The Suite Life (36 page)

The final course of action I laid out for myself before Alec came back was to increase the time I spent with “normal” people. It had been months since Olivia and I had promised to stay in touch, but I took a chance and phoned her office to set up a lunch date for the next day. I also made a date with Debbie
Warren, and I accepted a standing invitation from Marvin and Gregory to visit them in Rhode Island over the weekend before Alec returned.

As I had hoped, lunch with Olivia proved to be just the confidence booster I needed. Even though we hardly knew each other, I felt comfortable enough to talk about my upbringing, complete with welfare and blocks of American cheese for dinner, as well as my abusive first boyfriend. And, as a Wall Street insider herself, she was uniquely able to understand and empathize with my current concerns and frustrations. Best of all, she was genuinely interested and supportive when I told her about my writing aspirations.

“When I saw you at Alec's sendoff my first thought was that you were just another rich bitch who lived at the Luxe Regent,” she said, “but I knew you were something else entirely as soon as we started to talk.”

“I'm not much for pomp and circumstance.”

“Sort of an earth chick, it turned out.” She laughed. “But who knew there was an earnest writer inside?”

“What about you?” I asked. “What's your ‘inside' story?”

Olivia looked into space. “Nothing as earth-shattering as yours,” she said softly. “I just want to have someone to cuddle with.” She sighed.

“All things come to those who wait.”

“And pray,” Olivia added, and I thought for sure someone was going to have to pick me up off the floor.

“Is that something you do often?” I asked.

“All the time,” Olivia said. “I spend a lot of lunch hours at Our Lady of Victory.”

Who knew?
“I go there a lot . . . at least I used to,” I confessed. “Ironic, isn't it, that we might have met in church rather than at Alec's ostentatious extravaganza?”

“God sure works in strange ways, doesn't He?”

The Blessed Mother Mary had Martha, and now He's given me a sister.

“Amen to that, Olivia.”

I was just as comfortable with Debbie Warren the following day. She handled her role as the wife of a baseball icon with a carefree spirit, and she showed as much interest in me as Olivia had. She was also as forthcoming about the trials and tribulations of her life, and just as nonjudgmental about my own, past and present.

“After hearing what you've had to overcome I'm embarrassed to complain about anything,” Debbie said.

“Well, from what you've told me about the groupies who throw themselves at ballplayers, I'd say you have every right,” I said.

“Presley's got plenty of teammates who manage to resist,” she said. “There's no excuse for abusing a wife.”

You're preaching to the choir.

“We met when we were both on spring break in Cancún, and we've been together ever since. I thought his lustful escapades would have ended long ago,” she said with a sigh, the emotional pain clearly evident on her face. “And I never thought I would have to read about his indiscretions on the back page of the tabloids. I could just scream every time someone mentions the night when he was on the road and exposed himself in a disco to some college chicks.”

“Men.” I sighed, truly at a loss for words.

“
Some
men, Samantha.”

“The crazy ones.”

Debbie shook her head slowly. “Like my husband,” she said softly. “Who gives away a World Series championship ring?”

“Alec treats it as if he were on that 1998 team,” I said. “Lord knows what he did to earn it.”

“Amen, sister.”

“Have you thought about leaving Presley?”

“Every day,” Debbie said, looking straight into my eyes. “But it's so hard.”

Tell me about it.

“It'd be hell for our three kids, who adore their father, not to mention for me.”

“Pulling up stakes and all that,” I said.

“That's the least of it. My Italian Catholic family would be devastated by a divorce and I'd never hear the end of it.”

“You're
Italian
?” I asked, wide-eyed.

“Hundred percent.”

“I guess the blond hair threw me off.”

Debbie laughed. “Only my hairdresser knows for sure.”

We continued the girl talk for a while, neither of us mentioning the crazy men we were married to, and then Debbie shared her hope that she would eventually be able to use the degree in child psychology that had been gathering dust from the day she graduated from college. Like me, she mourned having allowed her own identity to be subsumed by that of her powerful husband. “Women.” She smiled. “Hear us roar.”

As we parted ways on the sidewalk outside the café we promised to get together again soon. I hailed a cab and thought about what it would be like to have two sisters in my life.

And I was thrilled to have something positive to talk about when I showed up in Rhode Island on Friday afternoon. By the time I left Marvin and Gregory at the end of the weekend, I felt that I was as ready as I could be to deal with Alec and the gilded prison in which I lived.

From the moment he walked in the door late Monday evening, Alec acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and there was no way I was going to bring it up. He didn't so much as ask me what was new as he grabbed a bite from the kitchen and
“medicated” himself, and only mumbled “good night” when he turned off the light.

