“I guess. But isn’t it pathetic that we all cite the same few names? In an industry that equals eight percent of the gross domestic product of this country. We can only point to two women who have made a total success of it?”
“Yes,” Henry said, and landed his hand on my familiar breast, as if he still had claim to it, making me falter for just an instant, because nobody over the age of two had touched that breast in several years. I’m not married to a boob guy. As nice as that may have felt, I removed the hand, hardly missing one beat of my story. I didn’t want it there.
“The management is about to enforce its ‘one strike’ rule,” I said.
“You’re kicking me out?” he whimpered.
“I’m going to sleep,” I said, and rolled away and onto my stomach, and while I held still, Henry fell asleep the way a little kid does, waving a white flag of surrender. I thought about waking him and getting him out of my bed but instead just watched him and his muscled back through his shirt, rising and falling in time with his breath. His form was lit by a dimmed floor lamp, framing the last four hours like the back cover of a book, and for the first time in a very long time, I didn’t feel so alone.
Henry has always been the type of man who can take care of things. In that moment of faux moonlight, I realized that’s what I missed most in my current life. I’m fully capable of taking care of Bruce and our brood; it’s just so much responsibility. It’s so lonely. I stared at the indentation in my bed where Henry had slept, the ghost of so much love almost visible.
? ? ?
My cell phone rocks me out of my daze. It’s Bruce. For a woman without guilt, my hand shakes badly as I take the call.
“Hi!” My voice is far too chipper.
“Hells Belle,” says a very cute Bruce. “I’m sitting here with Owen on my lap. Owen, what do you want to tell your mama?”
“Mommy has some money and Mommy will bring me new toys,” Owen informs me.
“Of course I will, but a little toy from the airport,” I reply softly, grateful to talk to him and not his father.
“Mommy can buy a BIG toy, she has so much money.”
Bruce must have read the business headlines.
“Nothing like teaching your kids all the wrong values,” I bellow, and Bruce takes the phone back.
“Okay, Belle, just how much of that CeeV-TV did you take down?”
Whenever Bruce uses Wall Street jargon in all the wrong ways, it warms my heart. It’s cute like a child is cute. Moments like these he forgets that he hates Wall Street. “Well, Bruce, we ‘took down’ enough to, hmmm, buy a tiny house in the Hamptons and dump that moldy rental.”
“No way.” He pauses long enough for me to imagine a certain genuflection to the gods. “No way. How much?”
“Umm, enough to pay off the mortgage on a certain Central Park West apartment,” I say with only a hint of a tremble.
“Belly Belle, my heart is pounding. My dick is stiff. How much?”
“Stop talking like that in front of Owen,” I plead, but little gets past a two-year-old.
I hear a chant begin in the background. “Stiff dick, stick shift dick. My shift is dick.” I giggle in spite of our awful parenting.
“I don’t know. We own about one hundred ten thousand shares with a cost basis of nine dollars. Watch it trade today, we’ll see how it opens, and where it settles, and then maybe I can figure out a number. Look, Bruce, the deal can always fall apart.”
“Holy mother of macaroni,” he says. “Ninety thousand dollars.”
I wince and try to love him despite a mathematical education that he should sue his preppy New England boarding school over. How did they ever graduate him with those skills?
“Umm, not really. Our cost basis was well over nine hundred thousand dollars. It looks like it will open around thirty dollars, so figure twenty-one dollars profit on one hundred ten thousand shares.”
“What is the NUMBER?” he hollers. He now has me on the speakerphone. I’m sure I’ve just heard something crash that contained glass, and I hear the scraping noise of him keeping small digits away from death-defying danger, and this of course makes me admire him. Shit, why had I done that kissing last night?
“It could fall apart, Bruce, but on paper, it’s at least a two million and three hundred thousand dollar profit”—I pause—“before tax.”
“O-boe, we are RICH!!! Your mommy’s a genius!”
“Yup, me rich! Yup, smart mommy!” and then I hear more glass break and I try to envision what they are doing and in which room they could possibly be finding so many things to destroy.
“It was really your idea,” I say, generously pumping up Bruce’s manly hormones, “and we don’t deserve to be rich.” I giggle. “We’re Central Park West’s version of trailer trash.”
“Who are you kidding?” he says modestly. “I say a lot about a lot. It’s another thing to take action. When you get home we’re serving you macaroni and cheese on the fine bone china.”
“We don’t have bone china.”
“But we could.”
“You grew up with that. You hated it. You hated doilies too.”
“I forgot.”