Never Enough (3 page)

THEY MET ON THE NUDE BEACH. ROB SAID, “I BET YOU’D
look great with your clothes on.” It was lust at first sight.

To Rob, Nancy personified everything hip and stylish and daring and free. She
was
New York, in all its sophistication, glamour, and allure. She was sparkly and saucy and had the street-smart veneer she’d been striving for. She was also gorgeous enough to make his pressed-against-the-glass-storefront, Jersey-guy eyes fall out. Plus, she was Jewish.

To Nancy, Rob personified everything she wanted in a husband. He was good-looking and hard bodied, clever and ambitious, well educated and smart. And, she soon intuited, from a family that was—at least by New Jersey standards—filthy rich. Plus, he was Jewish.

Neither of them ever looked back.

But neither did they charge ahead recklessly. Nancy may have been impetuous, but Rob was as methodical as a Swiss watchmaker. His heart had leapt impulsively, but his mind soon assumed full control. There was passion and romance and there were dreams of the splendor yet to come, but he laid out their future systematically.

They would date each other exclusively for a year. Then he’d move to an apartment big enough for both of them. Then they’d get engaged. By then he would have his master’s in finance from NYU. Once it was clear that his future was assured, they would marry.

His first job was with a small, staid New York investment bank named Ladenburg Thalmann. This was not the glamour end of the spectrum. Ladenburg was a perfectly respectable establishment, with impeccable roots in German-Jewish society. But its heyday had come in the nineteenth century. By the second half of the twentieth it was no longer a first-rank player on Wall Street.

But Rob was now an investment banker and determined to live as much like one as his salary permitted. The first thing he did was move to a landmark building: La Rochelle, on Columbus Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street, where Mike Paradise and his wife were already living. Nancy moved in with him as soon as they were engaged.

Bill disapproved of Nancy from the start. He thought she was common because she didn’t have a college education. He referred to her as “that waitress.” Nonetheless, Rob and Nancy married in September 1989, only a few months after his mother died.

Nancy chose Ali Gertz to be her maid of honor. The year before, Ali had learned that she was dying of AIDS. The news reverberated throughout the Upper East Side. AIDS was for drug addicts and homosexuals; Park Avenue socialites did not get AIDS. Ali told friends that she must have been infected by a Studio 54 bartender with whom she’d gone to bed at the age of sixteen. The bartender, a bisexual, had later died of the disease.

Knowing she was dying, Ali made a choice. Instead of retreating to her Park Avenue apartment or her family’s summer home in the Hamptons, she stepped into the limelight, hoping that awareness of her fate would jar others into taking precautions. Barbara Walters interviewed her.
People
magazine put her on the cover.
Esquire
named her Woman of the Year. She was privileged, beautiful, and articulate. Her speaking out about AIDS triggered a quantum jump in awareness that no one who had unprotected sex was immune. She would continue to speak until the last of her strength deserted her. She died in 1992. ABC broadcast a movie about her called
Something to Live For,
which featured Molly Ringwald as Ali and Lee Grant as her resolute and loving mother.

Nancy’s choosing Ali to be her maid of honor seemed an act of love: letting a dying friend share in a commitment to life. A few ungenerous souls among the guests, however, viewed it as a grasp at Ali’s celebrity coattails. On the morning of the wedding, Nancy and Ali and Nancy’s second-closest friend, Bryna O’Shea, went to the Essex House on Central Park South to have their hair done and to put on their gowns.

As they were dressing, Ali began to recite a list of the pills she had to remember to take. There were uppers for energy, downers to take the edge off the uppers, dozens of high-potency vitamins, and, most important, AZT. She had to take four hundred milligrams every four hours and she wanted to be sure she wouldn’t forget amid the excitement of the wedding reception. She started to explain that AZT was most effective in combating the HIV virus that was the precursor to full-blown AIDS, but that her doctor had said—

“Just shut up, Ali,” Nancy said. “This is my day. Nobody wants to hear about your fucking pills.”

The wedding took place at the East River Yacht Club, across the East River from Manhattan. Nancy wore a gown she had selected at Victoria Falls in Soho. The reception was held at the club’s restaurant, Water’s Edge, which offered an unrivaled view of the skyline.

The weather that day was glorious. A warm September sun shone from a clear blue sky. Guests crowded onto the restaurant’s outside deck. The Manhattan skyline dominated everyone’s field of vision. To Rob and Nancy, it represented limitless promise. A magnetic field seemed to emanate from it, drawing them into its mysteries, tempting them with its riches, thrilling them with its range of possibilities.

