Opening Belle Read online

  It turned out that wine tasting was offered as an elective in the School of Hotel Administration. According to Henry, knowing about wine was the most useful class the university offered. He, a first-week freshman, had handpicked the students he felt would eventually run the campus and included me, as he told me later, because my face looked so earnest. He had studied our Freshman Faces, a hardcopy book for every new student, showing their picture and listing their studies, interests, and hometown, and then deduced who should, as he said, “hang out together.” He had walked through freshman registration finding those very people and amassing them together for wine tasting. Registering for a class as directed by a stranger seemed like the wildest thing I’d ever done.

  “Let me guess, you own a vineyard,” I joked.

  “Not currently.”

  “And you’re from L.A.?” I continued giving his clothing the once-over.

  “Close. Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak, generous tax credits, and more than our share of companies in bankruptcy protection.”

  “So what’s with the outfit?” I asked.

  “I haven’t yet gone to the place where I’ll be from but the native outfit there is this. You may wish to revisit your wardrobe too,” he said, nodding at my overalls.

  Why did this guy who knew what he wanted seem so sexy? The beer-chugging pot smokers bored me, the intellectuals were too intense, the jocks too single-minded, but a funny, social, smart guy who was ambitious without being nerdy got my heart fluttering, and I was not alone. Henry was surrounded by girls who seemed perfect.

  I joined the crew team and eventually found a boyfriend, a lightweight rower named Ansel who stood five eight to my five eleven. Rowing brought the intense work ethic out in me. There was something about forgoing pleasure, skipping parties, going for double workouts, and the higher grades, rocking body, and being a part of our often medaled varsity team that felt great to me. Everyone in my life had a place and Henry’s place was in the distance. We’d meet for the occasional lunch where my erratic heartbeat would sometimes betray me to myself, but as predicted, Henry switched girlfriends fast.

  In the middle of our junior year I began treating Ansel like a previously loved blankie that I still thoughtlessly carried around. One evening I dragged him to a party and ran into Henry, who proceeded to introduce us to yet another girl whose name I instantly deleted. Their names always ended with the “ee” sound—Joanie, Stacy, Tracy, Francie, Annie—and when he introduced me to this one I stopped listening.

  Ansel asked me to dance and Henry didn’t even wait for me to say no.

  “Well, kids, it’s time to cut the charade,” he said, grinning away.

  “Charade?” his girlfriend and I asked together.

  The three of us stood expectantly, waiting for Henry to entertain us in the usual way that Henry did.

  “Belle and I have been in love since the first week of school,” Henry announced.

  “We have?” I asked.

  “You are?” both Ansel and the dark-haired girl said simultaneously.

  The three of us waited expectantly for the punch line. But this time there was none.

  Dark-haired Girl turned toward him. “This time it’s not funny, Henry.”

  Ansel just looked hurt.

  “I’m serious,” Henry said. “I just don’t want to have these thoughts and not share them with the three of you. I mean, I’m not an asshole, or I am an asshole but I don’t speak behind people’s backs and I don’t cheat. I speak in front of people and I speak the truth. Am I right, Belle?”

  All three of them turned toward me. Was he right? Were we in love? I mean, I thought about him all the time, melted a little when we ate together or took classes together, and had even gotten to know his whole family when they made their frequent trips to campus, but I had resigned myself to a constant state of agitation. “What do you mean by right?” I asked, buying myself time.

  “I’m out of here,” his girlfriend said just before weakly smacking his face. The three of us watched her go but Henry turned away first. I never forgot how he could move on like that without looking back.

  “So what do you think, Amstel?”

  “It’s Ansel.”

  “Yes, sorry. What do you think?”

  “About my girlfriend cheating on me?” he asked.

  “I’ve been cheating on you?” I asked. The conversation grew weirder by the second. “Ansel, it’s not like you and I are even sleeping together—”

  “Wait, you haven’t had sex yet?” Henry interrupted, making both Ansel and me feel like losers. “Haven’t you been together for, like, a year?” he asked.

  “Well, we’ve talked about it,” I said weakly.

  “I mean, we’re going to,” Ansel said pathetically.

  “Oh my God, you waited for me,” he said softly, taking my hand.

  “I didn’t wait for you.” Had I waited for him? I was so confused.

