Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (27 page)

“Why don’t you stop with that and come to bed!” he yelled finally from the darkened bedroom. “You’re keeping me up with that light and with all that noise!”

“It can’t be more than ten
P.M.
now, and I have to finish packing.”

“Well, do it in the morning!”

He was in such a dark mood that I didn’t argue with him. Once he was asleep, I got up to finish.

Over the next three weeks, Jim would more than once take to his bed at an odd time of the day or night.

At the convention in Boston, Jim saw—and heard—how badly the D’Amanio and Kushner scandals, as well as all the previous missteps, had weakened him. As the governor, he was the head of the New Jersey delegation; nevertheless, all the talk that had gone on behind closed doors about who might run against him in the primaries was now right out there in the open, right in his face. Democrat Jon Corzine, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs who had used millions of his own funds in his successful run for the U.S. Senate in 2000, was said to be interested in the governorship (and in fact would be elected governor in 2005). He was something of an ally of Jim’s, so it was unlikely he would be considering a run against Jim in the primary. But now . . . who knew? Corzine was also connected to former Democratic senator Bob Torricelli, and everyone knew that Torricelli and Jim were not the best of friends.

The more Jim saw that his control of his public life—or perhaps I should say his public self—was collapsing, the more hysterically he tried to micromanage how his family appeared in public. Dress at the convention was casual much of the time, but Jim wanted Jacqueline in frills and me in a suit at all times. When I was getting Jacqueline ready on that first morning of the convention, he said, “Let me look at what you’re putting on her. She has to be wearing a pretty dress.” It was ninety-five degrees! He himself wore his suit-and-tie uniform at all times.

If you’re comfortable with who you are, and if you really are who you say you are, then you can just
be
who you are. But Jim was living a lie, and because of that, he couldn’t ad-lib. He didn’t dare. Consequently, every single word, every glance, every outfit had to be scripted, and all his energy went to learning the script and sticking to it. I believe it was why, in interviews and in his extemporaneous talks, he was so good at staying “on message.”

However, although Jim could control his words, increasingly he couldn’t control or conceal the revelation of his interior life as it informed some of his more controversial decisions. The public reaction to his appointment of Golan Cipel to the homeland security position was just the first among many. But by July 2004, Jim’s interior life seemed hell-bent on jailbreak. And so, as the script shredded and the costumes frayed, the public Jim fought against the private Jim by marching in the perfect family—or at least the perfectly dressed family—which he hoped would provide cover.

This was my second convention. I had attended the 2000 convention with Jim shortly after we became engaged and just days after Jim unequivocally derailed Torricelli’s effort to make himself the front-running Democratic candidate for the 2001 governor’s race. I had looked forward to the 2004 convention for months, because as a delegate I would have a role in selecting the person who might be our next president. But none of it was turning out as I’d expected.

One morning during the convention, Jim, Jacqueline, and I were having breakfast with Jimmy and Lori Kennedy in the hotel restaurant. “See those guys there?” said Jim, gesturing with a toss of his head to a nearby table where Jon Corzine and a few others were sitting. “Bet you anything they’re talking about who they should run against me.”

At a breakfast meeting the next day, Corzine said he was 100 percent behind Jim. Jim wasn’t convinced. “Well, he said all the right things,” Jim told me, “but he had to say all that.” Much of the time, it was a whirlwind of events: breakfast speeches, lunch speeches, cocktail parties. Jim and I—and often Jacqueline—rushed from one event to another, starting early in the morning and not stopping until late in the evening. Wherever Jim went, he took us with him, as if we were his magic amulets.

One day during the convention, I left Jim and Jacqueline in the hotel room to go shopping, and after an hour or two away I returned. The three of us had been to a breakfast, all of us dressed up, despite the heat. When I got back, my first wish was to shed my suit and get into something cooler. There, sleeping on our bed, was Jacqueline, in her undershirt and diaper, with her head nestled in the crook of Jim’s arm. She looked peaceful, her breathing easy. But even asleep Jim looked weary. Seeing him there in midday was like watching a fighter down on the mat just giving up before the count was done.

