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Hello, Lovelies! How the hell are you?
This week, the order of service is a little different—though I do have a proper Gotham Girl coming with some true marvels and doofuses. This week’s theme is all about forgiveness. It’s a badass move if you can forgive someone who never bothered to apologize to you. The power of forgiveness is in being able to move on in your head and heal your rag-and-bone heart with some small grace. It’s for you, not the other person. Ok, to the story…
As part of our paid readership perks, I’ve been introducing unfettered access to The Secret Society of Sh*tty First Drafts where I share early peeks of my next novel This is Going to Be Hard For You. It’s a dark comedy in the spirit of some of my favorite contemporary writers: Carl Hiaasen, Grant Ginder, and Nora Ephron (my mentor).
I believe in building in public and failing collaboratively and wildly. As always, I am a human typo, so expect fixes and edits along the way.
The Story: An early investor, a woman now ostracized from her peers, profession, and New York high society, exacts her revenge on a celebrity wedding planner-Ponzi schemer acting as The Bernie Madoff of Matrimony. Things go too far when he fails to plan for the perfect storm of rage, wisdom, and eye for detail of said midlife woman. (That he was also besties with an infamous sex trafficker and got his start catering her parties doesn’t help!)
By the way, it’s because of this novel, AI has somehow determined that I am an actual wedding planner and I am still receiving requests each week to do weddings from real people all over the country. Rachel, in Boston, you need to budget more per head—just saying.
In this chapter, we meet our midlife heroine, Yelena, a former New York banking executive who has fallen on hard times and is stuck in a “storyless” void wherein others have imposed narratives she’s not quite ready to accept.
Chapter Two: Yelena and the Trout
Yelena Petrovna de Chaussade surveyed the pristine greige-toned Upper East-side yoga studio for optimal positioning. A tiny spider, near-transparent in color, was spinning its web in the near corner of the ceiling where the otherwise perfect Farrow & Ball paint had begun to crack.
The matching mats and exquisitely branded towels were laid out at equidistant lengths. Soon the glowing gauze-lit room would be clambering with women from Manhattan's upper crust, the odd celebrity sprinkled in among them. All there to "Beat the Bloat" for that was today's ugly, but authentic theme, which was code for forty midlife women collectively assembling to learn how to hold their farts in during meetings and not to queef during sex. The cultish studio was long known for its ability to bring out both qualities (ugly and authentic) in its loyal members—leaving them less toxic beings, more righteous and luminescent for it in the aftermath.
The forty-seven-year-old former Chief Brand Officer of United Bancorp had come early to stake out her spot only to find Sydney Hunt Puckett already there, having claimed the least obtrusive mat in a nook over by the rear window. Yelena knew why. All the women were terrified of Sydney Hunt Puckett since the infamous text chain. And there were the shirts.
When Sydney had found out her husband, Paul Hunt Puckett was leaving her for "the bitchtress" which everyone knew was against 'the rules'—she had been incandescent with rage. Primrose had been unable to prevent her from getting at Mr. Paul's shirts.
Hookups with chippy mistresses who went home to their squalid little apartments in Queens with no expectations about holidays or a future life were all well and good. Still, one didn't upend one’s whole family, marriage, and life for such a nothing of a person.
And with that revelation, all of Paul Hunt Puckett's bespoke shirts and ties had gone sailing out of the penthouse windows high above Fifth Avenue across from the Met. Brightly colored, big, and tall, they had appeared like children's kites in the sky wafting down on the street only to be snatched at by bemused and curious tourists. Another fat cat affair was discovered. Yet another enraged New York society wife.
The shirts and ties had made the evening news for snarling traffic as cabbies and other drivers had to get out and remove them from their windshields. The Hunt Puckett's received a fine for littering with overpriced menswear.
