A Writer's Life (55 page)

But the defense attorney Blair Howard differed with O'Brien when it came his turn to speak. Lorena had been unable to think clearly at the time of the cutting, Howard explained as he delivered his closing argument on Thursday, January 20, the seventh day of the trial. “This lady is ill,” he said, nodding toward Lorena, who was seated at the defense table, maintaining a posture of serenity as the eyes of the entire jury were now focused upon her. “This lady has been stripped of all dignity, of all self-confidence,” Howard continued in a soft voice that invited commiseration. “She's been done in by the man she loved, the man that she tried to be a good wife to, the man she was faithful to. And as a result of all this battering, she needs a lot of help. She needs
your
help. And I would say to you that by your verdict, ladies and gentlemen, you can restore a little bit of self-respect so she can walk out of this courtroom not heaving and crying, but with her head up. It has been a tremendous ordeal. I know in my heart you're going to do the right thing. And that's because justice, ladies and gentlemen, is for all. For the weak as well as the strong. Thank you.”

By the time Blair Howard had sat down, it was midafternoon, and although Judge Whisenant had promptly dispatched the jurors into the deliberation room, the day ended without their reaching a verdict. Lorena left the court building shortly before 6:00 p.m., accompanied by her attorneys and her close friends Janna Biscutti, Erma Castro, and the latter's two daughters. Lorena walked out into the cold wind and through the snowy sidewalks toward the parking lot, being greeted along the way by hundreds of Latin American supporters who held up signs reading
NO ESTÁS SOLA
(“You Are Not Alone”), and they were cheering repeatedly,
“Lo-Re-Na … Lo-Re-Na … Lo-Re-Na!” She was hatless and wore a dark wool coat, and in her arms she held a teddy bear and a bouquet of flowers that someone had given her. Though she smiled and blew a kiss toward a camera crew, she refused to speak to the press as she slowly moved ahead through the crowd, closely guarded by two police officers and her friends.

“Sometimes women have to take the law in their own hands,” I was told by an Ecuadorean journalist who was standing next to me. Her name was Maria Gomez and she was covering the trial for a television station in Quito. “What Lorena did was very brave,” Gomez said as we watched Lorena climbing into Janna Biscutti's car and being driven away. Parked along the curbs of the streets around the court building were nearly twenty satellite trucks, and among the masses of pedestrians were vendors selling penis-shaped pieces of chocolate candy and T-shirts bearing the messages
LOVE HURTS
, and
MANASSAS, VA.—A CUT ABOVE THE REST
. There had been a press release distributed earlier in the week by the town's information bureau, reminding readers that the Bobbitt cutting had
not
occurred within the city of Manassas but, rather, within the territory of Prince William County.

On the following day, Friday, January 21, the court building's lobby and corridors were once more filled with spectators and journalists who were eagerly anticipating the jury's verdict. Throughout the morning and most of the afternoon the jurors had remained in the deliberation room, reviewing and debating the relevance of the evidence. At one point their discussions became so raucous that the bailiff knocked on the door and requested that they control themselves.

At 4:00 p.m., the jury sent a message to Judge Whisenant, asking him to clarify the meaning of “irresistible impulse.” After he had done so, the jury spent another hour in discussion. At approximately 5:00 p.m., they had come to a decision. This information was conveyed by the guards to the reporters and other people gathered in the corridor, and soon they were lining up and making their way into the courtroom, which within seconds was packed to full capacity. With the appearance of Judge Whisenant, followed by the arrival of the seven women and the five men who constituted the jury, the courtroom clerk called out in a stentorian voice, “Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict in the case?”

“Yes,” they answered collectively.

“Is this your unanimous verdict?”

“Yes.”

“Would the defendant please stand,” said the clerk. Lorena rose from her chair at the defense table. She was wearing a black skirt, a white silk
blouse with a crucifix hanging around her neck, and her posture was perfect. Her three attorneys stood close by as the clerk proceeded to read aloud from a piece of paper that had been prepared by the jury foreman:

“… We the jury find the defendant, Lorena Lenore Bobbitt, not guilty of malicious wounding, as charged in the indictment, by reason of insanity.”

