Paris: A Love Story (2 page)

Both books are still on his nightstand in the rue des Écoles—unfinished.

Shopping in Paris is one of our rituals. It is the only place in the world Richard enjoys shopping. Our closets are full of Parisian purchases spanning the last decade and a half. In a chic Right Bank boutique, I parade several beautiful suits and dresses. Richard looks up from the phone and nods at the velvet suit I am modeling. “That color looks good on you,”
he says. “C’est aubergine, monsieur,” the saleslady interjects. Richard has spotted some shoes of the same shade and, still on the phone, signals the lady to bring those, too. I decline the cashmere overcoat, the color of cream, that he drapes on my shoulder. “Let’s get a coffee,” I say, our time together nearly up.

On the rue de Rivoli, we squeeze into a crowded café terrace, Richard looking for shade, me for a sunny spot. “I’m sorry I can’t stay for your book party,” he says. “That’s the end of your perfect attendance record for four books,” I answer. “But you know I came just to be with you,” he says. “It won’t always be like this,” he promises. The black embassy car is at the curb; the driver is holding the door open. We kiss. It is our last time together in Paris.

From the café on the rue de Rivoli it is a short stroll to the W. H. Smith bookstore, where I now head. On the front table I see Bob Woodward’s new book,
Obama’s Wars
. I buy a copy and head back out into the October sunshine. At the Tuileries Garden, across the street, I pull up a wrought-iron chair and flip to the index. Holbrooke, R.: a great many listings. I turn to the one that also lists me. A wave of anger and disbelief washes over me as I read. According to Woodward, the president soured on Richard when my husband asked him to call him Richard, not Dick, at the ceremony appointing him special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. “For Kati,” Richard explained, “who is in the audience, and who doesn’t like ‘Dick.’”

How could the president—who once requested that his friends not call him “Barry”—hold this against Richard? I am
too agitated to sit for another minute in the sunny gardens. Embarrassed that I made such a big deal of my preference for Richard over Dick, a fact I made clear to him the minute we met, in 1985. Angry that such a trivial matter would turn the president against the man he just assigned his toughest foreign policy job. And then, as I head toward the Seine and home, I am overwhelmed by love for a man who would use his precious one-on-one with the commander in chief to ask a favor, for his wife! No wonder he never mentioned the Woodward book, nor brought a copy home. He was trying to protect me—as always. I have an urge to run after the limousine speeding him now to a military base outside Paris—to tell him I love him, one more time.

•   •   •

Aside from my superstitious fear that things were going too well for us, there were no signs, no portents of tragedy looming. He played tennis over Thanksgiving weekend in Southampton. We did a marathon of movies, his favorite pastime. But if I believed in signs, there was one. As Richard packed to return to Washington on that Sunday, he searched frantically for his wallet. We looked in all the usual places, emptied all pockets in his closet, and moved the bed and chest of drawers. No sign. Oh well, he said, it’ll turn up. It always has.

I returned to New York, Richard to Washington. Every time he called, he asked if his wallet had turned up. There was no money in it. He had already canceled his credit cards and replaced his security passes. Still, he was agitated that it had not turned up, as it always had in the past. Why are you so
upset? I finally asked him. “It’s the picture of us in the Tuileries, and your sister’s telephone number,” he said. “I’ve had them since 1994.” The wallet has still not turned up. Like Richard, it disappeared.

He disappeared. That is how it seems to me. I had assumed that death would be a gradual transition, a passage after long illness, and sad, unhurried good-byes. Not a midlife thunderclap.

One and a half hours before his collapse we were making our Christmas plans on the phone. We were finally getting away. I made him laugh when I described an incident in the news about an overzealous Homeland Security agent at LaGuardia, accused of groping by a diplomat we did not particularly like. An international incident was in the making—though compared to the life-and-death issues on which Richard spent every waking hour, a minor one. “Oh, it feels so good to laugh,” Richard said. Just one more week, I said. “Well, don’t bother coming to Washington this weekend,” he said. “I’ll be at the White House for the president’s year-end review. Got to go meet with David Axelrod at the White House, then Hillary at State. Love you.”

Love you, too.

When he called an hour and a half later I barely recognized his voice. “I feel a pain I have never felt,” he said from the ambulance, en route to the George Washington University Hospital emergency room. This voice of deep pain was not one I had ever heard. “I have no feeling in my legs,” he said. There was fear in my husband’s voice. “I am on my way!” I shouted over the siren’s wail. Those were my last words to Richard.

