The Suite Life (22 page)

I didn't begrudge the women the perks that went along with their marriages—Lord knows I enjoyed those myself—or the men the opportunity to relax and enjoy the fruits of their hard work. But I began to feel that there was more to life than this. I wanted to know how these women defined themselves apart from their husbands' power and the multimillion-dollar bonuses they provided. And I wished that they could be more interested in me, Samantha Bonti, apart from seeing me simply as Alec's wife. But I held my tongue.

Of course, I wanted to help Alec fulfill his dream, but I too had a dream and it seemed to be getting lost along the way. Trying to maintain my sense of self was growing more difficult every day as my husband's huge presence took precedence over everything else in our lives. I could begin to feel Samantha
Bonti getting swallowed up by Mrs. DeMarco—and I missed the old Sam.

I dropped a hint about how lonely I felt to Alec one night as we were getting ready for bed, and he took me in his arms and promised that work would let up soon. He told me that all of these changes would just take some getting used to. And then, ever the problem solver, he suggested we get a dog as a companion for me when he was away. I agreed that I would love to have a little dog, but, of course, in Alec's world of huge appetites a huge dog was the only way to go.

Not one to put off what could be done immediately, Alec arranged for us to pick out our new pet the very next weekend. We drove out to the east end of Long Island and, after winding our way through the country, found our way to a farm, where the owners proudly displayed their litter of eight Bullmastiff puppies. We picked a big, strapping pup, named him Hercules, and took him home that day.

The first few months of my new life as Mrs. DeMarco saw the escalation of Alec's wheeling and dealing. He made no effort to conceal how crazed he was, and he made no apologies for being that way. He saw stocks as a game and, as with any game in which he found himself, he played to win. Period.

He was like a silverback in a pen with other angry gorillas, all competing for the same prize. In this case it was selling the stock at the highest price. Sell-side feared him, buy-side embraced him, and when a two-dollar broker wasn't looking he was there to take a bite. He was the true master.

Each day at Transglobal Equities brought a new contest for Alec's magnetism. He continued to attract colleagues into his orbit who were worthy of being on his team. His main competition at Transglobal Equities was Ted Ross, who was vying for the best players in the company to join his own. Both men were
driven, and determined to win over the senior partners at Transglobal. Both also had their eyes on the even bigger prize—being in Grigor Malchek's orbit. After all, Alec said, if you're going to run things you might as well run with the man who ran the entire stock exchange. In fact, he was so determined to get close to Malchek that he sometimes let someone else higher up take credit for his ideas just to increase his popularity and keep his name out there in the ether. It made no sense to me, but Alec assured me that he knew what he was doing when it came to pleasing Malchek. Keeping a low profile—that's what appealed to Malchek.

Ted Ross was short and stocky and showing early signs of going bald. While his brother Robert, the senator, went on to New York Law School after college graduation, Ted had followed their father into the financial world, where his salesman's energy and bravado allowed him to shine. Nowhere near the imposing physical specimen Alec was, he nonetheless didn't shrink from throwing his professional weight around and leaving others in his wake. He didn't care at all that, behind his back, people whispered about his having a Napoleon complex that manifested itself not only in the office but also at home, where he was working on his seventh child. God knows these types needed more offspring.

The end of every day brought a comparison of their trading activity and the awarding of an unofficial, virtual trophy that the winner got to keep only until the market opened again the next morning—unless one of them had got the jump on foreign exchange activity the night before. Alec preened most when he strolled into the office with that day's trophy already in hand. He'd bested Ted on the merger deal, and he never tired of throwing a triumph in the face of the guy who had tried so hard to keep him down.

When he came home now, he was so exhausted that most
evenings he fell into bed with no more than a cursory “How was your day?” tossed my way. But on those rare occasions when he was in the mood for conversation, we didn't talk about much of anything other than business. He just assumed that I was fitting in and enjoying the life he had given me as much as he enjoyed his own, right up to his nightcap in bed of Johnnie Walker Blue, green chartreuse, or a joint—or some combination thereof.

I
was
enjoying myself, but I ate dinner alone, save for Hercules, and far too often for my liking. And I didn't count the formal client dinners Alec dragged me to as quality time with my husband. Our life together was changing rapidly, as his all-consuming climb up the ladder of success seemed to demand more and more of his time. Clearly our courting days were over, but I understood that now more than ever, he needed my support to reach his goal. So I didn't complain, and I listened attentively to anything Alec cared to share, even on those occasions when he came home loaded and shared stories about the seedier side of Wall Street that left me tossing and turning all night. As his dutiful wife, I told myself that, right now, his needs came first.

Over time, it became abundantly clear that the sexual escapades to which he'd confessed before we married were not a thing of the past. Alec had his secretary handle all the arrangements for “business entertainment,” but I overheard more than I wanted to about five-hundred-dollar-per-champagne-bottle strip clubs or all-out penthouse romps. Alec's early adulthood knowledge of S&M came in handy, too, as it appeared that a lot of his partners at Transglobal had kinky fantasies involving leather and latex that could go all night with the right amount of blow and pills. He never had less than ten thousand dollars cash on him, and he salivated about the power he wielded in sexual arenas as much as Tony had about a score or kickback opportunity. Memories of my past flooded back and demanded
comparison to my present. My eyes always widened as Alec's pillow talk got around to highlights in which he seemed to take pleasure in recounting these stories from “business” trips that included porn stars flown in on private jets at a cost of twenty thousand dollars a day.

