12
Woman #1: My husband’s an angel!
Woman #2: You’re lucky. Mine’s still alive.
The following weeks were a Kleenex marathon of hermit dwelling. I met with Kiki’s divorce lawyer and filed the paperwork, if a Night of the Living Dead drone can fill out forms. I made the painful phone calls, which were gasp-inducing to all, who proclaimed “NO! You guys?” and “Everything seemed so perfect,” and of course, “WHY?” I wanted to be a lady about the whole thing and not sling the mud of Tim’s indiscretions, but from my wounded tone, people gleaned the dirty details and accurately sniffed the scent of another woman.
After dropping the bomb on my cute Dad, who was quiet, clearly dismayed, but supportive, it was the call to my maid of honor, Jeannie, that was the hardest. She had been there the fateful night we met, winking at me behind Tim’s back, holding her white wine and smiling; she knew we would get married.
And now she was as in shock as I had been; when I told her, she promptly burst into tears.
“I don’t believe this! Oh, Holl . . . I’m so upset. That asshole!” I heard her sniffle and pull tissues from a box. “I would have expected that from his loser friend Mark Webb, but never Tim!” Jeannie had had the pleasure of getting hit on by a shitfaced (or as Sherry Von would say, “overserved”) Mark at our wedding. He was, along with all six of Tim’s Wall Street groomsmen, so trashed that he was doing the Tom-Cruise-in-Risky-Business run-and-slide-on-knees move across the dance floor at our wedding reception—albeit in tux in lieu of boxers. Clearly, as it is always all about him, our wedding reception may as well have been his living room, the way he was carrying on, front and center. When his fifth slide actually knocked down Lauren, one of my other bridesmaids, Tim told him it might be time to head home.
“You know,” I told Jeannie as I twisted the curly phone wire around my finger, which still bore my wedding ring, “I secretly thought that after Mark’s behavior at our wedding, he and Tim would grow apart. That through the years we’d pull the feeding tube on that friendship. But they’re still best friends, and I can’t help but blame Mark a bit—he’s such a louse, such a bad influence.”
“Honey,” Jeannie said soberly. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him hump it.”
“True enough.” I laughed, eyes welling anew with fresh hot tears.
“But still, that whole world Tim rolls with, it’s this Boys Club in finance. They’re all the same. Dirty jokes, booze, and obviously women on the side. It’s the hedge fund culture. The I-can-get-away-with-anything money. I thought I got a good one, but they’re all the same.”
“I’m so sad, sweetie.” I heard Jeannie’s voice break. I was touched she was so traumatized on my behalf, but it killed me to hear her cry for me. “I’m just so appalled. I mean, even if he begs you to take him back, you won’t, will you?”
Obviously the fantasy was comforting. He’d wake up, wonder what the hell he was smoking, and bolt back, hysterically imploring me to forgive and forget.
“We have Miles. I don’t know.”
“Hey, I have three kids. And after that whole Governor Spitzer debacle, I told William in no uncertain terms that if he ever pulled that shit, I’d be out the door.”
“You don’t know till you live it, I guess,” I replied, zoning into space. My skin was tight and itchy from the streams of tears, and while both Jeannie and Kiki were indignant, thrusting the girl-power mantras in my direction, I felt only weak and scared and alone. The only way I could even get myself to breathe was to have a melodramatic emotional seal-off à la Princess Butter-cup: I shall never love again.
The night before Tim and I were to preliminarily sit down with our lawyers, I got a shocking buzz from the lobby doorman—“Mrs. Sherry Von Hapsburg Talbott is here to see you.”
My heart skipped a beat. Well, unlike Kiki, I supposed I wasn’t to be frozen out, if she was paying me a house call. I knew from her reaction to Kiki that she abhorred cheating, so she must have been mortified by Tim’s behavior.
I opened the door to find her immaculately dressed, even in the heat of early May, in an Oscar de la Renta cream sheath, alligator Kelly bag, and Tom Ford sunglasses atop her highlighted head.
“Hello, Holland.” She said my name as if it were Newman saying “Jerry” on Seinfeld. Why the acid?
“Come in, Sherry. Please, sit down. Can I get you anything to dr—”
“I have one thing to say and I won’t waste your time with small talk or niceties,” she said, chin skyward as she brushed a blond lock from her suspiciously wrinkle-free forehead. “Holland. You are making a huge mistake.”