The days and weeks that followed seem long ago. Grief distorts everything—time included. Even as I reeled from shock, the explosion of love and the tributes from all corners of the globe were a balm. Richard was a big man—in every sense of the word. Controversy was bound to dog such a large personality. Throughout his career he collided with more cautious public servants. But all of that seemed washed away now by a general disbelief at the death of such a vividly
alive
man.

As the wife of such a public man, my grief could not stay private. My husband was still fighting for his life following twenty-one hours of surgery to repair a dissected aorta when our friend Samantha Power, my constant companion during those days, persuaded me to leave the hospital to attend Mass with her and her three-year-old son. (I remember her babysitter gave me a St. Christopher medal, which is still in my coat pocket.) Almost the minute we sat down in the pew, my phone rang. I slipped outside to Pennsylvania Avenue to take a call from the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. “Mrs. Holbrooke,” he said, “we are praying for your husband’s speedy recovery.” I thanked him politely. After seventeen years
with Richard, I knew not to waste a second with this key figure in the conflict for which my husband had given of his last measure. “You know, Mr. President, this is more than a job for Richard. It is his mission. He genuinely loves your country and your people too,” I said to the man with whom Richard had a famously fractious relationship. “Well, we need him back here, Mrs. Holbrooke,” Karzai said. “He must get better.” I thought I detected something akin to genuine emotion in his voice—but maybe I just wanted to.

As I headed back to the church, my phone rang again. The State Department Operations Center announced that Pakistan’s president, Asif Zardari, was on the line. “Kati!” he greeted me, for we had met. “I told Richard he was overdoing it! He must take it easy. He was traveling too much, and to such terrible places. Oh, I am so sorry. But he will be better. He is a strong man and we are all praying for him.” Zardari sounded like an old friend. Genuinely concerned. Human to human.

•   •   •

The third call as Samantha, her son Declan, and I were leaving the church was from President Obama. “Michelle and I are praying for you both,” the president said. “Richard is a strong man. He’ll pull through. We need him back.” The next time I left the tightly sealed world of the hospital was to attend a State Department event at which both President Obama and the secretary of state were to speak about Richard. It was a holiday party for the diplomatic corps, and Christmas carolers were circling around dignitaries and their spouses in their festive attire. I had changed my clothes for the first time since
Richard was admitted, but I neither looked nor felt festive. There was still hope then, but not enough to make the sound of “Jingle Bells” anything but jarring. I felt utterly disembodied as I shook hands with State Department colleagues of Richard’s and led our children into the ornate reception room of the secretary of state. Hillary was her warm, compassionate self. She had spent hours at the hospital, often silently holding my hand as we sat waiting. It was no effort to be with someone who loved Richard as much as she did. President Obama spoke eloquently to the gathered diplomats, calling Richard the greatest diplomat of his generation, now fighting for his life. Then the president took time to speak with me and each of our four children. I have White House photographs recording this event, but subsequent events have erased the memory of what he said to me.

As we set off from the State Department for the short walk back to the hospital, a black official SUV pulled up. “Mrs. Holbrooke,” the driver said, “I am with the FBI and I was attached to your husband’s security detail in Kabul. Let me drive you back to GW.” We all climbed in, and now I wish I had noted the agent’s name. He was there when everything turned and he was a kind man.

My cell rang. “Hello, Kati, this is Farzad Najam.” “Oh hello,” I answered, trying to sound bright. “Which paper are you with,” I asked, having been told Pakistani journalists were waiting at the hospital to interview me about Richard’s condition. “Kati, this is Dr. Najam,” he said. “Oh, I apologize, Doctor,” I said, my tone slipping. Lulled by the surreal holiday party
and the presidential attention, for just a moment I had stopped thinking about the doctors and the vigil in the ICU. “How far are you?” Dr. Najam asked. “A few minutes away,” I answered. “Okay, then. See you when you get back,” he said. I suppose my body language gave me away, for, though I said nothing, the previously talkative agent fell silent and picked up speed.

We trooped into the windowless room set aside for the family on the ICU floor. Dr. Najam and his team were waiting there. “Mrs. Holbrooke.” The handsome Pakistani cardiologist was now formal and, for the first time, unsmiling. “Richard is telling us he wants to go.”

