The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund (8 page)

My little dreamy family cocoon had cracked. And it wasn't a beautiful, vibrant-hued butterfly that flew out. It was a sickly, wan, gray, fraying moth. Too bad my effing husband couldn't keep his very hungry caterpillar in his pants. I shuddered with rage.

Kiki wanted me to lose my edit button? It was history now.

“I can't believe he did this to me. That fucking asshole,” I squeaked as Kiki and I staggered into my apartment. She walked me down the hallway and positioned me in Tim's office while she proceeded to ransack the contents of his desk as I quaked on the tufted leather cognac couch.

“What are you doing?” I asked, watching her rip through every drawer like the Tazmanian Devil.

“Tim told you he'd be in Chicago till tomorrow, right?”

“Uh-huh.” I slumped back into the couch, staring at framed pictures of Tim, Miles, and me in Italy a few years ago: in Venice on a gondola; in Pisa, pretending to hold up the Leaning Tower; by a monastery in Padua.

“Good. That means we have twenty-four hours to gather as much information as we can. He probably already has his money hidden, fucking bastard.”

“Wait, wait, Kiki—slow down. Maybe it was . . . a fling. Or—”

“Come on, Holly. I know this is so heinously painful, but you have to act now to self-protect. If he was banging Russian whores like Barbara Ceville's husband, he wouldn't concoct fake trips. You get action at lunchtime. This isn't some courtesan doling out nooner blow jobs in the W Hotel. This is a mistress.”

A
girlfriend
? Like . . . a whole other relationship? No, no, no, no. He loved us!

“I'm giving you the List. Meg McSorley gave it to me—she was my friend's friend who ended up being my divorce adviser. The woman who got me through. You have to call the twenty top lawyers in town—today—and make appointments. That way, he can't hire them. It would be a conflict of interest if you're already in their books as a potential client—”

“Hold on—Kiki, slow down. I'm really out if it right now, I . . . don't know about d-d-d—” I couldn't even say it. I could barely process what I'd just witnessed, let alone entertain the concept of divorce. My parents had been married for thirty years until my mom died of heart disease at age fifty-five. My dad lived in Florida and had wealthy widows throwing themselves at him, but he never bit; he loved the memory of my doting mom more than life itself. So how could I, coming from a perfect family, be headed for splitsville? It was too crazy! This was not my life. Maybe I'd confront him and he would freak and beg for me to stay. I had to at least see what this was all about before calling lawyers. The crazy part is that Tim was the person I'd call whenever something bad happened—I almost wanted to call him to cry about what I was going through. My body felt both heated, charged with boiling rage, and chilled with an icy grip of devastated sadness. I watched Kiki, who was cracking file cabinets and opening stacked boxes in a frenzied hunt for God knows what. My eyes focused behind her, on an eight-by-ten wedding photo, grainy and black-and-white, our faces smeared by the kinetic twirl on the dance floor, my veil wrapped around us in a gauzy ethereal sheath, binding us together. We were partially obscured by the white tissuey wave, but you could see our faces beaming through the delicate tulle. As I looked at the picture, which so captured the beauty and joy of that moment, my eyes gushed for the first time, recollecting the paralyzing vision on Wythe Avenue in Brooklyn. He was kissing that girl and holding her as he once had held me. Clearly what bound us together was not a wedding vow stronger than oak: Our bond now seemed as wispy as my veil, as fragile and transparent as its lace border.

 

 

 

“
U
h-oh ... Bingo.” Kiki looked up at me, gripping a nondescript manila envelope.

“This is exactly what I was looking for.” She held it up, looking almost dismayed by her eureka moment, a discovery she had wanted to make but was then unhappy to unearth, like someone whose job it is to deep-sea dive for dead bodies. You're successful when you locate one, but the find is extremely unpleasant.

I got up and staggered across the room to see what she was holding. Nothing special. The return address was GTP Mortgage, LLP, on Oakdale Avenue, Suite 4300, in MacLean, Virginia. So what? I stared at her blankly.

