We worked on the story for five months, and Buddy and I became close friends. He introduced me to politics and country music—Machiavelli, Lyle Lovett, and Jesse Winchester. He was divorcing that summer after a long marriage, and was struggling with it. We had long late-night phone calls about wars and men and women and the business of politics. We skipped over small talk completely. And maybe there was a sort of love affair, platonic, but I didn’t see it then. I was too young—or maybe just old enough. Idealistic and caught up in all of this—the intrigue of state politics, a man and a principle, the rise and fall of ideals, a new story.
During the summer I fly back and forth to Washington, D.C., where Ray is doing final editing on the piece. Washington during the week, back to New York on the weekend, and Anthony and I don’t meet up again until September, when he calls my office. “Do you want to catch a movie tonight?” He’s working late and the theater is across the street from my apartment, so I buy the tickets and meet him there. Afterward we go to dinner at a trendy Mexican restaurant, and the bill comes to $104. I am relieved when he grabs it and then insists, “You paid for the movie.”
There are a handful of dinners, and then these dates become regular. It is an odd pattern, arranged without discussion—we don’t call from the road but take up again when we get back. Ours isn’t a whirlwind romance. It is slow and consistent, and it suits us both for more than a year. There is a unique ebb and flow to the news business, and we are wedded for the moment to our careers. Everything else is second. We both understand: an assignment trumps personal plans, no hard feelings.
We never talk about our families. There is no moment when the relationships are laid out. No moment when he says to me, The president was my uncle, John is my cousin, Jackie Onassis is my aunt. He is private, compartmentalized about his famous family and I am relieved. I like the world we are creating, just the two of us. Occasionally he mentions a vacation with his aunt and cousins, a weekend in the Vineyard. There’s an odd netherworld, really, where our invisible aunts and uncles and siblings and cousins carry on wordlessly in a back room. In the beginning it is just Anthony, a producer I met at work, and me. Two news junkies who like travel and the chase of a story. By the time we get to our families, almost two years after we met, my anxiety has dissipated. His mother is simply his mother—a woman with a beautiful house, a breathy voice, a cover story in Life.
The first winter we’re dating we steal out to his mother’s house in East Hampton for weekends. It is impossibly clean, with white-cashmere couches in the living room standing on finely made Cogolin straw carpets, handwoven, I imagined, by stooped old women in France. Just off the living room is the small library, which becomes my favorite refuge. The walls and the two sofas and chair are all covered in white and red fabric. The walls, white with thin red strips, are soft and pillowy to touch. The couch in front of the fireplace is white, too, and covered in sketched red Chinese print. The room is cozy and warm and full of family photos: Anthony as a little boy in England in green Wellington rain boots; with his younger sister, Tina; playing on the lawn with his dogs at Henley; the four cousins: John and Caroline and Anthony and Tina, dressed up as angels for a Christmas play.
Our first weekend at the house, Anthony suggests I take his mother’s golden retriever, Zack, for a walk while he goes to the gym. I am new here and trying to impress him, so I call Zack from the kitchen and walk toward the beach. Emilia, the housekeeper, watches me quietly. Her English and my Spanish are about the same. I can say “Hola, qué tal?” and she knows how to say “Good morning.”
We leave through the side door, and after a few feet Zack just stops and sits. “Come on, Zack,” I call to him. He has a blue-leather collar with his name engraved, and I tug on it to get him moving. “Come on, Zack, we’re going to the beach.” He digs his hind legs into the ground, and it starts to annoy me. What kind of dog won’t go to the beach? I pull harder on the collar, and he digs in deeper and starts to bark, so I pick him up and carry him halfway down to the beach before I hear Emilia. She’s running toward me, yelling in Spanish. “Para! Póngalo hacia abajo!” Put him down! There is an electric fence around the property for the dogs that I’m unaware of. Emilia makes motions around her neck and then points to Zack’s collar, and I realize I have electrocuted him. I wait for him to go stiff, but after he stops yelping he seems fine, so we keep going and when we get back Anthony is waiting for us, unsuspecting. “Thanks for taking him,” he says, smiling.