And then there had been the text. A mélange of scorned-wife rage, mixed with extremely sound divorce counsel, and Maggie Smith-style poetics. The divorce advice was quite solid. None of the other women in the class wanted to lose their lives or their apartments and be reduced to shabby little capes in the burbs all because of some stupid affair gotten out of hand. It had gone around the text chain and frightened them all so. Like a contagion, now many were almost afraid to do yoga or pretend to not queef, next to Sydney. All because of this raging screed of private math made so public as if it might exorcise Sydney's fury at being not chosen by her own husband and his sudden announcement that he was headed off to Greece with this shrew of a girl. It could have happened to any one of them. Yelena still had the infamous text on her phone.
She pulled it up now as Sydney Hunt Puckett paced by the window, on her phone, clearly in deep conversation with her divorce gorgons before bloat class started.
WHAT'S THE GOING RATE FOR THAT?
By Sydney Hunt Puckett
Here is what you need to work out line-by-line in the divorce decree so that nothing is mistaken, left up for grabs, or in jeopardy of future dispute:
80 weeks of throwing up and hefting their secret songbodies around inside you.
Of lightning pains, electro-shocking your pelvic bones into cracking submission of readiness.
To have your spine needled with a footlong
Only to bear down for twelve hours at a time, each time
What's the going rate for that?
The latest PushNup banter says $30,000 an hour
Ripped, torn open, your body split asunder
Bleeding out on the table
Then to be cross-stitched back together, a ragdoll of a person
Diapered like your child
The memories are still terror-fresh during sex
Six to eight weeks later, as deemed appropriate by your male OB/GYN
1800 hours of breastfeeding per year
Nipples sore, cracked and puss-filled
Oh, and that career you fought so hard for... now off in the haze
But all your blood-and-bone-bound loyalty will not waver
It doesn't know how
What's the going rate for that?
For those years of lost wages and advancement?
And now you, the new little hag bitch, with no children to scar you
You, who took the WÜSTHOF knives, my mother, gave us for our wedding
You, who now spoon sugar from my precious toile sugar bowl every morning
And use the Christofle given to us by our children's godparents
You do not get to keep my grandfather's 1919 Woodstock typewriter
You do not get all the future holidays with my children
Every Christmas joy shared with them and their children
What's the going rate for that? Thief?
You NEVER get to call my children yours—you, who broke our home. Hag bitch
You might have been my friend, had you not been party to picking apart our lives, Vulture
Making my children so poor they had to live on Cup Noodles
While you flew off to Greece with their father
What's the going rate for that pain on those little faces?
Put that in the divorce papers and immortalize it forever in the public record
Then, curse them both with all the blood left in your exhaustipated body
And channel all your HADs into a beautiful boiling pot of words
Render all the FAT from your HADs, SADs, and MADs
Into a soap
And clean up your side of the street
And then maybe you will write something decent
Maybe even love again
But make sure to calculate the pain and suffering
By every hour, by every ounce of the HAD, SAD, and MAD
Remember to TAKE HIS FUTURE—as you are owed half his retirement
The summer homes, TAKE them ALL
If not, lock in your dates now
Don't forget all future royalties on his work, his books, his art, his deals, his patents
And always ask, what's the going rate for that?
Then triple it ...and INVOICE their asses
Don't be the small cost of their living well
Be THE DEBT they owe FOREVER.
The New Yorker had published it in their summer poetry issue and hailed it as an ode to first-wife rage worldwide. Ironically, now it was shortlisted for a Pulitzer.
It had made Yelena think. It had made all of them think. $30K an hour for childbirth? Should they have requested Push-nups or Post-nups far earlier in their marriages? Many of them had been requested to sign Pre-nups, but it hadn't occurred to them to do their own math of future loss. Had Yelena lulled herself into too much trust? Leo would never do something so awful to them as Paul Hunt Puckett, would he?
Still, Yelena couldn't even quantify everything she'd sacrificed for her marriage to Leo and a family with their daughter Amelie, Typo, their Yorkie, and Teodora, their nanny-slash-everything. Every time, Yelena looked at her 49-year-old husband, an editor of literary fiction, she still saw the same Leo. Twenty-six, goofy-grinned and badly in need of a haircut, standing on the Pont Neuf serenading her—as a tone-deaf Tony Bennett. She still saw the exact man/boy she married. The one she'd always loved. If he was driving her mad with his incessant grammatical corrections or obsessing over how the dishwasher was loaded, all she had to do was conjure that Parisian moment when they were young, and her angst evaporated like the steam from said dishwasher.
