Opening Belle (13 page)

I jump from the tub, covered in stealth bubbles, and run naked to my phone. I call Bruce again from a different extension of the hotel phone. When I hear him lift, I scream, “We're rich, we're rich!” but his fingers are too fast, and again I hear dial tone. “Screw you,” I mutter, but I'm smiling into an obnoxiously gilded mirror in front of me while soap bubbles slop everywhere off my body.

I dance, I jiggle, and the housekeeping staff that promises to have the worst timing in the world is knocking on the door, probably to turn down my bed and put chocolates that nobody eats on my pillow.

“Not tonight,” I yell as I run for the robe, afraid they'll barge in anyway. The knocking continues. I knot up the robe and head to the door.

“Yes?” I fling back the door, ready to tell my tale to the maid, ready to push twenty-dollar bills in her hand to just skip my room. The adrenaline from the last minute has given me super-strength and I open the door so hard it swings open, smacks against the jamb, and shuts itself. In that second of exposing myself, my face flushed, terry robe hanging in some state of openness, there, in friendly bright-colored shorts and a blue shirt turned up at the wrists, with his face more defined and handsome than fifteen years ago and sporting a grin, that same grin that melted me so very long ago, is Henry.

I stare at the closed door with Henry on the other side. I tighten the robe up to my neck and reach to fix my wet hair. I feel a mound of shampoo suds sitting intact like a Bishop Peak up there. My hand reaches for the knob, and pauses as I get hold of myself and wonder what my next move should be.

W
HEN MY FATHER
was in that despair of metastasized cancer and we were getting beyond any thoughts of good news, I would sit in sterile rooms, partly frozen, braced in locked-down position for more bad news. At these moments, when the weight felt so heavy as to push me deeper in the earth, my mind would yearn for a day of nondescription, a day like any other that got bunched and filed in my drawer under “previous life.” I yearned for normalcy and monotony, where conversations between my father and me could consist of music and weather. I wondered about times in our past when I was eager to get off the phone to rush to do something as mundane as answering a client's call, or going to get lunch. I couldn't remember those last times, before a chance diagnosis made cancer the only topic in the room. What did we talk about? If only I had known, how I would have savored that chat and stretched it out. I would have concentrated. I would have been present.

It is the same with the kids. When was the last time Brigid had ridden in a stroller? Was I frustrated on that last trip by her increasing size, or the fact her feet dragged on the ground because she had grown so tall? If I knew there was a very last time I was to push her, maybe I would have lingered in Central Park or bought that ice cream she wanted just to commemorate a final stage of infancy? When did Brigid stop saying “Weely, weely wuv wu” when I gave her a lollipop or read a story with energy, or snuggled with her while ignoring a ringing phone? When did it become “Thanks”?

Somewhere in the future, you may reach to remember something in your current everyday. You know there will be a final time you walk your daughter to school, or have the body that can nimbly ride a bike, or comfortably wear a bikini. Most things aren't there for us as long as we think they will be. And that was confusing me these days with Henry oddly in my life again. Last times were supposed to be final.

Henry isn't speaking as he stands in the doorway. I mumble something first, something awkward about being in a bathrobe, being confused about CeeV-TV, since I just heard the news. But he just stands there adjusting his dark hair, shaking his head in an amused, King-of-the-Hedge-Fund way. I know he bought CeeV-TV stock and put it into Cheetah's fund. I know he bought about 2 million shares with us alone, and that the commissions from that will pay for the second-grade tuition for Kevin. Henry is well on his way to being a partner. Hedge fund partner, multimillionaire, father of three—my Henry is the whole package. He must be ecstatic and here to personally thank me, to tell me we're all even on the preschool front, that he will no longer be such a moron in our professional lives. But instead his movements get curious, as if he is confused or about to cry or in a great deal of pain.

