CHAPTER 7

ON A FREEZING THURSDAY IN JANUARY 1987, SOL GAVE THE keynote speech at a luncheon held by the Long Island Association, an organization that promoted the interests of Island businessmen. When he finished his speech—he’d talked about society’s need to remedy the urban blight and poverty that were so often at the root of the crimes judges were asked to rule upon—a crowd of people thronged around him on the dais. He was fielding their questions and listening to their comments when he noticed Joy among them.

He was surprised to see her. She’d come to a number of his speaking engagements, and several times she’d turned up without giving him notice that she planned to attend. But today the weather was terrible. Snow had been circling down from the heavens all morning, and the weather bureau had declared the storm a blizzard. It had taken people considerable extra time to make their way to the luncheon, and it was going to take them hours and hours to get home. But there she was. She’d come despite the blizzard. He felt flattered. But he felt even better when she made her way closer to him and said, “You were incredible! You were fantastic!”

She kept him company while he made his farewells, and then, as he headed down the steps, she took his hand. It was the first time he and she had ever touched.

She had, by then, taken the job with the mayor, and he had, by then, helped her figure out a more ambitious career to pursue. He’d pointed out to her that candidates for the 1988 presidential election were already launching their campaigns, that she and Jeffrey were by now wealthy enough to make major contributions and elicit them from their friends, and that if she played her cards right and backed a winner, she could end up with a job in the next president’s Washington administration. Or even with an overseas ambassadorship. “There’s nothing that wins the hearts of politicians more than funds,” he told her, and promised he’d show her the ropes. “For example, you have to be seen at the right functions. But you’ve got to get the guest lists in advance so you can decide whether it’s worthwhile going. Some you go, some you don’t bother. And you never go unless you go with someone of significance, because you don’t want to be buried. That’s worse than not going at all.”

He’d also suggested she put her money on Vice President George Bush.

She’d taken eagerly to his suggestions. And he had enjoyed playing Pygmalion to her Galatea. But he had not thought of her in an erotic way—not until she took his hand on the day of the blizzard.

Still, nothing sexual happened between them. Not for a long while. Only one thing changed as a result of their hand-holding: They began to telephone each other more often than they had before.

According to Sol, Joy was the chief telephoner. She called him every morning when he was up in Albany. She always called at 6:30 A.M., before he left his farmhouse to go to his chambers, and she’d tell him little things about her previous day’s experiences or ask him political or financial questions or say again what an inspiring, wonderful speaker he was. He loved it when she did that.

She never called from her apartment. She left the apartment, telling her family she was going jogging, and dialed him from a pay phone on the street or, when the weather was inclement, from a luncheonette. She didn’t want her calls to him, she explained, to show up on her phone bill.

Then one day she complained about having to carry change around with her. He gave her his telephone credit card number.

In February 1987, Joy and Jeffrey attended George Bush’s first major fund-raiser in Manhattan, a New York Republican County Committee dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. The ballroom of the hotel was packed that night, and the guests were feverish with enthusiasm for Bush. Joy was dressed to the nines, noticed a woman whose husband was a good friend of Bush’s, and she was somewhat overjeweled. The clothes and the jewels were in excellent taste, but somehow the whole package didn’t fit together. It’s as if, the woman thought, Joy’s a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s finery.

Joy wanted to come up to Albany and see him, Sol remembered. She told him this in one of her early morning calls, around the time she’d gone to the Bush fund-raiser. He thought that what she had in mind was observing how the court operated, so he said fine and suggested she bring Jessica and Evan. Kids were always fascinated by the workings of the court of appeals.

On the appointed afternoon, he had already taken his seat on the bench when she entered the courtroom. He expected her to be followed by Evan and Jessica and looked around the room for them, but they weren’t there.

That gave him pause. But he didn’t think long about their absence—perhaps because she looked utterly marvelous. Her full-bosomed figure was trim, her movements agile, and her lovely, mobile face alive with curiosity. He felt proud of her and turned to his good friend Judge Joseph Bellacosa, who occupied a chair on the wide curved bench, and whispered, “That’s my ward.”

Judge Bellacosa was impressed. Raising his eyebrows, he scribbled something on a piece of paper. Sol glanced down at the paper. Bellacosa had scrawled, “Madonna mia!”

