The First Wives Club (44 page)

He slowed slightly, held back by a knot of lesser cars. All the jerks slowed down on the Merritt at the first sign of ice. Well, they didn’t hold him back for long. Seeing a brief opportunity, he swung out into the left lane, shifting for speed, and insinuated himself into the almosttoo-small space two car lengths up. Horns of protest blared behind him. Fuck em.

I did it, he thought. Two car lengths. Those pussies wouldn’t even try, but I did.

He reached across the seat to the inside pocket of his suit jacket, fumbled out a pack of Dunhills, and tapped one of the cigarettes between his thin lips. As he lit it from the dashboard lighter, the words came into his mind again.

Held back, he thought, as he exhaled a steady stream of white smoke.

Nothing, no one, can hold me back, he told himself, his eyes on the curving road ahead.

The Swanns had tried but failed. He had known they didn’t want Cynthia to marry him just as he had known that she would, no matter what they thought.

From the first moment he heard her last name, his future brightened.

He had wanted her and he had gotten her. She was necessary to him.

She had helped him with that first giant step.

But she had ultimately failed him. The more compliant she had become, the more contempt he had for her. She was weak, he thought, and he hated her for it. He liked to believe it was his strength that made him succeed, but he sometimes knew that that was not the way it had been at all. It wasn’t his strength, it was the weakness of others that had helped him. That and his own ruthlessness in the face of trust and honesty. It had all been necessary, he told himself.

Whatever he had done had been necessary.

Mary isn’t weak, he thought. She’s a killer, worthy of my talent. A fit partner. We’re going to climb higher together. We’ll be world class.

Gil sped down the FDR Drive and screeched to a halt in his assigned space in the underground garage of his office building. Next week he and Mary would permanently move to the new apartment on Fifth, although it still seemed a shambles. He wouldn’t get to drive as often, and he d miss that. He patted the dashboard. Then he got out and in three strides reached the elevator to the lobby. As he stepped off the elevator.

Gus, the guard on duty, tipped his hand to the visor of his cap in a respectful salute and immediately buzzed the receptionist on the forty-fifth floor to alert her to the arrival of the company’s president.

A second guard stepped quickly in front of Gil and, taking a ring of keys from his hip, unlocked the door to his private elevator. Gil stepped in and the guard pressed forty-five and said, “Good morning, Mr. Griffin.”

Gil ignored both the guards and snapped open Barron’s. If he said hello to every one of the little people who greeted him, he’d have no time for work.

In the reception area at the executive floor, he found Mrs. Rodgers, his secretary, waiting for him, as he knew she would be.

“Good morning, Mr. Griffin.”

Walking past her without breaking his stride, he said, “What’s my calendar for the day?”

Mrs. Rodgers scanned her notebook while she tried to keep up with his brisk walk. Overweight and near retirement, she found the pace of Gil Griffin’s business life more and more difficult to keep up with, but after sixteen years with him, she was determined to maintain his speed until she reached sixty-five. She was up at five-thirty every morning so as to be in the office by seventhirty. It seemed as if the commute from Queens got longer all the time, and sometimes, especially on cold winter mornings such as this one, as she mounted the long flight of steps to the F train in the predawn darkness, she felt ready to give up. “But I’m going to make it to the finish line,” she would say to herself at these moments.

As they continued down the silent, carpeted hall toward Gil’s corner suite, Mrs. Rodgers breathlessly ran through Gil’s schedule for the day. Poor, luckless Stuart Swann picked this moment to come out of his office. Typical of his timing, Gil thought as he saw him out of the corner of his eye. Without turning his head, he said, “My office, fifteen minutes, Stuart.”

Just as he reached the entrance to his office suite, Mrs. Rodgers jumped ahead of him with a great effort and opened the door for Gil without causing him to stop. He rewarded her with a nod, but didn’t break his pace.

Gil proceeded to his desk and stood behind it, while Mrs. Rodgers, now out of breath, seated herself on one of the burgundy leather chairs across from him.

“The executive committee wanted to know if the two P.M. meeting is a luncheon meeting in the private dining room, or is it a meeting in the boardroom?”

