Hedge Fund Wives

The Workaholic, on the other hand, will inform you that you’ll be splitting the bill even before the waiter takes your drink order—and even though both of you know she’ll be expensing it, along with the black town car hovering outside the restaurant’s front door and the holiday gift—a crate of halfway decent California cabernet—she’ll be sending you in December. Like her husband, the Workaholic is married firstly to her high-powered, although not-quite-so-lucrative job as a magazine publisher/interior decorator/real-estate broker/corporate lawyer. She has no children and has talked herself into believing that she’ll be able to easily reproduce up until the age of fifty. But before you start feeling too sorry for the Workaholic, remember that she has a closet full of perfectly tailored Akris suits and Manolo Blahnik heels, takes pleasure in tearing her workplace underlings to shreds, and has a seven-figure bank account in the Cayman Islands that even her husband doesn’t know exists. ‘What’s his is mine and what’s mine is mine,’ is her motto. Welcome to the hedge fund wives’ version of women’s lib.

Of course, the Workaholic’s exact opposite, the Breeder, is hardly a poster child for the feminist movement either. Of all the hedge fund wives, the Breeder is the easiest to identify. She’s often sporting a big, pregnant belly and either carrying a new tot in a shearling-lined Louis Vuitton baby carrier or pushing one in a Bugaboo stroller. And in case you happen to catch her without one of her three, four, or five children, she wears their baubleequivalents—little enamel and gold shoes—on a chain around her neck.

By the time Jill had finished schooling me on the seven types of hedge fund wives, the cake plates had been cleared and Caroline had opened all of her gifts (I’d never seen so much Tiffany silver in my life). Jill walked me down to the entry foyer, where we were both given our gift bags and stood waiting for our coats when Ainsley sidled up to Jill to ask her if she was coming to her annual holiday party. ‘I can’t come. Glenn’s parents are expecting us in Oyster Bay that weekend,’ she said.

‘Oh really, that’s too bad,’ Ainsley pouted.

‘Why don’t you invite Marcy and her husband John?’ Jill suggested.

Ainsley protested, stammering through a half-cooked explanation that it was really just a small get-together and her husband Peter was already complaining about the number of people she’d invited. Jill pointed out that since she wasn’t coming, it wasn’t like John and I would be adding to the final number of guests. I felt stupid standing there as the girls argued about me, but I’d also visited the champagne fountain enough times over the course of the afternoon to dull my sense of shame and self-pity.

‘I suppose two more isn’t a big deal,’ Ainsley finally growled at Jill, tossing a handful of her long, pale blond hair behind her back. She turned to face me. ‘The party is in two weeks, Jill can fill you in on the rest,’ she said. Then she grabbed her fur from a patiently waiting maid and stomped outside.

‘Now you get to see Ainsley’s apartment and meet some of the other wives who weren’t here today,’ Jill said. She was quite pleased with herself, having exercised her considerable social power for seemingly good use.

‘I know. I can’t wait, I just wish that you were going to be there.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ she said before wafting outdoors into the brilliant sunshine, ‘as long as you don’t wear that coat.’

THREE Missing Spanx and Other Morning-after Anxieties

Two weeks later, on the morning after the Partridge’s annual Christmas party, I woke up with a lethal case of cottonmouth, throbbing head, and little memory of what had happened after half-past one the night before. Plus I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d done something really life-altering embarrassing, like maybe-I-need-to-move-to-Dubai-now embarrassing. Then the phone rang, punctuating the merciful silence of my darkened, cool bedroom with a sound so shrill, so loud, it made my brain feel like it was imploding on itself, and I lunged for the bedside table to snap it up, if only to prevent it from ringing again.

‘Hello?’ I croaked.

‘Good morning.’ It was John, my husband, who was predictably at work even though it was a Sunday, and according to the clock on my bedside table, not even nine o’clock.

‘Oh, I get it—you’re being ironic,’ I said.

I quickly calculated: The man had had at most four hours’ sleep the previous night. How and for God’s sake why he had made it into work when his appearance wasn’t required was beyond me. Was he in a bad mood because he felt just as hung over as I did or because of something else? Something involving me and the bottle of tequila with which I had spent the better portion of last night familiarizing myself ?

