Opening Belle (11 page)

Henry came in for the kill. “Such great food. Not sure I've ever eaten here before.”

“I think you got engaged here once,” I semi-hissed loud enough for both men to hear and soft enough to sound confusing to Tim.

Henry started to cough and I swear I could see the water he was sipping come out his nose.

“You got engaged here?” Tim asked.

Henry would not want Tim to know he has led anything but the perfect life, and yes, a broken engagement in Henry's world would be equivalent to failure. I watched him try to recover. It started with an odd snort.

“We talked about getting married here, but really we got engaged in St. Barths.”

Henry brilliantly made Tim think it was his wife we were talking about, and before Tim could ask how I possibly could have known about Henry's personal life, Henry took the floor.

“I was watching those money market options trading down today, and didn't really understand the fears the market has for them. They're so safe. Why do you think that's happening?” Henry was asking me about markets he knew far better than me but he also knew that conversing about drying-up credit markets was a subject infinitely more interesting to Tim than romance. I answered while staring icily at Henry. Had he become even more of a stuck-up wannabe WASP than I imagined? He never could lie and perform the way he is this afternoon. Is that what he's learned from his socialite wife? His dad was a small-town postmaster who wanted to be a novelist. His mother sketched stuff and made casseroles. They were nice, real people. Henry wasn't sprung from jerks. Where had he learned this?

•  •  •

“This is money for teasing men,” Henry had declared to me one day, as I proudly flashed a bonus check in front of him.

I had wanted to go out and celebrate because it was the first year my bonus hit seven figures. I was in my late twenties and had cleared a million dollars. Henry was still in business school, which made him go from being incredulous at my hours and pay to being downright nasty about it. Resembling the bitter wife left at home, Henry started acting like some portion of his manhood was being questioned by me. It was clear that Henry wanted to be the provider. The fact that I was outearning him made him nuts.

“It's emasculating,” he said. “I wish you were a nurse or a teacher.”

“Let's just be adults about this,” I implored. “I mean, you want to be successful but you don't want
me
to be successful?”

“I want us both to be successful but I don't want to be married to a man.”

“Making good money makes me a man?”

Meanwhile my father, now living in Atlanta, had gotten very ill. I was able to work out of the Feagin Dixon Atlanta office, and sleep in his hospital room each night. One stay lasted almost two weeks, fourteen days of being surrounded by people near the end of their lives, people who didn't take as many vacations as they could have, people who wondered about the chances they never took. I knew the universe was forcing me to look up from my spreadsheets and deal making and LCD screens. It was telling me that I needed to get married fast if I wanted my father to walk me down the aisle.

I came back to New York a day earlier than expected, calling Henry from the airport and wanting to tell him my big idea. I thought we should get married really soon, not in six months like we had planned but more like in two weeks when my dad was getting out of the hospital. I had to tell Henry we couldn't wait any longer. I could hear the familiar click of trading room clocks in the background, the noise he was used to hearing behind me.

“Great that you're here,” he said, all warm and friendly. “But some lawyers are taking us to see
Rent
on Broadway tonight. We just closed a deal. Closing parties, you know.”

“Okay,” I replied, while thinking that no closing party I had ever attended consisted of a Broadway show. “I'm picking up the underskirt for my wedding gown,” I said in untypical girlish fashion. The wedding stuff was turning me soft. “I'll see you late tonight.”

Henry had wanted us to live together for so long. I was going to use the weekend to get the rest of my stuff out of my sublet I never used and into our new apartment. In the hours he was at the play I would put on my whole wedding show: the underskirt, the bustier, the heels, the hair, and the spectacular silk wedding gown. We could have our own pretend wedding that very night when he came home.

Hours later I was on 8th Avenue, rain pelting down outside, while my friend in the Garment District hooked me up into one spectacular bustier-with-skirt device, to boost my everything and ensure wedded bliss. I twirled in front of a mirror in a room of anorexic mannequins. I noted that the upside of stress is the loss of a tummy. Between a very sick father, a long-distance fiancé, and a job that didn't allow for personal problems, I rarely had an appetite. Still, the gown seemed to wash everything away. The gown made me glow.

