Fairy Tale Interrupted (23 page)

Despite having spent countless hours hanging out in John and Carolyn’s apartment, I’d never stayed there overnight or alone. But John had offered me their place because my air conditioner was broken. Earlier that afternoon, after overhearing me in the office calling around for a repairman, he leaned on the doorframe, crossing his arms, his shirtsleeves rolled up, looking at me like
Are you kidding me?

“Rosie, no one in Manhattan is going to fix your air conditioner on a Friday afternoon when it’s nine thousand degrees outside.”

Even John, who could get anything he wanted with a snap of his fingers, knew when to accept the impossible.

“Stay at our place,” he said. “There’s food and wine in the fridge. Besides, Carolyn would kill me if she knew I let you suffocate in your apartment all weekend.”

And just like that, my problem disappeared. That was John. He fixed everything, or at least gave me some peace of mind. But he quickly followed his magnanimous gesture with a wisecrack:
“Just don’t sit around sniffing my clothes,” he said. “I know you want to, because you’re so in love with me.”

Soon after, John popped his head in again to tell me he was going to work out and then head off for the weekend.

“You have to meet Lauren in the lobby at six-thirty,” I said.

John was flying his plane to Massachusetts and dropping Carolyn’s sister off for a weekend on Martha’s Vineyard before continuing on with Carolyn to Hyannis.

After reminding John to pick up Lauren, I said, “Do you mind if I leave at five-thirty today?”

“Sure, Rosie, no problem. I’ll call you later.”

As he walked out the door, he turned to me once more and said, “Rosie, you’re the best. Thanks for smoothing things over.”

Before I left for the day, I put a pink sticky note on the table in his office: “Meet Lauren in the lobby at 6:30.” It never hurt to remind John twice.

A little after midnight—while I was tying up the main line talking to Matt—the fax line started ringing. The loft didn’t have call waiting, because Carolyn hated it—she thought it was rude to put someone on hold to find out who else was calling. (Whenever people, frustrated by a very persistent busy signal, asked why they didn’t have call waiting, I would say, “They can’t afford it.”)

Probably only five people in the world had the fax number, so when I heard it ring that late, I figured it was John or Carolyn calling to check in. I told Matt I’d call him back and picked up the fax line.

“Hello,” I said.

“Oh, Carolyn, thank God you’re home.”

It was Carole Radziwill, Anthony’s wife.

“Carole, it’s Rose. What’s going on?”

“Where are they?” Carole asked.

“What do you mean, where are they?”

The friend who was supposed to pick John and Carolyn up in Hyannis had called the house on the Vineyard—they didn’t arrive at the airport. Carole, who was spending the summer with Anthony at John’s house, had been frantically trying Carolyn’s cell phone, all the while hoping the busy signal at the loft meant they had never left the city. Realizing they weren’t at home, she released a small “Oh God.”

No way. No fucking way
. I hadn’t understood the direness of the situation until Carole uttered those words, but I refused to let my mind wander anywhere near the vicinity of their meaning.
No way
. Working for John came with a host of expectations and responsibilities: dealing with the media, maintaining his privacy, and making his life run as smoothly as possible. Being prepared for the unexpected had been part of the job, and I had always risen to the occasion. I could deal with anything. But not this.

There has got to be an explanation other than the obvious one. There’s no way that John would let something like this happen. They’re fine. They just decided not to go. They went someplace else, that’s all. I will find them.

I had to get off the phone and find out what happened. I had to fix this. Carole had already called the airports in Hyannis and on the Vineyard, so I called his flight instructor, Jay Biederman. I woke up his roommate, who told me Jay was on vacation with his family in Switzerland. I didn’t care where the fuck he was; I needed to find him. He’d know what was going on. I terrified
the roommate, who dug up a number. It didn’t matter that he was overseas or that it was so early in the morning there; when I reached Jay, he heard the panic in my voice and reassured me: “He’s done it so many times by himself, and it’s such a short flight. He hugs the coastline the whole way.” We were in agreement: no way had the plane gone down. Things like that just did not happen.

