27
“Ed and I have been talking,” says Mel sheepishly as we make our way back to the train.
“Oh yeah?” I say.
“We’re worried about you,” he continues. “We’ve never seen anybody in your specific circumstances before and we aren’t sure that you are taking all the possible precautions to stay safe.”
“Most likely not,” I agree.
“First of all, we don’t think you should go home right now, not while you’re being targeted for attack so flagrantly.”
“That makes sense,” I say. “But then again, home is where all my stuff is. What about the office? Can I keep sleeping there?”
“We don’t think that is a good idea either,” says Ed. “It seems like whoever is doing this is somebody who knows all about the Nylo Corporation and has a grudge against it. The building may not be safe.” He pauses, then looks me in the eye. “You’re looking out after your kids by sending them away, and that’s a good plan. You’re a good mom.”
I am a good mom? Me?
“But who is going to look out after you?” he asks. “That’s our job. We are supposed to have your back and keep you alive. But we’re in over our heads here, with respect to security, and we aren’t ashamed to admit it. We think you should work just as hard to protect yourself as you are working to protect your kids.”
“Alright,” I say. “So what should I do?”
“Don’t you have any friends who could put you up? Somewhere you could crash for a while? Maybe somebody you haven’t talked to in a long time who would be happy to hear from you?”
He’s trying to be helpful, but he doesn’t know how deeply his words cut me. The truth is that I don’t have anybody like that. When Ben and I were together, all of his friends became my friends. They were easy to impress and help out.
The central problem of most people’s lives, especially teachers, is that they don’t have enough money. The central problem of my life is that I have too much money. It was wonderful to be able to play god to his posse of scrappy, salt-of-the-earth Brooklyn intellectuals and artists, getting them work when they needed it in the industries that would be the most helpful to them.
It was like playing a very satisfying strategy game. I had my own Sim City to cultivate, full of fallow fields that I could dump resources into and watch thrive. Before we had kids, I treated his wild pack of college and high school friends as my ersatz children, inserting myself into every aspect of their sad lives, making them dependent on me to a pretty horrifying degree.
Ben loved it. He was like Aladdin with a magic genie and he got to dispense my riches according to his own whims, performing triage among his friends with respect to who needed what and who would benefit the most from my infinite largesse. I liked making Ben so dominant and indispensable among all of the other fellows, and I liked helping him cultivate this grungy garden of bros and bras. It was better than buying lavish real estate. I was trafficking in human souls.
Even those among his friends who were the most resistant to my handouts and charity still took advantage of the Nylo Corporation’s infinite coffers when it came to trips abroad, and yacht parties, and long lazy weeks in Nantucket during the summer. That was when our gray palace on the beach became a permanent crash pad for whoever was rootless and unmoored enough to coke and booze it up with us until they collapsed on king-size beds in private rooms, central air conditioning going full blast on their tanned and well-fed bodies.
During this time, and even after Olivia and Jane were born, I managed to convince myself that Ben’s friends were my friends. In fact, I told myself that they were more than just friends, even if they didn’t know it. They were my vassals. They had started to belong to me in some strange, demented, dependent way.
When we finally ended our relationship for good, my final gift to Ben was to return his friends to him, even if it meant them hating me. I never told him about all the awkward, too-bold overtures even his closest friends made once we were no longer together, leveraging the fake good times we’d had into sudden propositions of sex, of running away together abroad, of drug-fueled benders, of marriage.
I never told him how his friends abased themselves to remain in my patronage and in my good graces, throwing him aside as fast as they could.
But I didn’t accept any offer, even if occasionally I was lonely enough to want to. I was as cruel to his friends as Ben was to me, when I could have been the opposite and scooped them up and owned them for myself.
This was heartbreaking, but I relished the pain of it. It was one last pointless act of self-abnegation at the altar of his indifference. I had never had a group of friends the way that he did, all of whom depended and relied on each other for moving up in the world, for keeping each other sane, for challenging each other to make the most of themselves, for giving each other the space to make mistakes, and for being there for each other on the other side of failure.
Henley liked Ben’s friends, too. Henley worked his way through all of the women in Ben’s circle, pleased that I brought him such easy pickings. At first, each would picture herself as Henley’s one and only beloved, striding along at his side at the top of the world. But then the dark reality of Henley’s