“Joe, I don’t want to be alone with her,” Sol recalled saying to Bellacosa later that afternoon, when they’d left the courtroom after the day’s legal arguments. He’d told Joy he would take her out to dinner, but he was suddenly nervous about doing so. He was nervous because she was making, he believed, “a tremendous, tremendous rush” for him. He was nervous because, he also recalled, “I had never cheated in my life. I was straight as an arrow. And very critical of those men who strayed.” He didn’t even come on to women. “I never—never with one exception, [that] woman in upstate New York who used to make a play for me—I never, never, never made a pass at a woman.” And except for that one woman, they didn’t come on to him. “Well, yes, during campaigns. There was once a woman who slipped me a note saying, ‘You can put your shoes under my bed any time you like.’” But basically, women were so uninterested in him that he “used to think there was something the matter with me. And then I thought, maybe it’s because women know. They look at you, and say, ‘This guy doesn’t play around.’ So they leave you alone.”

Except for Joy. She’d been calling him all those early mornings and turning up unannounced at his speeches and at his chambers in Mineola.

Sol Wachtler didn’t ask himself whether he was now sending out different signals from those he’d sent out all his life, signals that said yes, he was available. He simply focused on Joy’s apparent desire for him. And in an odd reversal of traditional roles, seeing himself as a kind of virgin prince and Joy as the bold seducer, he worriedly asked Bellacosa where he was having dinner that night, hoping he could eat in the same place and thus preserve his virtue. When Bellacosa said, “Ogden’s,” which was a good restaurant set on the edge of the vast downtown plaza Rockefeller had built, Sol immediately said, “Look, make a reservation for me and Joy at a table near yours.”

It would have been all right, he remembered, except that she didn’t like the table. It was just inches from where Bellacosa was sitting with a friend. “I thought we were going to have dinner alone,” she objected. “This is like a table for four.” And before Sol could say anything, she called the headwaiter over and said, “Could you please get us a private table.”

The waiter obliged. He put them at a table in a quiet, dark corner of the restaurant. It was candlelit, and they ordered wine, and after he’d drunk some, Sol began to relax. They ate and drank, and they both began feeling happy, and when dinner was over, they went walking on Rockefeller’s plaza, where he showed her the sights.

It was while they were strolling that they came across Jeffrey’s limousine—Joy had driven up in it, chauffeured by Jeffrey’s driver, Charlie—and Sol realized it was getting late. “You better get back,” he remembered telling her. “You’ve got a three-hour drive in front of you. It’ll be midnight before you get home.”

“I can’t,” she said, “because Charlie is at the movies.” She’d sent him there, she explained, so that he’d have something to do while she was dining.

Sol invited her up to his chambers, to pass the time till Charlie got back.

In his chambers, he showed her around the opulent quarters—two rooms for his staff and a vast wood-paneled one for himself, furnished with a leather-topped desk, a soft couch, and a hand-carved table, on which were displayed photographs of Joan and the children.

She admired his view and his furnishings, but his nervousness had returned, and he kept trying to get her to go home. Then he decided to be direct with her. He told her how much he liked her, but that he still loved his wife. He said he’d never been unfaithful and had no intentions of becoming so. “Did you ever read Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’?” he asked her. When she said she hadn’t, he told her about how an ancient artist had sculpted on a vase the figures of a man and a woman, their hands almost, but not quite, touching, and how Keats had used that image to write about unconsummated love. The poet had elevated such love, made it seem the highest kind of love, he explained, for it could survive the centuries. “‘Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,’” he quoted, “‘Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!’”

Had Joy understood him? Had she comprehended that he was telling her that he and she had to be like the figures on that vase, destined to go through eternity never touching? He spelled it out. “That’s how you and I have to lead our lives,” he said. “Because I don’t want to get involved, Joy.”

She listened, but he wasn’t sure she followed him, because when he finally convinced her to go home, she said, “But aren’t you going to kiss me good night?” And although he’d wanted to be like the ancient Greek figure, a lover, yet chaste, a suitor free of the sullying physical connection, he didn’t want to disappoint and thwart her, and he took her in his arms and kissed her.

