Robert Tine - The Astronaut's Wife

Beneath these wealthy old lions were the men in their fifties and sixties, men who still had careers as CEOs and CFOs or in brokerage firms and banks. These men almost all had one thing in common—they had started out in their banks or brokerages back in the late fifties and early sixties, grateful to have a job with a nice firm and hoping to have something approaching a lengthy and comfortable career. They married their high school, college, or hometown sweethearts and bought little houses in the suburbs on Long Island, in Westchester, and in New Jersey. They never missed the 5: 23 train home because back in those simpler days there was nothing to be gained working late, tracking something as bizarre as a foreign stock market or the track record of a company manufacturing something in another country-like Japanese cars, for example.

The idea was to take the train into work in the morning, do your job, have a couple of drinks at lunch, go back to work, leave your desk at five on the dot to make your train back to Islip or Scarsdale or Ridgewood and hearth and home. The closest they got to a New York experience was having a Manhattan at lunch. One thing these guys in their short-sleeve shirts and crew cuts and Brook Brothers suits had never figured on happening was getting rich. They hoped they would make it up’ to twenty-five or thirty thousand bucks by the time they were in their forties, but real money—that was an impossibility. Bankers and brokers didn’t get rich. They made other people rich.

Then everything changed. The market exploded. Investment banking started to pay well and the wage slaves started to get rich. Moderately rich at first—they bought nice jewelry for their wives, their kids didn’t have to apply for financial aid when they went to college. And Dad got rid of his Dodge and bought himself a boat or maybe a sports car—an MG, perhaps or maybe a Thunderbird or a Corvette. No one knew it at the time but those shiny new sports cars were the beginning of the end, the thin edge of the wedge.

Then everything changed again. These guys were too old for the summer of love or the Vietnam war, but they felt that something fresh was in the air— and that was the bull market of the sixties that erupted like a skyrocket and yanked the wage earners into higher levels of wealth, heights they had never expected to attain.

And that’s when everything really changed. Miraculously, stock brokering and investment banking came to be considered sexy occupations and suddenly, the wage earners were no kidding, honest-to-God rich. They felt like they could do anything— and they did anything they chose. The first wife, the college sweetheart, the hometown girl was the first thing to go. Resentful kids suddenly had stepmothers who were younger than they were and bitter first wives took healthy alimony payments and opened gift shops that failed after a year or two.

The men were now in their fifties and sixties and had beautiful young wives in their twenties. The first wives got the house in Scarsdale, because their divorced husbands were now living in Manhattan, because that was the only place that the new, trophy wife would consider living. And it had to be on Central Park West, or the Upper East Side, and definitely west of Third. The apartments were huge by New York standards, but rarely the size of their old garage out in suburbia. And they had to have a playroom and a room for the nanny, because these rich men in their sixties now had a second set of children in diapers—children these men would not live long enough to see drive a car.

But right now, they were the most powerful men on Wall Street, which meant that they were some of the most powerful people on the face of the earth.

Beneath them were the wannabes. The class of wage earners was gone forever, replaced by the overpaid yuppies. The guys (and now gals) who, on their first day of work, put their boss in their sights and vowed (silently) to have his job in a year (and their boss’s boss’s job the year after that). They planned on getting rich, they planned on attaining Old Lion wealth, but they were going to be younger when they did it. And there wasn’t going to be a little old society lady in black on their arm, either. They had no plan to buy a Corvette. They were headed straight for the Ferrari dealer.

Jillian looked around at the crowd and saw that it was mostly made up of the young wannabes. They were the guys who didn’t think the hors d’oevres were too pretty to eat—they wolfed them down—not caring that they were spilling cocktail sauce on their thirty-five-hundred-dollar suits. When someone spotted that the bartenders were pouring eighteen-year-old scotch that retailed for a hundred and twenty-five a bottle, consumption increased dramatically…

Spencer held a glass of it himself as he talked to three yuppie sharks who were hanging on his every word. They may have been predators who would eat you alive in the arbitrage market, but they were still little boys at heart and they were getting to talk to, to hang out with, a genuine, honest-to-God spaceman.

“You’re sitting on top of what amounts to a fifteen-story building packed with high explosives…”

“Cool,” said one of the sharks, slugging back about twenty-five dollars’ worth of single malt.

“Then what?” asked another of them.

Spencer laughed. “Well, that was the part that none of us ever could figure out… After they strap you in, anyone with any sense backs off the gantry by about three miles.”

“Then what?” the third one asked. “What happens then? What does it feel like?”

“You feel your first kick after the main engines spark,” said Spencer. “But then the solid rocker boosters come on and that’s when you know you are about to go someplace very fast.”

“Zoom, zoom, zoom, huh?” said one of the Wannabes, crunching an ice cube between his very white teeth.

Spencer nodded and smiled slightly. “That’s about it… zoom, zoom, zoom.”

“Man,” said one of them, “I’d give up my 401k to go for a ride in a spaceship.”

“But you are,” Spencer replied simply. “You’re riding in one right now.”

“I am what, right now?” they guy asked, looking puzzled by Spencer’s enigmatic observation.

“You’re on a spaceship,” Spencer replied. “We all are. That’s what the earth is. A spaceship.”

“I mean a real spaceship,” the guy said. “None of that Whole Earth Catalogue stuff. I Want to ride in the shuttle. I want to feel those rockets kick in. Zoom out to outer space.”

Spencer shrugged. “Shuttle? Earth? What’s the difference? The Earth is a real spaceship. And believe me—we are in outer space right now.”

One of the yuppies looked around at the rich crowd, the vaulted ceilings of Fifty-five Wall Street and laughed. “You know, it’s not quite what I expected. Though I think I’ve spotted a couple of alien life forms here.”

Spencer smiled thinly. “Space is never what you expect it to be. Never.” One of the first wives who had not yet been dumped by her newly rich husband—and who looked like she expected the news at any minute—had buttonholed Jillian. She was a rather dried-up woman with a plummy accent and in an attempt to compete with a host of younger women she had dieted and exercised herself down to mere skin and bone. Jillian remembered something that she had once heard an old black Floridian woman say about someone else: “She’s as thin as six o’clock.” That sort of summed up this woman.

Jillian was wondering why she was even on this woman’s radar. What she did not know was that it was social death to stand alone at one of these functions. Jillian was just a port on her way to some place more socially acceptable.