Gil’s mouth turned up at the corners very slightly at the thought of having to eat an extra meal with those sycophants, and he said, “One P.M boardroom.” He was going to pitch the Japanese deal. The real one, not the plant he had thrown them.

”Anything else, Mr. Griffin?”’ “Yes. Have someone wash the salt off my car. And when Stuart Swann shows up, don’t buzz me. Just tell him I said wait.”

He noticed her drop her eyes at his comment. In sixteen years of dedicated service, she had never once commented negatively about him or anything that he did. If he thought about it, he would have guessed she didn’t particularly like him, which was all right with Gil, just so long as she did her job, and did it well. She had two assistants to help her do it, too. Highest-paying secretarial job in New York City, he thought. And there’s the profit sharing.

And her portfolio. She couldn’t afford to leave. He knew it and she knew it.

Gil walked to the window and stared out. He had never gotten over his fear of heights, but always took great pains to keep the fear hidden from others. He kept his back to the view and only looked out the bubbled, old panes. “Never let them see you sweat” was his motto, and he lived by it. So, when planning his space in the new building he had had the company buy, he insisted on not only the highest floor, but also the largest picture windows. However, the antique windows with their tiny, wavy panes had been installed on one side.

Those were for him.

Had he looked down, he would have seen the one street in America that was important enough to dominate all the others—Wall Street. And Gil was the current “king of the mountain.” From his perch, looking straight ahead, the view of Manhattan’s financial district with New York Harbor as its backdrop gave him the tight feeling in his groin that he lived for.

This is it, he thought, this is the ultimate thrill. Not car racing, not speedboating. Not even sex. This, the feeling of having control over billions of dollars of other people’s money. This is what I need.

The connecting door between his office and his wife’s swung open, and Mary came in with a rush.

“Gil, I’m so glad you’re in. Look at these,” she said as she dropped paint chips and upholstery samples before him on his desk. ‘What do you think?”’ He took a moment to compose himself, staring at the fabric and color chips without seeing them. Then very quietly with all the restraint he could muster, he asked, “What’s this, Mary?”’ “Cil,” she reminded him, as if he were stupid, “these are the samples for the apartment.” He could see she mistook his annoyance for lack of understanding.

“I have to get them to Duarto this afternoon if we’re ever going to get the new apartment finished.”

Gil, still cool, said, “If you have a decorator, why are you bothering with this stuff? Why am l? We’re paying him to decorate. Let him decorate.”

He brushed aside the samples and his own misgivings and asked, “Have you prepared the final figures for my meeting with the executive committee today?”

His irritation was clear to her now. Quickly gathering up the samples from his desk, she recovered and matched his tone, saying, “I just have to run through the analysis one more time. I’ll have it on your desk by one P.M.” She turned toward the door to her office.

“By twelve, Mary. I had asked you to have them for me by twelve noon so I would have time to review them before I take them to my meeting with the executive committee. By noon, Mary.”

Mary, becoming vice president of Federated once again, had the good sense to say, ‘Twelve noon, Gil,” before closing the door behind her.

Gil sat back and tapped his index finger against his lip as he tried to come to terms with his disquietude. I thought she was different, he mused.

Hard-nosed, ambitious, greedy. Like a man. I thought she was the one worthy to be my other half in business, my partner. Now give her four walls and she becomes like every other Greenwich housewife —decorators, color schemes, wallpaper.

Cynthia came to mind. He had been forced to almost accept this nesting trait in Cynthia. It was so mindless and she had been able to do nothing else. But not Mary.

Still, the worst women were those combinations of fuzzy thinking and aggressiveness, such as that useless bitch Anne Paradise. He fumed each time he thought of her. Who did she think she was, coming into my office and telling me what to do? He hated women who talked back, who disobeyed. At least Cynthia never did that. He thought of Mary. They really had something together. Was she going to ruin it? he wondered Softly, out loud, he said to the empty room, “Don’t fuck this up, Mary.”

He reached over to the intercom and slapped Mrs. Rodgers’s line open.

Send him in,” he growled.

He had looked at his watch and realized that if Stuart Swann had been on time, and he wouldn’t dare not be, he’d been cooling his heels in Mrs. Rodgers’s office for twenty-eight minutes.

