He had told her he would call her the next day about the Nabisco ad buy, but he also planned to beg her to see him again. “You have to see me,” he would say when he called. He would plead with her, tell her that he and his wife led separate lives and that his wife wouldn’t really care, even though there was no world in which that was true.
Madeline had heard him come in, and she silently entered the living room in her satin dressing gown and took a look at him sitting there in this fraught, stimulated, shattered state, and she knew. How did she possibly know? But somehow she did.
“Who is she?” Madeline asked.
“Oh,” was all he said, deflating.
“For God’s sake, Emmett, just tell me. It’s better that I know.”
Because he was a bad liar, and because he was still inside the circle of strong feeling that Faith had created, he said, “A woman I met at the office.”
“Tell me her name.”
“Faith Frank.”
“She works at Nabisco?”
“No. She wanted us to buy ad space in her magazine.”
“You mean she’s a lady editor?”
“Yes.”
“Redbook? McCall’s? Ladies’ Home Journal?”
“Bloomer.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Women’s lib,” he explained weakly. “You know.”
His wife was silent, staring at him. “I imagine she’s more beautiful than I am,” she began. “But is she more interesting than me? And is she smarter?”
“Madeline, don’t do this.”
“Just tell me, Emmett.”
He looked down at his clasped hands. “Yes.”
“Which? More interesting, or smarter?”
“Both.”
His wife took this in. She had asked, and now she had to absorb the answer, though it was cruel in a way he hadn’t meant. “She’s someone who’s going places?” she wanted to know.
“I get that sense, yes.”
“I see.”
When he had first met Madeline, he had thought her sexy and witty and bright, but he had realized a few months into their marriage that she possessed a limited repertoire of commentary, and that when held up to scrutiny, the things she said weren’t really all that witty. She had no passions, and her intellect was limited. He was bored with her by now and she knew it, and it was a bad, tight-quartered situation for them both. “I’m very sorry,” Emmett told her. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I wanted her. I wanted something that was . . . exciting to all parts of me. I know it’s rotten. But, Madeline, I feel very held back in my life. The fucking biscuit people. There is no one to talk to there, to spar with.”
“So that’s what you did with her? You sparred?”
“In a sense of the word.”
“I don’t think that sense of the word is in Webster’s Dictionary.” Then Madeline was quiet, thinking hard, trying to find an equitable solution that would save their marriage. Finally she said, “All right. Here’s what I’ve decided. I want you never to see her again.”
“You’re in luck. She wants that too, actually.”
“But you were planning to convince her otherwise, weren’t you? To make her see you. And you’re very convincing. You’re bored, Emmett. As long as you’re bored, it’s a danger to me and to us. Tell me, what would make you un-bored? Work?”
“I work. I work on Oreos and Lorna Doones and Chicken in a Biskit.”
“I mean work you loved,” she said. “Where the stakes were high.”
“I can’t even imagine that.”
“Work that excited you, and challenged you as much as some sexy, interesting woman does, and which involved people you could spar with in the office. Deals you could make. Big ones that you could live or die by. How does that sound? Exciting enough for you?”
He looked at his wife mildly, noncommittal. “What are you saying?”
The following week, Madeline released a massive sum of Tratt family money into an account in his name, a gesture that ran contrary to the agreement they’d drawn up before they married, at the insistence of her stuffed-shirt parents. It was as though it was hostage money, ransom money. With it he founded ShraderCapital in 1974. There was no question of not using his own name; he needed “Shrader” to be all over this thing, and not discreetly. It was a way to prove himself to her parents, and to her, and to everyone. Much later on, venture capital firms and hedge funds bore names that were very sword and sheath, very castle keep. The Mansard Fund. Bastion Equity. Split Oak Trust. The goal was to make the firm or the fund sound like a fortress that could resist all invading armies. Eventually these places had proliferated to such a degree that no evocative-sounding words were even left. It was sort of like the way writers had long been pillaging all the good phrases from Shakespeare plays for the titles of their novels, so the only phrases still available meant nothing. Soon, Emmett thought, people would be writing novels called Enter, Guard.
From the start, Emmett, a fast, impatient learner with a freakish memory, surrounded himself with wise finance men to advise him. Soon ShraderCapital did shockingly well, and over time Emmett made a fortune that was exponentially far greater than Madeline’s family’s. “I can eat the Tratts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” he’d often say to his wife, to whom he would forever be grateful. She was pleased, having realized that she sort of hated her parents too. They were very pretentious people. Her father sometimes wore a monocle.
But before then, there was another thing. The morning after that night of reckoning in the dark living room, when Madeline had provisionally agreed to give Emmett enough money to start his own firm, she’d also said to him, “I’d like you to get her on the phone now. This Faith Frank person.”
“What?”
They were at the dining table in the middle of breakfast when she brought this up. The housekeeper was serving grapefruit halves, and Abby was saying to her parents, “Why is it called grapefruit when it doesn’t taste anything like grapes?”
“I want to talk to her,” Madeline said.
So he had been forced to go into the den and dial Faith’s number and put his wife on, and sit there, humiliated, while Madeline said something to Faith about how Emmett wasn’t hers for the taking. “He stood beside me during our wedding ceremony,” Madeline hissed, and Emmett thought back to their wedding, and how uncomfortable he’d felt that day, standing there in a boxy suit. Luckily, Faith hung up on Madeline right away, but it had to have been humiliating for her as well. For a long time, Emmett would feel guilty for having allowed Madeline to put Faith through that. It was a weird moment, a perverse one, in which one woman had wanted to prove her dominance over the other one, in front of him, and he had let her. He’d been so weak, and it shamed him.
Madeline went straight upstairs to the bedroom after the call, and didn’t return to the breakfast table, but Emmett did. Abby was sitting all alone, poking at her food. Emmett suddenly remembered something, and he went and grabbed his jacket, which he’d left last night on a chair by the door. He felt inside the pockets, and then he presented the little paper umbrella to his daughter, saying, “For you.”
“Oh, I love it, Daddy,” she said. “It’s so tiny. And my doll Veronica Rose will love it too.”
Sometimes, though not very often, it was possible for him to make a girl happy.
Emmett Shrader didn’t speak to Faith Frank again in any meaningful way for nearly forty years. He became a large figure in business who appeared on the cover of Fortune, and she became an approachable, sympathetic heroine to women. Once every decade or so they accidentally found themselves in the same enormous, high-ceilinged room, attending the same black-tie event. But invariably he was in that room with Madeline, who over time took on the look of a figurehead on a ship, her hair swirled as if carved of wood, her gowns regal, hiding the now-thick body he had once desired, when it was far less thick.