“Oh, it wasn’t a problem at all,” I say, giving Zack a big pat.
We’re still in the campaign phase of the relationship, all promise and no accountability.
Love’s one thing, war’s another.
In January, Saddam Hussein fires Scud missiles aimed at Israel, and I go to the war in the Gulf, with Leslie Cockburn again. She wants to do an hour-long news special and sends me ahead to set up the interviews. I pick up my chemical suit and gas mask in London on my way to Tel Aviv.
The Israeli military has its public affairs office set up in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel. This is where we spend most of our days, in the lobby crowded with bored and restless journalists waiting for the daily briefing and press release. The rest of my time is spent on the phone, confirming interviews, or at our bureau office screening tape with the military censor and then feeding it via satellite to New York. Nights we lie in our rooms on unmade beds, waiting for the alarms to go off. The loud, high-pitched wail blasts like a fire drill, and people stream out with gas masks, no pushing or running, to a makeshift bomb shelter in the basement. Everyone except the news crews. We assemble in the lobby and head out in the direction of the smoke billowing up against a starlit sky.
War, at least this one, from my vantage point in Tel Aviv, is mostly long, uneventful days interrupted by sharp bursts of horror. Two intolerable extremes. Reporters aren’t afraid of war zones, or air strikes, the way people should be. They consider it a perk. Some nights I sit out on the hotel balcony watching the CNN reporter file live telecasts across the rooftop. I watch for a few minutes, and then go back inside to watch him on television, and then go back to the terrace again to watch him live. It’s odd—the story I see on the television is much more frightening than the one actually happening outside, much more frightening reported than witnessed live.
I learn a little about the power of the medium, about moments strung together for television and condensed. Days of war are cut into a two-minute report and then shrunk to fit the average TV screen. To do this to the experience is to distort it. It’s inevitable.
When I get back in February, Buddy calls and asks me if I want to go to the White House with him. “The Governors’ Ball,” he says. “How ’bout it?”
I wear what I think a young woman should, a Nicole Miller cocktail dress, black. It’s the only short dress in the room, but I’m winging it again. There is someone to prepare you for such things only if you are the kind of girl expected to attend dinners at the White House. If I were the sort of girl people expected to grace the halls of ABC, to marry European royalty, I’m sure there would be someone here steering me along. But all of this is so unpredictable, nothing my father or Millie or Grandma Binder could have prepared me for. If my mother has this sort of advice, she has withheld it.
We drive right up to the front door. A guard holds a list, asks our names, then whisks us through to the main lobby. There is a flock of photographers behind a rope, snapping away while someone announces our names for the AP wire and the White House photographers. There is a reception in the East Room, then a receiving line to meet President Bush. A sharp-creased marine stands directly behind him, whispering the names of people as they come through the line. I don’t remember what I say as I shake his hand, or if I say anything, but I have a photograph of the moment, and in the photo I’m standing between Buddy and the president, my back to the camera, and they are laughing together about something.
This is actually my second time at the White House, but the circumstan
ces are very different. A few months earlier, when war was just a gleam, I went with my boss to pitch an idea to John Sununu, White House chief of staff. We wanted cameras to follow President Bush as he prepared for war. Reality war. The White House wasn’t ready for it. We suggest to John Sununu the relevance of television as an instrument for “recording history,” and he looks back at us, unblinking. Unsmiling. Unmoved. “What does television have to do with history?” he asks. Then politely dismisses us.
When I go with Buddy, it’s all pomp and glitz.
We eat dinner in the Blue Room, and I sit between the country singer Gary Morris and Marilyn Quayle. Buddy is at another table.
After dinner we file into another room before the entertainment starts, and I see Bill Clinton through the crowd. “Hello, nice to see you again,” he says, gripping my hand. “How’d your story turn out?” He is warm, and I am flattered that he remembers me.
