The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund Read online

  Kiki had told me that when they first met, the sparks that flew between her and Hal were practically atomic. They shacked up for days, with Chinese food takeout cartons outside her door the only proof that they were not dead. But they had never felt more alive. Madly, passionately in love, they went at it in coatrooms, at other people’s parties, even in the handicapped bathroom stall at her tenth high school reunion. When I first met her, I felt removed from the whir and buzz of their shared sexual heat. I was puking my brains out, pregnant with Miles and feeling about as alluring as a cinder block, while Hal kissed and licked her ear and probably pawed her beneath the table. Tim and I were like an old preppy couple, relaxed into three years together and so excited for the stork—definitely in love, but not minks in the sack like old times. Come to think of it, Tim had never pawed me under the table.

  But slowly through the years as those electric currents flickered, faded, and then zapped out, Hal began to push Kiki away. He became cold and distant, obsessed with discussing Tiger Woods’s latest tournament during dinner rather than lusting after her the way he once had, and Kiki and I found ourselves a couple of golf widows languishing every Saturday and Sunday while our husbands hit the links or flew off to watch the latest PGA tournament.

  About two years earlier, on a winter weekend trip to Palm Beach, I clued in to how truly miserable she was, despite the fact that she turned every head by the Breakers pool in her Burberry string bikini.

  “I fucking hate it here. This place is all Newlyweds and Nearly Deads,” she said, from under her enormous sunglasses. “It’s so damn humid in this goddamn state, I get off the plane and I’m in Florida but my hair is in Cuba. I always look like dog-shit here; my skin, my hair. The state even looks like a big dick. And the moment I land here, it fucks my whole look.”

  I pointed to Miles so that she’d halt her incessant cursing.

  “Oh, sorry, Milesie. Aunt Kiki said a bad word.” She exhaled, looking at her watch as Miles smiled mischievously, then ran off to play on the dunes with his friends. “Ugh, can you fucking believe this shit with Hal and Tim’s golf? That sport could not be more torturous. It’s watching grass grow. It’s men with hideous pants walking,” Kiki lamented. “I’d rather gnaw on my own liver than take up that tartan hell. Sorry, I know you hate my cursing.”

  “I don’t mind; it’s just when Miles is here, that’s all.”

  “Oh, please. Even when he’s not here you say ‘sugar’ instead of ‘shit.’ You’re such a good girl,” she teased, patting my head. “I’m a naughty influence.”

  “I know, you say that I’m repressed and should lose my edit button. Fine. The golf thing sucks. It sucks sugar,” I teased. “But they work so hard, and if they can blow off steam . . . ,” I offered in Tim’s defense.

  “Please. Hal can blow me. For a change.” She looked off at the horizon as Miles played capture the flag with the other kids. “Holly, if I tell you something, do you swear not to tell Tim?”

  “Of course,” I promised. “Come on, I never tell Tim anything you tell me.”

  Kiki took off her glasses and looked at me. Her big blue eyes welled with tears. “Hal won’t sleep with me. It’s been months. I don’t know what’s going on, but I feel like Marie Antoinette. Minus the rolling head. There’s no head in my life. He won’t even let me—” Her eyes seemed to glisten with the dew of fought-back cascades.

  I felt terrible for her. But more than that, I was shocked. She and Hal had been self-professed “rabbits,” and for them to have such a sexual dry spell was unimaginable.

  “It’s just a phase,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder, trying to soothe her as she wiped away one escaped drop from her heavily mascara’d eye. “Tim and I have had that. It’s normal.”

  “I’m not so sure,” she said, wiping more tears away from her long, glistening lashes. “He came to my family’s seder and was so distant and rude. My parents and brother were appalled; he treated me worse than Pharaoh.”

