Innocent Spouse (34 page)

I started stammering again, “But, but …”

He pointed and said, “Go!”

Later that day the police let us back into the building, but it didn’t do us much good. Power was out up and down M Street, and the area was cordoned off. The electricity was off in chunks of the adjacent residential area, too, including our home, where Spencer and I resorted to camping lights and candlelight and an ice chest for refrigeration. This was not the last manhole-cover incident in Georgetown, only the most sensational. It became a chronic problem, due to old power lines, which was bad news for Nathans. Again I was interviewed on local news, but it wasn’t the kind of advertising we needed. No one wanted to come to Georgetown and risk getting blown into the air by a manhole cover.

Desperate to get some attention and therefore customers, I created a drink called “The Exploding Manhole Cover.” Actually, I created the name before I created the drink. When I mentioned it to my friend Lloyd Grove, who wrote the
Washington Post
’s popular “Reliable Source” column, he wanted to do an item with a photo for the next day’s paper.

“Oh my God,” I groaned to one of the bartenders. “We’ve got to come up with a drink and the
Post
wants a photo of it!” Together we concocted a root beer float in a champagne glass with half an Oreo cookie as the manhole cover. I hoped it wouldn’t be as revolting as it sounded. What alcoholic beverage could possibly work in a root beer float with a cookie on top? The bartender and I tried several recipes—most of them undrinkable—before we settled on Old Dominion Root Beer, a splash of vodka, a touch of chocolate liqueur, a puff of whipped
cream, half an Oreo and—for special effect—a few sparklers. At least it was photogenic.

The photo appeared in the
Post
the next day. Business picked up a little, a few people actually ordered them, and when former Clinton adviser Paul Begala came to Nathans to celebrate his birthday, I sent his group a tray of our joke drink, sparklers sparkling. CNN’s Bill Schneider asked to interview me about the drink for a story about the explosions scaring away customers. Between Lloyd’s item and CNN’s piece, Nathans scored a share of media buzz and a few more customers.

The manhole explosions exposed a critical problem under Georgetown’s quaint streets: The infrastructure was rotted. That’s why the power lines ruptured into flames. Some of the utilities, like water lines, were a hundred years old. The mayor announced a major public-works program—“The Georgetown Project”—a three-year repair job that required pulling up the sidewalks and most of the major streets, but when it was finished everything would be up to code.

I looked at the plans for the “big dig” and slumped. It was broken into quadrants, and each of the quadrants met at the intersection outside Nathans’ front door. There was no day of the entire project when Nathans wouldn’t be compromised, either with torn-up sidewalks and streets or heavy equipment out front making a horrid racket—not exactly the background music diners want with their steaks and wine. The work would be at night and they would tow all parked cars at nine p.m. It would start in October 2001.

S
PENCER STARTED FOURTH
grade at his new, all-boys’ school in the fall of 2001. I thought this school would be good for him, particularly because it had seventy-two acres of sprawling green lawns. He was growing fast. He needed room to move around. The school was a half hour from home, which gave us precious time together in the car. We talked, we joked, we listened to the radio. Howard Stern was a family favorite, though sometimes when the guests were strippers I changed to another station. “Mom,” Spencer would admonish me, “do you think I’m a baby?”

It was a routine Tuesday morning. I dropped Spencer off at school and then headed back to town for an appointment with Jake Stein at his office on Connecticut Avenue, only three blocks from the White House. It was an especially beautiful September day—dry, seventy degrees, an incredible cerulean sky—and I drove with the windows open and Diana Krall on the CD player. When I arrived a few minutes early and got parked, I switched over to the all-news station for the headlines on the hour. “A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.…” I got out of the car and headed to the meeting, concerned but not frightened.

In Jake’s reception room, a woman who’d been waiting near me snapped her cell phone shut and said, “A plane has hit the Pentagon.” She got up and left. I didn’t know, but I assumed terrorism. Within a minute a coterie of lawyers, briefcases in hand, rushed through the lobby to the elevators. One of them said, “B’nai B’rith is one floor above us. We should all get out of here.”

I said to the receptionist, “Tell Jake I’ll call him from home,” and I joined the procession.

