Innocent Spouse (16 page)

Wendy called. I pleaded for time. “I’m waiting for a big call. I think I’ll have it soon.”

“Okay, Carol,” Wendy said, “but that’s it.” I knew this time it really was “it.”

A waitress approached the table. A call from Paris was holding for me. It was the Chanel rep, with whom I had a good relationship. Karl Lagerfeld would do the show via satellite.
Jackpot!
I called Wendy, who was ecstatic. “That’s huge, Carol!” she said. “Wow! You did it.”

I beamed. I needed this booking to prove my worth, to stay in the game. I returned to the table and said to the salesman, “Well, I get to keep my job for another day.” He had no idea what I was talking about.

I
N THE MIDDLE
of all this, Miriam Fisher called. She needed me to pull more numbers together and went through a list of issues that were coming up in the week ahead, such as the final tally of my total debt and a meeting she had scheduled with Deborah Martin at the IRS. “Deborah’s very relaxed, so far,” she said. I chose to interpret that as a good sign.

A friend had suggested I stash away some money for Spencer and me—just in case. He suggested offshore accounts. I ran this idea by
Miriam. She put the kibosh on that. “In light of your debt and the circumstances,” she said, in her most serious, lawyerly voice, “the government would charge you with fraud.”

So much for that dumb idea. “Okay, Miriam,” I said, “I’ll get the numbers for you.”

L
ATER IN
J
ULY
Martha invited us to join her, Vijay, and Zal, at a summer rental on Chappaquiddick Island. I immediately said “yes.” Spencer and I packed our bathing suits and sandals and headed for Martha’s Vineyard. The “Casa Kumar” turned out to be an old fisherman’s camp. We drove to the end of a long dirt road, took a treacherous drive along a lumpy beach, and followed one more dirt drive to the house, which sat at the water’s edge. It was stripped down and ramshackle in a poetic seaside way, and we loved it. Meals were shared at a big table in the window-filled kitchen. We all cleaned up together. Spencer and I shared a room, but bedrooms were really just bunk areas divided by partitions. At night we could all talk to one another across them. The windows were open, the breezes blowing through.

In the mornings Spencer would don some goggles and grab his plastic bucket; I would slather him with sunblock, and off we’d go in search of what he called “nature.” The water was knee deep for him. We stopped every few feet as he reached down for a rock or a shell. Sometimes when something he was after would suddenly move, he’d jump into my arms. “Mom, are there sea monsters up here?”

“No, honey, don’t worry. Maybe some crabs and fish, but no monsters.”

At Chappaquiddick, Spencer’s world expanded beyond just our usual twosome. Sometimes he’d go off on a hike with his much older cousin, which, as he told me, made him feel “all grown up.” As a family we cooked and ate lobsters. We played games, sat at the table, and talked. We listened to music and danced on the beach. Spencer put his little feet on the tops of mine and I waltzed him in the sand. It was altogether lovely. The mosquitoes, of which there were many, couldn’t spoil that.

At night before his bedtime Spencer and I would sit outside and look for the brightest stars. I put my arm around him and we’d snuggle.

“Mommy, is Daddy up there or is he here?”

“What do you mean, sweetie?”

“Well, you said he’s watching over me all the time but he’s a spirit. I just wondered if he was up there on a star or down here with us.”

“Where would you like him to be?”

“Here with us.”

“That’s where he is.”

“Good.”

Spencer’s childish interpretation of death was endearing, a balance to my own acceptance of the hard reality: Howard was completely gone. He was a life form that had vanished. I had no idea when Spencer would come to terms with that view. Over time he did, but for the longest time he looked up and believed his daddy was there, in heaven, keeping an eye on things. Who would want to rob a child of that hopeful notion?