  But as time wore on and two more years passed, both Tim and I knew that things between Hal and our sister-in-law had seriously cooled. We had gone out to one of our weekly foursome dinners, and when Kiki put her arm around Hal, he brushed it off—in front of us. Even Tim noticed and commented on how harsh it was, but said that his brother was overworked and stressed out with The Fund, which was almost like a mistress to both of them. Seriously, sometimes I found myself getting so jealous of the darn laptop, I wanted to chuck the goddamn thing out the window. It could be 3:37 a.m. and I’d think Tim was getting up to pee, and then I’d hear him clacking away; the chirpy shwing! of an instant message had become like a jackhammer to my ear-drum. Or at the airport, minutes before they would close the flight, he simply had to run into the Admirals Club for just a second: more clickety-clacking. BlackBerries in restaurants. Cell phones at dinner parties. You get the picture. And through all of it, Kiki was my sharer in disapproving head shakes, tsk-tsks, and eye rolls from horrified observers, forcing us to whisper embarrassed comments like, “C’mon, sweetie, no texting during the Broadway show.”

  So it was a surprise, if not a total shock, when she sat me down at Sant Ambroeus on Madison Avenue one warm June day. “I’m filing for divorce from Hal,” she said, dramatically clearing her throat and looking me in the eye. “I’ve fucking had it with being Mrs. Hedgefund.”

  2

  “My ex-wife was a cardiac surgeon. She ripped my heart out.”

  “Going once ... going twice? Lot twenty-two: SOLD for seven hundred fifty thousand!” Delicate claps from the chic tuxedo- and gown-wearing crowd echoed the gavel’s podium bang.

  Was I at an art auction where a Damien Hirst was just hawked? An Etruscan vase? A Schlumberger honeybee ring? No. It was five days before Kiki told me the stunning news of her split from Hal, and the two of us were at the spectacular annual spring charity benefit for the Lancelot Foundation for children’s hospitals, at which Comet Capital, along with every other big hedge fund in the city, had taken a table inside the Puck Building in SoHo. For the past four years I’d worked on the committee with Posey and Mary, and we had fun planning it, and the event raised more money for charity than any other evening in New York City. It was very interesting to see the inner workings and politics when the event involved huge egos and huge wallets; for example, Hugo Lovejoy cut an extra check to Lancelot to ensure that this year his table “wasn’t in fucking Siberia.” By the way, their table previously had hardly been by the kitchen’s swinging doors—his wife, Pippa, simply needed to be in the front row this time. Or, as Hugo said it, “So she can see the auctioneer sweat.”

  Here’s the rule for the seating: The bigger the fund, the closer their table to the stage where the action was. There was the auctioneer calling out the astronomic bids, speeches by heavy hitters, and a Rolling Stones performance (lot fifteen, singing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” with Mick, Keith, and the gang, went for $1.2 million). Other lots included Fifteen Minutes with Warren Buffett ($700,000) and A Bowl of Matzoh Ball Soup cooked by Rachael Ray ($675,000). Lunch with Charlize had just garnered three-quarter mill.

  Kiki thought it was all terribly “yawnsville,” but I found it to be fun, definitely much better than most events. It was exciting, like Wimbledon for the hedgie crew, with heads turning as the auction bids volleyed higher and higher in order to impress colleagues and rivals.

  “Lot twenty-three: Vive La France: a private jet to Paris, a stay at the Ritz Hotel, couture show tickets furnished by the houses of Chanel, Valentino, Lacroix, Nina Ricci, Gaultier, and Lanvin.”

  Paddles went up as nervous wives rubbed their hands together in gleeful fits, envisioning potential Parisian shopping marathons. Beside Mary and Trish, Posey waved at me across the room, beaming as her husband made the opening bid.

  “I have one hundred thousand. Do I hear one-fifty?”

  New paddles entered the fray.

  “One-fifty. Do I hear one seventy-five?”

  Kincaid and Peach Saunders plunged into the
bidding war; he of Lightning Capital, Kincaid rolled up his sleeves: “Two hundred!”

  “Please, that woman wouldn’t know style if it bit her on her WASPy flat ass,” moaned Kiki to me in a whisper. “It’s like Chico’s exploded on her. What a fucking waste.”

  “Kiki, shut up!” Hal commanded angrily.

  I was holding Tim’s hand, which I squeezed when his brother snapped at Kiki, but he just stared straight ahead. Yikes. I looked at Kiki, who sat with her arms crossed, clearly wounded from being reprimanded so publicly.

