The End of Normal Read online

  Audrey’s party at a kids’ gym the next day was equally unsettling on the grandparent front. Ruth and Bernie not only never missed a family get-together, they usually arrived early. And if they were coming in from Palm Beach or Europe, it could be hours early, and by private jet, no less, so it wasn’t as if they worried about traffic. They were just that eager to see their grandchildren. I had to remind myself that overbearing was better than uninterested, and even if they popped in on us a couple of hours early, I was grateful that my kids would grow up knowing they were absolutely beloved by their grandparents on both sides of the family. I could live with Ruth and Bernie’s eccentricities.

  But as Audrey’s birthday party got under way that Saturday, Ruth and Bernie were nowhere to be seen. When they finally arrived twenty minutes late, Ruth confided that Bernie had collapsed on the sidewalk outside a SoHo store where they’d gone to return some clothing. He was fine, they both insisted, but I could tell that Ruth, at least, was rattled.

  My parents and Bernie sat down with the rest of the adults to watch the kids enjoy themselves, but Ruth hurtled herself into the middle of the toddler mayhem. It wasn’t unusual for her to be the life of the party, but seeking that spotlight at a kiddie playdate was extreme even by Ruth’s standards. The rest of us watched in dismay as she jumped into the big pit full of foam balls and began cavorting with the two-year-olds. There was something more frantic than funny about it. My mother, known to her friends as Pinks, occasionally socialized with the Madoffs. After the party, she told me she’d sensed an undercurrent of desperation in Ruth, as if she were trying to prove what a good grandmother she was, when nobody doubted it in the first place. In hindsight, I have to wonder whether my mom’s instincts were right: Ruth definitely wanted to leave an impression that day.

  Part of me wondered why the Madoffs weren’t showing the same wild enthusiasm for the grandson I was carrying that fall; reaction to the imminent arrival of Joe-or-Nicholas so far had been subdued, even when Mark proudly told his parents that his son would carry the middle name of Bernie’s father, Ralph. We thought they would be touched, but Ruth just scoffed and Bernie said nothing.

  The baby’s nursery was still unfinished, and my good friend Susan, a brilliant interior designer, was planning on meeting me at our apartment with a contractor after I dropped Mark off at work that Wednesday morning. We wanted to sketch out where the baby furniture would go and design custom shelving that would be able to carry a little boy through childhood, from teddy bears to football trophies. Our meeting had barely gotten under way when my phone vibrated. Mark was calling. I let it go to voice mail; he would call back if it was important. It immediately vibrated again. When I picked it up, Mark sounded agitated.

  “Where are you?” He was out of breath, barely able to get the words out. I was instantly scared.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Just tell me where you are right now.”

  “I’m at home. I’m having that meeting about the baby’s room.” Mark sounded angry, and I could tell now that he was hyperventilating. I walked away from the baby’s room, into the office off of our living room, and closed the door behind me. “Are you all right? Please tell me you’re all right!” Mark didn’t answer. I heard him catching his breath again.

  “You need to get everyone out of the house immediately. I’m coming home.”

  Now the panic was starting to burn at the back of my throat. What was going on? “Just please tell me you’re all right,” I begged. “Please, I need to know!”

  “I’m fine. I just need you to get everyone out of the house.”

  “How long is it going to take you to get home?”

  “I’ll be home in twenty minutes.”

  “Mark, I can’t wait twenty minutes! You need to tell me what’s going on!”

  His next words came out in a rush. “It’s my father. My father has done something very bad, and is probably going to jail for the rest of his life.”

  We hung up, and I felt relief flood through me. I had been so scared that something had happened to Mark that I didn’t even wonder what Bernie had done. As long as Mark was okay, nothing else mattered in that moment. Now I had to get the others out of the house. I tried to compose myself, but Susan took one look at my face and saw how upset I was.

  “Stephanie, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  The lie came to me quickly, without thought.

  “I’m really sorry, guys,” I said. “I have to go. That was just my ob-gyn. I got bad results on a glucose test and he needs to repeat it because I might have gestational diabetes.” Mere mention of the ob-gyn had the contractor packing up and bustling out the door, but Susan stayed put. I felt instantly guilty about the worried expression on her face.

  “Let me drive you up there,” she offered.

  “No, no, no,” I insisted. “It’s okay, I’ll just jump in a cab.”

  She left, reluctantly, and I waited anxiously for the sound of the elevator coming back up, silently urging Mark to hurry home. When he finally walked through the door, it was hard to believe he was the same man who had been breezily discussing baby names and laughing over stupid love songs a couple of hours earlier. His face was ashen, his body almost electric with anger. I followed him into our bedroom and shut the door. We sat on the bed, and he put his head in his hands.

  “I’ve spoken to Marty already, but I wanted to come home and tell you in person,” he began. My stepfather was retired at that point, but had been a partner at one of the city’s premier law firms. “I only have a few minutes, then I have to go meet with attorneys and the authorities,” Mark went on. “My father did something bad—what he did is probably going to crash the stock market.”

  These staccato pieces of information weren’t fitting together. I made him stop and go back over the morning from the beginning.

