The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund (6 page)

What I loved about the John Hughes movies was the characters' vulnerability, that
everything
got to them. Like real teenagers. The beauty was in them not knowing what to say—they didn't even dream of zapping out the pithy one-liner. It was the biting of the lower lip, the anxiety of wrong-side-of-the-tracks-ness, and the palpable insecurity that was so real to me. Not because zitty teenagehood was finally a distant memory, but because in some ways it never goes away.

Basically . . . I married a John Hughes hottie.

But instead of the kiss over flickering candles, frozen in a snapshot of happily ever after, I still sometimes felt like an outsider in Tim's world. When I was single I was hardly a party girl, but I loved being at music venues, seeing rock bands, and just feeling part of this huge giant city I'd moved to. Tim's world was way more rarefied, sort of a homogenous, preppy, athletic petri dish within this bubbling cauldron of diversity. In a way it's kind of amazing we even intersected at all, seeing as how I was writing about music and more drawn to nerdy musicians and writers and he was in what I considered to be the more robotic world of finance. But that's the magic of New York: You can go through any revolving door and you never know who you'll bump into on the other side.

This is how we met: a Wall Street party in the financial district.

When I first saw Tim, I was living with my roommate, my best college friend, Jeannie, who has since moved home to Boston. Even though we were smart and educated, we talked about boys all the time and primped together for Saturday odysseys around town. We were always up for anything. If we weren't going out to see a band, we'd all hit the phones and call around to see what was going on, and one particular night we ended up at a random party in what's now called SoChiTo (South of Chinatown, not to be confused with WeWa, West of Wall). New York had so many newly gentrified ghetto-to-gold neighborhoods, I couldn't keep track. But I remember having to look the address up on my map, as it was the first time I'd ever been there and the rental building was the first of its kind in that then-creepsville area. The space was big and boxy, the music was good (some trendy DJ “spinnin' it”), and the skyscraping view was twinkly and mesmerizing. But it was one of those parties where all the good ingredients still made up a crappy stew. Plus, I didn't feel well at all—my chunder was mid-esophagus and rising. Unlike the anonymity of, say, a bar or a music venue, parties were often bizarre two-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon social Venn diagrams where you bumped into random people you knew tangentially and you couldn't just be free to listen to songs or dance; there was too much small talk, too much “how do you know so-and-so?”

Did I have some kind of social anxiety disorder like the people on that drug commercial with all the warped, stretched-out faces? Why did I occasionally get nervous at parties? Sometimes I could have a blast, of course, but the newness—that feeling of starting over—always haunted me until I grew at ease with my surroundings. The elevator door opened and there were two signs, for apartments A to H and J to P, but we heard the din of music, voices, a breaking glass, and a collage of muffled whooping, “heys,” and “what-ups” before we could remember which letter we were looking for. Back then, there was always this excitement turning the corner into a party; even with the best of friends at your side, there was a nervousness of anticipation. And the anticipation turned to sheer dread when I beheld the scene: I detested this kind of crowd. It was mostly carbon-copied Wall Street dudes chugging beers in their fleece'n'khakis and girls named Muffy and Steph with blond bobs, black velvet headbands, and tragic Lilly Pulitzer-meets-Ann Taylor concoctions, slumming it on their first night downtown in eons. There were cashmere Ralph Lauren sweaters spanning the spectrum of punch to celadon. There was so much cable knit in the room, they could have started a branch of Time Warner.

R.E.M. blared, and there was a keg and towers of those red and blue plastic cups with the white insides. I never could stomach a beer—the taste conjured cow pee, not that I've tried bovine urine, but one can imagine. So I always opted for wine, no matter how cheap. So there I was as usual, all dressed up, sipping Gallo, looking around an all-white cookie-cutter apartment punched in the face by Pier 1, on husband safari. Jeannie and I might as well have had binoculars to scope the prey—we weren't that subtle. My laser beams were honed to cut through the masses of fleece-covered former frat boys burning off steam from their Wall Street analyst jobs and in search of a non-wasted one who seemed more mysterious Jake Ryan than rowdy jock.

Then in walked Mark Webb, the quintessential rowdy-jock-cum-date-rapist type, whom I had once met through a friend who'd gone to UVA with him. Mark was an analyst at Goldman Sachs who had a lust for money that rivaled his carnivorous sexual proclivities. How can I describe Mark Webb? Here's a try:

But alongside Mark was Tim. Gulp. He was . . . everything. I bit my lower lip and ran a hand through my blond hair, which was slightly too long at the time. He was gorgeous, with a bright smile that necessitated shades to behold. Not that he had huge Nancy Kerrigan Chiclet choppers, just superwhite teeth. And this was pre-Rembrandt, people. He screamed movie star. After circling each other throughout the night, we ended up meeting, and it was one of those conversations where an hour speeds by and soon enough your friends are standing behind him winking at you as your blush grows hotter.

