The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund (2 page)

You see, Manhattan is a different beast. Fortunes are made on people moving around money, not widgets. Very few companies create a palpable product, something you can hold in your hands. It's all about trading, investing, forecasting ups and downs in those markets. Nothing annoys my husband, Tim, more than when he asks what so-and-so does and I blithely respond, “Oh, you know, Wall Street.” He tries to calmly explain that there are titans of private equity and mere cold-callers, a spectrum of skill and wealth. But numbers now blur into hieroglyphics for me, despite my A+ in BC Calc in high school. It's as simple as this: I have zero interest.

More than once Tim has given me a mini-crash course—basically verbal Sominex—on the differences between traders who trade stocks versus commodities (like pork bellies and the all-famous Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice in
Trading Places
), versus venture capitalists who invest in small companies with high-growth potential. And then there are the current reigning titans, the kings of ka-ching: the hedgies. What my husband and his brother, Hal, do is all very mysterious and, well, to me, boring. Hedge funds, which are not really regulated, are based on an exorbitant “two and twenty” (or “three and thirty,” depending on how well they do) percentage of fees and profits, resulting in lots of boys with lots of cash. All anyone knows is that these guys are minting it, and that the culture, even if clueless about what they actually do, is obsessed.

Fashion designers are telling E! Television that their inspiration is “hedge fund chic.” Artists at the Miami ArtBasel Fair rub shoulders not with other artists or their dealers but with their new buttoned-up clientele, who fork out millions for a formaldehyde-suspended pig or a splatter-painted panel. When people ask what Tim does and I respond, “Hedge fund,” they say, “Oooooooh,” and I cringe, embarrassed; these funds are on people's lips and brains and are synonymous with piles of gold bricks. Not to mention people with no brains: There is even a new book,
Hedge Funds for Dummies
. Like their Gekko-y eighties counterparts, these guys love the money. Greed is good, so it was said, but these days, bragging is better. It seems that every guy my husband works with needs the latest phone, newest car, biggest house, to show off; there's no modesty—it's in-your-face, loud and clear, volume to eleven. And that's how they like it. As do the women who chase them. But while most women would secretly wear Nikes under their Vera Wang bridal dresses so they could sprint faster down the aisle to marry one, take it from me: There are sacrifices.

First of all, the MIA husband syndrome. Tim has to travel all the time, so I'm often solo after Miles's tuck-in with my remote control, learning way too much about Hugh Hefner's three girlfriends on E! or wincing at a taped tummy tuck on the Learning Channel (dashing any desire to have one, despite slight paunch). Then, when Tim is in residence, we have to go to a million “functions.” Hedge fund events, charity balls, Tim's co-worker's sister's wedding. The more money you have, the more friends you get, Tim jokes, but he loooves being the life of the party. Me? I'm way more boring. While he likes going out and sampling aged scotch or expensive wine, I prefer . . . Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice.

All of this is a terrific boon for my field of interest: charity work. There is so much money out there, and the dough coupled with the mounting social ambition yields a prime moment for raising money, so I've thrown myself into my volunteer work for the hospital, getting people to come to our benefit and raising tons of funds. In fact, I've raised so many Benjamins that Susan in the development office whispered I was being groomed for the board. But of course, there's a charity version of mutual back-scratching. It means that everyone who donates or buys a ticket to my event then asks me to buy one for their cause as well, resulting in a full calendar of going out.

These events can be fun, sure, but lately the whole black-tie thing has gotten worse, spiraling out of control to the point where we can conceivably be out five nights a week. Sometimes I worry about how easily lying comes to me in terms of wriggling out of attending. It's truly almost like breathing.
Hi, it's Holland. I'm sooo sorry, but Tim and I can't make your Night of Wagner at the Opera because we have friends in town!
Or:
Gosh, I'll have to miss your museum luncheon—I have a doctor's appointment, bummer!
Come to think of it, it's really just minifibs to spare people's feelings, because I generally much prefer small, intimate gatherings to stuffy formal fetes with penguin suits and pearl chokers.