  “Look, can we talk, Henry?” I asked.

  “No, can we talk?” Ansel asked me.

  • • •

  Henry walked me away that night, away from Ansel and the party and everything safe. For the next seven years we were rarely apart, and when he left me, it was in that same way he left the others. Never once looking over his shoulder.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Day the Market Moved on Me

  DURING OUR Four Seasons lunch, Henry acted as though we had never met, like I was some fresh-faced colleague brimming over with investment ideas for him and he was there to listen.

  I stood to shake hands, an automatic business response of mine, and felt my knees weaken from the adrenaline overload. Hadn’t he been told whom he was meeting? I searched his face for some shrug of irony but Henry wouldn’t break character. Why didn’t he give me a heads-up phone call? This was much worse than the forced “Hi” we mutter on the preschool steps. This meant I would be calling Henry daily. He would be my largest client and I was going to be subservient to him. I couldn’t breathe.

  I didn’t touch my food as Tim rambled on about the new investment strategy Cheetah would be adopting under Henry’s leadership. I could barely keep my water glass steady when I held it in my shaking hand. I usually hit my stride at such moments, but not that time. Henry snapped open his napkin and proceeded to enjoy three courses with a ravenous appetite.

  Everyone has someone they will never get over, where closure is not a possibility. Closure is made-up psychobabble. It’s not real. You just have to stay away from that person, because no amount of talking will ever resolve a thing. It’s not possible to actually work with that person and Henry was my person.

  Henry’s boss didn’t seem to notice. He was enjoying himself so much he ordered a chocolate soufflé for desert. Soufflé. As in an extra-twenty-minute-waiting-time dessert. And wait we did, trading niceties. My hair began to flop into my face, my earring weirdly fell onto the table, I looked down to see an ugly run in my hose; I was melting.

  Boylan said things like, “Henry went to Cornell and Columbia Business School.”

  And I would nod my head with disbelief and answer with things like, “Really? I went to Cornell too.”

  “I’d ask what year you graduated,” he said, “but I can tell it was well after me.”

  Polite titter from me.

  Henry kept the questions rolling. “Where did you go to business school?”

  Henry knew I didn’t go to business school, first because I couldn’t afford it and then for fear I’d never get another job at my level. I happened to work in the place that cared more about performance than degrees. Our chairman wanted employees he called “poor, smart, and determined to get rich,” and when I was hired, that described me. Was he trying to embarrass me in front of his boss? Was this retribution for the thong episode? If he was looking for some white flag of surrender, he picked the wrong victim.

  “I didn’t go to business school,” I said with artificial sweetener raising my voice. “I loved my job too much, and k
new real life had already taught me more than anything that could be taught in B school.”

  “Really?” said Henry, seemingly more engaged now that I was finally lobbing back. “I have to say, I’m a fan of formal training, though I do see your point. By the way, I can’t believe you’ve had three kids and are the primary breadwinner. How can you possibly juggle it all?”

  That did it. If there’s one cliché statement that working mothers everywhere despise, it’s that one: the “I don’t know how you do it” thing. I never thought I could hate Henry Wilkins but I sure was coming close.

  “Did I say I was the primary breadwinner? I don’t think I did. Also I think I’ve seen you at Fifth Avenue Preschool.”

  Just then the man sitting behind Tim took that particular moment to put a hand out and say hello to him, so I added, “Or maybe it’s because we’ve screwed sixteen different ways to Sunday. Yes, maybe that’s why we seem to have met.” I lifted my linen napkin, dabbed at my lips, and smiled.

  “Oh,” Henry said, clearing his throat and reddening. I had shut down the “her husband has no job” conversation. “Well, you’d be hard to miss in a crowd,” Henry said in some feeble attempt to regain his footing and because Tim had turned back to our table, “but when I’m at that school I’m so focused on my kids, I never notice the adults.”

  Gag me. Men have no problem impressing their bosses with their family-man rap, while women never dare mention their families at work. “Yes, I’m sure you were just too focused,” I said.

  Tim continued to look admiringly at his younger protégé, oblivious to the invisible conversation also going on at the table.

  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 laug
hed 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.

  CHAPTER 13

  Gentlemen Prefer Bonds

  IT’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.