Hedge Fund Wives

In the aftermath of the subprime lending debacle, Bear Stearns, once one of the most venerable banks on Wall Street, was forced to sell itself to JP Morgan for less than it was worth. Much of its well-paid staff, including several of Peter’s friends, had been laid off, leaving Peter to scramble to forge relationships with new brokers.

‘And to top it all off, Peter was personally heavily invested in Bear stock. He’d worked there for ten years before he left to do his own thing. When Bear sold to JP Morgan for a pittance, the Partridges lost just about everything they had. Lord knows why they’re throwing this party. They really can’t afford it.’

‘I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose so much so quickly.’

‘Hey, this is New York. Fortunes are made and lost every day, especially in a market as volatile as this one.’

This, I knew to be true. John and I, for example, had profited from fluctuations in the energy markets. We were overnight success stories, but we were the exception. Far more had lost their shirts. No one could have anticipated that Greenwich, Connecticut, aka hedgefundlandia, would become rife with home foreclosures.

‘Hey, let’s have lunch next week, my treat. Do you like Nello?’ Gigi asked, mentioning the name of a popular Italian restaurant on Madison Avenue.

‘I’ve never been, but John has and he tells me it’s good.’

‘It is. The pasta is incredible. Tuesday at noon work for you?’

‘Absolutely,’ I’d said, and for the first time since the miscarriage, I actually had something to look forward to.

Gigi handed me her card in case I had to cancel—which I promised her I wouldn’t, my agenda being completely empty and all—and we walked back toward the living room, where the party was just starting to pick up steam. The music had gotten louder and drinks stiffer. At around eleven, Gigi bade us all goodbye—she’d promised her babysitter it wouldn’t be a late night—but before she left she introduced me to Peter Partridge, who immediately plunked a pair of felt antlers on my head and asked me to pose with Ainsley in front of their fifteen-foot Christmas tree.

Clad in a strapless chartreuse mini, her hair tumbling in her trademark flaxen waves over a pair of lightly tanned shoulders, Ainsley was every inch the Woman About Town. She had the kind of haughty aura that is particular to people accustomed to being at the center of attention anywhere they went. Ainsley’s parents were upper middle class, but socially ambitious enough to know that by sending their daughter to Exeter in Massachusetts for boarding school and then to Rollins in Florida for college, they would be giving her an opportunity to join the ranks of high society. They were right: Ainsley met Peter at a charity benefit while she was working as a summer intern for House & Home, however it wasn’t until she bumped into Peter two summers later at Piping Rock that the pair began to date. They were married a year and a half later (a picture appeared in Town & Country magazine), and Ainsley gave up her job working in Vogue’s fabled fashion closet to dedicate herself to charitable works full time, or so she told the New York Times Vows columnist at the time.

For several subsequent years, Ainsley and Peter were considered New York’s golden couple. She had beauty and charm, he, pedigree and (it was assumed) tons of old money—still the best kind. They were photographed at parties, written about in all the newspapers, celebrated everywhere. I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t thrilling to be momentarily allowed into their inner circle, even if Ainsley had kept calling me by the wrong name. (Where she got Tricia from Marcy, I’ll never know.)

I had been sitting on the couch for a while, pretending to listen to John and one of his colleagues discuss the latest round of firings at an investment bank downtown, when Peter suggested that we all do a round of shots, which, when they arrived, turned out to be closer in size to tumblers, filled close to the brim with tequila. Everyone threw theirs back in one, and I, not wanting to stand out in the crowd, followed suit. It was a bad move. The quails’ eggs and tiny tartlets might have been delicious, but they hadn’t provided much in the way of stomach lining. I was immediately drunk.

I found John in the hallway between the kitchen and dining room, talking to Ainsley. Tugging lightly on his shirt, I tried to get his attention.

He didn’t notice, so I tugged harder. ‘Honey, I’m going to get my coat,’ I said.

‘Really?’ he asked, looking at his watch.

I nodded and swayed, and John moved to steady me. But Ainsley moved faster. Clasping a skinny, sinewy arm around my waist, she pouted prettily and said in a surprisingly husky voice that I simply could not go, that she was just getting to know me. (Err, Tricia?)

‘C’mon, Marce, let’s stay a little longer,’ John seconded.

I agreed—stupid me—and whiled away some time thumbing through a stack of coffee table books (most of which featured Ainsley in some way or another) in front of the fake fireplace in the Partridges’ living room. Three-quarters of an hour later, I was no longer tipsy but tired and truly ready to go home. But when I went to find John, I stumbled into Peter, who somehow talked me into accepting a glass of Montrachet from him in the kitchen. He’d just opened the bottle, the last in a case he’d won at a charity auction and said it would be a shame not to drink it. Okay, okay, I relented. And, yes, I could have declined Peter’s offer and left the party, slipping out into the foyer and through the front door without anyone noticing, but the thing is that I really felt like it would have been rude to turn down the guy. He’d just lost his business and the majority of his savings. The least I could do was share a bottle of Montrachet with him.