M
Y FATHER WAS
seventy-nine years old and in failing health. He suffered from diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. When my brother David called to say Dad had been admitted to the hospital with a heart problem, Spencer and I raced to his bedside in rural Virginia. My other brother, Robert, who lived near my father, was there when we arrived. David had made it sound like the bell was tolling but when we arrived the doctors said that while Dad was in rough shape, it was not his time. I treasured my visit and gave him loving assurances and kisses, but afterward I told Robert, “You and David have to handle this. I’m tapped out. I can come see him, I can spend time with him, but I can’t handle the heavy stuff. There’s no more of me left to pass around.” And there wasn’t. He died within the year and was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery, where I read the eulogy. Spencer and I, with my brothers, walked behind the horse-drawn caisson to his grave.

While seeing his grandfather was fun for Spencer, seeing him in a hospital brought up too many memories of his father. As we walked out into the fine summer day I asked, “Would you like to hike a mountain
stream?” The hospital’s location was close to the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a weekend. We had time. Spencer beamed.

We drove up, up, and up a twisting mountain road in the Shenandoah National Park and parked near a familiar trail. I’d been there years before and recalled it as tame enough for urban folk. We looked for “nature” and right away we found it in the form of a snake. It was gray with white stripes and we decided it had to be poisonous. “Mommy, you’re not the one who knows how to kill snakes. That’s Daddy, and he’s not here. We shouldn’t be around a snake without Daddy.” He pulled me away.

We held hands and walked deeper into the woods, away from the snake. I held him over a stream so he could drink from the clear mountain water. This he declared “cool.” Later, at a roadside country store, he wore down my resistance and I bought him a plastic Davy Crockett rifle. He cradled it in his lap. “I’m a real mountain man,” he beamed. On the highway, headed home, Spencer stared out the window for quite a while then turned to me and asked, “Mommy, if you marry again will you tell me if it’s an alien?” I promised him that I would.

T
HE PACE OF
my life was quickening. While June and July were packed with enough New York high life, professional success, and personal excitement plus an escape to the Vineyard to make me believe my problems had gone away, August reminded me they had stayed put, waiting for me. I may have been changing but my problems remained the same. Sometimes they overwhelmed me, but apparently it didn’t show.

“You don’t look the same,” a French friend told me soon after we returned from the Vineyard. “You always used to look like a woman carrying a burden, head down, very serious. Now you look like a woman who’s walking on the Champs-Elysées with your head up and smiling.” Odd that before Howard died, when I didn’t have a burden I looked like I did, and now, with nothing but burdens, I looked stress free.

My psychiatrist noticed it, too. “Something in you that was dormant is waking up,” he said.

“Not a moment too soon,” I replied. I knew I was changing. I stood up straighter and my step was more purposeful. I could see it, feel it. But I couldn’t explain it. My troubles in the real world were as daunting as ever. I guess Nietzsche was right: That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

The staff at Nathans needed a lot of attention. The night manager, Bob Walker, asked for a raise. I used his request as leverage. “I don’t mind giving you something but in return I’d like you to knock off the sauce when you’re on duty.” He didn’t look happy. “Look, Bob, you’re the responsible grown-up here at night. I worry about your driving home. You’re a father. I really want you to do this for me but if that doesn’t work, do it for your family.”

He nodded. As I walked away, he said, “Doug thinks all the managers should get raises.”

I stopped, turned, considered what he’d said, turned again, and then continued to the office. His words got me rattled. Where was the money supposed to come from? They were the most highly paid managers in the city, their pay scale out of line with what the business made. Doug Moran knew I had the government breathing down my neck. I still couldn’t figure out what he did for his hundred-thousand-dollar salary—and now he wanted more?

A
T
L
ARRY
K
ING
L
IVE
, Wendy called me into her office. “Here, Carol, I’ll give you an easy one.” She asked me to book George Stephanopoulos, who’d left the Clinton administration the year before. He was reportedly writing a book about his years on the campaign trail and in the White House. I was grateful for the bone she’d tossed me but I wished she’d told me that everyone else at CNN, including the network’s White House correspondent, had pursued him without success. His publisher would be nuts to let him do any interviews before the book was even written. “These are the summer doldrums,” Wendy said. “We need bookings.” Stephanopoulos did not return my calls.