•  •  •

The Garment District borders the Theater District in Manhattan. It was nearing eight o'clock, and since I was just several blocks from the 41st Street theater where
Rent
was playing, I had an unstoppable urge to see Henry before the show.

There he was, but not with any lawyer. She was a beautiful blond woman, grabbing familiarly at his arm as they walked by me. Me, the wet woman, the loser with the giant shopping bag full of wedding gear. That was when I should have turned and left and never spoken to him again, but my brain was not capable of processing what I saw as fast as my body was moving. I gamely kept a “happy to see you” face frozen on, and instinctively jabbed my hand forward from my soggy wool coat, to meet the hand of an underfed, bony woman.

“I'm back!” I chirped to Henry, putting down the bag and tossing myself toward him.

He held my arms stiffly, controlling my face so that I only brushed his cheek instead of his lips.

“Belle,” he said flatly while looking at the girl.

“Oh, sorry, I'm Henry's girlfriend,” I said to Thin Girl, thinking he thought I owed her some explanation. I grabbed the bag too quickly, which made the wet brown paper bag filled with lacy, dreamy stuff of the future tear in a slow-motion
cccchhhhhttttt.
I awkwardly picked assorted white clothing off the wet, dirty ground and hugged the pillowy pile to my chest. I wasn't sure why I said “girlfriend” when I'd been using the
fiancé
word for weeks. This wasn't going at all as expected.

Thin Girl laughed strangely while Henry tossed back his head, nervously running his hand through his hair. “You're not my girlfriend,” he said.

He looked at me directly, right in the eye. Just like in college when he dumped his last girlfriend, right before he led me away for the rest of my life . . . up until now. Again, I waited for the punch line, but there wasn't any. I stood in shaky stillness, waiting to be saved, and I watched Henry guide the woman into the theater. He went to the “Will Call” window, surrendered a credit card, and never looked back.

I stood on the curb long after the lights went down, holding the wet and white bride paraphernalia to my chest. I took hours to walk back to the sublet apartment, the one I hadn't lived in since moving most of my stuff in with Henry, the one with the mattress on the floor, the dead plants, and the blankets in the oven. I still had the key. I flipped the lights on and threw the obscenely expensive wedding clothes on the table, where they dripped rain and tears onto a dusty floor.

The next time I ever spoke to Henry was as someone's mother, trying to get her kid into preschool. And now my whole family would be dependent on him and me making giant trades together, from the opening to the closing bell of the stock market, every business day.

I
T'S
2:45 p.m. on a February afternoon and I'm sitting in the back of a chauffeur-driven car. The driver and I are parked in awkward silence while the late-afternoon sun reflects light from the windshield into my eyes. The glare makes it hard to see my phone, to confirm what I already know: that the person I'm supposed to be traveling with, the person I should be at the airport with right now, has gone AWOL.

I watch people come in and out of the Indian restaurant we're parked in front of in the East 20s, but I'm not here for the curry. I'm here to get our star market analyst, Rudolph Gibbs, out of what I'm told is a whorehouse. I need him out within the next five minutes if we're ever to catch our 4 p.m. flight.

Shuttling adults from point to point puts me in a continual state of anxiousness. I can't strap a grown man into a car seat and plug him with Pirate's Booty to get him to where I need him to be. I confirm and reconfirm plans with assistants, have double-booked flights so we have a backup plan, and despite all this, the trip can still explode into nail-biting drama. If Gibbs and I miss today's flight, we'll miss a dinner with one of my biggest clients.

