The Startup Wife(74)
He pushes the plate of mochi toward me and we each take one. “You will always be a founder of this company. No one can take that away from you,” he says, as if I’m about to die and need to be reminded of my legacy.
“I’m not quitting, I’m just not going to be on the board.” As soon as the words come out of my mouth, I regret them. I’m about to tell Cyrus that, but he’s biting into his mochi and I can see from the set of his mouth that even though he begged me not to quit, he’s relieved now that it’s done. He relaxes, lets out a little sigh of pleasure as he swallows. I bite into mine. The creamy green-tea flavor floods my mouth. “Oh my God,” I say. “Why didn’t we always wait? It tastes so much better this way.”
* * *
I resign from the board. In my place, Cyrus appoints Yvonne Caplan, an ethics professor from Harvard. Apparently, she’s a rising star among philosophers. Once a month, I bore holes into the glass walls of the boardroom and see her sitting in my seat, a petite woman with cropped brown hair, her hands folded on her lap. Occasionally, she nods. I could reprogram the camera in that room to live-feed into my computer, but I don’t—I know they will hardly give her time to speak, that Craig is panting down the line, that Cyrus is telling everyone how utterly perfect everything is because two hundred and fifty thousand people get married using WAI rituals every week, and now, because of Marco, we can do even more to shepherd humans through their short time on the planet, providing them with community, spirituality, a place to turn when life begins to feel devoid of meaning, and who is little Yvonne Caplan to dispute any of that?
In many ways, things are exactly as they always were. Ren and I design things and we code things and we run our team like Santa’s Workshop and the sun swathes the Manhattan skyscrapers in gold dust. In the meantime, I am no Sheryl Sandberg, but people are starting to notice me. “THE BRAINS BEHIND WAI” is an article that does the rounds. Then I get an invitation to headline the Girls Who Boss Festival, and a few weeks after that, I walk past a woman wearing a T-shirt with my face printed on it. MY FACE. Oh, it’s grainy and screen-printed and also antiqued, but it’s me. And the caption says, WAISER. I am super-happy about this, even though when I tell Jules and Gaby, I pretend like it’s no big deal.
I haven’t forgiven Jules for voting against me at the board meeting, but I should’ve known better than to hope he might break ranks with Cyrus. Cyrus has always been, and will always be, first for Jules. Gaby must know too, and they must have reached some kind of agreement about it. I haven’t decided yet whether it’s that Cyrus let me down or that I just staked too much on Marco’s mania. I’m not angry, or at least I don’t experience it as anger. I’m caught somewhere in between, maybe not yet ready to decide whether I’ve been betrayed or merely sidelined. I do know one thing: whatever anyone else did to me, I was the one who let it all come to this, I was the one who put myself on the wrong side of that glass wall. I’m not sure if I can ever forgive myself for that.
* * *
Cyrus and I are on a date. Someone—a tech guru—is being given an award. I can’t remember exactly who it is, but Cyrus has to show up to a fancy dinner, and a few months earlier when we were playing Should We Go to This? I agreed to go too. I am wearing a dress. I am wearing very tall shoes. And makeup. I feel shiny and beautiful.
Cyrus is wearing a tux. He is magnificent.
We are seated at the front of the room at a large round table, and as is often the way with these things, they thought it would be clever to split Cyrus and me up, so I’m sitting between two white men in tuxes, one old, the other even older, and Cyrus is sandwiched between two women, one showing cleavage and one in a demure off-the-shoulder dress. All evening, through caviar and blini and rillettes and lamb chops and tarte au citron, Cyrus and I text each other.
How’s it going?
Yeah good.
How are your neighbors?
Can I tell them how much I hate capitalism?
No, I don’t think so.
Are you crushing on the woman beside you?
Who, Pamela? No.
Cyrus knows everyone. Pamela runs a seed fund, and Celeste, on his other side, is the ex-wife of Dennis, who runs an online gaming startup. People get out of their seats and come up to Cyrus and say things they think are funny, like, “Any chance you can give me a heads-up when the apocalypse is going to hit?”
I mostly don’t hate drinking champagne and going to dinners where the interior decor consists of portraits of people who probably murdered my ancestors. The reason I don’t hate it is because Cyrus and I have so much fun ridiculing everyone that it’s worth it just for the anthropology, and for the reminder that we share the same view of the world.
How many of these men are on their second wives? I text Cyrus.
At our table, he replies, I’d say about 70 percent.
The post-IPO wife is the butt of many of our jokes.
We’d been tetchy when that first lawyer brought it up (Your odds aren’t good!), but now that Cyrus knows more of these people, we realize Barry wasn’t singling us out, because divorce after great success is actually a trend. Not a dirty little secret but like a totally sanctioned and okay thing that men do once they hit the big time.
This is only one of the many qualities we dislike about all the other people who do what we do. Other things we don’t like: the sanctimonious way they talk about how much of their money they give away. Their insistence that they are on the right side of politics, even if they support 45, because what they are doing—upending the order of things—is, by its very nature, progressive. Change is everything. If you transform the way people order their pizza or the way they pay their bills or the way they lose weight, you must be doing some good in the world. For that, you deserve money, and lower taxes, and even a wife with a better ass.