Woman on Top (16 page)

“You look so serene in this room full of charged men,” I said.

“I just left the world of investment banking after twenty years. There wasn’t a single day in all those years I felt content.”

This man definitely seemed different than the others. The pit bull ready to pounce energy must have dissipated when he made his exit from finance.

“What do you do now?”

“Not much. I made about twenty million a year so I have some leeway to figure it out. But I’m relieved to have left that world behind.”

“Twenty million dollars a year? I would have left after one year.”

He didn’t laugh.

“There was never enough money. It’s addictive. Until one day I turned fifty and realized it was getting late in the game to lead such a miserable life. My daughter paid a high price for my working so hard and never being home while my first wife, her mother, spent her time at our club and shopping.”

“What’s wrong with your daughter?”

“She’s seventy pounds overweight and channels dead people at night.”

He looked for my reaction. Stunned at his confession to a total stranger, I figured this man’s head must be saturated with pain. Enough pain to have left twenty million a year behind. How often did that happen?

At that moment Len, now standing behind my chair, put his hand on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry to interrupt. We need to get going,” he said.

I turned to the man on my left once again as I stood up. His face still portrayed the anticipation of something I might say to make him feel better about his daughter.

“I hope your new life works out just as you imagine and that your daughter finds her way. Life has many chapters and this could be a wonderful new one for both of you.”

With a faint smile he stared off into the distance.

“What was that about?” Len asked as we left the party.

“Just another unhappy very wealthy man. Know anyone like that?”

CHAPTER 19

May

C
an I see you tonight after work? I’m just dying to make love with you. I was sitting in a meeting today, doing a two billion dollar deal and all I could think about was making love with you.”

There was a pause as Len sighed.

“No one would believe what goes on with us. Do you think my kids would ever believe what kind of sex I’m having?” he giggled.

I pictured the oak paneled conference room, the enormous, obscenely expensive conference table surrounded by mostly male lawyers from Pointer, and St. Clair, James and their clients, like Len, who were paying these lawyers a thousand dollars an hour. They’d be doing the deal, the negotiations for a two billion dollar transaction sitting in the war room oozing machismo, the beat of war drums pounding in their chests, bluffing each other until the deal was done. Len had said that he was the master of walking away from the table, absolutely sure that the other side would yield because he was always the toughest one of all.

Len would be at the table in his white shirt, no jacket, his body to all outward appearances fully engaged in the war that was going on, but he was thinking of making love with me. I agreed to meet Len halfway between New York and Connecticut at nine that night since he thought he could escape for a few hours while the lawyers haggled over the contractual details.

Len’s deal making testosterone levels must have been sky high that night. He was ravenous and I was thrilled to satisfy his hunger. After we made love Len held me in his arms.

“That was incredible. If I died tonight, I wouldn’t care because I’ve had you.” He kissed me tenderly and then continued.

“I was thinking that we should move Jake’s body next to Judy’s. That way when we die, we can be buried together. I’d hate for you to be in Connecticut.”

I snuggled closer into his body.

“I feel like a king. You just ring my bell. I literally wouldn’t care if I did die tonight.”

I kissed his neck.

“I can’t get enough of you. I love your joyfulness and playfulness. It brings out the best in me. You know, I feel like I know your body better than I know mine,” he said.

A moment or two passed before reality set in.

“Have you thought about where you’re going to live in New York?” he asked.

“Not yet. I have lots of options.”

“I don’t want you to make any decisions based on me.”

I stared at him. One minute ago he had confessed to a willing foot in the grave having known the greatest heights of life because of our lovemaking. He was content to spending eternity with me, just not now.

“Does that mean you don’t care where I live?” I asked.

“It means you make your own decisions. Don’t factor me into them.”

I pulled away from his body. How quickly he had transformed into a man with a steel heart. This part of Len scared me, and I dreaded any head on collision with him.

His sexual needs fulfilled, he was back at the table in the war room.

Several days later, it was late afternoon when the phone rang in my office.

“Kate, this is Linda from Dr. Mann’s office. I have the results of your pap smear. You have Trichomoniasis.”

“I have what??”

“Trichomoniasis. It is a sexually transmitted disease that a man passes onto a woman or a woman passes to a man,” she said.

I stood up and began to pace around my desk.

“What?”

“Your pap smear shows that you have trichomoniasis. You’ll need to take a medication and your partner will have to take the medication too to clear this up.”

My heart was pounding as I called Len’s office and asked to speak with him. He was in a meeting. I told his secretary it was urgent and that he needed to call me as soon as he was available. Then I sat frozen at my desk waiting for the phone to ring. It took only five minutes before Len called. I conveyed the news to him.

“I haven’t been sleeping with anyone else,” his voice was panicked.

“The nurse said that I got this from a man. You’re the man.”

“It must be the woman in Birmingham. I got it from her,” he said.

“That was supposed to have been over a year ago. You told me you used condoms with her!”

Silence.

“We didn’t. I was very inexperienced. I was too embarrassed to tell you,” Len finally said.

“When you asked me several months ago what I had used for birth control in the past, you were adamant that I better have protected myself now that I was sleeping with you. And I asked if you used condoms with that woman. You said ‘of course’.”

The phone remained dead silent.

