“I can’t believe he made his girlfriend sit alone at the garage on a beautiful summer weekend while he worked out at the gym. What a prince!” He laughs.
He repeats this disbelief to Anthony when he gets back, and to his sister and to everyone who comes around over the weekend. What a prince!
My first impression of John is entirety. He is complete in a way I’ve never seen. My second impression is that he is aware of the effect he has and does his best to dispense with it immediately. He makes everyone in a room feel at ease. He says his name without the F. and without the Jr., “John Kennedy,” his hand reaching out. No matter who, no matter where, no matter that everyone in the world knows who he is.
Anthony and John have been sharing a summerhouse for several years, though they are unlikely roommates. John is Oscar to Anthony’s Felix, banging through the house, marking his territory like a teenager, leaving trails of movement behind him: a dirty dish, an empty bottle, books and newspapers wrinkled from spilt drinks. If he has been in the kitchen, every cabinet is opened. In the bathroom there are towels on the floor and a toothpaste cap in the sink.
If Anthony is the angel, the English schoolboy, well-mannered, polite, John is the scamp. Every family has one—the one you feel obliged to frown at occasionally, to disapprove of half-heartedly. The one who’s always late, but for whom you hold up the party because you need him—the charmer, the one who gives a great toast with no notice, cracks the perfect joke in a tense moment.
They have a practiced banter, a routine.
“Carole, do you know that Anthony hates children and old people?” He tells me a story about Anthony in line with his groceries losing it over a sweet old woman in front of him who couldn’t seem to find her change in the bottom of her handbag.
“No, but that’s great we have that in common,” I say, smiling.
“John, tell Carole about the camping trip when you almost killed us.”
John complains about the small bedroom. Anthony tells him it’s what he gets for being late. In the evening, we grill steaks and fresh vegetables and drink vodka with grapefruit juice, and I listen to the two of them top their stories of each other all night. Watching them this weekend, I can see they can’t stand too close to each other, and can’t bear to be too far apart.
The following weekend I meet Anthony’s mother at her house on Dune Lane. She invites us to lunch. It can hardly be avoided any longer. I have the feeling they aren’t used to Anthony bringing a girl around. He is thirty-two, but there hasn’t been a serious one. His mother has heard about me, I’m sure—Emilia has likely reported our winter weekends.
Lee and Anthony’s stepfather, Herbert, are waiting for us in the library. They stand up to greet us when we walk in. His mother has a striking face: wide-set eyes and sharpened bone lines. I see Anthony in it. She is friendly, and when she opens her mouth to speak, a lyrical voice delivers the words, like a woodwind instrument, melodic and precise. Herbert is a tall, elegant man, who looks fit for a smoking jacket and pipe. He’s professorial, with distinguished silver hair. A highly regarded Hollywood director disguised as an English gentleman.
We start with awkward handshakes, but Herbert is warm, if unsure how exactly to proceed, and Anthony’s mother, I can see, is naturally curious. We move to the patio, where pitchers of iced tea are set out, a small pitcher of sugar water for sweetener, and a pile of big, beautiful Queen Anne cherries in a wicker basket. Emilia serves us salad—avocado, fresh green beans, and thick slices of peeled tomato drizzled with lemon—as we wander through formalities.
“So where did you grow up?” Herbert asks, and when I tell him, he makes a touching attempt to do something with it. “Suffern, yes, of course, I know it.” He turns to Lee. “I staged a ballet near there, a long time ago. It’s a charming little area.” My knowledge of ballet is limited, so I stick to Suffern, spitting out names of towns he might know in the area. “There’s an old hotel,” he says. “Off of Route Seventeen, I think it is. A charming old hotel way up on the—”
“Yes, right. Motel on the Mountain!”
“Oh, yes. ‘Motel on the Mountain.’”
“I don’t know if that’s the real name. My family took that road upstate when I was a kid. That’s just what I called it.”