And take luncheons, for example. I have a strict
no-luncheons
policy, which can be tricky in Manhattan, and thus involves at least weekly lies to various hedge fund wives who invite me to their interminable afternoons at La Goulue or Sette Mezzo. Let's face it: The word “luncheon” is “lunch” plus “eon” because it takes eons for the darn thing to end. My last was a Museum of Natural History luncheon that went on so long, it was as if the gigantic T. rex dinosaur jawbones bit a humongous bloody chunk out of my day. Whether I was giving tours at Miles's school, working at the hospital writing fund-raising letters, or simply running the house, my time was in scattered pieces like the fossils. So I feel zero guilt as I rattle off faux excuses to various invitations that would no doubt be the equivalent of social root canal.

But lying to Tim was different.

My husband of seven years knew me so well, I had to avert my eyes when I spewed out some invented plan, tending to a supposedly errant cuticle or lip gloss touch-up rather than look him in the eye. It had come to this since our last major fight a month ago.

“I don't think you quite understand, Holly,” he yelled at me, brown eyes ablaze. “You are NEVER to speak to Kiki again. Ever. She is
out
of this family. She left my brother and she's a tacky little bitch. The Talbott family sticks together, and if Hal has booted that slut from his life, we do the same. Delete her from your Outlook. That garbage Kiki Talbott is Out. Of. Our. Lives.”

He slammed the door to his bathroom. I heard the shower go on and closed my eyes, knowing that despite his fervent militaristic command, my best friend—my now ex-sister-in-law—was most certainly not going to be dumped in the trash.

 

 

 

We had married two brothers, the scions of Comet Capital, a thriving New York City hedge fund. When I first met Kiki Silverstein, I wasn't quite sure about her—she was kind of a loud-mouth, wearing a leopard-print Dolce&Gabbana coat with big gold buttons, huge Rachel Zoe-esque sunglasses not unlike an insect's compound eyes on top of her head, and five-inch platform tranny-esque black patent leather heels, rattling off a laundry list of orders to her assistant through a headset on her newfangled shiny cell. She ran a manicured hand with dark red nails through her shiny dark-brown shoulder-length hair and had a bit too much eye makeup on her crystal blue eyes. While Posey, Mary, and Trish, my circle of New York mom-friends I'd met through Miles's school, were incredibly refined and traditionally “ladylike,” Kiki was brassy and sassy and had edge to spare, with a gutter mouth and a sick bod she flaunted that immediately put all guys' minds in the gutter right beside her language. But little by little, I saw that beneath the windup doll that cracked everyone up with her hilarious zingers and often scathing one-liners was a gentle, nurturing, warm soul who, in the six years of her marriage to Hal, truly grew to be family. In fact, despite how polar opposite we were, she became the sister I never had. And I couldn't excise her from my life just because Hal did.

Kiki had told me that when they first met, the sparks that flew between her and Hal were practically atomic. They shacked up for days, with Chinese food takeout cartons outside her door the only proof that they were not dead. But they had never felt more alive. Madly, passionately in love, they went at it in coatrooms, at other people's parties, even in the handicapped bathroom stall at her tenth high school reunion. When I first met her, I felt removed from the whir and buzz of their shared sexual heat. I was puking my brains out, pregnant with Miles and feeling about as alluring as a cinder block, while Hal kissed and licked her ear and probably pawed her beneath the table. Tim and I were like an old preppy couple, relaxed into three years together and so excited for the stork—definitely in love, but not minks in the sack like old times. Come to think of it, Tim had never pawed me under the table.

But slowly through the years as those electric currents flickered, faded, and then zapped out, Hal began to push Kiki away. He became cold and distant, obsessed with discussing Tiger Woods's latest tournament during dinner rather than lusting after her the way he once had, and Kiki and I found ourselves a couple of golf widows languishing every Saturday and Sunday while our husbands hit the links or flew off to watch the latest PGA tournament.

About two years earlier, on a winter weekend trip to Palm Beach, I clued in to how truly miserable she was, despite the fact that she turned every head by the Breakers pool in her Burberry string bikini.

“I fucking hate it here. This place is all Newlyweds and Nearly Deads,” she said, from under her enormous sunglasses. “It's so damn humid in this goddamn state, I get off the plane and I'm in Florida but my hair is in Cuba. I always look like dog-shit here; my skin, my hair. The state even looks like a big dick. And the moment I land here, it fucks my whole look.”

I pointed to Miles so that she'd halt her incessant cursing.

