TWENTY-ONE
Darley
As Darley and Malcolm got ready to meet Cy Habib for drinks, she dabbed perfume on her wrist, she swept mascara through her eyelashes, she brushed her hair until it shined, and she slipped her Saint Christopher necklace over her head.
Malcolm’s mother had worn a gold Saint Christopher necklace for as long as Darley had known her. Etched in the center of the medallion was a man holding a staff and carrying a child on his shoulder. The story of Saint Christopher, Soon-ja had told her, was that of a giant man who ferried passengers across the river to safety. He was the patron saint of travelers.
When Malcolm was twelve years old, he had a soccer tournament three hours away, so Soon-ja and Young-ho had packed up the car, a forest-green Ford Explorer, and driven him. An hour into the trip, flying along at sixty miles an hour on the New Jersey Turnpike, a tractor trailer lost control of the breaks and slammed into the side of their car. The Ford Explorer flipped, tumbled, landed upright again, and skidded to a terrible screeching stop against the guardrail. The way Soon-ja told the story, she opened her eyes and it was as though she had imagined the entire thing. She turned to look at Malcolm, who was sitting in the back seat, still buckled in, still holding his Game Boy in two hands. Young-ho was in the driver’s seat, gripping the steering wheel, completely unharmed. The three of them opened their doors, shaking, and huddled and clutched one another on the side of the highway. None of them had a single injury, not a bruise or a scratch or a sprain. The paramedics came to examine them, the police came to file a report, a fire truck arrived as a precaution. As an EMT checked the vehicle he found one thing: Soon-ja’s Saint Christopher medal, the one she had been wearing around her neck, hanging from the rearview mirror.
On the day of Darley’s wedding Soon-ja presented her with the necklace, and Darley wore it whenever she flew, whenever she took a long drive, whenever she needed that extra bit of luck. As she and Malcolm walked along the leafy sidewalks of Willow Street to meet Cy, the necklace warming against her chest, she felt good. Her breath made little white puffs in the cool air, her long coat swirled prettily as she moved, and the neighborhood smelled lightly of woodsmoke. Darley felt lucky. She reached down and took Malcolm’s hand.
Darley and Malcolm had spent the week cramming as though for an exam, learning everything they could about Cy Habib. Cy was a divisional senior vice president of Aeropolitical and Industry Affairs for Emirates Airline. He had started out in the graduate training program of British Airways before he was recruited by Cathay Pacific. He was so talented and his reputation was so good that Emirates had brought him over and created a position for him. Cy was the perfect example of why the aviation industry was so appealing—his success wasn’t based on pedigree, it wasn’t predicated on the banking hierarchy, it was a meritocracy that rewarded sheer intelligence and passion.
When they arrived at Colonie on Atlantic Avenue, Cy was already seated at a small table in the front. Darley made the introductions, Cy ordered a bottle of wine, and the three of them talked flying: they compared adventures they had taken by Cessna and Cirrus, swapping stories of their favorite spots to land. Malcolm’s was the runway at Ingalls Field Airport in Hot Springs, Virginia, one of the highest airports east of the Mississippi, with a runway cut into the top of a mountain. Cy was sentimental and he liked the First Flight Airport in North Carolina, where the Wright Brothers practiced gliding. They liked Block Island despite the short runway, they were both desperate to make a Grand Canyon trip, and Cy showed them a video on his phone of landing on Dauphin Island, Alabama, where the runway started an inch off the water.
Darley bragged about Malcolm, about the blog he had made when he was just a kid, about his meteoric rise from analyst to managing director, about his work ethic and the year he was on the road so much he managed the hat trick of achieving secret status on all three major U.S. airlines. Then Malcolm talked about Emirates, about his market observations, about their long-anticipated IPO and how he thought it could unfold.
They were having so much fun they ended up ordering dinner and more wine and then even dessert and only stood to leave when the waitstaff began subtly flipping the chairs onto the tables in the back.
Unlike Darley, who came to be fascinated with planes because of her interest in the financial side of the industry, Malcolm had wanted to be a pilot when he was a little boy. He went to business school instead, but as soon as he had a little money, he started taking flying lessons. He would get up at the crack of dawn and catch a New Jersey Transit train to the general aviation airport in Linden, just five miles south of Newark Airport. He’d fly for an hour or two and then change into his suit and tie and join the commuters heading into the city, at his desk on Wall Street by eight forty-five.
