Hedge Fund Wives

John glared at me before flopping over on his side and opening the drawer of his side table. He pulled out his bottle of Ambien, popped a pill in his mouth and swallowed it with a swig from his bottle of Evian.

Shortly after we moved to New York, John started having trouble sleeping. I encouraged him to stop reading his finance magazines in bed and offered to make him chamomile tea or hot milk, but he insisted on going to the doctor to get a prescription.

‘All the traders take the stuff on a nightly basis,’ he claimed, and so, he, too, started relying upon the drug to get to sleep. I didn’t think it was a good long-term solution, but I also knew that he was under a lot of stress at work and, like me, was still getting acclimated to our new life. I was also relieved that the cocaine binge (which we never discussed) had ended in Aspen, and hoped that once John settled in to his job and had become used to its demands and pressures, he would be able to quit the Ambien as easily as he had seemingly quit the cocaine.

Washing down the pill, he lay back down and shifted over on his side (away from me), sending his magazines in a flurry to the floor. He didn’t bother to pick them up but announced without turning around to face me, ‘Just don’t expect me to dry your tears when Gigi scolds you for serving from the wrong side or showing up with a stain on your collar. Then we’ll see how you define your relationship.’

I said nothing, but in my head, I thought: Man, my husband’s becoming an asshole.

Gigi was nervously chewing on her bottom lip, reading through her notes, and jotting a few words down here and there in the margins when the doorbell rang. Jill’s nanny, a diminutive Filipina woman with a tidy appearance, ran to get the door and two pretty young women appeared in the kitchen’s doorway.

‘Where are the aprons?’ asked one. She had dark brown hair and bore a heavy resemblance to Katie Holmes, pre-Tom Cruise and her Scientology-condoned makeover.

Gigi closed her notebook and plucked four starched white aprons, still in their dry cleaning bags, off of a coat rack in the corner of the kitchen. ‘Here you go, Maggie,’ she said, unwrapping an apron and handing it to the dark-haired girl, before doing the same for each of us. ‘I need you two to start assembling the canapés. You’re on the mini BLT towers,’ she said, nodding to Maggie. ‘Can you manage the vichyssoise with truffle-foam shot glasses, Gemma?’ Gigi asked the other girl, this one with sea glass-colored eyes, freckled skin, and shoulder-length strawberry blond hair.

‘Yeah, no worries,’ she said. Her voice was soft, and she had a lovely British accent.

‘And, Marcy, I’d like you to help the girls and then set the tables. The china is already out in the living room in crates, and you should find the tablecloths and silver there as well. The flower arrangements are lined up in the foyer—I’m sure you saw them coming in. Once you’re done with that, would you put out the place cards? Here’s the layout,’ she said, handing me the evening’s seating chart. ‘Each one should be tucked into the silver clam shells you’ll find in a box with the salt and pepper shakers.’

I slipped the crisp white apron over my head, tying its waistband in a bow at my back, the way Gigi had styled hers, and got to work assisting Maggie and Gemma with their prep work. Maggie said she was working every day that week with A Moveable Feast and had taken on extra hours with another catering outlet. Her boyfriend, a mortgage broker, had been sacked from his job and wasn’t able to cover his share of the rent. They were both scrambling to find a cheaper place but in the meantime Maggie was working at all hours and had missed several casting calls because of it.

Gemma, meanwhile, was possibly going to have to withdraw from NYU because her father, an office-supplies salesman, had promised to pay for her tuition but the credit crunch had also taken a toll in the U.K. and he hadn’t made enough in sales commission to be able to afford Gemma’s school fees. Even Bear was having money problems. He’d lost a bundle on the stock market after he’d followed a bad tip given to him by a drunken dinner guest. To make matters worse, he commuted to work from upstate New York and the spike in gas prices was biting into his monthly income. He and his wife had been forced to tap into their IRA accounts to make ends meet. Their plan to move to Florida and retire in five years had been scrapped entirely.

Their stories made me feel guilty. It didn’t seem fair that so many people were struggling to keep their dreams alive—you couldn’t watch the news or open a paper without being confronted with a dozen similar tales—and I, one of the very few, very lucky ones whose lives hadn’t been negatively impacted by the economic downturn, didn’t feel particularly lucky.

After the girls had moved on to assembling other hors d’oeuvres, I made my way across the foyer into Jill’s living and dining rooms. I nearly gasped as I entered the living room, which bore the hallmarks of what was known as mod-baroque design: lots of color and bold geometric patterns, and plenty of eclectic, ornate furniture and decorative objets. For example, in Jill’s dining room a carved wooden sideboard, painted in high-gloss paint, was topped with a collection of large Murano vases and set against a wall covered in lime-green jacquard wallpaper. A chandelier constructed out of champagne flutes, hugged the ceiling, and the walls were covered with abstract oil paintings, one of which had to be a Willem de Kooning, an artist whose work I’d seen at the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the adjacent living room, there was a sky-blue area rug, a ’50s era dark purple velvet couch, and a pair of antique armchairs covered in real zebra hair; sculptures constructed of neon lights stood in the corners and a set of sexually charged out-of-focus black and white photographs hung on the walls. I’d never seen anything like it.