I thought about my last conversation with Carolyn and how I’d told her to get on the plane.
Oh God.
Standing alone in the middle of that big, empty space, I made phone call after phone call. Smoking a thousand cigarettes, I called the airports—Caldwell, Hyannis, Martha’s Vineyard. I called Ted Kennedy’s house in Hyannis and his assistant at home. I called the friends who were supposed to pick them up, and I called Matt.

I needed to stop Matt from going to L.A. for the Rob Lowe shoot. He had to be here. But I kept getting his answering machine. He had probably turned the ringer off because of his early flight.

I needed to keep it together. When everything sorted itself out in the morning, I didn’t want John lighting into me for losing my head and calling the whole world to say his plane was missing. I never wavered from protecting his privacy.

But around 2:00 a.m., Carole called back: she had alerted the Coast Guard.

Oh my God, what is she doing? He is going to kill me. If this becomes a thing, he will be furious with me.

I managed crises and kept things quiet: that was my job. My job
was
John, and I refused to let go.

Just as a sleepless night ended, I finally got Matt on the phone. “Don’t go to the airport,” I said. “John’s plane is missing.”

Matt was silent for a long time; then he said only “This is going to be terrible.”

My stomach dropped at his verdict.
You don’t know that,
I thought.

Having exhausted all my options, I finally turned on the television to see what the news was reporting. CNN showed footage of military helicopters scanning the dark waters around Martha’s Vineyard. The monstrous picture on the screen conflicted with an image that continued to run through my mind, consoling me like an old family photo, of John landing in a field and exiting the plane, a dirt-streaked Carolyn, angry but unhurt, not far behind.

The phone wouldn’t stop ringing, with every friend, family member, and colleague who had the number calling the apartment. I engaged in that irrational communication, answering the phone each time as if I were simply taking down a message while John and Carolyn were out of town, like any good houseguest. But people wanted answers, and I didn’t have them.

I tried to ground myself by checking my home machine—remembering there was another place I belonged—and discovered I had dozens of messages.

“Rose, I am so sorry,” each message began.

Fuck that
. They hadn’t even found the plane yet and people were ready to give up on him. Well, I wasn’t. I hung up the phone. But as soon as I did, it rang again. I picked up. I had to: it could be John needing help. Of course, it wasn’t.

At seven o’clock in the morning, one call came in that I was glad to get. It was Carolyn’s best friend, Jessica, who had become a judgment-free, safe harbor for anything to do with Carolyn.

“Jessica,” I said. “You need to come down here right away.”

She hung up before I had finished my sentence and was at the door so fast I swear she must have flown.

“Where is she?” Jessica, still wearing her pajamas, asked when I opened the door.

“What do you mean, where is she?” I asked.

Jessica had lent a sympathetic ear to Carolyn the day she refused to go to Rory’s wedding and hadn’t spoken to her since my intervention. She assumed I was keeping Carolyn company as she hid at home freaking out about John.

“She went with him, Jessica,” I said.

Jessica lost it. She cried. I cried. We reminisced, and then scolded ourselves for it. We schemed, and then were embarrassed. We were all over the place. How else could we be? No blueprint existed for behavior in such a situation. Having Jessica as company was a relief, but eventually she had to go back home. She had a life.
Unlike me,
I thought, and then pushed it out of my mind.
This is just a big mistake
.

After she left, I was alone again, inundated with phone calls and overwhelmed by the solemn droning of the TV. I wanted to rip the phone out of the wall and throw the television out the window. An hour later, the intercom rang. It was Tony, a friend of John’s whom I had called at 6:00 a.m. because he owned the gym where John worked out—one of the last places he went before getting on the plane. I thought he might be able to provide me with a clue to help me find John. After I tracked him down in the Hamptons, Tony told me he was coming back to the city right away.

As soon as he walked through the front door, I fell into his arms and sobbed uncontrollably. A deep well of abandonment
poured out—John and Carolyn disappeared, and nobody believed they were coming back. A strong, macho Italian guy, Tony immediately stepped into the role of my protector, which I so desperately wanted and needed in that moment.

His visit was also a reality check, as I listened to his description of the media and mourners gathered outside the building; I shivered as I realized I had no idea what was going on in the outside world, even nine floors down. Apparently, hundreds of people had appeared to leave flowers and candles and to pay their respects. So many had assembled that the police put up barriers to make an organized line for those wishing to visit the makeshift memorial. That was in addition to the hundreds of media outlets stationed on the block.

