The Astronaut's Wife (8 page)

Jillian Armacost had had her doubts about Spencer leaving NASA and the two of them leaving Florida, particularly for a destination like New York City. But with the deaths of Alex and Natalie Streck, each grotesque in its own, unique way, she knew she could not stay there any longer. The place was haunted for her now, and perhaps a radical change of place and style of living might be enough to banish the bad memories and the hellish images.

And yet New York was quite a stretch. There were two fundamental problems to deal with. First off, the city itself—the noise, the confusion, the polyglot population—was disconcerting at first, but Jillian was sure that she could adapt to it.

With the other problem she wasn’t so sure. Suddenly and without warning, she found that she was rich. The aerospace corporation that had hired Spencer was paying him in a year what NASA paid in a decade. In addition to the salary, the company provided a vast duplex company apartment in the
heart of the Upper East Side, along with a company car—a Jaguar—that came with a private parking space that cost as much as the rent for a two bedroom apartment back in Florida. Jillian just wasn’t used to being able to afford anything she happened to see and the effects were quite disconcerting.

Oddly enough, and to Jillian’ s immense surprise, Spencer took to the New York way of living without the slightest hesitation. Without a second thought all of his old clothes went to Goodwill and he spent a couple of days outfitting himself at Bergdoff’s, Paul Stuart, and Barney’s. Jillian had to ad-mit that her husband looked pretty sharp and well turned out in his new clothes, but somehow he did not
quite
look like Spencer—that is,
Jillian‘s
Spencer.

In addition to all this, Jillian was not quite used to the social life that went along with corporate life. It seemed as if they went out at least five nights out of seven, but always during the week, never on Saturdays or Sundays—rich New Yorkers appeared to vanish on weekends— which was quite a bit more socializing than Jillian was used to.

The nature of the entertainment was different, too. Until the move to New York, Spencer and Jillian had socialized in bars not unlike the one where their tragic farewell party had been held— back-country taverns where the drink of choice was long-necked beers, where people only had scotch on their birthdays.

Now they went out to dinner almost every night.
New Yorkers of a certain type made a fetish out of first-class restaurants and if you didn’t know someone on the inside of the most chic restaurants in the city, you might have to wait up to a month for a reservation. Jillian had to admit the restaurants were fabulous, beautifully designed, with exquisite food faultlessly served. One thing puzzled her about these palatial places—she wondered how they could charge such extortionate prices for such minute portions. But since they moved to New York, price had ceased to be a consideration. The company credit card paid for all—Spencer’s expense account was virtually without limit. And, Jillian noticed, he seemed to enjoy using it.

Dinner was almost always preceded by a cocktail party. Sometimes they were held in fabulous apartments with million-dollar views of Central Park, sometimes they were held in places not normally open for parties like the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or at the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. But wherever they might be held they always had one thing in common. When Spencer announced that they had to go to yet another cocktail party and Jillian groaned and moaned about it he could always silence her with a single reason. So far, it had never failed.

That night, “business” took them to a party in the gargantuan lobby of a building on Wall Street that had been built as the old U.S. Customs House for
the Port of New York. But these days Fifty-five Wall Street housed a bank—a bank very interested in doing business with the company that featured Spencer’s name so prominently on its stationery.

For once Jillian did not object to going out to a cocktail party—Spencer had told her that there was a rumor that the big boss, the head of the company might attend this particular function. She had heard so much about the mysterious Jackson McLaren that she was very anxious to meet him—even if it meant another night out on the social scene.

Fifty-five Wall Street had been built by the same firm of architects that designed Grand Central Station and some of the pharoanic scale of that building lingered in this one. The lobby was vast, a space so huge and beautiful it was almost daunting. The ceiling seemed so high above the pavement it appeared to have been lost in the night sky. Fifty-five Wall, the high cathedral of high finance, was built to prove that money was the greatest power known to man.

