The Suite Life (42 page)

In the meantime, none of Alec's therapists could get through to him, and he descended to a level of despair and despondency that made pitiful look good. Out of common decency, if for no other reason, I placed a few calls to those so-called medical professionals to inquire about the prescription cocktail he was taking. Each claimed ignorance of others who might have been treating the same case and said there was no way of knowing how many mixologists were involved. I replied by saying that even if this was true, surely the therapist had noticed that Alec
was not entirely cogent when he was sitting in a session, and that whatever therapy was being applied wasn't having any measurable positive effect. I told them all that they were lucky they could take Alec in measured doses.
I,
on the other hand, had to live with him.

Forwarding Alec's BlackBerry communications to them as evidence of just how crazy he was put an exclamation point on my circumstances, and how hard it was for me to hang on to my own sanity:

I am going home, rolling a doob. Smoking it on our couch. Heating up the horrible trough of food. So if you come home with her, explain that her father is an UNHEALTHY, FAT, STONED, ANIMAL POTHEAD!!!!

In one of his rare lucid moments, Alec told me what he should have been sharing with his therapists: “I feel as though I live my life in a glorified jail.”

Gianna must also have felt like she was in prison with Gary, because she ended up having an affair with a high school teacher. A year of therapy hadn't done a thing to save her marriage, and I wasn't surprised about that, either. Gary had always seemed like a nice enough kind of guy, but he also struck me as weak, and I'd never once thought he'd be good in a foxhole. Without Alec to lean on for his livelihood, Gary was a fish out of water and well on his way to failing as a man, too.

Victor and Sofia had also been on life support for a couple of years already, and she finally decided to pull the plug that year. They, too, had lost everything they had, and the finger pointing between Alec and Victor wasn't pleasant to witness.

Quite frankly, with all of the relationship carnage surrounding me I wondered whether therapy wasn't a complete waste of
time. The light of hope had always shone on me, however, and I'd always thanked God for that, so I tried to stay positive about the potential of both psychological counseling and romance. I thanked God for Spiro when it came to
affaires d'amour,
and for Olivia, who was living proof that what I reached for wasn't beyond my grasp.

My “sister” had kept up a torrid relationship with her construction worker boyfriend, who turned out to be an avid sailor and a man of means who had grown up in Northport, Long Island, the son of a well-to-do investment banker. He had a trust fund that could easily support a family for life and had only worked construction to keep himself grounded as he did his own searching. Now that he had grasped Olivia, he too was ready to be “off on an island somewhere,” as she had mused the first time I met her. Plans for a sailboat charter service on the island of Formentera, off Spain's Mediterranean coast near Ibiza, were well along and they'd be relocating there soon.

God bless the child that's got his own, indeed.

Alec also saw hope in Olivia's good fortune, but it was the warped kind, as pretty much everything to do with Alec was. As soon as he got wind of the frequent trips she was making to Europe, he wondered if I'd mind asking her to smuggle some hash back.

I dove into my journal to take my mind off the dim prospects for
The Blessed Bridge,
and also to give me something all my own to hold on to in the midst of Alec's insanity, clinical or not. And I held on to the promise of having love one day with Spiro.

As yet another unexpected blessing, Alec grew to accept Marvin and Gregory. He got to know that they accepted him for the burnout he was without once mocking him or even condescending to him. He got to know just what good friends they could be in March, after they patted him on his back for
being cleared in Spencer Edelman's investigation and having all claims against his former boss dismissed by the New York State Court of Appeals.

Yes, unbeknownst to me
and
Alec, his name had cropped up on several documents and in a handful of recorded wiretaps. The ones in our mini-mansion weren't very hard to arrange, given Alec's proclivity for deconstructing telephones that then had to be repaired.

Of course, if he'd known he was being dragged into yet another investigation, Alec would have let it roll off his back. It was all just business as usual for him. The way I saw it, I'd gone from Tony Kroon's criminal prosecutions in Brooklyn to Alec's fraud prosecutions in Manhattan. One mob to another.

At least this time the guy I was with came through clean as a whistle. Alec, despite everything he'd done, had never done anything illegal—at least when it came to trading. And that was something he could actually be proud of.

It was no surprise that Ted Ross and his brother, Robert, also came through with flying colors. Their Harvard pedigrees and deep pockets kept their names almost entirely out of the court dockets and scandal sheets.

Spencer Edelman, he of his own gubernatorial aspirations, had to have a scalp, however, and he managed to implicate a senior trader. When I saw a headline mentioning Carmine Sacco, the mobster's name splashed above the fold on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal,
it was a delicious irony to me. Alec, however, took it all in stride. “He didn't have a chair when the music stopped,” he said.

Sorta like what happened to you, I suppose.

Although he had shown a glimmer of spunk when that news hit the papers, it didn't last very long and he soon resumed his wallowing. Paying the rent or utility bills was always a balancing act, and I had to squirrel food away for my daughter and me
most of the time, stocking up whenever a few extra dollars came my way.

Alec, however, never seemed to lack for food—not that I was around him when he ate. As far as I could tell, he hadn't lost a pound, and I was sure he had plenty of snacks stashed away, as well as just enough money to satisfy all of his appetites including booze. He always had a bottle close at hand, even if the label was pedestrian. He always had some loose cash for a magnum of wine or a two-liter bottle of vodka that was on sale.

