Innocent Spouse

by Carol Ross Joynt

  “Today we’re saying good-bye to Arcadia,” I told Spencer.

  “But why, Mommy, why?”

  “Because Daddy was her captain, and a good captain, and I would probably just run her into the rocks.” He thought that was funny, thankfully, and didn’t question me further.

  After this we would be down to just one boat, Howard’s eighteen-and-a-half-foot Herreshoff, the Carol Ann, which to me seemed small enough to keep and too sentimental to let go. I had fantasies that Spencer and I would take her out. Or, perhaps, he would grow up to want her for himself. Regardless, she was a keeper.

  When we finished unloading everything, we sat in the cockpit. It was comfortable and familiar. Howard, Spencer, and I had enjoyed some happy family hours on Arcadia. I found a half-full bottle of Mount Gay rum in the galley and on my last trip up, I said, “Don’t want to leave this, do we? Let’s have a sip. A toast, really.”

  “Why not?” Randy said. “Howard would approve.” It was eleven a.m. I poured some rum into two Dixie cups and handed one to Randy.

  “To Howard,” Randy said.

  “To Arcadia,” I said. We touched cups together and knocked back the rum.

  “I want some, too,” Spencer demanded.

  “Honey, it’s rum. You can’t have rum,” I said.

  “I want to do a toast to Arcadia and Daddy,” he said.

  “Okay, a little toast—but you aren’t going to like it, I promise you.” I poured half a teaspoon of rum into a cup and handed it to him.

  “To Daddy,” he said, then reenacted the way we had tossed the rum down our throats. Before it got past his tongue he spit it out, spraying wide and hard. That brought laughter to what was otherwise a sad farewell. I locked the hatch, fastened the canvas cover, and stepped off the boat. It was the first of many good-byes to the life we’d known. I resolved not to look back. If I didn’t look back I would be okay. Go forward. Always forward. Forward. Forward. Forward. And I did.

  WE WERE INTO summer but it didn’t feel like any summer I’d ever known. Every day was a battle or an avalanche. At Nathans, Doug Moran and I paced warily around each other, watching. The staff sensed the tension, and I didn’t like that. They were also beginning to hear about the IRS case, and I didn’t like that, either. It’s not that I expected to keep it secret, but I couldn’t talk about it publicly, and the rumor mill, as it usually does, was certain to make a swordfish into a whale.

  On the home front, I had to downsize and fast. I asked a real estate agent to sell the Georgetown apartments—two, factoring in the studio down the hall—and help me find a house, “something not too big, not too expensive, but the right size for a mother and a little boy.” When I was honest and told her about my IRS issues she reared back like I was suddenly radioactive. I knew it would be this way now. Even if I was earning my own money fair and square, I was branded.

  A friend recommended a family financial planner, a nice woman who met with me at the apartment. She arrived in a conservative suit, with a little bow tie at the collar of her blouse, sensible shoes, and carrying a smart briefcase. I greeted her in a T-shirt and jeans. We sat in the den. She opened her briefcase and handed me some forms. I brought her up to date on everything that was happening to us. I told her about the IRS, the debt; Nathans, its debt; the lease; the risks that filled the road ahead. When I was done, she closed the briefcase.

  “You don’t need me,” she said with a thin smile. “You need a lawyer.” She stood up, turned to leave, then stopped. “No. You need lots of lawyers.”

  I RETURNED TO New York in June to help produce the Larry King Live broadcast that previewed Princess Diana’s dress auction, followed a week later by the live show covering the auction itself. Christie’s had a party for the princess. Diana was approachable, friendly. I had written her a lot of letters requesting an interview and gotten only polite rejections in reply. She flattered me, though, by remembering the letters. Leaning toward me in the “mosh pit” at Christie’s, Diana said, “So much effort for so little result.” She laughed. “But really, I’m not doing any interviews.”

  In all, I made three trips to New York that June of 1997. I didn’t like to leave Spencer, but he took it well, and even better when I returned home with a surprise in my suitcase. My trips were on weekdays. We talked on the phone every morning and evening. He was in daylong summer camp and happy to hang out with his pals and babysitter. But I missed him. It was us alone in the world and seeing him each day made the drudgery of survival less draining.

