Read Online The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund by Jill Kargman - Free Book Online

home?” I wondered aloud.
    â€œHolly, news flash: It’s Brooklyn, not Mars. You said you used to go there and see bands all the time! What happened? Now it’s like you and Tim fucking think you’ll burst into flames if you cross a bridge! Trust me, they have oxygen over there, you’ll be fine.”
    I know, I was lame. But when you don’t normally make the trek, even if it’s geographically close, it feels like oceans away. I didn’t want to disappoint her, though. “Okay, okay, I’ll come,” I conceded. “I always loved Williamsburg.”
    â€œMe, too. The guys are so damn hot,” she purred. “Last week, I screwed this guy I met at Lux, and when I woke up I was so disoriented, I needed a fucking compass. I went to go to the bathroom and saw the Manhattan skyline out the window and almost fainted. But I started walking and got my bearings and, I’m telling you: the restaurants, the galleries, the clothing boutiques—all amazing. I’m obsessed.”
    â€œSo why didn’t you move there instead of TriBeCa?” I asked, semireeling over her roll in the hay with some random dude.
    â€œI’m not that obsessed,” she said. “I like somewhat gentrified. Not edgy-now, nice-in-ten-years. I’m thirty-two; it’s too late for that grunge shit.”
    An easy fifteen-minute ride on the train later, we hopped out onto Bedford Avenue. And Kiki was right. The energy was palpable. The people all seemed a decade younger. Even those in their thirties looked like kids, thanks to hip outfits, various facial piercings, and tattoos aplenty. I suddenly felt like one of those uptown crones Kiki spoke of, but I was excited by the whole new world. I watched a bunch of guys carrying their guitars up some stairs to a practice space, and a crew of miniskirt-wearing girls with funky-colored hair and bloodred lips popping in and out of stores. I remembered having the same feeling when I went to Kings Road in London in 1983. It felt cool and raw, and even though I was a tourist passing through, I got excited that there were people doing something punky and different. This time, though, instead of looking up at them as older, cooler people portending my adulthood, it was more of a bittersweet looking back. I was the older one, and they held all the promise of becoming artists and musicians or prostitutes, who knows. But they sure did look amazing.
    â€œIt’s up here,” Kiki said, gesturing as we walked around the corner toward the gallery. “I think it’s like two blocks down on the left—” She froze. Halted in her Manolo Blahnik’d tracks.
    Uh-oh, great. I couldn’t entirely keep the whine out of my voice. “Please tell me we’re not lost, Kiki. Because I have to be home to get Miles in a couple—”
    She silenced me by calmly putting her hand on my arm and squeezing firmly.
    â€œOw!” Her grasp clenched my wrist. “Holy sugar! That hurts!”
    â€œShhh,” she commanded in a mute daze, grabbing me even harder.
    I was about to complain again when I noticed her huge, widened eyes staring in a forty-five-degree angle across the street. What? Was there a mugging in progress? Slowly I turned my head to follow her fixed gaze as she pulled me back into the shadow of a parked van. My eyes landed on what she had beheld, the sight that had made Kiki, the most talkative person on planet Earth, silent, the vision that had caused the most nonstop, kinetic, ants-in-her-pants live wire stop cold, turned her normally warm hand to ice on my wrist: It was my husband making out with another woman.

8
    â€œWhen I meet a guy, I think, Is this the man I want my children
to spend their weekends with?”
    â€”Rita Rudner
    Â 
    Â 
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    Fog. I have heard people say they’ve been trapped in one, mired in a cloudy, gray state of catatonic mumbling and grief. It’s usually people who have just buried