“Oh, sorry, Milesie. Aunt Kiki said a bad word.” She exhaled, looking at her watch as Miles smiled mischievously, then ran off to play on the dunes with his friends. “Ugh, can you fucking believe this shit with Hal and Tim's golf? That sport could not be more torturous. It's watching grass grow. It's men with hideous pants walking,” Kiki lamented. “I'd rather gnaw on my own liver than take up that tartan hell. Sorry, I know you hate my cursing.”

“I don't mind; it's just when Miles is here, that's all.”

“Oh, please. Even when he's not here you say ‘sugar' instead of ‘shit.' You're such a good girl,” she teased, patting my head. “I'm a naughty influence.”

“I know, you say that I'm repressed and should lose my edit button. Fine. The golf thing
sucks
. It sucks sugar,” I teased. “But they work so hard, and if they can blow off steam . . . ,” I offered in Tim's defense.

“Please. Hal can blow
me
. For a change.” She looked off at the horizon as Miles played capture the flag with the other kids. “Holly, if I tell you something, do you swear not to tell Tim?”

“Of course,” I promised. “Come on, I never tell Tim anything you tell me.”

Kiki took off her glasses and looked at me. Her big blue eyes welled with tears. “Hal won't sleep with me. It's been months. I don't know what's going on, but I feel like Marie Antoinette. Minus the rolling head. There's no head in my life. He won't even let me—” Her eyes seemed to glisten with the dew of fought-back cascades.

I felt terrible for her. But more than that, I was shocked. She and Hal had been self-professed “rabbits,” and for
them
to have such a sexual dry spell was unimaginable.

“It's just a phase,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder, trying to soothe her as she wiped away one escaped drop from her heavily mascara'd eye. “Tim and I have had that. It's normal.”

“I'm not so sure,” she said, wiping more tears away from her long, glistening lashes. “He came to my family's seder and was so distant and rude. My parents and brother were appalled; he treated me worse than Pharaoh.”

But as time wore on and two more years passed, both Tim and I knew that things between Hal and our sister-in-law had seriously cooled. We had gone out to one of our weekly foursome dinners, and when Kiki put her arm around Hal, he brushed it off—in front of us. Even Tim noticed and commented on how harsh it was, but said that his brother was overworked and stressed out with The Fund, which was almost like a mistress to both of them. Seriously, sometimes I found myself getting so jealous of the darn laptop, I wanted to chuck the goddamn thing out the window. It could be 3:37 a.m. and I'd think Tim was getting up to pee, and then I'd hear him clacking away; the chirpy
shwing!
of an instant message had become like a jackhammer to my ear-drum. Or at the airport, minutes before they would close the flight, he simply had to run into the Admirals Club for just a second: more clickety-clacking. BlackBerries in restaurants. Cell phones at dinner parties. You get the picture. And through all of it, Kiki was my sharer in disapproving head shakes, tsk-tsks, and eye rolls from horrified observers, forcing us to whisper embarrassed comments like, “C'mon, sweetie, no texting during the Broadway show.”

So it was a surprise, if not a total shock, when she sat me down at Sant Ambroeus on Madison Avenue one warm June day. “I'm filing for divorce from Hal,” she said, dramatically clearing her throat and looking me in the eye. “I've fucking had it with being Mrs. Hedgefund.”

 

 

 

“
G
oing once ... going twice? Lot twenty-two: SOLD for seven hundred fifty thousand!” Delicate claps from the chic tuxedo- and gown-wearing crowd echoed the gavel's podium bang.

Was I at an art auction where a Damien Hirst was just hawked? An Etruscan vase? A Schlumberger honeybee ring? No. It was five days before Kiki told me the stunning news of her split from Hal, and the two of us were at the spectacular annual spring charity benefit for the Lancelot Foundation for children's hospitals, at which Comet Capital, along with every other big hedge fund in the city, had taken a table inside the Puck Building in SoHo. For the past four years I'd worked on the committee with Posey and Mary, and we had fun planning it, and the event raised more money for charity than any other evening in New York City. It was very interesting to see the inner workings and politics when the event involved huge egos and huge wallets; for example, Hugo Lovejoy cut an extra check to Lancelot to ensure that this year his table “wasn't in fucking Siberia.” By the way, their table previously had hardly been by the kitchen's swinging doors—his wife, Pippa, simply needed to be in the front row this time. Or, as Hugo said it, “So she can see the auctioneer sweat.”