He knows of this drive for some reason, the back way upstate, though he can’t quite remember how, and he talks about this part of New York as if it’s another country. We have little common ground, and it is obvious but maybe not hopeless.
I become a regular at his mother’s lunches on Sunday afternoons, and this is how my relationship with Anthony’s family unfolds, between tomato slices and endive salad. Between grilled salmon and sorbet. It trickles out through Evian and fresh lemon wedges over the rims of fine crystal. From our level playing field at ABC, I am suddenly thrust into class divide.
Function versus form—this is what separates us. This practice of lunch, for instance, is foreign to me. Lunch to me is what you eat—a quick sandwich or a yogurt grabbed on your way out the door. It is not this formal theater, this dance, this series of small acts: the salads, the drinks, the sequence of courses. The slow waving of forks in the air. The time stretching out between bites.
I am in the habit of eating standing up, out of the refrigerator, or manning a sandwich in the car. Eating is strictly functional, like sleeping. There was a different cadence to meals in the house I came from. The meals my grandmother laid out in her basement were mostly disposed of in silence. After she died, all trace of ceremony disappeared. Food appeared at random intervals. There might be a pot of pasta and sauce or a big tray of frozen fish sticks or chicken potpies at night, or there might not. We were never required to attend meals. If you were near the kitchen, and there was food, you consumed it. And when we were grown, out of high school but not quite settled elsewhere, and having Sunday dinners together, we would all sit down at once and spoon from an enormous platter of pasta. Chairs were squeezed in, assorted settings scattered around. All of us banging elbows, grabbing for Kraft parmesan cheese, bread, butter. Cans of soda slid across the table. If there was something to say, it was at once, never fewer than three conversations in play, with all of us jumping in and out.
But here in East Hampton, meals serve a different purpose. The lunches have a simple feel, but no detail is overlooked, and the seating is carefully planned. They would be interesting merely to watch, but you aren’t allowed to. You are expected to bring something, a story, to the table. You are graded on participation. I met Hamilton on one of these Sundays, and Hamilton always had a good story. I doubt he’s ever gone anywhere without one. He has, in fact, extras, in case anyone comes up short. Lee became good friends with him through her job at Giorgio Armani. They seem an odd match; he’s barely grown-up, a year younger than I. But they are close, spending weekends and vacations together. He and Anthony are close friends too.
There is a hierarchy at these lunches. Usually one person is more highly regarded, and he or she takes the lead role. The rest of the table maneuvers itself in this person’s direction. Stories are saved for this guest. They are currency, after all, and get a higher price depending on who’s listening. You don’t want to waste them. For instance, no one, I notice, is bursting with a story to tell me. The person sitting next to me will offer polite small talk and wait for an opening with the more interesting person on the left or the wife of the mogul across the table. I haven’t quite mastered this art, talking about nothing while waiting for a turn to tell my story.
But I have learned a little. I glance at Dominick Dunne’s column in Vanity Fair, because no one seems to tire of social gossip. I begin to save up stories about work assignments. I start to look for them during the week, stories I think worthy of a Sunday lunch. I learn to say Peter Jennings, and then just Peter, with terrifying regularity.
Then, too, there is the pressure of knowing who people are. In my family, you are expected to be familiar with the Yankee infield, past and present. A newcomer would neve
r recover from Who is Don Mattingly? From then on he or she would be politely endured.
I am new at Dune Lane, and everyone here already knows everyone else. Or they have friends or a place in common that instantly unites them. They are familiar with Larry Gagosian, the gallery owner, who comes here in his role as art expert, and with Chris Whittle, who recently made a killing in private education. They all know Mickey Schulhof, the chairman of Sony U.S.A., who, because he was holding a Pomeranian under his arm when I met him, I mistook for Lee’s dog trainer.
