The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund (11 page)

“She did it. We can do it. I don't have a kid, so I can be in the driver's seat. You just work on pampering yourself, building yourself back up. I will take care of everything.”

“Kiki, I love you. What would I do without you?”

“Listen, it fucking sucks. You're basically in hell right now, express train, zero stops. There's gonna be crying and more crying until your tear ducts look like the Sahara. But you have to wake up and breathe in and out and get through those heinous days. It will obviously take a while until you feel whole enough to even function let alone date. And then even when you're ready, every bad date, you'll be sitting in the back of that taxi crying. But every good one—whether it works out or not—will give you a glimmer of what your life could be like. Romantic and exciting. I know I made the right choice leaving Hal. You have more to work through because you didn't have a slow deterioration like we did. But trust me, you will triumph over this noxious toxic sludge of a moment. You will push through it and fucking shine on the other side. It's like that river of shit the guy crawls through in
The Shawshank Redemption
. You'll cry and barf and get through this horrible tunnel and then you will be free of all this pain. I swear to you.”

I just prayed she was right. Because at that moment it felt like a thousand football fields of misery ahead of me.

The next few months brought ten chopped-down trees' worth of tissues, long talks on the phone with my only other divorced friend, Natasha, incessant meetings with lawyers, a battery of Tim's assistants packing up his things for the Carlton House on Madison Avenue (where Wall Street titans shack up post-divorce), and a planned date to sign final marriage-dissolution documents. My heartbroken father flew into town to console me and help me through navigating my prenup and guide me to take the high road and ask for what was only fair. While the Empire State was “no fault,” Tim's whore-bangage couldn't help me at all; in fact, it was the same legal consequences as if I had been banging my trainer at David Barton. My dad stayed up with me into the night, wiping my tears. “Honey,” he said, “let's think this through. I know you're hurt, I know you're angry, and while part of you might want to make him pay, you don't want to make Miles pay emotionally. Your mom and I never had any of this kind of lifestyle, and we were fine.”

And my dad was always right. Like my mom, he was a calmer, nobler soul than I, who wanted to gut Tim for all he was worth . . . but it wasn't worth it. Not for karma, or even Miles, but for the fact that I was too tired for the fight. I didn't feel like rolling up my sleeves to duke it out. Even though I was blood drunk for some kind of revenge, I didn't want to punish Miles by suing for custody, so I let him share fifty-fifty with weekends and Wednesday evenings. Financially, because of our ironclad prenup, I was hardly entitled to what I ended up scoring: our beloved apartment.

Tim, out of guilt, gave me the whole thing and agreed to pay the maintenance, but because it was well beyond the money stipulated by our contract, that was all I'd get. Child support for Miles, sure, but good-bye Bergdorf's charge card; adios clubs, even David Barton gym membership. My lawyer said I could have probably fought for some of these, but I just wanted the whole thing done. I didn't want to give Sherry Von any more ammo—I was sure she was steaming I got the apartment, since she'd been the one who'd found it for us; it had once belonged to a prominent socialite she knew from Locust Valley. And I loved it. I had decorated it myself, and it was a constant in Miles's changing life. And since Tim was always away so much, anyway, we were both used to it being spacious for the two of us, but always cozy, with the third bedroom functioning as a TV and toy pit with Miles's art station and an easel. Home was everything to me, especially because I had grown more into a nester than ever, and I wanted one touchstone that would remain sacred. Luckily Tim didn't fight me on it.

But as for all those other perks of being a hedgie wife, I never really was so obsessed with all that excess. Did I really need to call one of Tim's assistants to get theater tickets or make that reservation? I'd call myself, so what. I was almost relieved to eliminate the middleman. And, sure, on a rainy day it was great to have a driver, but sometimes it was fun to get soaked. I loved my walks. Walking in New York is one of my greatest pastimes, and so many wealthy wives miss out on that pleasure. He could keep it all. I had my pride and wasn't going to beg for more, even if it was my due.

When Tim and I finally entered the offices, each flanked by our lawyers, we briefly locked eyes. I looked down quickly to try not to cry. I soberly stared at the dotted line, and as the ball rolled through the ink and onto the paper, I realized the shock had subsided and clarity was taking its place through closure.

