At the Graybar building at Lexington and Forty-second Street, I ran through the labyrinthine corridors to his office, two rooms, seedy and dark. His assistant, Joanne, his only employee, was there. I was taken aback; she was the knowledgeable one, the competent one whom I had been dealing with by phone for two years. Why wasn’t she in jail? I kept saying that I wanted my papers, my records. She was a wall. In an alcove I saw file cabinets and started pulling out drawers, files, but I was too hysterical to know where to look.
I went into Powers’s office. I had been there only once, early on. A room that, with its low-overhead prudence, must have impressed me, but that now revealed itself for what it was: pathetic, shabby, with grimy windows that faced an air shaft. I searched his battered desk—nothing. I stared at his chair and saw him sitting there, a pudgy, middle-aged mama’s boy, his face shiny as egg whites, with a languid confidence, not too much confidence, not too little. Oh, he knew the value of staying in the invisible gray middle ground. Had I liked him? Not really. But then, I didn’t think I needed to. Trusted him? I must have. I had heard about him from my old theater buddy Jim Leverett, who had invested with him for a long time and had always had good results. Thinking it had been time to have someone smarter than I was handle our money, I had asked Jim to put me in touch with him. My fault. All my fault. There was a list of numbers on the phone. I dialed them. A car service, a dry cleaner, nothing. A fat man in a uniform came through the door. As he came toward me, he said if I didn’t leave he’d call the cops. I pushed past him, yelling at Joanne, “Why aren’t you in jail?”
Downstairs I went into Chase Bank, where I supposedly had an account, and was amazed to find that I actually did, if only in the amount of $21.47. I told the teller to close the account. She said she couldn’t do that without the cosigner’s signature. Guess who. I asked for the manager. All I could say was, “I want my money.” Louder and louder. He gave me the money. Did I imagine that it might be the only money we would ever recover? No. My brain had not yet dared to venture into the future.
The cab ride home seemed to take hours. I was bent double with shame, guilt. The incessant reel in my head that would replay for months had begun. How could I have ever . . . ? Why did I not see . . . ? Did I honestly think he . . . ?
With Clem, at last the tears and fears spilled over. He was calm. He was more dismayed by my reaction than by what had happened. Yes, Powers was a thief. Yes, he was a scumbag. “But it’s only money,” Clem said. His clarity and detachment soothed yet dismayed me. Would I have to fight alone? I needed a warrior. Yet Clem made me feel safe, loved. Later, Sarah came over. She brought her pragmatism, her strength. As always, I listened to her and would learn from her.
The next day Sarah and I went through our first metal detector and went upstairs to wait in the corridors of the ADA’s offices. Grim, musty, a place of function, a place that smelled of troubled, anxious people. The halls of justice may not have been stately, but they quieted me. I belonged there. I wouldn’t mind working there. After all, I would need a job. No, I was too old, too damaged.
A young woman in a black dress—all the women wore skirts—stormed by, a soldier carrying an armload of files, her heels hammering on the worn wood floor. Mid-stride she stopped, turned, and approached us. This was Valerie Arvin. In her cubicle she filled us in on what we could expect. Powers would be arraigned, perhaps that day, and would undoubtedly plead not guilty. In ten days or so we would testify at a grand-jury hearing. If all proceeded as planned, indictment would follow and he would be sent to Rikers Island to await trial. There were ten victims and multiple counts of grand larceny. We heard the phrase Ponzi scheme for the first time. I laughed. Such a silly word. Sounded more like a kid’s game than a devastating crime. Valerie said these cases took time to sort through and the felon usually pled out. That was all about him. What about us? Would we get any money back? Where did the money go? Wasn’t there anything we could do? She shuffled papers, hedged. Money trails were hard to track. Her job was to gather evidence to prosecute Powers. As for restitution, well . . . That day there were no answers. Maybe a glimmer of justice, but no answers.