I would swing in and out of moods about the show. I loved the work, but what I used to think rocked the world now could feel shallow and pointless. I liked to take on world issues, but I couldn’t get stressed anymore over whether Michael Jackson or Mick Jagger would do an interview. But I needed to be productive because I really needed the job. Stephanopoulos would have been a nice little coup. I tried, I failed.

At Morgan, Lewis, and Bockius, Sheldon and Miriam worked hard to find ways to bring down the tax debt. Miriam asked me to sift through five years of Howard’s credit card charges, particularly restaurant charges, and to mark those that were business related. What qualified as a business dinner, I wondered? I recognized so many of the charges. Did champagne and steamed lobsters at a romantic window table at the Black Pearl in Newport, Rhode Island, count as a business dinner? It was October 1993, a sailing trip in New England, our first time away from Spencer, and I was anxious about leaving him. Howard
pocketed the dinner menu as he always did when we ate out. In the restaurant world, did that make it a business dinner? Another restaurant owner told me, “You write off all your meals. Why else be in the business?”

“Why does Deborah Martin’s report cover only five years?” I asked Miriam at one of our meetings.

“Because that’s when they decided to stop looking. Deborah had enough. She had a good case. She could have gone further back and would probably have found more, but she said she had enough and stopped.”

I
WAS CUTTING
my emotional ties to our possessions. I looked at the furniture in terms of what could go and what should stay. It came down to this: We’ve got to have beds, chairs, tables, a sofa. Almost anything else can be sold. I needed cash, desperately. Spencer and I operated on a third of the income we had had when Howard was alive. We weren’t poor, but our household expenses cost more than what I had. It cost a lot to keep the Bay house and the apartment in good working order so they could be sold. I had to be smart—and legal—and try to find money somewhere to keep everything going.

Howard’s estate was fat with money that I couldn’t use. Dividend checks from his stock portfolio regularly arrived in the mail. They were in Howard’s name and, with Uncle Sam watching, I had to put them in the estate bank account. The money from the sale of anything that was in Howard’s name went into the estate account as well. The income from the Joynt family trust stopped the day he died. The way the trust was set up, when Howard died the remainder went to Martha and her son and to Howard’s two sons from his last marriage. Since the trust documents and Mr. Joynt’s will were written before Spencer was born, he was not mentioned. There was a lot of money around us, but none of it was mine or my son’s.

I
EXPLAINED MY
IRS problems over dinner with Roger Cossack, host of a legal affairs program on CNN. I told him that even though my lawyers were “building a wall around me,” letters from the IRS arrived
in the mail every week. “They threaten to put liens on my bank accounts, to seize whatever property I own, to take my car and anything else they can get their hands on. They are really scary letters,” I said.

“What do you do with them?” Roger asked.

“I open them, read them, and fax them to Miriam Fisher. Maybe I should skip the reading part and go direct to the fax. Might be better for my mental health.

“Once I actually called the IRS 800 number to tell them I had legal representation,” I said. “That didn’t impress the woman at the other end of the line. She started asking me when I was going to send a check for the full amount. You know, a few million dollars.”

“You’re on their radar,” Roger said. “Most of us live our lives and never show up on it. We just hope to stay that way. You used to be off their radar. When this is over, you’ll be off it again, but that may take a while. Don’t be surprised if they audit you for a few years.”

“But what about the people who can’t afford a lawyer?” I asked. “I think about them every time I get one of these letters. They make me feel like a deadbeat, a criminal. Never a hint that I might be innocent.”

Not that the IRS needed any guidance from me, but I was struck by how cold it is out in the cold. “If I didn’t have lawyers explaining everything to me, calming my paranoia, I’d probably be locked in my house with the furniture piled against the door. I hope when the hearings on the Hill are done the IRS tones down its language. They need to hire Miss Manners.”

“You forget that a lot of these people they pursue did commit fraud, did break the law.” Roger was again the lawyer, but I knew he was right. “Those letters are crafted for the guilty, not the innocent.”

Roger was a widower and his son was grown and out on his own. I told him about Spencer and how much it weighed on me each time I went to New York for the show. “It’s tough because the trips are good for me but I worry I’m some kind of awful mother, leaving Spencer with the babysitter.”