After he signed, my lawyer simply said, “Okay, then.”

That was it. A decade together and a Tiffany fountain pen pierced our matrimony like a silver scythe.

“Holl—”

I looked at him, his lips folded together in a stern grimace.

“Sorry.”

Saying nothing, I blinked back tears as I opened the door and left.

My dad came back to visit for a couple days and we stayed up through the night as we both cried, me for my marriage, he for my mom, for the past, for easier times. I told him how even when I was fighting to swim back to the shore of stability, after ten strokes I'd realize the forceful current of grief had dragged me twenty strokes farther out to sea. I was weary and thought I'd drown.

“Honey, remember the utter despair you felt after Mom died?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You thought you could never function again in the world without her. And it was hard, terribly hard, for all of us, but we soldiered on. You can do it, you will do it. Not just for Miles, but also yourself. You're young, you have your whole life ahead of you, and you need to be strong.”

Leave it to dads to hand out the tough love. He was right; I could wallow in self-pitying misery till the Crypt Keeper giggled in my face with his sharpened sickle or I could buck up and jump back into life. I only wished my mom was there to help me through this second dark chapter.

But as time passed, when I breathed in and out, it took less effort. It used to be that when my alarm went off, I'd immediately feel a two-ton weight upon my chest. But then, little by little, it was one ton. And then half. And less. Until slowly I became more anesthetized to the gut-churning pain. Sheer agony became blunt pain became discomfort. And soon enough discomfort morphed into tolerance for my situation. And once I started to get used to everything, I started, step by tiny step, day by day, to feel that if I squinted hard enough, I might be able to make out an infinitesimal ray of light in the distance. When I looked back on how far I'd come from not wanting to get out of bed, to pulling myself together and dealing with it for my son, I knew the future could only get less and less gray.

Kiki had been right: I would get through this. As Miles and I lay in bed one night, I read his stories until my own eyelids grew heavy like his and I ended up passing out next to him. And in the reverie of watercolor illustrations that danced in my dazed head, the color that emerged in the distant swirl was yellow. Sunny, Nina Ricci yellow.

 

 

 

I
f my life were a movie, this is when you'd cue the
Rocky
or
Star Wars
music. Something majestic. Something grandiose forecasting my rise from the emotional ashes of my scorched home! Okay, so maybe the long days were peppered with a few random crying fits in Starbucks. I also tended to weep and get full-body shivers when I found one of my neighborhood accounts closed; I didn't think Tim would stoop to literally shutting down house charges for banal things like toothpaste and combs, but he did. “Sorry, Mrs. Talbott,” the old guy at Zitomer's replied. “I'm afraid it's been shut down.” Ditto at Clyde's Chemists, Citarella, the hardware store, even
amazon.com
rejected my one-click all of a sudden. The spigot was turned off completely. Horrifyingly, when I went to buy Miles's favorite steaks from Lobel's, I bumped into Emilia d'Angelo—with her chef—selecting filets mignons for a dinner party. We chitchatted and then the sweet man I'd been buying meat from for a decade looked at me sadly and said my house account had been shuttered. I saw Emilia pretend to play with her Bulgari necklace and carefully study the sirloin, but I knew she had overheard. I would now certainly be the talk of the next Sette Mezzo gathering. I guess it was like Sherry Von said: You're either part of The Family,
Godfather
style, or not. I was now clearly Fredo floating facedown in Lake Tahoe.

Soon after my denied beef, the news hit the press. Not to the extent of Kiki's split, since she was more glam and high profile than I was, but we were included in a column on megadivorces in both
W
and the local society mag
Quest
, both with photos of Tim and me at various charity benefits chaired by Sherry Von.

I looked at my smiling younger face in those photos; I wished I could have warned that girl what was coming down the painful pike.

