Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (29 page)

As I walked into the room, one or two got up to greet me with a kiss or a hug, and the others greeted me from their seats, their expressions sympathetic or uncomfortable or both. A couple of people just gawked at me, clueless as to how to react. I wished they would all disappear. I went back upstairs.

Later Jim came upstairs, telling me he would like me to be at the press conference that afternoon.

“I’ll think about it.”

“But if you come, you can’t cry,” he said. “You have to be strong.”

“I can’t promise that.”

“You have to.”

While Jim was downstairs with his advisers trying to figure out how to spin the fact that there was a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against him, I went back upstairs to try to figure out how in the world to tell my family. They would all have to be told one way or another.

Now it was about 8:00
A.M.
, not too early to call my family. First I called Paul and Elvie. Elvie picked up, and I told her that I needed both of them to come over right away.

“Is anything wrong?” she asked.

This was not a conversation I could have on the phone. “Just come over as quickly as you can. Please.” I waited while Elvie repeated to Paul what I was saying.

“Dina, what’s wrong?” said Paul, now on the phone himself.

“Nothing’s wrong. Just come over.”

They said they would get Meagan and Nicole in the car and head down to Princeton. Then I called Rick and asked him to come over. He told me it was going to be hard for him to get away from work, but if I needed him, he would come. Knowing he was there for me was enough for the moment. I said, “No, don’t worry about it. I’ll call you later.” Lori and Jimmy Kennedy also came down from Rahway to be with me.

At this moment, only the downstairs hub of Jim’s inner circle knew what was going on. Now the news would end its quarantine and begin to travel. First it would make its way upstairs to my family and friends. Then it would make its way into the world. While I didn’t think Jim’s announcement would make the news in Portugal, I had to be sure that my mother and father didn’t learn via the TV what their daughter was going through. Jim was a public figure. He had no way of fully protecting our privacy, and therefore I had no way of protecting or shielding my parents. But I continued to search for a way to tell them.

But how do you tell your parents that just the day before, a lifetime ago, your husband, whom you’ve known for almost ten tears, told you that he’s “confused” about his sexuality and thinks he might be gay? How do you tell them that he’s had an affair with another man? I didn’t want to put it into words. To do so cemented it, made it real, collapsed my life. I wasn’t going to tell my parents that part, at least not yet.

Odd as it may seem, I had not given the fine points of homosexuality much thought either. As someone who considered things politically, I had long been in favor of domestic partnerships for gay couples. I thought that a lot of the legal impediments homosexual couples faced were unfair and needed to be eliminated. If one member of a couple were ill, the other should be permitted to be informed of and involved with health-care decisions. If a couple had a stable and ongoing relationship, one partner in the couple should certainly be able to use his or her health plan to cover the other partner. I also didn’t believe that homosexuality was a “lifestyle choice” and thought it was likely to be inborn. I was, and am, also a practicing Roman Catholic. I attend mass every week, get ashes on Ash Wednesday, and go to church on Christmas Eve; and while I don’t share the church’s views on birth control, abortion, or stem-cell research, I did feel, and continue to feel, that marriage is a sacrament reserved for a union between a man and a woman.

When I counted the number of gay people I knew, I didn’t even have to use both hands. Three were members of Jim’s staff, and another was among the troopers assigned to me—a favorite, someone I liked and trusted immensely. In the previous twenty years of my life, there had been three other people I knew to be gay—a former teacher of mine, a nurse at the hospital, and a hospital volunteer. That was seven. Eight, if I counted Jim. There were probably others in the administration and in other areas of my life, but, just as I’d been in the dark about Jim, I was probably also in the dark about them.

Jim had people around to advise him both politically and emotionally, and even cheer him on. I sensed even then that while there would be many people whose hearts were with me, their sympathy would be so spiked with their discomfort that I would feel done in by it. And I didn’t know anyone in whose eyes I could see not so much sympathy but empathy, a recognition that they had walked—“staggered” may be more accurate—in my shoes. No one I knew was comfortable even broaching the subject with me.

