The Hazards of Good Fortune Page 4

  As a Jewish man, north of fifty, marrying a glamorous, considerably younger gentile, it did not escape Jay that he was personifying a longstanding cultural cliché, but this did not trouble him. His child was Jewish-identified so he had done his part in maintaining the tradition and he was hardly rabbinic. Nicole was witty and spontaneous. Through her work in government, she was friendly with Tony Blair and when she heard Jay admired him, she arranged drinks at the former prime minister’s hotel in New York that turned into a weekend at Jay’s East Hampton home and an ongoing friendship. Whenever they were together, Jay always felt like Nicole was on the verge of making something better happen.

  But he was in no rush to marry again, so a year passed before he asked her to sign a prenuptial agreement. She was in her middle thirties with no significant savings, divorced, without close family relationships, and looking for a soft landing, so she readily agreed. They were married in a small ceremony on the beach in St. Kitts.

  Jay had been traveling for work, and Nicole was bored with the round of yoga classes, lunches with girlfriends, gallery visits, and fundraisers that constituted her daily life. The previous summer they had flown to Ascot for the races—Jay was thinking about getting into the thoroughbred game—and with friends had chartered a yacht in the Caribbean over the holidays, but these trips felt obligatory. He had begun to harbor an inchoate malaise but was not sure if it was a function of his age—the previous week his physician described his prostate as “boggy” and performed a biopsy (results inconclusive, a wait-and-see approach)—or of something amiss in the marriage. Disinclined to blame others for his displeasure, Jay wanted to be certain of its origin before establishing a new course. Until recently, he knew he did not want to go through another divorce, but he had become less sure of this. The flush of infatuation had resolved into the familiar, and although his wife was no less captivating, the amount of attention she devoted to him had ebbed. When they drove together, she sat next to him transfixed by the latest app on her phone. In conversation, she often seemed preoccupied. These thoughts were on his mind when he stepped on to the veranda that morning, and he hoped to consider them on his ride. But it was hard to think about anything that involved his wife objectively when she was bouncing along in the saddle directly in front of him.

  The bridle path led through a sycamore grove and Jay could hear the chirping of birds in the branches. He grew calm as he imagined the green buds that would appear in the next few weeks. Spring was his favorite time of year. The pink and white dogwoods were a sign of universal beneficence. As he pictured their riotous blossoming, Nicole said:

  “I want to have a baby.”

  “Excuse me?” He wasn’t sure he had heard correctly.

  She gently pulled Sugarplum’s reins and turned to face her husband. Jay’s horse halted. “I said I want to have a baby.”

  “This is new,” and not a conversation in which he wanted to engage. It then occurred to him that here was the opportunity to make the grand gesture he had been searching for while lying in bed last night. If they were drifting apart, what better way to bridge the divide before it ruptured into a chasm? Babies were glue; the means by which many battling spouses repaired nearly sundered marriages. As providers of shared experience, children were more reliable than mountains and rivers. They were Experience with a capital “E” painted in colors that were ever shifting and lifelong. But if babies represented all this, then why did Jay feel his entire body contracting?

  “When I married you I didn’t know I wanted to be a mother, but things change, don’t they? I’m nearly forty and I’m not ready to put my ovaries on the shelf.”

  “I have a child. One is plenty, believe me.”

  “Maybe you’ll like being a parent more this time. You’re older, wiser, better looking.”

  “Nicole, this was settled. I don’t want to relitigate it.”

  One of the clauses in the prenup spelled out that they had mutually agreed not to have children together. Jay was not a man who believed he needed to litter the earth with offspring. He had texted Aviva yesterday—he tried to keep in touch, despite her lack of interest—and had not heard back. This was typical. His relationship with his only child brought him little satisfaction, and he did not want to roll the genetic dice again.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “But that was a long time ago, and I thought we might revisit it.”

  The quaver in her voice, and the vulnerability it implied, told him his wife was willing to ignore the blunt nature of their exchange to advance her point. Jay had anticipated this discussion. Over the course of the past year, he noticed that whenever they were around young children, Nicole displayed an interest new to her. Where she had disregarded their presence before, now she crouched or got on the floor to play with them. That and what he interpreted as a morbid interest in the rapid approach of her fortieth birthday, along with jokingly referring to her shriveling ovaries, were clues that led him to believe something significant was brewing. Jay knew this to be a sensitive area with many women whose ability to bear children was waning and tried to soften his tone.

  “We both went into this marriage with our eyes open.”

  “People change,” she said.

  “Look, I’m sorry you feel this way because, well, it’s going to make things—” He stopped himself. There was no point completing this thought because it would lead to a ratcheting up of tension and all he wanted was an agreeable hour on his horse.

  “Make them what?”

  “You know I like to do anything I can for you, right?”

  “Mostly, yes.”

  “Fair enough. Almost anything. But, look—we agreed, and I’m not going to change my mind.”

  “I’ll convert. I’ll become a Jew. We can raise another Jew together.”

