What Remains (20 page)

When Carolyn became Mrs. Kennedy, the press camped outside their apartment. They shot her walking Friday, talking on the phone, going to the deli, drinking her coffee. They caught her in the doorway kissing John good-bye, getting into taxis, walking the steps down to the subway. They followed her in perimeter, just a few feet away. There was a steady hum of clicking the entire first year.

One afternoon when she was supposed to meet me uptown at my office, she called and was crying. She had been out, and they had tailed her the whole time, and she couldn’t bear to go out again. I went down to see her. Photographers were sitting in parked cars, some with the engines running because it was cold, in twos and threes. They held cigarettes out the window. I could see them talking and laughing, on stakeout.

We came up with the idea that afternoon that she’d wear the same outfit every day—jeans and a white shirt, with her hair in a ponytail and sunglasses—and then the pictures would all look the same. And they’d stop taking them. We thought it was brilliant. But it didn’t work. They just kept shooting. The same picture over and over.

I had fantasies about Carolyn after she died and in all of them I was saving her life. And it was always in a grand, theatrical way. There was a crazy woman who used to stalk her; she came with the family. At some point she had stalked all of them. Anthony, too. And in one of my fantasies this woman drew a gun as Carolyn and I were coming out of her apartment and I jumped in the way. Sometimes I changed the person or the place, but there was always danger, and I always saved her life. And there were always photographers standing by, taking pictures.

There was one fantasy where I just shot the stalker. I shot her outright, before she drew. There was a long trial and the paparazzi were demonized and we were allowed to testify on end, Carolyn and I. We had a captive audience. No one in the jury told her to
get over it.

“It’s not like they gave me a handbook,” Carolyn says, laughing, standing in her closet a year after they were married. She pulls suits out—Prada suits in grays and browns—and throws them into a pile on the bed. “You take them—at least you have someplace to wear them.” She had bought the suits after their wedding for lunches she supposed she’d be having, appointments she’d be making, things she thought “Mrs. Kennedy” would be doing. She had picked out pale-blue stationery with Tiffany liners. Stationery she thought another woman might use to write out long letters to confidants and friends.

And now a year later we’re both laughing at the pile of someone else’s clothes. She knew things would change when she became his wife, more than she could imagine. She tried to tuck herself in neatly that first year. But it wasn’t so much about learning the rules as it was about learning they weren’t for her.

The glass wall and you’re constantly bumping into it.

I didn’t have a handbook either. If there had been one, I doubt I would have left Suffern. It would have seemed too impossible. I would have stayed where I was, my nose pressed up to the windows, wishing I were somewhere else. There is a map, I am sure, in those handbooks, and “You Are Here” would have been a place way off to the side, with no roads to anywhere.
You can’t get there from here
.

Carolyn is studying herself in the long mirror in her bedroom. “I’d never wear this anyway. You’ll have to take it in,” she tells me. “But take it. And this one, too. They go together.”

“My butt is definitely smaller than yours,” I say, laughing.

“That’s because I’m six feet.”

“No you’re not. The press writes that because it sounds good—‘six-foot blonde.’”

“Don’t worry about it,” she says, “being short. You have nicer breasts.”

We try on clothes and then get takeout from Bubby’s and spend the rest of the evening talking; which of us would look better pregnant, what she will name her kids.

“What about Stas?” she says, looking at me sideways. She is lying across her bed with Ruby curled up under her arm.

“I like it,” I tell her. “But is that a family-approved name? Besides, I think
I
get it.”

“It’s whoever has him first. Stanislas Kennedy,” she pronounces. “It has a really nice ring!”

I start to laugh. “You would never get away with it. I have to bequeath it to you.”

There are rules about these things, and being married now, she is aware of them. She makes me promise to be godmother.

I get a note a few days later on the pale-blue stationery engraved with her new name.

Anthony is grinning wildly, watching the rearview mirror. We are at a stop sign when he shifts into reverse. “What are you doing?” I turn around and see the headlights of a car behind us coming closer. “Anthony, what are you doing?” I repeat, but he’s not listening. He’s chuckling to himself, backing up steadily until our bumper hits the car behind us with a jolt.

A door slams shut; an angry voice comes toward us. “What the hell are you—Jesus, Anthony, you bastard!” It’s John, and Anthony can barely breathe he’s laughing so hard. John marches back to his car, and Anthony, still laughing, puts the Jeep back in gear, and we drive off with them behind us. We’re on our way to a birthday party in Bedford for John’s cousin Bobby. We knew they were coming, but it is a coincidence they pulled up behind us. Anthony marvels at his fortune.

