by Linda Wolfe
Now Sol and Joy enlarged the circle of those who knew their secret. Joy told two women friends, Carol Palin, whose father had been an owner of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, and Faith Golding, Ron Perelman’s first wife. She also told Phil Friedman and her divorce lawyer, Sol’s friend Norman Sheresky. And soon, she and Sol started going out with some of these chosen friends and relatives.
One night, they went to dinner in a restaurant in Greenwich Village with Phil Friedman. Throughout the meal, judges, lawyers, and political personalities came over to the table to greet Sol. He knows everyone, Phil Friedman thought. And everyone knows him. But later, when he got to know Sol better, he was struck by the fact that although Sol knew hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people, he didn’t seem to have any real friends. Any close friends. He’d told Friedman, whom he’d just gotten to know and who was young enough to be his son, that he and Joy were going to get married, and that when they did, he wanted him to be his best man.
On another occasion, Sol and Joy went to dinner with Sheresky and his wife at the celebrity hangout Elaine’s. Sheresky found the evening extremely uncomfortable. While they were eating and randomly discussing politics and law, Joy suddenly demanded of Sol, “Do you love me?” Sol didn’t answer her. He seemed embarrassed to be asked to talk of love in front of friends. But Joy wouldn’t let him off the hook. “Do you love me?” she asked again. And when, still, Sol didn’t answer, she repeated the question yet again. Then at last, in a hollow voice, Sol said, “Yeah, I do.”
But that wasn’t the end of it. Having elicited the answer she wanted from him, Joy in a few minutes asked the question again. And again. Until at last Sol again gave her an affirmative answer.
Sheresky felt sorry for Sol. There was something about the scene that reminded him of The Blue Angel.
He was also annoyed at Joy. He hated the way she kept complaining to him about her husband screwing some dame, when all along she was having an affair with Sol. He hated the way she talked as if she were holier than thou. A victim.
There was someone else who knew—and yet didn’t know—about the relationship between Sol and Joy. It was Lauren Wachtler.
Lauren and Joy had been seeing a great deal of each other during the past year or two and, separated in age by only seven years, had become close friends.
Lauren’s grandmother, Joan’s mother, Elsie, didn’t like the idea. “Joy’s a viper,” she grumbled when Lauren talked about her new friend. But Lauren enjoyed the company of the glamorous stepcousin her mother had never permitted her to know during her teenage years. Joy, she felt, was very simpatico. She had a way of paying compliments and of listening attentively and even raptly that made Lauren feel, as she all too rarely felt, beautiful and smart and altogether special. And as if that weren’t enough, Joy was incomparably generous. Whenever they went walking together, Joy was sure to notice something amazing in a shop window and just as sure to say, “Wouldn’t you love to have that?” and if Lauren allowed that she would, Joy generally went out and bought it for her.
One day, in a burst of intimacy, Joy hinted to Lauren that she was having an affair with her father.
The idea upset Lauren. She knew her father liked Joy. He always seemed very happy when he was around her. And she knew that Joy liked her father. She’d seen her flirting with him, adjusting his tie, touching his hair. But an affair? Soon after Joy intimated that she was having a sexual relationship with Sol, Lauren asked her father to take her to lunch and demanded point-blank to know.
Sol looked her in the eyes, swallowed, and said, “No.”
Lauren didn’t know what to believe.
If Joy had worked at developing a relationship with Lauren, Sol had been working at developing one with Jessica. He wrote her notes on his creamy, embossed court of appeals stationery, he bought her games and played them with her, he sang her songs and plucked out old tunes on a guitar, and he talked to her about right and wrong, good and bad. One day he invited Joy to bring her to a session at the court of appeals. “The cases on Tuesday were pretty good,” the twelve-year-old wrote to Sol appraisingly afterward. “I mean, I thought they were fine. Maybe it’s because it was my first and I don’t know the difference between a good lawyer and a bad lawyer.”