Luckily for me, Jacqueline was too young to need an explanation at this point, because I couldn’t imagine how I could have gotten her through the shattering of her family, the removal from her home, the news—sudden and unexpected—that it was happening because her father had admitted he’d had a “not sexual but sexual” relationship and might be gay. And that didn’t even include how he had tangled and knotted the homeland security chain of command by putting his lover in a position that, in the event of another terrorist strike, might well have risked the safety of millions. My God. Any one of those elements would have been devastating to a slightly older child.

Waiting for Lori, Jimmy, and my family to arrive, I was waterlogged with tears. But I pushed them back for Jacqueline’s sake. She played and watched
Barney
in the family room, and I stopped in to sit with her during the moments I felt in control. At one point, before my family arrived, Ray Lesniak came upstairs without Jim. He sat down next to me, looking uncomfortable, and said that he had the name of a good therapist he thought I should talk to. He told me he had already called her—I assumed after consulting with Jim—and had asked her if she was available to speak with me on the phone this morning.

I should have realized what this signified. When Jim and I had spoken the evening before, the plan was that he was going to announce he wouldn’t be running for a second term and possibly that he was being blackmailed. And that was all he was prepared to say, as far as I knew. But I now recognize that bringing a therapist, a stranger, into this secret was a prologue to a more devastating announcement that was surely coming. The downstairs crowd was already in the know, but I wasn’t and Jim didn’t even have the courage, or maybe the decency, to tell me himself.

I called the therapist, because I knew that I alone could not prepare myself for whatever was coming. She told me how bad she felt for me and talked me through my feelings a little bit. We spoke a little about Jim’s affair, a little about the press conference and whether I would go or not. For the life of me, I can’t recall more than that, probably because at that moment my mind was going in several different directions simultaneously. I was waiting for my family and trying to determine how I would tell them, trying to figure out when to tell my parents, worrying about Jacqueline, and trying to predict the future and what life would be like from this moment on. Somehow the conversation with the therapist came to an end, and I agreed to speak to her again later.

When Paul and Elvie arrived—this was sometime between ten and eleven—it was obvious to them that everything wasn’t all right at all. My eyes were puffy from crying and from lack of sleep. I hadn’t done more than run a brush through my hair, and I didn’t have any makeup on. I have no idea what I was wearing. By now Lori had arrived as well, and since she was a kindergarten teacher, I asked her if she would take Jacqueline and her two cousins into the playroom or outside. Once they were gone and Paul, Elvie, and I were seated, I tried to find a gradual way into what I had to tell them, but there wasn’t one.

So I leaped.

“Jim’s being blackmailed,” I told them. “A former employee of his is accusing him of sexual harassment, so he’s not going to be running for reelection.”

“Who’s blackmailing him?” Paul asked.

“Golan,” I said.

“What, that Israeli homeland security guy?” asked Paul.

“Yes.”

“He’s the one that’s blackmailing him?”

“Yes,” I said. That was it. Paul looked puzzled and upset, but knowing me as well as he did, he didn’t ask any further questions. He just told me he and Elvie would support me in any way they could.

I couldn’t bear to be completely candid. Some people deal with devastating pain by sharing it. They try to surmount trauma by telling it over and over until it doesn’t hurt so much. Talking seems to lessen their agony. But that’s just not the way I’m put together. Trauma leaves me speechless. Literally speechless. Call it denial, but although I now knew exactly what was going on, putting it into words made it worse. My ability to speak was only as great as the pain I could tolerate. And right now, I was bearing about as much pain as I could stand.

Paul was going off to work, with my blessing. After I walked him to the door, I returned to the family room and to Elvie.

“There’s more,” I said. Then I repeated what Jim had said to me the night before. “Jim is confused about his sexuality. He thinks that he might be gay.”

Like me, she was incredulous. “I can’t believe this is happening.” She just lowered her head and didn’t say anything more.

