“I want out, Mark. I’m done with this.” Susan delivers this statement in a flat, lifeless tone, as she might say, Looks like rain. She opens the vanity mirror to check her makeup. “I want sixty percent of everything, and the house as well. You keep the cars and the retirement accounts. I’d like to file the papers next week.”
She snaps the mirror closed and exits the convertible. And just like that, it’s officiaclass="underline" My marriage has begun its slow-motion spiral to the first circle of hell.
We approach the front door wordlessly, trying to assemble a convincing facsimile of a happy and centered Greenwich couple. Rich Honeywell opens the door with a flourish. He’s dressed in a pair of black Ted Baker slacks, a charcoal Armani shirt, and Donald Pliner loafers.
“Hey, it’s the Barstons!” Honeywell says theatrically, as he hugs Susan (a bit too warmly for my comfort). “Word up, Barston? You get lost on the way or something?” This offhand dig is a passive-aggressive notice that we are the last to arrive, but it’s the unintended irony that makes me blink. Yeah, I got lost on the way, all right
“Jennifer’s been asking all night, ‘Where’re the Barstons, where’re the Barstons?’ She’ll be psyched you’re finally here.” Rich says this breezily as he shepherds us through the palatial, antiseptic interior of his McMansion-in-progress. Like the homes of most of our friends, the design has a predictable look and feel. The furnishings bear the fingerprints of a particular interior designer who specializes in a bland, WASPy décor that appeals to new money clients with absolutely no sense of style of their own. She’s booked up for six months in advance. “Jen, come say hello to the Barstons.”
Jennifer Honeywell curtails her lecture to the waiter on how to serve the platter of jumbo Gulf shrimp, and wheels around with exaggerated delight. “It’s the Barstons!” she squeals like a teenager, and I remember something I’d heard about her trying out a new antidepressant.
We apologize for being late, then I give Jennifer a kiss, Jennifer and Susan kiss, and Rich takes advantage of the pleasantries to try to score a kiss on the lips with Susan (which she successfully evades). I take note of Jennifer’s new body — it has been honed and shaped by spinning classes and Pilates into a rock-hard leanness that teeters on the verge of masculinity. The excessive athleticism has introduced an asexual coarseness to her face. Too bad; she used to be among the most attractive of my friends’ wives.
Rich makes a sweeping gesture toward the French doors. “The bartender’s got a bottle of Grey Goose with your name on it, kimosabe.”
“Let’s have at it,” I say.
Honeywell directs us to the open-air patio overlooking an exquisitely manicured backyard of Kentucky bluegrass — an emerald carpet gleaming under a full moon. Predictably, Susan and I peel off in different directions. It will be this way for the entire night, but I’m cool with that. The blast of communal energy from the party lifts my spirits.
At the bar, a pimply-faced Greenwich High School kid gives me a double shot of Grey Goose on the rocks. Duly fortified, I meld into a nearby amoeba of acquaintances. They interrupt their debate about Robert Trent Jones golf courses to slap my back, shake my hand, and high-five me.
“I was just saying,” Ford Spilsbury says, “that the Lido course on Long Beach is as close to eighteen-hole nirvana as you’re ever going to get. The sixteenth hole is the ultimate par five, and you have an eagle opportunity if you can survive the double-water carry.”
The five of them — Spilsbury, Foster, Brightman, O’Clair, and Cantwell — are clubhouse friends, and, like me, they are all Wall Street jerks: bankers and brokers and traders and lawyers. The Ivy League degrees on this patio cost millions in tuition dollars, but they were worth every penny. The diplomas our parents bought for us are a license to steal. Collectively, we siphon off a disproportionate chunk of the country’s GNP, and trundle it north to our trophy wives in Greenwich. We buy expensive cars and homes and boats and pools, and go on obscenely expensive vacations, all of which is meant to inform everyone just how much we’re taking out of the American economy for ourselves. Our nine-year-olds are infected with this zombie-like consumerism, and are as tragically conversant with the iconic symbolism of Tiffany and BMW and Prada as their parents. We confuse wealth with class; we think they are synonymous, when they most assuredly are not. Inevitably, we will pass the former on to our children, but not the latter.
In this particular fishbowl, we wrap ourselves in an aura of effortlessness. We are expert at concealing the fears that haunt us at 3:00 in the morning: the TMJ-inducing toll our careers take on our stomachs and our mental health; the slow decay of our marriages; the warning signs that our children might not end up at an Ivy League university; the velocity at which our spending is outpacing our income. We hide behind the breezy accomplishment of breaking eighty on the course at the Stanwich Club, pretending everything is right in the world when we’ve come to know that the pursuit of this life is a cancer to the soul. I gaze up at the moon in the star-studded sky and heave a sigh. Maybe my spirits aren’t so lifted after all.
I’m mildly surprised to find my glass is empty. I break away from the group for a refill. As I’m waiting at the bar, a call lights up my cell phone. I flip it open. “This is Barston.”
On the other end an uncertain pause, then a soft fumble of the handset. A hand slips over the mouthpiece. Heated whispers, shushing, and the musical laughter of drunken young girls — a live feed directly from Fiona’s piss-up at Greenwich Point Beach.
I say nothing, just listen. More giggles and whispers, all unintelligible. Her nanny friends put her up to this, I realize, and it is juvenile, immature — a slumber party prank, for chrissakes — and then, the act of chickening out; the curt click of the line going dead. I’m staring at my phone, waiting for... I don’t know what.
I’m jolted from my reverie by the underage barkeep holding out my replenished drink. I take a greedy slurp, my temples throbbing with the pulse of curiosity over this au pair Lollapalooza taking place just a few miles away.
The night wears on, booze is consumed in disturbingly large quantities, and the conversation becomes edgy. The subject matter is friendship, fidelity, and minding your own damn business. Would you tell a friend if you knew his wife was cheating? Foster says, “No fucking way, it’s not my business.” Cantwell says, “Of it’s your business. It’s your buddy.”
Foster: “I can’t be the one to tell him something like that. It’s too... heavy, man. I’d be ruining his life.”
Rob Brightman chimes in: “So you’d keep it to yourself? How would you sleep at night?”
O’Clair says: “I get Foster’s point. Why is it his responsibility to break the news that the wife is banging the tennis instructor?”
I jump in. “He’s your best friend, Chris, that’s why. You couldn’t look him in the eye at a party like this if you knew his wife was being unfaithful. You’re duty-bound to tell him, and let him take the appropriate course of action. Case closed.”
The passion with which I deliver this point brings the debate to an abrupt end.
Brightman breaks the uncomfortable silence: “So any of you assholes have something to tell me?” The group explodes in laughter. Everyone, that is, but Ford Spilsbury, who has kept conspicuously out of the conversation.