She was all too aware that she sounded like a teenager who hadn’t done the reading. These were words Mina had gathered from cable news, in recent days, but not necessarily words whose significance she understood. Bob was considering selling the bank, Weiss & Partners, to the Koreans. This she knew. If the Koreans weren’t interested, other U.S. banks were being convened to discuss the possibility of another buyer. This would include Goldman, Tom’s bank. She knew this because Tom’s boss’s boss had been summoned to the Fed that weekend for a meeting with the other CEOs. She hadn’t even known, until now, that the Fed was an actual location in Manhattan; she’d thought it was just another faceless government entity. She had, of course, kept that to herself when speaking with Tom.
But these were the broad strokes; she barely even had a hold on what it was Bob had done wrong, what missteps, exactly, had Tom and his friends shaking their heads in feigned sympathy six months ago. Back then they’d had to twist their mouths to conceal ill-disguised grins; now, when his failure was impending rather than hypothetical, they were all fearful themselves, ashen and underslept.
“Mina,” Isabel said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to the rest of you, okay? My husband isn’t here, is he? Do you see him here, enlisting me as his confidante? He’s in the city. He’s been there for weeks. He flew home from Shelter in August. I don’t know what’s going to happen to the rest of you. I can barely figure out what’s going to happen to me.”
They sat in silence once more. Tiny waves appeared on the surface of the swimming pool and the water lapped at the filter, making delicate sucking sounds. Mina had to believe that this finality, this resolve, from Isabel, was merely cloaked panic. That it was not really relevant, not to this situation. That they’d based their own lives, their children’s futures, on something more substantial than sheer forward momentum, the unheeded enthusiasm with which those children had once built their sand castles at rented houses in the Hamptons, far too close to the returning waves.
“That isn’t what I meant,” Mina said. “You know that.”
Isabel reached over to her, taking Mina’s hand and spreading her own so that their fingers could interlace.
“Of course it’s what you meant. I don’t blame you. We’re all allowed, right? My father used to say that no one would be afraid of an apocalypse as long as he knew there’d be enough canned food left to feed his own tribe.”
Isabel laughed, and Mina smiled, too.
“That sounds about right. I mean, I wouldn’t know. But based on the stories you’ve told me.”
“I keep thinking about him, you know? He always acted like Bob’s success was all imaginary. Like I was such a fool to take it at face value. While we were building this house, for those last few months when we were still in the city full-time, he used to call me up late at night and just . . . rant into my ear for an hour, sometimes. And I’d be alone with Madison, sitting in the apartment with the lights off, feeling the way I used to feel when I was a teenager and he’d come home and I’d lock myself up in my part of the house and he’d yell at me through my bedroom door.”
Mina considered saying nothing; Isabel was speaking as if in a dream, and Mina did not want to recall her to where they were, how they usually spoke to each other.
“It’s not imaginary, Isabel,” she said finally. “I mean, whatever happens, it’s not that.”
And then Isabel looked up at her, her face wiped clean in the way that you’d sometimes see news anchors freeze in place when their audio feed failed to deliver the other half of the conversation.
“Oh,” Isabel said, her voice so low it sounded more like an inhalation than speech.
Mina watched, over Isabel’s shoulder, as Lily’s head bobbed in and out of the lower corner of the kitchen window. She couldn’t possibly be doing the dishes, could she? Surely no one had eaten since breakfast in this house. What did this girl spend her days doing, then? Mina knew there were others, even though Isabel’s staff was relatively small, compared to the committees that ran some of their friends’ homes. They had that expressionless Russian woman—was she Russian?—who always seemed to disapprove of whatever greeting Mina tried on her. And that woman had a small team of equally expressionless but younger and more buxom blondes from Eastern Europe who scurried around corners and disappeared from any room Mina entered. So what did Lily do all day?
Mina wondered this, often, about her own employees. The woman she had in charge of the house issued their marching orders, and as far as Mina could tell, every task was completed with efficiency and nearly invisible exertion. And still she sometimes felt like the inactive center of a clicking machine, divorced entirely from the muffled frenzy all around her. She hadn’t known, when she was twenty-four, what it meant to run a household. Sometimes it occurred to her with clammy anxiety that she didn’t know much more about it now, either. And if she hadn’t learned by now, then surely—
“I miss my mother,” Isabel said. “She would know. She’d know what to do.”
“There’s nothing you can do, not yet. Nothing’s certain, right?”
“Not yet, no.”
The irony here was that Isabel was by far the most literate of them all when it came to their husbands’ work. Mina remembered a lunch at the club this past summer, their kids nearby, drinks sweating on the table. Tennis balls popping softly in the background like a summertime lullaby. A few other women sat with them. Suzanne Welsh was there, and Jim McGinniss’s wife, Kiki, who would only have been there by Isabel’s invitation, since she lived primarily on Long Island. Someone had complained about a husband slipping into bed at 4 A.M., for once not even smelling of scotch, and Isabel had nodded, tilting her head up to the sun, shifting her chair out from beneath the forest green table umbrella and stretching her browned legs in front of her. The last time I saw them like this was when we were first married. You guys remember that, the whole yield burning nightmare? And they were all so terrified for those few months? I don’t know how they do it, when things bottom out like that. They don’t sleep for days at a time.
There had been utter silence at their table. Suzanne Welsh had scrutinized her hands in her lap so closely that it looked like she was trying to see through them to her own veins. And Mina would admit it, too—that something in her stomach had solidified, some free-floating unease she’d always felt had gathered itself into some final, defined shape. Not jealousy, but fear. And fear of what? What did any of them care if Isabel understood what was going on, if she knew the language, the right phrases? She’d probably give anything, at this moment, to be ignorant. To not understand.
The day after that afternoon at the tennis courts, Mina had driven to the library. To Stamford, rather than their local library. She’d checked out ten books on finance—some just general nonfiction, social histories she guessed you’d call them, some memoirs by former Wall Streeters. She hadn’t read any of them in the end. If Tom left her for another woman, it wasn’t going to be because that girl understood his work. The nuances of whatever it was that he did to make her spending money. That much was clear to Mina. She might not be a brain trust, she might not be his equal, but she knew her husband.
Isabel let her hands fall to the table, her wedding ring scraping the glass.