Back out on Connecticut Avenue, it was still that gorgeous day, and the street bustled with the vehicle and pedestrian traffic of a typical
workday morning. I could tell from their faces who else knew, and who didn’t know. A group of construction workers stood laughing over a joke. A businessman anxiously flagged a cab. A woman on her cell phone demanded, “Where’s Mom?” A few blocks away the White House was being evacuated. The vice president had been squirreled away in a secret bunker. In a few minutes the broad avenue would transform as workers streamed from their offices. I got home and called Spencer’s school.

“We’re not changing the routine as yet,” the operator said. “We’ll notify all parents if there’s a change of plan.” School was sixteen miles from the White House. He was safe out there. I turned on the TV and saw black smoke pouring from the two towers. I watched and watched. When the first tower fell I ran outside to find someone, anyone, human company. When the second tower fell I picked up the dog, packed him and some food into the car, and headed to Spencer’s school. Traffic had begun to build. No panic, no rage as each car inched along, headed away from the city. On the radio they reported a hijacked plane that might be heading toward Washington. I scanned the blue sky. By the time I parked at the school the radio reported United Flight 93 had crashed somewhere in Pennsylvania.

The school called an assembly to attempt to explain the events to the students. With the dog in my arms I waited outside Spencer’s class, and as the children filed out his teacher’s eyes caught mine and for the first time I got emotional. Tears welled in my eyes. Maybe it was because I felt safe and knew my son was safe. Spencer saw me and looked alarmed. It was hard to tell how much he or his classmates knew. Their expressions were worried, confused, but not frightened. They were fourth graders. Could nine-year-old boys comprehend what was happening? Spencer was happy to see the dog. I bucked up, gave him a hug, and walked with him to the assembly.

The school’s outdoor amphitheater was filled with students and parents, who were arriving by the minute. I looked up at the tall green trees and the bright yellow sun and tried to reconcile the beauty and the horror. It was not possible. I held the dog in my lap and wrapped an arm around Spencer. The principal gave an eloquent talk about the terrible things that had happened, the lives lost, the fear and uncertainty that still gripped us, and how the students needed to know they
were safe. “You are safe here and you will be safe when you go home. If your parents aren’t here yet, we will stay here with you until they arrive. We’ll have lunch, and classes will go on as long as you are here.”

I looked at the crowd and thought, With one of the doomed planes out of Washington, it’s possible some people here will be personally affected by this nightmare. We later learned that a classmate’s father was on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the Pentagon.

Driving home, Spencer and I were struck by how the lanes of Massachusetts Avenue headed out of the city were jammed with cars, and the only vehicle going in our direction was ours. The sidewalks, even as far as five miles out, were packed with pedestrians walking away from the city.

“Will we be okay?” Spencer asked, holding the dog in his lap. I assured him we would be okay. We heard the occasional fighter jet streak overhead. By evening there were tanks parked at intersections throughout our neighborhood. Smoke was still rising from the Pentagon across the river. Neighbors came over, I made pasta, and we ate and watched the television coverage together. That night, in bed, I listened into the wee hours to the jets patrolling overhead.

I did not call Jake Stein that day, nor did I think of Nathans.

B
EFORE
I
EVER
fell in love with a man, I fell in love with
Two for the Road
, a movie starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. It follows the romance and complicated marriage of a smart and stylish couple who have one child. I was drawn to their nomadic, freewheeling existence and especially to Finney’s bad-boy persona. I’m one of those women who have a weakness for brains but also for mischief. I didn’t know it then, but as I look back over my life it’s fairly plain. Even before Howard, I was involved with men who were very good at what they did, but who also made their own rules, for better or worse. Good-looking, smart, successful, and just scoundrelly enough to attract and keep my interest, the kind of characters screenwriters transform into heartthrobs.

Howard was the quintessential irresistible rascal. He seduced me that way, and I succumbed willingly. It was—more often than not—a great ride. Roller coasters are thrilling, until they go off the rails. Ours went off the rails. It’s bittersweet that the best years were the last years, after therapy and Prozac helped to tame the beast within him. Once I returned to work, and began to assert myself in our relationship, he never got aggressive with me again, and the marriage was solid. Still, I had my eyes clamped shut. Looking back was like recalling the most thrilling ride and wondering if either I had been too ignorant, or too caught up in the thrill, to notice we were riding on thin air, destined for peril. It never occurred to me then, but there were so many signs of trouble: his offhand mention of an “audit,” his frequent appointments with lawyers, and his more-than-occasional fitful nights. Howard made it so easy to live in an ignorant bliss, though, because he always had a comforting answer. If something struck me as odd, and I asked, he’d tell me “Everything will be okay,” and I’d close my eyes once more.

