The staircase alone is a thing of great beauty– the wainscoting and railings are a rich, carved mahogany. The runner on the stairs muffles Ted’s footsteps. When he reaches the bottom, he rests his hand briefly, appreciatively, on the elaborately carved newel post, so smooth beneath his palm. He turns to his right and heads down the long hall to the kitchen at the rear. The kitchen spans the entire width of the house and looks out onto the professionally landscaped garden, blooming with colourful hollyhocks, hydrangeas and roses. The porcelain floor tiles are cool beneath his bare feet on these hot July days. In the winter, they’re heated. Early morning light filters in through the tall windows. Just being in the kitchen they’d had remodelled so painstakingly three years ago would normally fill him with satisfaction. But today it simply occurs to him that he’s glad they did it then, because they certainly couldn’t afford to do it now.
He reaches into the stainless-steel fridge, takes out the orange juice, and places it on the marble-topped island. He starts the Italian coffee machine and selects a cortado. Then, as the coffee machine whirs, he leaves the kitchen and walks back down the hall to the front door. He lingers for a moment in the foyer between the two sets of mahogany entry doors, gazing through the glass panels of the arched double doors as if afraid of the world outside. Then he unlocks and opens the heavy door. Even this early, he can hear the familiar sounds of their historic Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood waking up– delivery trucks and the occasional dog barking. He reaches down for the newspapers–The New York TimesandThe Wall StreetJournal–and steps back inside, closing the door. Once again, a soothing silence engulfs him. His home is his sanctuary.
This is Ted’s morning ritual. Coffee, newspapers, breakfast– and pleasant conversation with Jill when she gets up and joins him before they both go off to work. He’s always been an early riser, but lately his depression, or anxiety, or some fiendish blend of both, has him rising earlier and earlier. These days he’s tired and irritable, and striving not to show it. He’s not enjoying life the way he should, the way he’s been accustomed to. Well, how can he, when everything’s going to hell?
He tries to read theTimes, but the headlines, bold and frightening as they are these days, fail to grab him. He simply doesn’t care. He turns to the business section but finds he cannot concentrate. He’s a man from a prominent family, who lives in an expensive brownstone in posh Brooklyn Heights and works at an investment firm in Manhattan, so everyone assumes he’s rich. For a long time, that was essentially true. But that’s because he inherited money from his father, and he’s run through it more quickly than anticipated.
Therein lies the problem. Things have been getting away from him rather badly. So far, he has managed to keep it quiet. He has been borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. Jill is aware that things are a little tight, but she has no idea how tight. He’s mentioned it to her casually, but she hasn’t bothered to rein in her spending. She must think it is a temporary problem. He can’t bear to see her disappointed. He can’t bear to see her disappointed inhim. They have had a very pleasant life until now, their way smoothed by money and comfort. He likes to think that they are made for each other, that theirs is a great love story, theirmarriage a complete success– so rare these days– but he’s not such a fool as to think that ease has had nothing to do with it. Would they still be happy if the wolf was at the door? Would she still love him? He pushes away his cold coffee, feeling sick in the pit of his stomach. If his latest investment gamble doesn’t pay off, they are going to find out.
He can’t bear the thought of losing all this. Of losingher.Who is he really, who would he be, without her, the love of his life, and without all the trappings of success? He realizes he doesn’t have an answer. He was a child of privilege, he is a man of privilege; he has never really been anything else. He has never been tested. Perhaps now he will find out what he’s made of. The thought frightens him. What if there’s nothing there?
He senses Jill’s presence and looks up.
‘You’re up early,’ she says. She stands in the kitchen doorway, long, bare legs and short nightgown, her glossy dark hair framing her perfect face.
Is there a note of reproach in her voice? Is she worried? About him? He observes her carefully. She doesn’t like weakness, especially in men. It makes her angry. He knows this about her. She told him this early in their relationship; she said she couldn’t explain it, but any display of weakness in a grown man provokes rage in her rather than sympathy. He’d wondered about this at the time but hadn’t fretted unduly. He knew she’d had a weak, alcoholic father who’d lost all their money, and that would justify rage in anybody.
He can’t disappoint her. He can’t tell her the truth. Everything might still be all right.
She walks over to him and he rises from the kitchen tableand pulls her into a kiss. They are still in love, still very much adoring of each other in bed, even though they have been married six years and he is five years older than her. Surely they can survive anything?
Jill sinks into her husband’s kiss and then pulls back and studies him. Such an attractive man she married. Everything about him– his voice, the way he smiles, the way he moves. The way he kisses her, the way he touches her. She’s still in love. She feels lucky. More than that, she feels that she has made good decisions. She congratulates herself on this almost every day.