The power of the room and the people in it had the usual effect on Jillian. She felt absolutely insignificant. She stood with a glass of champagne in her hand watching men and women in faultless dinner jackets move through the crowd bearing trays of canapes almost too beautiful to be eaten.

Jillian surveyed the crowd. She was becoming familiar with the New York types. There were the old men, men in their seventies and eighties, men so rich they were worth more than some small countries. They had been so rich for so long that
they automatically commanded a certain kind of respect. Accordingly, they were treated like heads of state. These men were usually attended by women of the same age, perhaps a year or two younger, but never more. These were first wives who had married these men fifty or more years before, members of a generation who believed that a marriage vow was something that was not to be taken lightly—particularly the “for richer or poorer” part.

Beneath these wealthy old lions were the men in their fifties and sixties, men who still had careers as CEOs and CFOs or in brokerage firms and banks. These men almost all had one thing in common—they had started out in their banks or brokerages back in the late fifties and early sixties, grateful to have a job with a nice firm and hoping to have something approaching a lengthy and comfortable career. They married their high school, college, or hometown sweethearts and bought little houses in the suburbs on Long Island, in Westchester, and in New Jersey. They never missed the
5:
23 train home because back in those simpler days there was nothing to be gained working late, tracking something as bizarre as a foreign stock market or the track record of a company manufacturing something in another country-like Japanese cars, for example.

The idea was to take the train into work in the morning, do your job, have a couple of drinks at lunch, go back to work, leave your desk at five on the dot to make your train back to Islip or Scarsdale
or Ridgewood and hearth and home. The closest they got to a New York experience was having a Manhattan at lunch. One thing these guys in their short-sleeve shirts and crew cuts and Brook Brothers suits had never figured on happening was getting rich. They hoped they would make it up’ to twenty-five or thirty thousand bucks by the time they were in their forties, but real money—that was an impossibility. Bankers and brokers didn’t get rich. They made
other
people rich.

Then everything changed. The market exploded. Investment banking started to pay well and the wage slaves started to get rich. Moderately rich at first—they bought nice jewelry for their wives, their kids didn’t have to apply for financial aid when they went to college. And Dad got rid of his Dodge and bought himself a boat or maybe a sports car—an MG, perhaps or maybe a Thunderbird or a Corvette. No one knew it at the time but those shiny new sports cars were the beginning of the end, the thin edge of the wedge.

Then everything changed again. These guys were too old for the summer of love or the Vietnam war, but they felt that something fresh was in the air— and that was the bull market of the sixties that erupted like a skyrocket and yanked the wage earners into higher levels of wealth, heights they had never expected to attain.

And
that’s
when everything
really
changed. Miraculously, stock brokering and investment banking came to be considered
sexy
occupations and suddenly, the wage earners were no kidding, honest-
to-God rich. They felt like they could do anything— and they did anything they chose. The first wife, the college sweetheart, the hometown girl was the first thing to go. Resentful kids suddenly had stepmothers who were younger than they were and bitter first wives took healthy alimony payments and opened gift shops that failed after a year or two.

The men were now in their fifties and sixties and had beautiful young wives in their twenties. The first wives got the house in Scarsdale, because their divorced husbands were now living in Manhattan, because that was the only place that the new, trophy wife would consider living. And it had to be on Central Park West, or the Upper East Side, and definitely
west
of Third. The apartments were huge by New York standards, but rarely the size of their old garage out in suburbia. And they had to have a playroom and a room for the nanny, because these rich men in their sixties now had a second set of children in diapers—children these men would not live long enough to see drive a car.