It was a long, rapturous, exciting kiss. “A real kiss,” he would say later, with some awe in his voice as if remembering the disappointing kiss he had written about in his school newspaper column so many years before.

The next day, Sol remembered, Joy called him and told him “how wonderful the kiss had been, and how much she’d loved it.” But he was having misgivings. They’d started as soon as he and Joy had kissed. “After that kiss,” he recalled, “I knew I was in trouble. I felt sordid.” Now, he decided, he had to “break up with her.” So he asked his secretary to find him a beautiful restaurant in the country, and he said to himself, This is going to be a good-bye restaurant.

His secretary picked a luxurious French establishment in Rye, a suburban town about thirty miles from New York City, and he himself drove all the way down from Albany to Manhattan to pick up Joy and escort her to the restaurant—perhaps because he liked the idea of treating her like a date, perhaps because he didn’t want her to repeat her indiscretion of having Charlie drive her to a rendezvous with him.

He did a lot of saying good-bye over lunch. “You’re a married woman, Joy,” he told her. “And you’re getting involved in big-league politics. The last thing in the world you need is scandal.” He also reminded her, “I’m the chief judge. I’ve never—not ever—gone astray before. The last thing I need is scandal.” Finally, he said, “Let’s just cool it. Let’s be friends. And let’s not do anything. Please, Joy.”

But Joy didn’t seem to think much of his trying to set limits on their romantic future. “She said, ‘One day at a time,’” he remembered. “‘One day at a time. What’s the sense of saying what’s going to happen a month from now, six months from now? One day at a time.’”

Still, she agreed that for the time being, they’d just be friends.

Being friends, just friends, lasted only another week or two. Shortly after their lunch in Rye, Joy called Sol and told him she and her friend Paola Cohen were going to a health farm near Albany, and they’d like to drive over and see him. He said fine and asked her where the health farm was.

She said, “Monticello.”

He said, “Monticello is nowhere near Albany. But wonderful, come on up.”

They came. “What they did was,” Sol recalled, “they registered at the health farm. Joy had purposely picked a place with no phones in the room, so Jeffrey couldn’t check up on her. They registered there, and then they drove over to Albany and checked into the Susse Chalet, which is a motel near my house. Then Joy called and said, ‘Paola and I are dying to see your house.’ She’d wanted to see it on her last trip, but I’d kept telling her she couldn’t—I just wasn’t about to take her home. But now, she says she and Paola want to see the house. Okay. I went over to the motel to pick the two of them up. But only one of them came out. Joy. I said, ‘Where’s Paola?’ She said, ‘Paola’s sleeping. She’s exhausted.’”

He’d feel like a fool if he refused to take Joy to the house. And what, he asked himself, was he so afraid of, anyway? Then, “Okay, come on,” he said. “I’ll drive you over.”

That afternoon, he and Joy made love for the first time. He liked it, loved the feel of her body and the imaginativeness with which she caressed him. He had never made love in the way he had with her. But afterward, his mind was in turmoil. He felt guilty toward Joan and guilty, too, toward Joy. “I felt awful. I felt bad—which shook me. I felt I’d led her on. That this would never amount to anything. And I started getting worried. There was that ‘fatal attraction’ syndrome out there, and I was worried that Joy—I mean, talk about irony!—I was worried that Joy would start—she was very aggressive. Very aggressive.”

But despite his guilt and his fears, he wasn’t sorry. That night, he let Joy and Paola check out of the Susse Chalet and move into his farmhouse.

Joy introduced Sol to a whole new world of sexuality, a panoply of pleasures that made intercourse seem dull and pedestrian. From that time on, his affair with Joy would be in the forefront of his mind. But he had other duties, other preoccupations. One that became pressing around the time of the start of his affair with Joy concerned a judge under his jurisdiction. A state commission on judicial conduct had recommended to Sol that the judge, fifty-six-year-old Bertram Gelfand, the Surrogate of Bronx County, be removed from the bench. Gelfand, a long-married husband and the father of three grown children, had been running for reelection when a woman who had worked for him and with whom he’d been having an affair accused him of sexual harassment—he’d fired her when she broke up with him, she said. And he’d made ugly and obscene phone calls to her, and tried to prevent her from obtaining another job.

