Life on the Ramona Coaster (18 page)

At our friend Denise Rich’s Christmas party, ca. 1998

One day, at the end of August, I remember Mario running out to play tennis at a friend’s. He said he was going to shower there and meet me later at a party. I noticed that he had left his wedding ring on the nightstand and I remember wondering,
why isn’t he wearing his ring? Should I ask him?
But something held me back and I never called him on it. I couldn’t deal with what it could mean, so I convinced myself that it wasn’t a big deal. Meanwhile, a friend of Mario’s, who had been divorced for years, had become a permanent fixture at our home that summer and I felt like it was infringing on our privacy. I remember his friend would disappear during the day for a bit to give us alone time, but in the evenings he came to all the parties with us and I began to feel that he was encouraging Mario to go to the ones that were more geared toward singles. It seemed to me that this friend, who I didn’t think was very attractive and hadn’t had a girlfriend in years, was using Mario as bait to meet single girls at these parties and he would take Mario away from me to troll around and flirt. I remember more than once when I went looking for Mario, I found him surrounded by single women. They would be standing very close to him and it seemed like when I approached, they would take a step back. It started to feel like Mario was more interested in going to parties than hanging out with our married friends. Looking back, these things all seem like obvious red flags, but at the time I let it all go because I thought,
what’s the harm if my husband is happy?
That was my biggest mistake.

June and July were good, but by August and September I felt Mario’s behavior was becoming increasingly erratic. He seemed irritable and angry and I began to worry about his emotional health. He had been having issues with his knee and couldn’t play tennis, which was his usual way of releasing stress, so I tried to be patient with him. But, despite my efforts to be sweet and calm, by the end of September I felt like he was becoming more and more confrontational. At one point, one of my close girlfriends witnessed us having a huge blowout and she expressed concern that Mario wasn’t treating me well. She also told me that she had noticed that he was gone for forty-five minutes when he took our dog, Coco, out for a walk. She felt this was suspicious and asked me if I thought it was possible he could be having an affair, “When men disappear for long stretches like that to walk the dog, they are usually talking to their girlfriends.” At the time I laughed it off because, of course, that wasn’t happening to
me
. Mario wasn’t being unfaithful. It was inconceivable.

All that summer and into the fall, I was working nonstop. I remember the night of the cast party after we wrapped filming for Season 6, I wanted Mario to come with me like he always had at the end of every other season, but he said he was going to Westchester with a friend instead and didn’t come home until after midnight. What can you do in Westchester after midnight? If I questioned where he was, I felt he would get defensive and snap at me. At that point I felt his behavior had become unacceptable so I decided to go to our Southampton house by myself for the weekend to get some space. When I came home, I remember Mario told me he thought he needed to move out for a while. For the first time I considered the possibility that there might be another woman and I asked him straight out if there was.

He told me no and I believed him.

After that, he gave me a letter in which he explained how unhappy he had been. I tried to understand where this was coming from because I felt that we had been happy all summer. I remember his response was that it was because he was a good actor. I told him that we owed it to our marriage to go to counseling, so we started going to therapy together and I was hopeful that we would figure out a way to resolve our issues.

That October, I remember walking along Park Avenue with one of my good friends, before going to therapy one day, and she said to me, “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I think you need to know,” she paused and then said slowly, “I think Mario has been seeing another woman.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, in complete denial.

“Well, you know the other night when we were at Plaza Athénée for that party. People overheard him arguing with a woman on his cell phone when he was in the men’s room. He was screaming at her.”

I was stunned. I remembered that Mario had gone off that night to make a phone call and I had to admit that I did think he was gone for a little too long. I had also thought it was strange that he had wanted to meet me at the party since Mario hates arriving at events on his own. That evening we went to therapy and I decided to bring up what my friend had told me. Although I felt as if we had been making progress and I didn’t want him to think I didn’t trust him, I couldn’t get what she had told me out of my head. I asked him if he had been fighting on the phone with a woman at the Plaza Athénée party, but I felt like he just brushed me off and made a joke of it so I decided to drop the subject.

At home, later that same night, I walked into the den and I saw that Mario was talking on the phone. I remember as soon as I walked into the room he got very stiff.

“Alan, let me go now. Ramona just walked in,” he said abruptly and ended the call.

Alan is a good friend, so I said, “Mario, why did you hang up? I would have said hello to Alan.”

“This was a different Alan. You don’t know him,” he answered.

I sat down beside Mario. He seemed to be getting agitated. He asked me why I had come into the room, but I couldn’t remember. My mind was blank. Then something in my brain just snapped. It was like a veil had been lifted and it dawned on me that he had not been talking on the phone to a different Alan, or to any man for that matter. I stood up and I looked at him.

“Mario, that wasn’t a different Alan on the phone, was it? You were talking to a girl just now, weren’t you?”

I remember his face looked like he had seen a ghost. His eyes went wide. His mouth fell open. He had that same expression on his face when I was pregnant with Avery and I told him that my water broke and we had to go the hospital. He looked like a deer in headlights.

“Just admit you were talking to a girl. Just admit it,” I shouted.

He snapped out of it and got defensive, “Yes, I was. Do you want to know what else I do with her besides talk?”

Oddly, I suddenly felt calmer than I had in weeks.

I said, “No, that’s all I need to know for now,” and walked out of the room.

