The Suite Life (39 page)

Abiding faith in the Blessed Mother had always given me strength when I needed it most, and I always prayed hard for Alec. I had always gravitated toward others who shared my faith, and Spiro had used the word
God
more often in the short time I'd known him than Alec had in more than ten years of marriage.
I took this as further evidence that it was right for us to be together. And when the other mother Mary, Doris's assistant, sent me a rosary from Ireland while she was on an extended visit with her family, I realized that no amount of money could buy the love that came with her gift. It was these touching expressions of caring that got me through being untouched most of the time—yet another item on the list of things I vowed to change in my life.
Money doesn't define you. You should be the one who defines what it can do for you.

After checking in on Alec one evening when he was in the bedroom, only to find him watching porn on his laptop with his hands under the sheet and my thousand-dollar jar of La Mer skin cream opened at his side, I stopped going in there at all, and generally cringed when I heard him come out. His only comment was “I can't believe how soft my cock is. This cream is really something else.” Of course, his BlackBerry communication after that little encounter was noteworthy. I mean, this was an extraordinary man that I loved so much.

What had happened to the amazing man I married? Did Wall Street do this to him? Was this his chosen path now?

If only there were more humorous moments, like the time Alec's hundred-thousand-dollar Italian antique bed crashed to the floor with him in it, my prison sentence would have been easier to take. Lucky for Alec, Olivia had stopped working full-time for her boss and was dating a construction worker, of all people, who worked at a new hotel site close to the Luxe Regent. He came right up with two Mexican buddies, and I laughed right along with them as they did the necessary repairs.

In the new year, the literary agent whom Doris had recommended finally gave me a call to say that she wanted to set up a lunch, and I jumped at the lifeline that was being offered—tenuous though it might be.

This is going to be the most important meal of my entire life.

Moira Jewison made a reservation at Nello on Madison Avenue, but I would gladly have met her at a hot dog stand. She was already waiting at the table when I arrived. She appeared to be in her mid-forties, wore heavy designer eyeglass frames, and struck me as the high-end frumpy type, which was just how I'd pictured a literary agent would be.

“Samantha, I'm so pleased to meet you. I read your book and I just love it,” Moira said as soon as I was seated. “I couldn't put it down.”

I love
you,
Moira.

“I want to do something for you, but right now I'm going through a divorce,” she continued. “On top of that, I'm not fully recovered from a shattered elbow, and don't ask how that happened!”

“Oh, I'm so sorry,” I said softly.

“Don't be,” Moira huffed. “I was in the last two weeks of full bed rest and climbing the walls to get back into the game when your manuscript landed in my lap.”

And I've just landed at the foot of another bridge.

“Don't get me wrong,” she continued. “It has to be cleaned up before I can send it out. I'll give you the marked-up copy I have that will point you in the right direction, but you'll have to do the work.”

I was already visualizing
The Blessed Bridge
in the window of Barnes & Noble.

After that lunch I attended my writing seminar with a totally different attitude. I wasn't showing up just to become a better writer; I was showing up to be the best storyteller I could be. I was no longer thinking
The Blessed Bridge
would get published “hopefully, one day”; I was thinking “probably, soon.”

Soon
is a relative term, as I soon found out. Over the next few weeks I churned out revised pages and added new copy according to Moira's suggestions. But the turnaround from her was much less than ideal. She told me her divorce and her recovery from elbow surgery were still more time-consuming than she would have liked, but I couldn't help thinking she had many other writers in her stable who were higher in the pecking order than I was.

That's okay. I'll be at the top someday.

Progress toward publication might be slower than ideal, I decided, but it would be progress nonetheless, and every step would bring me closer to the validation of my dream. But it was Spiro who validated me as a woman. I felt truly blessed, and I made sure to acknowledge those responsible every day, in bed at night with my rosary, or on my knees in Our Lady of Victory.

By early summer I finally learned what had been bothering
my husband. For more than a year he had been distracted and edgy beneath the self-assured front he continued to put up. I'd had a sense of foreboding that disturbed me, but the signs of unrest he'd been showing were nothing compared to the behavior that ensued when DeMarco Futures was hit with a large margin call. Apparently, the real estate bonds that everyone had scrambled to scarf up had underwritten a whole lot of mortgages that were shaky at best, and the funds Alec managed—along with those of many others who were heavily invested in the mortgage market—weren't worth the rating they'd been given at the start.

Having overheard enough of his conversations on the phone to know there was a problem, I asked Alec if everything was okay, but he dismissed the concern evident in my voice with a curt “No big deal. I just have to cover a few shortages with some of my stock.”

Oh.

I hadn't been plugged into the Wall Street grapevine for at least two years, but I still caught wind of major developments during one conversation or another with people who were. I still saw Gary at family gatherings and Sofia at company functions, and I connected with Olivia regularly and with Spiro all the time. All of them mentioned the margin call, and all of them more than suspected that it was a bigger deal than Alec let on.