Whatever income I had from producing plays was still modest and sporadic, and now I had to scrounge for daily living expenses as Alec did to keep a roof over our heads. Scrounging wasn't anything new for me, and I knew I'd get by. I was thinking of getting a steady job, but Alec wouldn't hear of it.

I didn't want to live with Alec another minute, but I could look months into the future without seeing me anywhere else. All I saw was his impending bankruptcy and me being tied up with him still. Isabella, meanwhile, had a way of keeping me focused on my support system. When she spied me in a down mood my daughter-angel would ask, “Did you ask the Blessed Mother to help you feel better?” Tears welled up in my throat whenever she said those words.

“Did you talk to her? Did you tell her what you want?” she would always add. “Whatever it is, she'll give it to you, Mom.”

I always took her advice . . . and I always asked for salvation. Salvation for me, yes, but also for the pitiful man I was with, and for my daughter, who had her own cross to bear.

Months of prayerful requests were answered in part just as summer began, when Alec finally roused himself enough to announce that he would lower himself enough to look for a “lowly” Wall Street job that would “only be worth three hundred grand a year.”

I could still squeak out ten years with that amount.

He didn't offer any reasons for this unprecedented action, and I didn't care if it was because he was getting his game face on for the long climb out the depths or if he just wanted to have some flash cash for getaway weekends.
Anything
normal coming from him was heaven-sent for me, and I prayed that his lesson in humility would be the start of his salvation.

Even with all of the self-abuse Alec had administered for years, on the day he ventured back into the maw of capitalism he still managed to look more than decent in a business suit. I chalked that up to another one of God's mysteries and kept my fingers crossed.

Even though he was a mere shell of himself inside, he managed to talk his way into a job on his third interview. A regular salary was also God-sent, as was the medical coverage that included psychiatric care. I had no idea if Alec would avail himself of that, however, or whether the therapy would be successful, so I left those things in His hands, as He'd gotten us this far.

The gifts from God continued as Alec's boss turned out to be another angel. He was the perfect combination of shrewd Jewish businessman and rabbi, and he saw Alec as someone who could be saved while he contributed to the bottom line.

Alec, for his part, ratcheted down his excesses and displayed enough flashes as a lowly stockbroker to keep his boss's faith until the fall, but the job just wasn't big enough to keep his attention. “I can't do this anymore,” he announced to me in mid-October.

I've been feeling that way for a while.

A long while.

“I'm gonna tell my boss that,” he added, and he did—the very next day.

Several times, as a matter of fact, as his boss would have none of Alec's quitting. Alec told me he had shouted, “I'm depressed and just can't take it anymore!” but all that accomplished was
his boss's picking up the phone and arranging an interview with the company psychiatrist. But it didn't buy any better results. What it did buy was Alec's tailspin, as he experimented with a new course of prescription drugs. More sordid displays of his appetites were the only thing therapy had resurrected, and I called his psychiatrist when I'd had enough displays of psycho-pharmaceutical experimentation. I got her voice mail, but, as I was as ready as I'd ever be to say what I wanted to say, I left a message:

Listen to me. You've got my husband on five different medications—what, was I born yesterday? He staggered into a kitchen chair last night and fell face-first onto the table, busting up his head in three places. I'm documenting all this because if he dies in his sleep, I'm suing you and everyone else who put him on drugs.

She didn't return my call, but that was okay—my self-assurance and self-support system were all I needed. But what became painfully obvious to us both was that Alec needed some kind of new treatment. His angel of a boss stepped up to the plate again and arranged a stay at a bucolic rehab facility in Connecticut. At thirty grand for the week, still top of the line, even though it seemed to be the end of the line.

He's gone from husband to roommate to patient.

Alec managed to settle in, and the first report from those in charge after his second day there was that he was happy. They did advise, however, that he should be visited only after he'd had a meal, as that was when he was most stable. I had no doubt they'd heard his incoherent ramblings about everything from the food to the facilities, and I was certain they had their hands full with his daily threats of a daring escape, which was among the nonsense he copied me on via BlackBerry.

But I hoped with all my being that his caregivers also saw
the hopeful side I saw on those few occasions when his communications were from the heart, such as when he said he missed Marvin and Gregory almost as much as he missed Isabella, and when, out of the blue, he gave a thought to me:

I'm sorry hon. I should have treated you way better. I promise I'm getting out of this funk.

He followed that shocker up with an even bigger one citing 2 Timothy 4:7: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”

However, Alec still being Alec in some ways, he also managed to wrench his knee playing basketball with other well-heeled “inmates,” and then he signed himself out declaring he was again in control of his life. I crossed my fingers once more, and made signs of the cross with them often in the days that followed.

Once again my prayers were answered in part, as there were no excessive displays from Alec, but he still showed the listlessness of severe depression.

“It's not as bad as it looks, Sam,” he said softly from his bed late one morning when I had to roust him for a follow-up doctor visit. “I have a plan. It's a good one and I feel good about it. A ninety-million-dollar deal with a local cable sports network. I'm just waiting for two things to happen.”

I've been waiting for two things, too: a book deal and freedom. Freedom to explore on my own and freedom to choose the person I want to be in love with. Forever.

“It'll be all business next week,” Alec continued. “Suit, tie, the works. Just you wait and see.”

To his credit, he kept himself together well enough to muddle through at his boss's small stock-trading company. I was hopeful that he was on his way to making peace with himself
and that the deal he was working on, which he swore would set things right, would come to pass.