• • •
As I often explain to my readers, our capacity to deny, repress, and split off isn’t always, by any means, a bad thing. Indeed, it is this capacity that permits us to go about our daily lives while waiting to get the results of an MRI that will tell us whether we’ve got a brain tumor, while wondering whether our husband has decided he’s going to leave us for Sunny Voight, or while worrying our hearts out over the safety and well-being of our nearest and dearest. Thus I was able—despite (on August 18) that unpleasant scene on our front porch, and despite (on August 20) Jeff’s highly distressing real estate revelations, and even despite (on August 24) my ugly confrontation with Mr. Monti—to write my column, run my house, nurture my relationships, and (on August 27) serve my fabled red pepper, soup, followed by veal tonnato and tabbouleh, followed by a simple lime sherbet with blueberries, to Marvin and Susan Kipper, Dave and Joan Goldenberg, and the McCloskeys, plus Carolyn and one of her former husbands.
The meal was a smash with my dinner guests, none of whom knew how much I had on my mind. For only that morning Louis had phoned, to say he had come up with zip on Jeff’s real estate problems.
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” he said, after he broke the news, “developers are going bust left and right. Please don’t think I’m a wise-ass if I say to you that if your kid’s wiped out, he’s going to be in some very ritzy company.”
What about that new group—that new Consortium of Black Business Folks—that Louis had established and was working with? Hadn’t they been talking about some housing for the homeless in Anacostia?
Louis laughed. “Yeah, sure. I’ll tell you what, get some fat cat philanthropist to buy up Jeff’s houses and give them-to CBBF. Then Jeff can pay off his debts, the fat cat can get a place in heaven—and a tax deduction—and CBBF will turn them into first-rate, well-run housing for the homeless, They’ll even. I’ll bet you, name it after the fat cat.”
“This isn’t,” I told him, “a totally impossible idea. Semi-impossible, maybe. But not totally.”
“And if that plan doesn’t work, I think I could get you a couple of guys to torch the properties. Then Jeff could walk away with the insurance.”
The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “You know arsonists? Reliable arsonists?”
“Yeah, I do, Brenda, but that was a joke, okay?” Laid-back Louis sounded a little ruffled. “I know all kinds of guys who do all kinds of crazy things, but I’m trying to discourage them from doing diem.”
“Of course you are,” I said. “And I am with you a hundred percent. Anyway, I just might know a philanthropist who wants the family name on some homes for the homeless.”
Actually, I’m acquainted with four seriously rich people, three of whom (the exception is Joseph Monti) would easily qualify as philanthropists. One is my friend Carolyn, whose vast sums of money, however, are tied up in what is called a spendthrift trust, watched over by bankers who get to say yea or nay (and mostly say nay) whenever she wants to spend money on save-the-world ventures. Another is Vivian Feuerbach, a magnificent eighty-two-year-old grande dame, the widow of a man who had been in oil when it was good to be in oil. She likes me a lot—the two of us always share season tickets to the Washington Opera—but Vivian only gives money to the arts, and most particularly to music. The other philanthropist in my life, or formerly in my life, was retired ambassador Edmund Standish Voight, whose grandchild had died of leukemia and whose central charity was children’s diseases. Jake and I first met Edmund eight years ago at a black tie do at Children’s Hospital, for which he had just grandly purchased a CAT scanner. He was there with his niece, the daughter of the youngest of his brothers, the blue-eyed, black-haired-, beguiling Sunny Voight.
Sunny had just moved from Boston to take a job at the Smithsonian. Her Uncle Edmund was showing her around. And because we all took to each other, Sunny and Edmund and Jake and I found ourselves spending a lot of time together. And some of the time it was just Jake and me and Sunny. And some of the time (though nobody told me about it) it was just Jake and Sunny.