  Then, Mac MacMonigle, from RockyPeaks Capital, raised his paddle as his wife, Jessica (and her new boobs, courtesy of Dr. Hidalgo), beamed proudly. Paddles also flew at tables taken by megafunds like Cerberus, Centaurus, and Firebird.

  The honcho of Lava Capital jumped in around three hundred grand, and then Gianni Fasciatelli from WinStar took the bidding up another notch.

  One aside: To add to my abbreviated explanation of hedge funds, let me also say that an element of the scene is also the funds’ names. Because I’d seen all these paddle-happy people a million times at various industry events such as this one, I knew almost everyone—and their companies’ monikers. At the very same event a few years back, Kiki and I plopped at a votive-lit cabaret table during cocktail hour and developed a chart on little napkins of how one could create his own hedge fund name.

  It’s quite simple: To create an impression of maximum grandeur, one takes a Lofty Locale, often celestial or geographic (COLUMN A). Or appropriates an element from Greek Mythology (COLUMN B) or the name of an Elite Town or Resort Destination (COLUMN C). That word can be used alone or combined with a geological or topographical element (COLUMN D) before adding the group’s final name (COLUMN E).

  HOW TO NAME YOUR HEDGE FUND

  Results: StarPoint Capital or Cos Cob Ventures or Apollo-Crest Management. You get the picture.

  Whatever the custom formula, A, B, or C + D + E = ego + penis extension. Unless someone just wimps out and uses his last name or initials, this is a surefire way to peg how every fund got its name.

  “Lot twenty-four: SOLD for six hundred thousand to the gentleman in front.”

  Gag. It was Petri McNaughton’s snooze of a husband, Roy, from EverestPeak Management. Everyone at their table was patting him on the back like he’d accomplished something. All he did was shell it out—very publicly, I might add—for a frigging trip. Petri beamed. Posey and Trish rolled their eyes. While my friends sometimes had the odd excessive expenditure, they were pretty much down-to-earth by New York standards. Some people we knew socially would occasionally go a tad too over-the-top, but they weren’t even in the stratosphere of Dish McNaughton, who, rumor had it, once sent Roy’s plane to Maine for live lobsters for her daughter’s preschool class. For show-and-tell.

  After three more lots (including a victory for Mary, whose hubby bought her a day of shopping with Cate Blanchett and a trip to her facialist), Kiki grabbed my hand and led me off to the bathroom, aching to get a break.

  “And can you believe that schmuck who blew a million bucks for yoga with Rebecca fucking Romijn?!” She put on her bright red lipstick and adjusted her tan cleavage. “I guess that’s, like, twenty bucks for these guys.”

  “Please. Tim wants to bid on that week racing McLarens upstate,” I complained. “I told him it’s one thing to leave us if he has to go away on business, but how do I tell Miles that Daddy’s gone again because he has to race cars?”

  “Hal wants that, too. I guess they’ll go together and you and I will have some fun. Screw them. We can go see all those geeky Broadway shows you wanted to catch up on.”

  We lingered gossiping in the bathroom until Emilia d’Angelo, the ultimate hedge fund wife, entered. Emilia was the most put-together, perma-blond clotheshorse around, and her son Prescott was in Miles’s kindergarten class at St. Sebastian’s. Posey, Trish, and Mary were close friends with her, and so, by proxy, I was as well. I was always friendly, but she was a bit high profile in her spending, incessantly flaunting her wealth. Within one breath, she’d “casually” mention the ski house in Gstaad, the Gin Lane Southampton estate, the G5, and My Honey’s Money, their yacht based in the Caymans. Posey once joked that the d’Angelos’ boat made her mere 150-foot vessel look like a dinghy. Posey and I had become fast friends when our sons were in nursery school together at Carnegie, so when she quickly embraced Emilia, I came along. Since their husbands worked together and played golf all the time in Southport, and Emilia, Mary, and Trish’s sons knew one another from their nursery school, we all kind of became a clique, reinforced by always seeing one another at events like these. We’d also shared many fun hens’ dinners during all the hedge fund conferences when our husbands were away, trunk shows in one another’s homes for a friend’s new fine jewelry or handbag line or kids’ clothes, even the occasional couples’ weekend at the Mayflower in Connecticut.

