James Grippando: Money to Burn

“Where is it?” asked another.

“It’s some little town…” Shannon cringed, as if it pained her not to have every juicy detail at her command. “Oh, hell, I know this. It’s-shit, how’s a left-coast girl supposed to know? It’s like…Gonorrheaville. But not Gonorrheaville.”

“Gonorrheaville?” said Ivy, coughing on her rum runner.

“You know what I’m trying to say,” said Shannon. “It’s that town in Connecticut with the same name as the disease.”

“You mean Lyme?” said Ivy.

“Yes, that’s it!”

The other women laughed, and Shannon was clearly embarrassed that she’d drawn a blank on Lyme. Ivy hated to be mean, even if Shannon did deserve it, but she was feeling the effects of her rum runner and couldn’t help singing to the tune of the old Jimmy Buffett song: “Wastin’ away again in Gonorrheaville.”

“Very funny,” said Shannon.

“Searching for my lost blood test results.”

The laughter continued, but Shannon was getting pissed.

“Some people say that there’s a pool boy to blame.”

“Okay, enough. Who died and made you sorority president?”

Shannon was glaring. The other women fell silent, unable to believe what they’d just heard. The tropical breeze blowing across the deck suddenly felt ice cold.

Ivy could have stood her ground-hell, she could have shattered Shannon’s jaw with a 540-hook kick worthy of Bruce Lee-but the mean girl wasn’t worth the effort.

“No one died,” said Ivy, leaving her final thought unsaid:

Yet.

She turned and walked away, absolutely certain that Shannon and her troop of character assassins would spend the rest of the cocktail hour gossiping about the bitch Michael Cantella had brought along this year.

Ivy went to the portside rail and gazed toward the magenta-orange afterglow on the horizon. With her back to the gossip, and as she soaked in the last vestiges of a spectacular Caribbean sunset, it was hard to argue that this wasn’t paradise. The three-hundred-foot private yacht-one of three “boats” owned by Saxton Silvers’ CEO-was totally pimped out with a wave pool, a seventy-five-foot dining table custom made by Viscount Linley, and a Sikorsky S-76B helicopter with a landing pad that doubled as a basketball court. Ivy had yet to see all the toys, but the vessel was supposedly equipped with a retractable beach resort, which slid out over the sea from just below the starboard side deck, complete with sand, palm trees, and deck chairs. A crew of fifty served the passengers’ every need. Their first stop would be the Exumas, followed by Harbor Island, and then an undisclosed destination that catered to British royalty, Grammy-winning rappers, and every multimillionaire in between. Wall Street certainly knew how to reward its winners. Despite the pampering, however, the thought of so much structure to her week with Michael left Ivy wanting. Five days in the islands could have been perfect-without the Saxton Silvers crowd.

Her frozen rum runner was melting in the warm night air and losing its kick. Ivy poured the remaining half overboard, watching the wind catch the potent slush and turn it into cherry-red vapor before it could fall into the sea. Then she smiled to herself, a brilliant idea coming to mind. She turned quickly, her flats squeaking on the polished teak stairway as she climbed up to the promenade deck, that tune still stuck in her head.

Wastin’ away again in…

She found Michael with six other guys, each of them exhibiting the kind of athletic good looks that were almost a cliché at Saxton Silvers. The entire investment banking world was in many ways a cliché: elite firm No. 1 dominated by humorless grinds, No. 2 by straitlaced rich kids, No. 3 by backslapping Irishmen, and so on. Even before meeting Michael, Ivy had regarded Saxton Silvers as the Duke lacrosse team of Wall Street frat houses. She loved Michael anyway, this grandson of a blue-collar Italian immigrant made good-even if he was plainly playing the game tonight, pretending to care as one of the boys waxed on about an exceedingly rare Super Tuscan that he’d scored in Hong Kong last week.

“Michael?” she said.

The men kept talking, but a woman in a nearby cluster of superstars threw her a not-so-subtle look, as if to say, Please go back to your place downstairs with the other spouses. Amazing, thought Ivy, the way women were always tougher on other women. Michael excused himself, and Ivy led him away.

“Hey, having fun yet?” he asked.

She gave him a half smile, trying to be a sport. “Honestly?”

“This is the only event like this,” said Michael. “Some genius in New York thought the spouses might enjoy one cocktail party where they could get to know each other without us at your hip.”

“It’s not that.”

“What’s wrong?”

She turned her head slowly, drawing Michael’s gaze toward the lower deck. He caught on quickly.

“Ahh,” said Michael. “I see you met Shannon and her gosse.”

“Gosse?” said Ivy.

“Gossip posse.”

“Good one. That’s exactly what those women are.”

Ivy stepped closer, arms at her side as she laced her fingers with his. Their bodies weren’t quite touching, but she flashed an expression that would have tempted any man with an ounce of imagination.

“Can we get out of here?” she said.

“You mean go back to our cabin?”

She shook her head. “I mean ditch this cruise and lose these losers.”

“But…we just got here.”

She glanced across the glistening sea, toward the moon rising over the island’s silhouette in the distance. “This is such a beautiful place. Let’s hire a captain and charter our own sailboat. Just you and me.”

“Are you serious?”

“Does a Shannon Bear shit on her friends?”

Michael smiled. “You really want out of here?”

She draped her arms atop his shoulders and looked into his eyes. “I’m very possessive of my playthings.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ve had enough of these blowhards myself. We’re in port tomorrow morning. Consider it done.”

She rose up on her toes, hugged him around the neck, and whispered, “This is one move you will never regret, Michael Cantella. I promise.”

I COULDN’T WAIT TO GET OFF THE SAXTON SILVERS PARTY BOAT THE next morning, and by noon the sails were full on our private charter. It was a fifty-foot Jeanneau International, which was probably more boat than we needed. But Ivy kept her promise-“This is one move you will never regret, Michael Cantella”-and we spent each of the first three nights breaking in a different stateroom. “A promise is a promise,” she told me, and by now I knew everything about her was as advertised. She hadn’t become the love of my life by pumping me full of candy-coated popcorn and then skunking me on the prize.

The past three months had been picture perfect. My relationship with Ploutus Investments had been well established by the time Ivy started working there, and she was just a month into her new job when I invited her to lunch. She turned me down-repeatedly. Ivy was serious about her career, and dating a guy like me could have created a conflict of interest. Or maybe she thought I was just another Wall Street jerk. Whatever the reason, we worked it out on the condition that I say nothing to her boss, agreeing to keep our first date “just between us.” By the second date, sparks were flying. Ten weeks later, we were sailing the Bahamas together.

“Michael, can you help with the anchor?”

“Got it,” I said.

This was our fourth day away from Saxton Silvers and the MS Excess. Just Ivy, me, and a Bahamian captain named Rumsey who lived in a T-shirt that read RELAX: IT’S MON-DAY, MON. Ivy had raced J/24s in college and was a skilled sailor in her own right. Our captain knew the waters and was also a fairly talented chef. I did all the important stuff, like phoning ahead to the marinas to restock the liquor cabinet-and helping with the anchor.