I was stunned. “I beg your pardon?” I had never uttered that phrase in my life (it seemed so old-school), but I was indignant that she had walked into my house and pronounced these words.
“You have a child. A family. Talbotts are all about The Family.”
I was aghast.
“Well, I thought we had a great family,” I responded, trying to hold it together. “But unfortunately your son betrayed us.”
“I have some news for you, Holland Talbott,” she said, every syllable infused with ice, wagging a crooked ring-covered finger in my face as if instructing me on a life lesson. “Boys. Will. Be. Boys. You didn’t have to go and call him out on it. How positively juvenile. Women have been looking the other way for millennia. You do what you have to do to keep the family together.”
At this point I did something I never thought I would ever do; it was actually more of a Kiki move: I laughed in her face.
Her face morphed with rage. “Do you think this is FUNNY?” she stammered.
“Sherry, are you joking? This is not 1953. I’m not going to just take it and live a total lie! He took her to the hotel where we honeymooned, for God’s sake! ”
“Oh, please. Grow up!” she commanded. “You think you’re the first one to have a husband with something on the side? Men have needs. This is life. Marriage. Family. You have a son. My grandson. And you will alter the course of his life if you proceed with this NONSENSE!”
“It was your son who proceeded with ‘nonsense’ when he broke our marriage vows! The ones you so ruthlessly indicted Kiki for breaking, remember? What happened to the whole cheating-is-evil diatribe when Kiki strayed, huh?”
“That was different. She was the wife. And furthermore, she never had children. You have a responsibility—”
“To Miles or to you? To not have the world know both your sons failed at marriage?” I started to exit my lobotomized-with-grief state and become simply livid. “You can’t show up here and tell me to stay with Tim when he’s ‘in love’ with someone else—not even sleeping with random women but, in fact, enamored of one! How dare you lecture me on family?”
“For hundreds of years there was no divorce in the Von Hapsburg or Talbott families, and now you and that trash Kiki come in and leave our traditions of strong families in shards!”
“Strong, really? Living a lie for the sake of keeping up appearances? That’s weak! You may have chosen a life that is all about image and what people think, but I wasn’t raised by a mom like you. My late mother was the epitome of strength and would have never endured humiliation or betrayal like this. Please. Leave. Now.”
“You will be sorry,” she said calmly, turning to exit. Before the door closed, she placed a polished manicured hand on the gold knob, forcing it ajar. “Just so you know, Holland, you cross this family, and you’re finished in this town.”
“It’s not a town. It’s New York City. There are millions of people, so I doubt you can get all of them to freeze me out.”
“Correct, millions. Millions of young women: It’s a jungle out there for someone your age. Good luck trying to get someone to love you again. You should have just looked the other way like everyone else instead of making this big mess for yourself, for all of us. You’ll never get anyone as good as Tim to marry the likes of you.” She looked down at her diamond-encrusted Cartier watch. “Well, Hubert awaits me downstairs. Good day, Holland.” With that, she closed the door
I hated her. I wanted her to meet Hannibal Lecter in a dark alley. I wanted barracudas to gut her alive, crocodiles in the Everglades to chomp her to shards, Batrachotoxinous dart-poison frogs to pounce. She was dead to me. But unlike in breakups where there were no kids involved, both she and Tim would be bound to me forever. With no-kid splits, the spouse and in-laws can exit your life completely, eventually drifting out of vision like Wilson, Tom Hanks’s volleyball companion in Cast Away. But through Miles, we were tethered forever.
Sherry Von, I could happily bid adieu to, but Tim, for some crazy reason, I still mourned. Maybe it was because it was the nail in the coffin on my youth and that innocent love. . . . Was I pathetic that I still loved him as much as I detested him? I couldn’t just switch off that current. That night was the first of many that I went back to the beginning of our relationship in my head. I couldn’t reconcile what he’d just done with the guy I first fell in love with. I pictured him that first year we were dating, his fluffy hair coming out from his baseball hat like wings. He was such a nugget. A nugget, by the way, is not a fried piece of chicken eyelids for sauce dunkage; it’s a huggable, heart-fluttery, sweet, yummy thing. Generally, it’s a baby (“look at that cute nugget stuffed into the little snowsuit”), but sometimes a really nice, affectionate, huggable guy can be a nugget. Tim Talbott was the crown prince of Nuggetdom. He was cuddly, caring, teddy bearish, and loving, and, until now, he made me feel taken care of. Except . . . when he talked about business with a rabid competitiveness, which he did more and more through our decade together. As his success increased, so did his bravado. Talks about Miles or movies were eclipsed by how killer a trade was for the company. As he became giddy about his accolades in the press (a New York Times profile on top hedge funds cemented his ascent), I sensed him getting intoxicated by power. I missed the cute nuggety parts of Tim, the parts that were loving and protective, the parts that were fun, the parts that once made me think I’d be happy with Tim on a desert island forever.
