“It’s okay! He’s in the hospital. You can come over tonight!”
16.
Rob
ROB HAD HAD A BAD BACK FOR YEARS, PRIMARILY FROM INJURIES suffered while skiing too aggressively at Stratton Mountain. The Irish-born Park Avenue spinal surgeon Patrick O’Leary had operated on him in 1995, performing a laminotomy and discectomy between lumbar disks four and five on the right side. Five years later—in support of the theorem that the most likely outcome of back surgery is more back surgery—Dr. O’Leary did a revision laminotomy at L4–5 right and an excision of recurrent disk herniation in the same region.
But on his first weekend back in Hong Kong in the summer of 2003, Rob blew out another disk playing tennis. This was at L3–4, right, just above his earlier injury. He was crippled in an instant and in excruciating pain. At the hospital doctors admitted him immediately and put him in traction.
He remained there for a week. To be lying flat on one’s back in paralyzing pain in Hong Kong while reading secret e-mails between one’s wife and her new lover in Vermont was a distinctly twenty-first-century form of torture: electronic waterboarding, more or less. The exchanges he read were hardly pornographic, but they removed any lingering shred of doubt about the nature of Nancy’s relationship with Del Priore.
Discharged from the hospital, Rob spent the second week of July doing physical therapy three times a day. But even with that, and even using a cane, he wasn’t able to walk more than twenty yards at a time and found it almost impossible to go down a flight of stairs. He had no strength in his right thigh and, except for the pain he felt when he tried to walk, he was numb between his right knee and ankle. It seemed clear he would need another spinal operation.
He flew to New York to see Dr. O’Leary in mid-July. After all the X-rays and MRIs and ultrasounds and scans were completed and their results scrutinized by some of the highest-priced doctors on the Upper East Side of New York City, Dr. O’Leary scheduled surgery for early August. Although barely able to drive—he could only brake and accelerate with his left foot—Rob managed to get himself to Stratton the same day. He was motivated. He was angry. He was hurt. He was obsessed. He’d memorized dozens of lines from Nancy’s e-mails to Del Priore. He now knew she’d been lying to him. He now knew the truth.
He arrived at the house on the evening of July 18. It had been a perfect Vermont summer day: the sky clear, the humidity low, the temperature in the upper seventies. The loveliness of the weather could not have been more at odds with Rob’s mood.
That night, he called Bryna from the basement. “I confronted her,” he said. “Point blank. I told her I knew she was having an affair. I said her computer had a virus and for some reason it was copying me on her e-mails. I’d read them. So I knew. But it was over, I told her. She had to go back to Hong Kong right away. That item was not negotiable. Back to Hong Kong. Immediately.”
“What did she say?”
“First, she went ballistic about me being sneaky and spying on her. I said I wasn’t the issue: she was. Her and her affair.”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t admit it, but she didn’t deny it, either. She said, ‘It’s not black and white. It’s not what you think. It’s complicated.’ I told her it wasn’t complicated, it was simple: she’d been having an affair and I’d caught her and now she was going back to Hong Kong.”
“Is she?”
“No. She told me Zoe is in day camp, Ethan has his playgroup, Isabel’s still up at Camp Vega, and she wasn’t going to disrupt their summers just because I was throwing a fit.”
“But those aren’t the real reasons.”
“Of course not. But I can’t just abduct her. Besides, she promised she wouldn’t see him again. She promised she wouldn’t even talk to him. And she’s certainly not going to be sending him any more e-mails.”
“Do you believe her? Do you really think she’ll stop seeing him? Even though you’re back in Hong Kong?”
“I don’t know. But at least I know how to find out.”
Rob flew back the next day. His back was killing him. He could still barely walk. On Sunday, July 20, he e-mailed Frank Shea: “Can you get someone up to Vermont for Monday night? There may also be afternoon situations. Nancy will be more aware, because I’ve asked her to come home early. I want her back here because I believe she’s having an affair. I told her that on the basis that her computer has a virus I’ve read a bunch of e-mails from her to Mike. I asked her not to see him nor talk to him and just come back to Hong Kong. This is a critical week to determine if she spends any meaningful time with him.”