According to my snoops in the Glass Ceiling Club, Gibbs is presumably in one of the apartments over the restaurant, which is in a circa-1970s nondescript white brick building on a block of nail salons and photo shops. Gibbs is a Gatsbyesque character who always wears English hand-sewn suits and a cravat instead of a tie. A married, brilliant, king-of-the-sound-bite guy, he is often an accurate predictor of movement in the U.S. financial markets, which lets him get away with being such a fop. Business news channels can never get enough of Rudolph Gibbs. My largest client in the South, Raymond James, is bringing ten people to meet Gibbs at this dinner tonight. If he doesn't disentangle himself from whatever matter of business is going on in this building fast, if he doesn't get into this car very soon, tonight will fall apart. I can handle the plane reservations, the car service, the dinner reservations, the handouts depicting graphs of dollar/euro relationships, but I can't control Rudolph Gibbs himself.

“So who is his lunch meeting with?” I had asked his secretive assistant an hour ago. She told me it was with a client from Warburg Pincus. She wouldn't tell me the exact who, but I knew enough people at Warburg to sniff around there. My sources came up with nothing. I went back to his assistant.

“Does he have a love shack?” I asked her. I'd be surprised if he did. It's usually the suburban husbands who keep a small apartment in the city and Gibbs is a New Yorker. After a late night at work, the idea is to crash there instead of going home. But these apartments are referred to as love shacks not because the owner loves to work.

“He does not,” his loyal assistant had said almost proudly.

“Maybe I'll try the Indian restaurant I hear he likes.” I could tell by the snip in her voice she just wanted to keep her job and to keep his secrets. She wanted me to just go away.

“You know about that place?” she asked me cautiously.

“Some other women told me about it,” I said. “I'll find him.”

I called Amanda on my desk. “Where exactly is this place?” I had asked her.

“Please hold for brothel listing,” she said sarcastically. “King is off the desk. Let me try Ballsbridge.”

That's how I've come to be outside this supposed whorehouse. Except what do I do now? Is there a secret knock on the door? The restaurant sure looks legitimate. I get out of the car to take a look inside and even pretend to read the menu posted prominently over the counter. Bollywood posters adorn the walls, the obligatory fake potted plants are in the corner, and the smell of turmeric is in the air. But when I wander over to an inside door to the left of the counter, I notice it's slightly more handsome than its surroundings. It contains a panel of buzzers outlined in polished brass. Each buzzer seems to indicate a connection to either an apartment or maybe a room, and one has the name Unique Interiors. Could that be it? I hesitate to begin pushing random buzzers, but Unique Interiors seems like a promising name. The Indian cook behind the counter watches me.

“You want bathroom, you must buy food,” he says. He's about to say something further but then doesn't.

A woman pushing a child in a stroller tries to enter the restaurant, just as another woman attempts to leave. They start that doorway shuffle of politeness where the one leaving pushes the door open and then holds it while the lady and baby enter. It's while the leaving lady supports the open door with both her hand and leg that I notice the heavy amounts of jewelry on her fingers, the shapeliness of her legs, and the enormous heels on her feet. I follow her onto the sidewalk on a hunch. She looks a bit fancy for this place.

“Oh, excuse me,” I say. She scowls, furrowing her brow to form a number 11 above her eyes. She's too young to appear so worn.

“I'm looking for, um, my boss,” I lie.

“I not know your boss,” she says, and keeps walking, or clomping, in the shoes.

“His wife is about to come here to look for him,” I say slowly, “so I wanted to get him out of here first.”

She takes a long look at me and at my business suit. “I know not nothing that you are saying,” she says a little crossly but not convincingly. I continue with my lie and try to decide where she is from. Russia? Definitely somewhere in Eastern Europe.

“The wife of my boss,” I say slowly as I start to walk the block with her. “I need him to come with me now. He will get caught here and she's a mean bitch,” I add, getting into my story. I've never met Gibbs's wife but I bet she's no bitch.

“You'll lose his business,” I add, desperate to strike a chord here.

“Maybe I help you,” she says, “but I not know your boss's name.”

I start to say
Rudolph
but then don't. Gibbs would never use his real name.

“Oh, um, Mr. er . . .”

“Mr. Dixon or Mr. Lehman?” she asks, knowing exactly what my problem is. She now seems impatient, as if she is on a lunch break and I'm eating away at her precious downtime.