Opening Belle (37 page)

On September 29, the market is plunging and I visit Kathryn because she isn't as rattled as the other people on my floor. She isn't throwing phones or punching screens or swearing about horses' backsides. She is staring at her screen and watching everything turn red, and the only thing turning green is the price of gold. Investors are running for anything safe, safer than stocks or bonds or the U.S. dollar, and that's why only gold is trading up.

I notice Australian currencies swing higher and I smile and think of Henry and how he was buying everything Aussie six months ago. Henry is so sad and so rich.

Without looking at me Kathryn keeps typing and starts talking.

“I like you well enough, Isabelle,” she says. “And you know I'm not interested in being part of movements or change or anything like that and I'm sorry I didn't help you and your friends out.”

I let out a short laugh. “Yes, well that didn't go as planned,” I say. “You know those venture capital firms are the same; the technology start-ups are the same. Anywhere the culture is loose and lucrative, the same thing exists. Maybe our mistake was thinking Wall Street was unique when it comes to the advancement of women.” I can't believe I've quoted the things Elizabeth said to me at brunch eight months ago.

She doesn't seem to hear me. “And I like you well enough to not allow you to be made a fool of.”

“Kathryn. It's not a problem. The guys don't bother me and I'm done with thinking I'm going to be a partner here. I see things for what they are now. Don't you worry about me.” I wink.

Kathryn lifts an eyebrow and turns back to her turret. “You see, that's what's so maddening to me. You're too nice. You just don't see people for who they are. People like you get taken advantage of.”

“I don't feel taken advantage of, I just wanted a fair shake, but a lot of life is luck. Maybe at a different bank, things would have been different for me,” I say with no enthusiasm.

Kathryn seems glazed, like she isn't even listening.

“You aren't hearing me. This isn't about Feagin Dixon, it's about your husband, Bruce. He's no good.”

I watch her expertly manicured, not pink, not beige, not white fingernails stop tapping on her keyboard. I watch as she takes one of those hands that the fingers are on and she places it on my thigh. I stare at the hand like it's some repulsive insect.

“You have no right to speak of someone you don't know like that,” I say crisply. She's never even met Bruce.

Then she places both hands on either arm of my chair and swings me to look right at her. I don't think I've ever made full-on eye contact with her. It's unnerving.

“He cheats on you, does yoga with someone I know and has sex with her.”

When I look at her it's as if some ugly reptile has attached itself to her tongue. Everything I thought about her was wrong. Kathryn is certifiable.

“You do not know my husband. He may not have a great job and maybe your yogi friend sees him at the gym, but he is not a cheater. And besides, I'm your only real friend. Bitch.”

She looks startled. I look startled. Whose words are coming out of my mouth?

Kathryn wants to try again.

“How do I put this? He's into tantric. Some of my yoga associates practice this with a partner, and the extended sexual revelation is intense. He's partnered with a friend of mine, someone he met at a baby playdate at your apartment. He spends money on her, little stuff—bicycles, hotel rooms, and private coaching. But I'm bothered by this for you because I wasn't sure you knew and you seem like the kind of person who wants the full picture. You're the one making the money. You've been all in at this place, and all in with your family. I just thought you should know.”

“Tantric what? Don't you think if my husband were into anything beyond laundry and chicken nuggets I'd know about it? It's not like he's going to an office every day. He's home.”

“Not at nine p.m. he's not.”

“Because it's a yoga relaxation class. It helps him sleep.”

“But my friend—”

“What friend of yours? You don't have friends. You have people you pay to be nice to you, to try and keep you on this side of sane. I had no idea you were such a calculating bullshitter to say something so hurtful to me. Do I intimidate you? Is this some psycho head game of yours? Are you worried Manchester Bank will assign Cheetah to just me? Is that what this is about?” I say, while a part of my brain begins listing the clues; Bruce's constant texting, his new love of social media, him being online during vacation, and his obsession with his body. He checked every cliché box, and I never even noticed.

