Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (36 page)

Jim continued to push his agenda relentlessly. When I arrived home in the evening, he told me he had now talked to his developer friend, who could help me with an apartment. When I dismissed his suggestion, Jim went on to the next one he had ready.

“If you’re really determined to have a house,” he said, “I can have Mac McCormac find you one for two hundred thousand dollars.”

That was an insult. If there were a decent house available for that price, I would have found it myself. Besides, by now I knew that in this housing battle Jim was not only relentless—he had become devious. My Realtor, Marty, was, as I’ve said, related by marriage to Lori Kennedy, and earlier in the day I’d learned from the Kennedys that Jim had called Marty to tell him I didn’t want the house because I’d realized I couldn’t afford it.

I didn’t want to upset myself, so I didn’t let on that I knew what he’d done. Instead I again got up and walked into another room. But Jim followed me, haranguing me and telling me that he wanted his check back. I didn’t answer. If he wanted it back, he was going to have to put a stop payment on it.

The next morning, Jim changed tactics, sending in his “good cop” to replace his “bad cop” of the night before. Politicians make political appointments all the time as a way of rewarding their friends, a practice that is completely legal. Such appointments can pay stipends, some large and some small, and Jim had taken care of many of his friends in this way. In fact, he had already appointed Cathy to the Dental Board. Now Jim was raising the possibility of appointing me to a board. But then “bad cop” horned in, making the appointment contingent on my willingness to live in an apartment.

“I’m not having this conversation,” I told Jim. Really, he just didn’t stop. When he’d left the house, I called Marty, who seemed surprised to hear from me. I pretended not to have any knowledge of what had transpired with Jim and told him that I definitely wanted the house. Next I called the attorney who was reviewing the documents needed for the purchase of the house to check on the status of the review and to discuss details regarding my down payment.

But there was a glitch. The attorney told me he wanted the check made out to his trust account, not to the realty company. I disregarded Jim’s comment about wanting the check back and e-mailed Cathy, asking her to void the check payable to the realty company and to write another check payable to the attorney’s trust account. I reminded her again to send me copies of the tax returns I’d requested five days earlier. Among other details, the returns would show the sale of the house in Woodbridge. I asked Nina to pick up the package from Cathy. First she was told to wait, and then, after twenty minutes, she was told that Cathy had had to leave suddenly to attend a funeral in Florida.

When Nina told me what happened, I was both furious and devastated. Whatever was going on wasn’t right. I knew that. Was Jim having the tax returns amended now to conceal the sale of the Woodbridge house, his salary, or his savings? I never would have thought him capable of this, but I hadn’t seen the man I thought I’d married in months. I’d been wrong about so much. Why not about his basic decency?

With Jim so resistant to doing the right thing in regard to housing for Jacqueline and me, I began to ask around for recommendations for a divorce attorney. Clearly, I was going to have to resort to legal help to get Jim to behave appropriately.

The next day, Jim called to tell me that he wanted to talk to me openly.

There was a novel idea. I suspect that Ray Lesniak or Jimmy Kennedy had sat Jim down and told him that he was behaving badly. On my way home from work, I stopped in at the Kennedys’, and Jimmy told me that he’d spoken to Jim, who claimed
he
hadn’t called the Realtor to say I was no longer interested in the house—
I
had called him myself.

At home that night, Jim was calm, I was distant, and we didn’t talk at all.

The following morning Jim was gone very early. Later in the day I would be making my first attempt at simply going out to have a pleasant time. Lori Kennedy and I were meeting a friend for lunch, and then I would return home to change and head to Manhattan where Jimmy, Lori, and I would have dinner with my friend Nene and her boss, Gordon Bethune, the CEO of Continental Airlines, whom we both knew. Not bad, I thought, amazed that I was even able to consider a night out on the town.

After lunch, I went back home to change for the evening. As it happened, Jim had returned and was on the phone on the first floor of Drumthwacket (his preferred site for calls to Kari). He signaled for me to wait, but after a few seconds, when I saw he was not about to put the call on hold or hang up, I left. I hadn’t known he was in, so I’d left a note for him upstairs in our kitchen telling him my plans. After dinner, I would be heading to the shore, where my parents and Jacqueline were spending the weekend.