‘How are you feeling?’ John asked humorlessly.

‘About as bad as I sound, maybe worse,’ I said. ‘What happened last night anyway? I don’t remember anything after we ordered that second bottle of Patron.’

‘So you don’t remember the incident?’ he asked.

‘Incident? What incident?’ I didn’t like the sound of that word. It sounded like something that required the involvement of the police and lawyers, documents and affidavits, judges and juries. This couldn’t be good.

‘There was an altercation at the bar,’ John continued.

‘With who?’

‘With whom,’ he corrected me.

My husband, the grammar nut. I blamed his pedantry on his mother, a former middle school English teacher turned real estate broker, with whom (thank you, John) I had what I called a ‘civil’ relationship. Let’s just say that after almost seven years of marriage I’d learned to put up with the things I couldn’t change.

‘Okay…whom?’ I asked again.

‘A girl. She meant to throw her drink at Ainsley, but Ainsley ducked and it hit you instead.’

‘It did?’ I couldn’t believe that I didn’t remember having a drink thrown in my face. The only other time I’d blacked out was during my sophomore year of college, when I drank one (okay, six) too many beers while tailgating a Northwestern football game. ‘So then what happened?’ I asked.

‘You threw your drink right back at her.’

‘I did?’

‘Then she said something and you shoved her and then she socked you in the face.’

Feeling the tender spot around my eye, I uttered, ‘Are you serious?’

‘Yeah. I would have tried to protect you, but it happened too fast.’

‘Do you know why I shoved her? I mean it’s not exactly like me to engage in bar brawls.’

I heard John shuffling some papers, the sound of a drawer opening, and I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me. He always went into organizational mode when he was holding something back. It was his tell.

‘Spill,’ I said.

‘The girl who hit you…’ He paused, weighing his options.

‘Yes?’

‘She told you to put your girdle back on.’

‘Spanx. Girdles are for grandmothers. There’s a difference.’

‘I’m just repeating what the girl said. Can we not get lost in semantics, please?’

‘Alright, why were my Spanx off ?’

‘You tell me. You’re the one who took them off.’

‘Did I take them off…in public, in front of other people?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

Oh fuck.

‘You took off your stockings, too,’ he added, unbidden.

Doublefuck.

‘But I wasn’t wearing any underwear!’ The dress I’d worn was a little (okay, a lot) on the short side. Everyone in that club must have gotten an eyeful of my Britney Spears. For a moment everything went dark, and I had to move a pillow under my head.

‘Everyone must think I’m a lunatic. Why didn’t you stop me?’

‘Marcy,’ he sighed. ‘Of course I tried to stop you. But you wouldn’t listen.’

‘Did I slur?’ It was a masochistic question, but I needed to know everything.

‘There was slurring, drooling, stumbling, spilling, nudity, and fighting. Shall I continue or was that enough?’

‘John, help me out. I’m mortified!’

‘Well then that makes two of us,’ he said, and I realized that as stupid as I felt, John must have felt ten times more embarrassed. After all, I didn’t ever have to face these people again if I didn’t want to, but John had no choice; he worked with them every day.

I cleared my throat. ‘I’m sorry, honey. I know what a big deal it was to you that I make a good impression,’ I said.

‘Actually you sort of did,’ he grumbled. ‘Peter thought you were hilarious and Ainsley felt so bad after that girl decked you. They want us to all have dinner after New Year’s. Go figure.’

I’d rather let John control the TV remote for the next five years than have to go to dinner with the socialite and her husband.

I groaned dramatically.

‘Marcy, we aren’t in Chicago anymore. New York works differently. Deals aren’t made in conference rooms, but over cocktails and dinner tables. Zenith rewards rainmakers, the guys who are good at reeling in potential new investors. If I could do that, I could be pulling in much bigger bucks.’

‘But, John, we have plenty of money.’

‘My portfolio has outperformed all the partners’ expectations, and I’ve been rewarded for that, but I’m never going to move up the ladder if I don’t start bringing in new capital. And to bring in new money, we need to be out there meeting the people who have it.’