Sol was fond of her and used her remarks to augment an article he wrote for the New York Law Journal on the subject of overzealous attorneys.
She was an easy child to be fond of. She had turned into a beauty, fair-complexioned, lithe, and blond. In addition, she had a temperament as attractive as her looks. The rest of her family—Joy, Jeffrey, even Evan—were combustible, volatile, but twelve-year-old Jessica was as tranquil as a summer’s day.
Sol sometimes daydreamed about being married to Joy and being the little girl’s stepfather. But the idea of marrying Joy never conquered his reluctance to leave Joan. Throughout the spring of 1990, he kept telling Joy that he would do so soon, and some nights when he would have ordinarily gone home to Manhasset, he stayed away, sleeping in his mother’s Manhattan apartment or a little pied-à-terre he and Joan maintained on East 75th Street. But then he would go back to Manhasset, back to Joan. And although he’d told Joy it was okay for them to be seen in public together, after a while he changed his mind and said it wasn’t.
His waffling made Joy angry. So did the fact that he wavered about their summer plans. First he told her he’d spend the summer with her. Then he said he wouldn’t.
She couldn’t count on him for anything, and she told a friend that fears of ending up husbandless would sweep over her, threatening her self-esteem and stirring up ancient anxieties. Her mother, she said, had taught her that being without a husband was practically a crime.
Sol was aware of Joy’s fears, and as the summer wore on, he finally promised her that he would leave Joan on Labor Day weekend. In the meantime, he said, he’d move out of the marital bedroom and sleep, when he was at home, in an upstairs room. But Labor Day came and went, and at the end of the holiday weekend, he was still living with Joan.
Joy’s brother, Bruce, got married that September, and Joan Wachtler went to the wedding, which was held at a loft in lower Manhattan. She arrived early, in the company of Sol, who was going to be performing the ceremony, and as soon as she got there, he went to talk to the bride and groom, and she was left alone. No one she knew was there yet. At a loss about how to kill the time, she went outside, and there she ran into Joy, who had also come early.
Joan hadn’t seen her stepcousin in several years, not since the unpleasant encounter they’d had at the Long Island University dinner, but although she’d taken a strong dislike to Joy on that occasion, today she was ready to let bygones be bygones. Joy was looking very nice, she thought, not as ostentatious as usual. In fact, she was wearing a very tasteful black enamel pin with a modest sprinkling of diamonds, the kind of thing Joan herself liked. She went over to Joy and complimented her on the pin.
“What are you doing with yourself these days?” Joy asked her.
Joan told her about the geriatric center she was running at the Y. But as she talked, she saw a look of repugnance come over Joy’s face. Then, “How can you stand to be around those sick old people all the time?” Joy said.
“Somebody has to do it,” Joan told her. “And anyway, I don’t look at it that way. It’s very rewarding, what I do. If we didn’t have the center, many of the people who come would have to be institutionalized.”
Joy wasn’t persuaded. “I think it would be really terrible. That kind of work.”
Joan was relieved when other people started arriving. But since many of them were members of the family, she remained at Joy’s side to greet them.
A mistake, she realized in a few minutes. As the guests filed past, Joy kept turning to her to comment cruelly on their appearance or characteristics, spicing her observations with vulgarities. She spoke so roughly that Joan got the feeling that, for some reason, Joy was trying to shock her. Joan hadn’t heard such language since she’d gone to gradua
te school and taken a course in counseling drug addicts, where the teacher had used the roughest language he could in order to train the students not to be shocked by street talk. Joan, remembering her class, felt angry with Joy. What did Joy think? That she didn’t know words like that? Or was she trying to embarrass her? Make her feel old and old-fashioned because she didn’t use those words? Whatever her motives, Joan didn’t want anything more to do with her stepcousin. She moved away from her and avoided her throughout the rest of the wedding. And that was that, except that on the way home, she couldn’t help telling Sol what she thought of his precious “ward,” this hurtful woman on whose financial affairs he’d been lavishing so many hours and so much energy these past few years. “I don’t know how you spend any time with that woman,” she said. “I think she’s crass. And classless. And besides, she isn’t even pretty. Not nearly as pretty as she used to be.”