Gelfand’s lawyer, Milton Gould, had argued passionately that Gelfand hadn’t done anything so terrible, had merely behaved “as many a jilted lover has before and will again—irrationally, emotionally, and unreasonably.” And Gelfand’s wife had written a supportive letter to the commission. “Put yourselves into the position of this man,” she’d suggested to the panel members, “having to tell adoring children and a loving wife of thirty-one years something you feel will risk all that you hold important and necessary to life.… Sleepless nights, troubled days, and humiliation will remain with you long after the proceedings are over.”

Nevertheless, the commission had ruled against the Bronx judge, and in April, Gelfand announced that he would appeal their decision to the court of appeals.

Sol, who knew Gelfand and had been talking to him about his case, didn’t want to take part in deciding his fate. But maybe he wouldn’t have to, he realized. After all, his good friend, Milton Gould, was Gelfand’s lawyer; and his daughter Lauren, who had become a lawyer, was working for Gould’s firm. He would recuse himself, Sol decided.

He told this to Gelfand at a meeting between the two of them in his Mineola chambers. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I know the thinking of the court, and you have nothing to worry about—provided you don’t rock the boat.” Then, to get Gelfand to relax, he pointed out that the members of the court of appeals weren’t all angels and entertained him with some spicy anecdotes about them.

Still, Gelfand wasn’t sure he trusted Sol’s reassurances. Earlier Sol had promised him that he had sufficient influence with the commission to see to it that they wouldn’t even bring formal charges, yet nevertheless, he’d been repudiated. But he was grateful for Sol’s attention and concern, and reminded him, “You know the whole thing was politically motivated. I was up for reelection. The commission was responding to political pressure.”

“Don’t raise that,” Sol said.

Gelfand sighed. “But they’re applying a new standard to me,” he said. “A standard that others on the court aren’t being held to.”

“Look,” Sol said, “just don’t rock the boat and you’ll be okay.”

Gelfand said, “Yeah, I guess that if the court of appeals makes marital infidelity an ethical violation, there’d be a lot of vacancies in the court system—including a few on the court of appeals itself.”

Sol’s face changed. He looked agitated and edgy. Then, “Look, if you rock the boat,” he said, “I guarantee you, you’ll be killed.” His tone was one Gelfand had never heard him use before. It was cold and harsh.

Gelfand listened to Sol. When his case came before the court of appeals, he didn’t rock the boat, didn’t accuse the commission of playing politics, or say anything about his being held to a separate standard. But nevertheless the court of appeals eventually ruled, in a decision that he felt was virtually aimed at impugning his credibility, that he had to leave the bench. “Sol clearly used his office,” he would say later, “to euchre and browbeat me into not discussing the things that might have helped me—into keeping quiet about both political corruption and marital infidelity in the judiciary.”

During the months the Gelfand case was being resolved, Sol slept with Joy on numerous occasions. They saw each other once every other week and managed to spend at least one weekend a month together. When he stayed away from home on those nights and weekends, Sol told Joan that his work was incredibly pressing, that he was involved in a million things.

She began to feel resentful and, not knowing about his relationship with Joy, blamed his new remoteness on something she had once considered one of his most admirable qualities: his social conscience. He cares about, and cares for, too many ideals, she thought. He cares for them so much that I’m no longer a consideration in his life. The rules of the marriage have changed.

She tried not to let her resentment sour the rare times she and Sol were together, but her anger and hurt were so deep, she couldn’t control them, and frequently she exploded at Sol.

People began to notice. The children heard her tirades. Sol’s staff members heard them.

The staff members were unaware—as Joan herself was unaware—of the acute rejection to which Sol had subjected her. They were unaware—as she was unaware—that her anger was a response. And among themselves they gossiped that she was harsh and hard to live with. One day, a particularly loyal staff member, who was waiting in a car for Sol outside his house in Manhasset, heard Joan fiercely chewing out his boss and thought, She’s got some temper. She’s eating him up alive.

He was so certain that Joan was the villain of the marriage that he couldn’t understand why Sol accepted her abuse, why he stayed passive in the face of aggression. And, unable to grasp—as Joan herself couldn’t grasp—Sol’s own aggression, the passive aggression that lay behind his conducting a surreptitious affair, he turned to his boss’s longtime secretary, who was also in the car, and asked in bewilderment, “Why does he stay with her? Is it just money?”

