Woman on Top (8 page)

After several treatments, Jake ran a high fever for days on end and was unable to swallow. The chemo had acted against not only the fast-growing cancer cells but also the fast growing cells of the lining of his esophagus. On a Sunday night around nine o’clock, the doctor finally wanted us to meet him in the Emergency Room. We left the kids with my mother who was staying with us.

The waiting room looked filled with people needing attention of every imaginable sort. Surrounded by so many sick or injured people and by the busy staff, I felt anonymous and abandoned. We were led into a small examining room where, over the course of the next few hours, we were to find out that the chemotherapy had wiped out Jake’s immune system and he needed to be admitted to the hospital. He had no white blood cells to protect his body against infection. I started to cry. But Jake never said a word. The more he hurt, the more he battened down the hatches and braced himself for the coming storm. There would be no talking that night, just whatever comfort I provided simply by being there.

The noises of the Hartford Emergency Room buzzed around us. Not far from Jake, a man in his sixties who had been brought in with chest pains lay on a stretcher. Around midnight, while I stood near Jake’s side, this man died. His wife became hysterical.

This was about all I could stand. I wanted to go home, get into my warm bed on this cold night and pretend none of this was happening. I didn’t want to witness this woman’s heartbreak, knowing well it could be me one day. Life was slipping completely out of my control.

Finally, around one in the morning, Jake was taken up to a room where he quickly fell asleep. Sitting in the chair next to his bed, I raged at God, at fate, at whatever caused Jake to suffer so much. I wanted to be with my children and have the kind of normal life my friends were having. I wanted their problems.

Watching Jake sleep in the hospital bed tormented me. He had already lost ten pounds and a lot of his hair. At five in the morning I left the hospital and headed home to see the kids before school. In the car, I screamed at God at the top of my lungs, “You’d better lay off Jake. This is it, he’s suffered enough!”

That week with Jake in the hospital seemed endless. When I was with him I wanted to be home with the kids, when I was with the kids I wanted to be with Jake. But Jake’s white count slowly returned to normal. He said he was fearful of the next round of chemo and rightly so as he lost more and more of his energy, and all of his hair.

Each time we walked from Henry’s office into the bowels of the hospital, Jake looked weaker. He shuffled along the long walk and looked as gray as the walls we passed. And then on June 3, Jake received his last treatment. We were euphoric. We were promised a cure and we expected one. The pea-sized lump on Jakes’ shoulder had melted with the first treatment, and there had been no evidence of tumor during subsequent treatments.

Soon Jake was working full time again and we were back to the life we had known before cancer. We were truly the most grateful people alive. My grandmother had a Yiddish expression, “Scare me God, but don’t punish me.” Well, we had been scared but we had not been punished. We picked up our lives as if we had just been married, with the same excitement and hopefulness. We made love as if we had just discovered each other. Jake said he felt so appreciative to be back at work, doing what others might consider the same old thing but Jake could never again take for granted.

SPRING 1995

CHAPTER 8

May

L
en began inviting me to dinners with his friends, most of whom were investment bankers with whom he worked.

One night we were to have dinner at a small but very exclusive French restaurant in New Jersey with Thomas, a tall and strikingly handsome man. Len would hint to me at the extent of Thomas’ wealth but never give flat out figures.

“He donates millions every year to charity,” Len declared.

Thomas was accompanied by Linda, his beautiful wife and former secretary, who showed up with the largest breasts and most jewelry, both very real, that any woman could possibly carry all at the same time. Joining us at dinner was Paul, a media mogul from Alpine, and his surprisingly very ordinary wife, Sandra.

“Paul might be hard to take. He’s very full of himself,” Len warned me on the way over.

The restaurant looked crowded with diners elegantly dressed for a suburban restaurant on a Saturday night. Our men surveyed the wine list and finally agreed on the appropriate bottles, each well over a hundred dollars. The women sat idly by, so conversation had to be made with Linda and Sandra.

“Do you have children?” I smiled politely at them.

“Two, both in boarding school,” Linda replied.

“No, we don’t have children,” Sandra said quietly.

“Did you do any skiing this past winter?” Len asked Paul.

“Went heliskiing for a week in British Columbia. Spent a week skiing in Chamonix. We also went to Paris for ten days and did a week in Israel. I have to say, I love the French. Definitely prefer them to Americans,” Paul said.

Nobody said a word.

“And more than the French? I certainly favor the Palestinians over the Israelis. The Israelis are just a bunch of terrorists,” Paul continued.

Silence.

“I’m not sure how many people would agree with you that the Israelis are solely responsible for the troubles there and that they are a bunch of terrorists,” I finally said.

“Are you kidding? Are you aware of what goes on there?” Paul asked.

“Yes, as much as anyone is. I don’t think it’s as black and white as you make it out to be. It’s a very complicated situation,” I responded.

Len asked the waiter for the bill and paid.

Dinner ended and I gathered it was not a success.

We said our very polite good-byes while the valet parking attendants retrieved our cars. Len opened my door for me and then quietly got in on his side of the car. We drove in silence until we emerged out of the long driveway of the restaurant. Len turned to me as he drove.

“If you ever do that again, ever argue with a client or at a dinner, I’ll kick your chair right out from you at the table.”

Len glared at me and with those icy, unforgiving eyes. I did not doubt his words.

I filled my friends in on the details of the dinner while we ate our salads at The Oasis.

“Those women just sat there, like they’re not supposed to talk.”

“Len didn’t really say that to you? Did he?” Rachel said.

