Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (28 page)

I nodded but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

“I’m being blackmailed.”

“Who’s blackmailing you?”

“Golan.”

“Golan?” I didn’t get it.

He nodded. “For fifty million dollars.”

“What do you mean? Why is Golan blackmailing you?”

“I had a relationship with him.”

“A relationship? What kind of relationship?” I still wasn’t getting it. I wasn’t allowing myself to get it.

“Not sexual . . .” he said.

He paused. I must have given him a puzzled look, a stunned look.

“. . . but sexual.”

I still was having trouble comprehending.

“Not sexual . . . but sexual . . . ? What does this mean? What does this mean for us?”

“I need you more than ever.”

I started to cry, feeling a tangled mixture of bewilderment, injury, fear, sorrow, uncertainty, and, at the same time, relief that he still valued me. I sensed that Jim had done profound damage to our family, irreversible damage. Still, I pitied him, knowing that he knew that whatever the scope of the destruction, he was its agent. He looked forlorn. Jim got up from his chair, came over to the couch, and sat next to me. Then he just held me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get through this together. I just want this to go away.”

All I could do was cry.

“Golan’s demanding a lot of money, but I’ll start begging people for money in the morning.” Actually, the plan was for Jim and his advisers to solicit private money for Jim’s “defense fund.” Because the funds would be private and not public, they could be used however Jim wanted without his being accountable to the public. However, as I would learn sometime during that week, the real goal was to accrue enough funding to pay Golan’s bribe. Just then Jimmy and Lori Kennedy walked in. They tried to comfort me, and they tried to comfort Jim, embracing both of us, and then they started to cry. Now we were all crying, the four of us.

Jim and Jimmy started talking about whether they could bargain Golan down. “Maybe two million dollars?” said Jimmy.

“Maybe three million,” said Jim.

“Yeah, maybe three million,” said Jimmy, nodding.

“What do you think it would take to make it go away?” said Jim.

“I don’t know. He could always come back for more, I guess.”

It was futile. They were spinning their wheels, grasping at straws, having the kind of conversation you have when nothing you can say or do will make any difference at all.

I couldn’t stop crying, and I didn’t want Jacqueline to see me in this state. I didn’t want her to sense that anything was wrong. I wanted to protect her, so I asked Lori to put her to bed.

Jimmy and Lori left at about ten o’clock, and Jim and I stayed up to talk awhile. We discussed whether or not to try to pay Golan off to make the threat go away. “This is a difficult decision, and one that we will make together,” he said. We went to bed, but neither of us slept.

The next morning, Tuesday, Jim again brought up the issue of agreeing to Golan’s demands. “If I pay Golan off, we’ll be in debt for the rest of our lives,” he told me, bleakly. “We’ll never own our home, we’ll never be able to send Jacqueline to college. Nothing.” It seemed to me that Jim was thinking that he could announce he wouldn’t be seeking reelection, but that if he found a way to pay Golan off, he could see his term through to 2005.

At this point, all the particulars of the damage still hadn’t gotten through to me—at least not steadily—and so my emotions slid and skittered every which way. I was in tears, then I was numb, and then I was convinced we could find a solution. But wait. A solution to what? Jim’s governorship? Because he was my husband, his problems were my problems too. But where was our marriage? Was there a marriage? Had there
ever
been a marriage? Jim’s words rang in my ears “. . . relationship with Golan, “
not sexual but sexual
.” Had I missed signs of his
relationship
with Golan because I’d been concentrating on what I suspected was his
relationship
with Kari? Could I have recovered if that had been the case? Not that it mattered now, but I thought so. During the time I’d suspected Kari, I’d never threatened to leave. But Golan?

Never mind, I needed a respite from this. I needed a respite from myself. I took my shower, got dressed, but then felt exhausted by the effort. Still, I forced myself to go to work as if it were the kind of ordinary day I thought would never come my way again. At least there might be some distraction at work. Besides, if I stayed home, the house staff would know something was really wrong and, most importantly, Jacqueline would sense my despair. On the way to my office in Newark, I just sat in the car, not chatting with the trooper who was driving me as I usually would have.