I feel as though I’m being patiently tolerated at these lunches. Though they are all friendly, this is a tough crowd to break into. I don’t have a backstory. Sometimes I sense the curiosity of the guests. Who is this girl of Anthony’s? Like an extended family, they all have some amount of claim to him, and they wonder who has engaged his heart. Less frequently I recognize genuine interest. And after a while I notice that my trump cards aren’t really interesting to anyone. I’m not a former model. I don’t have a famous uncle or step-uncle or ex-lover. I can’t speak in the shorthand of boarding schools. And in this way, I reveal myself. Opinions are sealed without my knowledge.
It doesn’t matter that I’ve been to the Gulf War, filmed two documentaries, and it won’t matter if I go to Angkor Wat, with or without an Emmy, because Jackie and Lee have already been there. I am either unable to deliver these stories properly, or I’m simply cursed by lineage.
6
It is said there are only two stories—a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town; they are both here in mine. I took a journey, and Carolyn came to town.
We were at Sea Song. I was washing dishes, Anthony was running on the beach, and John was reading the paper when she walked out of the bedroom, blonde and ten stories high, in a white cotton nightgown with eyelet trim.
She walked across the living room and put a hand on my shoulder. She seemed to know me. “Hi, I’m Carolyn. You must be Carole. I forgot a toothbrush. Do you have one I can use?” Her eyes were as big as quarters and blue like a swimming pool and she spoke softly, almost whispering. I thought later, she didn’t want to scare me away.
I was wearing red-denim shorts and a white T-shirt tucked in. I remember this because she teased me about it for years. “You should have seen Carole when I met her, this sweet little thing, with her belted shorts and tucked-in shirt.” She told anyone who would listen. We had a story, like an old couple, about how we met, and she loved this part.
“What was wrong with wearing a belt?”
“Lamb, no one was wearing belted shorts, and red! I thought, ‘Oh, my God, who is this little one?’” She made me believe I was captivating.
I was geeky, earnest, completely miscast. I can see it in pictures now, but I didn’t know then. I was protected by naïveté—the certainty that I was getting along just fine. She was drawn to that. I wasn’t whom people expected Anthony Radziwill to be with. But then, she wasn’t whom people expected John to be with either.
When I close my eyes and think of her, I see her hands. She was completely unaware of them, but they were threaded through every word she said like melody lines, changing tempo and rhythm with her story. They were quick, jumpy but certain. “I don’t think we’ll be doing that,” she would say when something was ridiculous. Her index finger would draw a line around her sentence and stop, stabbing a sort of punctuation in the air. She had long, strong fingers. She wasn’t afraid to get them dirty. She wasn’t afraid to touch. She held my hand while she talked to me, or when we walked down the street. She played with my hair, absentmindedly, when she was making a point. It took me some time to get used to all the touching. She dismissed the barriers, the walls of politeness, the invisible personal space we protect. There was no awkward embrace with her, no hesitation. She hugged you tight, as if she might never see you again.
That first day, I noticed light and movement and her hands.
“Do you mind if I come with you to the store?” she asked.
“Sure, if you’d like,” I said. I was going to pick up steaks for dinner. Several of John’s friends had come by and were on the deck. He had a group of guys going back to college, and they were always buzzing around him.
“I’m so glad you’re here. I thought this was going to be all boys, all weekend.”
By the end of the weekend I learned that she had grown up a half hour from Suffern, in the blue-collar town of Greenburgh. That her father left when she was two, and her mother raised her and her two sisters alone. That as teenagers we had both worked for Caldor, she behind the jewelry counter and I at the customer service desk. That she now worked for Calvin Klein. What were the odds that John would bring home a girl from Caldor? She left a note behind in my bedroom.
Carole, you must seriously get rid of those Gap sneakers. Our friendship cannot proceed in a growth oriented way until you realize how important this issue is to me. Nice to meet you. XO, Carolyn
I thought that if we spent any time together we would be great friends.
They broke up the next weekend, and I didn’t see her for two years. John went back to his on-again, off-again relationship with an actress. She came a few times that summer with two girlfriends who barely spoke and three kittens. I kept locking the kittens in the laundry room because Anthony was allergic.