Gasps were heard throughout the courtroom. Lorena stood motionless, not indicating how she felt about the verdict. Finally she turned toward her attorney Lisa Kemler, who was positioned to her right, and asked, “Is that
good
?”

“Yes,” said Kemler with a slight smile. “You're free.”

John Bobbitt had not been in the courtroom on this final day, but his foster parents, appearing that evening on Larry King's television show, reported that John was “dumbfounded” by the jury's decision. However, the executive vice president of the National Organization for Women, Kim Gandy, applauded the verdict. “We're glad the jury rejected the twisted argument that a battered woman should be locked up in a prison cell,” she said.

In the next day's
New York Times
, an editorial writer posed the question:

I returned home to New York thinking that I no longer cared, either, although I could not easily discount the fact that I had invested six months on this story and had little to show for it except for two thick folders filled with my notes and my ten-thousand-word magazine article, which Tina Brown had refused to publish in
The New Yorker
. After I had filed away this material near my desk—labeling it: “The Bobbitts—a work in progress (1993-1994)”—I thought that I would reread it someday soon, reminding myself that Tina Brown had said it might be worthy of a short book.

Years passed, however, and I never got around to doing it.

D
URING THE ALMOST FIFTY YEARS THAT
I
HAVE LIVED AMONG
millions of New Yorkers whose origins and spiritual beliefs are representative of most of the world's nationalities, races, religions, languages, and eccentricities, I have become closely acquainted with very few of the city's 400,000 residents of Chinese birth or ancestry—a circumstance that I attribute as much to their traditional reticence and insularity as to whatever Oriental wisdom and discriminating taste they may possess in keeping their distance from me.

I have, in fact, become friendly with only two Chinese New Yorkers. One is Dr. Allan Jong, a slender, bespectacled, and soft-spoken psychiatrist close to my age, who practices on Park Avenue and is one of nearly thirty children sired by an itinerant Cantonese merchant who had three wives and a dozen concubines. The other is Jackline Ho, a petite, strikingly attractive, and adventuresome woman I mentioned earlier, who resides near me in a penthouse apartment and also maintains hillside homes in Hong Kong and in the Kona district of Hawaii, and who is often accompanied to dinner parties and restaurants by two men from whom she is divorced—her first ex-husband, a homosexual, and her second, a heterosexual.

Jackline Ho and Dr. Jong had never met, nor had I ever tried to arrange it, believing that what these two assimilated Asians needed least in New York was an introduction to each other. It was not only that I assumed that they lacked compatibility—Dr. Jong was reticent, refined, and sagacious; Ms. Ho was assertive, streetwise, and capricious—but it seemed to me that in their social and professional lives they preferred to associate almost exclusively with non-Chinese New Yorkers, and this was apparently consistent in their choices of partnerships in marriage. Jackline Ho's two husbands, though differing in their sexual orientation, were both American-born, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, while Dr. Jong's two wives were both American-born and Jewish.

“He was hung up on Jewish girls,” wrote his first wife, the author Erica (née Mann) Jong, in her 1973 best-selling novel,
Fear of Flying
. The main male character in the book (the heroine's husband) is Dr. Bennett Wing, a Chinese-American psychoanalyst who “practically never sweats” and has “long, thin fingers” and “hairless balls” and a “lovely swivel to his hips when he screwed.” While I am of course aware that works of fiction are offered as products of a writer's imagination, it nevertheless seemed to me, knowing Dr. Allan Jong as I did, including when he was naked—we often showered together after playing tennis at the Seventh Regiment Armory's indoor club on Park Avenue—that the fictional figure of Dr. Bennett Wing in
Fear of Flying
bore a close physical resemblance to my tennis partner Dr. Allan Jong, whom I knew to have hairless testicles, fingers that were long and thin, a markedly swivel-hipped motion as he ran around the tennis court, and, while he doggedly pursued every shot, he practically never sweat.