Meanwhile, the shortest trip my husband had taken was for three days in Aspen, Colorado, so it wasn't hard to do the math. It didn't matter to Alec whether the powerful titans in his orbit were insecure about the size of their dicks or were willing to pay any amount of money or take it from the big companies they worked for. A CEO could do that and hide it well and, for a woman to give them attention their wives did not, it was sure as hell worth it to them. Alec was a provider, and he would provide for himself and his family by providing something of value to somebody else.

One of Alec's favorite stories was about when Mitch, one of his bosses, who had married a former model and had six kids with her, came to him and said he couldn't take the pedestrian sex anymore and needed to get laid. So Alec secured the services of Heather Frankel, a porn star with more than a hundred movies under her belt. Then he segued from that tale to one about a vice president at the firm who was a small-dicked Irish Catholic who could hardly ever get it up, and when he did it was pitiful. The only way he could fuck his wife was in the shower because he needed water on his back to have an orgasm.

And I needed a chalice of wine after hearing about an even seedier side of my husband's pimping—the enforcement side. When one of the hookers on one of these trips charged a Rolex on his AmEx card, Alec tore it off her wrist and threw her out. I had barely digested that borderline-violent scene, however, when my on-his-way-to-being-a-titan husband trumped it with one that could have ended up with physical harm to
him
.

It seems that an hour into Heather Frankel's “date” with Mitch, she was no longer satisfied with the twenty thousand she'd been paid, and came out of the bedroom demanding more money from Alec, who was waiting in the living room of the suite he had booked for the occasion. Fat chance. These were ruthless bitches who only wanted money and this one had already gotten more than she was worth.

I knew what Alec would say before he told me there was no way he would let her set him up like that. When he refused, Heather dug her cell phone out of her purse and stormed back to the bedroom. Ten minutes later a three-hundred-pound black man with a shaved head showed up at the door to the suite with a gun and demanded twenty-five thousand in cash. Alec, of course, told the “gentleman” that wasn't possible, whereupon the man threatened to expose what he knew about Mitch and his colleagues to their wives and the media.

Alec-the-peacemaker smoked a joint and downed a Quaalude with the guy, and then gave him two grand to go away. To preserve my sanity, I got extremely good at tuning out while listening in. I didn't want to have to imagine what two of his bosses did with the three women they paid for or who did what to whom. The only thing that kept my antenna up was the possibility that Alec had been an active participant in any of the lechery he orchestrated. I knew that the women he paid for were only interested in his money, and so far he hadn't exhibited any of the telltale signs that he was getting sex elsewhere, but he was, after all, a man, and a powerful one at that.

When I raised this possibility with him one night, Alec swore up and down that he would never be unfaithful to me. But most important, he wouldn't ever want to lose the upper hand by showing any interest in sampling their wares. He insisted that picking up the checks and pleasing others were simply the means to get where he wanted to go. Knowing Alec, that made
sense to me. He got off on knowing the girls wanted him, but giving in would be giving them too much power. He always wanted to be in control, even at the cost of denying his own pleasure. Then he explained to me that he had fallen in love with me because I was the first woman he'd actually wanted to have intercourse with in a long time. But that made no sense to me at all, because we'd been married for almost a year and you could practically count on the fingers of both hands the number of times my maniacally focused husband and I made love since returning from our honeymoon.

Alec's efforts on the merger paid off shortly before Thanksgiving, to the tune of several million dollars. Unreal as that amount of money seemed to me, I wondered if it was worth the constant lack of quality time for Alec and me, or the painful hemorrhoid attacks his fast living had brought on. I was starting to worry about his getting sick.

Much as I'd tried to warn him about his prodigious eating habits, my words fell on deaf ears and he just kept on as usual. Nor did he listen to my gentle suggestions that he spend more quality time with Hercules. My exhausted dragon-slayer husband didn't really want to be bothered with the family dog, even on weekends, and he made it clear that he would prefer Hercules to be in his cage when he got home. I felt bad for the dog, but tried my best to comply. It wasn't always easy, though, because I was never sure when he would walk through the door, and I wanted to give Hercules as much love and freedom as I could before consigning him to his cage for the night.

Week after week, Alec went on taking big stock positions and satisfying big appetites, and I soldiered on lunching and shopping and hitting the beauty salons. He was particularly proud that one of the bonuses of the score he'd made was being able to grab three hungry junior associates for his team. Alec let them run the smaller deals, which not only kept him stocked
with plenty of cash but also gave him time that could be put to better use. He had Grigor Malchek on his fishing line and fully intended to land him.

The reeling in was to take place in San Francisco, and I was especially excited because Giovanni and I were both going to join him. Giovanni's firm had a minor interest in the deal, and the plan was that Alec would go out ahead (in a private jet, of course) to do some hunting and fishing. It seemed that all the Wall Street big shots enjoyed killing animals just as the guys in the mafia enjoyed killing people. Giovanni and I would join him a couple of days later.

Since the merger had gone through, the next step was to see where all the players found their seats once the music stopped. Some pretty powerful men were angling to run things, and Alec had lines into all of them. He fully intended to help Malchek get what he wanted, which was to have his handpicked guy become CEO of the newly merged firm. But that wasn't all. Alec also fully intended to climb over everyone else and become Malchek's right-hand man in the near future.

I was looking forward to the trip because it would give me some time along with Giovanni. We shared a limo to JFK, and when we were settled into our wide leather first-class seats for the long flight to San Francisco, he warmed my heart by saying just what I'd been thinking.