“See this? Looks boring and tedious, right? Some dumb financial packet you put aside for Tim?”

“Yeah. . . .” We got tons of stuff like that. I never cracked them. I never dealt with the finances. When tax return time came, I just signed on the dotted line where the yellow stickers with red arrows told me to.

“This is how Hal did it, look—” She opened the envelope to reveal a packet with two CDs. The discs appeared to be normal, unmarked in their jewel cases.

Huh?

“See, this is how they mail them. Top secret, in an unmarked envelope. Like Ticketmaster, since they don't want people to swipe concert tickets. You know, they send them from some P.O. box in Iowa or something?”

I nodded, vaguely recalling how in college I had chucked some Smashing Pumpkins tickets by accident, thinking the envelope was some junk-mail solicitation for a magazine subscription or political campaign.

“These hedge fund guys, they order these kits. It's how to plot your exit. They cost like a thousand dollars and this guy instructs you how to start laying the groundwork.”

I still had no idea what she was talking about. Kiki walked over to Tim's Bose CD player by his desk and popped one in.

“Hello,” a man's voice spoke crisply. “This is Lachlan McDonald. And with these divorce secrets for high-net-worth men, you'll be ahead of the game. These guidelines will instruct you how, over a one- to two-year period, you can be armed with information on arranging finances and understanding the reality of the divorce process. Back in the day, a caveman would simply kick his wife out of the cave. Now, the woman gets half the cave. . . .”

 

 

 

Mr. Lachlan McDonald droned on as I started panting. Harder and harder. I meandered back to the couch, where I melted down completely. So it wasn't some trashy whore; it was phase one of Operation Leave Holly. My hands shook. Kiki came over and hugged me as I wept in silence, a silent hysterical cry like toddlers in the moment before the air comes back out of their tiny lungs accompanied by an unbridled piercing wail. All we could hear over my retinal faucet were McDonald's introductory tips:

 

 

 

Blah blah blah. On and on and on it went, a tricky litany of fox-like ways to hide money, a dizzying verbal collage of words like “offshore” and “deferred compensation.”

“You see,” Kiki said soberly, putting her hand on my knee. “These bastards planned it. Yes, I kissed that guy, I filed the papers, but I found Hal's computer cache with Web sites like
mensdivorcesecrets.com
and
divorceprep.com
—he was already thinking about bailing, so I bolted before he could take the year or two this asshole tells them to plan.”

Could that possibly be true? I staggered toward Tim's desk, which I previously couldn't bear to look at. I looked at the closed drawers, potential keepers of more secrets, a dormant volcano that could spew the lava of hot lies were I to explore them. And yet with Kiki beside me, I exhaled and got on the floor and opened them.

At first, it was the usual boring taxes, investment research information, and other yawn-inducing legal and financial documents. As I sifted through the files, I started to think maybe this was a fluke, a whim on Tim's part. Once we talked about this, I'd discover it was some onetime thing. Maybe she was a high-class hooker? He loved our family! Maybe he was just getting his rocks off. . . .

But then I saw a brochure for a Relais & Chateau spa in Oregon. Huh?

“What's that?” Kiki said, as my brow furrowed.

“Tim was just in Oregon. But he said he was at some huge convention hotel. This looks awfully romantic and luxurious for a business meeting.”

Kiki grabbed it and perused the high-gloss photos of body wraps, massages, mahogany four-poster beds, and couples dining by candlelight.

“This was
not
business. It was
bidniss
,” she scoffed, clearly nauseated. “Monkey business.”

I sifted through folders, envelopes, Pendaflex files—each containing mystery receipts—La Petite Coquette, a lingerie store on University Place. One If by Land, Two If by Sea, a romantic restaurant where one would never do business, on a MasterCard I'd never seen before. My head spun, my tongue dried, my gag reflex triggered.