An hour after sending the e-mail, he called Shea.
There was a fresh edge of panic in his voice.
“Can you do it, Frank? Can you have someone up there tomorrow night?”
“It’s already in place. Rocco Gatta will be going up tomorrow.”
“Look, Frank, my oldest girl is away at camp—that’s Camp Vega, up in Maine, I think I told you about it when we had breakfast—and the other girl is going to day camp. Nancy can easily arrange to have the nanny take the youngest out of the house all day, so it’s not just nighttime, do you understand?”
“Loud and clear, Rob. We’ll be watching all day.”
“And you’ve got to let me know, all right? I can’t wait for a summary at the end of the week. If they’re together, I need to know right away. You’ve got all my numbers, don’t you? My cell, the office, the Parkview number?”
“I’ve got ’em all, Rob. We’re on top of this. I’ve told Rocco to call me the minute something happens and I’ll call you the minute I hear from him.”
“It’s getting worse, Frank. The whole thing is getting more serious. I want to catch them in the act.”
Nancy
For two whole weeks, before Rob came to New York to see Dr. O’Leary, they had felt free. Nancy still kept weekends reserved for the children, and Amity didn’t come over again, but during the week the affair filled not only their nights, but, increasingly, as Rob would come to suspect, their afternoons.
Nancy called Michael just after July 4 and told him to take the afternoon off from work. He arrived at the house at 2:00 p.m. She was waiting in the driveway in full Bonnie and Clyde mode: reckless, thrill-seeking, ready to cut loose. “Let’s go for a ride,” she said.
This time he drove. “Where do you want to go?” he said.
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Let’s go somewhere and rob a bank.”
He looked at her as if she might be serious. She explained about the movie Bonnie and Clyde.
The weather had turned hot and humid. Michael drove toward Manchester, but for once shopping was not what Nancy had in mind.
“Let’s go down to Bennington,” she said.
Michael got on Route 7 and drove south for twenty-five miles. They wound up in downtown Bennington, where North Street becomes South Street and where Main Street goes west. Muggy heat radiated from the dull brick of buildings that housed failing or already failed businesses. They stopped at a red light at the four corners intersection in the charmless center of the town.
“Which way?” Michael asked.
“I don’t know. Turn right.”
A block and a half later, she said, “Stop! Pull in here. I can’t wait another minute to make love!”
The Kirkside Motor Lodge was not exactly a destination resort. It was a blue-collar motel for a blue-collar lover. She went into the office and paid sixty dollars, cash, for the room.
Although Michael was finding her an eager and vigorous lover, he couldn’t shake the sense that for Nancy the act was merely prelude to the aftermath, when she begged him to hold her tightly and to protect her and to promise her that he’d always be there.
“Don’t worry, baby doll, I’ll be here,” he told her over and over again.
“Call me ‘baby doll.’ Call me ‘butterfly.’ I want to be your baby doll and your butterfly for the rest of my life.”
But later in
the afternoon at the Kirkside Motor Lodge, with the air-conditioning window unit wheezing and rattling as it battled the heat, he called her Nancy.
She sat bolt upright in the bed.
“Don’t call me that when we’re in bed! Don’t ever call me by my name when we’re in bed together!”
“Why not?”
“Because he calls me that and I hate him! With him, bed means pain and humiliation. He hurts me, Michael.”
“Physically?”
She began to cry even harder than she had in the parking lot outside the Riverview Café. Her whole body convulsed with her cries. Finally—Michael clocked it at seventeen minutes—her crying subsided into sobs.
“You touch me so tenderly,” she said. “You care about how I feel. You don’t know, you don’t know how awful it’s been.” And again she started to cry so hard she wasn’t able to speak.
Eventually, she said, “I’m sorry. You’re going to think that all I ever do is cry. But you don’t know how much you mean to me, Michael. I’ve been living in hell and now you’ve come to rescue me.”