During the next few weeks, Sol, who had been unable to leave Joan, yet unwilling to part from Joy, unable to give himself wholly to Joan, yet unwilling to deprive himself of Joy, continued to vacillate and to put off choosing between the two women. And then he came to a decision—or at least arrived at a course of action. He told Joy he had a brain tumor. He seems to have believed that if she thought he had a brain tumor, she wouldn’t want him for a husband, wouldn’t want to spoil her young life by saddling herself to a sick and possibly doomed man.
His choice of a disease with which to extricate himself from the relationship—his choice of a brain tumor rather than, say, cancer—was not entirely haphazard. For a number of months he’d had symptoms that could, he had learned after doing some research, be the result of a brain tumor. His left leg pulled and felt numb; his left foot dropped. The symptoms were so marked that he later said he truly believed that he had a brain tumor. But he did nothing to verify that belief, underwent neither of the diagnostic tests, the CAT scan and MRI, that might have proven or disproven the existence of a tumor. He hadn’t wanted to, he would later explain, because the diagnostic tests entailed lying under apparatuses that created a feeling of entombment, and he was claustrophobic.
Nevertheless, he informed Joy that he’d gone to Long Island Jewish Hospital and had a brain scan, that it had shown a shadow on his cortex, and that he was making arrangements to go to the Mayo Clinic for further testing.
Joy seems to have been unsure at first about whether to believe him. Or at least, she wanted a reading on whether he had a brain tumor from her favorite astrologist, Elizabeth Racine. She swore by Racine, who’d been doing horoscopes for twenty-five years and had a big following among celebrities. Going to Racine’s nearby apartment on East 82nd Street, she entered the inner sanctum, a small smoky room where the bookcases were lined with astrological tomes, and she revealed to the astrologist what Sol had told her.
Racine confirmed that Sol had a brain tumor and even had a theory about what might have caused it. “Ask him,” she directed, “if he ever had a head injury when he was young.”
Joy did, and to her astonishment learned that once, when he was around five years old, he’d been hit in the side of the head by a heavy chain he’d been playing with at a garage.
Joy was amazed at Racine’s perspicacity. And so, Sol told her, was he.
Sol’s reports to Joy about his brain tumor became ever more dire—and more elaborate. He was back from the Mayo Clinic, he told her one day. They’d said his tumor was inoperable. He was attending physical therapy sessions, he told her another day. Their purpose was to teach him how to cope with the loss of motor skills that he would face as a result of the tumor. Then at last, he told her that he didn’t want to burden her with his medical condition, and that therefore they should stop seeing each other.
Joy, predictably, got upset—and seemed truly concerned. She wasn’t the kind of woman who would abandon a man just because he was sick, she told him. No, she would stick by him, so he wouldn’t have to face his medical problems alone.
A short time later, Sol told her he had fallen and gone to a hospital. He also told her that the hospital had called Joan, who’d come to the emergency room and been informed about his brain tumor. He was indicating to Joy that he wouldn’t have to face his medical problems alone anymore.
He continued to see Joy after that, but only occasionally. When they got together, the sex between them was still intense. But most of the time they just stayed in touch through the telephone, and by the start of the new year, 1991, a mood of melancholy began to sweep through Sol’s life. “I cannot escape the feeling that I could enjoy life a bit more if I didn’t care quite as much about what others thought of me,” he wrote in January to a Yale student who had inquired about his philosophy of life. “Unfortunately, the strictures of a civilized and easily scandalized society have kept me from the ultimate happiness of saying or doing whatever I wanted at any given time.”