Unable to help myself, I tiptoed down the hall toward the Tischmans’ private quarters. Passing a small office, which featured indigo blue walls, a writing table encrusted in seashells spray painted Ferrari red, red-and-white-striped Roman shades, and an inky leather chair made out of ebonized oak, I reached Jill and her husband Glenn’s bedroom. It was painted in gray and hung with chartreuse graphic-printed silk curtains that coordinated with the upholstered headboard and a bench stationed at the foot of the bed. A large Dorothy Draper yellow screen painted with Grecian urns was tucked behind a gray suede fainting couch. Above the bed hung a partially nude portrait of a young Japanese girl, her schoolgirl socks still on and legs spread wide. Pressing forward down the hall to the last room, I found an incredibly messy guest bedroom—there were ties and men’s shirts scattered on a Chevron striped rug, half-empty water bottles crowding the surface of a puce Lucite bedside table, magazines and newspapers piled high on a mother-of-pearl tray on the floor next to the bed. Across the hall were the doors to the children’s rooms, behind one of which I could hear a cacophony of yelps, cries, and screams.

I glanced at my watch and realized that I’d spent enough time ogling Jill’s apartment and needed to get started on setting the tables before Gigi discovered my delinquency and had a nervous breakdown. But just as I was about to high-speed tip toe back down the hall to the dining room, I heard a loud crash and the door to one of the children’s rooms banged open, revealing a little girl dressed in a navy jumper dress and gray cable-knot cardigan, her light brown hair clipped back by two plaid barrettes, her plump cheeks flaming red and streaked with tears. ‘I don’t love you anymore,’ she yelled behind her shoulder, before running smack into my thighs.

She reeled backward, and I braced her shoulders to keep her from falling. Once she regained her balance, she shook me off and raced back into her room. Her nanny appeared from inside the bathroom and regarded the fragments of what looked to be fine porcelain scattered all over the hardwood floor. ‘Ava,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘What did you do now?’

And with that, the girl burst into a fresh wail and threw herself on her pink shag rug. ‘But Mommy said she would have tea with me before my bath and Mommy doesn’t like drinking out of plastic!’ she cried.

I ventured into the room, which was decorated in various shades of pink, with butterfly-themed wallpaper, silk balloon shades, and a fuchsia crystal chandelier. A child-sized table was set with an elegant fine china gold and ivory tea service, minus the teapot. As the nanny began picking up the pieces, I carefully approached Ava and knelt down next to her writhing, kicking body.

‘Can I have some tea please, Ava? You’ve set such a nice table. And I’m so very thirsty.’

With a snivel, she raised her head and studied my face through her long, wet lashes. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

She had her mother’s olive skin tone and fine features. I told her my name and that I was there to help with her mother’s party. ‘But I’m suddenly very thirsty,’ I said, clutching my throat and swallowing hard. ‘Would you please, please share some tea with me?’

She nodded solemnly and rested her hand on mine. ‘You poor dear,’ she whispered. A post-tantrum hiccup escaped from her small mouth as she guided me to her table, where she instructed me to sit and stay until she returned with another teapot. After searching frantically through her toy box, a gorgeous little chest painted with butterflies and flowers, she finally found a teapot made of pink plastic, and poured me a cup. For the next few minutes, we sat like that—Ava pouring and I drinking and remarking on the delicious flavor and subtle aromas of her make-believe tea, as the little girl fussed with the imaginary pots of sugar and cream—until the nanny emerged from Ava’s en suite bathroom and clapped her hands together, calling an end to my diversion and her play.

‘Bath time,’ the nanny announced. ‘Say goodbye to your guest.’

Ava set her tea cup down carefully and circled around the table. ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ she said before bestowing me with a dramatic air kiss. ‘Let’s do this again soon.’

Regretfully I left her to her bath and returned to the dining room and my chores. I quickly laid down the white linen tablecloths and set the tables with the floral arrangements (long glass troughs tightly packed with raspberry-colored English garden roses) glasses (stemless red and white wine goblets) and plates (hand-painted with flowers and made of fine bone china) and began working on the place cards. I recognized quite a few of the names—Caroline’s was on the list, as was Dahlia’s and Ainsley and Peter Partridge’s. Jill, the evening’s hostess, was seated next to Jasper Pell, whom House & Home was honoring that night as their ‘designer of the year’ and who happened to be the very same decorator Caroline had suggested I hire at her baby shower.