  “Nicole, come on. Be serious”

  “I’m dead serious.”

  “It isn’t about religion. You can convert if you’d like. If that’s your path, by all means, follow it. But this was decided before we got married and I’m not going to entertain the question.”

  “You won’t even think about it?”

  “I thought about it before we got married, and if you had insisted on it then—” his voice trailed off.

  “What? You wouldn’t have married me?”

  “I’d like to continue riding.” Jay slapped the horse’s haunch, and Mingus moved up the path.

  “Would you have married me?” The rewording rendered the question a demand.

  He was past her now. Jay began to trot and then canter. A full day at work lay ahead of him and as far as he was concerned this conversation had ended five years ago. What did she mean by offering to convert? That felt glib to him, a gambit rather than a sincere declaration of anything other than a desire to get him to procreate. But if Nicole were Jewish, would he be more inclined to have another child? He dismissed the thought. Jay was not that retrograde.

  In the distance, he heard her voice as if emanating from the very woods that surrounded him. “You should think about it, Jay. You really should think about it.” He wasn’t sure what that meant. Then: “I’m going to ride another trail.”

  Jay raised his hand over his head and waved but did not turn around.

  Since Nicole had come to the marriage with little other than her looks and intelligence, theirs was not a blending of economic equals, and because, as Karl Marx put it in another context, everything is ultimately about who controls the means of production, her power was solely of the soft variety. In other words, she would not come out of a divorce with a dime more than had been contractually agreed to. Having a child might alter those prospects. Although Jay was not a lawyer, he knew that introducing children into a divorce was a wild card. Custody battles could be brutish and long. He had friends whose ex-wives used their children to vitiate “ironclad” prenups with outlandish requests for child support. Jay knew a six-year-old
girl with a court mandated five-thousand-dollar-a-month clothing allowance. Often enough those conflicts found their way into a media ravenous for them. The damage two otherwise civilized people could inflict on one another in family court was grotesque.

  And the words Nicole had called out to him when they parted: You really should think about it. He was not sure how to interpret that sentence. Was she saying that he should think about it because she believed it was the right course for the two of them as a couple, or were her words a veiled threat? How serious was she? Was this a whim that would pass in the manner of others (following a holiday in the Burgundy region of France, Nicole briefly intended to acquire a vineyard) or was this something that a recalcitrant husband could not wait out?

  Nicole was absent when Jay came downstairs from his shower dressed for the office. As he was preparing a bowl of oatmeal, he returned a call from the president of Tate College, his daughter’s school. A biologist by training whose name was Winslow Chapin, the president told him that the college was going to try something new this year and have a parent speak at commencement. He wanted to know if, as a prominent entrepreneur and a member of the Tate College board of trustees, Jay would be willing to be the first one to do it.

  “You can put a benevolent face on capitalism,” the president said. “It would be a fresh perspective for our students. Meryl Streep is going to deliver the commencement address.”

  Jay was flattered. He often spoke to business groups and was occasionally quoted in the media, but had never been asked to speak at a college graduation. He realized the invitation was a precursor to being asked to make another large gift to the college but that was fair, and he admired Meryl Streep. When he hung up his mood was considerably improved.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Seated in the back of a chauffeur driven town car en route from her home in Larchmont to her White Plains office, Westchester County District Attorney Christine Lupo felt a low-grade anxiety. Her son was waiting to hear from the five colleges he had applied to and later in the day she wanted to attend her high school freshman daughter’s volleyball game. To make her schedule work, she would have to move a meeting with a family court judge, which she had already rescheduled twice. Then there were the usual indictments, plea allocutions, grand jury subpoenas, sentencing recommendations, court pleadings, and scheduling orders she had to deal with every day. Her driver/bodyguard was Sean Purcell, a thirty-seven-year-old father of three. His base salary was eighty thousand dollars, and with the overtime he earned driving his ambitious boss to her constant public appearances, he nearly doubled it.

  Christine listened through earbuds to the lush tones of Verdi’s La Traviata. The lofty peaks and bottomless valleys of the music, the plangent intonations of the singers, the world apart they evoked served as a distraction from her troubles. Sometimes she played it on the car’s sound system. Earbuds signaled Sean to be quiet.

  As the car sped north, she noticed the bareness of the trees silhouetted against the sky and hoped it would be an early spring this year. Christine had just turned forty-eight and her winter had not been easy. Getting older was not a big issue for her, and she had learned to cope with the mudslide of work that landed on her desk each day, but there was a vexing problem in her personal life. She suspected her husband of infidelity. They had been attending couples therapy for the last six months, did exercises that involved looking into one another’s eyes, went on therapist-mandated “date nights,” and this was the result. At least she thought it was.