‘You want to rub shoulders with rich people. I don’t understand how this requires my involvement.’

‘I’d like for you to get us invited to more parties like the Partridge’s. Last night I met a Venezuelan banking scion and an Ecuadorian flower exporter. They want to set up a dinner and talk about Zenith’s investment returns. And why? Because they saw us with the Partridges and figure we’re connected. Marcy, despite, or maybe because of the crap you pulled last night, people here love you. You had tons of friends in Chicago. I know that if you set your mind to it you could get us invited to the right parties and fundraisers.’

‘John, you know I’m not big on schmooze fests. Can’t you just go out without me?’ I gulped down the glass of water on his bedside table since mine was already empty. My headache was getting worse by the second.

‘It looks bad for a guy to be at parties on his own. People will think I’m trolling for chicks.’

I spit my water back into the glass. ‘Say what?’

‘My point is that I want you with me. All you have to do is be your normal, charming, and hopefully not inebriated self, and I’ll do all the real work. We might have to throw a few dinner parties when our apartment is ready, but otherwise your actual input is minimal.’

‘I don’t know, John. I thought we agreed that we were going to focus on getting pregnant again. What I want is a baby, for us to be on diaper-duty, not schmooze-control every night of the week. That’s not at all how I pictured our lives here.’

‘So you’re telling me that you have no interest in making friends and having fun? Because basically that’s what I’m asking you to do. And I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to get pregnant again before you have a chance to form a social network. God forbid if anything happens next time, you’ll at least have some friends to lean upon for support.’

‘I’d rather lean on barbed wire than any of the wives I’ve met.’ I snorted.

He sighed with exasperation.

‘John, one woman wouldn’t shake my hand, another snubbed me because I don’t have an interior decorator, and just last night someone sneered at me because she didn’t like my dress.’

‘They can’t all be that bad.’

‘There are two nice ones,’ I confessed.

‘I know you miss Chicago, but it’s time you start trying a little harder to settle in.’

‘Umm, need I remind you of what happens when I attempt to settle in? I get blind drunk and moon people.’

‘How about you try skipping the tequila next time?’

‘Sober socializing? No, thanks. My couch is way too comfy,’ I joked.

‘You owe me after last night,’ he said, in a tone that suggested I not attempt to breathe any more levity into the conversation.

In the spirit of moving forward, I decided to make a concession. Also because I felt really guilty about having made such a total idiot of myself in, of all places, the Rose Bar in the Gramercy Park Hotel. It was the hot spot in New York; on any given night it was filled to capacity with the city’s most influential editors, wealthiest power brokers, and hottest model-actress-socialite-whatevers (the new ubiquitous hyphenate). If it were up to me I’d never set foot in there again, but if I ever wanted to get the baby I’d dreamed of having, it sounded like I had to.

‘Okay, John, but once I have a so-called social network, then can we try again for a baby?’

‘Whatever you want, Marcy.’

‘Then I guess we have a deal,’ I said.

‘That’s my girl.’

‘I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?’

Oh, if only I’d known.

FOUR The Worst Hedge Fund Wife on the Planet

Heaving myself out of bed, I guzzled down the rest of my glass of water and threw on an old T-shirt and a pair of John’s boxers. Sunlight poured through a gap in our curtains, illuminating a wedge of vanilla carpet where my outfit from the previous night lay in a sad little heap. I picked it up and tossed it in the little hamper we used to collect our dry cleaning, then retrieved my shoes, a pair of leg-lengthening, bank-breaking black pumps, and my quilted black satin clutch, both from Chanel, both carelessly scattered around the room. I shelved them in their appropriate tissue-lined boxes while at the same time eyeing the floor for my stockings and Spanx.

Oh right, I’d left those at the club.

Along with my self-respect.

Nice.

I needed coffee, lots of it. Without it, I knew I would be unable to function for the entire day, not that I had anything in particular to do, but still. I slipped on my fleece slippers and padded over to the kitchen, where I sloshed some milk in a saucepan, ground some coffee beans and dumped the entire grinder’s worth of grounds into the liner. Once it was brewed, I poured a couple cups of the coffee into the saucepan with the warmed milk and then emptied the whole mixture into the red-and-white snowflake mug I’d used since high school. If there was one thing I had down to a science, it was making coffee just the way I liked it.

