What Remains (11 page)

I am new at Dune Lane, and everyone here already knows everyone else. Or they have friends or a place in common that instantly unites them. They are familiar with Larry Gagosian, the gallery owner, who comes here in his role as art expert, and with Chris Whittle, who recently made a killing in private education. They all know Mickey Schulhof, the chairman of Sony U.S.A., who, because he was holding a Pomeranian under his arm when I met him, I mistook for Lee’s dog trainer.

I feel as though I’m being patiently tolerated at these lunches. Though they are all friendly, this is a tough crowd to break into. I don’t have a backstory. Sometimes I sense the curiosity of the guests.
Who is this girl of Anthony’s?
Like an extended family, they all have some amount of claim to him, and they wonder who has engaged his heart. Less frequently I recognize genuine interest. And after a while I notice that my trump cards aren’t really interesting to anyone. I’m not a former model. I don’t have a famous uncle or step-uncle or ex-lover. I can’t speak in the shorthand of boarding schools. And in this way, I reveal myself. Opinions are sealed without my knowledge.

It doesn’t matter that I’ve been to the Gulf War, filmed two documentaries, and it won’t matter if I go to Angkor Wat, with or without an Emmy, because Jackie and Lee have already been there. I am either unable to deliver these stories properly, or I’m simply cursed by lineage.

It is said there are only two stories—a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town; they are both here in mine. I took a journey, and Carolyn came to town.

We were at Sea Song. I was washing dishes, Anthony was running on the beach, and John was reading the paper when she walked out of the bedroom, blonde and ten stories high, in a white cotton nightgown with eyelet trim.

She walked across the living room and put a hand on my shoulder. She seemed to know me. “Hi, I’m Carolyn. You must be Carole. I forgot a toothbrush. Do you have one I can use?” Her eyes were as big as quarters and blue like a swimming pool and she spoke softly, almost whispering. I thought later, she didn’t want to scare me away.

I was wearing red-denim shorts and a white T-shirt tucked in. I remember this because she teased me about it for years. “You should have seen Carole when I met her, this sweet little thing, with her belted shorts and tucked-in shirt.” She told anyone who would listen. We had a story, like an old couple, about how we met, and she loved this part.

“What was wrong with wearing a belt?”

“Lamb, no one was wearing belted shorts, and red! I thought, ‘Oh, my God, who is this little one?’” She made me believe I was captivating.

I was geeky, earnest, completely miscast. I can see it in pictures now, but I didn’t know then. I was protected by naïveté—the certainty that I was getting along just fine. She was drawn to that. I wasn’t whom people expected Anthony Radziwill to be with. But then, she wasn’t whom people expected John to be with either.

When I close my eyes and think of her, I see her hands. She was completely unaware of them, but they were threaded through every word she said like melody lines, changing tempo and rhythm with her story. They were quick, jumpy but certain. “I don’t think we’ll be doing that,” she would say when something was ridiculous. Her index finger would draw a line around her sentence and stop, stabbing a sort of punctuation in the air. She had long, strong fingers. She wasn’t afraid to get them dirty. She wasn’t afraid to touch. She held my hand while she talked to me, or when we walked down the street. She played with my hair, absentmindedly, when she was making a point. It took me some time to get used to all the touching. She dismissed the barriers, the walls of politeness, the invisible personal space we protect. There was no awkward embrace with her, no hesitation. She hugged you tight, as if she might never see you again.

That first day, I noticed light and movement and her hands.

“Do you mind if I come with you to the store?” she asked.

“Sure, if you’d like,” I said. I was going to pick up steaks for dinner. Several of John’s friends had come by and were on the deck. He had a group of guys going back to college, and they were always buzzing around him.

“I’m so glad you’re here. I thought this was going to be all boys, all weekend.”

By the end of the weekend I learned that she had grown up a half hour from Suffern, in the blue-collar town of Greenburgh. That her father left when she was two, and her mother raised her and her two sisters alone. That as teenagers we had both worked for Caldor, she behind the jewelry counter and I at the customer service desk. That she now worked for Calvin Klein. What were the odds that John would bring home a girl from Caldor? She left a note behind in my bedroom.

Carole, you must seriously get rid of those Gap sneakers. Our friendship cannot proceed in a growth oriented way until you realize how important this issue is to me. Nice to meet you. XO, Carolyn

I thought that if we spent any time together we would be great friends.