I was reeling from Jim’s disclosures of the last two days and what they meant for me privately, as a woman, a wife, and a mother. Could I have gotten beyond Jim’s having an affair with a woman? I don’t know. I had been suspicious of his relationship with Kari without threatening to leave. But I had no proof, and she did live thousands of miles away. As for how I would react if I’d learned that Jim had had an affair with a woman who lived close by? I like to think that with counseling and effort we could have gotten beyond it. But my sense of how I might react to such news is merely hypothetical. I don’t know what I would have done. But I do know that I could not get beyond what, as of Wednesday night, I wasn’t entirely willing to let in: My husband had had an affair with a man.

I had lunch prepared for the girls and attempted to play with them in between escaping to my bedroom to cry. At about two o’clock, two hours before the scheduled announcement, Jim came upstairs to the residence living room with Ray Lesniak to show me the statement that he and his advisers had crafted for the afternoon press conference. I knew he would announce that he would not seek reelection and was being blackmailed by a former employee, and I’d been preparing myself all morning to handle that. I was First Lady, and these were matters the public was entitled to know. I might be near tears, but I thought I could hold them in.

Jim handed me the statement. “I want you to look at what I’m going to say.” He didn’t say anything more than that. I started reading, not expecting to come upon anything I didn’t already know.

“My truth is that I am a gay American.” I stopped cold. In less than a day, he had resolved his confusion?! How could that be? Where had this come from? I said, “You mean you
think
you are.” How could Jim be so sure he was gay? We were married. We had a child together. And what had happened to his reassurance that we would make decisions together, that we would get through this crisis together?

Jim didn’t answer and instead looked at Ray, who then responded for him. “That’s what he is. There’s no more pretending, and we all have to accept the truth.”

We
do?! Easy for him to say. I was hanging over a very deep pit, holding on to a very thin branch. And, methodically and coolly, he was sawing the branch off from the trunk while Jim looked on. No more hope. In slow motion, I watched myself fall.

I read on and just a few lines later saw that Jim was going to resign as governor of New Jersey as of November 15. I said, “How can you resign November fifteenth? It’s only three months away. What are we going to do? You won’t have a job, and we don’t have a home. Where will we go?”

“Don’t worry,” Ray said. “You’ll have a place to live. I have three houses. You can live in one of them, and I’ll get him a job.”

I was crying again. All I could do was cry.

“You have to pull yourself together for the press conference,” Jim said. “You have to be Jackie Kennedy today.”

Jackie Kennedy?! Her husband was murdered. Someone had killed him while he was riding along in a motorcade in broad daylight. He didn’t humiliate her in front of the world as Jim was about to do to me.

I was stunned at what I’d just learned and at war within myself, not sure whether to go to the press conference with Jim or not. How could he even ask me to go with him? This was the man who had betrayed me, and my knowledge of the betrayal was so new and so raw I didn’t think I could bear to stand next to him. And yet . . . and yet . . . Even then, I thought of this moment, still in the future, as a moment that Jacqueline would look back on one day. In an odd way, I wanted to be there, not for Jim but for my daughter’s father. The man who was leaving office in disgrace was her father, and I wanted her to know that I’d been there for her father.

There was more still. I had stood by Jim’s side for so many years because I believed in him, and because I loved him, and because I had promised to be with him “in good times and bad times.” I didn’t particularly want to love Jim at this moment. I didn’t want to feel it, and I didn’t want anyone else to know I was feeling it. But love doesn’t evaporate overnight, and however reluctant I was to feel it, and though I don’t love him now, at that moment I still did love him. If there was ever to be a bad time, this was it. I had to be there.

Ray Lesniak was talking to me. What was he doing in this room anyhow? He shouldn’t have been here—but I could barely hear him over the distraught voices inside my own head. Ray was saying, “Dina, you need to do whatever you’re comfortable with. No one is going to force you one way or another.”

Jim remained silent, as he had at so many other important junctures in his life, again letting others speak for him. He’d gotten someone else to find out if I would marry him, and now he was getting someone else to tell me the marriage was over. What was it with this man? He could talk to strangers, and he could talk to crowds, but he couldn’t talk to me.