Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (8 page)

I experienced a wild range of emotions that night. When Jim was ahead, I was giddy with excitement—a shrieker and a clapper in a way I almost never am. As the count progressed into the early evening, it really did appear that Jim was going to win, and I was jumping for joy. A reporter in the crowd, who didn’t recognize me but did recognize exuberance when he saw it, walked over.

“Why are you so excited?”

“He’s going to win!” I was so excited that I didn’t bother to point out to him how self-evident the answer to that question was.

During the evening Jimmy Kennedy and I spent some time together. “Wow!” said Jimmy at one point. “He can actually win this thing!” He grew silent for a moment. “But you know what? In a strange way, I hope he doesn’t win,” he confided. Although they’d been friends for nearly twenty years, Jimmy was concerned that if Jim became governor, he would rarely see him—both because of Jim’s new responsibilities and the distance between Rahway and Trenton—and that their friendship would be weakened. That was really the first time I realized that if Jim won, it would affect our relationship profoundly, but not in a way I could predict at all. That scared me and made me uncertain. This, like much else, was something Jim and I had never discussed.

But when all the results were in, Jim did not win. In fact, he lost by less than 1 percent.

A news report appearing the next day announced that an officer had later seen me “necking” in the car with Jim, but that when I was observed, I ran away. Just another instance of the fiction that often passes for journalism. But in fact as much as I yearned to see Jim that night, I did not—except from a distance for a few minutes at about twelve thirty that night when he came onstage in the Sheraton ballroom to make his concession speech and thank his supporters. He was perfectly polished in his delivery, but I couldn’t tell how he was really feeling from so far away. He left the stage almost immediately.

Jimmy Kennedy had gone looking for him, but he couldn’t find him.

Then I tried to reach him by cell phone, but there was no answer. I felt a terrible sense of loss and sadness. We’d been together for a year, and yet on a night such as this, Jim and I had not been together, or seen each other, or even spoken.

I went home, and by the time I got into bed an hour later, I still hadn’t heard from him. I cried myself to sleep.

The next day, my thirty-first birthday, I was exhausted and upset. I didn’t even want to get out of bed. I finally heard from Jim later in the day. He wished me a happy birthday, and the day after that, when we had dinner, he brought me a bouquet of flowers. He told me he’d been exhausted and upset on Election Night.

That made two of us, though I didn’t say so.

The next day, New Jersey’s
Star-Ledger
ran an interview that had taken place with Jim the day after the election. I read about Jim calling his estranged wife to tell her about the loss and how “bummed out” she was for him. This troubled me. Why had he called her but not me? I felt worse because this followed another story a few days earlier, describing how well they got along during his visits to British Columbia to see his daughter. The report depicted them holding hands while taking walks with their daughter. I began to have doubts. Was he playing games with me? Was he still in love with Kari? That apprehension stayed with me.

But Jim McGreevey gay? It never crossed my mind.

4. LIMITED ENGAGEMENT

BEFORE THE SELF-DESTRUCTIVE AND
feverish eruption of his admitted relationship with Golan Cipel, Jim had years of low-grade symptoms, a mild rash of sexual secrets, though I only found out later, after he had resigned. Jim was known to have a taste for strippers, women who worked at New Jersey clubs much like the fictional Bada Bing! where Tony Soprano and his buddies liked to hang out. This yen for strip joints, whether real or meant to create the impression that he was straight, was part of Jim’s life long before he knew me, even long before he knew his first wife, Kari. When the story about these visits broke (and again, this was after Jim’s resignation), it was reported that Kevin McCabe—mayoral aide to Jim, later his labor commissioner and best man at our wedding—often accompanied him. The press also reported that Jimmy Kennedy, Jim’s good friend, sometimes went with him on these outings, which could take place any time of the day or night, supposedly as a way for Jim to blow off steam that built up on the campaign. Much later, when a reporter asked about these side trips with Jim, Jimmy said, “As far as I’m concerned, he was like every other guy that I knew. Sometimes when people are in politics, they want to give the impression to everybody that they are a regular guy.” This is a regular guy?

