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FOUR The Worst Hedge Fund Wife on the Planet

Heaving myself out of bed, I guzzled down the rest of my glass of water and threw on an old T-shirt and a pair of John’s boxers. Sunlight poured through a gap in our curtains, illuminating a wedge of vanilla carpet where my outfit from the previous night lay in a sad little heap. I picked it up and tossed it in the little hamper we used to collect our dry cleaning, then retrieved my shoes, a pair of leg-lengthening, bank-breaking black pumps, and my quilted black satin clutch, both from Chanel, both carelessly scattered around the room. I shelved them in their appropriate tissue-lined boxes while at the same time eyeing the floor for my stockings and Spanx.

Oh right, I’d left those at the club.

Along with my self-respect.

Nice.

I needed coffee, lots of it. Without it, I knew I would be unable to function for the entire day, not that I had anything in particular to do, but still. I slipped on my fleece slippers and padded over to the kitchen, where I sloshed some milk in a saucepan, ground some coffee beans and dumped the entire grinder’s worth of grounds into the liner. Once it was brewed, I poured a couple cups of the coffee into the saucepan with the warmed milk and then emptied the whole mixture into the red-and-white snowflake mug I’d used since high school. If there was one thing I had down to a science, it was making coffee just the way I liked it.

Taking my first gulp of the hot, dark liquid, I peered inside the refrigerator, where I found the signs of a drunken, middle-of-the-night food binge—the pumpkin pie I had made two days earlier was almost entirely eaten and one of my earrings was nestled in between a halfeaten round of Camembert and a carton of orange juice that had been full when we had left for the Partridges but was now mostly gone. Feeling even more disgusted with myself, I closed the door of the fridge and looked down at my stomach. It was bloated and distended.

Gross.

My head pounded behind my left eye socket, and without thinking I reached up to apply pressure on it, causing a thunderbolt of pain to rip through my head as soon as my fingers made contact. I stooped down to check my reflection in the mirrored backsplash, only to have my fears confirmed: I had the beginnings of a black eye. A real, Oscar-de-la-Hoya-worthy shiner. It was gonna be ugly.

Gulping down another mouthful of coffee, I started trying to piece together the previous night’s timeline. There had been three glasses of champagne, which I had downed in rapid succession. Not advisable, obviously, but I always drink quickly when I’m nervous, and that night, surrounded by John’s hyperwealthy colleagues and their expensively maintained wives, I certainly had cause to be. You see, it was pretty clear that most of the other wives at the Partridges’ party grew up with nannies and private school kilts hemmed just so, while I had carried a house key around my neck on a dingy white shoelace and braved the Minnesota winters in multigenerational hand-me-downs. Even last night, wearing a new designer dress and multiple coats of a new mascara the woman behind the cosmetics counter swore was what all the movie stars use, I still felt like a prairie girl among princesses.

However, for John, I put on a brave face. He seemed to be reveling in our transition into a higher tax bracket and new city as much as I was floundering in it. Since being recruited by Zenith from his desk at the Merc, John had been completely obsessed with his work. His job as a specialist in trading energy derivatives required him to, for example, predict, hopefully correctly, how much the price of a barrel of oil was going to rise over the next quarter and why. It was all tremendously complicated, time-consuming, and stressful, but it turned out that John was really good at it, and in the span of less than a year, he’d managed to make the fund an obscene amount of money, which had in turn made us wealthier than we’d ever dared to dream.

For anyone without an intimate understanding of what hedge funds do, in a nutshell they invest other people’s money. We’re talking super-wealthy individuals who have the five to twenty million dollars you need to play ball with these funds just lying around, gathering dust, twiddling their little green thumbs. If everything goes right, the investors get back whatever profit (or return) is made, minus twenty percent and two percent of the total investment that the fund keeps as compensation. (A few managers take a full fifty percent of the profits, but they’re more the exception than the rule.)

For a long stretch of time everything did go right—the rich got richer and a bunch of guys in the right place at the right time minted huge fortunes virtually overnight. And then the economy tanked, and the party was suddenly over.

John and I were a total anomaly. While we were upgrading our furniture and researching luxury vacations, the rest of Wall Street was taking it on the chin. The banks had all underestimated their exposure to the subprime mortgage industry meltdown and had been forced to write off billions of dollars. As they started reining in on the amount of loans they were making to small and large businesses, deal flow slowed and with fewer deals in the pipeline, profits dipped. Soon thereafter pink slips started to fly. The Federal Reserve intervened to save the banks from going under, but at the expense of the dollar, which sank even lower in value. To make matters worse, the boost U.S. exports received as a result of the weak dollar was far smaller than previously anticipated or hoped for, and the president’s pro-ethanol policy was making the cost of all food higher as Midwestern farmers ditched less profitable crops in order to grow corn. To top it all off the Saudis were once again raising the price of crude, mainly because of the weakening dollar. The long run of American prosperity was coming to an end.

