Hedge Fund Wives. Tatiana Boncompagni
him for the weekend for a friend’s wedding. We had a nice time, and so when the next wedding cropped up, he asked me again, this time introducing me as his girlfriend. A bunch of his friends got married that year—I think I went to six nuptials in all—but it was the one in Minneapolis that I remember best. The bride came from Swedish stock, and in the old tradition of the Vikings, you had to drink a shot of aquavit every time someone got up to speak. Needless to say, John and I were both completely drunk by the time the herring appetizers had been cleared, and over a plate of meatballs smothered with lingonberry sauce, he told me that he loved me.
I nearly choked on my Wasa bread when he said it. I’d only ever thought of our relationship as a warming drawer—nice and toasty, but not exactly fiery—and he’d never once given me the impression that he thought I could be The One. But then it occurred to me that John wasn’t the passionate type, and I’d been misreading his signals all along. He asked me to move into his apartment, and then a year later he asked me to marry him. That’s when we started talking about our future together, where we wanted to live, how many kids we wanted, the mistakes our parents had made that we didn’t want to repeat. That sort of thing. John was easy on a lot of fronts, but he felt passionately about one thing: Once we had children, he wanted me to stay home and take care of them.
His mother Penny, short for Penelope, had been first a school teacher—she taught sixth-grade English at a private school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the posh suburb of Detroit where John grew up (and attended public school). She later became a real estate broker, and according to John, once she left teaching for real estate she became a real shrew. Penny was habitually rude to John’s father, who was a life insurance salesman and often brought home less income than she did, and was always too tired or too busy to make dinner (or breakfast and lunch, for that matter) or throw birthday parties for John and his younger brother Jake. She wore nothing but pastel twinsets and slacks, and had her nails done every Friday afternoon no matter what. John tells a heart-wrenching story about breaking his arm in Little League and having to wait on a plastic chair, his injured arm cradled in a makeshift sling while his mother’s fingers and toes were painted silver-flecked mauve.
Penny once confided in me that she’d gotten pregnant with John by accident and then, a couple years after he had been born, figured she’d have another baby so that John wouldn’t always be pulling on the bottom of her cardigans (‘stretching them out’). ‘He needed a playmate,’ she had said, smoothing a lock of dyed blond hair behind her ear.
John still resented her.
‘There’s no way I’m going to be like Penny,’ I told him over and over during our engagement, when it still seemed useful to discuss hypothetical middle grounds, like, what if the bank gave me a four-day workweek, or what if I could work from home. Eventually we figured out that there was no telling what the future would hold for us, but I knew for sure, that I, unlike Penny, wanted children. I wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of my middle-age years baking chocolate chip cookies, reading bedtime stories, and cheering at soccer games. I wanted nothing more than to become a mother. I liked working in finance but I didn’t want it to be my whole life.
Still, as much as I wanted to start a family with John, I was afraid of being dependent on him for financial security. I enjoyed the independence of having my own source of income, the feeling of empowerment that came with knowing that I could take care of our family if need be. What if the dynamics of our relationship changed for the worse? And what if John ever left me?
After much consideration, I eventually agreed to quit my job when I got pregnant with our first child. As afraid as I was of losing my independence, I was more fearful of losing John. He made me feel so safe. With him, I never felt alone, and the awful memories of my childhood didn’t seem to affect me as much. My parents had fought constantly and sometimes violently, and I knew that with John I’d be able to give our children the sense of security my sister and I had lacked growing up. And really, that’s what mattered most to me: creating a peaceful home environment. No lying, no yelling, and no hitting.
Caving into John, however, meant that even if I got the promotion to vice president at the BlooMu, I would eventually have to quit. But I never got to make that decision for myself, thanks to Michelle, a blonde from Evanston, Illinois. Pretty and well put together, Michelle had enough ambition and charisma to make up for what she lacked in intelligence and diligence. I sometimes had to cover for her at work, but she ingratiated herself with me by teaching me a battery of useful tricks, like how to use hair powder when I didn’t have time to shower or that tying a scarf through the belt loops of my suit pants could add a little flair to my outfit. My big mistake was confiding in Michelle that I wanted the vice presidency but was planning on leaving the bank as soon as I got pregnant. The next day she marched straight past me into our MD’s office and told him what I’d said. Before the end of the week, Michelle was announced as the bank’s newest vice president.
Michelle did her best to drive me out of the bank, and I did my best not to hurl her little plastic deal trophies at her face every time she called me into her office. But it wasn’t for another year when I was passed over again for a promotion (for reasons I still don’t understand) that I started thinking about requesting a transfer to another department.
The only thing open at the time was a job in private client services. Whenever anyone on the investment banking side went there, we joked that they were being ‘put out to pasture’, or that they weren’t ‘hungry’, meaning they’d lost their drive and couldn’t hack it in the big leagues. Some of the other bankers referred to it as ‘early retirement’. But I was desperate and determined, and spent the next three weeks begging everyone who would listen to me why I should be allowed to become relationship officer for the bank’s high net worth clients. Thankfully I’d built up enough goodwill at the bank to win the job on probation.
If the bosses at BlooMu had banked on me growing bored with client relations, they must have been surprised at how quickly I took to it. Even I hadn’t expected to find my new post as stimulating as my last, but it was. Whoever said figuring out how to weight a client’s portfolio in stocks, bonds, and alternative assets was less challenging than, say, charting the expected increase in economies of scale following a corporate merger was dead wrong. Plus in private wealth management I went to a lot of charity balls and fancy dinners and learned all about gourmet food, fine wine, flowers, décor, and etiquette—basically all the things that the daughter of a Post-it Note salesman (my dad worked as a B-to-B account manager for 3M) wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise. I went on golf weekends in Palm Beach, wine tours in Napa Valley, and to the Art Institute of Chicago’s big gala when Bloomington Mutual was one of the fundraiser’s main sponsors. Michelle got the big job, but I got the better one—one that, lo and behold, had prepared me better than I could have ever imagined for my new life in New York. It would be many months before I had this epiphany, but when it finally came, it would be worth the wait.
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