Len and I both took medicine to clear up our respective infections. He wanted to prove to me that the last time he had seen the woman from Birmingham was last fall. He wanted to show receipts from hotels. I wouldn’t look at them.

“We didn’t use condoms because I didn’t even know we were having sex at times,” he said.

He began to laugh, “I thought she raped me.”

“You used that line on me. Remember The Madison?”

“My doctor says that the nurse was wrong about where you could have gotten this. People get it from dirty toilets, from past partners and it lingers,” Len said.

“I’m not sure if you’re just making that up about dirty toilets or your doctor is incompetent. But he’s right about one thing. A man typically does not show symptoms, so it can linger in a man, a man like you.”

Len had gone too far this time.

“Who cares where I might have gotten it at this point? You lied. The virus could have been HIV,” I said.

For the first time since I’d know him, Len’s face had a helpless look. This time, he had lost control of the narrative, a rare moment in this man’s adult life.

CHAPTER 20

June

T
he master bathroom in Len’s house was the size of most living rooms, and for Manhattanites, the size of their entire apartment. Set in the middle of the green marble floor was a two person Jacuzzi with gold plated faucets. Nineteenth Century antique English mahogany mirrors lined one wall over two hand painted porcelain sinks with fleur-de-lys design.

It was a lazy Saturday afternoon, Len had just finished running and we had several hours to spare before our dinner plans that night. When he went into the Spanish white tile shower, I joined him, a gesture he always appreciated since Judy had not showered with him in all of their years together.

We playfully washed each other’s bodies and held each other tightly as the warm water covered us. I preferred the water much warmer and whenever Len closed his eyes to wash off, I reached over to the gold plated faucet and turned it to “H’. And Len immediately turned it right back to “C” as soon as I closed my eyes.

We dried each other off and slipped into bed, although it was against Len’s productive nature to get into bed at five in the afternoon. But sex had taken a new priority on his agenda of what was important to accomplish.

Len looked tired from running and by lying on his back, waiting to be serviced, he made it clear he wanted to be catered to. I readily complied and we made love slowly in the late afternoon dusk. Afterward, we held each other for a long while before Len jumped up.

“I need another shower before I get dressed for dinner,” he said as he headed into the bathroom.

When the water went off, I got up and opened the bathroom door to find Len standing naked in the front of the mirror by the sink. He was brushing his wet hair and in great spirits.

Len was about to lather his face to shave and was smiling to himself in the mirror, when he started wiggling his wide hips and belly - he was singing:

“Macho, macho, man…”

King Len, as I often called him, was certainly feeling like the Lord of the Manor tonight. He continued swaying his hips and singing over and over again those same words.

“Macho, macho, man.”

We were dining that night with some of Len’s much younger colleagues and their wives. These women knew they would rarely see their husbands as the men amassed their fortunes.

King Len felt masterful when he was with these young colleagues and said so often. He thrived on their energy and enthusiasm but most of all on their complete admiration for all that Len had accomplished. He knew when he walked down the halls of Duke Heller, he was finally six feet tall in the hearts and minds of these young men.

“I didn’t kill myself for twenty-five years just for the money, it was also ego,” he told me many times.

It was the money and the ego because neither alone would have been enough for Len, a man in need of constant recognition. As long as an appreciative audience marveled at his triumphs, his enormous ego could relax.

“The best part of all is when I call one of these young guys into my office to work with me. They are terrified until they get to know me, of course, to know what a great guy I am.”

“You should see when he walks down the halls at Duke Heller. People say ‘there he is’,” Len’s administrative assistant told me one day when I called the office looking for Len.

Len knew he had truly arrived when he was able to donate large sums of money. He reveled in the booklets printed that listed his donation for all to see.

“When Judy died, I donated two million dollars in her memory,” Len boasted.

“What a generous tribute. Who’d you give the money to?”

“To my business school, of course,” he said.

“You’re not serious.”

“Why not? I was very happy there. And look what that school did for me.”

“But this wasn’t about you. It was about Judy, her cancer, her suffering. Why not help others who are now suffering?”

Len looked devastated. How could I not appreciate his largesse?

“I want to help others end up like me.”

“You mean create more rich white men.”

Len was furious. If I wasn’t in awe of his generosity, what good was I?

“You know I do care about people. I helped my barber when he confessed to me he had money problems,” he added.

“Wow.”

The ultimate exertion of Len’s power and ego was during a partners’ meeting several years before when he wasn’t getting his way.

“I stood up, picked up a Sixteenth Century Ming vase and threw it against the wall. I walked out of the room. Well, they did what I wanted after that.”

Our social calendar was a non-stop affair. The following night we were having dinner at Len’s country club. My middle class childhood had taken place in Manhattan and I had spent no time whatsoever in clubs. Not until several years after Jake died did I feel compelled to join The Golf Club of Montwood. Nearly all of Chloe and Ben’s friends’ families belonged to the one club in our area and all of their friends spent the weekends swimming together and hanging out there. It was not a fancy, expensive or large club and the members were all men - eight hundred of them.

On a crusade that my kids were to have normal fatherless lives, and determined that nothing would get in the way, including a male only club, I knew we were going to become members of the Golf Club of Montwood. My children had suffered enough and the fact that they were fatherless could never stand in the path of their swimming or hanging out with their friends.