Do you remember Leslie Caron in Gigi? Lili? An American in Paris? Absolutely irresistible, right? Those expressive eyes! That graceful dancer’s body! That accent! That style, so ingenue yet chic! Now combine her with the young Audrey Hepburn. Those expressive eyes! That graceful dancer’s body! That accent! That style, so ingenue yet chic! And give her warmth and modesty, along with a Ph.D. in paleontology, plus a blind, irrational reverence for surgeons. Would you want a woman like this (who, incidentally, had Leslie’s lush mouth and Audrey’s fine cheekbones) anywhere near your beloved surgical husband, especially if his taste ran to the Leslie-Audrey type rather than to bosomy Playboy bunnies? Of course you wouldn’t. No woman would. So why did I let her in? Was I that sure of Jake or of our marriage? I think that the answer is yes but I also think there’s another answer: Although I couldn’t compete with Sunny in body and eyes and accent and cheekbones and chic, I was light-years ahead of her in ingenue.
I’m embarrassed to admit that—even after the day I saw them together, leaving the Holiday Inn across from Saks—I couldn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing. I was willing for Jake to tell me that he had gone with Sunny to the Holiday Inn to help choose a room for Sunny’s mother’s next visit. I was willing to hear that they’d gone to Saks to secretly buy me a birthday present (my birthday was a mere ten months away) and Sunny had started to faint from the heat and Jake rushed her off to the Holiday Inn to lie down. I was willing to hear that there was this really spectacular view of upper Wisconsin Avenue which had to be seen from a room at the Holiday Inn. I was willing to hear almost anything except what I heard on that hot June day eight years ago, when Jake came home and I said to him, “Before we have our dinner, we need to take a walk in the Bishop’s Garden.”
“Taking a walk in the Bishop’s Garden” was how Jake and I used to tell each other, in code, that we needed an urgent, private talk—immediately. We saved these walks for red alerts—like the time ten years ago when the doctor thought I had a brain tumor and I sat in the garden sobbing and clutching Jake’s hand, and we wound up having a fight because he refused to swear that if I died of this tumor he’d marry my friend Marianne who, while admittedly not that sexy, would make a wonderful mother for our boys.
Words usually burst right out of me, but on this bad June evening all the words seemed pasted to my throat. We strolled through the Cleveland Park streets, past wide porches hung with trailing baskets of geraniums, and onto the grounds of our neighborhood cathedral, then took the stone steps that led by a trickling pool down to the heart of the Bishop’s Garden, flamboyant this season with roses in red and yellow and pink and palest peach champagne.
“So,” I asked, bending down to breathe the shy perfume of a newly opened rosebud, “are you and Sunny having an affair?”
Jake looked at me as if deciding whether he wanted to operate and if so where was the best place to plunge in the knife. “She didn’t want it to happen,” Jake told me. “And I didn’t want it to happen.”
I straightened up. “Then I guess it didn’t happen.”
“It happened,” he said.
We sat—as far apart as we could—on a small wooden bench just beyond The Prodigal Son, stone figures draped in an all-is-forgiven embrace. I contemplated my wedding band. “Are you in love with Sunny?” I asked my husband. “And if you are, what are you going to do about it?”
“We love each other,” Jake answered. “And—oh, Jesus, Bren, I’m sorry—but I swear I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
I had planned to maintain my composure while Jake explained that he wasn’t in love, but merely infatuated, and hadn’t the slightest intention (What was I thinking of? What was I, nuts?) of leaving me. But all of a sudden I’m hearing that our marriage could really be over, I’m seeing my life about to careen off a cliff, and I started to sob even louder than I had on the day I’d sat sobbing about my brain tumor.
He pu
lled out a clean white handkerchief and handed it to me. I threw it back in his face and continued to cry.
“Look,” he said, neatly folding the. hankie and putting it back In his pocket, “I’ll really understand if you want me out of the house while I’m thinking through—”
“You’re leaving already?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“No discussion» no nothing? Eighteen years and it’s over, just like that?” I wiped my wet eyes with the back of my hands and sniffed up the drip from my nose. “Tell Sunny Voight to go and get her own husband! Tell her to get the hell out of our lives!”
