•
If anyone had asked me whether, and when, I planned to tell Jake that his older son was facing financial disaster, I would have replied that Jake already knew. (Wasn’t he sitting right there on the porch the night Mr. Monti warned us that our “real estate genius” would soon be begging on street corners?) I would also have replied that in view of the fact that Jake had seen fit to ignore this warning, too bad for him. I would also have replied that nonetheless I intended to tell him about it . . . eventually.
The reason I wasn’t in any hurry to talk to Jake about Jeff was that talking to Jake was difficult these days. He used to be a good friend of mine—CAN HUSBANDS AND WIVES BE BEST FRIENDS? was a column devoted to an affirmative answer—but in recent years our friendship has started to pale. And although I don’t believe that the survival of our marriage is in question (as it was when Jake took up with Sunny Voight), it is suffering from something worse than the marital common cold. Like maybe the flu. Like maybe even pneumonia.
In any case I’m convinced that our rising tensions (I think I’ll ditch the illness imagery) are tied to the success of my newspaper column. Which has led, in the past few years, to lucrative speaking engagements, TV talk show appearances, and a certain (not unwelcome) amount of celebrity. But which also has led to the toppling of Jake from his long-entrenched position in the family as chief financial provider and leading authority. To call a spade a spade (which is not, despite what Adrienne says, a racist remark), I-believe that Jake is resentful of my success. “No,” he once said, his eyes frosting over, When I directly confronted him with this theory, “I only resent what success has done to your character.”
I believe I’ve already mentioned that Jake regards me as controlling and simplistic. He also seems to think I think that I’m much smarter than he thinks I am. (“A little learning,” he has taken to muttering ominously, “is a dangerous thing.”) He also describes as “prurient” and “nosy” and “intrusive” my passionate interest in the human condition. And he has more than once accused me of using die power of my column “to recklessly mislead” my reading public.
That last accusation arises (you will not be surprised to learn) whenever I write columns on medical matters, which—since I don’t have a Washington outlet—are probably being sent to him by some secret agent in the AMA. He absolutely hated STAND UP TO YOUR DOCTOR. He was enraged over NOBODY KNOWS YOUR BODY LIKE YOU. And last winter we fought an entire day about WHY ARE DOCTORS STILL SCARED OF ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE?
In my column I pointed to the closed-mindedness that afflicts too many members of the medical profession, making them ignorant of, and dismissive of, nontraditional forms of healing. While granting that the claims of holistic healers and other out-of-the-mainstream practitioners must be examined with a healthy skepticism, I offered some stirring vignettes of startling cures achieved by assorted unorthodox means. Many of my readers wrote to say that they’d found my column thoughtful and eloquent. Not Jake, however, who acted as if I had written a paean of praise to Joseph Mengele, the Nazi doctor.
“You’re encouraging quackery,” he snarled. “You’re sending innocent, trusting people to charlatans.”
“All I’m doing is asking them to consider a broader definition of health care. Which is something”—I smiled a mean smile—“you doctors seem temperamentally unable to do.’ ” (The “you doctors” was a mistake, but never mind.) “Furthermore,” I continued . . .
I will spare you the rest of our argument, which began at the Phillips gallery, our number one favorite art museum in Washington, where we go from time to time to pay homage to the blissful Bonnards and Renoir’s sensual Luncheon of the Boating Party. The Phillips, once a private home, is to grand museums like the Louvre what the Bishop’s Garden is to the Tuileries gardens—not anywhere near as spectacular, but exquisite, human-dimensioned, user-friendly. Visiting the Phillips can sometimes be, for me, a spiritual experience, but not when I feel like bopping Jake with the Boating Party, whose fleshy, contented ladies and gents, lounging over lunch, stood in sharp contrast to us carping Kovners. Indeed, as I consider the deep dislike (okay, hate) we felt for each other that day, I believe it is all for the best that Jake does not get to see my newspaper column more regularly, He would not have appreciated, for instance. IT’S REALLY OKAY TO FAKE IT NOW AND THEN, which—though I continue to stand by every word I wrote—certainly provoked a lot of controversy.