The memory of Caroline’s quick dismissal of me at her shower made me suddenly realize that John was right about one thing: I wasn’t about to score any points with the other hedge fund wives by working as a server for A Moveable Feast. Cringing in anticipation of facing Caroline and Dahlia wearing an apron and carrying a tray of quivering canapés, I knew that it was too late to back out—I wouldn’t dare leave Gigi in the lurch, especially since she was already short-staffed for the night—and as much as I wasn’t looking forward to facing the other women’s sneering faces, I was genuinely happy to be working again.

Back in Chicago, before we moved to New York, I worked in private client services for Bloomington Mutual, a Midwest-based, multinational bank with brokerage, commercial, and investment arms. I’d started there fresh out of Northwestern University as a research analyst, and had always felt grateful for my job. Out of the fifty-two students who applied for the job from my college, I never thought that I’d be the one to land it. My grades were good, but so were those of the other applicants, and they’d all held prestigious internships at banks and law firms and showed up at the Bloomington Mutual informational meeting looking like they already had the job. I remember walking in and seeing them all there assembled in the career center’s main receiving room, their neat leather folders and Mont Blanc pens poised for note taking, the girls in fresh-pressed navy wool suits that didn’t look like they’d once belonged to their mother (like mine had).

But to my great surprise the Bloomington Mutual managing director in charge of recruitment had been impressed with my work history. ‘There’s nothing like a nine-to-five to teach a kid real responsibility. These unpaid internships are a bunch of malarkey,’ she had grumbled during our one-on-one interview the following day. I got the impression that she’d worked her way through college and high school like I had and perhaps even recognized a younger version of herself in me. Or maybe she just liked the cut of my mother’s DKNY. Who knows? What matters is that she picked me and after briefly returning home to Minnesota to reorganize my belongings and earn some cash to pad out my near-empty bank account, I moved into a small apartment near Wrigley Field with a couple of my girlfriends from school and started working at the bank.

I was good at my job. I didn’t mind pulling all-nighters in preparation for a big pitch or meeting, and loved trying to make sense of the endless charts and graphs that we were forced to produce. My strengths, according to the progress reports I received, were in proofreading documents and writing deal memos, rather than in the more analytical aspects of my job. To be honest, I was happy to leave the number crunching, and economic modeling to the other analysts, and they were happy to turn to me for help synthesizing complex deals into readable reports.

Little by little I started making a name for myself at BlooMu, which is how we referred to the bank in-house. As I mentioned earlier, my bosses liked me. I think it was because I was respectful and always on time, and didn’t bring my ego into the office every day like a lot of my contemporaries. No task was too menial, no deadline impossible. When my two-year research-analyst program ended, I was asked to stay on as an associate, received a nice bump in pay, and a lot more responsibility. My managing director, a forty-something man who resembled a geekier Richard Gere, took a liking to me, and brought me on overseas trips—I saw London, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Berlin—all on one deal, a merger between two liquor conglomerates. I made polite and witty (if I do say so myself) conversation at client dinners and cocktail parties, took copious notes at meetings, and never, ever took advantage of my corporate card. Five years and many deals later, when my MD was promoted and a vice presidency spot opened up, the word at BlooMu was that I was a shoo-in for the job.

But around this time things had started getting serious with John. We had met at a mutual friend’s housewarming and he asked me to lunch. I didn’t hear from him for a while, but then one night he called and asked me if I wanted to come over for a drink. It was a booty call of course, but, hey, I was lonely. My brutal work schedule didn’t exactly leave much time for socializing and I had no better prospects beating down my door, begging me for a date.

The same was true for John and after about twenty-or-so of these late night calls, he invited me to go to Wisconsin with him for the weekend for a friend’s wedding. We had a nice time, and so when the next wedding cropped up, he asked me again, this time introducing me as his girlfriend. A bunch of his friends got married that year—I think I went to six nuptials in all—but it was the one in Minneapolis that I remember best. The bride came from Swedish stock, and in the old tradition of the Vikings, you had to drink a shot of aquavit every time someone got up to speak. Needless to say, John and I were both completely drunk by the time the herring appetizers had been cleared, and over a plate of meatballs smothered with lingonberry sauce, he told me that he loved me.

I nearly choked on my Wasa bread when he said it. I’d only ever thought of our relationship as a warming drawer—nice and toasty, but not exactly fiery—and he’d never once given me the impression that he thought I could be The One. But then it occurred to me that John wasn’t the passionate type, and I’d been misreading his signals all along. He asked me to move into his apartment, and then a year later he asked me to marry him. That’s when we started talking about our future together, where we wanted to live, how many kids we wanted, the mistakes our parents had made that we didn’t want to repeat. That sort of thing. John was easy on a lot of fronts, but he felt passionately about one thing: Once we had children, he wanted me to stay home and take care of them.

