Strangers at the Feast (25 page)

Douglas worked in consulting but had a hobbyist’s fascination with real estate. He loved to wander into apartments for sale to see what four hundred thousand or a million dollars could buy. On Sundays at brunch, he’d scour open house listings, and then he and Denise would mosey from showing to showing, inventing stories for the realtors about their impending elopement, Denise’s large inheritance, or how Douglas had just been offered a job with AOL.

Denise, who sometimes suffered an uncharacteristic timidity entering these places, admired Douglas’s fearlessness. No space was too grand, too imposing, for him. He flung open closet doors, twisted on brass bath faucets. He looked at sweeping views of Central Park, shrugged, and said, “Too bad you have to look at the zoo.”

Sunday nights, over tapas and sangria, they ranked the apartments on their cocktail napkins, Douglas’s rule being that rank couldn’t correlate to price. Amenities had to be valued: doorman service, outdoor space, proximity to Central Park. Wallpaper versus paint. Co-op versus condo. Back at Douglas’s small studio apartment, Denise would lie in the dark, envisioning the people who lived in all those lofts and penthouses, wondering if they understood their enormous luck.

And then, in 1998, she and Douglas married, had the twins, and moved to Stamford, where suddenly
they
were living in a house with gleaming parquet floors, a kitchen skylight, walk-in closets. Douglas called the house a financial “stretch”—he’d sold off some Internet
stocks for the down payment and worked long hours in New York to cover the mortgage—but Denise loved the house, and there was enough money left over to hire a sitter a few nights a week and eat out. She hired a personal trainer. The boys took music appreciation classes.

For the first time in her life, Denise could stop juggling jobs. Good-bye, fluorescent lights. Farewell, political-correctness seminars. Gone were the pantsuits, the brainstorming sessions with dry-erase boards, the unsolicited midday neck massages from Don Romano, marketing VP. She was delighted that she might go to her grave without fixing another paper jam. She could not, for the life of her, understand women who worried about quitting their jobs to raise children. Were they retiring from NASA? Were they throwing in the towel midway through mapping the human genome? Denise’s mother had worked two jobs every day of her life; there was no glory in it. Anyone who thought work was a way to create meaning in life had never been poor.

A distinct misery had hovered over her childhood home. In each room, the strain of their lives could be seen in the frayed and splintered furniture, in the worried look on her mother’s face as she set dinner on the table and mentally calculated how much money was about to be devoured. In her father’s eyes lurked a constant shame that manifested, at times—if his hamburger was overcooked, if he suspected Denise had spent her paycheck on clothes—as rage.

Douglas, on the other hand, never lost his temper; he rarely complained. He dressed as Santa Claus for Christmas, and when he came home from work, he set down his briefcase, got on all fours, and gave the twins pony rides around the living room. In the first years of their marriage, Denise, who had long used activity as a way to escape discontent, experienced an almost tearful joy in the simple act of being at home.

So when Douglas started talking about flipping their house, claiming that a few modest renovations could turn a 30 to 40 percent profit
within a year, Denise was inspired. They put granite countertops in the kitchen, winterized the back patio. They built a sunporch and repointed the brick exterior. Denise didn’t ask where the cash for the renovations came from. She’d been under the impression that Douglas, like everybody, was “dabbling” in stocks. At dinner parties, people swapped ticker symbols like recipes. And late at night, he’d disappear into his den and click away at his keyboard. When he climbed into bed, he’d curl up close, stroke her thigh, and whisper, “Baby, I made us a grand today.”

Douglas had always given her the feeling of great confidence, and he was not a stupid or reckless man. But a bubble was a bubble. A marketwide implosion was hard to escape from unscathed, if you were in deep.

Douglas had them in ass deep.

Apparently, in order to renovate the house, he’d invested most of their savings in dot-com start-ups: online shoe stores, messaging boards, Brazilian pharmaceuticals. If it was a long shot, he bought. All day long, he’d been checking ticker prices from his computer at the office, dumping one stock, buying another.