Another day, toward the end of the convention, the troopers dropped us off near the restaurant where we were to have dinner with some of Jim’s supporters. As we got out of the car, Jim said to me, “Let’s walk around the block before we go in.” I was happy to have some time alone with him during this whirlwind of a week. It was now two weeks after our first conversation about Jim’s not running again.

As we walked, he again asked me whether he should run for reelection. Even though I have come to accept what a sham Jim’s marriage to
me
was, my marriage to
him
was not a sham. So there are still moments of reflection when I am stunned anew, not only by Jim’s capacity to exploit me emotionally but at his willingness to do so. At this point, as I now know, Jim and his staff had already agreed, at a meeting during the convention, that because Golan’s suit would expose him as the adulterer he was, he would absolutely
not
run again. In fact, to protect himself, he’d considered resigning immediately.

Jim knew—
had
to know—that I would be devastated by his unfaithfulness, traumatized by the end of my marriage, shaken by the recognition that I hadn’t been able to tell the difference between appearance and reality, and scarred in my ability to trust. Nevertheless, in asking me whether he should run again when he knew for sure that he wasn’t going to (and even thought he might resign), Jim was toying with me, knowingly depriving me of time I desperately needed to prepare myself for the debacle soon to come. That kind of selfishness is hard to forgive.

But I was still operating from within my marriage, not his. So this time when Jim asked me whether he should run for reelection, I said, with an inadvertent irony that couldn’t have been lost on him, “I will support any decision you make, but if you decide not to seek reelection, you will appear guilty. People will think that you have something to hide.”

We had planned to spend a few days in Newport, Rhode Island, with Lori and Jimmy Kennedy following the convention. Jim planned to stay until Monday, and Jacqueline and I would stay until Wednesday. One night during the convention, he told me that he was not coming to Newport. He told me there was too much going on, I assumed in regard to potential primary opponents. Then, a couple of days later, he changed his mind and said that he would come after all. I didn’t know it then, but Jim’s announcement of his resignation from the governorship was barely two weeks away.

In Newport, Jim remained anxious. Later, on Saturday, as we were walking to dinner, he got a call from Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland security. Secretary Ridge told Jim that the terrorist threat level had been elevated to high alert for New York City and New Jersey as a result of the discovery of a plan to attack two financial institutions—Prudential in Newark and Citibank in New York City.

“I’m going to have to head back tomorrow morning to take care of this,” Jim told me. He had decided to hold a press conference Monday to reassure the public, which was the right thing to do. But I knew as well as Jim did that it didn’t take a day to organize a press conference. He had a Communications Department charged with such duties. Jim didn’t really have to head back on Sunday morning at all, but he was in such a foul mood that I preferred to stay on without him.

On Wednesday, August 4, Jacqueline and I returned to Drumthwacket from Newport. It was two days before Jim’s forty-seventh birthday and just eight days before he would resign on national television. I asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday.

Maybe a quiet dinner at Jimmy and Lori’s, he said, adding that he really didn’t want to go out.

The next day, Thursday the fifth, Jim was already in bed when I came home from work at 5:30
P.M.,
and he stayed there for the rest of the night, trying to sleep.

We did go to the Kennedys’ for his birthday dinner the following evening, but it didn’t feel like a celebration. Everyone was subdued, especially Jim. I had bought him a beautiful sweater and shirt in Newport, which I gave to him. He liked the gifts but didn’t make a big deal of it. After dinner, while Lori and I played with Jacqueline, he and Jimmy went out to the backyard and stayed there for almost forty minutes. When they came back in, Jimmy had a concerned expression on his face and was quieter than usual. I noticed Lori register Jimmy’s expression, although she didn’t say anything.

Lori later told me that whatever Jimmy had learned that night about his old friend, he was adding it to what Jim had already told him the previous week. On reflection, I’ve come to think that Lori was also in on the secret. She just wasn’t herself that night. If my speculations are correct, Jim told Lori and Jimmy more than he’d told me, and more than he would ever tell me directly.

