Opening Belle Read online

  She seems mad at me. The water stops, the chatting from the stalls stops, and Amy, with one furious motion, snatches too many hand towels from the glass shelf. The extras flutter to the floor, moved by the wind of her anger as she turns on her heels and leaves.

  When I reappear in the main room, the mood has changed from caution and anticipation to debauchery. I’m looking at a frat party in good clothes. The bulk of men on the dance floor have their Hermès ties wrapped Indian-headdress style around their heads like preschool boys. They body-slam each other, and sandwich women caught in their paths. The women shriek in mock horror but make no attempt to leave the floor. One could argue they’re enjoying this, but maybe not. Maybe they also feel the need to please, the need to be the team player, to hang out with the big guys as they cling precariously to some piece of the banking pie. I might know that to be true if I ever had a real conversation with one of them, but I don’t. Nobody ever really talks about this stuff, especially to me, one of the few senior women on the floor. I became a managing director at twenty-eight here, the youngest to ever do so. And now at thirty-six I am really comfortable in the role. It makes me so proud. It makes me so lonely.

  The other thing to note about the dancing Injuns is that they’re mostly older higher-ups. The younger ones stand timidly on the sidelines, unlearning every politically correct thing ever taught to them. Body-slamming women or removing pieces of clothing while moving in a sexually explicit manner would seem to be a bad choice in a corporate setting. The scene before them is confusing and they don’t know how to act. They stand uncomfortably, shifting their weight and their drinks, trying to take in a subconscious lesson on being a big shot on Wall Street.

  The professional women all stand at the bar, appearing slightly lost, as if they came upon this party by accident. They look as if they hardly know one another, because they really don’t.

  I’ve been visible enough already; I’ve been checked off the attendance list for the holiday party and it’d be fine for me to slip away now. Anything that will happen after this moment will not be good and the networking window for the evening has closed.

  As I’m leaving I stop to notice a peculiar thing happening on the dance floor. The boys are giddy, slapping their hands in unison while tossing something to each other. Like square dancers, they form a fairly impressive circle and enthusiastically hurl the thing back and forth while clapping to the beat of the music. I catch a glimpse of the object they’re throwing: a shiny and sort of hairy ball that catches the light for a moment each time it’s thrown. I want to leave but am transfixed because something about the object seems familiar. The dancing, jumping, sweaty men cheer, and the circle grows larger. They shout each time someone catches the thing and I can’t help but watch.

  When I realize what they are throwing, I have a millisecond conversation in my head that goes something like this:

  Logical Me: “Take a second. Do you really want to make a scene?”

  Hysterical Me: “I’m going to kick King’s bony ass.”

  Logical Me: “If you do this, you lose all respect; just intercept it, put it back in the Toys ‘R’ Us bag, and elegantly exit left.”

  Hysterical Me: “This is it, I’m going in.”

  Logical Me: “Back away, no confrontation, no fight. Status quo keeps your reputation.”

  Hysterical Me: “They are throwing around Brigid’s Haircut Barbie head. My four-year-old’s present from Santa, the one I just stood on a Toys ‘R’ Us line forty-five minutes for, the last one on the shelf.”

  I leap the two steps down to get to the dance floor. Marcus has the Barbie head pulled to his ear and releases her quarterback-style. I lunge and intercept and can’t believe how well I just did that. I hold her by her tousled hair while some guys start whistling and I start shouting.

  “You classless boneheads! This is my daughter’s Christmas present. How could you? HOW COULD YOU?” I’m almost as loud as the music. The clapping misses the beats and I hear a few “whoa”s.

  I look up to see the women at the bar holding their drinks, paused in midair. Stone Dennis, a young investment banker I’ve been helping train for our sales department, strides up to me. I remember him as a schmoozer: untalented with numbers, but desperate to be accepted. It’s pathetic that he has to be the one to set these guys straight. The music blares on, but the dancing stops as everyone waits to see the next move. I want to tell Stone to not even try to apologize. He is new and young and I know he’s not responsible. But instead of trying to talk to me, Stone smiles, leans toward my left hand, and in one motion swipes Barbie yet again and I, in turn, lunge for him.