  The auction broadcast was a ratings winner. We were “live” from a raised platform in the middle of Park Avenue, attracting attention with lights, cameras, and comedian Joan Rivers. She cohosted from the New York location while Larry ran the show from our “home” studio in Washington. Drag queens gathered around the platform to wave and shout for her attention. Joan loved it. In the middle of it all fire trucks roared past, which added to the raw excitement of live TV. The national audience got a raucous taste of New York. My primary job was to get successful bidders out of Christie’s, across the street, and up onto the platform with Joan.

  The event won me points back at the office. I needed them. Our executive producer, Wendy Walker, was sympathetic to my plight but still had a job to do, and she expected me to work at full capacity for her to be able to do it. Full capacity from me—with Spencer and Nathans and the IRS all clamoring for my time—had become a challenge. Wendy made clear that being a productive and hardworking member of the LKL staff had to be moved up on my priority list. Our working relationship was strong because I did what she asked me to do—land the biggest gets, the hard-to-book people who draw winning ratings. When I first took the job, before Howard died, Wendy and I discussed it over lunch. “I need someone to go after the interviews Barbara, Oprah, and the Today show are trying to get,” she said. “I need someone who can write the letters, make the phone calls, take the meetings, negotiate, and get it done.” I told her that it sounded good, that it was what I wanted to do. Because of Spencer, I asked to set my own schedule, which amounted to a half day in the office.

  “If I get the people you want me to get it won’t matter whether I’m ever in the office,” I said. “If I don’t get them, it won’t matter if I’m in the office all the time.” She agreed. Becky, the show’s senior producer, was not enthusiastic about the arrangement, however, and she was not shy about making that clear to me. Wendy said, “Don’t worry about Becky. I’ll deal with Becky.” That was fine when I delivered, but Becky’s doubts and objections had more influence after Howard died and my performance weakened.

  The main office of Larry King Live was a warren of cubicles on a top floor of the CNN building, a stone’s throw from Union Station and the Capitol. In the middle of the office was a “booking board.” It was big—about seven feet by eight feet—and displayed two calendar months. As soon as a producer had a confirmed booking, the name of the guest, the studio location for the interview, and the producer’s initials went up on the board. Nobody wanted white space. As a producer, you wanted your initials all over it. Once upon a time mine were everywhere. Now, not so much.

  “I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” a sympathetic Wendy said during a meeting in her office. “I think you have too much to do. I’m going to lighten your load.” While I appreciated the gesture, she took away the least heavy part of my burden: the books. Authors don’t say “no” to network interviews, least of all to Larry King. The challenge with the book beat was to let a publishing house down gently because you might very well have to call the next week to ask a favor. I didn’t want to give up books because that beat kept my initials all over the booking board. After my load was lightened, my get list was daunting. The pope was still there and the queen of England and “other royals,” plus Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Madonna, Woody Allen, Oprah, and Michael Jackson.

  I never treated Wendy’s requests with anything less than absolute seriousness—nothing ventured, nothing gained—and so I pursued
a meeting with New York’s Cardinal O’Connor regarding the pope. We met in a handsome reception room at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, resplendent with silks and brocade and important art. He was friendly and chatty, but his message was clear: “The pope is not going to do an interview.” No surprise there.

  “We’ve heard there’s something in the works with Barbara Walters.”

  He said nothing, but his expression was priceless.

  With Michael Jackson, I made repeated calls to one of his Los Angeles handlers, Sandy Gallin. He never took my calls but had an assistant leave a recorded message: “Mr. Gallin wants you to know that Michael Jackson will never do your show so don’t call back.” That didn’t stop us. Oprah’s people always took my calls, always took my pitches seriously. But Oprah would only do the interview if Larry came to her in Chicago, and Larry did not like to travel. I dogged Lisa Marie Presley but she was as elusive as a hummingbird. Wendy’s personal obsession was to bag an interview with Doris Day. No matter how much Wendy may have wanted her, though, and how hard I tried, Doris Day was not to be gotten and that was that.

