Primates of Park Avenue (22 page)

“And all bets are off on the weekend,” a friend explained when I asked her the rules. Meaning, start in the morning if you want, and have wine for lunch and a cocktail before dinner and more wine with dinner. For many of the women with kids I know in Manhattan—women who wore sunglasses in the school hallways on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday mornings—drinking is way to self-soothe and self-medicate, a solution of sorts, something to bring on sleep, a reward for surviving the cab ride, the crosstown schlep, the argument with the nanny. Seeing someone underfed but overserved at a gala or dinner out, seeing someone who needs to be poured into her car by her driver, is nothing unusual. People might whisper about it the next day if you go
really
crazy, but there’s a basic understanding and unspoken agreement, and it is this: “We drink. No big deal.” There’s a spectrum, of course, from teetotaling to being an alcoholic. But what struck me as I drank with the women around me was that, be it psychological, social, or emotional, the drinking was mainly, to my eye, tribal. It is virtually comme il faut because it is part of the culture and it is part of the culture in large part because it works on the worry. “They need a bar in the pediatric ER!” Candace told me emphatically after her trip there with her son.

And not just alcohol. On the Upper East Side, benzodiazepines are a girl’s best friend. Plenty of the Manhattan mommies I knew relied on prescription drugs, daily. Ativan. Xanax. Valium. Klonopin. Ambien—they had them all, and weren’t afraid to take them. Frequently, they mixed them with wine, as was the regular practice of a glam fashion designer and mommy of two whose head was frequently in her plate at an Upper East Side restaurant of the moment—at lunch. The women I knew took antianxiety meds to fall asleep. They took them in the middle of the night, when they woke up with their hearts pounding, panicking about schools or money or whether their husbands were faithful. They took them to calm their nerves before drop-off or a luncheon where they expected to encounter more frenemies than friends (the mere idea of seeing the Queen of Queen Bees at an event, with her sneering and snideness, made me want to reach for a flask). And they took them again when they wore off. I wasn’t judging, really. I used benzos myself to medicate for my phobia of flying, and one day in the school elevator, overhearing another mother, a perfect stranger, tell her friend that she hated flying and Xanax didn’t help, I turned to her and suggested, with great authority and no self-consciousness, “
That’s because you have to take
it with a Bloody Mary
!” We had never seen each other before, let alone spoken.

Some women will leave off their wine and their benzos as their kids get older. For them, these are a way to smother the stress of being in charge of your children and the people in charge of your children and everything around you, all the time. When the kids are older and in school all day and the hand-to-hand-combat phase of mothering begins to fade, so does their using. But for a portion of these mothers, drinking and drugs are more than a phase. For them, motherhood doesn’t just incite the urge to drink and mix; it masks it, providing a convenient pretext and deep cover. Everybody else is doing it. So no one notices. Some of the privileged mommies will develop “a problem.” At an Upper East Side AA outpost located in a church between the Prada and Ralph Lauren storefronts on Madison Avenue, exquisite, lean mommies decked out in Chanel and Céline and Valentino, all just a few blocks south, avail themselves of the program’s child care option so they can slip into a meeting. They are a secretive tribe within a tribe and they will never, ever tell. At parties, they will arrive early and carefully request something that looks like wine in a wineglass. At a moms’ dinner at Serafina, they will pass off tonic with lime as a vodka tonic. They will say they’re not drinking because of antibiotics, or a headache or an early appointment the next day. They will keep up appearances and save face, because that is the rule and the way. At their AA meetings, they will settle halfway into their chairs without ever really relaxing, rustling in place like slender, nervous racehorses, their faces tense with effort and worry. Really, it could be lunch at Le Bilboquet, the unmarked restaurant and gathering place of the tribe around the corner. All that is missing is the glass of wine.

But wine cannot blunt the biggest anxieties. One of these, I realized after the evening at Rebecca’s, was
dependency
. The more I watched and listened and lunched and drank with the UES mothers around me, the more I saw that for many of them, their lives, happiness, and very identities hinged on things and people entirely outside their control.

Economic dependency on their husbands, I came to believe, kept many of the women I knew awake at night, whether they realized it or not. The knowledge that their husbands could leave them for someone else, the simple realization that they could not support themselves without him, seemed to gnaw at some of the women I knew as badly as their hunger pain. Some told me, in hushed tones, that like their mothers and grandmothers, they had secret bank accounts where they stashed their allowances and other money they had access to “just in case.” Several women clued me in about “year-end bonuses” husband gave their wives—as if they were employees rather than partners. “My mother told me to get as much jewelry as possible from my husband. As insurance,” a woman told me wryly as we chatted on a playground bench about a mutual acquaintance’s spectacularly acrimonious and very public divorce. My interlocutress had graduated summa cum laude from an Ivy. She also had an MBA. But she had never worked.

“The very type of woman who is drawn to a master of the universe type,” Manhattan clinical psychologist and author Stephanie Newman told me when I asked her about anxiety and economic dependency in her Upper East Side practice, “may well end up feeling marginalized in her own home, fearful that she cannot fend for herself and support her children.” And if things do go wrong in her marriage, “divorce may be no solution, in practical and emotional terms” observes Rachel Blakeman, LCSW/JD, “for a woman whose self concept is entirely wrapped up in having a perfect marriage.” For many such women, there is no way out of this conundrum—being married to a rich and powerful man—that had at first felt like The Answer.