The bride and groom were radiant. They danced with élan. Their smiles were illuminated by joy. But Nancy later complained to friends that Ali Gertz ruined the day. All through the reception she talked to the other guests about AIDS. Whether she meant to or not, she stole the spotlight. She was beautiful, she was a celebrity, she would die young. Nancy felt that more attention was paid to her than to the bride. Nancy had no time for her after that.

Nancy was not a forgiving person. She took offense at the most innocuous of remarks and found disparagement in the most neutral of comments about her. Her reactions were swift and extreme. If she felt a friend, or even a relative, had slighted her, she would cut them out of her life without a further word. And it was permanent. Nancy did not relent. In this, she was similar to Bill. No Amish church practiced shunning with more rigor than Nancy.

Rob and Nancy remained at La Rochelle on West Seventy-fifth Street. Rob liked living in the same building as Mike Paradise, his old college roommate, who by then was married and practicing law in midtown Manhattan. The two couples socialized frequently. One evening the foursome had made a dinner date, but Mike’s wife canceled at the last minute, saying she was not feeling well. An hour later, Nancy looked out her window and saw Mike and his wife laughing happily as they climbed into a taxi in front of La Rochelle.

She felt as if she had been spat upon. She told Rob that not only was she never going to speak to either Mike Paradise or his wife again, but that Rob was not to do so either. So in thrall to her was he that for the next two years he did not say so much as good morning to his old college friend.

For their first anniversary, Rob bought Nancy a mink coat. Bill paid for it. Unable to express love in other ways, Bill sometimes compensated by bestowing expensive gifts. Rob made sure Nancy never found out that he’d bought the coat with his father’s money. She was thrilled to receive the coat. It seemed to change her personality. For the first time, she acted truly proud of herself—as if the gift were a reward for accomplishment. She glowed when she wore it and she wore it everywhere, nine months a year. At restaurants, she did not check it. Instead, she draped it over the back of her chair. The Madonna song had been written for her:

ROB GLOWED LIKE NEON AGAINST THE DRAB, GRAY LADENBURG
Thalmann sky. He viewed his time there as an apprenticeship. It lasted a year; then Lazard Frères hired him. This was his big step up, even if by 1990 Lazard had entered a period of genteel decline.

Lazard traced its roots to the California Gold Rush, but its corporate culture reflected old-world—some said outmoded—attitudes shaped by the French billionaires who controlled it. In the 1960s and ’70s, Felix Rohatyn’s brilliance and flair carried the U.S. division of Lazard into the front ranks of American investment banking, but as larger, more aggressive, and more technologically advanced competitors muscled their way onto the scene, Lazard witnessed a dimming of its luster. Even Rohatyn wondered aloud whether the jaguar that was Lazard could survive among a herd of elephants.

Rob did not concern himself with such metaquestions. What he cared about was advancement. His competitive instinct had not waned. Even in a field where everyone worked preposterously long hours and where everyone was single-mindedly focused on the one goal that mattered—making money—Rob stood out. He knew that money—enough money—could buy his father’s respect. This mattered more to Rob than he liked to admit. It might even have mattered more than he recognized.

Rob didn’t have the polish needed for mergers and acquisitions. M&A, as it’s called in the investment banking business, required an element of salesmanship in addition to the necessary number-crunching skills. Rob found his niche in the more predatory realm of distressed debt. The idea with distressed debt was to make money from failure, not success. It worked like this: you find a bankrupt company or one on the verge of bankruptcy, buy the company’s bonds at a penny on the dollar, and use the resulting leverage to force reorganization. Then, instead of taking cash payment on the bonds, you take shares of the company’s stock. As your reorganization turns the company around and it starts showing a profit, your shares rise a few thousand percent and everybody is happy, especially your bosses. At the end of the year, when you get a bonus ten times bigger than your salary, you’re even happier.

The M&A stars and the ballsiest, craftiest, luckiest traders wore the crisp white uniforms adorned with epaulets and scanned the horizons from the top deck. The distressed-debt boys worked the engine room, out of sight. This was where Rob discovered his true talent: he could plow through thousands of pages of red ink and spot the single spark of life. He could find—among the halt and the lame, the sick and the dying—those few companies worth a bet. The work was more tedious than glamorous, the hours it demanded not merely unreasonable but grotesque. “I laugh when I think about forty-hour weeks,” Rob would say. “I’m putting in forty-hour days.” But he got results. He got such good results that he didn’t even notice that he’d begun to cross over: he was becoming an investment banker, not a mere man.

The only reason people become investment bankers is to get rich. Not only do they have no problem worshipping Mammon to the exclusion of all else in life, they also lose the ability to understand people who don’t. They tend to believe that the only reason other people don’t become investment bankers is either because they’re not smart enough or they’re afraid of hard work.