He’d practically wiped out the joint account with the money Denise had put away since her waitressing days, and everything they’d saved for the children.

Denise felt sick.

“Everybody got burned,” Douglas said one morning as he stared disbelievingly at the financial pages. “I mean, I fucked up. But major financial geniuses. Top players at hedge funds, hon. Everyone was in tech stocks. It wasn’t just me.”

Denise, clearing his plate, had to stop herself from throwing it across the room. She didn’t know at the time that this was just the beginning of their seven-year financial roller coaster.

“Douglas, touch a cent of our money again without consulting me and I’ll file for divorce.”

There was no getting back what he’d lost. Because of Denise’s
catering experience, her friend Sally got her a job as nutrition counselor for one of the public high schools, replacing a woman who wasn’t returning from her maternity leave.

“You don’t have to go back to work,” said Douglas.

They both knew this was a lie.

Denise started at the end of the spring semester, telling friends that she needed to get out of the house. “I’m bored with baby talk.”

In the afternoons Denise left the twins at day care and drove to the gray rectangular slab of Jefferson High. The first few months were dreary; she loved her
own
children, but toward kids in general Denise was indifferent. And these high schoolers didn’t even seem like children. All those trashy clothes and foul mouths, the braces and pimples and bored-faced bovine chewing of gum as she tried to explain the food pyramid. The cafeterias reeked of grilled cheese and French fries. The bathrooms smelled of perfume and strawberry lip gloss and were covered with graffiti detailing which of those lanky, pimply pubescent boys had big cocks. The girls showed so much cleavage even Denise couldn’t help staring. The halls were painted pale green and pale blue, asylum colors—not inappropriate. Maps and time lines hung in every room, a daily reminder that though she was a college graduate, she couldn’t name half the countries in South America. She thought she’d go crazy. Surely there was some other job she could get, a job with more adults and fewer pierced tongues.

But if anyone asked her at dinner or a cocktail party, she professed commitment to public schools and the community. Turning kids around. Combating childhood diabetes.

“Denise, you’ve gone all
Stand and Deliver
!”

When really she dreamt of torching the place.

Then for the 2001 summer session, a new history teacher arrived. Masood Salam just graduated from Brown and came from a wealthy Jordanian family. God only knew what he was doing teaching at a Stamford public school—a liberal streak, she figured—but he was
handsome, dressed fashionably for a teacher, and all the teenage girls had a crush on him.

Within weeks, a bathroom stall read: “Please, Mr. Salam, go down on me.”

It was a difficult year for her, losing her savings. Their house, with all its renovations, still had not sold. Denise didn’t carry herself like the most happily married woman. When she said “husband” she rolled her eyes. She flirted, even with the high school boys. The truth was, she hadn’t worked in two years, hadn’t been out of the house, around men, and had forgotten the pleasures of the adult world.

Masood would sit at the luncheon table, where the daily ritual was a competition among the teachers for who had suffered the most outlandishly difficult question in class, and for who had produced the most plausible incorrect answer.

Jorge Velasquez asked me why the Dead Sea was called the Dead Sea.

Derek Freese asked why slaves didn’t all just head south to Mexico.

Warren Keating, English teacher of thirty-five years, explained: “Admit ignorance and you lose them altogether. I figure about ten to fifteen percent of the answers we give are jibberish, but that’s an acceptable margin of error. These kids need to believe there are people who know.”

Denise agreed. As the mother of two children, she understood well the parental obligation, the time-tested maternal mandate, to occasionally make shit up.

Tereza Huzka, the Polish chemistry teacher, had her own solution. “I do not allow questions.”

“Google is
killing
us,” sighed Angela Nova, who had been outed by a web-savvy student after saying Alaska and Hawaii were the fifty-first and fifty-second states. “I’m an English teacher! I don’t teach geography!”

But when Masood arrived, he threw them all for a loop, because he
could
answer every question.

“Of course it was the ancient Greeks who first used bedsprings,”
he said, cutting into his chicken cutlet. “They fashioned them out of braided leather thongs and hung them between opposite sides of the bed.”