It’s a family birthday. I’m having the conversations you have at these things, catching up. There are people here I see only once or twice a year, and we’re working our way toward food, getting drinks through rooms crowded with people, eating standing up. But if I stepped aside, pulled myself back from this to watch, here is what I might see. Anthony and John, doing their show, dodging jabs like sparring partners—who’s quickest. Anthony has the edge now because of the car, and because of the car, John will goad him on, introduce him as the Petit Prince all night. It’s a particular art—one they’ve been honing for thirty-odd years. The imitations: Anthony does a perfect John, John a perfect Anthony. They will invariably have a complaint for Carolyn and me about each other on the drive home tonight. Each one keeps score and wants reassurance he came out ahead. One will think the other did something deplorable.
John didn’t even bring a bottle of wine,
Anthony might say, a slave to manners. John will still be irked about the car and will be scheming his next practical joke. Here they are at their finest.

But then we are somber. There is a checkup at the end of the month, and then a surgery. We expect it now when we go in. There is, I know, only so much they can do here. I see it in Dr. Rosenberg’s face.

I know there will be a time when we stop coming here, but I think we’ll look back and see how good some of these days were.
We were crazy
—
how did we do all of that?
We’ve talked about this, Carolyn and I.
Some day so far from now, we’ll come back here and everything will be different. You’ll be in a different life and we won’t even believe we were once here.

It is a harder operation this time. Anthony’s recovery just creeps along. Each week they tell us he needs to stay longer. He has an infection they can’t seem to get rid of. The halcyon days, the skipping, the laughing, sneaking out with buckets of blood and tubes tucked into a gym bag—are all suddenly so long ago.

The day after surgery is Lee’s birthday. “Oh, no,” I say as it dawns on me.

Carolyn is driving the car. We’re on our way to Building 10, and she stops in the middle of the road. “Are you kidding? We can’t just ignore her birthday.”

She turns the car around, and we go to the florist in Bethesda and pick out arrangements of Oriental lilies. Big, bright flowers. “These look like her,” she says. We spend an hour with the florist getting them just right, and take them back to the hotel and put them in her room. Carolyn signs the card from the four of us.

I have to change my routine a bit this time. I can’t stay during the week, because I’m in the middle of shooting a story, so I arrange for other people to visit, and fly back and forth as much as I can.

“Gustavo was here today,” he tells me on the phone. “Provi made dinner.” He doesn’t say it, but I know it makes him happy. Provi is Gustavo’s mother. They live in Georgetown, fifteen minutes from the NIH. She is one of the family almost. She worked for his aunt and uncle in the White House, and they took care of her after.
Provi
—you can say her name after thirty years, and she instantly becomes part of the present. She is older and doesn’t come to the hospital but sends home-cooked food with her son, who is Anthony’s age. With Gustavo, Anthony can bypass the last ten years. He comes almost every night while I’m away, bringing dinner and sneaking in beer.

Anthony is at the NIH for twenty-five days while I fly back and forth to Reno tracking a con man.

There is an infomercial on late-night cable for a company called National Affordable Housing Coalition. They promise low-interest mortgage rates, regardless of credit, income, or bankruptcy. Its founder, Craig M—, targets low-income people, most of them living in housing projects. He promises them a piece of the “American Dream,” and they believe him.

Craig has a paper trail of failed businesses, disgruntled employees, and cheated clients. He is a reporter’s dream. I track down his ex-employees and people he has ripped off. I call hundreds of his victims and listen to their stories. It is always the same: they went to Craig’s seminar, gave him five hundred dollars, and never heard from the NAHC again. I take a camera crew to an Atlanta housing project and interview one family he scammed in their overcrowded, run-down apartment. I call the toll-free number from the infomercial and sign up for his ten-dollar seminar, which turns out to be nothing more than a long pep talk to persuade people to join the NAHC. At the end of each seminar, those who pay the five hundred dollars are promised that someone from the NAHC will walk them—people with little money and poor credit—into the home of their dreams. He is making millions, but no one is getting a home.

I’m working with the correspondent Arnold Diaz, who is well known for his “Shame on You!” series that used to run on the local news. Our plan is to confront Craig after we get all of our footage.

Carolyn loves this story. She wants to take this guy down. While I’m staking him out, she calls me hourly for updates. “What are you doing now?” she says, when I answer the phone.

“Nothing. I’m in the parking lot, waiting.”

“Call me back as soon as you see him!”

I wait in the parking lot for almost six hours, and when I spot him, I call her.

“He just left the office. He’s getting into his car,” I tell her. She wants all the details.

“What does he look like?” she asks.

“He’s short, and his gut is hanging over his khakis, and he’s wearing a Ralph Lauren button-down shirt. I can see the logo.”

“How close are you?”

“He’s walking to his car. It’s a Mercedes. Oh, perfect—his license plate reads ‘Idea Guy.’”

Carolyn groans. “What a loser!” she says.

I slide down in the front seat and whisper into the phone, “He just walked by my car.”

