Worthy Opponents(12)
When he came home at night, she was often out with friends. She had a circle of people she went to parties and the theater with. He went to business dinners without her. They led parallel lives, which intersected as seldom as they could arrange.
He missed the children now that they were away. It had come much faster than he expected. Maureen had warned him of that, and he hadn’t listened. He called Jennifer in California two or three times a week. Zack was harder to reach, floating around Europe, and half the time he forgot to buy a SIM card when he moved to a new location and his family couldn’t call him. He had come home for Christmas for two weeks and gone back to Europe with his two friends who were taking a gap year with him. They were good boys and didn’t get in trouble, but Mike wanted Zack to be in college and get an education. This wasn’t Mike’s dream for him, but for now, everything was on hold. The three friends were having a good time and Zack didn’t seem eager for it to be over, and who could blame him. Floating around Europe for a year sounded good to Mike too. It was something he had never done. His father would never have let him. In his youth, with his parents, you either went to school or you worked. You didn’t drift around Europe with a Eurail Pass and a backpack. Mike’s parents were shocked that he’d let Zack do it, but Maureen had been a strong influence, and fully approved of Zack having fun for a year before starting college. She didn’t want him becoming driven like his father. Jennifer was already so much like him, Maureen didn’t want their son to be too, sacrificing his home life and family for a career. She thought it was the worst lesson Mike had taught them. Her own father had been like that, and Mike’s parents were too. Mike’s father was nearly seventy and still building his empire because he enjoyed it. His mother was running her mammoth business at sixty-seven. Maureen had nothing in common with any of them, not even Mike. And her mother had been like her, never engaged in anything, and she had died relatively young, having never done anything except indulging herself and spending money, and her husband never objected.
Maureen had friends she enjoyed, some of whom Mike didn’t even know, and she didn’t introduce him. She had had an absentee husband for most of their marriage. It was just the way things had worked out. They let it happen. She didn’t ask herself the difficult questions, like if she still loved him. It didn’t make any difference now, and she didn’t want to know the answers. And by now, neither did he. It was best not to think about it.
Mike started his morning meeting at nine o’clock sharp every day, to bring his close associates up to speed on the projects they were working on, the new investments they were considering, and work in progress on various deals. He arrived at the office at eight A.M. himself. He liked a quiet hour to gather his thoughts and get organized. He was up at six every day and read The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal before he came to work. He read the London Financial Times on the weekends. With the children gone, he had more time on the weekends, no basketball games to attend for Zack, or parties to drive Jenny to or pick her up from at midnight. He had made more of an attempt to be attentive to them in their final high school years, but it was late in the day, and whatever he did was never enough to satisfy Maureen, and even if the kids didn’t complain, she always did. The kids were close to their father when they saw him and didn’t object to his busy work life and frequent trips. They were proud of what he’d accomplished. Maureen wasn’t.
Now he had more free time to play tennis and golf on the weekends, usually with business associates, or important investors he was courting. Almost everything he did related to business somehow. Maureen considered that a cardinal sin too.
They had a house in the country that they seldom used now, with the kids gone, and hadn’t for several years. The kids’ weekend activities kept them in town, and he didn’t want to get trapped in the country alone with Maureen. Their house in Connecticut stood empty all the time now, and he didn’t miss it. Maureen had moved there in the summer for a month or two, while he stayed in the city to work. They went to Maine for three weeks every summer with the kids, to sail and have barbecues. Jenny had taken a summer job in San Francisco for the coming summer, so the trip to Maine was uncertain this year, unless Zack came home and wanted to go. This was a whole new chapter in Mike and Maureen’s lives. They couldn’t count on their children to distract them and keep them together.
Mike’s investment team walked into his office promptly at nine. His office was sleek and modern, with chrome and glass, a long wooden desk, and contemporary art on the walls. It wasn’t cozy, but it was elegant and efficient, on the forty-seventh floor with a breathtaking view of New York.
Will Stinson was the senior member of the team. He was their specialist in bio and high-tech investments. Joe Weiss knew more about real estate development than anyone Mike had ever hired, and Renee Durant was a fantastic research source for what Mike called the “softer” brands, unusual investments that had done well for the firm. She had suggested the low-priced women’s fashion brand that had proven to be brilliantly lucrative, although Mike’s mother had turned her nose up when he asked her about it. But it had become one of the highest-volume brands in the world. Fashion at absurdly low prices. The business model had been imitated by many, but never as successfully as the company Mike helped grow to billion-dollar proportions, to the envy of investors who had paid no attention to that market before. Mike had ridden in on the crest of the wave and sold the company three years later for a fortune.