On my way to New York, Ray Lesniak called. Did I have a divorce attorney? Ray wanted to know. I said I hadn’t retained anyone yet. He told me that he’d been advising Jim about divorce terms, and offered me another version of Jim’s “Settlement Without Lawyers” plan. Ray said that if I agreed to an uncontested divorce, Jim would give me $250,000. He was not forthcoming about exactly how my hard-up husband would scrape together this money, and I didn’t ask. Ray’s law partner, Paul Weiner, would take care of the details. All I’d need was for my attorney to sign off on the agreement, a requirement of state law mandating that in a divorce each spouse must have separate representation.

Well, that was something. When I got together with my dinner companions, I felt less burdened than I had in months, and ready to have a good time. And I did, thanks to the fact that Gordon Bethune is one of the funniest men I’ve ever met. For the first time since August 12, I actually laughed. Still, I had moments of sadness that I was there without Jim, who had learned of the gathering and called Jimmy to ask why he hadn’t been invited.

I surmised that Nene hadn’t invited Jim because she simply didn’t think he’d accept. I felt bad, sort of, since Jim had invited me to attend some events with him. I had declined. My days of public appearances with him were over.

I arrived at the beach house late that night and went to church with Jacqueline on Sunday. It had been a pleasant weekend, but I knew I still had the housing headache ahead of me. On Monday, despite my e-mails and Nina’s visit to Cathy’s office, Cathy had no check and no tax returns to give Nina. Undoubtedly, Cathy was acting on Jim’s orders. I wasn’t going to ask again, but I needed the down payment for the house by that very day at 5:00
P.M.
My anxieties were in some ways the anxieties that any and every newly separated woman will immediately recognize, but I also knew that I had options and resources available—or at least friends and family with resources—that are not available to most women. I needed to borrow money for the down payment in a hurry, and luckily Mario offered to help.

I wasn’t home free, not by a long shot. By this point, Jim and I were very distant with one another. Civil and chilly. He left early and came back late, and the space we lived in was so large that even when we were both there, we didn’t encounter each other much. Although neither of us had moved out of the bedroom so as not to further alert Jacqueline to a problem, we slept as if the mattress were the entire United States, each of us at the edge on our own side of the Continental Divide, me on the Atlantic Coast, him on the Pacific.

Thanks to my medications and my scrupulous efforts to keep myself from engaging in upsetting conversations with Jim, my panic attacks were now under control. I pretty much had my putting-one-foot-in-front-of-another plan for equilibrium. But now and then, despite my vigilance, things happened that could push me right back into my most devastated state. The worst of these happened on a Saturday in October.

I had meandered into the kitchen one morning, as I always do, with nothing more on my mind than a coffee junkie’s need for her morning fix. I was in that still-rested post-sleep state—in my bathrobe, not my armor. On the kitchen table, I noticed a pile of papers—plain old Arial Bold typescript on white 8-by-11—indistinguishable from a routine memo or rough draft of a policy paper. I glanced at it idly. It began, “As you probably know, two months ago, my entire world blew up in an instant. . . .”

Altogether there were nine single-spaced pages, and they seemed to be the beginning of a book, probably the book he’d decided he would write once he accepted the fact that I would not co-author one with him. What can I say? I kept reading.

On page six was the following passage:

While my first marriage was a real attempt to try to live a normal life, my second was for political benefit. I married a woman for political gain. It was the lowest point of my moral life and I’m deeply ashamed of it.

And then, a little farther down:

Dina was still in the hospital with complications after the pregnancy. Golan came over to my simple condominium to talk. Eventually we went upstairs into my bedroom where we touched and explored each other.

It was an exhilarating night—yet forbidden.

I just stood there, feeling as if someone was putting a knife to my heart. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, and it just had. The Kennedys, both of them, were my confessors, sounding boards, nurses, and therapists during those early months, and after I read these passages, I didn’t know what else to do except head for their house with Jacqueline.