There were days when Darley could resent Malcolm, could feel like she’d sacrificed her career for their family, left a big, interesting life to have babies, but then she remembered all Malcolm had sacrificed as well: a career flying the planes he studied, early mornings on the airstrip in New Jersey, the smell of carbon and jet fuel filling him with an excitement he could rarely feel for life on the ground.
That was good, right, love?” she asked as they walked home along the Promenade, their fingers interlaced.
“So good,” Malcolm answered. “It felt amazing just to have a real conversation with someone after being on eggshells for months.”
“What do you mean, eggshells?” Darley asked. Did he mean with her?
“It’s been so hard pretending everything is normal, keeping your family in the dark and not telling them I was fired.”
“Oh, yeah, sure.” Darley nodded and rolled her eyes.
“We need to come clean soon, though,” Malcolm pressed. “It’s been a long time.”
“I know, I know. I’m just dreading talking to them about money after everything with George.”
“I have to be honest with you, Darley, the more you try to keep my firing a secret, the more humiliated you’re making me feel about it,” Malcolm said quietly.
“Oh no.” Darley stopped and turned to him. “I’m not trying to make you feel humiliated! I’m just protecting you! You know how my parents are.”
“I mean, I do know how they are.” Malcolm dropped her hand. “They like that we met at business school, they like that I’m in banking, but Darley, we have two kids, I’ve spent every Christmas and Easter and birthday with them for a decade. I think they know me by now, and they’ll still accept me even if I’m briefly unemployed.”
“Oh, gosh, I know they will, of course.” Darley’s face crumpled. She hadn’t realized how much it had been hurting him, how with every day of this lie she was telling her husband, over and over, that he was only welcome to be a Stockton as long as his paychecks were flowing in.
Malcolm pulled Darley in for a hug, and she pressed her cheek against his crisp blue shirt. “Give your folks a chance, Dar. I think they might surprise you.”
That night, as Darley lay in bed next to Malcolm, listening to his even breathing, comforting as the sound of rain or a kitten’s purr, she tried to figure out why she wanted to keep Malcolm’s story such a secret. Why was she so worried he would be exiled from her world?
Darley had noticed something about people with money: they stuck together. Not because they were intrinsically shallow or materialistic or snobbish, though of course those things could very well be true, but it was because when they were together, they didn’t have to worry about the differences their money meant in their lives. They didn’t have to worry about inviting a friend to Bermuda for the weekend, they didn’t have to worry about flights to Montreal, they didn’t have to worry about car rentals and overpriced restaurants and jackets and ties at the clubs. Their friends could all keep up, they could all pay their way, there was no awkwardness about offering to cover shares or lend a tux or waiting until a paycheck cleared on a Friday. There was just a built-in assumption that if a trip, a party, an occasion seemed fun, their friends would be along for the ride, and they would know how to act when they got there.
The other thing, the thing that sucked to talk about, was the secret lurking worry that other people were using them. Using them for their weekend homes, their good alcohol, their big apartments, their parties, their internships, their closets, their, well, their money. Darley saw it all the time to varying degrees—guys who bought their girlfriends jewelry and laptops and paid for expensive vacations, only for them to realize the guys were essentially bribing their way into a relationship; guys who amassed crowds of hangers-on when they paid for bottle service or houses in the Hamptons. There was a difference between sharing your good fortune and being taken advantage of, and sometimes discerning the difference could break your heart. It was just easier, in some ways, to stay close to those who liked you but didn’t need your AmEx to have fun.
There was a clique of girls at her high school, a clique Darley occasionally joined for lunch when her own friends were out sick or traveling. They were called the Rice Girls because, everyone said laughingly, “They were all white and they stuck together.” Darley’s own group was exempt from such derision because Eleanor was Chinese, but deep down she knew it was the same thing—she hung out with a group of rich girls who all had nearly identical upbringings. They all had wealthy parents and grandparents, they all had maids and nannies, they all had tropical vacations and restaurant birthdays and closets full of skis and rackets, and, in Eleanor’s case, a three-thousand-dollar set of golf clubs.
