by Linda Wolfe
Still, nothing sexual happened between them. Not for a long while. Only one thing changed as a result of their hand-holding: They began to telephone each other more often than they had before.
According to Sol, Joy was the chief telephoner. She called him every morning when he was up in Albany. She always called at 6:30 A.M., before he left his farmhouse to go to his chambers, and she’d tell him little things about her previous day’s experiences or ask him political or financial questions or say again what an inspiring, wonderful speaker he was. He loved it when she did that.
She never called from her apartment. She left the apartment, telling her family she was going jogging, and dialed him from a pay phone on the street or, when the weather was inclement, from a luncheonette. She didn’t want her calls to him, she explained, to show up on her phone bill.
Then one day she complained about having to carry change around with her. He gave her his telephone credit card number.
In February 1987, Joy and Jeffrey attended George Bush’s first major fund-raiser in Manhattan, a New York Republican County Committee dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. The ballroom of the hotel was packed that night, and the guests were feverish with enthusiasm for Bush. Joy was dressed to the nines, noticed a woman whose husband was a good friend of Bush’s, and she was somewhat overjeweled. The clothes and the jewels were in excellent taste, but somehow the whole package didn’t fit together. It’s as if, the woman thought, Joy’s a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s finery.
Joy wanted to come up to Albany and see him, Sol remembered. She told him this in one of her early morning calls, around the time she’d gone to the Bush fund-raiser. He thought that what she had in mind was observing how the court operated, so he said fine and suggested she bring Jessica and Evan. Kids were always fascinated by the workings of the court of appeals.
On the appointed afternoon, he had already taken his seat on the bench when she entered the courtroom. He expected her to be followed by Evan and Jessica and looked around the room for them, but they weren’t there.
That gave him pause. But he didn’t think long about their absence—perhaps because she looked utterly marvelous. Her full-bosomed figure was trim, her movements agile, and her lovely, mobile face alive with curiosity. He felt proud of her and turned to his good friend Judge Joseph Bellacosa, who occupied a chair on the wide curved bench, and whispered, “That’s my ward.”
Judge Bellacosa was impressed. Raising his eyebrows, he scribbled something on a piece of paper. Sol glanced down at the paper. Bellacosa had scrawled, “Madonna mia!”
“Joe, I don’t want to be alone with her,” Sol recalled saying to Bellacosa later that afternoon, when they’d left the courtroom after the day’s legal arguments. He’d told Joy he would take her out to dinner, but he was suddenly nervous about doing so. He was nervous because she was making, he believed, “a tremendous, tremendous rush” for him. He was nervous because, he also recalled, “I had never cheated in my life. I was straight as an arrow. And very critical of those men who strayed.” He didn’t even come on to women. “I never—never with one exception, [that] woman in upstate New York who used to make a play for me—I never, never, never made a pass at a woman.” And except for that one woman, they didn’t come on to him. “Well, yes, during campaigns. There was once a woman who slipped me a note saying, ‘You can put your shoes under my bed any time you like.’” But basically, women were so uninterested in him that he “used to think there was something the matter with me. And then I thought, maybe it’s because women know. They look at you, and say, ‘This guy doesn’t play around.’ So they leave you alone.”
Except for Joy. She’d been calling him all those early mornings and turning up unannounced at his speeches and at his chambers in Mineola.
Sol Wachtler didn’t ask himself whether he was now sending out different signals from those he’d sent out all his life, signals that said yes, he was available. He simply focused on Joy’s apparent desire for him. And in an odd reversal of traditional roles, seeing himself as a kind of virgin prince and Joy as the bold seducer, he worriedly asked Bellacosa where he was having dinner that night, hoping he could eat in the same place and thus preserve his virtue. When Bellacosa said, “Ogden’s,” which was a good restaurant set on the edge of the vast downtown plaza Rockefeller had built, Sol immediately said, “Look, make a reservation for me and Joy at a table near yours.”