  But Kiki never understood my friendships with them and considered them lockjaw preppies. Maybe because she was hipper and a bit younger, but also, I suppose, because she didn’t have kids, so she didn’t quite grasp how much we had in common, whether it was teachers, school gossip, fund-raisers, or sports games. Plus, Posey and I often snuck off from the mommy posse and went to get a glass of wine; we even had our own secret miniplaygroup, which we called Tots’n’Tonic. During those winter months, when our guys were two and three, with ants in their pants, I thought I’d have to check into Payne Whitney.

  “Hi, ladies. Marco just bought me the Hermès Alligator Trench!” Emilia beamed. “It’s all handmade from one gator hide! Can you believe it?”

  Kiki always said Emilia probably weighed in at 102 pounds and got down to double digits when she took her massive diamond ring off, which was all I could think of as the refracted light off her rock blinded me while she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear.

  “Congrats,” I said. She always seemed to be going on and on about all her stuff. Luckily the rest of my friends didn’t seem to do that and were a bit more discreet.

  “See you tomorrow at school,” Emilia replied, smiling, and exited.

  “I wish I could throw her in the Everglades and have all those gators chomp her ass,” Kiki said, fishing for a cigarette in her clutch.

  “They’d still be hungry,” I countered as I applied lip gloss.

  “Touché.” Kiki laughed. “She’s no more filling than a fucking cracker. She’s like a human Triscuit.”

  “I feel bad. She’s nice, though,” I offered, guiltily. “She just, you know, tries too hard to impress.”

  “Barf. Your whole mommy world is like these clones. They look fifty in their thirties; I mean, what’s up with that? The silk scarves, the cashmere cape thingies with the ruffle or fur piping, hellooo, AARP!”

  Kiki’s hemlines were more like early twenties in my friends’ opinions, I’m sure. But while my sister-in-law was the polar opposite of some of my friends, I was somewhere in the middle, seeing both sides of the coin. While I wasn’t as edgy as I used to be (not that I was ever as daringly cool or as much of a risky fashionista as Kiki), I still had more pizzazz than most of my circle. Yes, I had long dirty blond hair and the requisite Tory Burch getups, but where the other ladies sometimes veered off in Republican wife territory, I sometimes went back to my semihipper stylings from my magazine days when I’d buy fun cheap dresses from hole-in-the-wall shops or well-worn rock tour T-shirts. But those days were behind me; not that I was a conformist or anything, but I was a mother and definitely had to dress up more often than not given the functions I had to attend by Tim’s side. And when I was socially off the hook, I just wanted to be comfortable and not stress about getting decked out, hence my boring uniform of jeans and a blouse, a plain shift dress, or a skirt and cashmere T-shirt. But I must confess, sometimes I missed that feeling of being young and daring. And while I wasn’t going to sport Paris Hilton-length minis on one end of the spectrum or my friends’ matronly floor-length fur coats on the other, I knew I could be somewhere
in the middle of both extremes. Emilia was the type who simply made too much of an effort. Every hair in place, every accessory of the moment, always fancy, fancy, fancy. Even her son was fancy. I swear, I once heard Prescott, as he was being picked up the last day before Christmas vacation, saying, “Mummy, are we taking the Cessna or the G4 to Lyford?” When Emilia replied that, alas, it was the Cessna this time as their Gulfstream was in California getting reupholstered in chocolate suede since he had gotten stains from his Milano cookies on the tan couches, he grouchily snapped “Aw, man! Shucks!”

  But a lot of these women felt that this was the role they were cast to play: preened, polished, perfect—many of them dressing not for their husbands but for one another, glossed and glamorous and without human flaws. Foreheads were tight, thanks to ’TOX from Dr. Pat; asses were cellulite-free, thanks to Dr. Dan. Breasts were perma-pert, legs vein-free and hairless, skin smooth. There were lasers, lipos, and lips plumped, nails polished, feet massaged. Many retained makeup artists for black-tie engagements such as this one. Picture the larger-than-life cheerleading squad who ruled main hall by way of Madison Avenue and Avenue Montaigne.

  The bathroom door opened and I could hear the auctioneer’s booming voice echo through the marble stalls.

  “Lot thirty-three: Get to Play a Dead Body on Law & Order. Value: priceless.”