Kathryn is silent and puts her hands to her sides. “People who enjoy tantric sex as part of their yoga practice don't always consider it cheating. They justify it because of the revealing nature of the practice. To truly achieve enlightenment and extended sexual pleasure the mind has to be so centered and yet adrift. It's like tripping on drugs except there are no drugs save for the limits of your own mind.”

I let this garbled woo woo language swirl around for a full ten seconds before I respond, “What the WHAT???”

Nothing I can say right now will make sense and I feel jittery and sick to my stomach, like one of those ticker symbols in front of me, blinking around in value, not knowing which direction to trade. I'm living in a world where everything and everybody in it is make-believe.

T
HE
C
HINESE
consider the number 7 to be lucky. I'm staring at my illuminated screen, black background, everything else red, like spilt blood. My screen is full of 7s and none of them are lucky. The Dow has lost 777 points, or over 7 percent of its value in one day, one terrible day, this terrible day. Bruce and I have been married for nine years and my husband evidently has a seven-year itch.

I search the Internet for tantric yoga enlightenment and I learn that it's wonderful for channeling the mind/body/spirit connection and leads to improved sexual health. With the sex Bruce and I haven't been having he certainly isn't getting much home-tutoring. My mind whirls and I read on. Tantric yoga is great for people who have lost their soul connection in the mundane world. What the hell? Belle McElroy is apparently the mundane world that my husband suffers within.

I imagine Bruce being stretched into fantastic positions by what I picture to be a lithe, tattooed young mom he met in my living room, the living room that I paid for, that came with the apartment that I bought.

I know that the first step of grief is denial. Why am I not denying this news? How do I know that Kathryn is right? Maybe the denial stage was the constant throb I've had in the back of my head for months. Maybe it started in that golf cart in Southampton where it was apparent that everything between us was wrong. Why have I always defended Bruce and his non-contributing life?

I think about how easy it's been for Bruce to sit back and justify his low efforts while getting to point a finger at the wife who does everything for him, who enables each new idea that pops into his head, and who gives him the chance to navel-gaze and decide he isn't being sexually fulfilled. How simplistic for him to get to pretend I'm a bad person because I work on what he considers the evil Wall Street.

People began packing to leave for the day, wiped out by the markets. I want to plead to any of them, these Dicks of the Dais, women of Glass Ceilings, to stay with me, to please, please stay and hold me close in this terrible time. Don't leave me alone on this giant floor of this broken-down company.

I've been watching people file out one by one, to be with their own families, to be comforted by someone else, people willing to love them, flaws and all. I wonder how welcome they'll all be now that they're worth so much less money? I think of how Bruce enjoyed dropping $20 tips for $5 beers with the wink of “plenty more where that came from” to assorted waitresses. I thought he was just generous. Part of me had applauded Bruce and the way he acted, but really, he was mocking me. Maybe when he acted supportive of me on a big trade, he was also clapping himself on the back for his choice of mate and her ability to sow and reap while he performed sun salutations.

By 11 p.m. there are only three humans left on the trading floor, three men I hardly know who work in the risk arbitration department.

I should call a friend right now, a Carron or an Elizabeth. What do regular people do at times like this? I've had bad things happen to me before but I always fixed things on my own. I'm a fixer, I remind myself, and I need to resolve this. But I don't know where to start and I catch myself for one weak moment wishing I could call Henry.

I want to see my kids right now but I'm not going home. I'm afraid of what I'll say. I have to be sure of the outcome I want before I enter a room with Bruce in it. If I get sidetracked with drama and tears and rebuttals, I'll lose the resolve that has brought me to the decision that I have already made. It's interesting that Bruce hasn't called once today. He doesn't miss anything about me.

The three “arb” guys stand, ashen-faced. I guess the weak markets made them go long, buy stocks on weakness, expecting them to rebound quickly for a profit. Had they done that in recent days, their clocks would have been cleaned. There are no buyers out there at any price, so they watched their positions sink, Titanic-like, while they smashed things on their desks. Their faces tell me that entire story.

The last one of them to leave looks across at me. I pretend to be engrossed in my screen of 7s.

“Isabelle?” he asks.