The next day Buddy faxes the front page of the Times-Picayune. There is a photo of the two of us at the dinner, and the caption reads, “Governor Roemer and his date, Carole DiFalco.”
Buddy and I stop off at flirting and Anthony and I inch right along. We are perfect for each other, even if it’s not immediately obvious why. More Newman and Woodward than Taylor and Burton. In love we are both the turtle, slow and deliberate.
I like our relationship. We are both on the road a lot, so there are many hellos and many good-byes, and when we come back so many stories to tell. It all works smoothly until a weekend in September, a year and a half after we met. “I don’t care. Go,” I say to him. He is going to Captiva, Florida, for the weekend with his friend Holly and another coworker. They’re going away, and he’s assumed there’s no need to involve me. I’m in Boston working on a story about the Mob. There is a phone call and a casual mention, I won’t be around this weekend.
I am suddenly tired of the unspoken rules—of the coming and going as we please. I am angry about this lapse of judgment—wanting to spend a holiday weekend with friends instead of thinking to spend it with me. I am sure he is surprised at my reaction. I am.
“What do you want me to do, Carole?”
“I’m not going to tell you what to do. Figure it out.” I know this is a loaded message. It’s a test, really, and I’m waiting to see how he scores. But he doesn’t know that. We hang up, and I go to dinner, and when I get back there is a message I don’t return. And then the phone rings in my hotel room, late.
“I called you. Didn’t you get my message?”
“Yes,” I answer. And this is all we say.
This is how we fight—silently, stubbornly, neither of us yielding. No passionate explosion, but a slow, quiet burn. We are both determined to finish our own way. I go back to New York the next day, and he goes to Florida. I distract myself with the hearings on Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
Two months later, he calls late from his office. “Hi, it’s me, wasn’t sure if you’d be there. Do you want to grab dinner?” And we start back up again in the same easy way. We finish the Captiva business quickly and neatly.
“Did you end up going?”
“Yeah, I did.” And I respect him for being outright. He did what he wanted to do, no apology. I like this about him. He tells me about the place they found, the ’Tween Waters Inn—a great cheap motel right on the beach. “I’m going back for Thanksgiving,” he says. “Do you want to go?”
I don’t say yes or no, but he calls later with dates and flight numbers just the same. “I can’t come for the whole weekend,” I hear myself saying. “I’ll meet you there.”
Whether he believes I will actually show up or not, I don’t know, but he is sitting out on the second-floor terrace when I pull into the parking lot. “Welcome to paradise,” he shouts down, as if he’s been sitting there in that spot for two days, watching for me.
This is when the tides change. It’s hard through the prism of a hospital bed to remember these delicate little heart trembles, the butterfly wings. It’s hard to remember his body muscular and free of lines, running shirtless on the beach and breathless back into our room. But this is how he is the first evening, barreling through the door with big, puffy breaths. “They just launched a shuttle. God, I wish you had seen it!” His eyes are wide. He couldn’t wait to run back here, couldn’t wait to run back to tell his girl, me.
Just like this, we go from being one thing to another.
We leave Florida in a different gear and cruise into the rhythm of a couple—weekends are assumed, holidays are assumed. Let’s see where this goes.
5
We rented a house in Sagaponack, Long Island, for the summer—the name, Sea Song, painted onto a piece of driftwood at the end of the long pebble driveway. A great field stretched out behind the back deck, and beyond it you could hear the ocean. For a few summers it was our idyll.
Sea Song is modest by Hamptons standards—three small bedrooms separated by an open kitchen and living area, furnished with Pottery Barn tables and white slipcovered couches. Sliding glass doors open onto the back porch, where the shrubs are overgrown, and off the side deck is an outdoor shower, the hidden jewel. There are no walls around it, just some well-placed trees offering privacy without blocking the view. It faces east, and in the mornings I turn toward the sun with my eyes closed, letting the water stream down. I paint the landscape in my head—the large field of wildflowers, the ocean beyond. Then I snap my eyes open quickly to catch it.
