Book Review: Primates of Park Avenue
/Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir
My more or less unconscious adjustment process is called habituation, the simplest form of learning, in which an animal, after a period of exposure to the stimulus, stops responding and starts accommodating it. Hypervigilant, skittish prairie dogs living near humans eventually don't bother to give alarmt calls when we walk by; we start to seem like white noise to them. Deer get used to how utterly rank we smell (in Michigan I learned that sometimes before you see a dear, you can hear it give a tremendous snort, a harrumph of disgust at your vile stench, if you are upwind) and come in close to eat from our gardens. And so, surrounded by people dressed in ways I would have found confoundingly foreign just months before, I now outfitted myself a little more conservatively, a little more expensively, a little more carefully. It felt like the last surrender, a giving up of my former self.
But although this sort of thing is invariably amusing when applied to freaks (and Manhattan's super-rich would qualify for that term if anybody does), it fills Martin's book with with a Schadenfreude that starts to feel a little sickly. As that previous quote makes clear, Martin didn't simply observe these socialite wives of wealthy men – she morphed herself into becoming as close to being one of them as her parvenu status and slightly strained finances could manage. She shares their confidences; she visits their homes and chats with them at playgrounds and charity events; she consoles them during their hard times, and she gratefully accepts their consolations during her own personal tragedies. It's increasingly disturbing to read these personal interactions while at the same time watching Martin sharpen her knives behind the backs of these women while they're bearing their souls to her.The most infamous part of the book is of course the concept of these brutal masters-of-the-universe husbands treating their wives like upper-tier servants and giving them “year-end bonuses” if they perform their various duties well. After tattling to her readers about how these wives are effectively powerless despite their high-profile social lives, about how they starve themselves to stay thin and spend large amounts of money on the latest fashionable crushing exercise programs, she paints a grim picture of the uncertainty of the world where these women live:
Economic dependency on their husbands, I came to believe, kept many of the women I knew awake at night, whether they realized it or not. The knowledge that their husbands could leave them for other women, the simple realization that they could not support themselves without them, seemed to gnaw at some of the women I knew as badly as their hunger pain. Some told me, in hushed tones, that like their mothers and grandmothers, they had secret bank accounts where they stashed their allowances and other money they had access to “just in case.” Several women clued me in about “year-end bonuses” husbands gave their wives – as if they were employees rather than partners. “My mother told me to get as much jewelry as possible from my husband. As insurance,” a woman told me wryly as we chatted on a playground bench about a mutual acquaintance's spectacularly acrimonious and very public divorce. My interlocutress had graduated summa cum laude from an Ivy. She also had an MBA. But she had never worked.
“Interlocutress” - it just makes you shiver. And not at all in a good way.