  “Dude,” he says to me, “chill out.”

  Did he really just call me “Dude”?

  Some foreign energy enters my body and I feel like I’m watching myself move like a crazy lady. I grab Stone by a wrist and twist him toward me, ending the motion only when Stone has turned 180 degrees and is now in a full headlock. Stone, in turn, lifts his arm and pulls his elbow back. Is this twenty-three-year-old guy trying so hard to be accepted that he’s actually about to punch me? I feel more amazed than fearful.

  “I am very chill,” I hiss in his ear.

  “WHOA!” shouts Marcus, and steps between us.

  A big vein bulges in Stone’s neck and his breath smells like pot. He hurls Barbie back to Marcus, who hands her back to me, even straightens her hair a bit as he does this and then goes so far as to straighten my hair too.

  “Belle, geez, they’re, like, $19.99 or something. I’ll buy you a new one tomorrow,” he says, and looks truly sorry.

  The crowd watching us grows and I feel my throat thicken. It’s really time to leave before I get sobby and pathetic. I say nothing more and head to the coat check to gather my coat and whatever remains in my toy bags.

  CHAPTER 2

  When That Was Us

  TORNADOES, ILLNESS, famine, floods, and fires. I’m trying to get some perspective. It’s nothing, really, my little world and its little problems. I know I’m stronger than this. Where is my woman of steel hiding? This is not the person I think of as me. I resemble a car crash lately, a sodden, sulky, weepy, empty mess, rumpled and barely standing at the edge of Union Square. Was it children that took away the chicly dressed alpha girl and replaced her with this diminished version of me?

  New York University students pass in clusters and some snuggle into each other as they walk. Their lives seem light and optimistic, and I miss that. I should get home to Bruce and the kid, and I will go home but not until I expel this nervous sparking energy. If he’s still awake, he’ll want to talk; if we talk I will tell him the story and if I tell him what just happened he will want to do some caveman thing, which will be both a satisfying and expensive choice for all of us. He will lapse into some predictable speech on the evils of Wall Street, which is convenient for a guy with three digits in his paycheck and four digits of personal expenses every month.

  I should want to quit, especially after a scene like tonight. But, if I can put on blinders and earplugs each morning, I’ll be fine. I love what I do, we need my income, and who are they to get me so upset? I keep telling myself the culture is the price I pay for the thrill of my job and the great paycheck. I keep walking, toy sacks and all.

  A young man and woman, in their early twenties, walk in front of me on the west side of Washington Square Park. The lights in the trees reflect down, forming something like a halo around them. Their jackets swing open, oblivious to the piercing cold air. Steam puffs from their mouths as they laugh uncontrollably at something the man just said. Their fingers touch, without holding hands, and their raging hormones are almost visible in the air around them. Her long hair bobs in and out of her coat collar, tangling recklessly the way mine did before I thought it unprofessional and chopped it to my shoulders. (“Damn,” Bruce had said.) Her boyfriend wears jeans with unpremeditated holes in them. I love that. I miss that. Bruce wears khakis now and I can’t remember when we stopped looking like that cou
ple and became our own version of a couple just trying to get through the day. I trudge on, wondering about tomorrow morning in the office and what people will say about Barbie’s head.

  Children can make an intolerable job tolerable. Humiliation takes my relatively thick skin and morphs it into full-grain leather, but my kids are worth it. On days when I fancy myself to be some working mother’s version of success, someone who does it all with decent capability, I feel pretty happy about everything. I once relayed this thought to Bruce and he responded by drawing me a pie chart, showing me the time I spend with the kids while they’re upright and awake versus time spent with them in the horizontal and asleep position. If it were a Weight Watchers chart, the allotted amount of sugar would be equal to my time spent with children not deep in a REM state.

