Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (35 page)

By late summer, I still was uncertain about where I’d live after Drumthwacket. I didn’t know how I’d come up with the funds for a down payment, so one Saturday (or Sunday) I followed Jim into the bedroom to have a conversation about it. “I have no money,” Jim said, as he said so many times, wearily now, as if I should have known better than to ask by this point.

“How can that be?!” I said, as I had so many times before, this time impatiently. “What happened to the money from the sale of the house in Woodbridge?” By now I had done the math. In addition to the house in Woodbridge, which would have sold for about $200,000, there was Jim’s salary. His gross income was about $156,000, which would have left him with a net of just under $100,000 annually, or close to $300,000 by the time he left the governorship. Since he had free residential housing, free recreational housing, free transportation, free household help, and an expense fund of $70,000, there should have been quite a bit left over.

“Where did it all go?” I asked.

“I don’t have to explain anything to you,” Jim said angrily as he headed for the bedroom door.

“I deserve an explanation,” I told him. “You would have wanted one from me.”

At that, Jim seemed to calm down. “Look, I don’t have any money,” he said, “but we can work things out.” He suggested that we meet with a financial planner, and I agreed. My mother must have heard us arguing, because just as he entered the kitchen on his way toward the door, she went toward the refrigerator, in effect turning her back on him.

“I’ll see you,” he said.

I spent the rest of the afternoon watching
Stealing Home,
a movie that, ironically, had been filmed at both the beach house and Drumthwacket. After that, we all sat around telling family stories and, as it got dark, a ghost story or two.

I was happy to have my family there. They never asked me questions or tried to probe but instead treated me as they always had, maybe with even more indulgence than usual. Paul continued to be my personal techie, patiently making house calls to address the many disasters involving my computer, my cell phone, or the cable TV. Elvie was, at a moment’s notice, available to take care of Jacqueline, along with her own girls, as was my dad. Rick, who is the quietest member of my family but also one of the most sensitive, showed up more at the beach house than he had in the past, and I knew it was to see me. My mom, who had always fretted over me—“You’re too thin, you’re too thin!”—as if I were in the midst of a hunger strike, continued to bake for me and make soup for me and send care packages home with me. I felt so alone in the world during this dark, lonely transition that having them physically near offered a comfort I couldn’t have found anywhere else.

At the end of that day, close to midnight, I went to my bedroom to check on Jacqueline, who was sleeping. I straightened her sheets, covered her, and removed her empty milk bottle from her crib, and as I did so, I heard my cell phone beep on my dresser, indicating that I had missed a call. I checked to see who’d called and saw that it was Jim’s number.

Sitting down on the bed, and bracing myself, I speed-dialed his number. Jim answered on the first ring, and as I sat there in the dark, we talked for a while.

“How are you?” he asked, with more concern in his voice than I’d heard in a while.

“OK,” I said warily.

“I’ve been thinking about our conversation, and I felt so bad that after I left the beach house I almost turned around and went back to talk to you,” he said.

I just listened, thawing, however reluctantly.

“So have you figured out where you and Jacqueline will be living?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

I cried. Although the intimacy between us was gone, I hadn’t yet gotten to the point where crying in his presence was out of the question. So I cried. It was all I could do whenever I had to think of the future.

After that weekend, I went back to Drumthwacket, determined to finalize the purchase of my house. I signed the mortgage papers and asked Mario and a friend of his who was a contractor to look at the house I’d chosen in order to assess its condition. The contractor told me that it was structurally sound but needed a lot of cosmetic work.

Marty, the Realtor, told me that if I now wanted the house, I’d have to give him a down payment the next day. Despite Jim’s protestations of poverty, he’d finally told me a few days earlier that he would be willing to give me a check for the down payment. But when Marty asked for the check, I had to think quickly, since I didn’t yet have the funds and obviously didn’t want to share that particular piece of information with him. My attorney and the seller’s attorney were in the midst of the review, but they hadn’t yet dotted every
i
or crossed every
t
. So I told Marty that I wanted the review to be completed before making the down payment, and luckily he agreed.