Among the things I advocated faking now and then were geographical knowledge (nod thoughtfully and don’t ask where Ouagadougou is), pesto sauce (Contadina puts out a pesto which, if you wanted to claim that you made it yourself, no one—and I mean no one—could tell that you hadn’t), and orgasms (moan a few times and contract your vaginal muscles). I also relayed some crafty advice passed on to me years ago by an enterprising and quite large-bottomed lady who, whenever, a lover was in residence, would strategically drape a couple of pairs of tiny bikini pants around her bedroom, She was absolutely convinced that these tiny bikini underpants—three sizes smaller than those she actually wore—would succeed in persuading her lovers, thanks to the power of suggestion, that her bottom was small enough to fit into those pants.
Now I happen to think that this is a funny story. Not massively hilarious, but cute. Yet although it drew a laugh from friends like Carolyn and from some of my readers (who wrote and told me so), there isn’t a man among the four I went to bed with this year to whom I could tell it in hopes of sharing a giggle. At one time Jake might have laughed at this story, but now that he’s into finding flaws in my character he would doubtless see this as proof of another flaw. Louis might want to laugh, but I suspect that Adrienne’s spirit still whispers in his ear, “Beware of lookism,” Philip wouldn’t laugh, though he might murmur “Most amusing,” and then he would turn it into a two-hour special some meditation on women and beauty and the nature of truth called “Thighs and Whispers.” As for Joseph Monti, I actually tired to tell him this story the day we set the date for our sex rendezvous. But although, he was eagerly making plans to betray his wife and church, and caressing my left nipple while he was planning, he frowned at the mention of “underpants” and said that pretty women shouldn’t soil their lips with smutty stories.
• • •
The planning meeting with Joseph Augustus Monti took place March 10, in the back of a white stretch limo that first drove me to National Airport, then him to McLean. I had offered—between my quarterly torture session with Sherman Schwartz, my periodontist, and the 5:30 plane I was catching to go to New York—to stop by his office to drop off what I hoped he might find a helpful column on children called LET THEM GO AND THEY’LL COME BACK AGAIN.
“You don’t have to come to the office. Just call me up when you’re done with your gums and I’ll pick you up in the car,” Mr. Monti countered. “We can talk about the children while I’m taking you to the airport on my way home.” He assured me that the detour would be “no trouble, no trouble at all. In fact,” he added caressingly, “a pleasure.” I could tell right away that my unspoken goal—to set up an appointment to go to bed with him—was going to be achieved without much difficulty.
The chauffeur-driven limo, its smoked-glass partition providing privacy and its miniature bar providing a nice Burgundy, seemed made for an easy segue from “let’s talk about Wally and Josephine,” to a fraught-with innuendo “let’s talk about us.” It didn’t take long before I was soulfully saying to Mr. Monti, “I married very young and I sometimes feel I missed out on . . . certain kinds of experience. On the other hand,” I hastened to add, to let him know I wasn’t unhappy, just horny, “I’m fortunate in having a wonderful marriage.”
Mr. Monti confided that he too—“knock wood,” which he knocked—was exceptionally fortunate in his marriage. “Three beautiful daughters. Two grandchildren on the way. A wonderful wife.”
“She seems quite wonderful” I agreed, smiling and sipping my wine and sinking deeper into the plush upholstery.
“Quite wonderful is right,” he said, as he poured more Burgundy. “A woman of great understanding. And acceptance.”
I nodded solemnly, trying to look impressed. “Understanding and acceptance are wonderful qualities.”
“Wonderful,” he repeated, bringing our total number of “wonderfuls” up to six. “She understands my appetites. And she accepts . . . she accepts that I must . . .” He shrugged an excessive Italian shrug and tossed me an unconvincingly sheepish smile and reduced the space between us to practically nil. The limo was moving slowly through the afternoon rush-hour traffic, but Mr. Monti and I were starting to speed.