But life is not a desert island. Life has cad clients who cajoled out the worst. It has mothers-in-law and mergers and acquisitions and sports bars. And Avery. And now, what was left of our little oasis was gone.
The next day, I showed up at the hospital to meet with the development office about the next year’s benefit; under my leadership cochairing, we’d raised $3 million for our event at the Waldorf and I’d even launched a sold-out Young Patrons after-party for the under-forty set.
Susan, the department head, who worked full-time pro bono (her husband was a Wall Streeter, so she waived the nominal salary), sat down with me in her office.
“Holly,” she said, taking my hand nervously. “I’m afraid I have some upsetting news.”
“What?” I wondered, terrified—maybe she had been diagnosed with something?
“I got a very upsetting call this morning. I feel awful. . . .”
“What happened?”
“Mortimer DuPont phoned. I guess . . . unfortunately . . . I, um, understand that Mrs. Von Hapsburg Talbott phoned him, and they . . . said they are going to pass on having you join the board.”
You could have knocked me over with a benefit RSVP card.
“What?”
“Holly, I am so sorry. I told him that you have done more than any of these women, that you’ve raised the most, have been here till all hours writing personal notes and stuffing envelopes, but he simply said that we can’t cross Mrs. Talbott. And he just wants to start fresh with the benefit next year.”
“Wait—start fresh? So you’re saying not only am I not getting on the board even though I’ve done the most work, but I am also booted from the event I helped create and launch?”
“Holly, trust me, I am sick about this. It is so unfair. But my hands are tied; I mean, Mr. DuPont is head of the board and built the whole new wing. This whole thing is so disturbing.”
“So I am barred from even doing volunteer work! This is crazy. I raised tons of money!”
I knew the board was a serious honor that would involve the New York slogan of “Give, Get, or Go”—give tons of money, get it by raising it from your friends, or hit the road, Jack.
“I guess he said that so many donors do business with the Talbotts and might not want to take sides if you call upon them or something.”
“I’m sorry—take sides? Giving to the hospital because I ask them is not taking sides!” I was so enraged, I thought I would pop a blood vessel.
“Listen, you are preaching to the choir,” Susan said, taking my other hand as I began to cry. “This is all politics. I guess they’re worried that so many people you would be soliciting are linked to Tim through investments or whatever. It’s so unfair and ridiculous, but please know that once the dust settles, I’m hoping you can still work with us in some capacity—”
Great. Morty and Sally DuPont, rumor had it, possessed not one, not two, but three private jets through his company, Solar Partners. He gave sky rides to the Bushes and other pals up to Maine or down to Hobe Sound, and there was even Fifth Avenue lore that Sally had once sent Rubies, her beloved infirmed purebred Pomeranian, alone in the leather-appointed 757, to a canine diabetes specialist in Chicago. And now, these titans of not only industry but also, apparently, charity were booting me from my own volunteer work. I rose from the table, offered a weak hug good-bye, and wandered home in a trance.
As I entered my apartment, my breath became dotted with whimpers as I staggered in a Frankenstein-like walk to the phone.
Heart pounding, I called Kiki to report Sherry Von’s pop-by and subsequent sting operation.
“That fucking Mayflower BITCH!” exclaimed Kiki, in even more of a rage than I was. “What does she get out of blackballing you? What the fuck does she want from you?”
“I told you. She wants me to play nice, look the other way, and stick together.”
“So, what, she just thinks Tim can have his cake and fuck it, too?”