But not for us. Ours was just starting.

Although we were lucky, I didn’t feel like it. Moving to New York had been difficult for me. Okay, gut wrenching. Shortly after our relocation, I had gotten pregnant. A dream, since we’d spent a year trying before it finally happened. You could say that I was—and am

- totally obsessed with babies. I love the way they smell, the sounds they make when they eat, their tiny little hands making angry little fists when they cry. It hadn’t mattered to me that I vomited five times a day and could only stomach Saltines and cheese sandwiches for the duration of the whole first trimester. I’d watch those Gerber baby commercials on television and just melt with happiness. I was going to be a mom.

Everything was going great until I hit the twenty-week mark and started bleeding. First it was just some spotting, but when the flow got heavier, my doctor put me on monitored bed rest in the hospital and they shot me full of drugs that were supposed to help. But it was too late. I miscarried. It wasn’t meant to be, the doctor said. We’d try again, John said. A lot of people said a lot of things, but nothing could allay the pain. My world was black. I couldn’t stop crying. For weeks, all I did was cry. Cry and eat cheese—Burrata, fresh off the plane from Tuscany, weeping with moisture, and Stilton from England, massive slabs of the salty, piquant stuff. John brought me only the best, unpasteurized, illegal cheese. I could eat it now: I wasn’t pregnant anymore. There was no danger of ingesting a piece of Listeria-laden fromage and losing the baby.

I had sat on our new couch, my misery wrapped around me like a blanket, and thought of my baby. I wondered what he would have looked like, whether he would have inherited John’s blondish hair or my dark locks, John’s lean, athletic build, or my softer, shorter one. Would he have been popular? Bookish? Funny? Preferred pancakes to waffles, bacon to sausages? I’d never know. All I could do was imagine. Imagine and then weep. I told John that I wanted us to move back to Chicago. New York held only unhappiness for me. I missed our old lives and I missed our friends.

‘We’ll make more,’ he assured me.

Now in the kitchen, I considered the empty seat at the breakfast table and silently cursed John for making me go to the Partridges. I had wanted to stay home and watch an episode of Lost, but he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I promise, once you have a glass of wine and start talking to people, you’ll be glad you’re there,’ he’d argued, and when I still refused to budge from our big comfy couch, he pulled out the heavy artillery: ‘My bosses will be there. It won’t look good if you’re not with me.’

I harrumphed, unimpressed.

‘We haven’t been out in months. Don’t I deserve a night out with my wife every once in a while?’

Thus reminded that I, baby or no baby, still had some wifely responsibilities to perform, I pried myself off the couch and let him prod me into our bedroom in the direction of our walk-in closet, where I squirmed into my trusty Spanx, a pair of stockings, and that stupid dress. And although I had resigned myself to spending the night quietly sipping champagne in a corner, hoping that no one noticed what a big, friendless loser I was, I actually ended up having a good time.

The highlight of the evening had been—no, not the tequila—but meeting Gigi Ambrose, the well-known caterer, cookbook author, and frequent Today Show guest. With masses of auburn hair, Jessica Rabbit curves, and enough Southern sass for a whole cotillion’s worth of debutantes, she was the kind of woman you want to hate, but can’t. She was too charming, and on top of that, her recipes had always served me well in the kitchen. Even so it had taken me half an hour to work up the nerve to walk up to her and introduce myself.

‘I love the kumquat glazed chicken skewers,’ I’d said in reference to one of the hors d’oeuvres being passed around on silver trays that evening. There had also been caviar-topped quail eggs, blue cheese and candied fig tartlets, not to mention grilled polenta squares and seared tuna bites. But the chicken skewers had been my favorite, and as a conversation opener I had asked Gigi if she’d included the recipe for them in her next book, a home entertaining guide she’d already started promoting on her Today Show segments.

‘Oh, I’m not catering tonight,’ Gigi had drawled in response. Her voice was deep and warm, and she smelled of vanilla and rosewood. ‘Ainsley went with another company, which is more than fine by me. I’m here with my husband.’