  Bernie had called his sons into his office and told them to prepare their proposals for employee bonuses; he was going to distribute them early this year. Mark and Andy had immediately been suspicious; that never happened, and it made no sense. Bonuses were based on year-end performances. Traditionally, Wall Street bonuses are doled out in January or February, and Madoff Securities had always paid theirs out on the later side. Mark and Andy objected to the unexpected switch and wanted to know why Bernie was changing the timing now. Bernie remained adamant, but offered no real explanation. He looked haggard. Mark left the meeting thinking his worst hunch was proving true: His father was terminally ill. The two brothers had retreated, then regrouped and decided to confront their father again. They had marched back into Bernie’s office. Mark took the lead.

  “What the fuck is going on?” he demanded.

  “I can’t tell you here,” Bernie replied. “We need to leave. Let’s go to my apartment.” The penthouse where Ruth and Bernie lived, at East 64th Street just off Lexington Avenue, was a few blocks away. On the way out, they made excuses to the secretaries about going gift shopping so the sight of all three Madoffs suddenly leaving together in the middle of the morning wouldn’t set the employee rumor mill churning.

  At the apartment, Mark and Andy found their mother sitting on the living room couch, her face completely devoid of expression, looking as if she were in an open-eyed coma. She sat there wordlessly. Bernie spoke.

  “It’s all one big lie,” he told his sons. His elite investment advisory business, with its private fund that Bernie personally managed and billionaires begged to join, was nothing but an enormous, international Ponzi scheme. There were no investments, no brilliant returns, just somewhere around $50 billion in debts that he couldn’t pay. Bernie betrayed no emotion or remorse, calmly delivering his bombshell with the cool demeanor of an anchorman reading a wire report on the evening news. When he was done, he began to cry. He said he would be distributing approximately $140 million in “bonuses” to family and friends, then consulting hi
s attorney about turning himself in a week later. He would probably go to jail, he added pointlessly. Ruth, a woman who never had nothing to say, remained silent and zombielike. The two elder Madoffs watched blankly as their sons tried to absorb the unfathomable betrayal. Andy crumpled to the floor, sobbing. Mark was shaking with rage. He tugged at his brother to get up.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” Mark said.

  The brothers stormed out. Neither parent made a move to follow.

  Out on the street, Mark immediately dialed my stepfather’s number. Marty heard the tension in his son-in-law’s voice. He and Andy needed to see him; could they come right over? Marty gave him the room number of the hotel where he and my mother were camping out while closing the sale of their apartment. When Marty opened the door, he could see that Mark and Andy were both obviously distraught, pale and shaking. They repeated what Bernie had told them. Marty debriefed Mark and Andy for a couple of hours, trying to piece together what was happening, then began assembling a legal team for them both, turning to the top experts in his old law firm. Mark and Andy had made up their minds the minute they had fled their parents’ penthouse.

  They were turning their father in.

  It was a decision that should have made them heroes, but would instead, for the foreseeable future, cost them everything—their family, their livelihoods, and their own good reputations. Exposing their father would bring them under scrutiny as well, even though neither Mark nor Andy had worked for the fraudulent fund. But the Ponzi scheme Bernie had run for decades would turn out to be the biggest in history, and those closest to him were inevitably caught in its cold shadow, regardless of their innocence.

  Mark spent the rest of that grueling day in a series of intense meetings with his lawyers and in phone consultations with federal authorities. Back home, I paced the polished floors. All I could do was wait and worry, assured only by the terse little text messages that popped up on my phone every hour or so from my husband: Still meeting. I tried to keep calm for the sake of the baby I was carrying; I couldn’t afford to stress out and put him at risk. I just wanted Mark to come home. What was happening? What did it all mean? What had Bernie done? The office party was that night—were we supposed to go and load up our plates at the taco bar and pretend nothing was wrong?

  It was late at night by the time Mark appeared, ragged and spent. He had contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney’s Office and told the appropriate authorities that his father, the King Midas of Wall Street, the great, vaunted Bernie Madoff, was a fraud. A con man. A phony. A criminal. They had no proof, no documents, no inside knowledge. All they had was their father’s confession. Mark and Andy were scheduled to be at their lawyers’ offices the next morning to meet with investigators from the U.S. Attorney’s Office and SEC officials.

  That evening, our unanswered phones were filled with text messages and voice mails from friends at the firm, partying at the Mexican restaurant. Hey, where r u guys? Ruth and Bernie were there, everyone was having a great time, what was keeping the Madoff brothers? The staff had no idea what horror would face them in the morning, when a swarm of federal agents would descend on their offices with search warrants.

  Mark was lying prone on our bed, crying. I had never seen someone I loved so hurt, so deeply anguished. My attempts to comfort him felt small and useless. I could tell he was exhausted and in shock, his emotions careening from fear to disbelief to anger to despair. What if his father killed himself, and he and Andy were blamed for the Ponzi scheme? What was going to happen to his mother? Mark couldn’t believe that Bernie’s confession in the penthouse that morning was the first time Ruth was hearing the awful news; she had been too calm, so disturbingly emotionless that it crossed Mark’s mind that she might have been medicated. That in itself was telling. Ruth wasn’t one of those Valley of the Dolls socialites; a bottle of wine was her usual poison. Mark didn’t know what he was supposed to think of either parent anymore. His pain was almost palpable. Had his whole life been built on his father’s lies? What kind of monster was the man he idolized?