I had befriended Jackline Ho about twenty years after I had met Dr. Jong. I had been given her private New York telephone number by her second husband, the heterosexual one, in 1995, three years after their divorce. This husband was J. Z. Morris, the tall and blondish forty-five-year-old land developer based in Sarasota who had acquired 206 East 63rd Street in 1973. He believed she might be helpful to me in what I was trying to write after I had put aside the Bobbitt material in the latter part of 1994, when I had revived my interest in writing a nonfiction novel set within the five-story brick structure at 206 East 63rd Street, which I had privately identified as the “Willy Loman of buildings in New York.” J. Z. Morris had gradually converted it into a modern commercial property in which the upper three floors were rented out to tenants using the space for offices, studios, or showrooms, while the lower two floors and the basement were, of course, designed to accommodate a two-tiered dining establishment, several of which had by now come and gone.

During Jackie Ho's thirteen years of marriage to J. Z. Morris, beginning in 1979, she occasionally helped her husband in overseeing the property, not infrequently taking it upon herself (since her penthouse apartment was a few doors away and she was untimidly mercenary in matters of business) to pursue and admonish those tenants who were habitually late in paying the rent. Following her amicable divorce from Morris in 1992—so amicable that he continued to stay with her when visiting New York and was welcomed as well as her houseguest in Hawaii and Hong Kong—she continued to assist him in looking after the old building at 206 East 63rd. What I hoped to get from her for use in my book, which was tentatively entitled
The Building
, was some interesting information about the tenants
she had come to know during her years as the rent collector and manager of the property—insights and anecdotes that might add to the research I had already done, and might further enliven my narrative as I sought to describe this place as if it were a multiplex movie house, a five-story structure layered with real-life dramas, comedies, romances, and mysteries. If I dug deeply enough and interviewed enough people, I often reminded myself as I fantasized, I might be able to find here, at this single address, along this shadowed side street in the middle of Manhattan, a story line that would span the entire twentieth century.

I saw my story as beginning during the horse and buggy era of Frederick J. Schillinger, and then advancing into the motorized age of Frank Catalano (who, as you remember, purchased the storage business from Schillinger's heirs and replaced Schillinger's horse-drawn moving vans with trucks), and finally progressing into the period of reconstruction and modernization as personified by J. Z. Morris and Jackie Ho and their diverse and changing cast of tenants, which included a travel agent, a freelance photographer, an engraver, an Italian designer of women's shoes, a Gypsy fortune-telling family, a two-partner law firm, and a procession of restaurant proprietors who never seemed to survive economically at this address for very long. No fewer than nine restaurants had opened and closed at 206 East 63rd since J. Z. Morris had renovated the building. I had patronized every one of them, starting with Le Premier in 1977, and, being sentimental about restaurants and easily pleased as a customer, I was both saddened and bewildered by the frequency of foreclosures.

As I said earlier, my old friend Nicola Spagnolo, the third restaurateur to try his luck at 206 East 63rd Street, had closed Gnolo in the spring of 1985, following an eight-month history that almost led him into personal bankruptcy. The two-floor restaurant space went unrented for the next fifteen months. In the winter of 1986, however, it was taken over by an optimistic and audacious gourmand named Marvin Safir, a cousin of an acquaintance of mine at the
Times
, the columnist William Safire, the latter having added an
e
to his surname because he thought it would encourage the pronunciation he preferred:
sah-fire
, rather than
say-fur
. His cousin Marvin was nearly sixty when he opened the fourth restaurant at the Sixty-third Street address, calling it Moon's because his boyhood nickname had been “Moon.” He had previously owned two small praiseworthy restaurants, one on the West Side, the other further uptown on the East Side, but at this point in his life Marvin Safir wanted a more spacious dining interior so that he might rival the triumphant and trileveled “21” Club on West Fifty-second Street, where, as a onetime patron, he
believed he had never received from the proprietors and waiters the deferential treatment known to the man by whom he measured himself: his late father, Leo Safir, a flamboyant ladies' man and bon vivant who had manufactured men's robes and been referred to in the garment industry as “the Bathrobe Baron.” Although the decor at Marvin Safir's Moon's imitated the “21” Club (dark wood paneling, gleaming brass appointments), and although he had hired a distinguished chef who had cooked in the White House for President Gerald Ford, Moon's restaurant never managed to draw sufficient numbers of customers to support its high overhead and compete with “21”; it closed after two years, in 1988, having lost more than $2 million. “The restaurant business,” said one of Marvin Safir's partners, “is an oxymoron.”