There was little time to assimilate what had happened, to weigh the effect, and certainly there was no time to heal. Each day I hit the ground scurrying for solutions. The absurdity of that was soon clear, as the ramifications of the damage spread. My accountant told me that no taxes had been filed for us by Powers in the last two years. Yes, I had even turned over the preparation of our taxes to him. Sarah had as well. Again the waves of shame and guilt, the stupidity. I was told it was only a matter of time before the IRS would impose liens on what we had left: about $8,000 at Merrill Lynch and $3,000 at Chemical Bank. The accountant would try to intercede on our behalf, but until Powers was indicted, until the DA’s office supplied paperwork . . . All a catch-22. Soon I wasn’t scurrying for solutions, only Band-Aids. What could we hock or sell? How soon could I sell my office, Sarah her condo?
As Valerie had outlined, Powers was arraigned, denied bail, and sent to Rikers. So far, so good. Let him fester, rot in hell. But part of me was envious. No scurrying for him. His job was done. Ours had just begun. Within a week the victims of Powers found each other and met for the first time around my accountant’s opulent conference table. There were indeed ten of us, plus a few spouses and relatives. Not, of course, Clem. He had really meant it that day before we were married when he had handed me the checkbook and stepped back from all things financial. Sarah and I knew only our friend Jim Leverett.
We were all in various stages of shock, anger, and disbelief. Quickly, we had a leader, the senior alpha male of the group. The agenda was clear: track the money trail, recoup what we could, put the bastard away for life. Short term, hire a lawyer and a private investigator. We agreed to share all information and work as a team. Then we each told our story. Most of us were theater connected: actors, directors, writers; one of us was a star, and, who would’ve thought, one of us was a producer for Law and Order. Sarah and I were the most recent suckers to be caught in the web, while some had been with Powers for many years, even decades, and had welcomed him into their homes. The amounts of loss ranged from the low six figures to $1 million–plus. Jointly, Sarah and I were in the low to mid-range. But the bottom line was that we had all lost everything. Everything was a great equalizer. Some had jobs, some didn’t. We all had some assets at hand. We agreed to meet regularly, and, on a lighter note, before we disbanded we dubbed ourselves the VIPs, Victims of Powers. At that first meeting, the group galvanized me. I finally opened up to my anger. I may have been victimized, but, thanks to the solidarity, I knew I could be strong.
Two weeks later, we all testified at the grand-jury hearing. Before we made our appearance, we had a private meeting with District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. The legendary DA was open and informal, well apprised of the devastating nature of the crime, and listened to our concerns about full disclosure between the ADA and our group. Overall, more form than content, but it did make us feel that our case was special and that at least the guy at the top was watching.
For the actress in me, the witness chair at the hearing was a stage I didn’t want to be on. The questions were straightforward, but my voice was a foggy quaver. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the answers; it was just that in some way I felt that I was the one on trial and I had better get the answers right, or else. Worse, when the jury started asking questions, it hit me: My God, what if they don’t believe me? Powers could walk out a free man.
I needn’t have worried. He was indicted on thirty counts of grand larceny and held over for trial. As a result of the meeting with Morgenthau and the hearing, the media woke up to us. I cringed. I was afraid of being judged, of being thought incomprehensibly stupid. But again, I needn’t have worried. Unlike some of the others in our group, Sarah and I were hardly Page Six material, as a few of the others were, and in the small piece the Times ran, we were an afterthought: “ . . . and a woman and her daughter.”
I had lost money and I had also lost trust. I viewed people as the enemy and clung to my safe places: home with Clem and Sarah, Al-Anon, my closest friends—those who listened and cared, not those who spouted outrage and advice—and crowds. I was on a jammed Lexington Avenue subway coming home from the grand-jury hearing when I first noticed that sitting there flesh to flesh between strangers, I felt peaceful, almost euphoric. I was just me. Nothing expected of me. I breathed my air, took up my space. My secrets my own.
