Opening Belle (3 page)

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 couple 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.

W
E 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 takes 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.”

Did she really just call me “Izzy,” like we're close friends?

“I mean, you heard those women in the bathroom tonight. They're basically prostituting themselves to move their careers. It's got to stop.”

Silence.

I don't confide in anyone I work with. This conversation catches me off guard. I try to think. What is she really up to?

“Yeah, well, I'm kind of busy?” I say weakly. I want to hear more. The women I know at work only say positive things about the place. It's not some morale-sucking post office. You don't get ahead with disparaging remarks, so we never say what we really think, we say what our bosses want to hear and accomplish big, capitalistic things at great human cost. Countless young MBAs are brought in, given little direction and ample verbal abuse, and most disappear within five years. The survivors—me included—are people who learn to look the other way. I'm not proud of my ability to do this, but I do it and beat myself up about it. I don't need a support group for this.

“Look, the way we all run around, it'll never happen—us getting together. Come. Really, you'll be surprised at who's here,” Amy says.

“Who
is
there?”

“Just come. The Ear Inn. In the south Village. I'm hanging up,” and with that, she does.

I'm drying my hair. I'm going to bed. What could they be meeting about?
Please
, I think,
now I'm even lying to myself. I have to go. I can't go. I shouldn't go. My family needs me. They need you? They don't even know you're home. I could leave the apartment again and Bruce would never know.

I slip on low-riding jeans I've just recently starved myself back into, and some boots with a killer three-inch heel. This brings my five-foot-eleven frame up significantly, and I feel slightly charged and something bordering excitement. I keep telling myself I'm not going and yet I keep getting dressed to go, as if I've surrendered to some powerful force. I crack the boys' bedroom door to see Bruce snoring on a chair with a Nate the Great detective story splayed across his chest. Three angelic-looking children breathe in and out simultaneously. Owen, my two-year-old, is facedown on the floor and not even in a bed, but everyone is safe and alive. I should wake Bruce and send him to bed. I should put Owen in his crib but the odds of waking him up are too high, and the idea of having to explain to Bruce where I'm going too complicated.

I tiptoe out of the room, down the hall, ring for the elevator, and reverse my route back into the cold, much to the interest of the late-night doorman.

I
PUSH PAST
a thick group of December sidewalk smokers, to enter a bar full of pool tables and skinny jeans. The women of Feagin Dixon are huddled around a table and an untouched pitcher of beer. In their business suits, they complicate the mood of the room like tourists in a world not their own. Here they look both familiar and strange to me. I pull up a chair and nobody acknowledges me. We don't instinctively make that high-pitched noise of excitement that women make to greet each other. We're cut from the same non-fun cloth; none of us grew up with money. We are scroungers who found a way to grow wealthy without a pedigree. We tend to not be girlfriend girls. We just want to do business and go home.