It would have been all right, he remembered, except that she didn’t like the table. It was just inches from where Bellacosa was sitting with a friend. “I thought we were going to have dinner alone,” she objected. “This is like a table for four.” And before Sol could say anything, she called the headwaiter over and said, “Could you please get us a private table.”
The waiter obliged. He put them at a table in a quiet, dark corner of the restaurant. It was candlelit, and they ordered wine, and after he’d drunk some, Sol began to relax. They ate and drank, and they both began feeling happy, and when dinner was over, they went walking on Rockefeller’s plaza, where he showed her the sights.
It was while they were strolling that they came across Jeffrey’s limousine—Joy had driven up in it, chauffeured by Jeffrey’s driver, Charlie—and Sol realized it was getting late. “You better get back,” he remembered telling her. “You’ve got a three-hour drive in front of you. It’ll be midnight before you get home.”
“I can’t,” she said, “because Charlie is at the movies.” She’d sent him there, she explained, so that he’d have something to do while she was dining.
Sol invited her up to his chambers, to pass the time till Charlie got back.
In his chambers, he showed her around the opulent quarters—two rooms for his staff and a vast wood-paneled one for himself, furnished with a leather-topped desk, a soft couch, and a hand-carved table, on which were displayed photographs of Joan and the children.
She admired his view and his furnishings, but his nervousness had returned, and he kept trying to get her to go home. Then he decided to be direct with her. He told her how much he liked her, but that he still loved his wife. He said he’d never been unfaithful and had no intentions of becoming so. “Did you ever read Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’?” he asked her. When she said she hadn’t, he told her about how an ancient artist had sculpted on a vase the figures of a man and a woman, their hands almost, but not quite, touching, and how Keats had used that image to write about unconsummated love. The poet had elevated such love, made it seem the highest kind of love, he explained, for it could survive the centuries. “‘Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,’” he quoted, “‘Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!’”
Had Joy understood him? Had she comprehended that he was telling her that he and she had to be like the figures on that vase, destined to go through eternity never touching? He spelled it out. “That’s how you and I have to lead our lives,” he said. “Because I don’t want to get involved, Joy.”
She listened, but he wasn’t sure she followed him, because when he finally convinced her to go home, she said, “But aren’t you going to kiss me good night?” And although he’d wanted to be like the ancient Greek figure, a lover, yet chaste, a suitor free of the sullying physical connection, he didn’t want to disappoint and thwart her, and he took her in his arms and kissed her.
It was a long, rapturous, exciting kiss. “A real kiss,” he would say later, with some awe in his voice as if remembering the disappointing kiss he had written about in his school newspaper column so many years before.
The next day, Sol remembered, Joy called him and told him “how wonderful the kiss had been, and how much she’d loved it.” But he was having misgivings. They’d started as soon as he and Joy had kissed. “After that kiss,” he recalled, “I knew I was in trouble. I felt sordid.” Now, he decided, he had to “break up with her.” So he asked his secretary to find him a beautiful
restaurant in the country, and he said to himself, This is going to be a good-bye restaurant.
His secretary picked a luxurious French establishment in Rye, a suburban town about thirty miles from New York City, and he himself drove all the way down from Albany to Manhattan to pick up Joy and escort her to the restaurant—perhaps because he liked the idea of treating her like a date, perhaps because he didn’t want her to repeat her indiscretion of having Charlie drive her to a rendezvous with him.
He did a lot of saying good-bye over lunch. “You’re a married woman, Joy,” he told her. “And you’re getting involved in big-league politics. The last thing in the world you need is scandal.” He also reminded her, “I’m the chief judge. I’ve never—not ever—gone astray before. The last thing I need is scandal.” Finally, he said, “Let’s just cool it. Let’s be friends. And let’s not do anything. Please, Joy.”
But Joy didn’t seem to think much of his trying to set limits on their romantic future. “She said, ‘One day at a time,’” he remembered. “‘One day at a time. What’s the sense of saying what’s going to happen a month from now, six months from now? One day at a time.’”