  I brandished my target list at Wendy and begged for mercy. “Please give me some people who are gettable. I need some easy stuff.”

  “Carol, you weren’t hired to go after the easy stuff.”

  Chapter 14

  WIDOWS WEAR BLACK and people take that to mean they’ve shut down—suppressed their emotions—but really, they don’t. There’s still a living, breathing woman inside and the emotions are similar to what she felt when she had a living, breathing husband. Coping with loss, grief, and survival puts a damper on thoughts of romance, including sex, but they don’t go away entirely. More than anything I needed a hug, arms around me, a shoulder, but there were also instinctive stirrings for something more. In the months after Howard died, I thought about kissing, and men in general, in an abstract way. I thought about past kisses rather than future kisses. When I thought about sex, I wondered whether it would ever happen again. I was a mother in my mid-forties who was accustomed to marital sex. Everything was familiar and comfortable. The idea of having sex with someone new caused me agony. It felt like betrayal. Also, I was clueless. It sounds ridiculous, but I felt as if I didn’t know how to have sex now. What about AIDS? What about condoms? Aaaarrgghhh! It scared me. It had been too long since I’d been in the world of singles, and now all the singles were half my age. The last time I was single we hadn’t heard of AIDS. I was part of the pill generation, not the condom generation.

  I REMEMBER MY first real kiss. It was from my boyfriend Tom Harvey when we were in our early teens. It was a Sunday summer afternoon, sunny and breezy. We sat at the edge of a dock on a creek. I wore a yellow sleeveless shirtwaist dress and sandals and he was in khakis, a blue short-sleeved oxford cloth shirt, and loafers with no socks. Everything about him was attractive, even his ankles. His dark blond hair was straight and he nervously ran his hand through it, brushing it away from his forehead. He was a year older. He was shy, but not as shy as I was. We sat side by side, our arms occasionally brushing, and talked about nothing for a while before he leaned over and kissed me. I had waited for that kiss for weeks and when it happened I wanted to shout with joy. I kissed him back. I thought I would dissolve.

  My first kiss from Howard was equally wonderful. It didn’t happen right away. In fact, for the first two weeks we dated, and even though we spent practically every night together talking, driving around, and getting to know each other, there was no physical contact. There was affection and flirtation, but he didn’t make a move on me and I didn’t make a move on him. Then it happened, one afternoon, in the kitchen of my apartment in Washington. I was yammering about something and he pulled me toward him and shut me up with a kiss. It was deep and long, and it blew out my nerve endings. That night we made love for the first time, too.

  Soon after, driving in the car, listening to music, quietly taking in the views along the highway, he slowed the car, pulled over to the side of the road, and parked. Before I could ask him why he had stopped he took me in his arms and kissed me hard. He kissed me with more passion than anything I’d known before. My blood turned to steam. And then just as purposefully he pulled back, settled into his seat, and eased the car back into traffic. “I just had to do that,” he said. “I couldn’t help myself.” Of all the thousands of times we kissed, that’s the one I remember best.

  WHEN I DID think about widow sex, my mind was not on any particular person. I noticed men. I noticed men all the time. At stoplights, for example, I sat in my car and watched men cross the street, wondering about their bodies and what they might be like as lovers. In a government town like Washington, these fantasies were, well, like Washington. “First,” I’d say to myself, leaning on the steering wheel at a red light, watching a man, “you’ve got to get him out of the pinstripes.” Second … actually, there never was much of a second.