“I-I don't know what to say,” I sputtered, zoned in my pile of piecemeal clues that the man with whom I'd shared a bed literally was leading a double life.

“Say you'll call the lawyers. Two can play at this game, Holl.”

I wanted to die. I obviously wasn't truly suicidal and could never leave Miles mommyless, but I got it into my head that if Tim came home and found my dead body, he'd be sorry and would weep to the gods for atonement. There were more than a few Upper East Side suicides that were legendary, and often were caused by husbands upgrading to trophy wives or losses of fortune.

I gathered what strength I had to pick up Miles. Seeing him almost made me dissolve again into tears, but I summoned every last ounce of energy I had to hold it together and take him to Dylan's Candy Bar on Third Avenue. I had heard kids of divorce are more spoiled; I guess this was part one of indulgent sugarfests to come. He beamed as he got his crystal Baggie and started scooping pieces from the various bins with the tiny shovels. Kids with backpacks from all the different schools crammed the aisle, eyes ablaze, mouths watering, as mommies and nannies reined in the small-handed grabbers and gobblers. The Wonka-esque megastore was a candied kaleidoscope of lollipops, chocolates, every jelly bean shade in the color spectrum. And yet through my new eyes, it was all slates, grays, and blacks and whites.

—Oscar Wilde

 

 

 

“
M
ommy, thanks for the PEZ. I love you!”

“I love you, too, sweetness. But Milesie, you
should love me even if I don't buy you the PEZ. We have to love each other no matter what.”

“I know. Can we read
Frog and Toad
?”

“Sure, lovely.” We curled in his bed with a pile of books as I choked back tears. The innocent words of friendship and simple values buoyed me as I got through the final pages, kissed his forehead, turned on his dinosaur night-light, and closed the door. His little noggin would soon be matted with the sweat of sleep, peaceful and restorative. I wondered if I'd ever slumber that like again in my life.

Kiki had offered to come over and be with me, but I was so wrecked I just wanted to crawl into bed. As I lay there, not even twelve hours after my life-altering revelation, I started going back. I thought of each and every business trip. It was then that I first had a Keyser Söze flashback of my own: recollections of his “day trip” to Cincinnati, or that supposed conference in Utah. Was there even a board meeting in Wichita, Kansas? Or that boat ride with no cell reception with a client in Nassau? It was all lies. Like Chazz Palminteri, I mentally dropped that teacup—my heart, my happiness, my history—and it shattered to the floor in scattered pieces I couldn't even begin to sift through.

Just then, the phone rang. I sprang into action, pouncing like a puma to the caller ID screen. Tim. No way was I going to pick it up. I let it go to voice mail, which I furiously dialed a minute later. The computer voice alerted me to my One. New. Message.

“Hey, Holly, it's Tim. I miss you guys. Chicago's busy and really warm. Looking out my window now at the Sears Tower. I'll be back tomorrow night, can't wait. Love you guys. Call me if you're up, but I'm pretty pooped from these meetings all day and might crash. Love you.”

Fucking liar. In all my years, I was never a curse-word kind of gal. But this whole debacle morphed my tongue into Kiki times ten. That fucking assholic, deviant
serpent
had packed countless lies into probably every voice mail he'd ever left me. In St. Louis: “I'll say hi to the Arch for you.” In San Francisco: “I'm looking at the sun setting over the Golden Gate Bridge.” The Eiffel Tower. Big Ben. That was his stupid modus operandi: drop details of his surroundings. He probably even checked the paper and saw it was unseasonably warm in the so-called Windy City. I bet he was lying naked with that slutbag and winking at her while he uttered those patent falsehoods into the receiver. “I'm pretty pooped from meetings.” Yeah, how about pooped from porking your skank? I oscillated from frothing vitriol to self-pitying grief and back again every second. What would I do? How could I cope? For years I had looked at my few single friends through a lens of pity and relief that it wasn't me. And now it was.