‘I am, too,’ I said just as a woman in a chinchilla coat clomped through the doorway on five-inch platform heels. She had raven hair, large, probably surgically enhanced breasts, and a thin gold phone pressed to her ear. She was barking something in Russian into it. Later I would learn from Gigi that the fembot’s name was Irina and she called herself a matchmaker, but most believed her to be a madam. Irina set up pretty Russian girls, many just off the plane, with rich old men who wanted hot young things to take to dinner—and then home to bed. Eliot Spitzer was rumored to have been one of her better customers.

‘Darling, hello. I haven’t seen you in a while. It’s so nice to see you,’ Irina purred, leaning down—she stood six feet two in her heels—to give Gigi a double air kiss salutation.

‘Have you met Marcy Emerson?’ Gigi asked, putting her arm around my waist and giving it a reassuring squeeze.

Irina shifted her eyes, a pair of icy blue slits rimmed in heavy black liner, to me.

She was intimidating all right, and I had fumbled for my words, finally sputtering something like ’its cold out there, isn’t it?’ thinking that I’d be safe talking about the weather.

But I’d thought wrong.

‘In Russia we have a saying,’ Irina said, her voice as frosty as her glare. ‘There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes.’ She had made a show of looking me up and down before stomping off into the living room.

‘Umm, is it my imagination or did she just sneer at me?’ I asked Gigi.

‘Not your imagination.’

‘Well, then, what a friendly lady. I’m so glad I came.’

Gigi laughed. ‘You couldn’t get out of tonight, either, could you?’

‘Is it that obvious?’ I replied, and for the next ten minutes Gigi and I swapped our bullet-point biographies. She was originally from North Carolina, recently married her husband, one Jeremy Cohen, an ex-Goldman Sachs banker who’d originally made his money trading junk bonds (à la Michael Milken, minus the jail time). His particular knack was distressed investment, which meant that he bought and sold stock in troubled corporations. He’d started his first vulture fund in the late nineties following the International Monetary Fund crisis in Asia. After making a killing flipping undervalued companies in South Korea, Jeremy launched another fund and amassed yet another fortune buying securities in a string of utility companies across Texas. Immediately after Gigi married Jeremy, she got pregnant with a girl, now six months old and named Chloe, and moved into Jeremy’s gargantuan, feng shui-ed apartment in a newly refurbished luxury condo/hotel on Central Park South. I told her that I’d grown up in a suburb of Minneapolis, went to college in Chicago, where I worked post graduation at an investment bank, most recently as a relationship officer for the bank’s wealthy clients, and met John, whom I had been married to for five years.

Gigi and I finished our glasses of champagne and agreed it was time to join the others in the living room; our husbands were probably wondering if we’d left without them. Gigi suggested we take the long way back, through the Partridges’ dining room, where we gawked at a china hutch full of plates etched with two fancifully entwined P’s and an A.

‘Monogrammed tablewear,’ Gigi whispered, rolling her eyes. I giggled and she leaned in close to my ear to dispense a torrent of insider information, the importance of which I would realize only later, once it was too late.

‘I actually shouldn’t be making fun of poor Ainsley. Jeremy told me earlier tonight that Peter’s closing his fund. He started it three years ago and it never reached critical mass.’

I nodded. Critical mass in private-equity-speak referred to the amount of capital he had been able to raise. It was a common death knell for hundreds of startup funds.

‘Plus he cleared all his trades through Bear Stearns,’ Gigi continued.

In the aftermath of the subprime lending debacle, Bear Stearns, once one of the most venerable banks on Wall Street, was forced to sell itself to JP Morgan for less than it was worth. Much of its well-paid staff, including several of Peter’s friends, had been laid off, leaving Peter to scramble to forge relationships with new brokers.

‘And to top it all off, Peter was personally heavily invested in Bear stock. He’d worked there for ten years before he left to do his own thing. When Bear sold to JP Morgan for a pittance, the Partridges lost just about everything they had. Lord knows why they’re throwing this party. They really can’t afford it.’

‘I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose so much so quickly.’

‘Hey, this is New York. Fortunes are made and lost every day, especially in a market as volatile as this one.’

This, I knew to be true. John and I, for example, had profited from fluctuations in the energy markets. We were overnight success stories, but we were the exception. Far more had lost their shirts. No one could have anticipated that Greenwich, Connecticut, aka hedgefundlandia, would become rife with home foreclosures.

‘Hey, let’s have lunch next week, my treat. Do you like Nello?’ Gigi asked, mentioning the name of a popular Italian restaurant on Madison Avenue.

‘I’ve never been, but John has and he tells me it’s good.’