Once I was at work, though, I couldn’t function. I lurched through the day, grasping my situation and then losing my grasp on it. I stayed bunkered in my office, my door closed and calls to my office going to voice mail, as my thoughts continued to skid around my mind. The fact that the events of my life were taking place on a public stage amplified my pain, but my pain wasn’t about Jim’s job; it was about our marriage and our family.

Jim was signing the Highlands Preservation Bill that day and had called my office at 11:00
A.M.
as he was about to board a helicopter. He told me that he was probably going to hold a press conference later at the statehouse in Trenton to announce that he would not seek reelection, and that he wanted me there with him.

“Call me back and let me know,” I said. I couldn’t have thought through a cogent response, but if anything was routine in our relationship, it was that Jim’s plans were always in flux, and so my call-me-back response was automatic.

“OK,” said Jim. “I’ll call you back to confirm.”

When I hadn’t heard from Jim by noon, I thought maybe he’d canceled the press conference, but he called again at one thirty asking me to get to the statehouse as soon as I possibly could. He didn’t explain the delay. An hour later, thanks to having a state trooper driver who could speed with impunity, we were fifteen minutes from Trenton.

Then my phone rang. It was Jim again, only now he was telling me
not
to come.

“Are you going ahead with the press conference?”

“I don’t know. I have to go,” he said. “I can’t talk to you now. We’ll talk more later.”

It was no use asking him his thinking; his major political decisions were never made by him alone, but in consultation with his advisers. In fact, I thought he too often succumbed to his advisers. I was exhausted, wiped out, and red-eyed. I had barely been able to control my crying on the ride from Newark to Trenton. I needed refuge and, literally, a shoulder to cry on. Although I was just minutes from home, I couldn’t face going to an empty house, so I asked the trooper who was with me to turn around and take me to Lori Kennedy’s in Rahway, and when I got there I cried some more.

JIM DID NOT HOLD
a press conference that day after all. When I got home later in the evening, he was again in bed and on the phone. He registered my presence, but he didn’t say much of anything to me. He spent most of the night on the phone, talking to various people, including a rabbi whom he had asked to talk to Golan, or maybe to plead with him. In fact, Jim was directing the rabbi to Golan’s apartment. “. . . Yes, that’s the right apartment . . . No answer? OK, just wait . . .” This conversation lasted more than an hour.

Jim got off the phone and got up to go to the bathroom. As he came back into the bedroom, I could see he was having difficulty making his way back to bed, as if he had taken several sleeping pills. He could barely walk. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that he was drunk. At one point, his foot got caught in a lamp wire and he tripped, knocking down the lamp on his nightstand. Perhaps as a reflex, and almost to my surprise, I got up to help him as he stumbled about. I was suffering myself, and I was angrier at Jim than I’d ever been at anyone in my life. But I also felt pity for him. In fact, I felt pity for all of us.
Such a tragedy
, I thought.

Once he was back in bed, Jim took the phone and called the rabbi back again to ask if he’d succeeded in convincing Golan not to pursue the lawsuit. He hadn’t. Jim was distraught. Hours on the phone, and nothing to show for it. We tried to sleep, but all we did was toss and turn.

On Wednesday, August 11, for the first time during this crisis, Jim paid a visit to his parents and his sister Sharon, who were staying at the Bay House. I don’t know what he told them, but if it wasn’t the whole truth, or nothing but the truth, my guess is that it was more of the truth than he’d ever dared tell them before. He also called me to say he wanted to talk that evening when he got back.

I thought he might want to reopen yesterday’s conversation about paying off Golan. Maybe he’d been able to come up with the funds? But Jim never even mentioned Golan. Instead, once he was home, we sat at the kitchen table and talked, which we’d done so rarely during our marriage. Jim’s irritability was gone, and he seemed almost calm.

“This is not easy, but we’ll get through it,” Jim began. “We have our health and our daughter.” He told me that he was confused about who he was, confused about his sexuality. “I think I might be gay,” he said. However tentatively he phrased it, this was the first time he’d ever used the word “gay” to characterize himself, at least to me.

Confused. Might be gay
.

I began to cry. “If you thought you might be gay, then why did you marry me?”