  I held him in the dark, twining myself around his arm and putting my head on his shoulder. I was scared, too.

  “What’s going to happen next?” I whispered.

  Mark’s voice, scraped raw from grief, sounded small and far away.

  “I don’t know.”

  · two ·

  BIG FISH

  He knew by the third date; I knew on the fourth.

  I’ve always believed in soul mates. I grew up feeling absolutely certain that there was someone out there in the world meant only for me, and I assumed that we would eventually find each other and spend our lives together, because it was just meant to be that way. I took it on faith. It’s not as if I were one of those daydreamy little girls who played bride in her bedroom with a half-slip veil on her head and a bouquet of Kleenex carnations in her hands. I was more of a tomboy. But at heart, yes, I was a pure romantic.

  By the time my twenty-seventh birthday rolled around and I was still single, however, I was beginning to lose patience with fate. What was taking so long? Most of my friends who weren’t married were at least in relationships that were headed that way. Given the disastrous choices I’d made so far on the boyfriend front, my personal GPS needed some serious reprogramming if a lifetime commitment was the destination. So, as much as I’d like to claim that it was Cinderella optimism that made me agree to a blind date one bleary morning at the gym, it was probably just mounting panic. I figured I didn’t have much more time to waste if I wanted that happily-ever-after family I’d always imagined.

  “Listen,” said my locker-room matchmaker, a woman who was barely a nodding acquaintance from our respective weight machines, “I’m not going to guarantee anything, but I will tell you I met my husband on a blind date.” She was on a mission to pay it forward, apparently. Her eligible friend, she went on, was a thirty-seven-year-old guy named Mark Madoff, divorced with two kids, and he was probably one of the wealthiest men in New York City. My mind immediately seized on what I considered the one relevant detail:

  Thirty-seven years old? Ewww.

  That was an entire decade gaping between us. He would have been graduating from college when I was still in grade school! He would want to hit the early-bird smorgasbord when I wanted to go clubbing. Never mind that I didn’t actually go clubbing—I might want to when I was sixty-two, and I didn’t want my salsa partner to be using a walker. My mom’s voice interrupted my inner monologue before I could go much further: “Take any date you can get, Stephanie.” Mom had a point, but she was also probably even more anxious than I was. She and my stepfather worried that I was on my way to becoming the spinster daughter they would have to help support forever while she flitted from one artsy job to the next, always ridiculously overqualified and even more ridiculously underpaid.

  At the time, I was the assistant to designer Narciso Rodriguez, a position that, had we been cartoon characters, would have made me his loyal Chihuahua sidekick. My duties encompassed everything from booking his trips to Europe and making dinner reservations at the hottest restaurants to stopping at Bloomingdale’s to buy his favorite underwear. I also got to sit in on shoe-design meetings and loan my feet for inspiration—they were perfect shoe-model size 7½.

  It was exciting to be part of such a hot young designer’s team, but the job wasn’t doing a thing for my bank account or my social life. As much as I loved being in the fashion industry, Seventh Avenue isn’t exactly a meet market for straight women. I knew more men dying to dress me for a date than take me on one, and the droughts were starting to last longer and longer. My mother helpfully pointed out that the pool of eligible men my age was quickly evaporating. I considered the alternative, picturing myself sitting alone with too many spider plants in some basement apartment, watching feet constantly scurry past on the sidewalk outside my iron-grated window.
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  Maybe a divorced daddy pushing forty wasn’t out of the question after all.

  Of course, I did due Google-diligence first, researching “Mark Madoff” until I found some photos. Not trusting my own instant attraction—athletic, full head of brown hair, hazel eyes, warm smile—I sought validating opinions from all the gay men at work. They unanimously agreed: Mark was handsome. (This straw poll made perfect sense at the time.)

  Our first date was at a French bistro called Casimir in the East Village, then a slowly gentrifying neighborhood in what once was a dangerous maze of high-rise projects. Mark later admitted that he had picked a place downtown, far from both of our Upper East Side apartments, as a bit of a test: He wanted someone with a sense of adventure, not some high-maintenance Park Avenue princess. Little did he know that my office was actually a few blocks from the restaurant. I considered myself a downtown girl through and through, despite—or maybe because of—the privileged world I’d grown up around.

  That night, I raced uptown after work to shower and change into black pants and a simple but sexy black sleeveless top Narciso had given me. Then I headed back downtown for the big date. Mark was sitting at the bar drinking a bottle of Stella Artois when I walked in, and we immediately fell into the kind of comfortable conversation that feels like it’s resuming, not just beginning, as if we were just pulling through a thread that had stitched our lives together long ago. He started talking about a fishing trip he’d just been on.

  “I pretty much grew up fishing,” I volunteered.

  “Oh?” He sounded dubious. “What kind?”

  “I’ve caught bluefish, and I’ve been tuna and shark fishing,” I boasted. “My parents would drug us with Dramamine and take us four hours out into the Atlantic.”