His beautiful smile twists, his brow furrows, and his hand that's holding up his giant frame in the doorway goes to his forehead. I want to say something further, to ask him what's wrong, but I don't because I still know him well. I'm still fluent in his body language, having mastered it long ago. He can say whatever he wants with words but his body says so much more. He can show off in an investment meeting, he can sit looking rapt with his kids in preschool chapel, but still after all this time, I think I know everything he feels.

His silence makes me want to fill it responsibly—I'm the good girl, the enabler, and I should cover this awkward moment and be the leader here. But the leader is tired of being responsible for so many people. I feel some twinge of damsel, and it feels interesting to try to not take charge; it feels almost feminine. I let the awkward pause hang in the air, letting him deal with it.

His left hand reaches out and firmly goes around my neck. He has always liked my neck. It's long but feels small clasped by his large hand and cold fingers.

“What?” I whisper, even though I know what.

He has no right to be touching my neck.

His other hand comes under my soapy hair. I briefly think how thin it must feel. My babies made my hair fall out, and it never returned to me—my follicles, shutting down and exhausted from thirty-six years of pushing out blond hair, and then brown hair that was abused into being blond again. When hormones pushed them out of my head, they surrendered, rolled over, and died. And now I was sure Henry would notice this. But I feel oddly proud. I have so much now, so much to show for my time away from Henry.

He pulls my wet hair away from my face in that way that tells me he doesn't care that my hair is wet or thin or that it's messing up his shirt. I know if I let him kiss me, it'll be that kiss I'll always compare Bruce's to. Henry's are soulful and deep and they take me somewhere otherworldly. For just a small minute I let him do it, telling myself this will only happen once, and then I make him stop.

•  •  •

In the morning he is gone. I wake up and I'm alone with a lingering smell of soap and Henry in the air. I'm certain he slipped out of bed, scrubbed meticulously, and headed to the gym. He showers
before
working out. I'll next see him at the conference, where I will already be in second place. Henry will have exercised; Henry will have read the paper and every news site. Henry will have all the details about CeeV-TV down cold. Henry will be ahead of me.

I rise from the bed to catch my reflection again in the gaudy mirror. There's a gleam in my eye. Is it the money? Is it Henry or CeeV-TV? I don't know. I do know I like being alone as my conscience does some sorting. Shouldn't I feel dirty and wrong? Does kissing qualify as cheating? How could I be a semi-part of this Glass Ceiling Club that hates having to cover for cheating men while I now straddle that line myself?

Feeling his hands on my face again awoke something that never really left me, something close to giddy. After a few knockout kisses, his hands started moving everywhere, and I finally clasped them behind his back and held them firmly with one hand while my other hand pointed directly into his face.

“We both don't want that,” I said matter-of-factly. “What we do want is to talk and we're only going to talk about what we get paid to talk about. Okay?”

“You mean to tell me this is now a business meeting?”

“You are correct.”

“Is there a punishment for misbehaving?”

“Expulsion. Immediate expulsion. No second chances,” I said, retying the bathrobe and jumping under what felt like twenty pounds of eiderdown in the comforter.

Henry stood, watching me until an idea came to him. He brought a hairbrush from the bathroom and began brushing my hair, reminding me of how I loved when he did this. But I took the brush from him. He then brought over the chair I had propped my computer on in the bathroom, sat on it, and sighed. There was total silence for thirty seconds.

“It's very lonely and cold on this chair.”

“You'll be okay.”

“Permission to lie down? I'm so damn tired.”

I laughed and held open the covers. I felt like I was nineteen. “Permission granted, but I meant what I said about the ‘no touching' rule.”

We were very well behaved in a Florida hotel room frozen by air conditioning. Henry and I talked for hours about subprime mortgage markets, money market options trading, TIPS, the price of gold, and the fluctuations of the Chinese yuan. We steered clear of the spouses and the six children that lived between us, and I never asked why he left me because at that moment I didn't need to know. I've always been attracted to Henry's brain as much as his body and I always learn something from him, even if we're pulling apart investment deals rather than clothing under the sheets. For us, all that talking was sexy.