His mother Penny, short for Penelope, had been first a school teacher—she taught sixth-grade English at a private school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the posh suburb of Detroit where John grew up (and attended public school). She later became a real estate broker, and according to John, once she left teaching for real estate she became a real shrew. Penny was habitually rude to John’s father, who was a life insurance salesman and often brought home less income than she did, and was always too tired or too busy to make dinner (or breakfast and lunch, for that matter) or throw birthday parties for John and his younger brother Jake. She wore nothing but pastel twinsets and slacks, and had her nails done every Friday afternoon no matter what. John tells a heart-wrenching story about breaking his arm in Little League and having to wait on a plastic chair, his injured arm cradled in a makeshift sling while his mother’s fingers and toes were painted silver-flecked mauve.

Penny once confided in me that she’d gotten pregnant with John by accident and then, a couple years after he had been born, figured she’d have another baby so that John wouldn’t always be pulling on the bottom of her cardigans (‘stretching them out’). ‘He needed a playmate,’ she had said, smoothing a lock of dyed blond hair behind her ear.

John still resented her.

‘There’s no way I’m going to be like Penny,’ I told him over and over during our engagement, when it still seemed useful to discuss hypothetical middle grounds, like, what if the bank gave me a four-day workweek, or what if I could work from home. Eventually we figured out that there was no telling what the future would hold for us, but I knew for sure, that I, unlike Penny, wanted children. I wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of my middle-age years baking chocolate chip cookies, reading bedtime stories, and cheering at soccer games. I wanted nothing more than to become a mother. I liked working in finance but I didn’t want it to be my whole life.

Still, as much as I wanted to start a family with John, I was afraid of being dependent on him for financial security. I enjoyed the independence of having my own source of income, the feeling of empowerment that came with knowing that I could take care of our family if need be. What if the dynamics of our relationship changed for the worse? And what if John ever left me?

After much consideration, I eventually agreed to quit my job when I got pregnant with our first child. As afraid as I was of losing my independence, I was more fearful of losing John. He made me feel so safe. With him, I never felt alone, and the awful memories of my childhood didn’t seem to affect me as much. My parents had fought constantly and sometimes violently, and I knew that with John I’d be able to give our children the sense of security my sister and I had lacked growing up. And really, that’s what mattered most to me: creating a peaceful home environment. No lying, no yelling, and no hitting.

Caving into John, however, meant that even if I got the promotion to vice president at the BlooMu, I would eventually have to quit. But I never got to make that decision for myself, thanks to Michelle, a blonde from Evanston, Illinois. Pretty and well put together, Michelle had enough ambition and charisma to make up for what she lacked in intelligence and diligence. I sometimes had to cover for her at work, but she ingratiated herself with me by teaching me a battery of useful tricks, like how to use hair powder when I didn’t have time to shower or that tying a scarf through the belt loops of my suit pants could add a little flair to my outfit. My big mistake was confiding in Michelle that I wanted the vice presidency but was planning on leaving the bank as soon as I got pregnant. The next day she marched straight past me into our MD’s office and told him what I’d said. Before the end of the week, Michelle was announced as the bank’s newest vice president.

Michelle did her best to drive me out of the bank, and I did my best not to hurl her little plastic deal trophies at her face every time she called me into her office. But it wasn’t for another year when I was passed over again for a promotion (for reasons I still don’t understand) that I started thinking about requesting a transfer to another department.

The only thing open at the time was a job in private client services. Whenever anyone on the investment banking side went there, we joked that they were being ‘put out to pasture’, or that they weren’t ‘hungry’, meaning they’d lost their drive and couldn’t hack it in the big leagues. Some of the other bankers referred to it as ‘early retirement’. But I was desperate and determined, and spent the next three weeks begging everyone who would listen to me why I should be allowed to become relationship officer for the bank’s high net worth clients. Thankfully I’d built up enough goodwill at the bank to win the job on probation.

If the bosses at BlooMu had banked on me growing bored with client relations, they must have been surprised at how quickly I took to it. Even I hadn’t expected to find my new post as stimulating as my last, but it was. Whoever said figuring out how to weight a client’s portfolio in stocks, bonds, and alternative assets was less challenging than, say, charting the expected increase in economies of scale following a corporate merger was dead wrong. Plus in private wealth management I went to a lot of charity balls and fancy dinners and learned all about gourmet food, fine wine, flowers, décor, and etiquette—basically all the things that the daughter of a Post-it Note salesman (my dad worked as a B-to-B account manager for 3M) wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise. I went on golf weekends in Palm Beach, wine tours in Napa Valley, and to the Art Institute of Chicago’s big gala when Bloomington Mutual was one of the fundraiser’s main sponsors. Michelle got the big job, but I got the better one—one that, lo and behold, had prepared me better than I could have ever imagined for my new life in New York. It would be many months before I had this epiphany, but when it finally came, it would be worth the wait.