They talked about music. She liked the Backstreet Boys. He liked Rascal Flatts. They both liked Brian McKnight. They talked about movies. Her favorite movie of all time was Bonnie and Clyde. Her recent favorite was Unfaithful with Diane Lane. Michael hadn’t seen it. She told him he should.
“Do you know what kind of tattoo you want?”
“I want the Chinese characters for the years my three kids were born.”
“I don’t think they do Chinese at Blackbear.”
“They’ll do whatever I tell them to do.”
Brattleboro was a river town. Like Rutland and Bennington and Bellows Falls, it was nitty and gritty, a brick and mortar town that smelled of fresh tar and fast food, not maple syrup. There were postcards of Brattleboro, population twelve thousand, but nobody bought them.
Once, it had been a thriving railroad and mill town. Even in 2003, down by the river—in the section that the locals called the Brat—many of the abandoned factories and shut-down hotels were still standing. Rudyard Kipling had lived there a hundred years earlier, but by 2003 the only writers to be found were in the Brattleboro Retreat, a drug and alcohol rehab center that had become the town’s biggest employer.
Still, remnants of a counterculture remained. Sixties hippies who wanted to renounce bourgeois values but who hadn’t quite been ready to live on a farm had settled in Brattleboro. Echoes of their music, faint whiffs of pot smoke, and some of their offspring survived. The Blackbear Tattoo and Jewelry Company served their needs.
It was not quite as easy as Nancy had expected to find the right designs for her tattoos. She’d brought a drawing of the Chinese characters she wanted, but she and the tattooist had to spend an hour on the Internet before she was sure they had it right.
“Don’t fuck it up,” she told the tattooist. “I’m not going through this again.”
Michael waited patiently, easing himself into his new role as Nancy’s escort.
She was excited when it was over. Three tattoos—Chinese characters, each about the size of a quarter—adorned her bare left shoulder.
“Wait until my uptight husband sees these,” she said. “He’ll totally freak out.”
“Do you really think he won’t like them?” Michael asked.
Nancy laughed. “If you knew him, you wouldn’t be asking that question. He doesn’t like anything I do unless it’s something he’s told me to do. But a tattoo? It’ll be like I’d acted in a porno film. You don’t understand, Michael. You couldn’t understand, which is one reason why I like you so much. My husband is all about appearances. All that matters is how it looks, not what it is. But fuck him. Let’s go into town and take a walk and then we’ll find someplace where I can buy you dinner. I don’t want to go home yet. I’m having too much fun.”
It was only a five-minute drive from Blackbear to the center of the Brat. The rain had stopped, leaving the air heavy and the sidewalks wet. Nancy was so delighted by her tattoo—or by the fact that she’d finally shown the courage to get it—that she almost broke into a trot.
They wound up at the Riverview Café on Bridge Street and got a table by the window.
“That’s where I live,” Michael said, pointing across the river at New Hampshire. “Five miles that way.”
“Do you want to show me your house?” Nancy asked.
“No, ma’am. I’d be embarrassed to after being in yours. It’s a mobile home.”
“You’ll show it to me. Not tonight, but soon.”
Nancy ordered a shot of tequila before dinner. “I don’t drink much,” she said, “but it seems like a girl with a tattoo ought to drink a shot of tequila.”
She seemed about to call him Clyde and to tell him to call her Bonnie. Michael, who didn’t drink or smoke or swear, ordered a root beer.
After dinner Nancy had a Jägermeister, a seventy-proof herbal liqueur. She was giggling by the time she finished it and she told Michael he’d better drive back to Stratton. She gave him the car keys as they walked across the parking lot.
But before he could put the key in the ignition, she started to cry. She put her face in her hands and she cried. She put her hands by her sides and she shook her head back and forth and she cried. She bawled. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She cried and she cried and she cried.
Michael always kept close track of time. So he knew she cried for twenty-two minutes as he sat next to her, saying nothing.
Finally, she looked at him.