He heard Stuart’s one light tap at the door. Knock like a man, he thought, and he decided to make Stuart do exactly that. He did not respond.

After a too-long wait, two more taps, only a little harder this time, but Gil knew this was the best this wimp could do. Magnanimously, he called out for Stuart to come in. Stuart stepped into the room with a scared smile on his face. “You wanted to see me, Gil?” He didn’t close the door until Gil answered with an abrupt motion of his hand.

He kept Stuart standing in front of his desk, not asking him to sit down.

Without preamble he said, “Stuart, I’ve been reviewing the figures for the last quarter on the corporate pension funds, and what I see is that your funds are the three lowest in the firm. Why is that, Stuart?”

Stuart was never prepared to handle these sessions, Gil knew, and he listened to Stuart stutter and stumble through an explanation. He cut him off mid-sentence. “Stuart,” he said as if talking to a retarded child, which is exactly how he thought of Stuart Swann, “if these figures aren’t turned around by the end of next quarter, you’re going to have to answer to an executive committee review. I won’t be able to protect you if that happens.

“And Stuart. There’s been word on the street about my interest in Mitsui Shipping. That leak wouldn’t be from you, would it? Only the executive committee members were aware of it.”

“No, not from me, Gil.”

“Good. If I hear different, your seat on the committee is jeopardized.

You know that?”

Stuart looked at him for a moment, opened his mouth, then closed it.

He nodded. Gil gave him a curt, dismissive nod and turned back to his desk.

Stuart’s silent departure left Gil both pleased and angered. What a wimp, Gil thought. There wasn’t a Swann who could stand up to him.

Not the old man, not Stuart, and certainly not Cynthia.

They go soft after generations of wealth, he thought. Those families need an injection of new blood every other generation. The gene pool needs stirring up. Even though he saved their precious family business by merging it with Federated, they still had not accepted him as one of their own. And all the rejections he had felt at the hands of the rich families, all the contempt they had shown him for being aggressive and single-minded, was now focused on the one remaining Swann in his life.

Stuart Swann, he knew, had to pay for the offenses of the past. Gil hated to admit it, but in some ways, he needed Stuart. Like all great kings he needed a whipping boy, a focus for the hatred he felt for the weak, a place to contain the overwhelming hatred he felt for all those who were not on his level.

Stuart Swann, my whipping boy, he thought with a chuckle. Well, not quite a whipping boy, but almost. Not quite a king, either, but almost, he thought, now laughing to himself.

His reverie was broken by Mrs. Rodgers’s buzz on his intercom announcing Dwight McMurdo to see him. He greeted the partner casually, but his stomach still fluttered at having a member of one of the oldest New England families beholden to him. He had made McMurdo, as well as the other partners, millions of dollars.

Dwight was smiling nervously. He asked, after the basic pleasantries, “What’s with Mitsui Shipping, Gil? What’s our position on the stock?

I just heard from the specialist handling Mitsui, the guy’s sweating bullets. He tells me there’s a run on the stock. I swear, it’s up five points over yesterday.”

”Dwight, don’t worry. We’re positioned perfectly.” Gil could see that Dwight had let the tension of the game get to him.

Dwight continued as if not hearing Gil. ‘I mean, Gil, with the price of the shares going up, we’re going to be pushed off the playing board.

This will blow the whole deal, Gil. What’s going on?” His voice had gone shrill as he came to the end of his harangue.

Gil leaned back in his chair, his fingertips touching in an arch, savoring the moment. This asshole, he thought. All his years on Wall Street and he still didn’t understand the game. Slowly, relishing the power he had, he said, “We don’t have any position on Mitsui, Dwight.”

He watched Dwight try to absorb that, then continued, “We’re as safe as a babe in its mother’s arms, Dwight. I was never interested in Mitsui—that’s not my target.” He watched Dwight’s shoulders relax at the same time a quizzical look came over his face.

“But I don’t understand. You told the executive committee …”

“Two things are important, Dwight,” Gil continued, as if he were instructing a young trainee in the business instead of talking to a seasoned veteran. “How you play the game, as well as whether you win or lose. And you can’t win if you don’t know how to play.”