The following morning, Saturday August 7, I left with Jacqueline for the shore at about 10:00
A.M.
Sunday evening, when I returned, Jim was again in bed and again on the phone with an attorney, I think from Washington, D.C. He was visibly depressed, now leaden rather than agitated. During this month, I had often asked him what was bothering him, and he generally put me off by telling me he was under stress from the scandals or just tired. This time when I asked, he told me that he was “trying to figure things out.”

“What do you mean?”

But his answer was vague, as his answers often were when he didn’t want to discuss something, and I didn’t press him.

MANY HAVE SUBSEQUENTLY ASKED
me whether all these phone conversations didn’t tip me off, especially ones such as this, which I knew to be with an attorney. Of course I knew that something was going on. I could see it in Jim’s irritability and in behavior that was unusual for him, like taking to his bed, which he’d never done before. But a call to Jim from a lawyer didn’t strike me as odd, especially given that both of the new scandals—involving David D’Amiano and Charles Kushner—involved legal matters. Jim was the governor, governing is about the law, and law requires lawyers.

Even my awareness that Jim was talking to a lawyer from Washington, D.C., didn’t raise my own homeland-alert system to orange. Jim had an office in D.C., as all governors do. He also had pollsters and advisers in D.C. I’ll go even further and say that I’m sure that over this six-week period I heard the word “lawsuit” in Jim’s conversations with his chief of staff and with his governor’s counsel. But “lawsuit” didn’t strike me as unusual either, especially in regard to D’Amiano’s case.

I have been asked, What did I know about Golan Cipel and when did I know it? What did I know about Jim McGreevey, and when did I know it? But shouldn’t the question be “What did Jim know about himself, and when did he know it?” Or “What did he and his staff know about Golan and about Golan’s suit, and when did they know it?” I have no answers. Only questions and newspaper clippings, which no one in political life ever fully believes in, and for good reason. Should I have known? Should I have figured it out? You tell me. I was married to a man who had lied to himself for a good part of his life, who lied to others for the rest of it, and who lied to me in word and in deed, in mind and in body, in acts of commission and omission. I was married to a man who invented stories he hoped would aerosol away the bad smell of the truth, who committed adultery (never mind the sex of his partner), who withheld truths central to his being, and who had done so from the first day we met.

Should I have known?

How should I have known?

17. ENDGAME

THE ENDGAME HAPPENED QUICKLY.

On Monday, August 9, 2004—he would resign just three days later—Jim called me after I had left work. I was running errands at a local mall.

“Dina? When will you be home? I need to talk to you.”

I told him I could be back within an hour and a half.

He was silent for a moment. “I also asked Jimmy and Lori to come over and they said they could be here by seven thirty
P.M.
” As I hung up, I felt my mind go blank and my body go numb. I knew for certain that whatever had been happening for the past six weeks was now coming to a head. My body began to shake. I called Lori before I got to the car.

“It’s me.”

“Oh. Dina. Hi.”

“Jim just called. I know you’re coming over tonight. But what’s going on?”

She’d known before I did when Jim wanted to marry me, so perhaps she knew this.

“I don’t know,” said Lori. “Jim did call, but he was very evasive. He didn’t say much.”

Ordinarily, Lori would have been eager to figure this out with me, but I could feel her reluctance and her discomfort. I wondered what she wasn’t telling me.

I got the trooper who was assigned to me that day to get me home as quickly as possible, and I hurried to the family room, where Jim was watching Jacqueline. Since Jacqueline was happily involved with her newest
Sesame Street
tape, Jim and I went into the sitting room. Jim sat in a chair, and I sat on the couch to his right. He was very tense.

“I want to tell you that what I’m about to say has nothing to do with you.”

I nodded. He had obviously rehearsed this moment.

“I want to thank you. You’ve been great. You’ve been a wonderful wife, and I want to thank you for everything, especially Jacqueline. I want you to know that I love you.” Then he repeated what he’d begun with. “This isn’t about you.”