  “That’s hurtful,” I told him. “And you’re only working part-time so it’s not like they’re orphans and don’t you think it’s decent of me to bring home real money?” It was a harsh thing to say but Bruce’s ego was solidly intact.

  “Of course I do,” he said. “But at least I’m proud of my life and I’m not answering to people like those guys you work with.”

  I had wanted to point out that he frequently answers to his playmate, the ATM, withdrawing money I work for at a gasp-worthy rate, or that he finances obscure interests in sports equipment, music, and anything to improve himself that he follows with abandon and then drops. He made me wonder if people who grew up rich and didn’t stay that way inherit the unfortunate habit of deploring wealth while at the same time remaining unable to live the frugal existence they extol.

  A woman who was in Bruce’s boarding school class at Choate, a self-proclaimed “scholarship kid” named Aripcy Salinas, liked to take me aside and fill me with her insights on guys like him. She worked at a competing bank and we sometimes found ourselves in the same room. I found myself listening whenever she asked me what he was up to and I told her some inflated lie about his technology business or his unusual hobbies. Ari saw right through it. Because she was surrounded by those bred with wealth while not having it herself, she had insights I didn’t have. As she explained once, “By not taking corporate jobs like in retail or accounting and taking up the arts or fitness therapies or being an expert at throwback stuff like vinyl record collecting or retro ski equipment, they seem cool and creative, like they’re making their own way in the world. But,” she added, “after a decade or so, it seems stupid.”

  “Bruce helps a lot with the kids,” I lied. “Men don’t get enough credit for staying at home.” But the reality was that the more money I made at work, the more Bruce’s spending climbed on just the sort of stuff she described.

  Ari, a Mexican-American, self-starting, no-nonsense beauty, sighed like an old sage. “At least you’re not telling me he’s a Tibetan pastry expert or a champion three-wheeled bike racer or that he plays the lute.”

  “Can you at least laugh when you say that?” She wasn’t even smirking. “Bruce is a great dad,” I said truthfully, “and he’s trustworthy.”

  “Look, it’s a gender-neutral problem. The girls I knew who grew up rich and never worked became surfers.”

  “Surfers?”

  “All of them.”

  “I’d think they’d buy jewelry or something.”

  “The jewelry and fancy car thing is for the new money. No, they surf and sometimes design stuff that they then have someone else make, and then they sell that to each other out of their living rooms. It’s all based on insecurity.”

  “Surfing based on insecurity?” I asked skeptically. At least Ari was entertaining.

  “It’s because they never had to work and when they realized that life is more fulfilling if you do work they felt too old to start at the bottom and too proud to take a regular, schlumpy job, so they make up their own job that nobody competes against. They get to be really good at something and not as boring to hang out with as they would be if they had no job at all. Ask your friend Elizabeth. The start-up world is full of these people.”

  Months later, I talked to Elizabeth about Bruce’s habit of flitting from one big purchase to another. He bought Pinarello Dogma bikes (plural) that cost as much as a small car ($25K for two) and parabolic skis that nobody uses anymore. He takes car services in nice weather when the bus or one of his bikes would have worked just as well. Bruce really likes having money but doesn’t want to do what has to be done to earn any. But because he is a loving father and husband, and because I can afford to keep him deep in racing bikes, I bite my cheek and keep silent.

  Elizabeth had said to me, “I grew up with these guys. It’s textbook and doesn’t get truly depressing until they turn forty. That’s when they finally get the message that they’re never going to be the success their daddy was.”

  “So what happens then?” I had asked nervously.

  “That’s when they go for their yoga teaching certification. Some obscure type of yoga, Forrest or Harmonica yoga.”

  She was joking and I was laughing, but at the same time my heart was sinking. This conversation happened two years ago, and so far it appeared to be a bull’s-eye assessment of my husband on his bad days.

  “Still, he’s cute,” I had said as I thought about his good days. He loved nature, and our kids could identify different trees in Central Park. They were adept scooter riders and acted well loved. I wasn’t sure what was okay to demand of a lower-earning partner and I didn’t want to turn into a chart-lady, one of those women who made chore lists for her husband, which felt as mature to me as the homeroom helper list in preschool.