I was cripplingly weary with the turn my life had taken. It was truly as if it were someone else’s plummet, all in bold font, tabloidy and rank. Was Sherry right? Was I being too rash in confronting him? Should I have waited it out and seen if the affair would fizzle, and keep our family together instead of shining a floodlight on his indiscretions? But there was no room for second chances when Tim wasn’t even begging—or asking—for one. There was no remorse, no dramatic throwing of his blubbering, weepy carcass at my feet in penitence. There wasn’t even a meek apology. Tim left me no choice. And Miles . . . my eyes welled with tears thinking of Sherry Von’s poisoned words, her suggestion that I somehow am a shitty mom by clipping our family apart with the long, sharp scissors of divorce. I collapsed on the couch and cried to Kiki, weeping in a way I hadn’t since my mom died. I took deep breaths and exhaled staccato air through my lungs, my body shaking.
“It’s okay, honey. You are strong. Like your mom, you are a rock, and you one hundred percent are going to get through this,” Kiki said in such a confident but calming way that I was sad she wasn’t a mother—she would have been a natural.
Thank goodness it was summer vacation and I could just hole up while everyone else swung golf clubs or skied far away. Then I could roast with the rats in the city that summer while they all hit the Hamptons or the Vineyard or Newport and not face the masses until the fall; hopefully by then I’d be somewhat cobbled together to deal with the public scrutiny of being La Divorcée.
“There will be no public scrutiny,” Kiki said.
“There won’t?” I asked meekly. “I just know all those perfect moms are going to have a pity party for poor dumped Holly,” I lamented, imagining their condescending pats on the back as they gripped their husbands even harder.
“No. Because I am going to help you,” pronounced Kiki. “You are going to be my project,” she promised.
“What do you mean?”
“You are the best mother to Miles. You organize his life: his playdates, his Super Soccer Stars, his TechoTots computer lessons, his Petite Picassos art class—and I am going to do that for you.”
“How?” I wiped the tears that had spilled and settled on my cheeks, rendering my skin tight and hard.
“I’m going to help you press the restart button of your life. Makeover, new hair, new clothes, new confidence, the works. We are going to show that bitch Sherry Von that she was wrong—plenty of guys would kill to be with you. I will be your social quarterback. And while our loser ex-husbands are watching the NFL, we will be making our own plays.”
“Kiki, I really appreciate that, but I’m such a mess right now, I don’t even know where to begin.”
“I do,” she said. “Repeat after me, one hundred times: Nina Ricci short yellow dress. Nina Ricci short yellow dress. Nina Ricci short yellow dress . . .”
I knew she was referencing Reese Witherspoon’s post-divorce Golden Globes dress, which she rocked on the red carpet, proving philandering Mr. Philippe a total raging idiot. That frock was a symbol to all divorcées that they could take an emotional beating and still land on their five-inch Roger Viviers.
“She did it. We can do it. I don’t have a kid, so I can be in the driver’s seat. You just work on pampering yourself, building yourself back up. I will take care of everything.”
“Kiki, I love you. What would I do without you?”
“Listen, it fucking sucks. You’re basically in hell right now, express train, zero stops. There’s gonna be crying and more crying until your tear ducts look like the Sahara. But you have to wake up and breathe in and out and get through those heinous days. It will obviously take a while until you feel whole enough to even function let alone date. And then even when you’re ready, every bad date, you’ll be sitting in the back of that taxi crying. But every good one—whether it works out or not—will give you a glimmer of what your life could be like. Romantic and exciting. I know I made the right choice leaving Hal. You have more to work through because you didn’t have a slow deterioration like we did. But trust me, you will triumph over this noxious toxic sludge of a moment. You will push through it and fucking shine on the other side. It’s like that river of shit the guy crawls through in The Shawshank Redemption. You’ll cry and barf and get through this horrible tunnel and then you will be free of all this pain. I swear to you.”
I just prayed she was right. Because at that moment it felt like a thousand football fields of misery ahead of me.
The next few months brought ten chopped-down trees’ worth of tissues, long talks on the phone with my only other divorced friend, Natasha, incessant meetings with lawyers, a battery of Tim’s assistants packing up his things for the Carlton House on Madison Avenue (where Wall Street titans shack up post-divorce), and a planned date to sign final marriage-dissolution documents. My heartbroken father flew into town to console me and help me through navigating my prenup and guide me to take the high road and ask for what was only fair. While the Empire State was “no fault,” Tim’s whore-bangage couldn’t help me at all; in fact, it was the same legal consequences as if I had been banging my trainer at David Barton. My dad stayed up with me into the night, wiping my tears. “Honey,” he said, “let’s think this through. I know you’re hurt, I know you’re angry, and while part of you might want to make him pay, you don’t want to make Miles pay emotionally. Your mom and I never had any of this kind of lifestyle, and we were fine.”