They broke up the next weekend, and I didn’t see her for two years. John went back to his on-again, off-again relationship with an actress. She came a few times that summer with two girlfriends who barely spoke and three kittens. I kept locking the kittens in the laundry room because Anthony was allergic.

At the end of the summer Anthony and I take a vacation in the south of France. We fly to Nice and drive to St. Tropez, where his mother is renting a house. We spend a few days around Nice and then drive through seaside resort towns, gracing the Mediterranean with our romance. We stop at a small café in Cannes, and Anthony orders lunch in perfect French.

“Je t’aime,” he tells me.

“Je t’aime,” I repeat.

“Keep practicing, Sweetie,” he says, winking.

“What does it mean?”

“It means I like you, a lot.”

At St. Paul de Vence we stop at La Colombe d’Or and watch the old men play boccie, groups of them in the hot sun shouting at each other in French, throwing wooden balls at patches of dirt. We watch them for an hour or maybe two, there’s no hurry, and then we’re off again.

At the post office of St. Tropez, we call his mother to tell her we’re here and then wander around the small town. We stop for chocolate croissants at the patisserie, for gelato at the ice cream shop. In the beginning all of it is so new. Along the French Riveria, I think I’m the first to fall in love.

The house his mother is renting is on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. It is the guesthouse on a very large estate, so large the guesthouse has a guesthouse, and that is where we stay—in separate bedrooms.

Our routine is a series of small entertainments, flowing sleepily one to the next. We walk the stone path, cool in the morning shade, to the motorboat at the dock. Mediterranean villas often come with a boat and captain on call to ferry guests to beaches and coves. We have a swim and then take off for another place. We lunch at Cinquant Cinq at the height of the season. With the people who winter in St. Barth’s and have a corner table at Sette Mezzo in New York. Then spend afternoons back in town, sipping iced tea in the cafés along the port, watching the yachts maneuver in and out.

A procession of minor events leads to dinner: a late-day swim or tennis, conversation on the patio with white wine and vodka tonics, and then finally our meal, and the next day we start over again. The third day here is my birthday. His mother gives me a sarong from her favorite shop, and that evening we toast with champagne,
à votre santé!
We are young and happy and have all the time in the world.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait,
PJR
produced a series of hour-long specials on the war. All this summer I have been working on the third one, called
A Line in the Sand
. I resumed the research when I returned from St. Tropez. Looking for stories for the piece, I find a small article one morning on an inside page of
The Washington Post
: “Iraqis Fire Shots Near U.S. Team.” There is a picture below the article of a convoy of trucks leaving a military facility in Fallujah, purportedly moving nuclear weapons. It is blurry, taken with a long lens, but I think we can use it for the show. The article quotes a United Nations weapons inspector named David Kay.

Luck and resourcefulness and an endless succession of phone calls—they connect the dots. This is what makes a good reporter.

You make a phone call and then another and then another and someone gives up a little bit with each one. I call the number in Vienna for the International Atomic Energy Agency, David Kay’s base, hoping to find someone who will help me get to someone else who can get in touch with him. It is 10 a.m. in New York, 4 a.m. in Vienna, and he happens to answer the phone. He is just back from Iraq. There is no price you can put on luck in this business.

He tells me he was with the inspectors at the Abu Ghraib military facility, that they took pictures of suspicious crates at the military base, and that after that the crates suddenly disappeared. Intelligence reports tracked the crates to a site in Fallujah, so the inspectors followed, and at Fallujah they were rebuffed.

“But the pictures,” I ask him, “how did you get those pictures?”

“One of the guys climbed up the water tower,” he says. “And then the Iraqis fired shots.”

I ask him for copies of the pictures, and he offers me video. “Video?”

“Sure. I have video of the entire incident. The convoy, the water tower, the Iraqis shooting at us, six tapes.”

“Yes, I want it,” I say quickly, before he can change his mind. “How soon can you send it?”

“I’ll be in New York in two days. I can give it to you then.”

I meet him at a coffee shop, and he hands me the tapes. I make copies and messenger them over to him at the United Nations that afternoon. He needs to play them for the UN Security Council.

The footage is incredible. When the guards deny the inspectors entry to the facility, one of the inspectors in Kay’s group turns on the video camera. “Okay, then I’ll have to call New York,” Kay tells the guards, and he proceeds to set up a satellite phone in the middle of the desert—a clunky contraption with a big round satellite dish. Then he sits down cross-legged in the sand, waiting to connect. A camel walks behind him, and you can hear gunshots in the background. To which Kay remarks, deadpan, “It’s cops and robbers in the desert, ladies and gentlemen.”