That evening, Jim and I sat in the kitchen to touch base. Now there was a new complication. We had never actually used the word “divorce,” though as we each talked about finding our own homes, it had been understood between us that we would be divorcing. However, as of this evening, Jim wanted the down payment to be contingent on my immediate agreement in principle that we would be working out the terms of a divorce settlement between us. I was not opposed to proceeding toward a settlement, but the wrinkle was that Jim wanted us to come to this agreement without any lawyers (never mind, of course, that he was a lawyer and that he was being advised at every step by Ray Lesniak, another lawyer). He continued to assert his poverty, saying that he had three savings accounts—including one for Jacqueline and one for Morag—which in total amounted to roughly $75,000. Besides that, he had an IRA that he said he did not
have
to share with me since it preceded our marriage, but that he
would
share it.

There was another piece of news. Jim had already been talking to people about doing a book, and one of the people he’d spoken with had suggested that a book coauthored by both of us would be worth a hefty advance; apparently because of its novelty, it would be worth more than a book by him alone. A novelty indeed! With me cast as the accepting, forgiving, understanding cuckolded wife in this modern-day Saint’s Life. “I can get an advance of five hundred thousand,” he told me. “After agents’ fees and taxes, we’d net two hundred fifty thousand, which would be one hundred twenty-five thousand each.”

He had to be kidding. My days as his partner were over. “No,” I said. “Not on your life.”

Jim again demanded that we reach divorce settlement terms within a week, or I could forget his “generosity.”

The conversation ended without any agreement, but now as I walked out of the kitchen to check on Jacqueline, I realized Jim was treating me as his adversary and would fight me with whatever it took. Jim’s resistance wasn’t about money anyhow, not at its cramped little heart. It was, once again, about secrets and betrayals. He had hidden from me what he did with his time and he had hidden from me what he did with his body. And now he was hiding from me what he’d done with money that, in actuality, was ours. If he could get me to agree to a backroom settlement, then maybe he could keep his secrets.

How could Jim possibly be so impoverished? How could the proceeds from the sale of a house that was legally conjoint property suddenly disappear? How could another few hundred thousand dollars of income from Jim’s job as governor also disappear? Had it gone to underwrite Golan’s home purchase when they were lovers? Had it gone to Kari as a reward for being a compliant ex-wife? Unlike me, she’d been willing to let Jim arrange the terms of their divorce settlement without legal representation.

Seeing that Jim was now willing to regard me as an enemy, all at once something began to happen to me that had never happened before—I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. My heart was pounding, my body turned rubbery, and I felt myself on the verge of blacking out.
Am I dying?
I wondered.
Am I having a stroke? A heart attack?
I was terrified, and the terror made it worse. I was in Jacqueline’s room by then, and suddenly, and without warning, I collapsed.

Jim, who had followed me, was alarmed at the sight of me like that as well. He tried to help me get back to my feet, but I was too weak. My legs wouldn’t support me, and I was so drained that I couldn’t even speak, which frightened me further.

“Do you want to go to the hospital?” he asked.

I shook my head no. Jim picked me up without disturbing Jacqueline and helped me down the hall to bed, where I fell asleep almost instantly.

The following morning, however, Jim was back to badgering me, pressing me to agree in principle on a book and possibly a film deal. I was afraid that the conversation would become charged, leading me right back to the scary place I’d been the night before. This time I didn’t say no, only that I wouldn’t commit to it.

Put me in any really dire medical emergency and I will invariably, if irrationally, want to prove immediately that I’m perfectly fine. Therefore the morning after I’d collapsed, I was determined to go to work. And so I did. Later in the day, Jim called to ask how I was and to tell me that he had asked John McCormac, the state treasurer, to meet with us in the evening to discuss a financial plan. I felt sick all day—right on the verge of a recurrence of what had happened to me the night before—and even had chest pains. I considered going to my hospital’s emergency room or to see a cardiologist I knew who was associated with the hospital, but I put the idea aside and somehow made it through the day.