She couldn't have even conceived of all the hardships that would come their way. God were they dumb! Of course, you could have it all, the big job, the perfect family, the thriving romantic relationship, the apartment in the city, the retreat in the Berkshires, she'd convinced herself of this all these years. That was how her generation of girls had been raised—the myth every woman her age had been sold. And let's face it, it seemed like a lovely dream of balance and achievement and happiness. But that's just what it was, a myth. She was always failing at something.
Now, here she was, desperate for a hiding spot in yoga, in the wake of her epic public shaming. They had taken her computer, her bank wine cozy that she used to hold all her expensive Montblanc pens and pencils, even her family photos—and now a looming congressional probe? All 535 congressmen and senators lined up to give her a regulatory colonoscopy in front of the world.
She was still processing it. She'd done nothing wrong. Nothing illegal or even slightly out of bounds, yet she'd been made to feel like the most hardened criminal. What she also couldn't imagine was how to exorcize all the rage. New York Magazine had covered the Hunt Puckett shirt incident and Sydney's screed of bitterness in much the same way the Journal had covered Yelena's professional downfall. Now she too was ostracized by the women in class in the wake of her fury put on full display in that front-page photo of her being led out of the United Bancorp headquarters looking downcast and stricken. She could have hurled a thousand bankers' shirts out the window that day, but this would not have remedied her rage. Nor would a lengthy prize-winning poem.
Instead, Yelena's attempt to exorcise her fury had taken the form of driving their car out to the Berkshires to the woods at the edge of their property where she thought no one could see or hear her, locking all the car doors, and screaming at the top of her lungs until it was dark, and she no longer had any voice left. Their caretaker, Merwin, had trudged out to ask if she needed any assistance or elderberry lozenges. Alas, she had come prepared with a thermos of throat coat tea. Such was her nature.
There was no righting such betrayal—neither hers nor Sydney Hunt Puckett's. The poem Yelena would ultimately craft would be a carefully constructed statement, delivered before Congress in measured tones, so that they might realize there was, in fact, no there... there. No great fiduciary misdeed. No malignant misrepresentation. They had imagined it all. It was all made-up stories imposed on a midlife woman who'd been left momentarily "storyless" while creating hopeful brand campaigns around financial independence for other midlife women. In this way, she was no different than Suze Orman—albeit markedly less spray-tanned, and a bit more behind the scenes. This had always been her style.
Now, she looked around the empty room and decided to cast her lot in with Sydney Hunt Puckett. Better to terrify the rest of the riff-raff than side with them. Not wanting to crowd her, Yelena put her things down one mat over and gave Sydney a knowing nod. Fuck the homewrecking sluts. And fuck her simpering, career-wrecking patriarchal bosses, and the Journal. The ones who dismissed you as futzing about with the logo and then indicted you for the bank's ruin. Asshats, every last one.
In any case, she never liked to be too close to their instructor, Teagan, a wraith-like creature, a white witch of the highest order whose every movement held an air of austere effortlessness, as this might garner unwanted corrective attention in front of the rest of the class. Yelena had had enough corrective attention over the past month to last a lifetime.
