She organized events at a school for poor kids and sent me the T-shirt to prove it. She sat beside Mayor Bloomberg at a dinner for twelve, attended birthday parties for the wives of bankers who’d been burned in effigy in recent demonstrations of civil unrest. She did one day in the city every week, on a trading desk, and mentioned in passing that she’d had a short on the euro for so long she could retire to Bali on that money alone. She sent me a hundred dollars last fall, to get a massage when I hurt my neck, and we sent each other a few things around Christmas, sweaters, slippers, gloves, a blouse, though in February she threatened to send me a plane ticket, so that we could meet up at a conference he’d brought her to only to ignore her—in a little town in the French Alps where if you skied down the wrong slope you ended up in Italy, and you had to take a taxi to get back to your hotel. I hadn’t skied in twenty years. She might not have meant it. It’s easier to say stuff when you’re loaded, or when divorce doesn’t land you in a tiny peeling apartment counting change for the laundromat—or maybe she just wasn’t as scared as I was, like that’s how you are when someone really turns your crank, when every single gesture between you is not a marriage transaction or a judgment of who did what or who did wrong.
South of Providence I headed toward Plainfield, then Norwich, then drove down the coast for an hour. Off the highway it was wooded. As I got closer, the road wound scenically along endless stone walls and dense hedges impossible to see through. The pavement turned to dirt and sometimes went beside a field with a lone horse in the middle, wrapped in a blanket or unclothed, with some big house in the distance that said to all who passed, “Get a load of this, you fucking dirtbags.” I found the mailbox and pressed the button and drove through the gate, and was surprised at how loud the gravel was, and slamming my door I looked up at the house, holy fuck, fieldstone chimneys, big columns on a massive porch.
In my cursory investigations, Michael Rapazzo’s name had turned up on a list of speakers at some economic summit, and on the board of a dozen companies, and as the founder of a free health clinic in Hoboken, and as the backer of a charter school, or a string of them, mostly for profit, in tax-free public spaces. Three-quarters of the $20 billion he managed came from large pension plans of state employees in Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Cops, firemen, teachers. In 2011 he’d had his best year, and he was up 24 percent in the first quarter of this year.
He’d also appeared on TV financial news shows once or twice, fending off attacks on private equity, citing a study by some think tank or university, he couldn’t remember, that proved he’d created eight thousand jobs. But I was drawn to his posture of authority; he was conventionally handsome, and I could imagine him mistreating his family in all the ways Amy had mentioned, growling at breakfast, forgetting birthdays, spending Christmas alone in a hotel in Lisbon, falling asleep at dinner. I couldn’t fully assess the debate on carried interest, or whether the companies he’d succeeded in turning around justified the ones he’d accidentally leveraged into bankruptcy, or, more generally, whether bankers should have their intestines wrapped around their throats for wrecking the earth’s economy, but I’d heard from Amy how hard he worked to unlock potential value in undercapitalized industries. I worked just as hard to unlock the business in her pants.
I knocked, and was relieved to see how ashamed she was. She looked tall and grim and expensive, and as I entered the house it smelled like citrus cleaner and new carpeting. What could she do for me except destroy my little world? The magazine had coughed up a plane ticket but I’d canceled it, adding twenty hours of driving to my already aching back, hoping my car didn’t shit the bed, telling Robin I had to stop in New York for meetings, meetings I didn’t actually have—to do the graphics on a can of dog food—all so I could make this sordid little detour. Although I hadn’t texted Amy until the night before, since I hadn’t been sure how long my work would take, how many days I’d need at the trial in Boston. There had also been the distinct possibility that I would chicken out, which left me feeling less ashamed and disgusted.
Her hair was darker, her front teeth were big and white and slightly crossed on the ends. She wore a gray turtleneck. She’d written back that she had a lunch date, housepainters were there, and her younger daughter had to be picked up at one. We’d have an hour or less, but yes, she’d said, please come. Anyway, I had my own kids to get home to. Beanie had his first cold, and Robin was covered in hives from exhaustion. I wanted to get off the highway and sniff their heads.
Amy led the way, not saying much. The kitchen was long and white, with a couch in a bay window and a dog on the floor sweeping its tail. Annabelle was a rescue mutt and Amy’s best friend. The ceilings were eighteen feet high. In the space above our heads you could hang hammocks, rope swings. The marble island was the size of my kitchen and covered with stacks of home design magazines, cookbooks, baskets of fruit, onions, pads of stationery, phone chargers, mail, a box of essential oils, a basket of ribbons, scissors, a stack of delicate-looking white bowls that, when I touched them, turned out to be made of rubber. The island was entrenched with things that could’ve gone in a drawer, Scotch tape, stapler, pie weights, cutting boards, a pewter mug of unsharpened pencils. It looked like the staging area for a yuppie war.
The doorknobs, drawer pulls, light fixtures, and color schemes were bright and coherent. Somebody had baked a crust in a casserole dish that sat on the counter, although I didn’t know if that someone was her; I wasn’t sure what she did all day, between the philanthropic commitments and the mommy stuff she claimed to live for, rocking her son in the middle of the night, building a tree house, standing in a pool all afternoon teaching the girls how to dive. What she did in the way of housework and how it resembled what went on in my house I never figured out. On this very day she had a list of things that needed her immediate attention: a local art museum pre-gala speech had to be written to rally the host committee, the lunch in town she couldn’t cancel with the sub-Saharan head of Oxfam, and then she was taking her kids to the park. On slow days, she tutored in math at the after-school program they funded in town. She’d been to the hospital they’d built in Macedonia and wanted to go back. She also managed some pile of money. She worried about the Fed’s monetary policy watering down the dollar. At Christmas they’d gone somewhere in the Caribbean I’d never heard of. In February she’d skied Chamonix.
Who was this woman? I stood there in my coat, so nervous and guilty I almost choked, and asked for some water. She ran the tap and handed me a glass. A photo on the fridge showed a younger Amy with lighter hair, evenly cut on the bottom, before her son was born, holding Emily as a baby, standing behind the older girl, the beautiful blue-eyed Lily, and the husband, who looked decent, older, balding—beside an even older, smiling, bald-headed guy who I guessed was his father. I noted a pink receipt from a landscaper for “decorative stonework,” for $68,342. It was detailed and handwritten in plain language. There was a twenty-dollar bill under a magnet and a phone number scribbled on a business card that named Amy O’Donnell as principal partner in something called Cardinal Growth Fund. In the photo on the fridge she looked happy and serene. They were standing at the folded-out staircase of some kind of aircraft. The husband was tall and thick, with a big head and bags under his eyes. The older man, upon further inspection, was international war criminal and goon for the state Dick Cheney.
“You know him?”