Denise thought the school board had sent a mole! Masood wasn’t high-school-teacher-smart, he was smart-smart. She’d been told that every few years an Ivy League graduate would arrive, try to teach
War and Peace,
and eventually become depressed by the overcrowded classrooms, the poor lighting, the vague smell of asbestos. At the first sight of a switchblade, the new teacher zipped off to law school. But Masood was unflustered by the chaos of the school, and lacked pretension or ambition. While the other teachers forked their salads and sipped their Snapples, Masood like to read aloud the celebrity sightings from Page Six of the
New York Post
. Once, he slid the paper over to Denise and pointed to a picture of Cameron Diaz in a string bikini.

“You could pull off a swimsuit like that,” he said.

Since getting married, Denise had become accustomed to what she thought of as window-shopping adultery. As she stood around dreary parties when Douglas went on too loudly with a story she’d heard before or launched into one of his hypothetical situations, her eyes would rove the room, landing on a single tennis pro eating a celery stick or a vascular surgeon checking his pager. She would think: What would
that
be like? And in a flash, the arbitrariness of her life became clear; if she’d sent her assistant to the catering gig where she’d met Douglas, she might be standing at another party with another husband. This thought could, for an hour or so, unhinge Denise’s sense of obligation, and even love. But by the time she and Douglas were back home brushing their teeth, critiquing the party’s hors d’oeuvres, and by the time she kissed her children good night, the deep comfort of routine took hold. She was happy to curl up beside the man who was, even if by chance, her spouse.

But when Masood caught her smoking in the Minimart parking lot and waved his forefinger in a shame-on-you gesture from his car,
Denise felt an unprecedented curiosity, one that did not fade by nightfall.

Soon after, he approached her in the teachers’ lounge, holding out a pack of Dunhills. “Shall we?”

They smoked behind a dumpster while class was in session—they agreed that the nutrition counselor lighting up would send a bad message. If it rained, they smoked in his car while a strange, mournful Middle Eastern music played from his tape deck. They agreed that mad cow disease was being blown way out of proportion, that the euro would make life easier on tourists; they gossiped about other teachers, wondering whether the track coach and school nurse had something going on, joking about where they might be frolicking; they fell silent as the words
grope
and
quickie
filled the car.

Suddenly Denise’s long, dull days were filled with expected and unexpected encounters with Masood. She could breeze through tedious inventory forms knowing she’d see him at lunch and on his break between seventh and eighth periods and at the day’s end before he left to coach soccer. Any day he called in sick, the clock hands moved in gel. She wasn’t certain if she felt happy or unhappy; she knew only that she felt deeply alive. Longing electrified her. In brief fits of despair, she would suck down a Twinkie in the stairwell, thinking:
This is sugar. This is your brain on sugar.

By the time she drove home, groggy from her postsugar rush, she was not particularly thrilled to see her husband.

Douglas hadn’t taken the financial fiasco well. He didn’t dare complain to her, and she knew he wanted her to believe he’d get them out of the jam.

At night he always had a copy of
Forbes
or
Fortune
in his lap. He thumbed through the biographies of Warren Buffet and George Soros. She’d long been aware of the male obsession with the biographies of great men, with trivia about Einstein’s napping habits or Lincoln’s favorite breakfast foods. On any given morning, the Metro-North trains were filled with pale, tired men in gray suits devouring
the lives of presidents and generals. Or athletes. Men who had never swung a bat or thrown a football could wax eloquent about the seasonal stats of Derek Jeter. Men didn’t have heroes, they
studied
heroes, as though greatness and masculinity could be transmitted through reading, as though knowing the lyrics to every Mick Jagger song or the names of the E Street Band members got them one step closer to playing Madison Square Garden. A woman, at most, would dress like a woman she admired, maybe slip on some Jackie O. sunglasses, a Princess Di pantsuit, but no woman ever rattled off the title of every Bette Davis film and thought that it made her a femme fatale.

As Douglas devoured countless biographical anecdotes of adversity, Denise wanted to ask: who writes the biographies of men who failed and just kept failing?