“Accepts that you must what?”
“Satisfy them.”
“You tell her when you satisfy your appetites?”
“Sometime I tell her. Sometime she finds out.”
“But when she doesn’t find out, you always tell her?”
As the limo swung onto the Fourteenth Street Bridge, Mr. Monti finished his wine, then helped himself to mine, then got rid of the glasses, after which he swiveled toward me, one hand pressing my shoulder back into the seat, the other—palm flat—Insistently rotating round and round and round against my shamelessly receptive left nipple.
“You mean,” he said, “would tell my wife about us?”
The hand that was pressing my shoulder had moved significantly southward and rapidly disappeared into the interior, setting certain sensitive sections to singing oh-my, oh-yes, oh-more, oh . . .
“Ouch!” My turned-to-mush body suddenly congealed. “Excuse me for saying this, Joseph, but I really don’t think that’s any place for a pinky ring.”
Mr. Monti was deeply apologetic.
“Please forgive me, Brenda,” he said, withdrawing his hand and removing the ring from his pinky. “The last thing I would want is to cause you pain.” As he made his move to return to where he had been before being rudely, interrupted, I pulled away and said, “Wrong time. Wrong place. But if, just for argument’s sake, there should happen to be a right time and right place, I think you need to know that you would cause me serious pain if you told your wife about it.”
“Just for argument’s sake,” said Mr. Monti, “what do you think would be the right time and right place?”
I knew half the answer immediately, though I certainly also knew that my response was more than a little bit kinky. Which didn’t stop me from answering, “For argument’s sake then, let’s say March eighteenth. I’ve got some time available in the morning.”
• • •
My trip to Manhattan included a sushi dinner with my older sister, Rosalie, and an early-morning taping of a cable television show on food guilt. The TV people had offered to put me up at the Berkshire Place, but with all I had to tell Rosalie I decided I’d spend the night on her living-room couch.
There are twelve years, ten months, and three weeks between the date of my sister Rosalie’s birth and mine. For twelve years, ten months, and three weeks, as she is often wont to point out, she reveled in being our parents’ only child. At the age of fifty-eight she has finally recovered from the shock of arrival. But she still resents the fact that I am always going to be twelve years, ten months, and three weeks younger than she.
Tall and leggy and slender, with her jawline fairly intact, my sister looks good for her age the way Lauren Bacall does. Which doesn’t quite do it for Rosalie, who would rather look good for Jodie Foster’s age and who is heading toward sixty kicking and screaming, “Why me?” In her job as a conference coordinator, Rosalie shows the organizational skills that both of us inherited from our late mom, known in northern New Jersey as perhaps the finest president ever to preside over Fair Lawn Hadassah. In her chronic dissatisfaction, however, Rosalie seems to be taking after our dad, a life insurance salesman who believed that he sang better than Ezio Pinza and who felt that if he had only aimed for Broadway instead of Prudential, he would have been the man Mary Martin tried to wash out of her hair in South Pacific.
Our father, who died two years ago, sang decades of popular songs—from “Jeepers Creepers” to “Bésame Mucho,” from “Goody Goody” to “White Cliffs of Dover,” from “Some Enchanted Evening” to (keeping up with the times) “What I Did for Love.” He sang at Bar Mitzvahs and weddings and on trips down to the shore (during which Mom and Rose snoozed and I sang along), and although he was surely no Pinza he could put a lump in your throat with his “Once you have found her, never let her go.”
Dad at least had a vision of what perfect happiness was: making beautiful music up on a stage. Rosalie, on the other hand, is forever revising her life and she still hasn’t got a clue as to what she is going for. She has been an airline stewardess, sold real estate, ran a gallery down in SoHo, worked as the pastry chef at La Folie. She has ranged, since her divorce, between defiantly single (“Who needs them?”) and desperately single (“I’m nothing without a man”). Currently a blonde, she was briefly brunette with a stick-straight Lulu-in Hollywood bob and has also tried her luck as a frizzy haired redhead. She has also tried being a mother, which has worked out just fine with her dog, but not with her only human child, Miranda, an independent producer who is living out in Los Angeles and keeping in cautious touch with her mother by fax.