After the news programs began listing the date of John and Carolyn’s deaths—July 16, 1999—before the Coast Guard had even made the announcement, I turned off the television and went into a media blackout. It was death porn and I couldn’t look at it. I popped in a videotape, Chris Rock’s comedy special
Bring the Pain,
and played it on a loop. It was my salvation.

Day turned into night without notice. The calls that never stopped coming allowed me to ignore the passage of time, Saturday becoming Saturday night, hope becoming hopelessness. Tony kept urging me to take a break, put the phone down, but I wouldn’t hear of it. He said I needed to eat—a typical Italian response to tragedy. Nicotine was all the fuel I needed. And rage.

One phone call in particular got me so angry I could feel my mother’s influence (the part of me that could tell off a bishop in church) asserting itself.

“RoseMarie, it’s Barbara Walters. Can you ever forgive me for calling you at a time like this?”

How the hell did she get that number, and how did she know I was at John and Carolyn’s? I wanted to kill the person who gave her the information.

“Probably not,” I answered.

“I’m going on the air tonight with
20/20
. I already have people who are going to talk to me. Is there any way you can say something, on or off the record?”

“Anyone who is going to come on the air tonight doesn’t know anything and is not a close friend of John’s. Trust me,” I said before hanging up.

I could deal with scandal, problems at
George,
or Carolyn being stalked, but not this. I didn’t know how to do this.

Around dinnertime, the intercom rang again. Downstairs, Richie Notar, one of the owners of Nobu, had beat his way through the sobbing mourners, bushels of flowers, a cathedral’s worth of candles, and pushy paparazzi to deliver bags and bags filled with food. Nobody told him to come, he just came, figuring someone would be here, trapped and in need of nourishment. He didn’t start eulogizing John, a regular at his restaurant, which was around the corner from the loft, and someone he worked out with at the gym; he just dropped off the bags of food. I practically choked on his kindness before giving him a huge hug. Delivering a five-star meal to a woman holding a vigil was the kind of thing John would do.

After Richie left, Tony set the table and started to lay out all the gorgeous food.

“RoseMarie, come sit,” he said softly.

I looked at the food covering the table and it turned my
stomach. The phone rang again and I lunged for it. “Hello?” I said desperately.

Tony wrenched the phone from my hand and hung it up.

“You don’t need to talk to whoever that is,” he said. “Now sit. And eat.”

He took me by the shoulders and guided me to the table as if I were a child. We sat in silence, me picking at my food, and him devouring the meal as if he had just completed a marathon workout.

The phone continued to ring throughout dinner and as we cleared the dishes. It rang while we sat on the couch through another round of
Bring the Pain
. And it rang through the night. But somehow, having Tony there—someone just there for me—I was able to let go and sleep for a few hours.

In the wee hours of Sunday morning, when the phone rang again, I picked it up by force of habit.
John, call, you asshole
.

It was Senator Kennedy’s office. In a tight, quiet voice, his aide relayed the message that the Coast Guard had changed the status of its mission from search and rescue to search and recovery.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“They don’t expect to find them alive,” she said.

As the predawn light began to etch out the details of their belongings—hats, a chair, framed photographs, books, a pair of shoes, all so ordinary and unfeeling—I knew with certainty. John and Carolyn were gone.

A week after a single phone call sent my life crashing to pieces, I couldn’t face John and Carolyn’s funeral alone. The day was
cruelly hot.
Thank God for air-conditioning,
I thought as Negi and I rode uptown together for support. I put my head against the black leather of the car’s headrest, but I couldn’t relax. Details ran through my head: faxes of reading assignments for the funeral, messages from out-of-town guests, addresses for invitations to the service. Although John and Carolyn were gone, my work for them was ongoing. Just as I had dealt with the logistics of their lives, so did I continue to after their deaths. At the request of the families, I had spent the past week in the apartment, amid their belongings and their memories, which I wrapped around myself like a security blanket. Tony stayed by my side, making me coffee in the morning, going off to work, and returning in the evening with takeout or groceries. I didn’t say it out loud, but I secretly hoped our friendship would lead to something more. During that crazy time, he made sense: a tough Italian business owner and a friend of John’s. How perfect.