Hedge Fund Wives

Hedge Fund Wives
Tatiana Boncompagni

The fall from the top can be a long one…Eager to play the part of dutiful wife, down-to-earth Marcy Ermerson agrees to relocate from Chicago to New York City when her husband is offered a big-time job managing a hedge fund. Leaving behind her own dreams, Marcy forgoes finding a new job in favour of trying to start a family. Besides, as she soon discovers, hedge fund wives don't work, they play. Hard.…Although at first it's fun to shop and party, Marcy quickly realizes that to find her feet in this new world of excess and superficiality she needs true friends. Only problem is behind every smile lurks a stab in the back.But it's not until her suddenly social climbing husband abruptly leaves her for his thinner, blonder mistress, that Marcy decides it's time to stand on her own two feet and fight for the things that are far more important than money.In the throes of the credit crunch, this tantalising tale is perfect for fans of Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada who still want a bit of bling for their buck.

TATIANA BONCOMPAGNI

Hedge Fund Wives

For Max

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#uae383e4b-55fb-55f3-b74e-dcb461d1b99b)

Title Page (#u7035b4ff-cf16-532c-b1fa-566c8cb47705)

Dedication (#u40653ff2-b35c-52f4-89fa-dcb2ab9eb6e3)

One Baptism by Champagne Fountain (#u4e41e6f1-fd81-59c6-a442-6502bcca58f0)

Two The Accidental, the Westminster, the Stephanie Seymour, the Former Secretary, the Socialite, the Workaholic, and the Breeder (#u22f28b3c-0eca-5cee-b867-cbd0a5709c16)

Three Missing Spanx and Other Morning-after Anxieties (#ud333bae4-d63c-55e5-9d60-eddfbfab9114)

Four The Worst Hedge Fund Wife on the Planet (#u803e295f-2dc7-59c0-a367-402c63ae58f6)

Five Becoming a Rules Girl (#ud30b544d-e522-572c-92bd-5b5e750f79c2)

Six Parties Galore (#u320f0785-3440-5f2b-a147-6d00add889fb)

Seven Setting the Table (#u4ed61e4f-7cbb-53de-bf71-ce016d5a9d5f)

Eight Nip Slips, Gilded Cookies, and Screen Sex (In other words, dinner at Jill’s) (#litres_trial_promo)

Nine Gynomania (#litres_trial_promo)

Ten And the Socks Come Off (#litres_trial_promo)

Eleven I Say Oblivious, You Say Ubiquitous (#litres_trial_promo)

Twelve Eco-disaster (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirteen Surprise, Surprise (#litres_trial_promo)

Fourteen Of Course (#litres_trial_promo)

Fifteen Drinks Anyone? (#litres_trial_promo)

Sixteen Asset Stripper (#litres_trial_promo)

Seventeen Baggage and All (#litres_trial_promo)

Eighteen Spread to Worst (#litres_trial_promo)

Nineteen Take This Portfolio And Stuff It (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty Money Ain’t the Only Thing Green (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-One Where’s the Antacid? (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Two Just When You Think It Can’t Get Any Worse...It Does (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Three Down to Business (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Four Reckoning at Bergdorf’s (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Five Baby Shower 2.0 (#litres_trial_promo)

Q & A with Tatiana Boncompagni, Author of Hedge Fund Wives (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About The Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

ONE Baptism by Champagne Fountain (#ulink_c5065040-5f07-5b51-9b5e-6d8dcb4c4135)

When I first opened the invitation to Caroline Reinhardt’s baby shower, I thought I’d received it by mistake. I barely knew anyone in the city besides my husband John, who six months earlier had been recruited from his desk at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to trade energy derivatives for a New York-based commodities-focused hedge fund. They made an offer we couldn’t refuse, and in the short span of a week, we were packing our boxes for Manhattan and toasting the Windy City goodbye with vodka gimlets in the bar at the top of the John Hancock Tower.

Now, half a year later, it was early December, and I was surrounded by hedge fund wives. With the sun shining bright against a clear sky, the air refreshingly cool on the necks of the fur-and-diamond-clad shower guests as they streamed past a pair of gargantuan front doors—doors that had reputedly once graced a fourteenth-century Venetian palace—and into the lavishly decorated home of Dahlia Kemp, wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Thomas Kemp, the day held nothing but the promise of pleasure. Once inside and relieved of their furs, the women would fill their flutes at a free-flowing Perrier-Jouët champagne fountain and nibble on passed hors d’oeuvres of beluga caviar and jamón ibérico, all the while studying (furtively, of course) the Kemp’s impressive art collection and gossiping in excited half-whispers about the expense to which Dahlia must have gone for the event.