The secretary, saddened, shook her head. “They’ve been together a long time. There’s a lot of history there.”

Sol had by now begun to take a more active role in directing Joy’s flirtation with politics. “‘Go over to the Bush for President headquarters,’” he remembered telling her. “‘Bush is going to run in a primary against Dole, and there’s no one that candidates are more grateful to than the people who work for them in primaries, because once you’re a candidate, that’s something else—you have the whole party machinery behind you. But in the beginning it’s only volunteers who are personally committed. So, go over there and volunteer yourself.’

“She did, but about three days later, she calls me up and screams—she’s a big screamer—‘You gave me terrible advice. Al D’Amato says that Dole’s going to win. He’s backing Dole. Al D’Amato says Dole’s going to win and I’m crazy to support Bush.’

“I said, ‘Joy, Bush is going to win, and this is great, because now D’Amato is taking all the regular Republicans and putting them on Dole. So you’ll stand out even more as a Bush supporter.’”

She did stand out. “Who is she?” “How come the limo?” Bush campaign staffers wondered when she first started coming down to campaign headquarters at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel. They soon got to know her, for after her first few visits, she turned up almost daily, sometimes doing the most mundane chores such as stuffing envelopes and manning the phone lines. Some of her coworkers found her delightful, a competent and generous woman—she’d send her chauffeur out to buy sandwiches for everyone at her favorite delicatessens. “She was one of the few volunteers you could depend on day in and day out,” Russ Schriefer, the state campaign’s executive director, would one day say. But others were less kind. “She’s a snake,” one woman who worked with her decided. Another woman, whose husband was one of Bush’s financial advisers, concluded, “She’s pushy, and everything she does, she does with an eye toward an appointment.” This woman and her husband were working exceedingly hard for the Vice President, with no personal reward in mind, and it irked her that Joy seemed transparently interested in self-advancement.

Still, whatever others thought of her, Joy worked hard, particularly at raising money. She brought in money for Bush from all sorts of sources, from her wealthy friends, from the designers whose clothes she bought, even from a repairman who came to her home to fix her stereo set. “She sucked him up for one thousand dollars,” Julie Wadler, the New York campaign’s finance director, recalled.

“Today I met someone named Brown,” Joy would tell Sol when next she spoke to him. “Today I met someone named Firestone.” Sol would check into the backgrounds of the people she’d met, tell her who they were, and, if he deemed them important or thought they might be of future political help to her, compose notes to them for her to sign. “It was a pleasure to meet you at lunch the other day…” “I loved talking with you. It’s always a delight to talk to someone who’s so well informed.” She’d put the notes on her own stationery and send them off.

Sol liked writing notes for her. It wasn’t so different from what he used to do, when his kids were little and he’d helped them do their school assignments. So sometimes he didn’t create just simple glad-to-have-met-you communications, but more substantial letters, comments on speeches given by politicians and statesmen Joy told him she’d encountered, reactions to reports about them that had appeared in the press. “I read your interesting and inspiring closing statement,” went a letter Sol wrote for her to send to an acquaintance whose address before a conference on global survival had been reported in a newspaper. “All those present will certainly remember you as well as the leadership you brought.” “You done good,” went a letter he directed her to send to a friend who had taken a controversial political stance in Congress. “Back where I came from, that was the highest praise of all.”

No one to whom she sent his letters guessed that the seasoned New York pol was dictating her correspondence, and Sol threw himself into the task with gusto. “We’re sowing seeds,” he explained to Joy. “You’re casting your bread on the water. This is how you’re going to get recognition. This is how you let them know you have some intelligence.”

She was getting recognition. And meeting more and more interesting people. At a Bush fund-raising luncheon attended by both the Vice President and his wife, Barbara, she met Tania Melich, an influential Republican strategist and consultant. Melich was the organizer of the New York State Republican Family Committee, a committee of Republican women for choice, and Joy agreed to join the group and have her name listed on its stationery. She also met Lawrence E. Bathgate II, a gregarious multimillionaire lawyer and land investor who would soon be named finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. “This is all so exciting,” she confided to Bathgate. “I want to become more involved.”

