Down the Rabbit Hole

The tale of my divorce is long and filled with twists and turns. No more than many, but no fewer, either. I’ve long since moved past the anger and bitterness. In fact, most of it feels like a movie I’ve seen or a story I know really well rather than something that happened to me.

Still, I am working on a memoir and those years take up a big chunk of my life. And this episode is on my mind today for some reason.

The Wasband and I took part in creating a corporation that grew from a good idea to a $200 million dollar, publicly traded corporation in seven years. Seven years is a short time for such growth, but a very, very long time to put every available ounce of energy into a business venture.

He was the CEO. I wrote the sales and marketing materials as well as the investor and public relations. I had no official title and was paid no salary. Publicly, his position was that he didn’t want anyone to think he was taking advantage of the company by paying his wife. Privately, he admitted that he didn’t want anyone to know how much of his job I actually did.

My awareness of his relationship with his secretary developed almost concurrently with the merger of our corporation with another, larger corporation. This was the end of the rainbow, the goal toward which we had been working. But by the time we arrived, it was clear there was no pot of gold waiting. Not for me, anyway.

When The Wasband returned from the press conferences in New York announcing the merger, he didn’t celebrate with me. No, it was Joey, his younger, thinner, blond secretary who drank champagne from her slipper and basked in the glow of “his” accomplishments. It was the proverbial line drawn in the sand, the first shot in the long, pathetic battle that commenced.

A few weeks later, I had a most unusual visit from a man I knew slightly, a man with whom The Wasband coached our son’s baseball team.

This man, we’ll call him Coach, was a stockbroker. When he came to the door that night, he looked like a beaten man—wild eyes surrounded by dark circles deep enough for nocturnal animals to nest in. After a terse greeting and a minimal exchange of pleasantries, Coach told me he’d been accused of trading with other people’s money, a very serious transgression that carries prison sentences measured in years. Decades, even.

I can still see Coach, hovering on the edge of my sofa and his sanity, wearing the boys’ team T-shirt, his coaching shorts, and an air of total desperation. His voice was so tight, so filled with panic, that I wondered how he could force it out of his throat.

Coach’s terse monologue moved from explanation to accusation to threats. His main point was that he’d gone to The Wasband for money, hoping to close the SEC investigation by returning the money he'd embezzled. The Wasband, evidently, had told him he had no money to give him because our assets were frozen until the divorce was final.

Coach threatened to accuse The Wasband of being a co-conspirator to insider trading if I didn’t somehow release money to him. He had, he claimed, lost the money trading in the company's stock and believed we owed it to him to help him out of this jam.

Feeling like I’d fallen down the proverbial rabbit hole, I grasped the edge of the grand piano. As Coach talked, I glanced at my reflection in its glossy black surface from time to time, just to make sure I still existed in the real world.

When Coach wound down, I told him his problems had absolutely nothing to do with me, and that I was not going to get involved in any way.

For a long moment, Coach appeared to be considering violence. He raised his fists toward me, shaking visibly, then let them fall helplessly to his sides. He paced the length of the room a couple times, muttering to himself, then whirled back toward me to repeat his threats about implicating The Wasband.

Just then, my children and a few neighborhood kids trooped noisily through the front door, which broke the standoff. Deflated, Coach allowed me to usher him out the door and, I hoped, out of our lives.

No such luck.

I’ll be back tomorrow with Part II of this story, "Making Muffins for the FBI."