Henry asked about work and for some reason I told him about the Glass Ceiling Club. He asked thoughtful, caring questions, soft questions, and I found myself telling him much more than I probably should have. I told him how both a part of and apart from the other women I felt, how frustrated I was not being able to get any further in the firm, and then I was quiet.

“But do these women really deserve to take it to the next step?”

“Some, yes.”

“And when you were more junior than you are today and men spoke shit to you, what did you do?”

“It bothered me less than it bothers most women. My skin is thicker.”

“Why is your skin thicker?”

I think about that. “I had an awesome dad, which I think is a nice vaccination for life. It also didn't hurt to not be rich. When you're scrabbling upward, the big picture is clearer. I didn't get sidetracked by bullshit.”

“Interesting. But it's the limitations that bother you. It's not the politically incorrect stuff. Your elevator stops one floor beneath the top, and you want the penthouse.”

“I'm mad someone is telling me where my career tops out, not letting me at least have the possibility of getting to the top. It burns my rubber to know I'm smarter than some of the guys in the penthouse and that I could do a better job than them.”

Henry smiles. “You really love the markets. That's always what's made this job for you. You love the story of the markets and that's why you stay. For most people the money is why they stay, but for us it's the markets.”

“I love the markets. I mean, every day is different in our jobs and we have to really care what the rest of the world is up to because what's going on in Europe matters. Whether or not the governments in the Middle East are getting along is something we need to know about. This job makes me feel connected to the world. I'm not sitting in some cubicle somewhere being isolated and out of touch and wondering how many subscribers my magazine will have this month or how many batteries my firm will need to buy. This job makes me feel alive.”

“We love the markets,” he said, and we grinned at each other in a total nerd-fest way.

“But look at Ina,” he says, referring to Ina Drew, a woman about ten years older than me, whose career seemed unstoppable. Men loved her. Women loved her. She kept getting promoted and managed to have two kids. She switched firms a few times but was now the chief investment officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and a member of their risk committee.

“Yeah, it sure looks like it's working out for her. Also Sallie Krawcheck, CFO of Citigroup, the world's largest bank.”

“So it can happen.”

“I guess. But isn't it pathetic that we all cite the same few names? In an industry that equals eight percent of the gross domestic product of this country. We can only point to two women who have made a total success of it?”

“Yes,” Henry said, and landed his hand on my familiar breast, as if he still had claim to it, making me falter for just an instant, because nobody over the age of two had touched that breast in several years. I'm not married to a boob guy. As nice as that may have felt, I removed the hand, hardly missing one beat of my story. I didn't want it there.

“The management is about to enforce its ‘one strike' rule,” I said.

“You're kicking me out?” he whimpered.

“I'm going to sleep,” I said, and rolled away and onto my stomach, and while I held still, Henry fell asleep the way a little kid does, waving a white flag of surrender. I thought about waking him and getting him out of my bed but instead just watched him and his muscled back through his shirt, rising and falling in time with his breath. His form was lit by a dimmed floor lamp, framing the last four hours like the back cover of a book, and for the first time in a very long time, I didn't feel so alone.

Henry has always been the type of man who can take care of things. In that moment of faux moonlight, I realized that's what I missed most in my current life. I'm fully capable of taking care of Bruce and our brood; it's just so much responsibility. It's so lonely. I stared at the indentation in my bed where Henry had slept, the ghost of so much love almost visible.

•  •  •

My cell phone rocks me out of my daze. It's Bruce. For a woman without guilt, my hand shakes badly as I take the call.

“Hi!” My voice is far too chipper.

“Hells Belle,” says a very cute Bruce. “I'm sitting here with Owen on my lap. Owen, what do you want to tell your mama?”

“Mommy has some money and Mommy will bring me new toys,” Owen informs me.