Bathgate found her charming. “That’s easy enough to do,” he told her. “You just have to give us your time, money, resources.”

Joy’s smile, he remembered, was incandescent.

“How much do you love me?” Joy asked Sol one day. “How much—on a scale of one to ten.”

He said, “Three.”

She didn’t like that very much, and the next time they were together, she asked him again, “How much do you love me? On a scale of one to ten?”

He said, “Four.”

Joy had a psychotherapist. Her name was Eleanor Sloan, and she lived in Philadelphia, practicing there and, whenever she came up to New York to visit her daughter, in Manhattan as well. Sloan was a short, heavyset woman in her late fifties. There was nothing chic or sophisticated about her. She wore ordinary clothes, sensible shoes, had about her none of the trappings of affluence that Joy so admired. But Joy swore by Eleanor, liked her so much that she’d been going to her for years, and had even sent friends and family to her for treatment.

Sloan wasn’t a psychiatrist or a psychologist. But in order to practice psychotherapy in Pennsylvania or New York, training in such fields isn’t necessary. Nor is a license.

Sloan wasn’t the sort of therapist who sits back and listens to a patient and only on occasion offers an interpretation or a suggestion. She was a talker, a bright, directive woman, with strong opinions about what would be best for her clients. It was easy to grow dependent on such a woman—she was like a dear best friend. Or a mother. Joy leaned on her, relied on her for guidance, didn’t just visit her for treatment but telephoned her whenever she had a perplexing decision to make or an attack of anxiety to fend off. Sometimes she called her four or five times a day. Just the way she used to call Jeanette.

Sol ought to see her too, Joy told him not long after they’d begun their affair. Maybe Sloan would be able to help him, because clearly he needed help. He’d stayed married to Joan—whom Joy didn’t think he loved—for thirty-five years.

At Joy’s behest, Sol went to see Sloan. “I’d never been to a therapist before,” he remembered. “Never thought I was in need of one. But Sloan was going to instruct me in how to leave my wife. How best to do it. She said, ‘It will take you two years to leave your wife. That’s how long the process takes.’”

The idea of leaving Joan made Sol uneasy, but he liked going down to Philly to see Sloan in her West Evergreen Avenue office. Afraid of scandal, afraid of Joan’s learning of his disloyalty, he had told no one, not a single friend, that he was having an affair. The need for secrecy oppressed him, made him feel inauthentic, feel like an impersonator, and it was a relief to be with someone who knew his secret.

Besides, Eleanor, as he soon began calling her, had another beneficence to offer him. “She let Joy and me sleep together in her house,” he recalled. “It was a perfect cover for us, because Joy used to say to Jeffrey, ‘I’m going down to Eleanor’s for the weekend,’ and if Jeffrey called, Eleanor would answer the phone and say, ‘Joy’s out.’”

But they didn’t always sleep together in Eleanor’s house. Sometimes they’d stay in a nearby hotel, in Germantown. “Eleanor would make a reservation for me under my assumed name. Which was Sloan. I was Al Sloan.”

By this time, Sol and Joy had grown closer, exchanged all sorts of confidences. She had told him the sexual predilections of all her husbands—he hoped she’d never talk about his. She told him, too, about her relationship with her stepbrother Van, which made him surprisingly jealous, even though it had happened so many years ago, when she was just a girl—he thought maybe it was because they’d spent the night together on his boat, when it was tied up at Bibbs’s dock.

He told her stories about his boyhood and about his father, who’d loved him and wanted to keep him from the taint of business, but who hadn’t really been an affectionate man. She told him about her mother and how much she’d loved her, but that she’d hated the way Jeanette had gone from relationship to relationship before settling down. She didn’t approve of that part of her mother’s life at all, she said, and she didn’t want to be like her in that respect.

He was touched by her anxieties. One day, when she asked him again, as she was always asking him, “How much do you love me, on a scale of one to ten,” he said, “Ten.”