But for every downer moment I had—wondering what to do with my wedding album, my ring, our family photos—I had a pep talk from Kiki. It was she who told me how to sit Miles down and tell him that I loved him more than anything on planet Earth and that Tim and I both adored him as much as ever. It was she who gave me my new gym card with a bow on it, and a new colorist, Juan, who insisted, with her by my side, that I needed to get blonder again, and lose the mousy mommy shade I'd sported for eons. Thanks to Kiki's coaching, the past months had been a montage of fitness, pampering, and Holly-centric laser-beam focus. It was a jumble of psycho long walks with Kiki, running the soccer ball in the fields in July with Miles, endless museum trips with him on too-hot days, and pounding the Poland Spring instead of my usual Sprite, which had become my water to the point where a horrified Kiki told me my diet resembled Britney Spears's. It's not that my fingers were oranged with Cheeto dust or anything; I just had . . . rather unsophisticated taste buds for the circle I previously ran in—that of pure protein or liquid lunches and frisée-with-balsamic dinners.

Next we hit Frederic Fekkai in SoHo and I bit my lip as my long locks were cropped to a sleek bob; then the colorist amped my dishwater blond into a high-octane summery hue of childhood as Kiki stood by instructing him and cheering at the results, which I must confess were amazing and shaved five years off my looks. In two short hours I'd gone from Debbie Downer to Debbie Harry.

Tim requested that post-camp Miles spend a week with him in London, where he would be spending more and more time due to the burgeoning U.K. office. I wanted to fight him and say hell no, as the thought of his skank near my child made me ill to the point of hurling bile. But Tim had been traveling nonstop for close to a month and I couldn't forcibly keep my son away from his dad, especially since he was an only child and had no sibling comrades in the divorce trenches.

So when Kiki invited me to her friend's house in the Hamptons, I decided that rather than roast on the gray asphalt frying pan that was Manhattan, I should go. Kiki had sworn up and down that we could avoid the hedge fund scene out there—that of the $500,000 summer rentals, helicopter landing pads, and polo we had been forced to endure in previous years. The four-inch-stiletto, sunglasses-on-head, tanorexic party set would be over the hedge, so to speak, as we'd hole up alone, especially since I knew the diseased cat was more than out of the bag vis-à-vis our divorce. Even though I was now not loaded, tongues wagged more about the rich than anyone else. I could just see people trying to figure out what I got, who Tim was banging. The rich are more scandal prone, with salacious affairs ranking as the big kahuna of gossip. And a hedge fund divorce seemed to have everyone talking.

One August day by the pool, Kiki and I reminisced about our early days as sisters-in-law.

“I almost fainted when Hal told me about the Black Falcon Club,” Kiki said, and laughed, sipping a fresh-mint-infused mojito. “That shit was so fucking brutal. I faked being into it for Hal's sake, but he clearly caught on that crawling through a tunnel lined with bats wasn't my thing.”

I had to laugh at the recollection. The Black Falcon Club was a U.K.-based semisecret society whose members were almost entirely hedgies from New York and London, plus a few quirky characters like that old dude in
Contact
who went to outer space with the Russians and funded Jodie Foster's alien quest. Eccentrics, if you will (read: freaks with way too much money). Not unlike Michael Douglas's movie
The Game
, members booked time and paid upward of $100,000 per trip, which began when you were “kidnapped” by the club staffers in a travel adventure that took you to the literal ends of the earth. Tim and I, pre-Miles of course, went to places I hadn't even seen on the Discovery Channel. We hiked on an uncharted island with scorpions as big as my face. We played elephant polo in rural India. Watched the wildebeest migration in Masai Mara. Anaconda hunting. Surfed volcanoes. All places were either way too hot (watching Saiga antelopes cross the Gobi Desert) or way too cold (camping in an icehouse in Greenland), and all made me long for my bed at home.

Not one to challenge Tim's passion for these Black Falcon trips, I shut my mouth and even sometimes, despite the discomfort, got into it. But boy was I elated that I didn't have to do that anymore.

“Fucking Kalahari Desert!” said Kiki, mid-chug. “I think Tim and Hal were so jaded from their childhood at the Ritz and all that cosseted bullshit with Sherry Von that by the time they got to us, they needed to sweat and bleed to feel alive on vacation!”