When I got there, I handed Lori the nine stapled pages and watched as she read. Throughout, there were murmurs of horror and disbelief, some of it unprintable. She was aghast, speechless, didn’t know what to say. Who would?

I left Lori’s house and went back to Drumthwacket. Jim arrived after me. I was completely walled off for my own protection. I certainly didn’t mention the manuscript he’d left in the kitchen.

If he saw that anything was odd in my demeanor, he didn’t mention it. He told me that he’d talked to the president at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey regarding a job for me, and showed me a job description. I didn’t say much in response.

In a little more than a month, I would be leaving Drumthwacket. Although the lawyers seemed to be moving toward a closing, I still didn’t have a home I could call my own. During this time, I had not heard much from Jim’s parents. I imagine they were just as uncomfortable with me as my parents were with Jim, though for different reasons. But now Ronnie, my mother-in-law, was in the hospital, and I went to visit her. Jack was there, and so were Caroline and Sharon. It was an excruciating hour and a half. We struggled to make small talk, all of us. They didn’t ask me a single real question, and I didn’t offer them a single real feeling. I was relieved when I could finally leave. Besides, I had other problems on my mind.

My move toward housing had now stalled. Not only was there termite damage, but there was a chance the sale would fall through. My insomnia returned, and I spent the darkest hours before dawn on the Internet looking for other possible houses. There weren’t any.

The weekend came, and Jim asked me if I wanted to go with him to a dinner in New York City at which Ray Lesniak was being honored. I didn’t get it. How could Jim not talk to us all week, not worry about whether Jacqueline and I even had a place to live, and then ask me to go to a dinner?

As First Lady, I hadn’t added anything to my schedule in over two months. But I did think it was important to honor commitments I’d already made, especially when it was in service of organizations I cared about. That month, I attended the Women’s Heart Foundation Gala, held at Drumthwacket. After an hour, though, I had to leave, because I kept breaking into tears whenever anyone asked me how I was. I did much better at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Philadelphia, where I could hide in the dark. I wasn’t exactly in the mood for a concert, but the noise of the crowd overshadowed the noises in my head, and for that I was thankful.

I got back to Drumthwacket from Philadelphia very late, and Jim didn’t come back at all. We no longer kept each other informed about our comings and goings. In the morning, I took Jacqueline shopping with Maria and Lori and had lunch with them. When I went back home, I found Jim in bed in the middle of the afternoon. I was heading out for dinner with the Kennedys. Jim had declined their invitation, but before I left, he asked me what I planned to do with Jacqueline with respect to school. I told him that I had to have a place to live before I could think about where she’d be going to school. I reminded him that I’d be homeless in forty-three days.

“Do you want some help in finding a place?” he asked.

It depended on whether a “place” was a house or an apartment, but I didn’t say that. In fact, I didn’t say anything.

The following day, I went to church with Jacqueline at St. Paul’s in Princeton. It wasn’t where we had regularly gone to church, but after Jim’s announcement I never again went back to the Aquinas Institute, the small chapel a few blocks from Drumthwacket where we’d attended mass every Sunday and where Jacqueline had been baptized. I had come to know a lot of the parishioners and I just couldn’t stand to face any of them.

Meanwhile, though I was in the throes of hiring an attorney, catching up at work, and organizing a major fund-raiser, Jim was continuing to hound me about housing. “You should make arrangements to move before the fifteenth of November,” he told me.

“I’d move if I had someplace to move to,” I told him.

“If you leave on the fifteenth,” he said, “you will look like white trash.”

“I’m leaving on the fifteenth,” I said. “I don’t have a place to live.”

He looked at me contemptuously. “Don’t you have any dignity or self-respect?” he said. “Jackie Kennedy wouldn’t do that.”

Her again.

“Jackie Kennedy’s husband wouldn’t resign without making sure that his wife and daughter had a place to live,” I said angrily.
How dare he?
I thought. He had cheated, lied, and betrayed me, and he was calling
me
trash?