Remember that woman who dealt with bad times by saying “Could be worse”? Rosalie lives by the motto “Could be better.” Which means that, wherever she is, it—by definition—is never the place where she wants to be. “How’s the convention business?” I ask, and she gives me forty-five minutes on why she finds it deeply unfulfilling. “You know who’s being fulfilled?” she asks me. “Landscape architects. I’m giving serious thought to a career change.”
This career-change talk used to be the cue for me to do forty-five minutes on wasn’t it time she resolved her identity crisis, and didn’t she need to channel and focus her energies, and shouldn’t she come to terms with her limitations, and why in God’s name didn’t she grow up already!
We irritated the hell out of each other.
I once confessed to Jake that I loved my sister but didn’t like her. I believe Rose would have said the same about me. But when our father died and was laid to rest beside our mother in the Kedron section of the King Solomon Cemetery, we both resolved to make greater efforts at sisterhood.
I would make efforts to stop with the critiques.
And Rose—though she viewed whatever I did, including being born, as a critique—would make efforts to be less defensive and less touchy.
Which is why Rose tries not to tell me to shut the fuck up when I give her advice on how to live. Which is why—although my column advises everyone else how to live—I’m trying really hard to not advise her. Which is therefore why, instead of making my why don’t-you-grow-up-already speech; I said, as I finished the last piece of yellowtail at Hatsuhana, “Landscape architect—that’s really interesting.”
And then I told her some interesting stuff about me.
“I’m appalled,” Rose said when I’d filled her in on my short-term adultery plans. “I’m fainting with shock and horror. Tell me more.” We were at her apartment now (she has a nice place on East Seventy-fourth Street) and Hubert (Rose’s Great Dane) was sprawled at our feet, the beauty of his countenance, his charm and wit and intellect and grace having already been commented on ad absolute nauseam by his doting mistress. Rose stared at me contemplatively as I brought her up to date with my back-of-the-limo encounter with Mr. Monti, and then she said, “I disapprove. I really disapprove. God, this feels good. This feels great. I mean, this feels fabulous.”
“What does?”
“Feeling morally superior to you.”
“Well, okay, fair enough. You’re entitled.”
“And feeling more mature than you.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because what you’re planning is very immature. You’re not going to give me an argument on that, are you?”
I cleared my throat and fiddled with the zipper on my cozy flannel bathrobe. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Rose, but if you were doing it, I’d think it was immature. My doing it is . . . is a, well, it’s an exhaustively thought through, fully responsible choice. Not admirable. I’m not saying admirable. But when you look at the total picture—not immature.”
You can tell how improved our relationship is by the fact that Rose just shook her head, and laughed at me, after which she excused herself, hustled into the kitchen, and came right back with a bag of frozen Clark Bars. “Speaking of immature . . .” she said, and then the room fell silent, except for the snuffle of Hubert’s stuffed nose and the sound of our busy teeth chomping through chocolate.
Rosalie yawned, “So tell me, on this TV show you’re taping tomorrow morning—what are you going to say about food and guilt?”
I stood up and brushed the crumbs off my lips and licked the last of the chocolate off my fingers.
“I’m going to say that there’s nothing that a woman could do in bed that could possibly, in a million years, make her feel as guilty as eating four Clark Bars.”
• • •
I’m getting concerned that I’m coming across as devil may-care about guilt. Not true—I am a deeply guilty person. I’ll go even further and say that I believe I am gifted in guilt the way some folks are gifted in athletics. A sense of guilt is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of healthy adulthood. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. But having asserted that principle, I must add that although guilt is good, we must not overdo it—a point I have underscored in several columns, like IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT THAT IT’S RAINING and FORGETTING HER BIRTHDAY DID NOT GIVE YOUR MOTHER A STROKE and (one of my profounder explorations of the subject) NOBODY’S GOD—MAYBE NOT EVEN GOD.
