds, growing a garden . . .

“Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow.”

Sitting cross-legged directly in front of Owen and diagonally from me is the Wife. I've never had such a close-up chance to examine the woman who dethroned me. I take this Christian moment to do so. She is pretty in the classic sense. She has a very good colorist, and her shoulder-length hair has four varying shades of blond, equally striped. She looks as though she could use a good meal, though her perky, large breasts defy the smallness of the rest of her frame. She wears the obligatory low-riders and a thong peeks out the top of her jeans, perhaps sending a message of hidden vixen to us sitting behind her. I want to make a judgment call here but refrain, as she is, in fact, cross-legged, which does pull one's pants lower. I have my arm around Owen. Usually he is rapt, hanging on the storyteller's every word, but today he is engrossed with something else. He has his gaze too low to be paying attention. In fact, it is squarely on Henry's wife's ass.

The song continues, “All it takes is a rake and a hoe, and a piece of fertile ground.”

Inexplicably, Owen reaches out and begins stroking Wife's soft, tight sweater. The woman who stole Henry from me is getting stroked by my two-year-old. I grab his hand maybe harder than I intended.

“Ow!” he yells.

Wife turns and says, “It's okay,” and gives Owen a gentle stroke on his face before turning back. He reaches out again but not before I intercept.

“OWWWW!” This time the entire front row turns to look at us and I'm glad for the loud music.

I whisper in Owen's ear, “We aren't allowed to touch strangers.”

There is such a force in my voice that my rambunctious boy, the one who most loves confrontation, improbably sits back on his faded Gap overalls while I caress his back. The story of reaping and sowing goes on and on. The anger he feels radiates as heat coming from the hand I hold.

It happens the millisecond I adjust my grip. Owen senses this is his moment. He reaches forward fast. I swing out instinctively and catch air. It's too late.

With the small motor skills of someone beyond his years, Owen grabs the thong. He wraps his little fingers around that top strap, the one that's been peeking out at him for the past half hour. It was too difficult to resist in its lacy pinkness. He grabs the thong and pulls it toward him, where it seems to stretch beyond possibility. And it is only when Wife yelps “OWW!” that he releases it with an impressive
Snap!
That was not cheap elastic.

Wife turns to me and I'm expecting I don't know what. I mean Wife is one of the most beloved mothers in the school. She runs the library, she heads the benefit committee, and she has just had her thong snapped in front of all her PA friends. She is probably about to snarl at me but I can't tell for she has no lines, no movement in her face, which has been Botoxed into submission. I anticipate the scolding I deserve but instead see her blank look turn into a stiff smile.

“It's okay, big guy,” she says sweetly. She drips honey packed sweetness onto Owen as he attaches himself to my lower leg and she pats his head before turning to talk to someone else. Chapel has abruptly ended. Henry looks not at me but at the floor surrounding me—my slightly rumpled suit, my practical gray everything, and my giant sack of work with assorted technology spilling out. He says nothing but I can see what he's thinking.

All these years without Henry, all this time apart from someone I thought I would never be apart from, I found comfort in the fact that he ended up with this woman. It's not that I didn't like her, despite her seducing my then boyfriend, it's that I knew what Henry liked and she was not that. I had secretly reveled in the fact he married someone who, despite being rich and connected, had never had a grown-up job, who I'm told spent all her time fixing and refixing their apartment and country house, and managing an army of household staff.

Henry was too smart to stay interested in someone like her. I'd given their union one year of success, the sex year, before deep down I was certain he'd be suffering without having someone like me to keep him grounded, to sharpen his mind, to crack him up. But no, watching his eyes now I could see everything I had assumed was wrong. His face bore no recognition of the girl I had been. He simply looked incredulous. It was then that I knew what he knew.

Henry had picked the right girl.

T
HE SECRET
of working mothers everywhere is compartmentalizing: the ability to jam into a mental drawer that which can't be dealt with at the moment. She jams a family problem into a mental filing cabinet, slams the door shut, and does her work. When she gets home she reverses the process, disconnecting her wireless world while reviewing first-grade spelling words, or reading
Harry the Dirty Dog
for the fifty-seventh time. As she does this she tries not to think about the fact that her entire department will be tested on synthetic mortgage products the following day and that she needs to get a handle on what they actually are. I'm a world-class compartmentalizer and I wish this were an Olympic sport so I could stand on the podium with a gold medal around my neck and get some love for it.

After the chapel drama, I get to the office perilously close to the market's opening bell of 9:30 a.m. A pink note is stuck onto my computer screen. It reads, “Call Tim Boylan of Cheetah Global regarding EBS.”

I've only met Tim once. He is not my daily contact at Cheetah; he's the CEO of the entire place. I interpret this message to mean disaster because top guys don't call with good news. I bury the Owen/thong event deep in the filing cabinet of my brain, and I focus on Tim, on work, on the twinkling LCD screens on my desk.

An asterisk sits next to the EBS symbol, indicating news is breaking on Emergent Biosolutions and the stock will have a delayed opening. Whenever there is news that will significantly impact a stock price, trading halts in that stock while buyers and sellers figure out the correct price to begin again. This must be why Boylan wants to talk. I sold Cheetah over a million shares of EBS based on my advice.

I look over at Amy, who is on the phone, tapping her pen on the red underpart of her Christian Louboutin shoes and making some weird contortion of her face. I know she bought EBS for her own account. She raises her eyebrows toward me in a slightly accusing way, but doesn't say a word, listening intently to her caller.

I snap out of my seat and head to King, looking for information on pharmaceutical trading. King is on the phone, massaging his thick black curls. I get within touching distance, and true to form he tugs on my arm, brings me close to him, and now has his hand on the top of my ass. I pull away in what has become a habitual movement, not unlike the sparring of siblings. There are no boundaries and the parents are distracted. He hangs up.

“How much does Cheetah own?” he barks at me.

“Ten total,” I say. “EBS just came public last year. It's a great company.”

“Ten?” he repeats. “Ten million shares trading at twenty-two dollars per share?”

“Yes, King, I know. A two-hundred-twenty-million-dollar investment.”

“Like a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar investment!” he barks at me so the Dicks surrounding him can hear this too.

“Shit. What happened? Are they killing people?” My heart pounds.

“Anthrax happened,” King says solemnly before breaking into a smile.

At first I think there's been an Anthrax breakout or that the vaccine is ineffective but no, it's got to be good news. King is smiling.