Taking my first gulp of the hot, dark liquid, I peered inside the refrigerator, where I found the signs of a drunken, middle-of-the-night food binge—the pumpkin pie I had made two days earlier was almost entirely eaten and one of my earrings was nestled in between a halfeaten round of Camembert and a carton of orange juice that had been full when we had left for the Partridges but was now mostly gone. Feeling even more disgusted with myself, I closed the door of the fridge and looked down at my stomach. It was bloated and distended.

Gross.

My head pounded behind my left eye socket, and without thinking I reached up to apply pressure on it, causing a thunderbolt of pain to rip through my head as soon as my fingers made contact. I stooped down to check my reflection in the mirrored backsplash, only to have my fears confirmed: I had the beginnings of a black eye. A real, Oscar-de-la-Hoya-worthy shiner. It was gonna be ugly.

Gulping down another mouthful of coffee, I started trying to piece together the previous night’s timeline. There had been three glasses of champagne, which I had downed in rapid succession. Not advisable, obviously, but I always drink quickly when I’m nervous, and that night, surrounded by John’s hyperwealthy colleagues and their expensively maintained wives, I certainly had cause to be. You see, it was pretty clear that most of the other wives at the Partridges’ party grew up with nannies and private school kilts hemmed just so, while I had carried a house key around my neck on a dingy white shoelace and braved the Minnesota winters in multigenerational hand-me-downs. Even last night, wearing a new designer dress and multiple coats of a new mascara the woman behind the cosmetics counter swore was what all the movie stars use, I still felt like a prairie girl among princesses.

However, for John, I put on a brave face. He seemed to be reveling in our transition into a higher tax bracket and new city as much as I was floundering in it. Since being recruited by Zenith from his desk at the Merc, John had been completely obsessed with his work. His job as a specialist in trading energy derivatives required him to, for example, predict, hopefully correctly, how much the price of a barrel of oil was going to rise over the next quarter and why. It was all tremendously complicated, time-consuming, and stressful, but it turned out that John was really good at it, and in the span of less than a year, he’d managed to make the fund an obscene amount of money, which had in turn made us wealthier than we’d ever dared to dream.

For anyone without an intimate understanding of what hedge funds do, in a nutshell they invest other people’s money. We’re talking super-wealthy individuals who have the five to twenty million dollars you need to play ball with these funds just lying around, gathering dust, twiddling their little green thumbs. If everything goes right, the investors get back whatever profit (or return) is made, minus twenty percent and two percent of the total investment that the fund keeps as compensation. (A few managers take a full fifty percent of the profits, but they’re more the exception than the rule.)

For a long stretch of time everything did go right—the rich got richer and a bunch of guys in the right place at the right time minted huge fortunes virtually overnight. And then the economy tanked, and the party was suddenly over.

John and I were a total anomaly. While we were upgrading our furniture and researching luxury vacations, the rest of Wall Street was taking it on the chin. The banks had all underestimated their exposure to the subprime mortgage industry meltdown and had been forced to write off billions of dollars. As they started reining in on the amount of loans they were making to small and large businesses, deal flow slowed and with fewer deals in the pipeline, profits dipped. Soon thereafter pink slips started to fly. The Federal Reserve intervened to save the banks from going under, but at the expense of the dollar, which sank even lower in value. To make matters worse, the boost U.S. exports received as a result of the weak dollar was far smaller than previously anticipated or hoped for, and the president’s pro-ethanol policy was making the cost of all food higher as Midwestern farmers ditched less profitable crops in order to grow corn. To top it all off the Saudis were once again raising the price of crude, mainly because of the weakening dollar. The long run of American prosperity was coming to an end.

But not for us. Ours was just starting.

Although we were lucky, I didn’t feel like it. Moving to New York had been difficult for me. Okay, gut wrenching. Shortly after our relocation, I had gotten pregnant. A dream, since we’d spent a year trying before it finally happened. You could say that I was—and am

- totally obsessed with babies. I love the way they smell, the sounds they make when they eat, their tiny little hands making angry little fists when they cry. It hadn’t mattered to me that I vomited five times a day and could only stomach Saltines and cheese sandwiches for the duration of the whole first trimester. I’d watch those Gerber baby commercials on television and just melt with happiness. I was going to be a mom.