It was the same old, same old for Alec in the months that followed. Wheeling and dealing continued apace, and he piled up the millions in contemplation of ever greater wealth, as he made money for Grigor Malchek and other well-heeled investors. It became clearer and clearer to me that Alec was an easy touch for just about anyone who bowed to him in the process. He was constantly talking on the phone or at an event with someone who bent his ear about a worthwhile project, and he was as loose with his checkbook as he was morally with his business entertaining. When Gary wanted a Porsche, there was Alec to purchase it for him, and when Gianna and Gary had their eye on a condo in Brooklyn Heights with a to-die-for view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline, he loaned them most of the down payment. Alec-the-new-patriarch just couldn't say no to the sister who worshipped the ground he walked on, and the three of them knew the loan wouldn't be repaid for a long time, if it was paid back at all. But this was his family, so who was I to judge? If I had a family I'm sure I would have done the same.

Filomena still seemed oblivious to most of what was going on around her, including the string of loose young women on the arm of her elder, newly divorced son, but did she ever raise an eyebrow when he strolled into a family gathering with his black Southern belle on his arm. If she did have any opinions about Franco's new taste in women, she kept them to herself, with pursed lips. And whatever opinions I had on the matter, well . . . I kind of enjoyed the added color in the family.

Nor did I—or anyone else in the family—say a word about the extra pounds Alec was piling on. And although Isabella, who was growing into an ever more precocious child every day, didn't mention her father's weight gain, she did tell me about
watching him eat an entire box of dry Cheerios in bed, and she was forever running to me or Alma with a wide-eyed tale of discovering a stash of Oreos and Nutter Butter cookies, Kit Kats, Twizzlers, or Skor bars hidden under the bed.

Alec continued his workouts and human growth hormone injections with Kevin O'Brien, and he was beyond thrilled when his trainer introduced him to Calvin Ransom, the most famous pitcher on the Yankee staff. Alec acted like a child for days afterward, but it tortured me when our young daughter came to me one day because she'd seen “Daddy getting a needle” and wanted to know if he was sick.

“Oh, honey,” I said, wanting to reassure her, “Daddy isn't sick. He just gets those vitamin shots to give him more energy because he works so hard every day.”

She seemed to accept that explanation, but I hated the fact that she was being exposed to things no child her age should have to see.

I shouldn't have been surprised that even after achieving what he claimed to be his ultimate goal of striking out on his own, nothing had truly changed in Alec's world—not the money, or the self-medicating and partying, or the constant striving for more and more . . . and more.

Bloody bed sheets were still a part of our life as well, as I discovered one morning when he bolted out the door for work as usual, failing to say a word about the mess he was leaving behind. Alma, saint that she was, helped me dump the blood-soaked sheets into the bathtub, and cleaned up the drain clog they caused, without a word of complaint.

Isabella was not quite eight yet, but she was inquisitive and precocious, as her teacher was all too willing to tell me when I attended a conference with her. And she had certainly been witness to more than a child of her age should have seen or heard.
Clearly I needed to start talking to her about what was going on. Sometimes I would try to normalize things by chatting with her about what Daddy did at work and explaining that what was going on wasn't really so unusual, even though she was still too young to understand it all. It was difficult at first—for both of us—but it was far better than letting her imagine things that could have been even worse than the reality.

“You know,” I said, “Daddy is working really hard and he's under a lot of pressure because he's set a really big goal for himself. But no matter what, the most important thing for him is to give his family the best of everything.

“It's important to have goals for yourself and to follow your dream no matter what. But the most important thing of all is to figure out how to reach your goals and stay focused. That's something you're going to have to do for yourself when you grow up.”

“But how do
you
do that, Mom?” Isabella asked, looking very serious.

“Well,” I said, “you say your prayers every night, because God always answers. I haven't always prayed as often as I should have, but I hope you will.”

From that moment onward, I made it a point to share as much of my life as I could with my daughter and try to be the best role model I could. She loved hearing about whatever play I was working on, and she was always begging to go with me to meetings and rehearsals. It hurt me to tell her she'd have to wait a bit longer for that, but that pain was nothing compared to the hurt I felt because of Alec's lack of interest in our sweet daughter. Despite the fact that he was such a family man. The pressure of being rich finally caught up with him.

That holiday season I was overjoyed to be offered the opportunity to produce a play that would open between Thanksgiving and Christmas in a theater on West Forty-second Street.
It wasn't Broadway, but it was the closest I'd come so far. The production budget was also twice as large as any of the others I'd been responsible for and it would have been nice to have my financial-wiz husband to help me with it, but I'd long given up that hope. The status meetings Doris Bernstein held from time to time were generally opportunities for me to shine, but I was beyond nervous when she called around noon one day in early November to say that the next meeting had to be moved up and asked if I could be in her office in an hour. I was unshowered, un-made-up, still in sweatpants, with an unfinished report on my desk, and I knew that the Stavros brothers would be there checking on their investment.

I told her not to worry and then sprang into a panic as soon as I hung up the phone. I threw on my best pair of jeans, a great cashmere sweater, and a kick-ass pair of boots, grabbed my three-thousand-dollar Dolce & Gabbana jacket and a wide-brimmed Lanvin hat, and was out the door in minutes.

Talk about “getting by.”
I laughed silently as I pressed the elevator button.