It’s a unique perspective.

In his splendid novel
A Ship Made of Paper
, Scott Spencer describes the breed. He writes that in lieu of happiness they experience “the grim, burnt comfort of thriving in a world that is, for the most part, brutal and uninhabitable.” The investment banker, Spencer writes, “spends the best part of nearly every day surrounded by people who make money, not houses, or soup, not steel, not songs, only money, and who quite openly will do anything for financial gain…. He has made an alliance with these squandered souls, these are his people, his teammates, and among them he feels the pride of the damned. His friends are the guys who will fly halfway around the world to convince someone to take a quarter of a point less on a deal. Everyone else is a civilian, all those fruits and dreamers who do not live and die by that ceaseless stream of fractions and deals that is the secret life of the world.”

This was now Rob’s world. He’d been drawn to it by the promise of outrageous wealth, but his years at Lazard added a twist: no longer was it enough to earn millions per year, or even to earn more millions this year than last. The only way to really succeed was to earn more millions each year than anyone else.

“What good does it do me to make ten million a year,” he would ask friends rhetorically, “when the guy down the hall is making twenty?”

Rob had been at Lazard for three years when he and Nancy had their first child. They named her Isabel. Her birth meant they had to find a bigger apartment. Nancy spent months looking for the right place. She found her dream flat in the mid-Manhattan district called Chelsea.

Then Bill entered the picture. He came across the river to inspect. He walked up and down the street in front of the apartment. Trash blew across his path. Glass from broken bottles crunched beneath his feet. He saw winos, panhandlers, and people who looked like drug addicts. He saw women who must have been whores. With even more distaste, he found himself gazing upon people of indeterminate gender.

“It’s a slum,” he told Nancy. “It’s a filthy slum filled with perverts. How could you think I’d let my grandchild be raised in that kind of squalor? I won’t permit you to live in that apartment.” Nancy asked Rob to try to talk some sense into his father.

“Are you kidding? Find someplace else,” Rob said.

Eventually, they moved to Mercer Street in Greenwich Village. Isabel’s room was in a basement down the stairs. The only outside light came through barred, street-level windows the size of manila envelopes. They needed an intercom to hear Isabel cry. Nancy liked it because the upstairs rooms were large and bright. She said Isabel would be fine. Rob was spending a hundred hours a week at the office, so he wasn’t much affected by where they lived. Soon enough, they’d have their multimillion-dollar condo—as long as he never slowed down.

Nancy showed great affection for her daughter, but she had inherited her mother’s lack of aptitude for parenting. In the right mood, she could spend hours playing happily with the baby on the floor, but the tasks of motherhood bored her. Feeding a toddler three times a day—
every day
? Doing laundry? Taking the child out for fresh air? Such chores annoyed her. They dampened her carefree spirit. She felt they were depriving her of her right to remain irresponsible.

The apartment was only two blocks from Washington Square Park, where neighborhood toddlers played. Before wheeling Isabel there for the first time, Nancy girded herself for the banal chitchat she expected from the other young mothers—women, no doubt, who’d never partied from closing time until dawn. What she found floored her: there
were
no other young mothers there. The dozen or so toddlers running around were all in the care of their
nannies.
Rob got an earful that night.

Nancy had always worn a hard shell. She was easy to meet, but not easy to know. Even women who considered her a good friend sensed that she did not want to be known. You could talk to Nancy about what she’d bought, not how she felt. You could ask about the baby’s outfit, not how she and the baby were. Nancy didn’t simply have boundaries; her friends suspected she had built castle walls around her heart. It must have gotten lonely inside.

One of the few people to whom she felt close was Ira’s mother. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, both before and after the divorce, Ira’s mother had been a gentle, caring presence in Nancy’s life. In 1996, when Ira’s mother was dying in a hospice in Evanston, Illinois, Nancy flew out to be with her.

The lead statuette that Nancy’s mother and father had bought in Cincinnati thirty years earlier was by the old woman’s bedside when she died. Nancy, too, had come to treasure the statuette. In the figures of the two young and innocent little girls—so trusting, so seemingly full of sweetness, hope, and love—Nancy felt a link to something ineffable and precious and lost. Her older sister, Laura, reeling from her own rocky adolescence, had married and had moved to Oregon, severing all contact with the family. But on the statuette, Nancy believed, the two of them could stay forever linked. To Nancy, the statuette symbolized the capacity for closeness so lacking in her life.

She brought it back to New York from Evanston. It became her most valued possession, even more than the mink coat.