“I fell in love and was attracted to you. You were smart, beautiful, and talented.”

“This marriage was all a lie.”

He said, “No, we have a beautiful daughter.”

Suddenly, I was reeling, like a punch-drunk boxer—the blows had come so fast and furiously, I couldn’t absorb each one in time to ready or steady myself for the next one. I’d had a few weeks to prepare myself for the possibility that Jim might not seek reelection, and I knew I could stand by his side and look poised, and maybe even relieved, as he made that announcement. But now, in the last three days, he had told me that Golan was planning to sue him for sexual assault and harassment unless he could come up with $50 million. Then he told me this had come about because of his “relationship” with Golan, which was “not sexual but sexual.” As recently as dinnertime, I had little crannies of hope that at least, at the very least, Golan’s attempts at extortion would disappear if Jim announced he would not run again. That way he could finish out his term, and if our marriage was dying, it could at least die in private. Now another blow: It appeared Jim would be making more revelations at this press conference. He didn’t tell me what he planned to say, but I assumed he would reveal the fact that he was being blackmailed.

Another sleepless night. I was locked up in my body, a small cramped cell of dread. What I felt was akin to physical torment. I knew, my body was telling me, that my marriage to Jim was over, and my life as I’d known it was over too.

“You fell in love with a very confused man,” Lori Kennedy had said to me earlier that day. Maybe so, but for a “confused” man, Jim now seemed to be finding his way. In a span of less than twenty-four hours, he would move from telling me, his wife, that he “might” be gay to telling the world that he was. I couldn’t see it from my vantage point at the kitchen table in Drumthwacket that Wednesday night, but he had been traveling to this moment of self-acceptance for a good part of his forty-seven years, and was almost there, almost in the driver’s seat. But the rest of those close to him, and no one more than I, were lost and disoriented. Once again, I was in the dark, in a storm, in a skid on black ice.

18. MY DAY OF INFAMY

THANKS TO AMBIEN, I
was able to sleep for a few hours, but I still woke up early, weary and listless, not knowing what to do or how to do it. Jim was awake but still in bed, already on the phone planning for his press conference later in the day. I walked to the kitchen to make my morning coffee, grateful for the tiny shred of routine. With the press conference looming, going into the office or even working from home was completely out of the question, and I called Cindy to tell her I wouldn’t be in. What else of the life I had recognized as my own would survive?

As if she were reading my mind, Jacqueline called out to me from her room a dozen feet from ours.

“Mommy! Mommy! Come get me!”

“Good morning, sunshine,” I said to her, kissing her as I always did when I got her out of her crib and hugging her, today maybe a little more tightly than usual. Did she notice? I deliberately relaxed my grip, hoping I was hiding the sorrow in my voice as well. I wanted to shield her from all of it—my grief and confusion and the uncertainty ahead. I wanted her to feel as if the day were ordinary.

My father was still taking care of Jacqueline while I was at work, but my parents were vacationing in Portugal for the month, so my friend Freddie would be baby-sitting Jacqueline today at home. They were comfortable with each other, so there wouldn’t be a problem.

Jim came into the kitchen while Jacqueline and I were eating breakfast, telling me he’d be working downstairs in the first-floor library with his staff on the statement for his press conference, scheduled for this afternoon. They would work out the details of the press conference, as well as the wording for the announcement. In it, he would say that he was not running for reelection and acknowledge that he was being blackmailed. As for what he was being blackmailed about? I had no idea how he planned to handle it or if he planned to elaborate in any way.

“Why don’t you come down and say hello,” Jim said. Then he was gone.

Half an hour later, now dressed, I went down to the library. Around the table with Jim was a tense huddle of men, about half a dozen of them, arguing in audible but constricted tones. Among them were Jamie Fox, his chief of staff; Michael DeCotiis, his governor’s counsel; Jim’s political boss and mentor, Ray Lesniak; Curtis Bashaw, whom Jim had appointed to chair the Casino Reinvestment Authority; as well as political strategists Joel Benenson, Steve DeMicco, and Brad Lawrence. And there they were, sitting downstairs from our bedroom, apparently debating our future or lack thereof.