I needed to clear my head so I left the apartment. I met a girlfriend for dinner at a restaurant in the neighborhood and told her what had just happened. When I came back a few hours later, Mario was on the phone with one of our friends and I heard him say, “Ramona just walked in. She’s home. She’s okay.”

At first when I got home he seemed nervous and scared, but an hour or so later he began to seem more and more self-righteous. I remember, we were in our bedroom and Mario asked me if I wanted to know if anything more had happened. I told him he didn’t need to say anything because I already knew. I remember he kept saying that it meant nothing and it was just a symptom of his unhappiness. I was in a state of shock and disbelief. How could this be happening? The following morning at breakfast, I remember Mario telling me he was already planning to end it. Famous last (lying) words.

The next day, I was at the gym and I started getting calls from the press saying they were going to come out with an article stating that Mario was seen having dinner with another woman at Serafina. It was like a knife had sliced open my chest, and my guts were ripped from my body. I just kept thinking,
he promised me he wouldn’t see her anymore. How could he lie to me like that?
It was bad enough that he was seeing another woman, but now it was going to be in the press that he took her to a restaurant where I am a friend of the owner and my Pinot is served. Why would he disrespect us like that?

I called Mario and said, “A story is coming out that you were seen having dinner with another woman. You didn’t see her, did you?”

He said that he had.

I was shocked, “I thought you told me you were going to stop seeing her?”

He said he never told me that.

I thought,
who is this man? How can he tell me at breakfast that he is planning to end it and then turn around the next day and act like we never had that conversation?
I felt like I was losing my mind. It was as if my husband had suddenly become Jekyll and Hyde; one minute he would be warm, loving and remorseful, and the next he would seem defiant, belligerent, and angry. I began to feel like I didn’t know which Mario I was going to see from one day to the next. I thought we needed to talk about what was happening in therapy, but Mario seemed reluctant so I agreed to talk over dinner that night. We met at an Italian restaurant downtown. It was such a surreal moment. We were sitting in this beautiful restaurant and my husband was ordering wine as if we were having a normal romantic dinner, but really the bottom had just dropped out of my world.

I said to Mario, “You can’t see her anymore. You have to end it.”

I remember he looked at me and said, “I can’t promise you that.”

Basically, I was in shock.
He can’t promise me that? What does that mean? Does he think he’s going to be with both of us? Who is this man? How can this be happening? This is a nightmare. This isn’t real.
In all the years we were married, it never once crossed my mind that my husband would have an affair, much less that it would become a tabloid headline. I remember sitting across the table from Mario and thinking,
this isn’t my husband.
I just could not comprehend that this was who he had become. Even now, there’s a part of me that thinks of Mario as dead, that the person I sat across from that night was an imposter who invaded his body and took over his mind.

Over the course of the next year, the things that were written in press about Mario and this woman were so much worse than I could ever have imagined that night. It’s painful enough to come face to face with the possibility that you have been lied to and betrayed by your partner of twenty-one years, but to have to do that under the harsh, judgmental glare of the tabloid press is humiliating beyond comprehension. I had no time to process what was happening to my marriage, no time to digest the small morsel of truth that I could bear to swallow, before the most horrendous images were being forced down my throat.

At that point, the most important thing to me was to protect Avery. She was already on the edge at school. Not only was she struggling with the transition of being away, she had had a falling out with her best friend from high school, who was also now at college with her, and it was such a small campus that it had impacted all her friendships. She would call me every week crying because it was making her life miserable. The last thing she needed was to be worrying about what was going on with her father and me at home. I was afraid that her knowing about Mario would push her over the edge and I was not going to let that happen. I knew my marriage was already broken, but I wasn’t about to take Avery down with us. The morning that the article came out she woke up at 8:00 a.m. to eight missed calls on her cell phone from numbers she didn’t recognize. She called us in a panic because she thought someone had died. The one thing Mario and I agreed on at that point was that we needed to keep Avery out of what was going on between us, so we pretended that the article was no big deal. I basically ate crow to protect my daughter. I remember the three of us were on the phone and Mario and I told her it was just the press looking for a comment on a silly article and she shouldn’t worry about it. She believed us because she had put her father on a pedestal her entire life. It killed me to lie to Avery like that, but at the time I felt it was the right thing to do.

A week later we went down to Atlanta to visit Avery for Parents Day. I had told Mario at dinner that night that I didn’t think he should come with me, but Avery is his daughter too and I think he felt like I was being unfair. So I said, “Alright, Mario. We’re going to Atlanta next week. You have to make a decision; you either end it with this girl or you move out. It’s your choice, one or the other. When we go to Atlanta I will know if you’re texting this girl. I will feel it and I won’t be able to hide it from Avery. We’re away for four days, do not speak to her and do not text her. We don’t want Avery to know anything is going on, so please just don’t.” Of course, when we went down to Atlanta I was on edge the entire time. I remember shopping with Avery at Sephora and asking her, “Where’s your father?” because I sensed that he was off somewhere talking on the phone. If we were at a restaurant and he got up to walk Coco, I would tell him to leave his phone at the table because I could feel that he had been texting her.

At dinner that night, Avery was using my phone and she came across the story that had been in the press. Up to that point she had been living in a bubble at school and hadn’t really read the article. I knew I needed to do some damage control, so when she got up from the table I followed her. I cornered her in the bathroom and Avery said to me, “What’s going on? You’re acting so weird, making Daddy leave his phone at the table. Daddy’s all quiet and spacey. I saw that article on your phone, what does it mean?”