Certainly a three-course gourmet meal accompanied by rare vintage wines, a five-tiered Sylvia Weinstock cake and goody bags stuffed with diamond earrings and fourfigure day spa gift certificates had to amount to an important sum, even for the wife of a man who had cleared ‘three point two’ (billion) the previous year. Even the invitations, which had been hand-delivered by a white-gloved courier and sent with a small gift, an Hermès silk scarf, to underscore the party’s theme (Rue du Faubourg) and dress code (French chic), were absurdly costly. No, no detail had been skimped on or forgotten for Caroline’s shower, and years later all of the guests would remember the party as the last of its kind.

Although no one spoke of it, the economy had begun to sour and every day brought fresh tales of falling fortunes. Most of the women assumed that their vast monetary reserves would protect them from having to alter any aspect of their enviable lives, but of course they were wrong. Wealth is relative by nature, and if one day you have a hundred million dollars and the next you have only fifty, the things that were once within reach—the private jet, the home in Aspen, or even five-tiered Sylvia Weinstock cakes—are suddenly out of it. Under such circumstances, it’s not long before a marriage built around material possessions and predicated upon the shared responsibility of their care and maintenance, begins to crumble.

But on the day of Caroline’s shower, at least, the wealth flowed as freely as the champagne, and I was more than happy to partake in the merriment. Not because of the gourmet morsels and vintage bubbly—I’m more of a cheese plate and glass of white kind of girl—but because I was desperate to make some friends. I’d done little to no socializing since we’d moved, partly because shortly after arriving in New York I’d fallen pregnant—I later miscarried—and partly because I was, to be completely honest, deeply afraid of the other wives. They all seemed so…well…perfect; and fitting in with them felt like such a daunting task. Ergo, when the invitation to Caroline’s shower arrived, I had originally assumed there had been a mix-up at the calligraphers. I was just about to post the response card back with a little note alerting the host to the error, when John returned home from the office and assured me that the invitation really had been intended for me. Apparently one of his new colleagues at Zenith Capital had a wife who was expecting their first child and wanted to invite me to her shower.

On the day of the party, I had my hair blown out at the hair salon on the corner, and after getting caught with a stylist who was convinced they could pump more volume into my unrepentantly limp locks, ended up arriving a bit late to the Kemp’s four-story Upper East Side townhouse on a tree-lined block off of Fifth Avenue. I was only ten minutes late, but already the first gush of guests had trickled out of the entry foyer and into the first-floor living room, allowing me to make a mostly unnoticed entrance, which turned out to be a stroke of luck. When I spotted the rack of designer furs in the front hall, I realized that my bright pink puffer would have stuck out, literally, like a sore thumb among all that sable and mink; and I crossed my fingers that no one but the maid, whose sole job it was to keep an eye on the coat rack, would connect me with my pink marshmallow parka. Chicago’s anything-goes-as-long-as-it-keeps-you-from-getting-frostbitten approach to outerwear clearly didn’t apply in New York City. This was a chinchilla-or-bust kind of town, and I made a mental note to go shopping for a new winter coat as soon as possible.

Taking a deep breath I made my way through the mirror-walled marble foyer into the Louis-XIV-antiques-decorated living room, and surveyed its contents: a couch and several arm chairs upholstered in lustrous dove-gray silk; marble-topped side tables and a coffee table made of mercury glass; a huge ivory oriental rug and a pair of gargantuan Lalique vases filled with fresh-cut pale pink-and-white flowers. A large Dutch pastoral painting hung on the far wall just above the couch, and a slew of Impressionist paintings from Renoir, Degas, Monet, Cézanne, and Pissarro covered nearly every available inch on the others. I counted about twenty-five female guests milling about, each wearing at least eight carats of diamonds and shoes that cost as much as my first car.

I took another deep breath, fluffed my hair a bit, and decided to introduce myself to Caroline. Only problem: nearly everyone was pregnant. And not just a little pregnant—at least half of the women there were sporting basketball-sized bellies, making it next to impossible to know who I was supposed to be congratulating. Luckily, I didn’t have to take more than three steps toward a tray of mini croques monsieurs and Gruyère gougères before a striking blonde greeted me with a double air kiss.

‘Marcy, I’m Caroline,’ she said. ‘Thanks for coming.’

Caroline Reinhardt had pin-straight blond hair that hung in an impossibly thick curtain down her back, dark blue eyes, and rubbery lips. She was wearing a wool pencil skirt and sleeveless ivory silk blouse that showed off her toned arms, perky, full breasts, and flat stomach. In other words, there was no way this woman was pregnant. It took me a second, but when it finally dawned on me that she was having the baby via surrogate I managed to eke out a passably hearty congratulations.