Vic, look, I thought the unwritten agreement here was you speak about your love life, and I talk about business.” Celeste watched Victor set his fork down. There was a rupture going on inside of her.
“But come on—”
“Could we change the subject, Vic? Let’s not spoil this wonderful meal by talking about me? Really, who the hell cares?” She was not going to trot out that story of Michael. Display Skye, turn her into a wound that time still had yet to heal. She sipped her wine. Maybe that would quell what was going on inside.
“I do, Celeste,” Victor said, picking up his fork and looking down at his plate.
“Once again you’re the better man, because I don’t.”
The next morning—what a morning! Celeste had already had two clients. Both of them made her so angry she wanted to shake them.
Client #1: For the past fifteen years, she had been receiving statements from two different brokers and not opened a single envelope. She brought all of the (unopened) statements to Celeste.
Client #2: A young woman named Andrea Paz, clearly anxious, very attractive, very demure. She had a court settlement worth $100,000. Ms. Paz didn’t go into the details of the settlement, but for some reason Celeste thought it was related to sexual harassment.
“I’d like to be able to invest $50,000 for my children, for their college,” Ms. Paz had said. That had quite literally filled Celeste’s day with sunshine, and her business woman’s heart with joy. Halfway through the necessary questions, Celeste asked her what she was doing with the other half of the settlement.
“My husband invested it in his brother’s boss’ business.”
Celeste nodded, very slowly. “Did you happen to bring a copy of the paperwork?”
“What paperwork?” Andrea Paz asked, her large innocent eyes making her look fifteen, not twenty-seven. Celeste gritted her teeth and inwardly promised herself to make this money grow for Andrea’s sons.
Client #1’s statements revealed that one brokerage firm had kept her funds in a money market fund for the past fifteen years, where it had shrunk a bit because of the management fees. That was far better, however, than the other brokerage firm, which had simply churned and churned the money until they had the temerity to be billing her!
What was it about women that made them refuse to look? Okay, maybe once they looked they couldn’t see, couldn’t recognize the problem or the indicators, couldn’t decipher the financial statement. But they had to look first, in order to realize it.
What made them think that the money would take care of itself or that the money, their money, would be better thrust blindly into the hands of a stranger?
Celeste got so angry with these women—these women whose anxieties, neuroses and prayers were layered on to their funds. Money was neutral! Money can’t spend or invest itself, she wanted to yell at Client #1.
What the hell does your husband’s brother’s boss know about investing? she wanted to yell at Client #2. But she couldn’t. She knew they had both used all of their emotional reserve to just enter her office. No use scolding a person for that. She knew how to treat women like this, coddle them more gently than she would her two young nieces. Otherwise they would bolt, and who knew what kind of swindler would find them next?
What were these women so terrified of? To Celeste, the unknown was more terrifying.
Celeste sipped her coffee. She knew her own sin had been pride. She was once Celeste Amado, eighteen years old, National Merit Scholar, perfect 1600 on her SATs, invitations to attend nearly every Ivy League School back East and a hundred private colleges throughout the country. Celeste Amado, something bright and shiny, even to herself, an eighteen-year-old Celeste who had left midway through an insipid church service, choking on her tears. She wished she were far away. She wished it was next year.
“Whatever it is,” her mother said, following her, putting her cool hand on Celeste’s hot cheek, “it’s not the end of the world.”
That’s exactly what it was, the end of the world. The end of her world, at any rate, and of the way she had planned on living it. So many plans, they had made her dizzy with possibility. Dizzy with being eighteen, standing on the very edge of the world and the things that are the most important, the most meaningful.
“We love you,” her mother said. This was her mother, with the golden brown eyes and gentle touch Celeste had known all her life. This was the mother who had tied her shoes as Celeste read, who still dabbed a tissue at her face as she headed out the door, who continued to tuck all three daughters in at night. This was her mother—peace, consolation, solace all wrapped into one person.
Her mother stroked her face. “Everything seems impossible when we look at it for the first time. I know you, it will work out, it will be all right.”
Celeste felt her mother’s cool hand on her face, and the tears stopped. Her mother knew her and loved her. Michael loved her. Her mother was right, it would work out. Somehow. “Mom, I’m pregnant.”
At which point her mother, Mercy Amado, began to cry.
There were women who refused to look at the truth. Celeste had borne it, faced the implications of her pregnancy head on. Celeste thought of her sister Sylvia and stilled her interior rant. As she had told Sylvia, she could only find transfers and withdrawals of funds. Legally, those funds were all Jack’s, and he could do with them as he pleased because that inheritance had been bequeathed specifically to him. Although—and this is what Celeste did not say—what kind of marriage is it where the husband hoards it all for himself?
Celeste already had a sense about what kind of marriage it was. Early in their marriage Jack had pinned her in a closet, then apologized for thinking she was Sylvia. Sylvia had laughed when Celeste told her —what else could she do? Jack was just a little drunk, a little toasted, Sylvia said.
Since their chat at the bar in Laguna back in February, Sylvia hadn’t told Celeste if she had found out or done anything further about the money. Here was another woman, her Sylvia, she was going to have to shake some sense into, very very gently.
Sylvia had graduated from the University of California at Irvine with honors in Comparative Literature. That literature had included Russian, French and ancient Greek. Raised Protestant, she joked to her Catholic friends that she had given up Spanish for Lent—and had forgotten it completely.
Her degree had prepared her for a wide variety of jobs, all of which were unpaid internships. Sylvia knew there were adults in this world whose parents would subsidize their self-actualization for any number of years, but she was not one of those. Without drama or self-pity, she went out to find a job to cover her student loans.
She worked briefly for her father as a hostess in the restaurant he managed. She went home nightly cursing the fact that her parents had never taught her Spanish. With the intensity she had reserved for Anton Chekhov and Stéphane Mallarmé, she pored over vocabulary books and 1001 Spanish verbs. After a few months, even the dishwashers understood her.
But the commute inland was gritty, the pay absurdly low. At this rate she’d still be living with her parents when she retired. And it was getting very odd at home, the phone rang and rang and when Sylvia picked up no one answered—then it was tense between her parents, Nataly was in Pasadena racking up mountains of debt at CalArts. So she shifted gears and followed