She also didn't want to be too close to Peanut Mom—this was a mother with children several grades behind her daughter, Amelie. She had seen her often at school drop-offs and then in yoga found the woman always smelled disarmingly like peanut butter. A scent Yelena could not abide. Yelena had asked classmate Plum Croft Ames if she'd noticed the scent, and she'd replied with a guffaw, "Oh, Peanut Mom?" Plum always had a nickname for everyone. (Shelby, was Peanut Mom's real name, but Plum assured Yelena in her ultra-judgmental Connecticut clench accent that Shelby had smelled that way since Kindergarten, and Yelena wasn't imagining it.) Yelena wondered if it was something in Shelby's hormonal makeup, or maybe she just liked peanut butter for breakfast. Perhaps, it was residue from lunch making but who made lunches anymore? And weren't all the schools peanut-free these days due to allergies? Whatever the case, she found it distracting to her mindlessness practice, which she'd always called this type of exercise, and couldn't be near it today. Peanut Mom always staked her claim second row down front on the left. She basked in the glow of Teagan's attentions. Teagan never seemed to notice her legume fragrance.
Then, there was Sprinkler Dad; a kindhearted, single, Sad-Dad, whose real name was Martin. Martin's wife had left him with their daughter. Despite being quite successful as a composer and a cellist with the New York Philharmonic, he was in constant arrears for child support. Hence, his sexless sadness. So prodigious was Martin in the sweat department and covered head-to-toe in an ursine layer of hair, one never wanted to practice too closely to him without risking a nasty pelting of droplets when he hopped forward from downward facing dog to a forward bend. He always took a spot in the third row down right.
All the women had been distant from her since the Journal headline, "Yelena Petrovna de Chaussade Ousted in Scandal From Post as Chief Brand Officer of United Bancorp! A Power Player No More?" They averted their gaze with polite, quick smiles, looked past her, pretending not to see her, or down at their phones feigning an urgent text. She was little more than a ghost since the scandal broke and she'd lost her job. "Canceled," Amelie had gently explained to her mother, placing her small hand on hers. Yelena had been "Canceled." She might as well no longer exist except to pay attorneys and answer to bank regulators in Congress. Amelie, her wise, gray-eyed 11-year-old daughter had counseled her to don a cloak of invisibility when out, stay stealthy, and say only what the lawyers scripted for her until all of this had passed. Where did such a child come from?
Teagen entered flanked by her assistants who lit incense, spiritual music came over the surround sound to set the mood. All were glowing and enshrouded in white. Teagan wore her hair in a high loose bun while her assistants sported closely shorn monk-like pixie cuts. The rest of the acolytes poured in, each greeting the other with knowing smiles. This class would be brutal, it would wring every toxin from their pore and personality, they'd be less guilty upper East siders, privileged but using it to better the world somehow. What was that new movement Yelena's friends had been talking about at lunch? It was out of Oxford, Effective Altruism? Something about how you didn't haven't go off and volunteer in the hinterlands anymore, you could be more effective by generating wealth as a banker or a VC to fund on-the-ground programs. She'd liked the pragmatism of this. She had not fared so well in the jungle. On their last trip to Tanzania to visit their adopted baby rescue elephant, Caru, Yelena had gotten so ill with a Giardia-like bug that she'd been of no use to anyone, especially on the visit to the rescue sanctuary. But Amelie had been in heaven. And that was everything. Still, as a woman working in banking, she could rescue ten Carus... as long as she didn't have to visit them and drink the local water falsely bottled as though to look as if it had been purified.
Now, with everyone assembled on their mats, Teagan in position, the room took on a solemn, almost tribal ambiance. In the silence, with only Teagan's whispering incantations to guide them, there was a reverence as they all began to move in unison with this lithe, little fifty-something sprite. Yelena admired how there was a timelessness about her, a sense that she had always been that age and would always remain that age no matter how much time elapsed. She had somehow frozen herself in this magic middle and was all the more glorious for it.
Yelena tried, but she was so hungry all she could intuit when she gazed inside her deepest depths was the trout almondine at the Metropolitan Club and seeing Teddy again.
Class commenced. As the sea of women and Sprinkler Dad came into twisting half-moon pose, Teagan spoke, reminding them to be mission-aligned with their intention of Beating the Bloat of Perimenopause and Beyond (because excess gas was what was truly blocking your abundance chakra) amid this all-systems, decade-long, hormonal transformation that so many of us were journeying through. Her voice took on an almost gospel, commanding tone:
"Less projection, more presence. Close your eyes. Gaze inside the whole of yourself. Summon yourself to the deepest depths of your interior and intuit how your body feels..."