When I got back to Drumthwacket, Nina had left a packet of mail for me. Included was an envelope sent by Cathy. Perhaps I’d scared Jim or made him feel guilty, but at any rate he had made good on his promise, and in the envelope Cathy sent, there was a check made out to the realty company, as I’d asked. It was what I needed for the down payment on the house.

Later I thanked Jim for the check, and he and I sat down at our kitchen table with John McCormac, who was also Jim’s friend. Looking back, I suspect that Jim had already coached McCormac—known as Mac—as to what line to take with me. John said that, based on my income and Jim’s, all I could afford was a house for less than $200,000. As he said this, I could feel my heart begin to pound and my face flush. With the real estate market as inflated as it had ever been, how was I going to find a house for $200,000 in New Jersey? You couldn’t even get a refrigerator box for that amount. Besides, I had already found a decent home in a nice neighborhood where I could raise my daughter, and I was settling into the idea that that was where we would be living. Just knowing that this would be my home had brought me a little peace of mind.

But the house I had chosen was well over double what he was telling me I could afford. When Mac was finished, Jim followed up. “You’re going to have to find something for less than two hundred thousand dollars.” I knew there was nothing like that on the market. Jim and I had agreed that my housing search would be limited to towns with high-ranking school districts. But none of these towns had homes in that range.

I walked away from the kitchen table where we’d been meeting and went into the sitting room. A few minutes later, Mac left. Again, my memory of the event is fragmented, but I recall feeling weak and wanting to sit down on the floor. I began to cry, and soon I was lying curled up on the rug, terrified and unable to move. This time, I was sure I was dying.

When Jim came into the room, I asked him to call Lori Kennedy to come and take care of Jacqueline. He helped me to bed, but all I could think about was that I was going to die, and who would raise my daughter? Next Jim called Clifton Lacy, the commissioner of the Department of Health, who was a cardiologist. Cliff asked me in detail about my symptoms and told me that it didn’t sound like a cardiac problem. He knew or could make apt inferences about our lives at this point, so he told me that it was more likely that I was suffering from anxiety. What I was describing, he said, were the symptoms of a panic attack. Cliff then called a psychiatrist, who spoke with me on the phone and concluded, as Cliff had, that it was indeed a panic attack. Jim also called a doctor friend of his who worked at Princeton University to come and check me out. She arrived shortly after Lori and Jimmy Kennedy, who had come at my request. By then, I was feeling a little better. The doctor and I talked for a while, and she gave me prescriptions for Xanax and Valium, which one of the troopers went to have filled at the pharmacy. Everyone left. I took both pills and went to bed. It was probably the first time since the beginning of August that I’d had a good night’s sleep, but who wouldn’t with a double dose of Xanax and Valium?

Unbelievably, the following morning Jim went right back to hounding me about the house.

“You just can’t afford a house,” he told me. “Look, I’ll help you find an apartment, though.” And, he added, if I couldn’t afford to buy a condominium or co-op, I could always find a really nice rental apartment. “You could live in Union County or Hudson County, because they’re both affordable.” He said he had a developer friend who owned a number of apartments in Hudson County, and I could speak with him. I had no interest in looking for an apartment, and the locations he was suggesting weren’t known to have good school systems, but apparently making sure Jacqueline lived in a good school district was no longer a major priority. I had already found a house where I’d hoped to give Jacqueline a happy childhood in a town where she would receive a good education. Plus, the house I wanted to buy was on a circle, not a road with lots of through traffic—and potentially lots of gawkers.

“I’ve found a house I can live in and want to live in,” I said. As I spoke, I could feel my heart beginning to race. “I can’t continue this conversation right now.” I got up and walked out of the room. I had practiced meditation a little bit, so I immediately tried to apply what I knew to calm myself down. Once my breathing had returned to normal, I got dressed and went off to work.