  “Bruce has always been the cute one,” Aripcy had said. “He broke a lot of hearts at Choate. You’re the only thing he didn’t lose interest in once the wrapping paper was torn off.”

  The walking lovers stop, as one of them has presumably said something brilliant. Their eyes fix on each other’s and they do that lingering thing before diving in for some hard-core face mashing. As I pass them, I hit my Peek-a-Blocks hard and they explode into song, “Open, shut them, open, shut them, give a little clap, clap, clap. Open, shut them, open, shut them, put them in your lap, lap, lap.”

  I hail a cab.

  CHAPTER 3

  Slipping Out

  WE LIVE on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a co-op building where the residents think of themselves as socialist, lefty, and caring, but are as Park Avenue stuck-up as they come. Accidental celebrities who once waited tables but became the 0.02 percent financially successful in the arts live here, as do big-name shrinks, the odd attorney, and us. One resident offered to resell the high-end luxury goods that residents were casting aside and give the money to a homeless shelter. Our hearts are in the right place but we can be tone-deaf.

  Back when we bought this Central Park West place, as a newly married, childless, and cash-flush couple, Bruce drew elaborate, architecturally interesting plans for how we would renovate. Our eldest, Kevin, came along so soon, followed by Brigid, Owen, and a seventy-five-pound mixed breed but mostly Labrador dog named Woof Woof, so we took our four thousand square feet of space in the sky and made it into a three-bedroom apartment with lots of space for tricycles and without the media room and his-and-her bath solarium that we once imagined. There’s a mini-trampoline in what should be our living room, a Little Tikes slide where an ottoman should be, and countless objects with wheels: Rollerblades, fire trucks, dump trucks, strollers, scooters, Bruce’s racing bikes, and longboard skateboards. We never carpeted and we never entertain anyone over four feet tall. We have a mortgage that takes my breath away—dollar for dollar the same amount my parents paid for their house in the Bronx, but I pay it every month.

  To my neighbors I’m sure I appear to be a stuck-up, negligent mother. I don’t take the time to hang out in the lobby with the other moms. The doormen dote on me this holiday time of year, fully aware of who writes their tip check. They are no different from me in a job with a bonus season that could swing either way.

  The night doorman now t
akes my sacks from me—the sacks I’m completely capable of hauling into the elevator on my own. He puts them on the floor of the elevator and pushes the button for floor fourteen. I still can’t even remember his name, a fact that fills me with guilt. My own father was a doorman.

  When the elevator door opens, the scene in front of me screams, “Fun!” The slide is perched on the sofa, adding a foot to the drop to the floor, and it appears that mini golf was played because I step on a few rogue balls. I pass by the boys’ room, saving my day’s highlight of seeing their faces like some sweet dessert, before going to the master bedroom, where I pray I can get to sleep without waking Bruce. He’ll sense my distress and want to talk, or worse—get busy. But our bed is empty, the house silent, and the crib is empty too. I don’t think too much about this, as Bruce and I fall asleep all over the apartment with whichever kid we were trying to get to bed. I jump into the shower to visualize and dress-rehearse my entry to work in the morning.

  I’m drying myself off when I hear the phone ring. The phone? It’s almost 11 p.m. I dash to it with my heart pounding, certain of disaster on the other end. It must be Bruce; maybe one of the kids is in the emergency room. I can’t believe I didn’t scour the place looking for the bodies.

  I grab. “Hello?”

  “Uh, is this Isabelle?” says a woman whose voice seems familiar—can’t place her but I’m thinking preschool mom?

  “Yes it is.”

  “Belle, it’s Amy.”

  Amy. Amy with whom I was just washing hands at a party. Amy who sits next to me, to whom I rarely speak, and have never once spoken to at home, is calling me now?

  “Come meet with us. We’re at a bar on the Lower East Side. It’s a lot of women from work. Izzy, we can’t keep working like this.”