Still, she agreed that for the time being, they’d just be friends.
Being friends, just friends, lasted only another week or two. Shortly after their lunch in Rye, Joy called Sol and told him she and her friend Paola Cohen were going to a health farm near Albany, and they’d like to drive over and see him. He said fine and asked her where the health farm was.
She said, “Monticello.”
He said, “Monticello is nowhere near Albany. But wonderful, come on up.”
They came. “What they did was,” Sol recalled, “they registered at the health farm. Joy had purposely picked a place with no phones in the room, so Jeffrey couldn’t check up on her. They registered there, and then they drove over to Albany and checked into the Susse Chalet, which is a motel near my house. Then Joy called and said, ‘Paola and I are dying to see your house.’ She’d wanted to see it on her last trip, but I’d kept telling her she couldn’t—I just wasn’t about to take her home. But now, she says she and Paola want to see the house. Okay. I went over to the motel to pick the two of them up. But only one of them came out. Joy. I said, ‘Where’s Paola?’ She said, ‘Paola’s sleeping. She’s exhausted.’”
He’d feel like a fool if he refused to take Joy to the house. And what, he asked himself, was he so afraid of, anyway? Then, “Okay, come on,” he said. “I’ll drive you over.”
That afternoon, he and Joy made love for the first time. He liked it, loved the feel of her body and the imaginativeness with which she caressed him. He had never made love in the way he had with her. But afterward, his mind was in turmoil. He felt guilty toward Joan and guilty, too, toward Joy. “I felt awful. I felt bad—which shook me. I felt I’d led her on. That this would never amount to anything. And I started getting worried. There was that ‘fatal attraction’ syndrome out there, and I was worried that Joy—I mean, talk about irony!—I was worried that Joy would start—she was very aggressive. Very aggressive.”
But despite his guilt and his fears, he wasn’t sorry. That night, he let Joy and Paola check out of the Susse Chalet and move into his farmhouse.
Joy introduced Sol to a whole new world of sexuality, a panoply of pleasures that made intercourse seem dull and pedestrian. From that time on, his affair with Joy would be in the forefront of his mind. But he had other duties, other preoccupations. One that became pressing around the time of the start of his affair with Joy concerned a judge under his jurisdiction. A state commission on judicial conduct had recommended to Sol that the judge, fifty-six-year-old Bertram Gelfand, the Surrogate of Bronx County, be removed from the bench. Gelfand, a long-married husband and the father of three grown children, had been running for reelection when a woman who had worked for him and with whom he’d been having an affair accused him of sexual harassment—he’d fired her when she broke up with him, she said. And he’d made ugly and obscene phone calls to her, and tried to prevent her from obtaining another job.
Gelfand’s lawyer, Milton Gould, had argued passionately that Gelfand hadn’t done anything so terrible, had merely behaved “as many a jilted lover has before and will again—irrationally, emotionally, and unreasonably.” And Gelfand’s wife had written a supportive letter to the commission. “Put yourselves into the position of this man,” she’d suggested to the panel members, “having to tell adoring children and a loving wife of thirty-one years something you feel will risk all that you hold important and necessary to life.… Sleepless nights, troubled days, and humiliation will remain with you long after the proceedings are over.”
Nevertheless, the commission had ruled against the Bronx judge, and in April, Gelfand announced that he would appeal their decision to the court of appeals.
Sol, who knew Gelfand and had been talking to him about his case, didn’t want to take part in deciding his fate. But maybe he wouldn’t have to, he realized. After all, his good friend, Milton Gould, was Gelfand’s lawyer; and his daughter Lauren, who had become a lawyer, was working for Gould’s firm. He would recuse himself, Sol decided.
He told this to Gelfand at a meeting between the two of them in his Mineola chambers. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I know the thinking of the court, and you have nothing to worry about—provided you don’t rock the boat.” Then, to get Gelfand to relax, he pointed out that the members of the court of appeals weren’t all angels and entertained him with some spicy anecdotes about them.