“Don’t you see how conflicted I am? For years, I’ve had to pretend. I’ve had to act like the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect woman in the perfect marriage. But it’s all been bullshit. You’re the first man who’s ever accepted me as I am, without judging. I have such strong feelings for you, Michael, but I don’t know what to do.”
One of Michael’s attributes was that when he didn’t know what to say he said nothing.
“My marriage…my husband…oh my God, Michael, you have no idea what a hell it is. You can’t know what it’s like to live with someone you’re afraid of. Someone who cuts you to pieces with every word.”
He listened.
“It’s the money, it’s the kids, it’s this and it’s that and it’s everything. Everything I do is wrong. Everything I say. It’s how I dress. It’s how I talk. It’s how I look. He hates it all. He cuts me down to nothing. I’m living in hell and nobody knows it and I can’t tell anyone because I’m afraid.”
She put her face back in her hands and cried again. She cried for another twelve minutes. Fog from the river spread slowly across the parking lot. She stopped crying. As soon as she stopped crying, she fell asleep. Michael drove back to Stratton. He drove with one hand. His other hand was on Nancy’s leg. When she finally woke up, sniffling, she didn’t move her leg away. Instead, she put her hand on his and left it there all the way home.
She had weekend plans with the children and couldn’t see him. But on Monday she disconnected a few wires behind the television and said she needed him to come to the house to fix it. He came the next day, Tuesday, June 17, in late afternoon.
She’d finally finished the renovation. Her goal, she had written to Bryna O’Shea after a long e-mail silence, was to make the house “all me. I want the kind of comfort that’s healing to my soul and inner spirit…my private retreat…an environment of solitude. Each time I walk through the door I want to be greeted with warmth and love.” Nowhere was her vision more fully realized than in the guest room. She named it the “Blue Room.” The walls were painted blue, the bedspread and sheets and pillowcases were blue, the nightstands and the armchair were blue. She called it “a place of extra comfort…to find rest…and bring peace.”
She brought Michael to the Blue Room after he’d finished reconnecting the wires. It was there that they became lovers. It was “a perfect place to share with the man I was falling in love with,” she wrote in a computer journal she updated intermittently. And it seemed even more perfect when Michael told her that his favorite color was blue.
“Two people from different worlds,” she wrote to him in an e-mail the next day, “brought together…feeling an overwhelming connection…discovering that one is truly the other’s soul mate…”
Michael brought Amity over again on Saturday. While Connie was watching the children, Nancy brought him up to the Blue Room again. This time, they stayed for three hours.
They quickly established a routine. They would see each other only on weeknights, after 9:30 p.m., after Connie put the children to bed. No more weekends: if she started to leave the children with Connie on weekends, Rob would surely find out. They talked by phone ten times a day. On nights when Michael didn’t come over, they would stay on the phone for hours. Fortunately for them, they had little need to e-mail.
15.
Rob
ROB HAD TO FLY TO NEW YORK FOR ANOTHER SERIES OF meetings about Tokyo at Merrill Lynch. He met Frank Shea for breakfast at Le Parker Meridien on West Fifty-seventh Street, on Thursday, June 26. Merrill Lynch had booked
Rob into a room overlooking Central Park. He and Frank met at Norma’s, the hotel’s breakfast restaurant, which was famous for its thousand-dollar omelet filled with lobster and sevruga caviar, known informally as the “investment banker over easy.” But Rob restricted himself to orange juice, oatmeal, and whole wheat toast. He didn’t even eat much of that. His anguish over Nancy’s affair had taken his appetite away.
Frank’s first impression of Rob was of a tense, driven, but essentially gracious man who’d been confronted for the first time in his life by a situation that resisted quantification. No amount of number crunching could reveal what was inside a woman’s heart. Rob seemed tormented by uncertainty but very much in love.
He had called Nancy from Hong Kong just before leaving for New York. His daughter Zoe had answered the phone.
“Daddy,” she said, “Mike keeps bringing Amity over to play and I don’t like her.”
“Mike, the man who put in our big TV?”