From then on my recollection of events starts to get blurry. I do remember that all of us piled into a couple of cabs and headed downtown to the Gramercy Park Hotel, where there was a velvet rope that Peter and Ainsley had no trouble transcending, and inside the music was great, the vibe electric. Bottles of champagne, tequila, fresh orange juice, pomegranate juice, and soda crowded every square inch of our table. Once we were all settled, Peter handed me another drink, a tequila mixed with the pomegranate juice, and I honestly don’t remember anything of what happened after finishing it—no idea how or why I’d disrobed in front of a room full of the city’s most sophisticated, well-connected movers and shakers, or started a fight with a girl whose face and name I cannot, for the life of me, remember even to this day.

FIVE Becoming a Rules Girl (#ulink_03e5983e-5588-5a69-9c32-ea407e83d58c)

‘Honey, all of us hedge fund wives have to put up with the same Goddamn quid pro quo,’ said Gigi Ambrose.

Gigi and I were having lunch at Nello, home of the fifty-dollar plate of pasta. No joke. The smoked salmon ravioli actually costs fifty-five dollars. But despite the exorbitant prices—or maybe because of them—and the fact that Christmas was a mere three days away, the place was packed, buzzing with the kind of excitement such extravagance tends to generate. You feel the same thing walking into Bergdorf’s shoe salon, but there it’s overpriced platform heels that get everyone salivating, while at Nello, it’s the overpriced veal chops.

‘What quid pro quo?’ I asked, craning my head forward with interest.

‘Your husband may make tons of money, but you never get to see him.’

I laughed. ‘Too true.’

I took a bite of my penne rigate, which I must admit tasted like heaven—the hot and sweet sausages somehow managed to be both delicate and hearty—and surveyed the room. There was a maitre d’ hovering by the bar, nervously keeping an eye on all the tables. Waiters in black vests and white aprons tied at the waist were zipping around, taking orders, delivering plates of aromatic delicacies—artichokes drizzled in white truffle oil, pan roasted veal chops with sautéed wild mushrooms, and Chilean sea bass cooked in a lobster, saffron velouté. On one side of me a pair of older women with shopping bags at their feet pushed forty-two dollar tuna tartares around their plate; on the other side, a foursome of men, all devouring the veal and wearing wedding bands, openly ogled the lithesome young girls seated at the table next to theirs.

‘Rule Number Two,’ Gigi continued, snapping me back to attention with a flick of her hand, the same hand that happened to be sporting nine carats of flawless, colorless diamonds (Grade: F, Color: D, for those in the know). I was learning that one diamond wasn’t good enough for a Hedge Fund Bride; nothing less than three would do. Take Gigi’s engagement ring for example. There was the center stone, an emerald cut stunner that was, to my untrained eye, at least five carats, and then two triangle-shaped stones, each about two carats, flanking it. In Chicago, my three-carat engagement ring was considered flashy; here, it was barely worth flashing.

She had made it her mission that day to school me in the art of hedge fund wifehood and I, having been the ignorant newcomer I was, was most grateful for the lesson.

‘Never ask him about work. If he wants to talk about it, he will. And make sure you keep people who want stock tips, or in John’s case, predictions about fluctuations in the price of crude far away from him at social functions. There’s nothing that grates on Jeremy more than someone who wants free market advice.’

‘Is that Rule Number Three?’ I asked, trying to keep up.

‘No, three is to never talk about your own problems, especially any that might be work related, if you do happen to have a job.’

I opened my mouth to comment, but Gigi pressed on. ‘Rule Four,’ she said. ‘Keep the baby talk to a minimum. Children should never be a disturbance, especially at night.’

With that, Gigi bent her head in concentration over her fettuccine al funghi, and I couldn’t tell if she was a) focusing on the flavors, trying to discern the ingredients; b) trying not to get any of the rich mushroom and cream sauce on her ruffled silk blouse, which I assumed was made by a famous designer, and therefore wildly expensive; or c) thinking about the last thing she said, the thing about keeping children off the conversational menu.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t observed Rule Four over the previous six months. In fact, I had f lagrantly violated rules one through four. I was a fantastically shitty hedge fund wife. I didn’t fit the mold at all, but for that matter, neither did Gigi. She seemed too outspoken and vivacious, and she had her own thriving career. Plus she clearly loved talking about her daughter Chloe. She had spoken of nothing else during the first half of our lunch.

As Gigi expertly twirled her pasta around the tines of her fork, using the bowl of a spoon to anchor the pasta, I took the opportunity to continue studying her face. She had wide-set eyes, a straight nose, and full lips, but in the sunlight I could see that she was wearing a thick layer of foundation and that there were wrinkles creeping out from around her eyes and lips. She looked older and less sprightly than she did on television or on the cover of her book jackets, but she was still arrestingly beautiful.