When he wasn’t with her that spring of 1987, he thought about her all the time, and threw himself into guarding her financial interests. Bibbs had specified in his will that the Kings Point house, where Joy had grown up and Honey had eventually become chatelaine, should be sold and the profits used to bolster his estate. Sol began trying to sell the house. But it had sat empty and unoccupied for several years—Honey was living in Palm Beach—and it had lost the gloss it once had. It needed cleaning, painting, attention. On weekends Sol would go over to the house to see what work needed to be done, and sometimes he hired workmen, but sometimes he did the work himself. He vacuumed the house, and one day he got out tools, crawled outside, and repaired a bit of roof that was caving in. Joan thought he was going to a great deal of unnecessary trouble to spruce up her uncle’s mansion. But houses weren’t moving, he told her, so he had to make it as inviting as possible to potential buyers.

At last, toward the end of 1987, just after the stock market crashed on Black Monday, but before the bottom fell out of local real estate, he managed to sell the house, getting close to five million dollars for it.

One evening around this time, Joan, who was on the board of Long Island University, went to a fund-raising dinner for the school. To her surprise, her stepcousin Joy was there, and the two of them had been placed right next to each other at one of the banquet tables.

Joan made small talk with Joy, whom she hardly knew and hadn’t seen since Bibbs’s death.

Joy chattered back and then began gossiping about a woman on the other side of the table, an acquaintance of hers. Most of her comments were derogatory. Had Joan noticed the way the woman walked, she wanted to know. Had she noticed that her arms looked just like lamb chops?

Joan found her remarks offensive. She disapproved of mocking people, but especially of mocking them for physical characteristics, which she considered matters that were generally beyond a person’s control. When Joy went on making fun of the woman across the way, she couldn’t help thinking, Oh, boy, this Joy is really some piece of work!

Annoyed, Joan turned to the person on her other side, distancing herself from Joy, and as soon as she finished eating, she left the table.

By the spring of 1988, the affair between Sol and Joy was in full bloom, and he was feeling like a new, a young, man. He had for years looked like a young man, having banished his wrinkles with facial surgery. But now there was a new youthfulness in his very step and his high, optimistic spirit. He was also funnier than he had ever been. One night in March, he addressed a group of businessmen in Albany and made them laugh so hard that they begged for time to catch their breath between jokes. “We received a letter not too long ago,” he began, “from a disappointed litigant who said, ‘You judges are stiff-necked, arrogant fools who have no knowledge of the people, and even less knowledge of the law.’”

He paused after that for just the right brief second of time. Then he said, “Well, I say, ‘Picky, picky, picky.’”

The audience guffawed, and he went on to tell jokes about his friends and colleagues. He was so funny and so mischievous that when Governor Cuomo, who had also been invited to address the businessmen, got up to speak, he dubbed his chief judge “Mr. Laughs.”

Joy, too, was in high spirits. For one thing, her political career had taken off. She had become a chairperson of the New York Jewish effort for Bush and helped coordinate a gala Bush fund-raiser at the Plaza Hotel, attended by the Vice President and his wife. Then, in the summer of 1988, she got to play hostess herself to Barbara Bush, throwing a fund-raising dinner for her at Joy’s house in Southampton. She invited only forty-eight guests, set up elaborately appointed dining tables beneath a big white tent in the garden, ordered food from the finest caterers, and saw to it that Mrs. Bush changed tables after each course. Joy’s guests were enchanted by the balmy setting, the exceptional food, and the opportunity to talk intimately with the Vice President’s wife. By the end of the evening, Joy had not only made a friend of Barbara, but raised $135,000.

Her efforts did not go unnoticed. A few weeks after her fund-raiser, she flew down to New Orleans to attend some of the preconvention festivities that signaled the start of the Republican convention. One evening she attended a party thrown by the former ambassador to Austria at a hotel in the French Quarter. The party was a festive one—crowds of conventioneers were drinking ebulliently and eating their way through vast platters of creole shrimp, blackened redfish, and spicy alligator—but her party, Joy soon discovered, was the one people were still talking about, at least the chosen few who had attended both.

“It was intimate, that was the wonderful part of it,” Eric Javits, son of the late senator from New York, Jacob Javits, told her.

“It was the single most successful party for any candidate’s wife anywhere. Ever,” said Bruce Gelb, Bush’s finance co-chairman in New York.