“She shouldn’t flirt with other women’s husbands!” women told me pointedly about a beautiful French mother and investment banker, a mom at another school, when I asked why so many of the mommies at our school seemed ambivalent about her. She was a transfer to the troop, having married a wealthy New York native, and she apparently found the tribe’s sex segregation practices as bewildering as I did. Like me, she could often be seen talking to men at the kids’ birthday parties and concerts. Probably drumming up business, I figured, and trying to have a little fun. I found her glamorous and smart, and always searched her out. I made a point of putting my husband in her path, too. Wasn’t any woman who flirted with him doing me a favor? If he was in a good mood, my life was easier. And safe fun and titillation didn’t seem like much to ask in exchange for a lifetime of commitment. But for women who felt their marriages and motherhood were their entire identities, and their husbands their only lifelines, I came to realize, flirtation was anxiety inducing, even terrifying. It suggested the possibility and stood as a reminder that it could all be taken away.

Some of these women were economically dependent not only on their husbands, but on their husband’s parents. Much of the spectacular wealth on the Upper East Side is intergenerational, which can lead to strangely infantilized relationships between young adults (and not-so-young adults) and their parents or in-laws. More than one woman described to me the strange pressure of needing to please one’s in-laws because they held the financial purse strings. “My husband basically stands to inherit a lot and that gives his parents very real power over our lives,” she explained simply as we walked behind the group on a school field trip. Chatting about school tuition, which she said her in-laws paid, had led us here. She showed me her iPhone calendar, reading off a series of appointments and luncheons to which she would ferry and accompany her mother-in-law the next week. “It’s not that I don’t want to help out. It’s that there’s this unspoken script that I
owe
it, because they bought our apartment as a wedding gift, and my husband works for his father’s business.” Another women described a typical Upper East Side situation: she and her husband wanted a place of their own out at the beach for themselves and their two young children. Her husband’s parents had nixed the idea, saying their own place was much bigger, they had room for them there, and so their plan didn’t make “sense.” Her in-laws were being generous, financially and emotionally, but it cost the younger generation something, because they were also being controlling. “It would be nice to feel like we were the grown-ups,” she told me flatly. “It would be nice to have our own place and some independence.” Her situation is more common than not in the tribe I studied. Many very wealthy people in my town are, on some level, waiting for their even wealthier elders to die, with mixed feelings about it.

Other rich women I knew on the Upper East Side had money of their “own”—but often this meant being financially dependent on and emotionally beholden to their
fathers.
“I’m not complaining,” one woman told me about her parents’ significant wealth, wealth she and her sister stood to inherit, wealth she benefited from every day in the form of her bankrolled apartment and trips to Aspen and children’s educations. “But it’s weird for my husband.” Often, a husband works for his powerful father-in-law, or trades on his father in law’s cultural capital to forge his own business, professional relationships, and deals. Rarely is this state of affairs uncomplicated, because economic dependency is almost never free. Rachel Blakeman, a social worker and psychoanalyst on the Upper East Side told me, “No matter how good the deal feels financially, being beholden to someone else for your well-being and that of your kids is often emotionally costly. It can create resentment, insecurity, and all kinds of issues for a person and in a marriage.”

Our ancestors, women who gathered (and some who hunted, as Agta women still do today) had autonomy and a voice in their communities and power in their partnerships because the food they brought in, the calories they supplied, made them indispensable. Not much has changed. And so, often, the women I studied and knew and had coffee with seemed something even beyond economically dependent. In many instances their very identities seemed continent and relational, hinging on their relationships—to their friends and in-laws and parents, but most of all to their husbands and children. If you are not in a perfect marriage—and who is?—then how can you be a powerful man’s perfect wife? If you do not have perfect children—and who does?—then how can you be a perfect mother, or even a good one? And how can you save face? Divorce is not an option, and neither is trading in the imperfect children you love for perfect ones. Many of the women I knew suffered from the strange, culturally specific anxiety of being an extension of and reflection of someone else. In this sense, even their identities, their very selves, were not precisely or entirely their own.

“Thank
God
that’s over,” Candace exclaimed over lunch once her husband had transitioned to his new job. I thought she meant it was stressful to be unsure where he would land, or to contemplate a period of time without income. But Candace shook her head. “No, I mean
I
can relax now. I had to look really good every second while he was out there because that’s how it is here, especially if you’re asking people for something. Pass me the bread.” There it was—that unique stress. In this honor/shame culture, having a high status husband made you a high status wife. But having a great-looking wife—beautiful, with an enviable body and wardrobe and social connections to wives of other powerful men—could also reinforce and even boost a husband’s own social rank and professional status. Candace’s husband did, in part, owe his career to how good Candace looked in her Azzedine Alaïa dresses, to her social dexterity, her ability to charm just about everyone. Wives were their husband’s expensive baubles and bottles of wine, proof of their awesomeness, and husbands were their wives’ meal tickets. Talk about anxiety. Another plague. Another drop of wine. Another glass. And another.