I believe I have learned to distinguish the things that I shouldn’t feel guilty about from those things about which I most assuredly should. Like (despite what they taught me in parenting class) preferring Wally to Jake. Like (despite an excess seven pounds and a two-eight five cholesterol) eating candy. Like (despite the fact that Mrs. Monti won’t ever find out about it) sleeping with the husband of a wonderful wife and mother and future grandmother.
I knew at the time that Mrs. Monti would never find out about it because Mr. Monti had sworn a fearsome oath. I didn’t know at the time that (even though our secret would go with us to the grave, and even though I posed no threat to their marriage, and even though I wasn’t the first—or even the fifteenth—woman he had slept with) I would nonetheless feel I had injured Mrs. Monti, I didn’t know I would feel so small, so mean, so wrong, so unbelievably guilty.
I told you I’m good at guilt but, as I often explain to my readers, guilt must then be followed by forgiveness. We need to forgive other sinners—and ourselves. And so I’m in the process of forgiving myself for injuring Mrs. Monti, a process I am hoping to complete by the time I’ve managed to murder her husband.
• • •
It was while I stood in his office back on August 24, hearing him bellowing to the police that my younger son was a kidnapper and a thief, that I let myself think it: I want to kill Mr. Monti. Look what he’s doing destroying my Wally’s life. But not so fast! It seems the police could not call Josephine “kidnapped” unless she was being held against her will. (“Find my child,” Mr. Monti roared, “and when I’m finished talking to her, I guarantee she’ll say it’s against her will.”) As for the theft of the money, “Yeah, okay, I got it back,” he conceded grudgingly. “But that doesn’t cancel out that I was robbed.” He explained his deal with Marvin—“I retained the right to accuse this punk of the theft”—but that didn’t seem to galvanize the officer, who clearly was not responding with a blazing-guns, call-out-the SWAT-team sense of urgency to Mr. Monti’s increasingly wild accusations. A few more rounds and Raging Bull was raging, “Family problems? I’m not talking family problems—I’m talking crime.” And then he slammed down the phone with a red-faced, furious “Enough! I don’t speak to sergeants. You’ve got my number—have the police chief call me.”
He slumped back into his black leather chair, tap-tap-tapping the telephone with his pinky ring.
“I think I’ll go now,” I said with a smile as I took out my peach-glow blusher and brightened my cheeks. I looked fine. Mr. Monti was looking bruised. But not for long. “Don’t think, Mrs. Kovner”—his venomous voice stopped me dead at the office door—“don’t think that you are going to beat me out. If I don’t get Wally on this, I’ll get him on something, dealing drugs or even spying—I’ve got a couple of friends in the CIA.” He laughed. “Yeah, I’ve got friends and they could fix him pretty good. Fix him for a while. Fix him forever.”
I stared at him. He was trying to scare me, right?
“And it won’t be, you know,” he went on, “just little Wally who’s going to get it. There’s Jeff—you heard what’s doing with him?” I nodded. “And then there’s your husband. Your husband the fancy pediatric surgeon. Your husband and those two malpractice suits.”
Mr. Monti was pushing hard, but I didn’t intend to let him see I was shaken. “Those stupid lawsuits!” I snapped, “I can’t believe those people are suing. They’re being just incredibly ungrateful.”
“Ungrateful?” said Mr. Monti. “These are heartsick, heartbroken people, their children’s lives shattered by a surgeon’s knife.” He puffed out his cheeks and slowly blew the air from his pursed-up lips before he continued. “But lucky for them, a friend of mine—I’ve got my friends at the hospital—looked up their records and helped me track them down.”
“Tracked them down to do what exactly?” I whispered, though I already knew the answer.