I then had to put up with Jake explaining that this was precisely what Sunny wanted to do. Because she was such a moral, compassionate person. Because she didn’t see herself as a home-wrecker. Because . . . Well, despite the becauses, Jake had persuaded Sunny that she couldn’t walk away until “we understood if what we had together was too big to walk away from.” He actually seemed rather proud of this pretentious turn of phrase. I wanted to punch him right in his big fat mouth.
• • •
I suppose I should be grateful to Sunny Voight. I mean, until Jake met Sunny, I was basically a house wife who did volunteer work and tried to write on the side, occasionally selling an article to the Washingtonian or The Washington Post. After Jake met Sunny, and after Jake fell in love with Sunny, and after I realized I really might wind up divorced, and after I finally decided (though it was touch and go for a while) that I wouldn’t make it easy for them by killing myself, and after three months of Jake and Sunny sorting everything out and deciding it wasn’t too big to walk away from, and after my first full year of some heavy duty one-box-of-Kleenex-per-session therapy, I decided 1 didn’t want to be dependent, co-dependent, emotionally or financially dependent, or a woman who loved too much or herself too little or loved the wrong way, or . . . Anyway, what I mostly decided was that I was going to fix it so I’d never feel so frightened and helpless again.
By the time I had made this decision, Jake and Sunny were long done with their affair, and I was prepared to forgive—if not to forget. But I also was preparing—by writing several sample columns and getting them published in three small out-of-town papers, after which I wrote more sample columns and got them into seven larger papers, after which a syndicate started selling my columns to papers all over the country—I was preparing to be IN CONTROL OF MY LIFE.
Aha, you are doubtless exclaiming. So that explains it! That explains why Brenda (née Branson) Kovner became the can-do woman she is today. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. At least, partly wrong. Because, as Freud has taught us (though I can’t, at the moment, put my hand on the reference) all of our acts are multiply determined.
Consider the fact, for instance, that my mother always possessed the—excuse me—iron balls of a Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, it was easy to picture, with just a few religious and geographical shifts, Maggie running Hadassah and Mom running England. I therefore submit that since I’d inherited my mother’s potent organizational skills, my decision to be in control of my life was, at least in part, genetically programmed.
In addition to Sunny Voight—call her (a)—add my mother’s organizational genes—call them (b)—was the looming empty nest syndrome—call it (c): the fact that Wally and Jeff, then fifteen and seventeen years old, were growing up and soon to be leaving home. So I think it’s fair to point out that this decision of mine to be IN CONTROL OF MY LIFE also arose from developmental needs—the need to stop defining myself as a mother and a wife and to start to redefine myself as a person.
And then there’s—call him (d)—Dr. Milo Cunningham, my analyst, who helped me heal and redefine myself, who taught me that “admitting you’re scared is not the same as saying that you’re helpless,” and who (though he has suggested that I took him a little too literally) encouraged me to be IN CONTROL OF MY LIFE.
In conclusion I’d like to remind you (as I often remind my readers) that the answer to most complex questions isn’t (a), (b), (c), or (d), but “all of the, above.” On the other hand, when asked, as I am frequently asked these days, to whom I am indebted for inspiring me to BE IN CONTROL OF MY LIFE, I always mention my mother and my “ever-supportive family” and Dr. (Cunningham. But the first name I always think of is Sunny Voight.
• • •
Indeed, I was thinking of Sunny when I phoned Mr. Monti on August 28 and, making no reference to the unpleasantness of the twenty-fourth, asked if we could have a little talk. (I was thinking, I managed with her; I can manage with him.) Dressed in a pale-blue chemise with a saucy flounce, and sporting a beige straw cloche for the ladylike look, I arrived with a great big smile and a well-prepared script which began, “I know we can work this out. 1 know in your heart you’re a caring and warm human being.”
But Mr. Monti was hanging up the phone as I was ushered into his office, and the face I confronted was neither caring nor warm.
“My wife has moved in with Gloria. My wife has left me,” he rasped. “And you know whose head this is on? It’s on your head.”