  Sooner or later most women who’ve lost a spouse have to face the myth of the merry widow, as if the death of a husband turns a woman overnight into a sex-crazed party girl hot on the prowl for the next Mr. Right. It’s odd. Widowers are treated like lost dogs who need to be taken in, spoon-fed a fresh casserole, and fixed up with good women. Widows, on the other hand, are on their own. I can’t speak for every widow, but I wasn’t even remotely on the prowl. If anything, it was the opposite. I didn’t want a new other half. I’d been so content in my marriage, and motherhood—especially the last five years—that I only wanted my own marriage back. Early on, some close friends, Trish and Mark Malloch Brown, invited me to the movies and included an unmarried male friend who was visiting from out of town. It was not an official “date,” but he was a man and he sat next to me in the theater. Because we were a foursome, two couples, I was uncomfortable. I wasn’t used to being with another man this way, even if only a friend of a friend. It felt like I was cheating. I fidgeted through the entire film and couldn’t wait to get home. I missed having a man, I missed intimacy, and I hated having an empty bed, but I wasn’t ready to invite him, whoever “he” might be, into it. I wasn’t about to jump into his, either.

  Sometimes men showed up at my doorstep, unannounced. Too often they were husbands of friends, and I would obligingly invite them in for a glass of wine and some conversation. Usually they didn’t know why they were there—or, if they knew, they couldn’t act on it. I was relieved when they went home. Other men kept a polite distance, as if I wore a widow’s black veil. They didn’t know what to say to me after we’d covered Howard’s death, the IRS nightmare, trying to balance my CNN career, Spencer’s well-being, and Nathans, always Nathans. In their eyes I was a widow bereft and cut off below the waist. Bereft was one thing, but I wasn’t cut off below the waist.

  The only man who treated me like a woman, fresh on the planet, feminine, soft, desirable, and dearly in need of a kiss happened to live and work in New York. Without even seeing it coming, but desperate for something that made me feel good, I ignored my best instincts and fell into an easy, comfortable, and romantic flirtation with Paolo, who had been a friend to Howard and me and who was married. His wife lived in Europe most of the time and they had an agreeable “understanding”—very French. Paolo was a chef on Manhattan’s fast track. His downtown restaurant, Umbria, was pretty, stylish, acclaimed, and packed. He was the son of an Italian mother and a French father who had divided his time between both countries when he was growing up. He was younger than me by about five years, full of enthusiasm and love of food, wine, cooking, restaurants, and New York. His accent was an irresistible Euro gumbo that matched his sexy floppy hair and brooding good looks.

  Our first meetings were innocent enough. When he generously offered to help me understand this complicated business that had landed in my lap, I was over the moon. He would guide me through the mysteries of chefs, menus, wine lists, and kitchens. We would meet around eleven p.m., after my live show and his dinner service. He’d park his motorcycle on Madison Avenue and walk into the lobby bar of the Carl
yle hotel looking practically edible in black—always in black—leather jacket, jeans. Black suited him as handsomely as his starched white chef’s jacket. We’d sip tea or wine until both of us were too tired to keep talking. He had the grace and masculinity of Baryshnikov, if Baryshnikov had been a little younger and a little taller and with a full head of dark brown hair.

  I’d bring menus, spreadsheets, and profit-and-loss statements to our rendezvous. One night as I blathered away about one restaurant issue or another, he slid his hand over and placed it on mine and left it there, his warm skin caressing mine. I didn’t know how much I had missed the feeling until I felt it. I wanted him to never let go. I stopped talking, almost breathless.

  “Sometimes we want things we can’t have,” he said softly, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t want them. The first time we met I thought you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” I remembered the first time, too, when Howard and I had looked him up at a mutual friend’s suggestion. He had been the new chef, and the culinary next big thing, at an Upper East Side bistro. As he emerged from the kitchen in his crisp chef’s jacket and headed toward our table with a smile, my silent reaction was “Wow.” I never thought of chefs as alluring until that day. But I was married and he was married and I put the thought away.

  He wrapped his fingers in mine and leaned in close. “You are still that beautiful today.” Now tell me, what widowed tax fraud defendant with a cash-strapped saloon wouldn’t want to drink at that fountain?

  He walked me to the elevator. As we hugged good night, and he kissed each cheek, I had the urge to crawl inside his leather jacket and live there. But I was scared and he was married. Been there, done that.

  Howard was gone but I still felt very much his wife. Only the rules had changed. The new rules said I was free to do as I pleased. But what was that? I asked myself.