“What do you mean?”
“When Rob calls me by my name, the way he says it…it terrifies me. Because I know what it’s going to lead to.”
“What?”
“He beats me. He abuses me. He forces me to have sex.”
“Baby doll…”
“He gets drunk and he snorts coke and he comes after me with his fists. He’s broken my ribs. He doesn’t care. It’s gotten worse and worse and I don’t know what to do. I don’t have anyone to confide in. I’m so afraid, but I can’t leave. We’ve got this whole life in Hong Kong and everyone says we’re the perfect couple and I can’t just walk away from everything.”
Michael didn’t know what to say except that he would always be there for her. He held her gently for a long, long time. Then they drove back to Stratton so she could feed the children dinner. She picked up burgers, fries, shakes, and McNuggets at the McDonald’s in Manchester on the way.
During the days and nights that followed, Nancy said no more about being abused. “I don’t want to talk about it. Don’t ask again” was her reply when Michael brought it up. For the most part, her spirits were high. She loved her tattoo. She took to driving her Corvette instead of the Lincoln Navigator. She told Michael she was desperate to see where he lived, so they spent an afternoon and evening in his Hinsdale, New Hampshire, double-wide.
On days when she couldn’t wait until 9:30 p.m. to see him, she’d book a room at a nearby inn or motel and meet him in the late afternoon, leaving Connie to care for Zoe and Ethan. She’d use her credit card to reserve the room, but when she checked in she’d pay cash so the charge would not appear on a monthly statement.
She didn’t want to use the same motel twice, so they wound up driving around like researchers for a travel guide. The Londonderry Inn, the Inn on Magic Mountain, the Greenmount Lodge, the Snowdon Motel, Dostal’s—they could have written their own book: The Adulterer’s Guide to South-Central Vermont. This was their idyllic phase, when Nancy could articulate her visions of their future.
“I never want to leave Vermont,” she told him. “I’ve found a peace within me from being here, from being with you. I want to take a drive in the fall when the leaves have changed color. Fall is my favorite season. We’ll pull over somewhere and take a walk through the leaves. The air, it’s so crisp. Don’t you think everything smells so great in the fall? That’s why I love wearing suede—because I love the way it smells.”
One day, in a motel, Michael wanted them to take a bubble bath together. Nancy couldn’t bring herself to do it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s because of how I feel about my body. When you spend years of someone telling you how horrible your body looks…I just can’t shake it. I’m not sure I ever will.”
They still weren’t able to spend whole nights together. Nancy had to get back to the house before the children went to bed because she was afraid that if she didn’t, one of them would mention it to Rob. And when they were at the house Michael couldn’t stay over because she couldn’t risk having the children see him in the morning. Connie was a different story. She was sure that Connie knew by now, but she was also sure that Connie would never say anything, because if she did Nancy would fire her, and if she didn’t have a job she couldn’t stay in Hong Kong for more than two weeks. She’d have to go back to the Philippines and poverty.
“I love the first snowfall,” she told Michael. “It’s so clean. Can’t you picture us sitting inside, nice and cozy, a fire going, the snow falling outside? It could be a Saturday afternoon and we’re just being lazy. We’ll bring some more wood in for the fire, we’ll be listening to music, maybe I’ll draw or paint. I miss painting. You can write. I like to picture you writing…a novel maybe, then getting it published. The clothes have finished drying. I’ll take them out of the dryer. I love hot clothes, fresh from the dryer…”
He kept calling her “baby doll” and “butterfly.” He bought two pairs of blue crystal hearts and gave one to her. That way, each of them could hold two hearts together. To show her gratitude, she went to the Movado store in Manchester and bought him a $7,200 Concord Impresario watch.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever felt safe with,” she told him. “I’m in love. I’ve never been in love before.”
One day she noticed that Michael wasn’t wearing the watch. He was embarrassed to tell her why. Finally, he said he’d told his brother Lance about the affair, but Lance had been born again and told Michael he was immoral. More to the point, he told Michael he was fired. They argued. Finally, Lance said that Michael could keep his job in return for the watch.