She has an ideal life. She loves her job working four days a week at Clives, an art gallery on the Lower East Side. They don’t need the money, but more is always nice. And she’s ambitious– she’d like to have a gallery of her own one day. She likes being surrounded by good art, she likes meeting interesting people, she likes the parties. She loves working in Manhattan, and their gorgeous home in Brooklyn Heights– they have invested so much of themselves in it. She brings people here to entertain; they tell her she is a natural and charming hostess. It’s easy if you have caterers and an excellent cleaning lady. She wouldn’t be up for it if it required cooking and cleaning all day. She has her friends, her shopping, her gym, her cultural events– the theatre, the opera, the galleries. She’s beautiful and rich and has a gorgeous husband, and they are unencumbered by children. It’s all perfect. There is the faint spectre of aging, but she’s doing everything she can to keep it at bay with creams and routines. The thing is not to fight it too hard, not to look like you’re trying.
However, several times lately she has felt Ted rise from the marital bed and steal away. Why? He has been quiet lately, even a bit moody, which is not like him. He’s a man who usually enjoys life to the fullest. It’s been going on for a few months now, but it’s been more noticeable recently. Is he having a midlife crisis? He is forty years of age. Something has been bothering him, and whatever it is, she wishes he would snap out of it. Should she ask? Maybe she doesn’t want to know. This change in him makes her uneasy. It can’t be another woman, she’s sure of that. It must be something else.
‘Everything okay?’ she asks lightly.
He smiles at her. ‘Everything is perfect,’ he assures her.
She smiles back. She doesn’t believe him.
Chapter Two
A WEEK LATER,Ted stares at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, a feeling of pressure on his chest. He wonders if he is about to have a heart attack. Well, that’s one way out, he thinks bitterly.
Ted’s financial crisis has been a slowly snowballing nightmare. When he married Jill, he let her believe that money would never be a problem. But it hasn’t worked out that way.
He’d inherited a bundle when his father died. They’d put a lot of that into buying and renovating the brownstone. The work had gone almost grotesquely over budget, but he was simply unable to deny his wife anything. Those were heady days. It would have been fine if they’d been able to live on his salary afterward– it was respectable enough. The house and cars were already paid for, after all. But Jill had expensive tastes, and once he’d started wooing her with travel to Europe and the Caribbean, he didn’t feel he could suddenly say no. They’d gradually begun eating into what capital he’d had left after finishingthe renovation. And then Jill had started floating the idea of starting her own art gallery some day, which he knew would cost a fortune.
This is where he could have said that they had to begin living within their means. He should have laid it out for her. But he didn’t want to disappoint her, to appear lesser in her eyes. He’d never been sure that she loved him as much, or as helplessly, as he loved her.
But now he is staring into the abyss. They are about to lose everything. Because instead of facing reality, and asking her to face it with him, he’d started to borrow. And to save himself, he’d begun taking greater financial risks in the hope of greater returns. He’d seen it work for others. He’d seen it work for his brother, Greg, who was always banging on aboutno risk, no reward–andhe’d made a fortune.
But Ted has never had very good instincts about the markets. He’s essentially a client-relationship manager at his firm– an affable, charming person who meets with high-net-worth clients and reassures them that their financial goals are being met, based on advice from the firm’s team of financial geniuses.
His downward spiral had begun with taking out a small mortgage on the brownstone. Jill hadn’t liked it, but he’d explained that it was a smart financial move: their money could make more invested. When the bills started to come in faster than he could pay them, he’d gone to the bank– alone– to see about borrowing some money. He couldn’t get a line of credit without securing it against the house, and Jill, being on the title, would have had to agree, and he didn’t want her to know. Instead, he got a personal loan, using his sports car, a Porsche 911, ascollateral. He hadn’t had to tell Jill about that. Meanwhile, he’d tried his hand at some short-term investments, but overall, they’d made losses.
And then he’d overheard some of the investment guys at the office– mainly the young hotshot Jamie Pollard– talking about a ‘sure thing’. He listened in and decided that this would be the solution to all his problems. It was as if he had gone mad. The temptation to save himself was too much. He had no ready cash, so he found a private, high-risk lender for a short-term loan, who hadn’t insisted on security– though the loan terms were almost criminal. Ted was so sure he’d get the money back in spades in a couple of months that he was willing to take the risk. He knew others in the firm were doing the same thing. He thought he’d make a killing.
At some point during that time, he’d seen Greg’s ex-wife, Minerva, who was a client, and he’d told her ‘off the record’ that he had a ‘sure thing’ that he was recommending to her strictly as a friend, rather than as her investment adviser, and that he was investing in it himself. He’d convinced himself that it would pay off, that he would make both himself and Min a small fortune. She would tell Greg– how gratifying that would be. She’d gone ahead with it. And two months later, entirely unexpectedly, the stock tanked.
He remembers the moment so clearly– it was just three days ago. Even now it brings on a cold sweat. He remembers sitting at his desk at work, staring at his computer with his office door closed, watching the stock in free fall, feeling that he was in free fall with it. The stock had crashed and so had he. Enraged and panicking, he had confronted the cocky bastard Jamie Pollard,who’d given him the tip. He’d resisted the urge to grab him by the lapels and slam him up against his office wall.
‘What happened, Jamie?’ he shouted, desperate. ‘What the hell happened?’
Jamie shrugged. ‘Calm down, Ted. We all lost on that one. Easy come, easy go.’ He looked back at Ted and added, ‘Get a grip.’