At the end of the summer Anthony and I take a vacation in the south of France. We fly to Nice and drive to St. Tropez, where his mother is renting a house. We spend a few days around Nice and then drive through seaside resort towns, gracing the Mediterranean with our romance. We stop at a small café in Cannes, and Anthony orders lunch in perfect French.
“Je t’aime,” he tells me.
“Je t’aime,” I repeat.
“Keep practicing, Sweetie,” he says, winking.
“What does it mean?”
“It means I like you, a lot.”
At St. Paul de Vence we stop at La Colombe d’Or and watch the old men play boccie, groups of them in the hot sun shouting at each other in French, throwing wooden balls at patches of dirt. We watch them for an hour or maybe two, there’s no hurry, and then we’re off again.
At the post office of St. Tropez, we call his mother to tell her we’re here and then wander around the small town. We stop for chocolate croissants at the patisserie, for gelato at the ice cream shop. In the beginning all of it is so new. Along the French Riveria, I think I’m the first to fall in love.
The house his mother is renting is on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. It is the guesthouse on a very large estate, so large the guesthouse has a guesthouse, and that is where we stay—in separate bedrooms.
Our routine is a series of small entertainments, flowing sleepily one to the next. We walk the stone path, cool in the morning shade, to the motorboat at the dock. Mediterranean villas often come with a boat and captain on call to ferry guests to beaches and coves. We have a swim and then take off for another place. We lunch at Cinquant Cinq at the height of the season. With the people who winter in St. Barth’s and have a corner table at Sette Mezzo in New York. Then spend afternoons back in town, sipping iced tea in the cafés along the port, watching the yachts maneuver in and out.
A procession of minor events leads to dinner: a late-day swim or tennis, conversation on the patio with white wine and vodka tonics, and then finally our meal, and the next day we start over again. The third day here is my birthday. His mother gives me a sarong from her favorite shop, and that evening we toast with champagne, à votre santé! We are young and happy and have all the time in the world.
7
After Iraq invaded Kuwait, PJR produced a series of hour-long specials on the war. All this summer I have been working on the third one, called A Line in the Sand. I resumed the research when I returned from St. Tropez. Looking for stories for the piece, I find a small article one morning on an inside page of The Washington Post: “Iraqis Fire Shots Near U.S. Team.” There is a picture below the article of a convoy of trucks leaving a military facilit
y in Fallujah, purportedly moving nuclear weapons. It is blurry, taken with a long lens, but I think we can use it for the show. The article quotes a United Nations weapons inspector named David Kay.
Luck and resourcefulness and an endless succession of phone calls—they connect the dots. This is what makes a good reporter.
You make a phone call and then another and then another and someone gives up a little bit with each one. I call the number in Vienna for the International Atomic Energy Agency, David Kay’s base, hoping to find someone who will help me get to someone else who can get in touch with him. It is 10 a.m. in New York, 4 a.m. in Vienna, and he happens to answer the phone. He is just back from Iraq. There is no price you can put on luck in this business.
He tells me he was with the inspectors at the Abu Ghraib military facility, that they took pictures of suspicious crates at the military base, and that after that the crates suddenly disappeared. Intelligence reports tracked the crates to a site in Fallujah, so the inspectors followed, and at Fallujah they were rebuffed.
“But the pictures,” I ask him, “how did you get those pictures?”
“One of the guys climbed up the water tower,” he says. “And then the Iraqis fired shots.”
I ask him for copies of the pictures, and he offers me video. “Video?”
“Sure. I have video of the entire incident. The convoy, the water tower, the Iraqis shooting at us, six tapes.”
“Yes, I want it,” I say quickly, before he can change his mind. “How soon can you send it?”
“I’ll be in New York in two days. I can give it to you then.”
I meet him at a coffee shop, and he hands me the tapes. I make copies and messenger them over to him at the United Nations that afternoon. He needs to play them for the UN Security Council.
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