But right now, they were the most powerful men on Wall Street, which meant that they were some of the most powerful people on the face of the earth.
Beneath them were the wannabes. The class of wage earners was gone forever, replaced by the overpaid yuppies. The guys (and now gals) who, on their first day of work, put their boss in their sights and vowed (silently) to have his job in a year (and their boss’s boss’s job the year after that). They planned on getting rich, they planned on attaining
Old Lion wealth, but they were going to be younger when they did it. And there wasn’t going to be a little old society lady in black on their arm, either. They had no plan to buy a Corvette. They were headed straight for the Ferrari dealer.
Jillian looked around at the crowd and saw that it was mostly made up of the young wannabes. They were the guys who didn’t think the hors d’oevres were too pretty to eat—they wolfed them down—not caring that they were spilling cocktail sauce on their thirty-five-hundred-dollar suits. When someone spotted that the bartenders were pouring eighteen-year-old scotch that retailed for a hundred and twenty-five a bottle, consumption increased dramatically...
Spencer held a glass of it himself as he talked to three yuppie sharks who were hanging on his every word. They may have been predators who would eat you alive in the arbitrage market, but they were still little boys at heart and they were getting to talk to, to hang out with, a genuine, honest-to-God spaceman.
“You’re sitting on top of what amounts to a fifteen-story building packed with high explosives...”
“Cool,” said one of the sharks, slugging back about twenty-five dollars’ worth of single malt.
“Then what?” asked another of them.
Spencer laughed. “Well, that was the part that none of us ever could figure out... After they strap you in, anyone with any sense backs off the gantry by about three miles.”
“Then what?” the third one asked. “What happens then? What does it feel like?”
“You feel your first kick after the main engines spark,” said Spencer. “But then the solid rocker boosters come on and that’s when you know you are about to go someplace very fast.”
“Zoom, zoom, zoom, huh?” said one of the Wannabes, crunching an ice cube between his very white teeth.
Spencer nodded and smiled slightly. “That’s about it... zoom, zoom, zoom.”
“Man,” said one of them, “I’d give up my 401k to go for a ride in a spaceship.”
“But you are,” Spencer replied simply. “You’re riding in one right now.”

I am what, right now?” they guy asked, looking puzzled by Spencer’s enigmatic observation. “You’re on a spaceship,” Spencer replied.
“We
all are. That’s what the earth is. A spaceship.” “I mean a real spaceship,” the guy said. “None of that Whole Earth Catalogue stuff. I Want to

Spencer shrugged. “Shuttle? Earth? What’s the difference? The Earth is a real spaceship. And believe me—we are in outer space right now.”
One of the yuppies looked around at the rich crowd, the vaulted ceilings of Fifty-five Wall Street and laughed. “You know, it’s not quite what I expected. Though I think I’ve spotted a couple of alien life forms here.”
Spencer smiled thinly. “Space is never what you expect it to be. Never.”

One of the first wives who had not yet been dumped by her newly rich husband—and who looked like she expected the news at any minute—had buttonholed Jillian. She was a rather dried-up woman with a plummy accent and in an attempt to compete with a host of younger women she had dieted and exercised herself down to mere skin and bone. Jillian remembered something that she had once heard an old black Floridian woman say about someone else: “She’s as thin as six o’clock.” That sort of summed up this woman.

Jillian was wondering why she was even on this woman’s radar. What she did not know was that it was social death to stand alone at one of these functions. Jillian was just a port on her way to some place more socially acceptable.

“I used to be into AIDS,” the woman was saying, “but it got so crowded with the wrong sort.” “Really?” Jillian said, wondering just what the hell this old socialite was talking about. “Really,” she said emphatically. “It just became too, too trendy, you know.” “I see,” Jillian replied.
The woman made no secret of the fact that she Was scanning the crowd over Jillian’s

shoulder, searching among the party-goers for a greater social catch. Her hunt for someone else to talk to was so obvious that it made Jillian nervous. She took sip after sip of her drink and wished that someone
Would come along and rescue her from this extremely awkward situation.

Jillian felt that she had to say something. “I teach,” she said. The Armacosts’ move had, providentially, coincided with a shortage of school teachers in New York. With her credentials from Florida and glowing recommendations from her former superiors, Jillian had been welcomed into the New York City school system. It was the one thing in her life that seemed normal, even if some of her pupils had names like Ahmed, Jesus, and Ang. Kids were kids and Jillian just loved being with them.