In addition to favoring strip joints, Jim was also said to patronize prostitutes. One in particular, a woman named Myra Rosa from Perth Amboy, announced to anyone who would listen that Jim McGreevey had been her client for a couple of years, maybe as early as 1995. She told the police as much in a tape-recorded statement. On October 21, 1997, just two weeks before the election, a reporter from the
Star-Ledger
asked Jim directly about the prostitute’s claims. Jim is reported to have burst into tears, and the story was quashed, only to surface again in 2004.

Apparently, Jim’s sleazy encounters with women were only a cover for his sleazy encounters with men. As I later learned, his past was littered with casual sexual encounters, visits to gay clubs, public parks, and truck stops, although how he concluded that one set of adulterous, career-destroying secrets could protect him from another remains beyond my grasp.

I knew none of this. I was looking in the wrong place, insofar as I was looking at all. The only person I considered any sort of threat was Jim’s first wife, Kari, though she was thousands of miles away in British Columbia. What I saw as Jim’s connection to Kari—not what he might do with her, but what he might feel for her—blinded me to the possibility of other, more perilous connections. But, frankly, I didn’t think Jim had either the time or the opportunity for dalliances. Politics was his mistress. Also, I knew he never went anywhere without a driver, a ready-made chaperone.

I traveled in political circles, and I’m pretty sure that I must have had at least a dozen acquaintances who knew, or suspected, what Jim was up to. But there’s an old saying that explains why none of them told me, and it’s the one about killing the messenger. Can’t you just see it? “Hey, Dina! I heard your boyfriend carries five-dollar bills in his back pocket to give to the strippers.”

With one exception, my closest friends didn’t know these rumors, and the friend who did know dismissed it. She’d heard other rumors she knew to be false—one that Kari had left Jim because he was “abusive,” which was obviously ridiculous, since they maintained a cordial relationship—so it was just as easy for her to dismiss the stripper rumor. Plus, the rumor about Jim and the strippers just didn’t fit with how we seemed as a couple, and not just to her.

Beyond our acquaintances there was a small crowd of dedicated onlookers who must have known a lot more than I did. One was Ray Lesniak, Jim’s longtime mentor, whom I’d first met a dozen years earlier in Elizabeth’s city hall. As a member of Jim’s inner circle when he was both the mayor of Woodbridge and a gubernatorial candidate, Ray was in a position to know everything there was to know about Jim, which was far more than I knew. I don’t know if Ray thought I was aware of the rumors of Jim’s affinity for strip clubs and prostitutes, but he certainly never told me anything, or warned me even obliquely. I wondered if he’d even made the connection that I was the woman he’d met years earlier as the Planning Board commissioner his opponent had appointed. If he did remember me from that day in the Elizabeth city hall, he never acknowledged it. Our relationship, such as it was, was polite and existed only because of our mutual connection to Jim. What Jim’s circle of advisers—later characterized by the press as his “cleanup squad”—knew with certainty, the press knew as rumor. But in each case, especially because I was involved in local politics myself, some of Jim’s advisers must certainly have thought that if
they
knew what they knew, then
I
must know what they knew. But I didn’t. I would have to be out of my mind to have had an intimate relationship with a man who engaged in such behavior. And since I didn’t seem to be out of my mind, there had to be some other explanation. Many people knew that Jim wasn’t what he appeared to be, so I guess that made it easy for them to take the next step and conclude that
I
couldn’t possibly be what I seemed to be either. Their conclusion? Collusion. I must have struck some sort of bargain with him. There must have been something I wanted from him politically, in exchange for my appearance of partnership. That’s the only way I can make sense of the charge that I was just a “political wife.”

Of course, the local press was also on watch, especially reporters for the
Star-Ledger
, the
Bergen Record
, and the New Jersey Bureau of the
New York Times
. They didn’t have as much information as Ray and Jim’s inner circle did about Jim’s sexual risk-taking, but they did know the rumors. And so they reached more or less the same conclusion as those who knew more: Every woman has her price.

