Never Enough (11 page)

Dr. O’Leary proclaimed the surgery successful. Rob returned to the Pierre on August 10, having been told to allow two weeks for recovery before flying back to Hong Kong.

Frank came to see him on August 14, a week after the operation. It was another day of oppressive heat and stifling humidity, the temperature already in the nineties by the time he walked into the lobby. Rob hobbled slowly and painfully from the elevator to meet him.

“Are you sure you should be doing this?” Frank asked, glancing at Rob’s cane.

“Yeah, I’m used to it. My dad made me walk down to Fifty-seventh Street yesterday so he could buy me a pair of shoes he approved of. It took about an hour, but I made it.”

They walked slowly into the Rotunda, the Pierre’s splashy, self-conscious, and entirely successful attempt to evoke the ambience of the Gilded Age. Taking afternoon tea in the Rotunda had been an obligatory rite of passage for generations of trust-funded New York debutantes. It was only people from New Jersey like Carmela Soprano who met their daughters for tea at the Plaza.

Frank flashed back to his days and nights in the old Seventy-fifth Precinct. He’d come a long way: from the squad room to the tearoom, from a retooled Chevy to the Mercedes 600SL that he’d just left with valet parking.

“So things are okay with Nancy?”

“I think so. I just wish I could feel I could trust her.”

“That takes time to rebuild, Rob. You don’t just flip a switch to turn it back on.”

“I know. But like right now: she’s upstairs in the room and for all I know she’s calling him collect or she’s arranged for him to call her because she knew I’d be down here.”

“Even if she calls him collect, a hotel phone charge will turn up on your bill. I can have that checked to see if she was using the phone while you were out. As I said, I’ve got friends at this hotel. I can also have somebody monitor the times that the room phone’s in use for incoming calls.”

“I don’t know. She’d just make up excuses anyway. The thing is, Frank, I think I’ve reached the point where I’m going to have to make a decision. Either throw myself back into trying full-time to save the marriage and sticking with it even if I catch her in a lie, or admitting that it just can’t work and cutting my losses by getting a divorce as soon as possible.”

“Rob, we’re talking as friends now, okay? Because I’m no marriage counselor.”

“Understood. What do you think I should do?”

“If you want her, go after her with all your heart and soul. But keep your eyes open and watch your back.”

“In other words, don’t disable the eBlaster.”

“Don’t disable the eBlaster and don’t let her pay the phone bills and credit card bills every month without you putting them under a microscope first.”

“That’s a hell of a way to have to live.”

“Yeah, but maybe it won’t be for long. You’ll both be back in Hong Kong, you can sit down and have a few more heart-to-hearts, and you can start working with a couples therapist and Del Priore can crawl back into his cave. Nancy will forget all about him and then spend the rest of her life telling you how sorry she is for what she did.”

“I hope you’re right”

“So do I.”

Nancy

During the three days before Rob’s surgery, Nancy used calling cards to phone Michael every time she got out of Rob’s sight. During the two days he was in the hospital he insisted that she stay with him around the clock, so it was only after he returned to the Pierre that she was able to make plans. Time was short. Rob had booked her a flight that left on Friday, August 15. He said he’d be fine by then and he wanted her back with the kids. Neither of them acknowledged the real reason.

Michael drove down from New Hampshire early on the morning of Thursday, August 14. He reached midtown by 11:00 a.m. and parked his van. Then he walked a few blocks to the fountain in front of the Plaza, where Nancy had said she’d meet him at noon. He was not so “country” that the city fazed him. Down South he’d spent a fair amount of time in Birmingham, and New York seemed the same, only bigger.

As soon as Rob had left the room to go downstairs for lunch with Frank Shea, Nancy took the elevator to the mezzanine level, walked down a flight of stairs, and went out a side door of the hotel. Then she ran across Fifth Avenue to the fountain. The day was hot and muggy, the air greasy and stale, but Nancy was oblivious to the weather. She had eyes only for Michael, and there he was—right where she’d told him to be.

She summoned a horse and carriage and told the driver she wanted the long trip through Central Park. It was seventy-five dollars for the forty-five-minute tour. As soon as she sat back in the carriage, she broke down in tears. She cried all the way. At the end of the ride she told the driver to go around again. This time, she was able to talk.

“I’m so frightened. If he ever finds out you’re here I’ll be the one in the hospital. I’m not kidding. He’s so used to beating me over nothing; I really think he’d try to kill me if he knew. Do you know what I wish? I wish the fucking doctor had slipped with the scalpel and done him in.”

“Hey. That’s not funny.”