We hooked up that night (tonsil hockey only, no advanced bases), and the next day, with a spring in my step, I regaled the roomies with my re-lived lightning bolt of crushdom, delighting in every detail of his hand on the small of my back to putting me in a cab to the last kiss through the taxi window. I was twenty-four and he was twenty-nine—almost thirty!—a man.

 

 

 

And now it was ten years later. Sam and Jake (Molly Ringwald and Michael Schoeffling) conveniently disappeared for the most part, so that we don't have to know them all grown up; they are frozen in that idealized time of lower-lip biting and candlelit smooches. No diapers, work crunches, and business trips hovered in their romantic midst. Tim would be forty in two months, hotter than ever, but me? My forehead looked like Freddy Krueger had dragged his razor-edged claw across it—there were four deep grooves that I was strongly considering Restylane to remedy. Above my nose there were those creases they call the “elevens,” two vertical lines so deep, you could row a canoe down them. Why did guys get sexier when weathered?

Most hedge fund wives were early adopters of line fillers, microderm, and photo-facials, and by thirty they were all going under for the little snips of saggage here and there. I, on the other hand, was way too freaked out by needles and photos of Jocelyn Wildenstein to even go that distance. And why should I care so much about staying young? I'd already socially kind of put myself out to pasture. It was funny: Tim was the total life of the party, greeted by hugs and high fives all around when he entered a room, just like Kiki. Hal was a bit more reserved, like me. I guess opposites attract. Sadly, the glue binding Kiki and Hal had dried up and worn off, and I wondered what the future held for Kiki. Poor thing. To be “out there” again, ugh: my
nightmare
. I hoped she didn't have some rude awakening that all the guys our age now wanted twentysomethings; Kiki seemed so confident and excited about being free, but I couldn't imagine anything worse. I loved being married. The only thing Tim and I ever fought about (aside from radio stations and my clandestine relationship with Kiki) was my desire for one more kid; he liked our small nest as is and I would have loved another nugget, but I felt blessed to have Miles and Tim—our little family cocoon was so safe. I couldn't even fathom being back in the bar scene or at some Grolsch-stinking incubus of a party. I rarely, if ever, got nostalgic about those years. Maybe because I know I never missed any opportunities, and my life was pretty much right where I'd hoped it would be at thirty-four candles.

—Sharon Stone

 

 

 

A
few weeks later, in February, Tim and I were going on our weekly date night. Well, it had been weekly originally, but in the last year it had devolved into monthly, since Tim was traveling so much for work. I got my hair done and went to meet him for a drink first at the Knickerbocker Club.

But when I got there, I found him seated in a club chair by the fire with none other than Mark Webb, his UVA buddy from St. Anthony, their quasi frat. Mark was now the ultimate hedge fund guy, and when I walked in, he was showing Tim his new watch. Everything about Mark, from his tie to his custom shoes, was, in a word, slickster. He was unbelievably attractive, but in that exaggerated way that was too manly man, too chiseled, like Gaston in
Beauty and the Beast
. He had the cocksure swagger of some kind of superhero
(Hey, darlin': Snow Queen Vodka, rocks, no fruit),
but he was just, quite simply, rich. Filthy rich. Thirty-nine, he had never married, but bragged incessantly of his conquests and sexploits. Stewardesses on private jets, his trainer at E2 (the ten-grand-a-year fitness club), and countless slashies—models- slash-actresses. Slash-waitresses.

“So the new 650 series is what you have to get—” pronounced Mark.

“Are we looking for a new car, honey?” I probed.

“Not this second, no, but Mark always knows the latest on it all.”

He sure did. Here's the thing about the hedgie guys—there's always the newest, greatest, must-have new thing. Down to cuff links.

For Mark's thirty-fifth birthday, he had rented out the Puck Building and had an over-the-top black-tie meltdown. Caviar and champagne were everywhere, exotic dancers with feathered headdresses that rivaled Vegas, the DJ from Studio 54, Tiffany party favors, and cringe-inducing lap dances from the New York Knicks cheerleaders.

As a married woman, I sometimes found it vaguely threatening how much he spoke to Tim about his colorful sex life. It went beyond the obnoxious observations everywhere we went (“Holy shit, look at the cleave on that chick, that's a fucking cup-holder between those babies! I could stash my Corona in there! Or somethin' else, heh-heh.”). It was a general toxic pull away from the domestic tranquility of marriage. Even when it wasn't about T 'n' A (which was rare), it was always something about jetting off to JazzFest in New Orleans, or Vegas for the weekend, or his wild adventures, such as bungee jumping off cliffs in rural Peru—escapades that I knew Tim missed since we'd had Miles.

“So, Holly,” Mark said, leaning in conspiratorially. “You got any hot friends for me?”