“Yes. I don’t like Amity, she’s a pain.”
“When was the last time she came over?”
“Last night. And Mike sits in your special chair. I told him he shouldn’t sit there because it’s your chair, but Mommy says it’s all right because Mike’s her friend.”
“I’ll talk to Mommy about that, sweetie. In fact, why don’t you get Mommy now.”
When Nancy picked up the phone, Rob said, “I understand the stereo boy has been hanging around.”
“Michael? Oh, he’s brought Amity over to play a couple of times.”
“Michael? Since when did the stereo boy become ‘Michael’?”
“That’s his name, Rob. And he’s not a boy, he’s a man.”
“Who the hell is Amity?”
“His daughter. She’s five years old and very sweet and very lonely. Michael’s in the middle of a horrendous divorce and I suggested that he bring Amity over once in a while to play with the kids. They all adore her.”
“That’s not what Zoe says. Zoe just told me she’s a pain in the ass. And why is Michael sitting in my chair?”
“Wait a minute, Rob. Who the fuck do you think you are, Papa Bear? Michael can sit anywhere he wants in my house.”
“How about when he wants to lie down?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t play dumb, Nancy. You’re fucking the stereo boy.”
“Stop calling him ‘the stereo boy.’ You sound pathetic.”
“You’re having an affair with that asshole!”
“How could you even think something like that, much less insult me by saying it?”
“How many times has he been over?”
“Twice. Big fucking deal.”
“Don’t invite him again.”
“It’s my house and I’ll invite anybody I want. You’re such an asshole. Michael is my friend and that’s that.”
“Your friend? The last time I saw him he was the guy from Prime Focus who was going to install the home theater.”
“If you could only hear how fucking ridiculous you sound. I’ve had enough of this conversation. Good-bye.”
Now, over breakfast at Norma’s, Rob said, “I don’t know what to do next, Frank. I wish I believed her, but I don’t. And the e-mails—they’re damaging, but they don’t absolutely prove anything.”
“My only word of advice, Rob, is you’d better be sure you really want to know what’s in her e-mails. I’ve seen plenty of cases where that’s caused more problems than it’s solved. Sometimes you’re better off not confirming every suspicion. Especially if you’re trying to hold the marriage together.”
“No, Frank. I’ve got to know. But once I have proof, what do I do?”
“A lot depends on your level of tolerance. Assume the worst: assume she has slept with the guy a couple of times. Is it worth busting up the marriage for that?”
“Maybe not. But who says it’s only going to be a couple of times?”
“Rob, she needs the lifestyle you make it possible for her to have. She’s not going to throw that away to go live in a trailer park. You can lay it on the line: ‘Stop seeing him or start seeing my lawyers.’ If it comes to that. I hope it doesn’t.”
Nancy
While Rob was having breakfast with Frank Shea, Nancy was driving into New York City with Connie and the children. Once again she’d booked connecting suites at the Surrey. Bryna O’Shea would be arriving from San Francisco the next day.
It had become Bryna’s tradition to vacation in late June and come back to New York to visit friends and relatives. Nancy was the friend with whom she spent the most time. They shopped in expensive stores and ate in expensive restaurants and stayed out late going to clubs, and they talked about how much fun they’d had when they were single.
Bryna got into New York only hours before Rob left. For once it wasn’t raining, but the first heat wave of the summer had arrived, bringing temperatures in the nineties and rendering the New York air as stagnant and gritty as Hong Kong’s. Rob was at the Surrey when she got there. He looked drawn and wan. She was shocked by how thin he was. Rob had always been fit. He’d even competed in a Hong Kong triathlon. Now he seemed almost frail. Even more than his words to her over the previous two months, Rob’s appearance made clear to Bryna the extent of his distress.
They had only the briefest chance to talk.
“You look like shit,” Bryna said. “What’s happening? Confrontation? Open warfare?”
Rob shook his head. “Nothing like that. We’ve barely talked. I just stopped by to see the kids. I’ll try to figure it out once I get back to Hong Kong, but it’s really weird to look at her and imagine her screwing some illiterate handyman.”