“Holy shit, did he spot you? Let me come out there!”

“Yeah, I’ll really be undercover then with you in tow.”

I don’t have a crew in Reno, but we catch him in New Jersey. This time he’s giving a seminar, and we film it with the hidden-camera glasses—black, chunky glasses with a tiny camera embedded in the bridge. After the seminar Arnold comes out and approaches Craig in the hallway with the camera crew for a “spontaneous interview.” He tries to talk to us walking backward, but then turns around and starts to run. We chase him to the elevator, and Arnold and the camera guy squeeze in with him, the video still rolling.

Craig calls me a week later to schedule an interview. He wants to explain himself, he says. He’s afraid we have the wrong idea about his company, and he wants to set the record straight. I set up an interview at a hotel in San Francisco because he says he will be there on business, but he doesn’t show up. I have the cameraman film the room with his empty chair and Arnold Diaz with his arms crossed, tapping his fingers and watching the clock. I couldn’t have planned a better ending. The NAHC goes out of business the week after our piece airs. A class-action lawsuit is filed in Reno.

Anthony’s planning a trip the minute he gets back from Washington. We flee New York to escape cancer whenever we can, however briefly. It seems to collect in New York. We go to places that don’t have hospitals, so I travel with the number of MedEvac SOS International in my wallet. It is how I am able to sleep at night, with the number for MedEvac under my pillow. The assurance that regardless of how far away we go, there is a phone somewhere with a helicopter on the other end that can come and get him and take him somewhere safe.

Anthony wants to go to Alaska. “Enjoy your trip,” Dr. Rosenberg says. There is a shadow on an X-ray, but he says, “We’ll take a look at it when you get back.” We don’t see the shadow, we hear
Enjoy your trip,
and think,
How bad can it be if he’s letting us go away?
So Anthony organizes an eight-day guided kayaking trip through the Tongass National Park, down the Bering Strait, to watch the whales. We fly to Juneau and spend the night in a bed-and-breakfast with a small group of people and Kelly, our guide. The next morning she hands us life jackets, head nets to keep the bugs out of our eyes, and plastic ponchos in case of rain. Our kayaks and camping gear are packed on a boat, and we travel up the strait to a small island forty miles from anywhere. It’s a dream vacation, life-changing even, in different circumstances. It will take us five days to kayak back down the strait. We are with twelve strangers. Anthony is strong and laughing. Nobody knows he is dying.

We set up our tents under the spruce trees that line the pristine shoreline. There are breathtaking views in every direction, and then it starts to rain. We have a small two-man pup tent, and everything is wet, and the rain leaks into the tent through the seams. This I am not prepared for. The rain does not let up for three days. The morning of day three is the moment, if there was one, when I am ready to walk out. The rain has tapped my reserve, and Anthony must suspect this, that I am approaching a critical border, because he is doing his best to relieve it.

“Wake up, Peanut. I have a surprise.” He is tapping on the outside of the tent. It’s 7 a.m., and the other campers have already been up for an hour. He let me sleep in this morning, in the rain, while the rest of them made breakfast by the fire under a plastic tarp.

“Hmmm?” I mumble. I don’t want to move. I want to stay buried in my damp sleeping bag for the rest of the trip. I’m sure he’s going to make me get up, sing camper songs, traipse somewhere in the rain. I will not come out, I decide in my half-sleep, there is nothing they can do to make me.

“Come on, Nut, wake up!” I peek out, and he’s on his knees, smiling at me, holding a bowl of hot oatmeal with sliced bananas on top. Offering gifts. The sweetest man in the world, my husband getting up early to make me breakfast by the fire, but then he unzips the tent. It caves in from the weight of the water, collapses on me, and now I’m drenched. Everything that was just damp is now soaked—our sleeping bags, our clothes, our rain gear. Anthony slowly backs up with the oatmeal still in his hand, and I sit there for a minute, rain pouring down on me. I can choose to laugh or cry. But I’m afraid if I start to cry I won’t stop, so I get up quietly and pack up the tent.

The rain lets up by the afternoon and the sun comes out, and it is magical. We paddle out in the kayaks in search of the whales. A few hours pass, and suddenly we are surrounded by them. They are huge and graceful and seem to be showing off for us. They throw themselves straight up into the air and smash back down, slap their massive tails on the surface of the water and create swells that rock our kayaks. The first time they do this we all look up at the sky. We think there might be a storm. It’s like paddling up to thunder. “Hit the sides of the kayak hard with your oar if they come too close,” Kelly instructs us. “They’ll move away.”

At night we sleep in the tents under the stars and listen to them “sing.” “They sing long love songs,” Kelly tells us. “It’s part of their mating behavior.” It goes on for hours. They are enormous and indestructible and gentle. Everything else in the world seems so much smaller right now.