“To tell them it wasn’t too late to sue the pediatric surgeon who messed up their children. And”—his (once so melting, now so menacing) big brown eyes locked onto mine—“to offer them my help with their legal expenses.”
• • •
While I never refrain from criticizing the medical profession for being (this is a partial list) insensitive, greedy, arrogant, conservative, and patronizing to women, I also (where it’s appropriate) am always willing to give the doctors their due. I have nothing but praise, for instance, for my artful cosmetic surgeon, who rescued me from upper-eyelid droop. I adore my nimble internist, who is the Jascha Heifetz of the sigmoidoscope. I am even willing to grant that the sadist who deep-cleans my gums four miserable times a year is, though made of stone, the finest periodontist in the Washington area. And I’m totally convinced that my husband, Jake, whatever his personal inadequacies, is a brilliant, gifted, dedicated surgeon. (You don’t have to take my word for it; there are major—major!—hospitals in New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles where they’re begging on bended knee for Jake to please be their chief of pediatric surgery.) So when, a few months back, I heard that the Tesslers and the Malones were suing Jake for malpractice in the treatment of Tara Tessler and Kenny Malone, I knew (and this was before I knew that Joseph Augustus Monti had put them up to it) that Jake was being persecuted unjustly.
At the time the suits were brought, it was almost impossible to get my husband to talk about them. He was evasive, dismissive, cryptic, and abrupt. He was also (although, of course, he would never admit this to me—but I knew) terribly hurt that the Tesslers and the Malones, whose daughter and son he had done so much for, would take him to court on such baseless and nasty charges.
I extracted the details one night in July when Jake had come home from Children’s with a bad headache, and I offered to give him an almond cream massage. He flopped on his belly while I, on my knees, gently straddled his thighs, kneading his bunched-up muscles with the silky, slithery, almond-scented lotion.
“Ooooh, ahhh,” he sighed. “I love that a lot.”
“More?” I asked him.
“More.”
“Happy to do it,” I said. “But you’ve got to talk to me.
Which is how I finally got the straight scoop on the Case of the Shattered Spleen and the Case of Malrotation Volvulus.
Kenny Malone was the kid with the shattered spleen, which got badly smashed up (along with his leg) when he ran in front of a car at the age of six. Jake—in a race-against-the-clock emergency operation—saved Kenny’s life by taking out his spleen. Jake also, in the post-op care, gave Kenny his all-out, you’re-my-main man attention, the kind he rarely gives unless you are scared and sick and under the age of eighteen. The Malones had sent Jake a lavish “Thanks, Doc, we’ll never forget you” Christmas card every single year for the last five years. This summer—on the grounds that “due to the removal of his spleen Kenny Malone has suffered from, and-will continue to suffer from, a lifelong susceptibility to painful and potentially lethal infections”—the Malones filed a two-million-dollar suit against Jake.
The Tesslers’ suit was for few and a half million dollars.
Another family that should have been singing Jake’s praises instead of suing him, the Tesslers, had brought Tara in with a twisted intestine, which, as I understand it, is the English translation of malrotation volvulus. As Jake explained it to me, when a person’s intestine gets twisted, the twisting cuts off its blood supply, and without a supply of blood the intestine will die, and if a surgeon doesn’t untwist the intestine and remove the part that is dead, pretty soon the person will be dead too. The reason Tara Tessler, now three, is just in the fifth percentile for height and weight and has chronic diarrhea and will spend her life on a highly restricted diet is that Jake took out part of her intestine. And the reason Tara Tessler did not die at five weeks old is that Jake took out part of her intestine.
Okay, so what we’re dealing with here are very ungrateful parents, who got ungrateful after they met Mr. Monti. A man I thought, until yesterday, I’d know how to outmaneuver and control. A man I thought, until yesterday, was vengeful and mean but not that vengeful and mean. A man I thought I’d like to kill, which of course is totally different from deciding to kill, which—since yesterday afternoon, on Sunday, September 20, is what I decided to do to Mr. Monti.
• • •
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 pulled 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.”