5
•
AND DO NOT FORGET THAT YOUR MOTHER, THOUGH DEAD, STILL LOVES YOU
I suspect, it says something bad about me that—although I have dined at her home, entertained her at mine, and slept with her husband—I haven’t once mentioned Mrs. Monti’s first name. But in my defense, let me note that this is a woman who, whenever she introduces herself, will say, “Hello, I’m Mrs. Joseph Monti.” As I stood in her husband’s office, however, recoiling from his curses-upon-you glare, it flashed in giant letters on my brain: Renata, shortened to “Ren,” then homonymed into “Wren,” then omithologically generalized into “Birdie.”
Who, from what I’d just heard, had flown the coop.
Mr. Monti’s ashen face was precisely the shade of his gray Armani suit, and his suddenly deflated lips had turned the steely blue of his Hermès tie. Even in a state of shock, the man remained exquisitely color-coordinated. And unrelenting.
“Somehow—how, I don’t know yet—this whole thing is on your head,” he repeated menacingly. But I had come to make peace and would not be provoked.
“Mr. Monti, Joseph,” I said, taking him by the arm and thinking fast, “this is no time for blaming and reproaching. Come sit with me on the couch and tell me about it.”
Sounding slightly dazed, Mr. Monti murmured, half to himself, “She calls me up and she says, ‘I’ve put up with plenty over the years, but this time, Joseph, you have gone too far.’ ” He settled, with a heavy sigh, into the brown leather couch. I was right there beside him.
“Did she say what you had gone too far about?” I asked solicitously, removing my fetching cloche and fluffing my hair.
“Something to do with Josephine. Something—it didn’t make sense to me—about Josephine. But then she started crying. And then she hung up.”
Though I not only think of myself as, but am, a deeply compassionate person, I confess to faking compassion for Mr. Monti. For the truth is that Mrs. Monti’s flight left me with only one (uncompassionate) question: Was this good news or was this bad news for the Kovners?
I was just about to explore this when there were cries of “Daddy! Daddy!” and Annette and Gloria burst into the office.
“I’ve never seen Mommy like this before,” said Annette.
“She’s up in my guest room,” said Gloria, “sobbing her heart out.”
“She says as of now,” said Annette, “she’s a single parent.”
The Monti daughters, though no longer pregnant, still looked larger than life, their Dolly Parton breasts and their showers and towers of raven curls occupying far more space than your average breasts and hairstyles tend to do. Standing tall to their strappy shoes, and encased in designer duds, Annette and Gloria would surely have seemed, a dynamic duo anywhere but in the presence of their formidable father.
“Watch that tone of voice, missy,” Mr. Monti snapped at Annette, the color flooding back into his face
. “And Gloria, if you’re walking around the city with skirts that short, I don’t want to hear you’ve been raped. It will not be rape.”
I silently waggled my fingers in a hello to Annette and Gloria, hoping I wouldn’t be asked to leave what promised to be an informative family powwow. Lucky for me, the three throbbing Montis were far too overwrought to contemplate the propriety of my presence.
“You’d be on the rapist’s side? Against your own daughter?” Gloria asked, uncharacteristically unsubdued. “Another good reason for Mommy to want an annulment.”
“Annulment? What annulment?” roared Mr. Monti.
“And she’s prepared to take it all the way to the Pope,” Annette chimed in. “She says you’ve gone too far.”
“I heard that already. And I say your mother’s gone crazy. It must be—what’s this new ailment all of the women are getting now?—that PMF.”
“It’s PMS, Daddy,” said Gloria, “and it stands for—”
“In mixed company I don’t want to hear what it stands for.” With one reprimanding finger, Mr. Monti silenced his daughters and let the silence gather in the room. “And now,” he said, “the two of you sit and tell me why your mother has left our home and is suddenly talking annulment.”
Annette, alternating with Gloria, explained that their mother had packed a suitcase and left after Josephine telephoned her that morning.
“From where?” Mr. Monti interrupted.
“She isn’t saying,” Gloria said, trying to tug her skirt down over her kneecaps. “She told Mommy she’s hiding out from you because—” She stopped abruptly and sank her top teeth into her lower lip.
“Because what? Mr. Monti demanded.
Murdering Mr. Monti Page 9