Still, Gelfand wasn’t sure he trusted Sol’s reassurances. Earlier Sol had promised him that he had sufficient influence with the commission to see to it that they wouldn’t even bring formal charges, yet nevertheless, he’d been repudiated. But he was grateful for Sol’s attention and concern, and reminded him, “You know the whole thing was politically motivated. I was up for reelection. The commission was responding to political pressure.”
“Don’t raise that,” Sol said.
Gelfand sighed. “But they’re applying a new standard to me,” he said. “A standard that others on the court aren’t being held to.”
“Look,” Sol said, “just don’t rock the boat and you’ll be okay.”
Gelfand said, “Yeah, I guess that if the court of appeals makes marital infidelity an ethical violation, there’d be a lot of vacancies in the court system—including a few on the court of appeals itself.”
Sol’s face changed. He looked agitated and edgy. Then, “Look, if you rock the boat,” he said, “I guarantee you, you’ll be killed.” His tone was one Gelfand had never heard him use before. It was cold and harsh.
Gelfand listened to Sol. When his case came before the court of appeals, he didn’t rock the boat, didn’t accuse the commission of playing politics, or say anything about his being held to a separate standard. But nevertheless the court of appeals eventually ruled, in a decision that he felt was virtually aimed at impugning his credibility, that he had to leave the bench. “Sol clearly used his office,” he would say later, “to euchre and browbeat me into not discussing the things that might have helped me—into keeping quiet about both political corruption and marital infidelity in the judiciary.”
During the months the Gelfand case was being resolved, Sol slept with Joy on numerous occasions. They saw each other once every other week and managed to spend at least one weekend a month together. When he stayed away from home on those nights and weekends, Sol told Joan that his work was incredibly pressing, that he was involved in a million things.
She began to feel resentful and, not knowing about his relationship with Joy, blamed his new remoteness on something she had once considered one of his most admirable qualities: his social conscience. He cares about, and cares for, too many ideals, she thought. He cares for them so much that I’m no longer a consideration in his life. The rules of the marriage have changed.
She tried not to let her resentment sour the rare times she and Sol were together, but her anger and hu
rt were so deep, she couldn’t control them, and frequently she exploded at Sol.
People began to notice. The children heard her tirades. Sol’s staff members heard them.
The staff members were unaware—as Joan herself was unaware—of the acute rejection to which Sol had subjected her. They were unaware—as she was unaware—that her anger was a response. And among themselves they gossiped that she was harsh and hard to live with. One day, a particularly loyal staff member, who was waiting in a car for Sol outside his house in Manhasset, heard Joan fiercely chewing out his boss and thought, She’s got some temper. She’s eating him up alive.
He was so certain that Joan was the villain of the marriage that he couldn’t understand why Sol accepted her abuse, why he stayed passive in the face of aggression. And, unable to grasp—as Joan herself couldn’t grasp—Sol’s own aggression, the passive aggression that lay behind his conducting a surreptitious affair, he turned to his boss’s longtime secretary, who was also in the car, and asked in bewilderment, “Why does he stay with her? Is it just money?”
The secretary, saddened, shook her head. “They’ve been together a long time. There’s a lot of history there.”
Sol had by now begun to take a more active role in directing Joy’s flirtation with politics. “‘Go over to the Bush for President headquarters,’” he remembered telling her. “‘Bush is going to run in a primary against Dole, and there’s no one that candidates are more grateful to than the people who work for them in primaries, because once you’re a candidate, that’s something else—you have the whole party machinery behind you. But in the beginning it’s only volunteers who are personally committed. So, go over there and volunteer yourself.’
“She did, but about three days later, she calls me up and screams—she’s a big screamer—‘You gave me terrible advice. Al D’Amato says that Dole’s going to win. He’s backing Dole. Al D’Amato says Dole’s going to win and I’m crazy to support Bush.’