Another movie I loved was Martin Scorsese’s
Alice Doesn’t Live Here
Anymore
with Ellen Burstyn and Kris Kristofferson. It begins with the sudden death of her husband, upending her life and the life of her young son. They are left with not much more than each other, the proceeds of a yard sale, a station wagon, and the grit needed to survive. Like
Two for the Road
, there’s a lot of road-tripping as mother and son try to find a safe haven and start over. I was only twenty-four years old when I first saw it—long before a husband, widowhood, and road-tripping with my own son. The bonding moments of my relationship with Spencer have often been in the car, whether it was driving him to and from school or the many road trips we took together, up and down the East Coast and one adventurous three-week cross-country drive from Washington, D.C. to Oregon to California and back. When he was little—and not so little—if he wanted to have a serious talk with me, he would ask, “Can we go for a drive?” On the road we didn’t have to stare at each other, allowing both intimacy and space, or maybe it was because the open road is about moving on.

After Howard died I discovered a “widow” movie that I liked because it had some truths in it and a great line. The film is
Bounce
. Ben Affleck is talking to Gwyneth Paltrow about wanting her to be happy. She replies, “If you grade on a curve I’m happy. I may be widow happy, but I’m happy.” I’ve used that phrase dozens of times. I’m a widow. It can’t be erased or taken back or revised. It changes everything.

Often someone would pull me aside and ask, “How are you
really
doing?” as if they could see through my “I’m fine” mask. What I learned was that unless the questioner was also a widow or widower it was impossible to tell them how I was
really
doing. Details of being utterly alone, of raising a child by myself, of debt and business woes, of sharks in the water, of loneliness and grief—they were a lot more than most people could grasp. I learned to keep it simple. “I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.” When the Tom Hanks film
Cast Away
arrived in theaters in 2000 I went to see it as soon as I could. The story aside, I looked forward to two hours of looking at a tropical sea. But it was the story that got to me. A person otherwise enjoying the routine of life crash-lands on a deserted island in the middle of the sea. He’s trapped, stuck, torn away from everything he takes for granted. All he wants is to build his life raft and get back to civilization, and when he does return to the world he discovers how much he’s changed. That was me,
only minus the soccer ball named Wilson. I had a child to keep me sane as I tried to build the life raft and get us to dry land.

S
IX YEARS INTO
owning Nathans, and with six years still to go on the lease, my corner bar still confounded me, scared me, and caused me to feel very alone, especially in the middle of the night—worrying, tossing, thinking, worrying some more, tossing some more. I was only a little smarter. I learned to understand “tolerable” theft, that it was an expected part of the business. I learned that in a bar nothing much good happened after midnight. And I now knew the legal drinking age was twenty-one. I learned this lesson in an embarrassing way when one lunchtime I stood in the middle of the bar and joyfully asked a bartender to send a glass of champagne to a friend’s daughter who was celebrating her eighteenth birthday. The bartender froze, the room fell silent, and the birthday girl said, “But, Mrs. Joynt, I’m not twenty-one.” Yes, I learned everything on the job, and too often in public.

Then there was the daily task of staying in business. The roadwork, combined with the recession that hit all of Washington after 9/11, caused our gross to drop by as much as 30 to 40 percent, but our costs stayed the same or climbed. At one point, after churning through general managers, I hired a management company to run the place. They lasted a year. A very bumpy year. They had me take out bank loans that put me deeper in debt—“If you don’t get $75,000 right now you’ll have to close”—and when an employee filed suit against them they packed up and left, leaving behind the lawsuit and a more than $100,000 bill for their services. Fortunately for me, Vito Zappala, who had resigned, exhausted, a few years earlier, was “tan, rested, and ready,” and agreed to come back and take the reins. I warned him, “We have work to do. The mismanagers I brought in from the outside did a lot of damage. They scared away loyal customers and vendors. We have to mend fences. The debt, of course, is monstrous. And me? Well, I’m still as useless as before.”