Peter Jennings records the narration track to give the background of the story, and I edit David Kay’s tapes of Fallujah into a three-minute piece that leads off the show to earn my first producing credit.

Anthony adds
I love you
to the end of a Sunday night phone call. The summer of 1993 starts out otherwise uneventfully. It is our second year at Sea Song and we’re sharing the house with Marc and Lori. We’re back in the city on Sunday, and he calls my apartment to say good night, the way he does every night I’m not with him.

“Sweet dreams, I love you.” And he hangs up. Or maybe it is me hanging up quickly, startled.
What?
He is in the habit of ending our phone calls with
big kiss
—I am used to
big kiss.
I’m not ready for something new just like that. Shouldn’t we be drinking red wine, kissing softly in front of a fireplace? Isn’t that when this should be said?

I once spent a hot afternoon at the University of Texas, in the cramped office of Dr. Devendra Singh, and Dr. Singh used a specific science to explain love—the waist-to-hip ratio. I was working on a piece called “The Biology of Love” for a new magazine show called
Day One
. Dr. Singh was considered a pioneer for his work in the study of the evolutionary significance of human physical attraction. “Love at first sight,” he said, “all boils down to one thing—the proportion of a woman’s waist to her hips.” Men, he claimed, are biologically hardwired to favor an hourglass figure, and to prove his theory he conducted a study of
Playboy
Playmates over fifty years. He discovered that the Playmates had gotten thinner over the years, but their waist-to-hip ratio—that is, the waist measurement divided by the size of the hips—remained constant. The most desirable proportion, he discovered, was a 0.70. And here I thought love would feel like an Etta James song, with all those thrills and flutters—passion from the depth of the soul. But my waist-to-hip ratio is a 0.71, so I was encouraged.

I say it back one night,
I love you,
a month after he does, at Sea Song. We are in bed with the lights off, about to fall asleep, and I say it. He says it back. There. It’s done. And now we spend another summer building sandcastles with Anthony’s nieces and nephews and grilling fresh corn on the deck.

When you live in New York, life decisions, like moving in with your boyfriend, are for the most part made based on who has the better real estate deal. I am subletting an apartment on the West Side, and Anthony lives in a rent-controlled apartment on the East Side. My lease is up, and I have to move. This is how we wind up together in his bachelor pad on Seventy-Eighth Street. I have traveled light these first few years on my own, and I have little more than a suitcase. Anthony clears out a drawer and closet for me, but for a month I keep my clothes in the suitcase on the floor. I love the idea of spontaneity, of clothes flung over chairs, and yet I’m just too practical. I manage for the downside; if it doesn’t work, why unpack?

We disagree immediately on his décor. He has a couch covered in tiger velvet fabric that doesn’t quite seem to fit in the living room, and two mismatched chairs. There is an antique coffee table and a large, rectangular butcher-block table. It’s covered with piles of papers, magazines, bills, and letters, none of which I am allowed to touch. The tiny kitchen is stocked with mismatched dishes and pots and a cutting board so warped it is split down the middle. Down the hall is the bedroom—small with a dresser and bed and a clumsy-looking rocker in the corner. The economy of space in Manhattan does not permit the odd bulk of a rocker. On top of that, it’s homely—oak with a low rattan seat and wide armrests. Anthony has gym shorts and T-shirts spread flat over it to dry. The arms and back are padded and covered with vinyl. The sort of piece that works better on the porch of a big farmhouse than in a small apartment on Madison Avenue.

He lets me replace the shower curtain—plastic with a map of the world and stiff mold on the bottom—though he thinks it is wasteful.

“It’s still good. It keeps the water in, doesn’t it?”

“It’s gross,” I say. “I’m getting a new one.”

The cutting board I dismiss without asking, and it is the source of an enormous fight. We never seem to fight about interesting things—always passionately about the trivial: our different manner of cutting tomatoes, driving techniques, the high frequency with which I wash clothes and how much detergent is appropriate to use. The chair, though, is not settled with a quick fight. Our disagreement continues on and off for months. I try to adapt to it, moving it around first, from one place to another. Then I try to change the look with a chenille throw, a pillow wedged first on this side, and then that.

“Maybe we could give it to your sister,” I say. “She could just keep it until we have a bigger place.”

But it isn’t just any rocker. His aunt sent it when he moved in. “I thought you might like to have this,” she wrote in the note. “It belonged to Jack.”

