The Suite Life (40 page)

Alec's financial scrambling trickled down to Gary and then Gianna, and suddenly
their
lifeline was a little tenuous. There was a lot less extra cash for them, particularly devastating as the Christmas bills came due, and they even started having trouble keeping up with the mortgage payments on their dream house. It wasn't long before the first hints of the DeMarco relationship curse reared its ugly head, and it wasn't long after that when the thought struck me that they'd end up in a therapist's office soon to hash over their marital strain.

In the meantime, Sofia's marriage to Victor was also falling apart. They had tried therapy, too, but his prying into her emails and phone messages hadn't abated, his philandering hadn't stopped, he still smacked her around without warning, and, from what she told me, his self-medication was on a par with Alec's. Sofia was all ears when I shared my problems, but for her it was more than the usual “misery loves company.” She seemed to love wallowing in misery, and she never once took my hint that her time would be better spent planning a way to rise above it. When I discussed her attitude with Olivia one day, her wise words rang true.

“Sofia can't help herself,” Olivia said. “She has no vision for a way out, so she'd prefer to see you wallow with her. When you succeed she'll be forced to come face-to-face with her own failure.”

Victor's money problems also paralleled Alec's. He no longer had the wealth to support his lifestyle and smooth things over with his wife, and he started sponging off her family.

Suddenly it seemed like that “no big deal” was an awfully big deal for some people. But I couldn't do anything about other people's problems, and precious little about my own. I was doing what I could outside the Luxe Regent and inside my laptop, and I was still strapped financially. Isabella was too wise a child not
to sense a lot of what was going on, but she mostly didn't talk about it.

The play I was working on at the time went off without a hitch, which is more than I could say about working with Moira. She still hadn't sent the novel out to publishers and was asking for still more revisions. I made the changes she requested while I prayed for patience and for gratitude, and was especially thankful for a reminder of God's love that came my way when I needed it most.

In March Olivia sent me a beautiful rosary of blue and crystal beads from Spain, and I gave those beads quite a workout. By that time Alec was deep into his slide both at the office and at home. He sold off his helicopter, started jettisoning other possessions, and passed it all off as “retrenching.” To me, however, these seemed more like acts of desperation. But along with his increasingly foul mood, I also noticed a humbling in Alec—not so much as first, but enough for me to be aware of it. Finally, he confessed that he'd borrowed two million dollars from Ted Ross. I assumed that he'd had no intention of ever paying it back, but my woman's intuition told me that this wasn't going to end well.

In the midst of all this, Spiro had a way of pouring himself out in a handful of words that captured exactly how I felt about our relationship:

As I drove around today with my family, I was thinking and reflecting, and trying to decipher both the joy and the pain that has come our way. I felt bound in the confines of our SUV, and never so free at one and the same time. I saw God in the sunset . . . as I see Him in you.

I didn't see God in my husband's world, although my faith told me He was there somewhere. Shortly after Grigor Malchek was ordered to pay millions in restitution to the New York Stock
Exchange the pace of Alec's slide increased, and I wondered if that was just coincidence. Truthfully, it didn't really matter, and all either Alec or I cared about was trying to prevent ourselves from sliding down the slippery slope we were on.

Isabella's one-million-dollar college fund soon became a casualty of her father's financial machinations, and it wasn't long after that when nasty letters from people to whom Alec owed money started showing up in the mail. “I can't believe you are not sending me my final payment and you live in a penthouse,” his tax attorney wrote, and that was just one of the milder expressions of what his creditors thought of him.

Still, I continued to stand by him. I had to. He was my daughter's father. No matter what we had gone through, I felt I had to be there for him, if for no other reason than that he was the one who had taken me out of the world I'd been living in and so badly wanted to escape. That didn't mean I loved him, or even liked him, and I didn't want to feel indebted to him, but no matter what happened, I knew I would always be there to help pick up the pieces. There was a part of me that had to give him at least that.

The IRS didn't think much of Alec, either, which they made quite clear when they showed up at our apartment unannounced asking to see his private books. It seemed that he had loaned a cousin money to open a deli that ended up being a front for illegal arms dealing.

Alec made a show of being unconcerned about that particular visit, and he slid through yet another investigation, but I felt the slope growing ever more slippery, especially when a tax arrears statement for more than three million dollars showed up in the mail.

Things got so bad, so quickly, that Marvin and Gregory no longer asked me about my financial situation. But just the fact that they were there, and didn't see a single thing wrong in my
continuing involvement with Spiro, was enough for me. They didn't care about money; they didn't care what day it was; all they cared about was love.

Spiro was adamant that I should start my own production company, which, he said, made sense on a number of levels that he didn't need to list. “And get a credit card in your own name,” he added. To think that Alec had me sign a prenup before we got married.
How absurd. What is that worth now? It will be worth something when I'm the one making the money.

So, I saw the sense in what he was saying. I had to start generating some income for myself, no matter how modest, and I simply had to get in the game sooner or later. So I didn't refuse the money he offered to get me started, and, combined with the few bucks I still had in an old savings account, it was enough for the lawyers and accountants who—Alec's “faux pas” notwithstanding—would have to get paid for helping me to incorporate, enough for cards and letterhead and such. I said a prayer of thanks that I had a few bucks still left over to spend on the few lunches I was going to have to spring for. The one thing I had no trouble deciding was what I would name my company.