I dropped my head in my hands for a minute or two. The room was very quiet. Then I followed the doctor to the ICU. “Take your time,” he said. “Take all the time you like.” The ICU felt different now. The feverish activity of the past three days had ceased. With the machines turned off, it was as quiet as a battlefield after defeat. The doctors and nurses looked grim and deflated, as they silently removed their masks. I said a few loving words to Richard, but he was no longer my Richard. Life leaves the body so quickly.

Our children followed. David, Anthony, Elizabeth, and Chris each said his own good-bye.

I crossed the hospital’s lobby, where hundreds of people had gathered—a blur of outstretched arms and tear-stained faces. How had word spread so fast?

Admiral Michael Mullen in his impressive uniform, and his wife, Debbie, gave us a lift to our Georgetown house. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs carried Richard’s clothes in what
looked like a garbage bag. Samantha and her husband, Cass Sunstein, arrived with Thai food. We wept and drank and laughed for the rest of the long night, and told the stories we will be telling forever. None of us believed he was gone—least of all me. I don’t remember feeling anything at all.

I awoke from a drugged few hours of sleep the next morning with the same question I would ask every morning for the next few months. Did I dream this? But the worse I feel, the more decisive I tend to be. So I announced to my children and siblings, We’re packing up the house. I don’t want to come back to this place. So, still in our pajamas, using the bubble wrap and boxes provided by Richard’s assistants, we set to work.

An hour or so into our packing, President Bill Clinton dropped by, unannounced. Settling into an easy chair and, with his legendary gift for consoling the stricken on full display, he spun tales of the man he called “Holbrooke.” I loved the one of Richard coming to “interview” him in Little Rock to see if he was fit to run for president. Or the one of “Holbrooke” telling him exactly where to sit at various Balkan conferences for maximum impact. “Seating or negotiating—he always had a plan,” the president said. “Smartest man I ever met,” he said, as his eyes filled with unshed tears. And then, just as suddenly as he arrived, Clinton glanced at his watch and said, “Look at the time!” and then announced, “I have to go to Haiti,” and off he went.

We resumed packing. By day’s end, I pulled the door of the N Street house shut behind me for the last time. It had been our sanctuary and we had been happy there. I forced myself to turn around. The familiar lemon-yellow door pulled me back up the front stairs. I looked up and down the tranquil Georgetown street, as I did each morning when I stepped out to get the newspapers. I want to feel this now, I told myself. I want to remember. It was dark and cold when we headed for Union Station and back to New York.

My family got me through Christmas. My sister and brother, my two children and nephews never left me for a single day or night. My sister cooked Hungarian dishes she learned from our mother and grandmother, while my brother played the piano. My children, grieving still for their father who died four years before, understood what I was going through: shock, alternating with high spirits at having the people I most loved near me. Sleepless nights left me groggy and weepy all day. Somehow, the snow that kept falling, wrapping the world in shades of gray and muffling the noisy city, helped. So did my nephew Mathieu’s newborn, Lucien. We bought a sleigh and took turns pulling him in Central Park. Hours spent digging our car out from under fresh mountains of snow were a welcome distraction. Mostly we did what families whose lives have suddenly been upended do: we talked about past Christmases, with Richard, with Mama and Papa, and with my children’s father, Peter. The Missing.

•   •   •

After the Christmas holidays, I returned to Washington for Richard’s memorial at the Kennedy Center. One week before
his death, he and I had crossed the same red-carpeted lobby to attend Washington’s most glamorous annual event, the Kennedy Center Honors. The capital’s entire establishment turns out for this, Washington’s equivalent of the Oscars. Holding hands, we greeted senators and cabinet members. Suddenly Richard noticed the bulky silhouette of a man standing alone, the space around him cleared. The capital’s way of marking a
nonperson.
C’mon, Richard said, pulling me toward Congressman Charles Rangel. “Hey, Charlie,” Richard said to the freshly disgraced congressman facing ethics charges. “Let me introduce my wife, Kati.” After some idle chatter, we took our leave of Rangel. Richard, a veteran of Washington’s sometimes cruel local customs, often said it’s the people who are suddenly down and out that we always have to be nice to. It’s easy to be nice to those on the up-and-up.