Since the Stocktons were old money, they were more or less discreet with their filthy lucre. They flew coach unless the flight was really long, they drove their cars until the clanking noise became untenable, and they never, ever redecorated. But upon closer examination, the daily cost of life was eye-watering. The maintenance and taxes on the limestone on Pineapple, the maisonette on Orange, the country house on Spyglass, the memberships at the Casino, the Knickerbocker Club, and Jupiter Island, the kids’ Henry Street School tuition (kindergarten and first grade were fifty grand apiece), and Berta’s salary all added up. Sometimes Darley wondered if her father even knew how much was flowing from the taps, or if his assistant wrote the checks and he signed them without bothering to take his eyes off his blueprints.
Whenever a bill or an expense surprised Darley—the closing costs when she bought her apartment, an assessment from the Jupiter club when a hurricane ripped off the deck—her father would shrug and say, “It’s a rounding error.” And it was true. He could make or lose more in one deal than any of them could realistically spend in five years, including years when they bought property. It was a life of great privilege and ease, and Darley was grateful. But she also knew it made it harder for her to make friends. There were only so many people to whom her world made sense.
When Darley told this to Cord once, he squinted and looked perplexed. He didn’t seem to feel this way at all. “You need to loosen up, Dar. This is a city full of interesting people.” To Darley this was the central difference between them, and the reason she ended up with Malcolm and he ended up with Sasha. She needed someone she had known and trusted for years, while he could fall in love with a girl at a bar. For Darley, deep connections were made over time, through years of friendship, a slow unveiling of the many layers we build up around ourselves. She had been burned too many times by supposed friends: The college roommate who dropped out of school and begged her for a two-thousand-dollar loan to help her sick mother. It was only months later that Darley discovered there was no sick mother, only a cocaine habit, that the money was gone. The camp friends who stole her phone card and used it to call their boyfriends from the pay phone by the dining hall, racking up a hundred dollars in six weeks. The girls her first year at Yale who came over to watch movies on her projector and borrowed her car to get pizza but talked about her as a spoiled rich girl behind her back. The time one of those girls put a dent in her car and never even offered to help have it fixed. Darley knew that her family money made her vulnerable to these sorts of leeches, so she had long ago built up walls to protect herself. She had worried Cord never built those walls, that he let himself follow women and friends like a pilot flying through fog. That’s why she had been so resistant to Sasha, why it had taken so long for her to let her sister-in-law in.
She thought about her own prenup for the millionth time. Maybe she had made a stupid mistake when she gave up her trust, sure. But her biggest mistake had been giving money so much power over her life. By keeping Malcolm’s secret she was buying into the idea that her world was a club only available to those with a seven-figure income. And she didn’t want to live that way. She wanted, for the first time in her life, to peel back her bitter rind and open up to the sweetness within.
Everyone always said that it was the moment you stopped trying to get pregnant that you finally conceived. That you found love when you’d stopped looking. That your silk midi-length La DoubleJ dress went on sale the day after you bought it full price. (Okay, maybe that one was different, but it annoyed Darley nonetheless.) So it was, by that same law, that Malcolm got a new job the week after they confessed his Deutsche Bank firing to the Stocktons.
Tilda and Chip were outraged on Malcolm’s behalf about the Azul debacle. They understood right away that the CNBC leak wasn’t his fault, they were unequivocally compassionate about his ordeal, and, even better, Tilda took revenge into her own hands and served it in the most fabulously snooty way possible: She made sure that Chuck Vanderbeer and Brice MacDougal were blacklisted from every private club in New York City and disinvited from every society gala from the Junior League Winter Ball to the MoMA Armory Party. They wouldn’t be able to get a squash court in this town ever again, and Darley had to laugh knowing that Tilda had actually hit them where it hurt.
After their epic dinner at Colonie, Cy Habib had introduced Malcolm to Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the chairman of Emirates, and the sheikh had created a position for Malcolm: president and chief strategy officer. Malcolm would be based in New York and, among his many responsibilities, he would oversee the IPO of Emirates on the New York Stock Exchange. It was Malcolm’s dream. He was out of banking, he was poised to rise at the most impressive airline in the world, and while he was unlikely to achieve the hat trick of triple secret status on the three big American airlines anytime soon, he’d be home a lot more to watch his kids grow up and obsess about pigeon death. An unforeseen bonus of overseeing the massively lucrative IPO was that Malcolm got to decide which investment banks would be invited to pitch for the business. He invited everyone—except Deutsche Bank. Tilda said it best: the wrong guests could ruin even the best parties.