“I’m not getting rid of it,” he says. “It was my uncle’s.”

“But that’s exactly why it shouldn’t be here. You should donate it to the library!”

“No. I like it. It stays. Besides,” he adds with a wink, “where would I dry my gym clothes?”

I have bumped up against history. It won’t be the first time. Most things here, I am learning, have a story. The tiger couch, for instance, is not just a couch, but one his mother had custom-made at De Angelis. It has been photographed for fashion books. People in certain circles
know
this couch, just as people in other circles
know
this chair. There is a well-known picture of the president sitting in it in the Oval Office, where it looks much better.

In August, on my birthday, I feel the bump.

“Feel my stomach right here,” Anthony says. We are on the beach. “It feels like a little bump or something.”

“Oh, yeah. I feel it. There’s a knot. That’s weird.”

“Yeah. It’s little. It’s nothing.”

Cancer is like this in the beginning. It tiptoes in like a teenager past curfew.

Anthony’s body is carved and knotted with muscle—he runs marathons, works out at the gym every day, some days twice. It is impossible that there can be something unhealthy in this body that ripples on morning runs and twenty-mile bike loops around Long Island. We are quiet for a few minutes, then I run my hand over it again.

“It’s just a little bump,” he says abruptly. “I’ll have someone look at it when we get back.”

It is all very casual, and Anthony dismisses it with a quick hand motion, and we both lie down on our towels with our eyes closed to the sun. I let thoughts of the wedding we are going to that night, a twinge of hunger, fill up my head like sand. They spill right over the bump, and just like that I have dismissed it, too.

Unless you know to look for it, it is unnoticeable. It isn’t touching us. We go to the wedding that evening. We finish our vacation. We drive back to the city and carry on with our daily business. We let the bump lie there for a few months, and it grows.

In October I return to Cambodia to produce a piece for
Day One.
This is my first piece as an official producer.

This time I stay in Phnom Penh, at the Royal Cambodiana. It has changed considerably since our documentary aired. The hotel has electricity, phone service, and “western-style” breakfast in the dining room.

I am working on a profile of Bobby Muller, founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, whom I first met at the live debate on the night
From the Killing Fields
aired. He is someone you meet once and never forget. He has a clinic in Phnom Penh that makes prosthetic limbs for land mine victims. I interview young amputees at the hospital. I interview survivors of the murder at the torture prison in Tuel Sleng. On a day off from filming, my cameraman, Mark, and I take a plane to Siem Reap, in the western part of the country. It’s a wild town filled with guns, prostitutes, and illegal gems traders. It also lies in the shadow of Angkor Wat, the largest and most famous of the temples built in the ninth century at the height of the ancient Khmer Empire.

I pick up a card at the airport for “guide and driver” and hire the man who answers the phone to take us there. We drive through the jungle, and then our driver pulls over, and through the trees we can see the ancient temple. It is deserted except for a few monks in saffron robes burning incense. The jungle is overgrown, and the roots of the giant banyan trees are twisted around the enormous sandstone pillars, as though they are keeping the entire structure from collapse. The colossal lichen-covered Buddhas carved on each of the temple towers, scarred from years of warfare, stand watch. By late afternoon, armed Khmer Rouge soldiers in camouflage replace the saffron-robed monks. We stay for the sunset and then our guide, nervous, insists we head back to the hotel.

When I return to New York, I find that Anthony has seen several doctors, and each of them has a slightly different diagnosis for the bump. One performed a needle biopsy that was inconclusive. Two others told him to come back if the bump grew. Anthony seems to have whatever it is under control. We barely speak of it.

We fly off to St. Barth’s for Christmas, untroubled, to join Lee and Herbert and Hamilton. Herbert puts together a script for a short movie and then films it for fun.
The Kakadopoulis Story
—a satirical Greek tragedy about a murder and a double cross. Herbert directs and the rest of us make up the cast. Anthony plays the reporter trying to crack the case. Hamilton is hilarious as a misguided hairdresser, and Lee turns in a riveting performance as his mother. Lee’s friend Count Giovanni Volpe plays the murdered tycoon. I coproduce and take one of the leading roles, a rival reporter who seduces Anthony to get the story. Anthony and I have a love scene; we flub our lines and can’t stop giggling. You can hear Herbert scolding us off camera, “Carole, Anthony, stop laughing!”

It’s only when I watch the movie later that I see the bump as Anthony turns shirtless toward the ocean in the second scene.