The Hamptons is a collective name for a string of small beach towns along the east end of Long Island. In some minds, I suppose, it’s less a place than an endless round of social climbing and money. And maybe there’s that. But for Anthony and me it’s simply Long Island, a place of barbecues, bike rides, and long walks on the beach, a place to meet up with our friends in the summer. Holly, Anthony’s close friend from Primetime, has a house nearby. If it’s a slow weekend, and it usually is, she hires a deejay and we clear the furniture from her living room, drink margaritas, and dance all night. Her dad, Pete, and stepmom, Joan, have a home in Bridgehampton on Rose Hill Road. On some weekends we invite Marc and Lori out. Marc works with Anthony and Holly, and his wife, Lori, works at NBC. Anthony’s family is here, too. His mother’s home is one town over, in East Hampton, a bike ride for Anthony, a ten-minute drive for me. And his cousin Caroline lives down the road from us with her husband, Ed, and their children.
We leave the city on Friday afternoons to beat the traffic and stop at The Palm in East Hampton for steaks and creamed spinach. We get there before the dinner crowd to enjoy the cool air and the peaceful atmosphere of the dark wood and white-aproned waiters.
Anthony wakes up at ungodly hours, always. Weekends, vacations, and summers. “Boarding school, Peanut. They drilled it into us. Up, out, get on with it.” He pops with energy, throwing drapes open, switching the news on, soaking the world in. He likes to watch the morning shows at 6 a.m. when the anchors have barely swallowed their coffee.
I like to enter the day in gradually developed stages, but we manage a middle ground. He turns the volume down on the television, keeps the drapes drawn, and leaves me in bed while he goes for his morning bike ride to Radu’s Gym in East Hampton. And I pull myself upright before he returns for the next thing—tennis, kayaks, a swim.
“Carole gets up at the crack of noon,” he jokes to our friends. It isn’t noon, but most mornings it is true, he has run on the beach, gone for a swim, or biked eight miles each way to the gym, before I am up. I still can’t manage this sort of enthusiasm for the morning.
On Saturdays we pick up meat loaf sandwiches in the afternoon from the General Store on Sagaponack Road—warmed on white bread with ketchup—and go to Gibson Beach at the end of Daniels Lane. We meet up with Holly, who usually comes with the latest gossip. Our friend Richard is always there with the Sunday Times and his latest girlfriend. Steve, another friend from Primetime, brings his Kadima paddles and hits the small rubber ball back and forth with Anthony for hours.
<
br /> We split the rental fee, my first summer here, with John, who rarely shows up. But Anthony insists he pay his portion anyway. I meet John the second weekend out. He’d come in late the night before, after we’d already gone to bed. He walks into the kitchen the next morning, in his underwear, grinning and stretching a long arm out to greet me. “Hi, I’m John Kennedy. Anthony’s better half.”
“Has the old boy left you here alone?” he asks.
He is recruiting me, I can see. Comrades in goading Anthony. Don’t worry, I know. He hasn’t got me fooled, he seems to imply with his loaded smile, the eye roll, the “principe” and “old boy.”
I tell him that Anthony is at Radu’s and I’m just back from Joe’s body shop in Southampton.
“What?” He perks up. “What were you doing there?”
I tell him I got scratches on Anthony’s Jeep pulling out of the driveway and had to get them buffed out.
“He made you spend the whole morning at the garage with his old Jeep?”
“It wasn’t so bad. I brought a book,” I say. I am earnest, not yet initiated in their game of got you. “The scratches were superficial. It didn’t take that long, really. I was only there a couple of hours. It would have been quicker, but the guy had to finish an oil change.” I chatter on, oblivious, and John’s smile stretches out, his head moves slowly back and forth. I am implicating Anthony with each word.
What Remains Page 9