“Yeah, he did. These people live in another world. You wouldn’t recognize the women I’m meeting. It’s the fifties. They don’t work. All they know how to do is play tennis, golf, exercise and shop. They’re subservient to these rich, successful men. One of these women was laughing one night at dinner that she had just flown over to Paris for the weekend. She said she did the Louvre in fifteen minutes and checked it off her list. She said and I quote, ‘Nothing in there’.”

“But they can’t be happy. Can they?” Zoë asked.

“Why not? They don’t have to drag themselves out of bed to work when they don’t want to. They have tons of money, spend weeks in Europe and at spas every year, and all they have to do is keep their mouth shut while their narcissistic rich husbands do their thing,” I answered.

“But, it’s not us. Can you imagine being so stifled? It’s like being a prisoner in a marriage,” Bonnie said.

“These women are not the ‘social X-rays’ that Tom Wolfe wrote about in
Bonfire.
They’re a step below the sophisticated Manhattan socialites who are at least into charities and museum work,” I said.

“Who are they?” Rachel asked.

“I don’t know but what does this mean for our daughters?” I asked her.

Rachel had two ambitious daughters, an actress making it on Broadway, and a daughter in medical school. She couldn’t be concerned.

“Do we teach them to be gold diggers so they can marry rich men and live soft lives?” I continued. “Or do we tell them to be like us, women who most of these rich men can’t handle?”

A rare silence enveloped our table.

“Why’d you work so hard to get into Harvard and Harvard Law School? You could have just married a rich man and had a soft life,” I asked Zoë.

“I love my work. Aren’t you missing that point?”

“I do too. I can’t picture living such empty lives. And imagine how bored their husbands must get with them,” Rachel responded. We all knew that she had left her first husband after he refused to let her go to Yale Law School.

“What happens to these women when their fifty-five-year old husbands trade them in for thirty-year olds? They’re nothing. At least we have our work,” Bonnie said.

“One night we had dinner with a couple who just bought a huge mansion. The wife did nothing; the husband another big success in finance. Both of their kids were about to leave for college. I asked the wife why they’d bought such a big place at this time in their life and she actually said that she felt bored and this was her new project. Her husband was happy to comply.”

“Would you want to be one of these women? Kate, you could be one, if you marry Len,” Zoë said.

“I guess I can see why certain of these women would be seduced, they might not have other choices. But we are not those women. I feel so schizophrenic about my experiences in Len’s world. I want to take the moral high ground and yet I’m not running away from Len and his friends. But I will always work. These are the Stepford wives,” I answered.

“But what kind of compromises are you willing to make to be in that world? There is the security of a lot of money.” Bonnie said.

“I care about Len and I don’t think it’s about the security of money,” I said.

“Think about it, Kate. How far are you willing to go to be with Len?” Bonnie asked once more.

“I just don’t know yet. I just don’t know.”

My friends and I had to pause the deliberations. Four very confident, successful lawyers appeared lost, lacking any experience navigating their way through Len’s world.

The following week Len and I had dinner with one of his best friends, Brad and his wife, Catherine, an elegantly dressed woman and wearing much less jewelry than Linda. Brad had also made millions and was on an airplane five days a week traveling the globe for business.

We met at La Grenouille, a sumptuous little restaurant I had never been to before. Enormous vases of fresh flowers filled the small opulent room.

One could tell that Brad seemed pleased with himself by the smug smile he maintained on his face.

“I’ll take the wine list” he told the waiter and then ordered two bottles of Cabernet at $150 a bottle.

“So Len, I was in Asia last week. Quite a trip. Hong Kong for two days, Singapore for two and back to Hong Kong for one. Very productive.”

“Did you close the deal?” Len asked.

Catherine leaned over to me.

“I’m always home alone while Brad is off traveling. It gets lonely as you can imagine,” Catherine whispered.

“Do you work?” I whispered back.

“No, I’ve never worked. And now I’m suffering from depression. The meds help but Brad seems to be enjoying the view from the top and I’m languishing in the basement.”

Dinner was pleasant enough until Brad appeared to have reached his limit on alcohol.

“Somehow Brad and I seem to be going in different directions. He’s traveling, happy, and we….we honestly only have sex like once every six months at most. I wonder.” she whispered to me in one ear which allowed me to overhear Brad telling Len what sounded like a joke when I heard him use the ‘n’ word.

Len, whom I had never known to be a racist, let it slide. But I just couldn’t, could I? Would Len literally kick my chair out from under me at the table if I said something, even something simple like I didn’t appreciate that kind of humor?

I squirmed and fidgeted, trying to gag myself wondering whether the two glasses of wine I consumed would dictate my behavior. Was I supposed to accept the comments, because Brad was one of Len’s best friends, because I was becoming part of a world where women don’t make waves, or because I was just plain scared of Len?

Struggling through dinner and wondering what to do. Picturing the possibilities and the consequences. How punitive could Len be? At least I was sitting on a banquette this time.

But the worst part of it all, in the end I never said a word. I went home disappointed in myself. Lonely and desperately trying to fit into Len’s world, I began to wonder at what price that would be. Did I have the potential to be one of these women enjoying their husband’s riches and silently enduring the rest? Was I envious of these women or did I abhor them? Was ignorance bliss? The one thing I knew for certain - I was not one of them.

Sarah flew in from California just in time for me to unload on her. We had agreed to meet for lunch and now hugged each other tightly.

We’d known each other since we were six. Sarah was all of five feet tall, short wavy hair, big blue eyes, and a large smile. Whenever I ran away from my family when I was growing up, it took about three hundred yards to get to Sarah’s building. And my mother knew exactly where I had escaped to. But Sarah’s apartment provided a refuge and Sarah did the same three hundred yards in reverse when she needed to run away. We lived in standard two bedroom apartments, each shared a bedroom with our brother, had parents who both worked, and we went to the same schools and summer camps.