He also felt tired a lot of the time, so tired that at times he could hardly keep up with his work, which increasingly entailed lobbying the legislature for enough money to keep the courts running at full capacity. Last year, after his dispute with Cuomo, he had failed to get the judicial raises he’d wanted, and this year, Cuomo and the legislature were indicating that they would be slashing his budget drastically. It was a terrible mistake, Sol believed, because New York’s courts were more overloaded than they had ever been and needed all the money they could get in order to keep running. To prevent the cuts, he began to present his arguments to state legislators, sometimes making as many as twenty-five presentations a week.
The task was grueling. There were days he felt he could barely muster the energy for it, let alone perform his regular court duties of holding conferences and hearing arguments. And one day he sought out a doctor in Nassau—he was careful to choose a physician who was not his regular practitioner—and asked for something that would pep him up.
The doctor, an elderly man, prescribed Tenuate. It was an amphetaminelike drug that acted on the central nervous system and was most often used for dieting. Tenuate was not a dangerous drug if used for a short duration. But its manufacturer discouraged chronic use, because Tenuate could produce “overstimulation, nervousness, restlessness, dizziness, jitteriness, insomnia, anxiety, euphoria, depression,” among other things, and if used in combination with other drugs that acted on the central nervous system, it could cause a “psychosis, often clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia.”
“You gotta find me a woman,” a lawyer named David Samson said over dinner one night, in April 1991, to his buddy and sometime client Larry Bathgate, finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. “All I do is go to work and come home and go to sleep.”
Samson had been married for twenty-five years to his college sweetheart, a woman Bathgate had known even longer, having gone to high school with her. But the pair had broken up a few months ago, and Samson had moved from his home in Short Hills, New Jersey, to an apartment on East 81st Street in Manhattan.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Samson went on. “I was at a cocktail party the other night, and all these people went out to dinner together, but no one asked me along. So I went by myself to a little place over on Eighty-second Street. And then, I’m sitting there, eating alone, and Georgette and Bob Mossbacher come in. And they see me there. Eating alone. It’s embarrassing. You gotta find me a lady.”
“Sure,” Bathgate said. “I’ll look around.”
Sol was not altogether himself that spring. The amphetaminelike drug he was taking was not only energizing him but making him speed through his obligations like a hurtling train. A woman who attended a political dinner with him in May noticed that he seemed present but not present. “He’s wired,” she said to her husband. “His attention span is about twenty seconds. And it’s as if he’s off by himself, as if there’s a plastic box around him. He isn’t with the rest of us.”
Joan noticed it too. But she didn’t know she was noticing, or rather, she didn’t know what she was noticing. On a
trip to California, where Sol was to receive an honorary degree from the Claremont University Center and Graduate School, she complained to John Maguire, the president of the institution and an old friend, that Sol was exceedingly wound up and restless. “It’s not so much fun to travel with him these days,” she told Maguire, “because as soon as we get to our hotel, he’s on the phone for hours and hours. And I can’t get him to stop talking.”
As she spoke, Joan herself seemed unusually taut and tense. Indeed, Maguire had never seen her look so frayed. “Is anything wrong?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “I guess I’m just killing myself at work.”
Sol, in his vanity, thought Joy was still in love with him and that he could have their relationship back any time he chose. She still called him constantly, asking his advice about financial and political matters, and she still seemed to be hoping that her therapist, Eleanor Sloan, whom Sol was continuing to see, would eventually find the key to unlock him from his marriage.
But in fact, Joy was getting tired of her aging and reluctant married lover. One thing particularly bothered her. Now that she was separated from Jeffrey, she didn’t have a suitable partner to accompany her to the White House when she was invited there for dinner.
She took her son Evan, once. And another time, she took a casual friend, a theatrical agent.
The agent found her beautiful that night. She wore a short dress and more modest jewelry than she generally wore, and to him she looked like the epitome of Park Avenue chic. He also noticed that the President and the Vice President were exceedingly cordial to her. They really like her, he thought. They’re not just being political.