Bryna raised her eyebrows.
“All right, he’s not illiterate. And he knows how to stick a plug in a socket. And he’s sticking his plug in Nancy’s socket. And if I don’t get out of here right now I’m going to say or do something I’ll regret.”
“Stay in touch,” Bryna said.
It was only after Rob had left for the airport that Nancy told Bryna that she’d be going back to Vermont the next morning. She had to get back, she said. There was just so much to do, getting the girls ready for camp.
Bryna knew that wasn’t true. She knew Nancy never did anything to get the girls ready for camp. Connie did it all. There was another reason why Nancy was in such a hurry to get back to Vermont, and because Rob had been confiding in her Bryna knew what it was, but because Rob had been confiding in her she couldn’t let Nancy know that she knew.
For their one night out, Nancy wanted to go to the Odeon. In the mid-1980s, when Nancy and Bryna had been working and playing in the sandbox of the lower Manhattan restaurant and club scene, the Odeon had been the destination of choice for hip young martini-drinking, coke-snorting New York yuppies.
Without the Odeon, there might not have been a TriBeCa. Without the Odeon, the area surrounding West Broadway between Duane and Thomas streets might always have remained Washington Market. Jay McInerney set many a Bright Lights, Big City scene at the Odeon. After midnight, when those who’d come only to dine had been cleared out and the Bolivian marching powder was thick as pollen in the air, one might see not only McInerney, but John Belushi or Mary Boone or Bret Easton Ellis at the Odeon. It had been the epicenter from which had radiated the Wall Street greed and excess that defined the eighties and that lured Rob Kissel into the honeyed trap of investment banking.
Those glory days were long gone by the summer of 2003, when Nancy and Bryna ate dinner at the Odeon, but maybe it was a lingering aura of licentiousness that emboldened Bryna to ask the sort of personal question she knew Nancy despised.
“Are you having a fling?”
“God, no. Why would you ask something like that?”
“You seem different, sort of jittery, as if you wished you could be somewhere else. I know things have been rough with Rob. And I remember how we talked after we’d seen that movie with Diane Lane.”
“That’s just crazy,�
� Nancy said. “You should know I’d never do anything like that.”
And back in Vermont, Nancy decided she could not continue. Rob was already too suspicious. Nancy knew how obsessive he could be. He’d been hostile at the Surrey. She’d put nothing past him. She could even imagine him having her followed. And she was afraid of what he’d do if he ever found out the truth.
“I can’t see you anymore,” she told Michael in a phone call on June 27. “Rob’s too suspicious. I feel like he’s been spying on me. And who knows what else he might do? He has power, Michael. He has money. He might even come after you.”
“Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.”
“Well, I’m frightened. There was a look in his eye that really spooked me. It’s like he already knows and he’s just waiting to spring the trap.”
“We’ll be careful. We’ll be even more careful than we have been.”
“No, Michael, I can’t do it. I won’t be able to see you anymore.” And then she broke down in tears. Before long, Michael began to keep track of how many times Nancy told him they could not continue their affair and how much time passed before she told him it was on again. This first time, it was three days.
“I’ve got to see you. I don’t care if he knows. He’s never let me do anything I’ve wanted to do, but I’m not going to let him keep me from seeing you.” But three days after that Rob called from Hong Kong to remind her that he didn’t want her seeing Del Priore anymore. She said she wouldn’t. He warned her that she’d better not. She got scared and called Michael.
“I really can’t see you anymore. We shouldn’t even talk. Suppose he’s tapping the phone? That’s the kind of thing he would do. He can be dangerous, Michael. And I’m getting the creeps.”
“I wouldn’t let anybody hurt you, baby doll.”
She loved it when he called her baby doll. “The phone is too risky. Even the cell. We’ll have to stay in touch by e-mail.”
Then Rob hurt his back and wound up in traction in a Hong Kong hospital. She called Michael the day she heard the news.
Never Enough Page 9