‘It is. The pasta is incredible. Tuesday at noon work for you?’

‘Absolutely,’ I’d said, and for the first time since the miscarriage, I actually had something to look forward to.

Gigi handed me her card in case I had to cancel—which I promised her I wouldn’t, my agenda being completely empty and all—and we walked back toward the living room, where the party was just starting to pick up steam. The music had gotten louder and drinks stiffer. At around eleven, Gigi bade us all goodbye—she’d promised her babysitter it wouldn’t be a late night—but before she left she introduced me to Peter Partridge, who immediately plunked a pair of felt antlers on my head and asked me to pose with Ainsley in front of their fifteen-foot Christmas tree.

Clad in a strapless chartreuse mini, her hair tumbling in her trademark flaxen waves over a pair of lightly tanned shoulders, Ainsley was every inch the Woman About Town. She had the kind of haughty aura that is particular to people accustomed to being at the center of attention anywhere they went. Ainsley’s parents were upper middle class, but socially ambitious enough to know that by sending their daughter to Exeter in Massachusetts for boarding school and then to Rollins in Florida for college, they would be giving her an opportunity to join the ranks of high society. They were right: Ainsley met Peter at a charity benefit while she was working as a summer intern for House & Home, however it wasn’t until she bumped into Peter two summers later at Piping Rock that the pair began to date. They were married a year and a half later (a picture appeared in Town & Country magazine), and Ainsley gave up her job working in Vogue’s fabled fashion closet to dedicate herself to charitable works full time, or so she told the New York Times Vows columnist at the time.

For several subsequent years, Ainsley and Peter were considered New York’s golden couple. She had beauty and charm, he, pedigree and (it was assumed) tons of old money—still the best kind. They were photographed at parties, written about in all the newspapers, celebrated everywhere. I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t thrilling to be momentarily allowed into their inner circle, even if Ainsley had kept calling me by the wrong name. (Where she got Tricia from Marcy, I’ll never know.)

I had been sitting on the couch for a while, pretending to listen to John and one of his colleagues discuss the latest round of firings at an investment bank downtown, when Peter suggested that we all do a round of shots, which, when they arrived, turned out to be closer in size to tumblers, filled close to the brim with tequila. Everyone threw theirs back in one, and I, not wanting to stand out in the crowd, followed suit. It was a bad move. The quails’ eggs and tiny tartlets might have been delicious, but they hadn’t provided much in the way of stomach lining. I was immediately drunk.

I found John in the hallway between the kitchen and dining room, talking to Ainsley. Tugging lightly on his shirt, I tried to get his attention.

He didn’t notice, so I tugged harder. ‘Honey, I’m going to get my coat,’ I said.

‘Really?’ he asked, looking at his watch.

I nodded and swayed, and John moved to steady me. But Ainsley moved faster. Clasping a skinny, sinewy arm around my waist, she pouted prettily and said in a surprisingly husky voice that I simply could not go, that she was just getting to know me. (Err, Tricia?)

‘C’mon, Marce, let’s stay a little longer,’ John seconded.

I agreed—stupid me—and whiled away some time thumbing through a stack of coffee table books (most of which featured Ainsley in some way or another) in front of the fake fireplace in the Partridges’ living room. Three-quarters of an hour later, I was no longer tipsy but tired and truly ready to go home. But when I went to find John, I stumbled into Peter, who somehow talked me into accepting a glass of Montrachet from him in the kitchen. He’d just opened the bottle, the last in a case he’d won at a charity auction and said it would be a shame not to drink it. Okay, okay, I relented. And, yes, I could have declined Peter’s offer and left the party, slipping out into the foyer and through the front door without anyone noticing, but the thing is that I really felt like it would have been rude to turn down the guy. He’d just lost his business and the majority of his savings. The least I could do was share a bottle of Montrachet with him.

From then on my recollection of events starts to get blurry. I do remember that all of us piled into a couple of cabs and headed downtown to the Gramercy Park Hotel, where there was a velvet rope that Peter and Ainsley had no trouble transcending, and inside the music was great, the vibe electric. Bottles of champagne, tequila, fresh orange juice, pomegranate juice, and soda crowded every square inch of our table. Once we were all settled, Peter handed me another drink, a tequila mixed with the pomegranate juice, and I honestly don’t remember anything of what happened after finishing it—no idea how or why I’d disrobed in front of a room full of the city’s most sophisticated, well-connected movers and shakers, or started a fight with a girl whose face and name I cannot, for the life of me, remember even to this day.