“I didn’t mean it to be. Michael, you’ll never know how bad it’s been. Last Christmas, we were on vacation at a ski resort near Vancouver and he threw me against a wall so hard he broke my ribs. Why? Because I said I needed to stay in the hotel room and take care of my sick son instead of skiing.”

“Why would that make him mad?”

“Because his father said they’d come there to ski and everybody had to ski, no exceptions. He told me to have the hotel send someone up to stay with Ethan. I said no. He said he’d warned me about defying him and that this was especially bad because I was doing it in front of his father. I told him he could tell his father to kiss my ass and that he could go fuck himself while he was at it. That’s when he threw me against the wall.”

“And what happened?”

“I left with Ethan that night. I flew straight back to Hong Kong. As soon as he got back, he said he was going to punish me for defying him and he was going to teach me never to disobey him again. Ever since, whenever he wants sex—and he’s always drunk, and usually high on coke, too—I refuse, and then he rips my clothes off and forces me.”

“Oh, baby doll…”

Their second circuit around the park was almost over. They drew closer to the famed midtown hotels: the Ritz-Carlton, the Essex House, the Helmsley Park Lane, and the Plaza on Central Park South; the Trump International and the Mandarin Oriental on Columbus Circle; and on Fifth Avenue, the Sherry-Netherland, and a bit farther on, the Pierre, where Rob was just finishing lunch with Frank Shea. It was a world Nancy had come to know well. It was a world—the five-star world—on which she depended for what little self-esteem she had. It was a world Michael had never known and never would.

Even in the open carriage, the heat and humidity stifled. Sweat poured off both Nancy and Michael and flies buzzed around the neck of the horse that pulled the carriage.

“Why don’t you leave him?” Michael asked.

“I can’t. He would destroy me in a divorce. I’d lose everything. I wouldn’t walk away with a penny. And he’d probably get the children, too.”

“I can’t believe that. If you got a good lawyer—”

“Michael, you have no idea how powerful he is! And you have no idea what he’s capable of. His whole family: their only pleasure in life is grinding other people into dust.”

Nancy had booked Michael into a cheap hotel, paying cash in advance, and he stayed in the city overnight. She called him when Rob and Bill went down to the lobby for a drink and he hurried over and she met him at the elevator on her floor and they rushed into the stairwell and made love standing up, to the sound of the echoes of their moans and the smell of musty concrete.

The next day, he rode with Nancy in her taxi to the airport. Two blocks after he’d hopped into the cab she looked out the rear window and shouted: “We’re being followed! Driver, go faster!”

“What?”
Michael said.

“Don’t turn around! We can’t let them know we’ve seen them. I’ve got to lie down on your lap so they won’t see me through the window.”

“But they already know you’re here. It’s
your
taxi.”

“Don’t contradict me, Michael. I can’t stand that.”

Once her head was in his lap, he turned around. It was mid-afternoon on a midsummer Friday in Manhattan. All he saw was heavy traffic.

“Nobody’s following us, baby doll.”

“They
are
! I know it!”

She wouldn’t sit up. They were creeping along the Van Wyck Expressway when she screamed: “
They’re getting closer!
I can feel it!”

“Baby doll, baby doll, there’s nobody there.”

“Protect me, Michael. You’ve got to promise you’ll always protect me.”

“Sure, sure. Always.”

From the start he’d known she was high-strung. But it wouldn’t be his problem any longer. He’d had the most interesting summer of his life. He’d had a love affair with the classiest, most beautiful, and richest woman he’d ever met, and he was coming out of it with a seven-thousand-dollar wristwatch. Life didn’t get better than that.

The day after she got back to Hong Kong, Nancy got an e-mail from Bryna:

Nancy wrote back right away:

Bryna replied:

Nancy wrote back:

Midlife crisis. An interesting notion. As Joseph Campbell wrote, “Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.” He also wrote, “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

And then there was Dante.

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During the ten days between her own arrival in Hong Kong and Rob’s return, Nancy conducted Internet searches, using the following terms: “sleeping pills,” “drug overdose,” and “medication causing heart attack.” On Sunday, August 24, she also made her first call on her new cell phone. She’d set it up so she’d be billed at the Hong Kong International School. She thought of it as her “Michael phone.” She would use it only to talk to him. Rob would never see the bills. She’d take cash out of the ATM and open a secret checking account and use that to pay the bills. She was proud of herself for planning everything so well.

The results of her Internet searches fresh in her mind, she talked to Michael for almost four hours. Later, they would both say they couldn’t remember talking about anything special. Certainly, they hadn’t talked about sleeping pills or drug overdoses or medication causing heart attack.