At every VIP meeting new accounts of damage poured onto the table: property taxes not paid, IRAs liquidated, documents forged, even a voice impersonated to gain access to private assets. We were sure there had to have been collusion at Chase, Powers’s bank, where he had opened the token accounts in our names and through which he kited checks. But who would take on that behemoth? We were impatient with the DA’s office. Why thirty counts? Why not fifty, a hundred? And always the driving question: What had Powers done with the money? We each coughed up $2,000 to hire a lawyer and PI. We needed input from some pros. We knew the process would be long and tedious, but some action was better than none. Like all Ponzi schemes, Powers’s had imploded. The market had gone down, clients had withdrawn funds rather than “invested,” and the river had run dry. On March 29, one investor had wanted to cash out, hit a wall, and called the cops. Child’s play, all a game. But wreaking such havoc.
By the end of April, Sarah had sublet her pretty condo on Christopher Street and I helped her move out. The things she wanted to keep went into storage until the winds of fortune changed. She would live at my office temporarily, until I could empty and sublet it. The wheels of coops move more slowly. When I returned home that day, my L.A. friend Beverly called to tell me she had gone to see my play Wedding before it closed. She told me how funny it was and how much the audience had enjoyed it. I had forgotten all about the three-week production. I felt as it I were living in a movie that had been edited out of context.
The phone rang again. It was Jennifer Gordon, to say she was going into the hospital the next day for a double mastectomy. I told her I would be there. She was in her eighties, the cancer well advanced, the prognosis poor. This from the beautiful hostess of the party where I had met Clem, a friend of almost forty years. A stubborn thorn of a woman. Of course I would be there.
What I chose not to attend was a talk Clem had been invited to give at Yale. Sarah went. I knew the drill all too well. The talk, the Q & A, the smug academic audience, the cheap shots, the clever self-aggrandizing questions, all aimed at taking the old man down a few pegs. Jargon called it “deconstruction.” Yet another phrase to give academics a platform from which to produce very, very fat books that hammered the same nails over and over. All that they might be granted tenure and, if they were very, very lucky, a brief mention in the footnote of art history.
Clem, as usual, would not rise to the bait, answering each question in his earnest, straight-arrow way. During the evening he might say: Bear down, look hard at art, not the theory; develop your own taste; dare to have an aesthetic judgment. He might talk about art manufactured to shock, to be “new,” and use the word decadence, a word he was using more often of late. He might say: Art can transport us; it can startle us and stir our minds; it can please our eyes. He would surely say, “That’s the fun of it.”
Art academics were only one of the targets for my newly unleashed anger. They popped up like ducks in an arcade. How easy it was to let the embezzlement set up house in my brain. I stewed about the loss of human values and spiritual beliefs, the deification of greed, chaos, genocide, the epidemic of chewing gum and dog shit on the sidewalks . . . The spiral drained me of all perspective. The only antidotes that provided me respite were Al-Anon’s “one day at a time” (or in my case, one minute at a time), “take the next right step,” and my mantra, the Serenity Prayer. All to the good, but too often by the end of the day my thoughts would succumb to the wreckage of my future.
One evening at a crowded meeting, I looked up and saw a well-known director across the room. We had never met, but she had a play of mine that a mutual friend had given her. Uninterested, I looked away. I realized I had no sense of who I was anymore. I had redefined myself as an angry, stupid old woman who had ruined her family.
Since his hospitalization in February, Clem had been managing well. His schedule was much as it had been before, and Yale had been an easy jaunt for him. But a trip to Paris was coming up in June. Cahiers d’Art was sponsoring a three-day symposium at the Pompidou in his honor. There was no way of knowing if he would be up to it. Clem was no help; in his usual noncommittal way he would shrug and say, “Why not?” even as I, in my fretful way and with thoughts of Japan still raw in my mind, checked the logistics of Medicare abroad and portable oxygen. But I really hoped we could go; this was Paris, and it had been thirty-four years since we had been there together. Clem finally made his decision when, in the eleventh hour, the arduous schedule of panels and talks went head to head with his inertia, and inertia won out. Clem’s appearance would have to be via tape. Cahiers d’Art sent an interviewer and cameras while Clem sat comfortably in the living room, talking for hours about what he loved best.