And my dad was always right. Like my mom, he was a calmer, nobler soul than I, who wanted to gut Tim for all he was worth . . . but it wasn’t worth it. Not for karma, or even Miles, but for the fact that I was too tired for the fight. I didn’t feel like rolling up my sleeves to duke it out. Even though I was blood drunk for some kind of revenge, I didn’t want to punish Miles by suing for custody, so I let him share fifty-fifty with weekends and Wednesday evenings. Financially, because of our ironclad prenup, I was hardly entitled to what I ended up scoring: our beloved apartment.
Tim, out of guilt, gave me the whole thing and agreed to pay the maintenance, but because it was well beyond the money stipulated by our contract, that was all I’d get. Child support for Miles, sure, but good-bye Bergdorf’s charge card; adios clubs, even David Barton gym membership. My lawyer said I could have probably fought for some of these, but I just wanted the whole thing done. I didn’t want to give Sherry Von any more ammo—I was sure she was steaming I got the apartment, since she’d been the one who’d found it for us; it had once belonged to a prominent socialite she knew from Locust Valley. And I loved it. I had decorated it myself, and it was a constant in Miles’s changing life. And since Tim was always away so much, anyway, we were both used to it being spacious for the two of us, but always cozy, with the third bedroom functioning as a TV and toy pit with Miles’s art station and an easel. Home was everything to me, especially because I had grown more into a nester than ever, and I wanted one touchstone that would remain sacred. Luckily Tim didn’t fight me on it.
But as for all those other perks of being a hedgie wife, I never really was so obsessed with all that excess. Did I really need to call one of Tim’s assistants to get theater tickets or make that reservation? I’d call myself, so what. I was almost relieved to eliminate the middleman. And, sure, on a rainy day it was great to have a driver, but sometimes it was fun to get soaked. I loved my walks. Walking in New York is one of my greatest pastimes, and so many wealthy wives miss out on that pleasure. He could keep it all. I had my pride and wasn’t going to beg for more, even if it was my due.
When Tim and I finally entered the offices, each flanked by our lawyers, we briefly locked eyes. I looked down quickly to try not to cry. I soberly stared at the dotted line, and as the ball rolled through the ink and onto the paper, I realized the shock had subsided and clarity was taking its place through closure.
After he signed, my lawyer simply said, “Okay, then.”
That was it. A decade together and a Tiffany fountain pen pierced our matrimony like a silver scythe.
“Holl—”
I looked at him, his lips folded together in a stern grimace.
“Sorry.”
Saying nothing, I blinked back tears as I opened the door and left.
My dad came back to visit for a couple days and we stayed up through the night as we both cried, me for my marriage, he for my mom, for the past, for easier times. I told him how even when I was fighting to swim back to the shore of stability, after ten strokes I’d realize the forceful current of grief had dragged me twenty strokes farther out to sea. I was weary and thought I’d drown.
“Honey, remember the utter despair you felt after Mom died?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You thought you could never function again in the world without her. And it was hard, terribly hard, for all of us, but we soldiered on. You can do it, you will do it. Not just for Miles, but also yourself. You’re young, you have your whole life ahead of you, and you need to be strong.”
Leave it to dads to hand out the tough love. He was right; I could wallow in self-pitying misery till the Crypt Keeper giggled in my face with his sharpened sickle or I could buck up and jump back into life. I only wished my mom was there to help me through this second dark chapter.
But as time passed, when I breathed in and out, it took less effort. It used to be that when my alarm went off, I’d immediately feel a two-ton weight upon my chest. But then, little by little, it was one ton. And then half. And less. Until slowly I became more anesthetized to the gut-churning pain. Sheer agony became blunt pain became discomfort. And soon enough discomfort morphed into tolerance for my situation. And once I started to get used to everything, I started, step by tiny step, day by day, to feel that if I squinted hard enough, I might be able to make out an infinitesimal ray of light in the distance. When I looked back on how far I’d come from not wanting to get out of bed, to pulling myself together and dealing with it for my son, I knew the future could only get less and less gray.
Kiki had been right: I would get through this. As Miles and I lay in bed one night, I read his stories until my own eyelids grew heavy like his and I ended up passing out next to him. And in the reverie of watercolor illustrations that danced in my dazed head, the color that emerged in the distant swirl was yellow. Sunny, Nina Ricci yellow.