Of course, the biggest news was always splashed in huge headlines on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal,
which arrived at my doorstep every day, so no one had to tell me that Grigor Malchek was under fire from Spencer Edelman, the New York State attorney general, who had seized an opportunity to drag him through the mud. Malchek, however, didn't get where he'd gotten by being a shrinking violet, and he sued Edelman for defamation and false prosecution.

From what I heard after that bomb hit, Alec didn't think it
was that big a deal, either. He said the investigation would likely drag on for years, but he swore to more than one party that “Edelman was jerking off” and “no one was going to ‘Yale,' ” at least no one who mattered. However, the recent chink in Alec's armor made me think there might be more to the story, so I asked Spiro, whose opinion I knew I could trust.

According to him, Ted Ross was in it up to his eyeballs because his team had handled the bulk of the transactions being looked into, but many suspected that the investigation was more political than anything else. Democrat Edelman would love nothing more than taking Ted's scalp and also implicating Republican senator Robert Ross, who was leading in the polls for governor of New York, along the way. Spiro said that sliming the candidate would be reward enough for Edelman, but if he found something that actually incriminated Ross, he himself would be in the running for governor in the next election cycle. He said that the only thing men like Edelman and Malchek, and soon-to-be-governor Ross, really wanted was power. These men ruled the country in secret, and no one—no one—could be elected president without the support of Wall Street, where the game was really played.

Alec seemed to be as blasé about Edelman's investigation as he had been about the investigation into baseball's connection with performance-enhancing drugs, and it wouldn't have shocked me in the least if he had had some skeletons involving the major players tucked away somewhere.

The more I thought about my life with him, the more it seemed like just a more polished version of the mob I had known in Brooklyn. It involved the same thirst for power, the same mix of sex, drugs, and gambling. What the Wall Street Boys did might have been legal, but that was just bookkeeping. They wrote the laws they manipulated every day. Their violence—the hostile takeovers and insider trading—might not have been
literal murder, but they took the life of everything in their path, and the souls of many. Grigor Malchek was as much of a mobster in my book as mob boss Tino Priganti; Ted Ross was interchangeable with Rocco Caputo, my friend Janice's father who owned the Cue Ball, where mob business was conducted; and I had my very own Tony Kroon in Alec DeMarco. I'd thought I'd landed in the legitimate world when I met Alec, but all I'd done was switch deck chairs on the
Titanic,
and what a view I had.

Despite what Alec said about Edelman's investigation, he was still visibly affected. He warned me that things could get really ugly if there was a run on his company's holdings as a result of an initial call, and he mumbled more and more about “those bastards” while lapsing into deeper and more frequent self-induced stupors. By this time his excesses were too much even for his coterie of sycophants—Franco, Gianna, Gary, and Victor—who urged him to get some therapy.

Psychologist Donna Purke was sixty years old and carried her slim, elegant body well. Her self-confidence was evident in every gesture and every word, and it didn't take her long to size up what she was dealing with. Alec moved very quickly through analysis, getting tossed out on the first visit for having smoked marijuana just prior to the session.

After Donna suggested that a few one-on-one sessions with me might help, I figured that I'd do my duty and go for at least a couple of them. I was shocked when, after less than five minutes of conversation, she casually mentioned the divorce she herself was in the midst of and added that there was little likelihood either of us would be able to avoid the split that was on the horizon. After that, we talked more about stores and shoes and salons than about my marriage, and after a month she came to the conclusion that I wasn't the one who needed head-shrinking.

“Writing is my therapy,” I said at the session we both knew was going to be the last.

“I figured it was a special man.”

“I may have one of those, too,” I said.

“Good for you,” she said. “I met a great guy who was married with three kids, but he was self-aware enough to know he had to get out and courageous enough to do it. We plan to marry as soon as we can.”

So there is hope.

“Listen to me, Samantha,” Donna continued. “If you reveal yourself in your writing and with others who care about you, you don't need a professional listener. It's no wonder to me that the ones who repress everything get sick most often, and really sick a lot sooner than those who don't.”

“I only wish my mother could have unburdened herself.” I sighed.
Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall into place.

“I suppose she was abusive to you as well as to herself.”

“How did you know?”

Donna smiled. “It's what I do. But here's the thing, Samantha. Even if your mom had been the perfect mother, I'd still give you the same advice I give to every patient—God bless the child that's got his own.”

Wish I'd written that.
“Is that something original?”

“I wish,” Donna said. “It's from a Billie Holiday song, but it makes as much sense as anything I was taught over ten years of formal education.”

Stately and elegant though Donna was, until that moment pretty much all I'd gotten from her was where to get a great pair of wedges or a new hairstyle. I thought I'd rather spend two hundred bucks on something else. But those eight words of advice she passed along to me on the day we parted were worth
more than all of our sessions had cost, and much more than she could know.