  The office of District Attorney of Westchester County was not traditionally a launching pad for political careers, but Christine Marie Lupo intended to change that narrative. She had served as the DA for the past four years and was running for reelection against an opponent with so little chance she might as well have been unopposed. One of five kids raised by a Stella D’Oro factory foreman and a housewife in the Arthur Avenue neighborhood of the Bronx, valedictorian at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, Notre Dame on a full scholarship (History, BA), and Fordham Law School. Although she could have gone to work for a Wall Street firm, Christine didn’t feel she would be in her element there as a working class Catholic girl, what with all the expensive, well-bred legal talent prowling the halls in tailored wardrobes and hundred dollar haircuts. Instead, she took a job as an assistant DA in the Westchester office, married an Italian-American businessman, and had a son and daughter in quick succession. Reliable and ambitious, and possessed of an offhand attractiveness, neither her wedding ring nor the small gold cross worn around her neck deterred the occasional colleague from testing how seriously the young prosecutor took her marital vows (the answer: extremely). After nearly a decade as an increasingly hardworking assistant DA, she became a judge. Four years later no one was surprised to learn she intended to run for district attorney. She locked up the usual rogues’ gallery of domestic abusers, rapists, and killers, and her dynamic personality, form-fitting wardrobe, and impressive verbal skills made her a live wire on local television news. It was an open secret that her chocolate-brown eyes were trained on the state capitol.

  Her current office was located just off the Bronx River Parkway in an eighteen-story eyesore on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard that loomed in solitary ugliness, the only tall building in an otherwise undistinguished area. Sean pointed the car into the lot across the street and parked in her reserved space. Before getting out, she inspected her look in a hand mirror with the dark-eyed gaze of a warrior queen. Auburn hair styled fashionably short. Coral lipstick applied to full lips. The flawless skin beneath a subtle application of rouge. She ran a red fingernail beneath her lower lip, smoothing an imperfection in her makeup like a sculptor working a piece of clay. Christine Lupo appreciated the value of optics, particularly for women. She understood that a woman in public life was at a disadvantage and often had to pay attention to details a man could ignore. In college, she had studied Hatshepsut and Eleanor of Aquitaine, but her role model, about whom she wrote an undergraduate thesis, was Boadicea, the British queen who led an uprising against the Roman Empire. Boadicea gave no quarter.

  Sean held the door open for the DA. He was six three, two twenty, a former football star at Roosevelt High in Yonkers. As much as she may have identified with Queen Boadicea, Sean’s impressive physicality was a comfort.

  “Slay the dragons, Chief,” Sean said, as he did every morning.

  The figure she cut in her knee-length navy wool overcoat with the cinched belt as the wind mussed her hair was not arrived at by accident. She had analyzed her appearance as if it were a legal issue. It wasn’t that she was beautiful, exactly, although she carried herself that way. But she was striking and potent, and wanted your vote.

  Every week Christine led a meeting where the assistant DAs who headed bureaus joined her in the conference room around an oblong table, with their boss at the head, and described what they believed to be their most vital cases. She listened purposefully as the chiefs of Financial Crimes, Sex Crimes, Homicide, Rackets, Criminal Courts, Narcotics and Firearms, Career Criminals, Bias, Arson, and Vehicular Crimes made their presentations. Her staff gave concise accounts of how their cases were progressing (Christine calculating which ones were likeliest to land her on television) while she sipped coffee and jotted notes.

  Today’s meeting had been going on for nearly an hour when she looked up and asked, “Is it a winner?” The question was directed at Vere Olmstead, a fortyish black female assistant DA who headed the Sex Crimes unit. The case in question involved a male history teacher at a private school in the town of Rye who allegedly had a sexual relationship with a sophomore, also male. The ADA told her the minor’s parents wanted to bring the hammer down on the teacher, but the accused maintained his innocence and had the aggressive backing of his union. Christine was eager to prosecute a case like this, but it was not a subject she wanted to talk about on television. She told the ADA to bring it to a grand jury.

  The next hour featured
a massive stock fraud in Elmsford, a heroin ring in New Rochelle, and an orthodontist suspected of fondling an unconscious patient in Ardsley. None of the cases she heard about made her want to contact Public Relations and set up a press conference. When she brought the meeting to a close, Christine returned to her office and gave an interview to a newspaper reporter who was doing a story on a recent increase in domestic violence cases and wanted to know what the District Attorney’s office was doing about it. (“We’re prosecuting it, that’s what we’re doing!”)

  Despite the busy morning, Christine’s thoughts kept boomeranging back toward her husband. When they had married, she was already considering a political career, and her choice of spouse reflected her ambition. Dominic Lupo was low-key, industrious, and wanted children. His import-export business was growing, and she had believed him to be just the right helpmate for an ambitious wife. She had locked up hundreds of criminals. Her record in office was spotless. Only an unforeseen event could get in the way of the ascent she had adroitly plotted, and now it looked like that might be what was happening. Christine had made discreet inquiries and last week took the bold step of hiring a cybersecurity expert to hack Dominic Lupo’s phone in hopes of catching him in the act. She had expected to hear from the investigator by now.