The Challenge(6)
Beth discounted what he’d said as some kind of midlife crisis, or burnout, which she thought was incredibly irresponsible and adolescent of him at forty-three years of age with a great job at a prestigious investment firm on Wall Street. He was highly paid and suddenly no longer cared. Money and success were the gods that he and Beth had worshipped. Now he wanted to walk out on all of it, and he expected Beth to do the same. He got six of his clients to commit their investment portfolios to him, and he was proposing to manage their money for them long-distance, from the wilds of Montana. He told Beth he couldn’t live in New York anymore. The stress would kill him. He wanted a healthier, more wholesome life, which Beth considered a betrayal of everything they had built together. He thought all of it was meaningless, and they agreed to separate so he could pursue his new life.
She was furious with him. He had a great job, a wife, and a thirteen-year-old daughter, and he was giving it all up to live in Fishtail, Montana.
Juliet was heartbroken when they told her. They separated and he left his job, lined up his clients, and moved to Fishtail four months later. When Beth realized he was serious, she filed for divorce.
There had been no sign of what she called his “insanity” before. They’d had their squabbles like other couples, and minor disagreements, but there had been no hint that he would give up a career and a marriage and move to a town of four hundred people in Montana. The news had broadsided Beth, Juliet, and all of their close friends. There were other couples who appeared to have more severe problems, and no one would have been surprised by their divorces. In Tom and Beth’s case, everyone was stunned. Overnight, they had nothing in common, except their daughter. He said he couldn’t live in New York anymore, not even for Juliet. Tom simply said they had “run out of gas.” He had felt pushed to the breaking point doing business in New York, the constant stress and pressure, the viciousness, the competition, never having time to smell the roses (which he was allergic to anyway, Beth pointed out), and the quality of life or lack of it, living in the city, pursuing goals that had become meaningless to him. He said it was a phony life that he no longer believed in. He didn’t want to teach their daughter a value system in which the only thing that mattered was money and the pursuit of it, no matter what it cost the soul. He said that he felt as though he had wasted the first half of his life, and he didn’t want to waste the rest of it. He wanted to live in natural surroundings, hike and fish and ride in his spare time, and not have to ride the subway to work every day. It was an argument Beth couldn’t win. Their marriage had been shaky for the past few years, as they seemed to be going their separate ways and wanting different things more and more. Their relationship collapsed completely with the weight of the changes he wanted to make, and ultimately did make. He gave up everything Beth cared about in their marriage, all the superficial signs of status they had worked so hard for. Beth had no intention of giving up everything just because he had gone crazy. Tom had completely changed. Living in Montana was out of the question for her.
She had been working for a magazine when they’d met seventeen years before. She had felt much the same way about the magazine that he did about Wall Street now. She felt stifled so she had left to become a freelance writer, and had done very well in the years since. She contributed to their life and he envied the freedom she had working for herself. She no longer had to deal with office politics, which she had hated, and could work at her own pace. She worked harder as a freelancer than she had in her job, working for someone else. She thrived on the overachieving atmosphere of New York. He accused her of being a workaholic, which she conceded might be true. She loved all the cultural and status social events easily available in New York. Their parents had been high achievers too, and she and Tom had gone to the best schools. They had come from similar backgrounds, with the same values. She couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. They had become strangers to each other. Beth wanted Juliet to go to the best private schools, as they had, then eventually to an Ivy League college and succeed at a career she loved, not live in the sticks in a hick town.
“Money, money, money, that’s all you think about,” Tom had accused her. She was a money machine. He didn’t want to be one anymore.
“I want to provide the best for our daughter, and it takes money to do that,” Beth insisted. “You went to Harvard, why shouldn’t she one day?” Beth’s father had run an ad agency and her mother was a successful publisher. Tom’s father was the president of an investment banking firm. Success was important to Beth and Tom and always had been. Now he was opting to step out of the race. She was furious with him. “You want to waste everything we’ve accomplished and sit on a mountaintop in Montana? And what about Juliet? Where would she go to school?” That led to a ferocious argument about public schools, the advantages of rural living, the importance of nature, and the admission that he was sick and tired of competing with her and everyone else in Manhattan. He couldn’t see the point of it anymore. He said he needed to breathe and wanted a “real” life, like a “normal person.”
“For heaven’s sake, Tom, grow up. You’re not a Boy Scout anymore. You’re forty-three years old with a great career, a wife, and a child. You can’t just throw it all away and go hide in a cave somewhere.”
“I don’t want to hide. I want to breathe and live for a change. Living in New York isn’t real and it costs a fortune. We could live in Montana for a fraction of what we spend here.” He had a point, but Beth didn’t want to hear it. She was profoundly committed to life in New York, and everything it represented. “I’m tired of trying to impress people I don’t give a damn about.” He had some valid points, all of which Beth refused to listen to.