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hadn’t grown up wanting to live here, and fifteen years ago would have laughed in the face of anyone who told me that I would spend my thirty-fifth birthday looking down at Fifth Avenue and Central Park from the forty-second floor of a five-star hotel. Why on earth Mallory and I needed a two-bedroom suite for twenty minutes of birthday sex and a few hours of sleep wasn’t entirely clear, but that was the thing about having money and living in Manhattan. Cummerbunds were stupid, but I owned at least a dozen of them. Champagne gave me a headache, but some well-trained staffer had placed a glass in my hand as I entered the room, the hotel put it on my bill, and I said thank you. I suppose I also should have thanked the guy who had guaranteed me a clear view of my wet, naked wife by designing a shower stall with warm water running between double panes of glass to prevent fogging. I couldn’t explain this life—not to myself, and definitely not to Papa, who of course had been the first to call earlier in the day and wish me happy birthday. The call had ended the way our phone conversations always ended. “Tell your beautiful wife hello for me,” he said. “And love each other. That’s the main thing.” Coming from anyone else, it would have sounded like Pollyanna. But Papa was the real deal. To him, Wall Street was one big “Fonzie scheme,” no matter how many times I told him that Ponzi had nothing to do with Happy Days and Arthur Fonzarelli. Anyway, I took his meaning, and on some level he was right. But tonight I let myself feel the accomplishment of conquering the most amazing city the world had ever known, and like the song goes, “If I can make it there…”
    “I can’t wait for your fortieth,” said Mallory as she came up from behind and put her arms around me.
    Papa’s favorite crooner was still on my brain, and it suddenly occurred to me that Sinatra’s most depressing song—the one about getting old—skips straight from “when I was thirty-five” to “the autumn of the years.”
    “Let’s not think about forty,” I said, still staring out the window.
    Mallory rose up on her tiptoes and bit my earlobe. She was still dressed in her evening gown, still wearing her makeup.
    “Turn down the bed,” she said. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
    We mimicked one of those black-and-white-movie moments where the couple slowly slides apart until their fingertips finally separate as the woman heads off to the dressing room to “slip into something more comfortable.” Mallory was fun that way. Last week, she’d sent me a sexy video by e-mail as an “early birthday present.” It was a parody of Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy birthday, Mr. President” to JFK. (Mallory was certain that I would someday replace my mentor as president of Saxton Silvers.) It was hilarious, but it was also racy enough to warrant an e-mail subject line that read “Just Between Us.” That unique ability to make me laugh and turn me on—sometimes at the same time—was one of the reasons I finally was able to let go of Ivy and remarry.
    Ivy.
    I was trying not to think of her tonight—it wasn’t fair to Mallory—but Ivy was inevitably a part of my reflective mood. She just filled a different place in my heart, though I could never admit this to Mallory. Mallory and I had been good friends in high school but had never dated—and the entire student body wondered, Why not? She was the salutatorian of our senior class and went on to Juilliard to study dance. I went to the University of Florida, the best school that in-state tuition could buy. We lost touch until Mallory read about Ivy’s disappearance in the Times . She was divorced and living in an efficiency apartment in the Village, an intermediate-level instructor at a modern dance studio, when she called me to lend the support of an old friend. That was exactly how it remained for almost two years until suddenly we asked each other the same question: Why not? We