I used to love when coworkers, men I didn't know at all, knew of me just by reputation, but not tonight. He's a midsized, athletic man, gray at the temples, and I don't remember ever seeing him.

“Yes?” I answer with a frog noise blocking the usual sound of my voice.

He walks over to me and stands behind my screen, looking over my shoulder at the nothingness in front of me.

“Belle,” he says again, “you look like you need a drink. Want to get a drink?”

He appears to need one terribly, and I know I should try to be friendly. If I had a drink with him I might possibly tell him, this stranger, everything.

“Thanks,” I say gratefully. “But no. Need to be getting home.”

“Maybe we should both go home and face the music,” he says.

He believes my problem is the worst stock market since the Great Depression. People recovered from that.

“Need to go make a home,” I say, knowing it will mean nothing to him, but oddly it gives me some comfort.

M
Y LAST DAY
at Feagin ended in a blue-collar town in New Jersey in the arms of a large Hispanic man.

I was on a business trip, seeing clients in Trenton and Princeton and then, in a crazed attempt to make it home in time for dinner, I took the New Jersey Turnpike. Like some teenager in her rich-girl convertible, I wove in and out of HOV lanes I didn't belong in, desperate to pick the kids up from Bruce's new one-bedroom apartment, a place of glass and chrome that screams bachelor to all who enter. Bruce took none of the trappings of little kids with him. Besides some nice pieces of furniture he took nothing except half my money and a sizeable portion of my gut. We're all new to this split-custody lifestyle and to me it feels like an unending game of make-believe, as if we're playacting in someone else's uncomfortable drama. Nothing feels routine or natural yet.

The markets have rebounded some, but loans to businesses and individuals have dried up. The only trades I was having were sells and some value buyers tucking blue-chip names into young investors' accounts, people who would see this thing through for the long haul.

Since Bruce and I separated, I've had a vicious need to be with my children. World markets imploding and deals being canceled make no impression on me. I just need the people who need me. The apartment seemed suffocating in Bruce's absence and I have taken to leaving windows open all the time, exorcising some virus that infected our world. I put the thing up for sale in the weakest real estate market in a decade and haven't gotten the slightest sniff of interest from anyone. The playground and the Tea Bag House in Southampton are the only places where things feel right to me and I keep wondering about the public school system out there on Long Island and how my kids would fare in a world not artificially partitioned by money.

Each night I scan my children's faces for some sign of distress. I've oversensitized myself to the point where I consider every instance of lethargy or aggression to be some fallout from our lousy parenting. I never stay at work past 6 p.m. and I no longer entertain. Work has become simply a means to a paycheck and the paycheck is just to cover the day-to-day expenses for this unhappy existence. That evening in New Jersey where everything changed yet again, I was just a harried worker, needing to get home to her kids.

I was about halfway home when I stopped in Rutherford, New Jersey. I needed a bathroom so badly and couldn't make it all the way home. I took an exit and entered a town of old brick buildings where the businesses had names like Luigi's and Carmine's though everyone appeared to be Hispanic. I saw a Burger King, home of the easily accessible toilet. I jumped out of my rented Ford Taurus, locked the doors, and went into the stall with toilet water chemically coaxed to purple. I placed the keys on top of the toilet paper holder, that shelf too small to hold a purse but large enough to be in the way of getting to the paper. But in a rushed attempt to get out of the stall and back to the turnpike, I swung to hit the flusher with my foot. My size-10
¹
/
₂
pointy-toed boot caught the Hertz key ring in just the right place and knocked the keys into the toilet, where they splashed the second I pushed my foot against the flusher. While I tried to tell myself that I hadn't actually done what I did, I waited in vain for them to appear at the bottom of the toilet as the water settled. I pleaded with invisible forces to reverse the actions of those last two seconds while I suppose the swirling vortex of keys headed speedily on their way to some wastewater treatment plant in New Jersey. I was instantly a transportationless, frantic, pathetic mother who couldn't manage to get home to pick her children up from their father's one-bedroom sex pad because she flushed her Ford Taurus keys down the toilet.