Everything was going great until I hit the twenty-week mark and started bleeding. First it was just some spotting, but when the flow got heavier, my doctor put me on monitored bed rest in the hospital and they shot me full of drugs that were supposed to help. But it was too late. I miscarried. It wasn’t meant to be, the doctor said. We’d try again, John said. A lot of people said a lot of things, but nothing could allay the pain. My world was black. I couldn’t stop crying. For weeks, all I did was cry. Cry and eat cheese—Burrata, fresh off the plane from Tuscany, weeping with moisture, and Stilton from England, massive slabs of the salty, piquant stuff. John brought me only the best, unpasteurized, illegal cheese. I could eat it now: I wasn’t pregnant anymore. There was no danger of ingesting a piece of Listeria-laden fromage and losing the baby.

I had sat on our new couch, my misery wrapped around me like a blanket, and thought of my baby. I wondered what he would have looked like, whether he would have inherited John’s blondish hair or my dark locks, John’s lean, athletic build, or my softer, shorter one. Would he have been popular? Bookish? Funny? Preferred pancakes to waffles, bacon to sausages? I’d never know. All I could do was imagine. Imagine and then weep. I told John that I wanted us to move back to Chicago. New York held only unhappiness for me. I missed our old lives and I missed our friends.

‘We’ll make more,’ he assured me.

Now in the kitchen, I considered the empty seat at the breakfast table and silently cursed John for making me go to the Partridges. I had wanted to stay home and watch an episode of Lost, but he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I promise, once you have a glass of wine and start talking to people, you’ll be glad you’re there,’ he’d argued, and when I still refused to budge from our big comfy couch, he pulled out the heavy artillery: ‘My bosses will be there. It won’t look good if you’re not with me.’

I harrumphed, unimpressed.

‘We haven’t been out in months. Don’t I deserve a night out with my wife every once in a while?’

Thus reminded that I, baby or no baby, still had some wifely responsibilities to perform, I pried myself off the couch and let him prod me into our bedroom in the direction of our walk-in closet, where I squirmed into my trusty Spanx, a pair of stockings, and that stupid dress. And although I had resigned myself to spending the night quietly sipping champagne in a corner, hoping that no one noticed what a big, friendless loser I was, I actually ended up having a good time.

The highlight of the evening had been—no, not the tequila—but meeting Gigi Ambrose, the well-known caterer, cookbook author, and frequent Today Show guest. With masses of auburn hair, Jessica Rabbit curves, and enough Southern sass for a whole cotillion’s worth of debutantes, she was the kind of woman you want to hate, but can’t. She was too charming, and on top of that, her recipes had always served me well in the kitchen. Even so it had taken me half an hour to work up the nerve to walk up to her and introduce myself.

‘I love the kumquat glazed chicken skewers,’ I’d said in reference to one of the hors d’oeuvres being passed around on silver trays that evening. There had also been caviar-topped quail eggs, blue cheese and candied fig tartlets, not to mention grilled polenta squares and seared tuna bites. But the chicken skewers had been my favorite, and as a conversation opener I had asked Gigi if she’d included the recipe for them in her next book, a home entertaining guide she’d already started promoting on her Today Show segments.

‘Oh, I’m not catering tonight,’ Gigi had drawled in response. Her voice was deep and warm, and she smelled of vanilla and rosewood. ‘Ainsley went with another company, which is more than fine by me. I’m here with my husband.’

‘I am, too,’ I said just as a woman in a chinchilla coat clomped through the doorway on five-inch platform heels. She had raven hair, large, probably surgically enhanced breasts, and a thin gold phone pressed to her ear. She was barking something in Russian into it. Later I would learn from Gigi that the fembot’s name was Irina and she called herself a matchmaker, but most believed her to be a madam. Irina set up pretty Russian girls, many just off the plane, with rich old men who wanted hot young things to take to dinner—and then home to bed. Eliot Spitzer was rumored to have been one of her better customers.