Days passed, taken up mostly with VIP business. We divided into teams and interviewed lawyers and PIs. The legalese confounded me: contingencies, half-contingencies, no contingency; governance, attachments, Rico, depositions . . . The lawyer’s fees averaged $350 an hour plus $200 for an assistant, the PI’s, $200 an hour and $100 for an assistant. Even though we squeezed out a few partial contingencies, the numbers were way beyond our means. We hired them anyway. That done, we spent hours trying to sort out the money trail. So much unraveling, so much that couldn’t be unraveled. Whose money went where; had my office been bought with Cecil’s money, had Michael’s SUV been bought with mine? Kafka-esque. Powers’s records were not available to us, though we had finally been able to get statements from the DA’s office concerning losses—vital information for the accountants of those of us who were in hock to the IRS. One lawyer told us we were lucky to get them. Lucky! Many a day I wanted to cry, scream, or both.
As for our professionals, it was all to no avail. The PI interviewed Joanne, Powers’s assistant, and the man Powers lived with in Virginia and pursued contacts at Chase, but anyone who might have known something wasn’t talking. As for the lawyer, he served no purpose I could see, except for making a condescending appearance now and again and providing a small room for our meetings and a copier as needed by me, the secretary of the group. In all, we learned what we already knew. The DA had told us that the only apparent assets were a few low-end properties that were heavily entailed and of little value.
By the beginning of June, my office was rented for enough to cover the small mortgage and maintenance, plus $200 to add to our home stash. Thanks to Jim and Ann Walsh, and Steve Achimore from Syracuse, who gathered a truck and two other guys—all painters, all good friends—the move was more of a party than a wake. In blistering heat, we sweated and laughed and drank beer and emptied that space that I had treasured so briefly. This time the wonderful oak furniture was sold, and after the painters took a few things they liked, we trucked the rest a few blocks north to 275. By the end of the day we were all sprawled out in my new crammed bedroom/office, the AC at full throttle, drinking, eating Chinese food, Clem front and center. Before they left, I remembered a bunch of T-shirts in my closet that had accumulated over the years from Tony Caro’s annual artists’ workshop, Triangle. I gave them to the guys so they could smell as sweet as they were on their trip home.
On that day that I had dreaded, I was happy for the first time in two months. I had learned a new lesson: I could accept help when it was offered, and, who knew, soon I might even be able to ask for help. My mother had lived in isolation with her secrets, never daring to open up to “outsiders” about anything, much less when in need. A bit late in the day, I began to shed my own misguided thinking. It was a day of shedding. No wonder I felt so
good. I was all in one place for the first time in decades. I was down to basics, ready to take on whatever lay ahead. No more one foot out the door. No more just-in-case escape hatches. I had wanted to come home. Well, now I was. As for Sarah, she was floating. She had just completed her MBA, was bunking with friends, and was taking odd jobs until she found something better. Hard times, but I had faith that she would regain her ground in her own good time.
And then, a step back. The following week Clem had a particularly rough breathing night and I had to call 911. Against all my pleas, the ambulance took him to Roosevelt Hospital. A new ER, a new doctor, a superior staff, and a new wing that was spacious and bright. Once the crisis eased, Clem was angry at being there. I was drained after a long, placating day with him. Early the next morning, a nurse called to say he was checking himself out. I stifled my anger and picked him up. In the taxi, we returned home in silence. On my lap was a portable nebulizer, a loaner from the concerned young doctor to help Clem get through the nights to come. The upside was, we weren’t in Paris.
At home Clem was closed off. As always, he opened the mail, read, seemed calm, but there was a fire inside him. Willfulness, anger, stubbornness—whatever it was, it was new. The day was hot, his office windows open to gusty wind that rattled papers, everything in its path. He drank more than usual. Lit up a cigarette, and another, and another. This was not the Clem who had come home from Lenox Hill a few months before grateful to be alive. He was at war. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the sort of defiance that would help him fight his disease. This defiance was saying, Take me, damn it. Get it over with. I prepared the nebulizer for him. At first he was reluctant, but then he rather liked it. I told him to think of it as sucking on a cigarette. Eventually he fell asleep.
A Complicated Marriage Page 36