When we were finished with our entrées, Gigi ordered a bowl of gelato for us to share and spooning the creamy, cold ice cream into my mouth, I was reminded of my childhood in Minnesota. Whenever my sister and I did well on our report cards, my father would take us for ice cream at Byerly’s, an upscale grocery store in the suburb where we lived. This happened pretty infrequently since Annalise rarely studied—she was too busy with boys and cheerleading practice—so more often than not my father would take just me. We usually went on Friday nights when Annalise had a game to cheer, so she wouldn’t feel bad about her academic shortcomings, or at least that’s what my father said. Now, in hindsight, I think Dad was more concerned about making me feel better. After all, I was the one stuck at home on a Friday night when most kids were out with their friends, partying and whatnot.

Gigi wanted to know about my sister, so I told her that she had been the popular one and I the smart one. ‘A family of two daughters usually gets one of each,’ I said, adding that Annalise wasn’t exactly prettier than I was, but she had a better figure—larger breasts, longer legs—and had been the recipient of braces (whereas my parents, in their infinite wisdom, had decided I could go without) that had given her the killer smile that would eventually grace our local Dayton’s department store newspaper advertisements for its annual three-day back-to-school sale. Annalise, considered a minor celebrity in our high school thanks to those ads, was named Homecoming Queen her senior year. She had a string of boyfriends, tons of friends.

I didn’t.

I imagined this was why she couldn’t believe that I had married ‘well’ and she hadn’t. She was stuck in a shabby two-bedroom house with a husband who spent too much time watching sports (hockey, football, you name it…) on television and drinking beer (from a can, ‘not even a bottle’ she once complained bitterly to my mother, who then told me, even though I had on several occasions made it clear to her that I had no desire to know the inner workings of my sister’s marriage). It was down to Annalise to raise their two rambunctious boys—Jack, five, and Trevor, three—and fix things up around the house. My beauty-queen sister had to empty the gutters, mow the lawn, rake the leaves, shovel the snow, and on top of that clean the house and cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a grocery budget so small that they sometimes had to have hot dogs for dinner—five nights in a row. She couldn’t help but compare her life to mine and wonder where she’d gone wrong. It’s like I had disturbed the correct order of things, and she resented me to no end for it.

I explained this all to Gigi, who told me that she had a sister who was married, too, who was always jealous of her big city life until the day that Gigi started dating a Greek shipping magnate. In the beginning he was romantic and sweet and incredibly generous—he took her to nice restaurants and on lavish trips, and bought her expensive shoes. He also liked to rub her feet.

A little too much.

After a few weeks of dating, Gigi started noticing that her Greek magnate was getting a little too much pleasure out of touching her feet, and liked doing it at inappropriate times, like when he was driving them home from dinner or to his beach house in Bridgehampton. ‘He’d get hard just from touching the soft skin on the underside of my arch,’ she said. ‘That was his favorite part.’

Still, he was kind to her and seemed serious about their relationship—‘he told me that he couldn’t wait to introduce me to his parents’—so she put up with his sexual quirk. But then, he got mean. A few months into their courtship he started criticizing her. ‘If one of my nails was chipped, he’d tell me that I looked like a mess.’ One day she told him that if he cared so much about her nails, then maybe he should pay for her manicures. His response was to call her a gold digger and cut their meal short. Around the same time he became controlling about what shoes she wore. Sometimes, Gigi said, she had to change them four or five times before they went out.

She told me a story about one of their last weeks together, when they planned on meeting some friends for brunch at Felix, a restaurant and bar in SoHo. It was a cold Sunday in February and there was ice and snow on the ground. Gigi chose a pair of flat boots to wear with her jeans and sweater, but her Greek boyfriend pointed out that she’d already worn the boots once that week. ‘So I changed into my other boots that happen to have a lot of buckles, and he freaked out. He said they would be too hard for him to get them off. He threw a tantrum,’ she said.

The next day, she dumped him, and being a short man with a massive Napoleonic complex, he didn’t handle his dismissal well. For six months following their break up, he harassed her with vulgar, cruel phone messages and emails, and told all of their friends that he had dumped her because he figured out she was only interested in him for his money. ‘All rich men end up saying that. Even Jeremy has and John, if he hasn’t already, probably will.’

Gigi suddenly looked stricken and covered her mouth with her hands. ‘What am I doing? I’ve broken the most important rule of all. Rule Number Five: Never talk bad about your husband.’

I assured her that I was not going to tell anyone. ‘Who would I tell? I have no friends in New York.’ I reached across the table to squeeze her hand reassuringly.

‘No, sugar, you’ve got me now,’ she said.

The waiter cleared the bowl of gelato and took our coffee orders. One espresso dopio for Gigi, who explained that she needed the caffeine because she had been up all night with the baby and had to go to a meeting at her publisher’s after lunch. I ordered a cappuccino, extra foam, and told her that she didn’t have to justify her coffee order to me. ‘I drink way more than I should, and I don’t have kids or a job to legitimize my caffeine addiction,’ I said.