Spiro played cheerleader every step of the way:

I love the name
Bridge Span Productions.

I love the logo and the colors.

The letterhead is beautiful.

The envelope is great.

It's you.

I got a Platinum Visa card with a five-thousand-dollar line of credit, which I managed to score on my own. I also managed to secure my very own American Express card. It was green and it was all mine. I found myself selling almost everything I had. Little by little to pay bills. I took control and saved our life. From
Silver to Steuben to Birkins to Biedermeiers—it all had to go. What was it really worth anyway? I asked myself time and time again.

To celebrate my strides toward independence, I took myself out to a trendy downtown bar where the oh-so-young, oh-so-gorgeous, oh-so-gay bartender delivered a menu with a winning smile. It took but a second for me to order the special drink that was listed in boldface: the Brooklyn Bridge. I looked around the crowded room and took my time with the only drink I intended to have. And when the bartender dropped my bill on the bar, there was no doubt who'd be picking up the tab. The name on the card was Samantha Bonti.

Alec celebrated the occasion in his own way, of course. That was the night he had a heart attack, and I almost had one when I heard his screams at 4 a.m. and rushed into his bedroom.

Alec dismissed the event as a “mini” one. And, accurate or not, I was happy to hear there was anything small in his life. He did, however, listen to his doctor's advice about ratcheting down his self-medication, and he swore he'd finally get some serious weight off, since the lap-band surgery he'd had years ago didn't seem to have done the trick. But within a few days he was back to his former habits.

First on the list of Bridge Span Productions were stage adaptations of a children's book,
Stalk to the Sky,
about constructing your own ladder, and a documentary,
Hear Them Chirp,
about how everyone has a right to speak, no matter how small or how frail. Good old Mary Davies, my second mother Mary, helped me get those projects off the ground, and good old Spiro and a few other angels kept them afloat. But my main goal was still getting
The Blessed Bridge
published.

So what if all they elicited from Alec were a couple of harrumphs.

They were all mine.

And for the first time since we were married, I also filed a separate tax return. I needed to separate myself from Alec at least financially as he continued to unload everything he'd amassed in the past few years, and the late notices on the mortgage for our apartment started piling up in the mail, which indeed no longer brought any good news at all.

Although his dramatic reversal of fortune was painfully obvious to me and everyone else in the family, Alec shrugged it off by saying the bigger sharks were doing what they always did—eating smaller fish. When he let go of Victor and officially shut the doors of DeMarco Futures in July, it was anticlimactic. The inadvertent blessing for doctor-brother Franco was that he was finally doing better financially than his little brother.

Eventually, everything went—the homes, the cars, the toys, the club memberships, even the rose gold Rolex he had given me on a sloop off the coast of Bermuda. All of it. In the end, the hookers Alec had hired for others had more than I did.

The seven-carat yellow diamond ring he gave me was the last to go.

“I'll replace it with a better one someday,” Alec said. “Soon. You'll see.”

Why is it that the fallen king cannot see even though he sits among the ashes and ruins of his once-great empire?

Only one thing remained of Alec's former empire: the World Series ring he'd received from Presley Warren.

I'd always thought all I wanted was to get over the bridge and have money and success, but if the past decade had taught me nothing else, I'd come to realize that all I really wanted was love. Without that, what do we really have? A whole lot of things that can be sold and a whole lot of nothing in our hearts. So when Spiro called and requested a late meeting in his office one August afternoon, I jumped at the chance to see the one man
who'd made me feel loved lately. The pleasure that Spiro gave me in ten minutes made every cell in my body become more alive.

He poured some wine, and then made a show of interest in the latest production figures. I could barely pretend to be interested myself, because there were two buttons open on Spiro's white linen shirt, and I was drinking in his rugged good looks. His office was too dimly lit to see the silvery gray in his eyes, but there was enough to see that they were glued to me.

Gentleman that he was, Spiro wrapped up the business part of the meeting after ten minutes, and suggested we just be in the moment.

Fine by me.

Our glasses were nearly empty, so I went to the sideboard, two glasses in hand, and refilled them. As I turned around, Spiro's eyes froze me in my tracks. There was a different look in them, a look that started the butterflies going in my stomach. I was still frozen ten seconds later when he pulled himself up in slow motion and moved toward me.

“Let me take those,” he whispered, as he took the goblets from my hands and caressed my eyes with his. He set the glasses on the sideboard, and his hands went to my waist, pulling me closer.

“You don't know what you do to me,” he said softly, then paused for a wickedly delicious moment before his lips locked on mine. He kissed me and kept kissing me, and then he pulled my sweater over my head and caressed my neck with his lips as his fingers undid the two hooks on my black lace bra and slid the straps from my shoulders. His eyes widened and caressed my breasts as the bra fell to the floor. Then I stopped him. “I can't. I just can't do this. Not now.”

Our eyes locked for another moment.

“You are a good woman, Sam,” he said resignedly. “One I will wait for and want forever.”