“I didn’t want to do it,” he said, “but I need the job.”
“Of course you do.”
She went back to the Movado store in Manchester the next day and bought him another $7,200 Concord Impresario.
It was only a couple of days later, July 18, that Rob had confronted her. In a tearful panic, she told Michael what had happened. “He grabbed me. He grabbed me by the face and then he spun me around and pushed me up against the wall and my head hit a picture hanging there and the picture fell down. I was screaming and crying and I was afraid the kids were going to hear. I’ve got a terrible pain in my side. He must have broken my ribs.”
17.
Rob
ROCCO GATTA RETURNED TO STRATTON ON MONDAY, JULY 21. The house whose driveway he’d used in June was occupied, so he had to find another location along the side of Stone House Road. From his new vantage point he could observe only the entrance to the driveway, but that turned out to be enough. Once again, it was raining hard and winds were gusting when Del Priore’s blue van showed up at 9:20 p.m. The van pulled out of the driveway three and a half hours later.
Gatta called Frank Shea at home to report. It was 1:00 a.m. in New York, 1:00 p.m. in Hong Kong. Frank called Rob.
“Listen,” Rob said. “The next time it happens, let me know as soon as he arrives. I want to call the house while he’s there.”
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Rocco Gatta followed while Nancy took Zoe to day camp in the morning and then drove to Manchester to shop. On both days, she stopped at the Jelly Mill—a kitsch maven’s delight. She went back to Manchester on Thursday. Manchester was one of the biggest factory outlet centers in the Northeast. Nancy considered it her playground. She could have driven the fifteen-mile stretch of Route 11 between Londonderry and Manchester Depot with her eyes closed. Thursday morning was hot and humid. Showers were forecast for afternoon. Nancy went to the Jelly Mill, to the Levi’s outlet store, and to Carter’s for Kids. This was how she passed her days. This was what passed for meaning in her life. It didn’t have to be Madison Avenue in New York or Pacific Place or the IFC Mall in Hong Kong—any store with lights on and doors unlocked was a potential source of diversion and delight. She spent most of her waking hours trying to buy either or both.
Nancy didn’t see her constant shopping as an addiction. How
could it be if it was so socially acceptable? Most of the bankers’ wives she’d met at Parkview talked primarily about what they owned and what they were planning to buy next, or about which exclusive resort they’d be going to on their next vacation. Because she fit right in, Nancy saw herself as normal. If you had it you had to flaunt it, or else others might suspect you did not have it. Nancy subscribed wholeheartedly to the Parkview notion that a woman was what she possessed. She knew she overdid it sometimes in order to provoke Rob, but he deserved it for being such a controlling, intrusive, hypercritical son of a bitch. It did not occur to her—or to Rob, for psychological insight was not a quality either he or Nancy possessed in abundance—that she might also have become such a compulsive, conspicuous acquirer in reaction to her mother’s lack of materialism, which Nancy had experienced as deprivation. In any event, she led Rocco Gatta a merry chase through the streets of Manchester and eventually back to Stratton Mountain.
To Gatta, Thursday night looked like an early one at 702 Stone House Drive. All inside lights were off by 9:20 p.m. He sat in the dark and waited. It was one hell of a way to grow old.
The blue van arrived at 10:40. Del Priore cut his lights before turning down the driveway. By the time he had parked at the bottom, Gatta was speed-dialing Frank Shea.
As it happened, Frank was speaking to Rob in Hong Kong at the time, telling him that another uneventful day and evening had passed at Stratton Mountain.
“Whoops, hold on, Rob. Rocco’s calling on my cell right now…Rob? Bingo! Del Priore just showed up.”
“Thanks, Frank. This is it. I’m going to call her right now.”
“Be careful.”
“Careful?”
“I know how upset you are, but remember: at this point, you’re the one who’s been wronged. You don’t want to say anything that could come back and bite you.”
Rob called the house. No one answered.
He called again. Still no answer.
Never Enough Page 10