Yelena tried, but she was so hungry all she could intuit when she gazed inside her deepest depths was the trout almondine at the Metropolitan Club and seeing Teddy again. They had both been let go the same day from the bank three months ago, although for different reasons. Yet, with his being so tall and charismatic, and not under any government scrutiny, he seemed to have already landed at an interesting startup that was in stealth mode but had something to do with jet-set parties and product deals with all the big lifestyle doyennes. Presumably, their lunch was to talk about Yelena investing or playing some role on the board or team, which piqued her curiosity to no end. And here she was daydreaming about trout and meetings in the middle of her spendy midlife yoga class designed to free her from the cares of working—and all she could think of was how much she missed having a project. She must be deranged... delulu—as Amelie would say. Meanwhile, Teagan continued her incantations...
"...as it takes in oxygen and releases carbon dioxide cyclically without thought. Be with your breath and experience the sensation of your aliveness in the silence...into the silence," her whispered keening fell away, and down front amidst the silent, prayerful stillness, from seemingly nowhere Plum Croft Ames let out the biggest fart ever. It was a trumpet-like blast so long and loud you’d have thought they were all listening to an extended solo at the Newport Jazz Festival. Even Louis Armstrong would have done a spit-take.
Peanut Mom fell out of her pose, mouth agape in full horror, and turned to Plum Croft Ames who was still holding the perfect twist as if nothing had occurred. Yelena, having grown up with the offspring of oligarchs, knew perfectly well there was nothing blocked about Plum's abundance chakras. At a net worth of four billion-plus, there were no consequences for farting in yoga when you were a woman of her status. She could give a fuck.
Meanwhile, still stunned, the entire class stood frozen, anxious to see what Teagan would do. Would she exclaim "Huzzah! One chakra cleared!" Or would her sense of decorum and old soul etiquette be completely offended? Teagan paused, dead serious. And then a smirk played across her delicately lined face, and she burst out cackling. Next thing, the whole class was rolling on their mats in hysterics—even Plum Croft Ames.
Teagan turned to a cupboard behind her, pulled out a small packet, and announced to us, "This happens every time I teach this class and so I present to you," as she walked up to Plum, who was laughing so hard she was now in tears, "THIS special prize, my love," and bestowed the packet of magic powder.
Peanut Mom leaned over to take a gander and quickly said, "Ooh, I want that!"
And then suddenly, everyone was like, "Ooh, can I fart for a prize too?" and "Do you mind if I toot for loot?" and "Should we light a candle, or will we explode the room?" Which prompted, "Oh my God, you are such an eight-year-old boy!" and the terse retort, "No, I'm actually a chemist." Which resulted in an awestruck, "Really? That's so badass!" Followed by a chorus of "Could we all have one?" To which Teagan replied, yes, she had a case of samples and that they could all have one if they promised to try it before the next class.
Yelena studied the ingredients label on hers, "With a proprietary blend of ACV, kelp, bee wings, and rutabaga, FLOAT is 100% organic, and vegan, with no added sugars, gluten, soy, nuts, or theatrics.” Theatrics? “You’ll never feel the midlife bloat again."
But bee wings? How could it be truly vegan, Yelena wondered, if it contained formerly living creatures? And bees were so intelligent and necessary to the planet. Where did they source these bee wings? Were the bees already dead of natural causes? Or were poor, tortured, wingless bees left alive to suffer without purpose?
The whole endeavor felt so unsavory and vain. She cringed in disgust at her life. She wanted more than questionable anti-fart powders, bilious poetry, and being hurled to the curb by United Bancorp. And with that, she grabbed her Louis Vuitton Monogram Empreinte leather tote, made for the showers, and The Metropolitan on Sixtieth.
Teddy was funny, smart, and always had a plan. Teddy would know what to do.
Stay tuned for more soon.
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So fun! Looking forward to Teddy.
I WANT MORE!!!!!!!