I rarely read the newspapers. As a working mother, First Lady, and wife, I read mostly letters, e-mails, and speeches I was to deliver. I had little time for the papers. That’s not to say that I didn’t follow the news or keep up with what was happening. I remained as interested as ever, but I got my information from television and radio, which I could do while riding in a car. So, while some of these rumors may actually have appeared in print (and many of them didn’t), they never made it to TV or radio, and they never made it to me. But what if someone from the press had presented me with the rumors? It wouldn’t have made any difference. The better I got to know Jim, the more I saw how often the press got things wrong. There was the tidbit about my necking with Jim on Election Night outside the hotel, when I wasn’t. Then there was another report that said we got engaged at an Italian restaurant in Middlesex County on Valentine’s Day, when we hadn’t. There were many errors and much speculation. I decided early on just to ignore them all.

All politicians are subject to scrutiny and rumor, not to mention a fair amount of mudslinging. But a politician with a secret such as Jim’s is a politician who can be blackmailed, and a politician who can be blackmailed can leave his constituency vulnerable. The incompatible rumors—about both strippers and gay men—actually afforded him a certain amount of protection, each set undermining the other, but Jim’s sexual secrets did make him a target for blackmail. As the election approached, questions about Jim’s fidelity and sexual orientation were again newsworthy, because Jim was again newsworthy. He was setting his sights on the most powerful elected office in the state.

After Jim lost the election in 1997, he caught his breath and began campaigning to win in 2001. Our courtship continued pretty much as it had been—public community breakfasts, public fund-raising luncheons—but the character of our relationship was changing. I was with Jim more, for one thing, sometimes working the crowds with him, sometimes watching from the sidelines when he gave a talk. Helping Jim campaign was exhilarating, and it was during this time that my respect for him grew. Here was a man who advocated educational reform and state-sponsored health programs to help care for uninsured children, a man who wanted to reduce New Jerseyans’ exorbitant property taxes and auto insurance rates, both the highest in the nation. And he was tireless. Yes, I knew that Jim had his critics, that many who followed politics called him a “perpetual campaigner,” but what other people saw as ambition, I saw as passion. I believed in Jim and in the integrity of his message. I found his politics attractive, just as I found him attractive.

I’d always looked forward to our private dinners as a chance for Jim and me to unwind and get to know each other better. Now, with the campaign in full force, a new element was added. We still found time to relax here and there, but we became a team sharing invigorating postgame analyses. Jim knew that he could appear too scripted—no friendly, off-the-cuff asides—and too rehearsed, as if he’d given his speech hundreds of times before, which of course he had. He was trying to change that.
We
were trying to change that. Running through the events of the day to see where improvements could be made, we were partners, sharing the same ideals, working toward the same goal.

“How’d I do today?” he asked as we settled into our booth at a diner outside Hamilton in Mercer County. It was 1:00
A.M.
, and we were eating for the first time since breakfast, sharing a toasted bagel with cream cheese. Even at this hour, it was black coffee for me, tea with milk and no sugar for Jim. It had been a ridiculously busy day, with a stop at a senior-citizen center and three or four fund-raising dinners, at the last of which we were so hungry that even the rubber chicken looked good—not that we had the chance to eat it.

“It went well,” I told Jim. He was great at engaging in one-to-one conversations, an opportunity he always had with seniors and at picnics.

“Yeah, but how’d I do with the speeches?”

I thought Jim was hitting his stride and sounding more relaxed in his speeches, and I told him so. “Even someone hearing both of those speeches today wouldn’t have the feeling that they were hearing the same words,” I said. “You were on message, but you found different ways to say it each time.”

“Well, I’m glad I don’t have to give another speech until tomorrow night,” he said with a smile.

Then the talk turned to when we might get some time for ourselves.

“I know you have something next weekend, but how does it look for two weeks from now?” I asked.

I’d been wanting to spend a weekend in New York City, where we could take a hansom-cab ride through Central Park, go to a museum or two, and have dinner in SoHo. We’d had a few romantic evenings in New York, and I was eager to repeat them.