Joy was on her way, was becoming a highly visible member of the Republican political community. One night, back in New York, she attended a Bush fund-raiser at the Harmonie Club, a private club frequented chiefly by Jewish businessmen, and she even made a speech. Standing up and speaking in a quavering voice, she said people were always asking her how she had managed to raise all the money she’d collected for Bush but the fact that she’d done it was as amazing to her as it was to them, because she’d never done this kind of thing before. She said she was just a housewife, but her belief in George Bush was so strong that it carried her through the discomforts of having to ask people for money.

“Ugh. The naiveté shtick,” William Koeppel, a national Republican party leader, remembered thinking as he listened to her. “‘I’m just this little housewife. I’m doing this for God and George Bush.’ If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”

Still, her manner impressed some people. Jonathan Bush, the Vice President’s brother and general chairman of the New York State Republican Party, was one. He invited Joy to accompany him on the campaign trail to upstate cities.

When the campaign was over and Bush had won, Joy, who by that time had not only raised a great deal of money but, with Jeffrey, given the campaign three hundred thousand dollars and lent one hundred thousand dollars for inaugural festivities, told Sol she’d like to go to work for the Republican National Committee. He remembers disapproving. “You have an opportunity now to get something very significant and very important, and you deserve it,” he said to her. “What you should do is try to get yourself an ambassadorship.”

“How could I get anything like an ambassadorship?” she asked.

“Very simple. You took French in high school, didn’t you? You ask to become ambassador to France.”

“You’re teasing. They’d never appoint me ambassador to France.”

“Of course not. But then you ask to be ambassador to Belgium. Or if Belgium’s out, then Luxembourg.”

“They won’t appoint me to Luxembourg, either,” Joy protested.

“That’s right,” Sol said. “But then you pull out a map of the Caribbean.”

She did as he instructed. She asked for Luxembourg. But more than three hundred big contributors to the Republican victory had also submitted requests for ambassadorships, and one of them, an old friend of the President, also wanted Luxembourg. Joy’s interest in becoming ambassador to the little European country was discouraged. But sure enough, just as Sol had anticipated, her friends in the administration began discussing the Caribbean with her. Would she like to represent the administration there? If so, there were two possible spots. Bermuda. And Barbados. But the United States didn’t have an embassy in Bermuda, just a consulate’s office.

So Joy said she’d like Barbados. And, afraid that being identified as pro-choice would harm her chances for appointment, she asked to have her name removed from the letterhead of the New York State Republican Family Committee, although she continued to support the group both financially and ideologically.

She was sponsored for the ambassadorship by two of the many prominent men she’d come to know during the campaign, Bruce Gelb and Jonathan Bush, and Sol promised her he’d help her with her application.

She was grateful and wanted to help him too. Why shouldn’t she use her political contacts in Washington to get him a better job than the one he had? Why shouldn’t she try to get him named attorney general? Or, better yet, appointed to the Supreme Court!

There weren’t any vacancies at the start of the Bush administration. But it was clear that shortly there would be. Joy began spreading the word whenever she met with top Republicans that Sol would be an ideal candidate for the highest court.

William Koeppel, who’d listened irritably to Joy when she’d said at the Harmonie Club that she was nothing but a housewife, overheard her promoting Sol. He didn’t know there was a sexual relationship between them. But he knew they were related to each other. Cousins, or something. Relatives of the Long Island builder Bibbs Wolosoff. “Joy’s being made into the family political contact person,” he thought when he heard her pitching Sol. “It’s a family plan to get him to the Supremes. Well, why not. The Rockefellers worked as a family. So did the Kennedys. So now it’s a Jewish family. It’s the Wolosoffs.”

Those were heady days. The two of them working to help each other attain a heart’s desire. For his part, Sol peppered Joy with suggestions about how to prevail at becoming an ambassador, helping her develop a résumé, writing out sample questions that might be asked of her at confirmation hearings, and even composing the answers she should make to the questions. “Question: Do you believe that the current situation in Haiti will have a direct effect on the politics of the Dominican Republic? Answer: My study of the region is ongoing. I have not yet focused on that subject. I will certainly do so immediately, and will submit my response to your question as soon as I am able. Question: Do you think ambassadorships should be sold? Answer: Absolutely not! Question: There are those who might charge that you bought yours. Answer: No one with any regard for our president or his judgment would make such a charge. While there are no specified credentials or criteria for ambassadorial designations, President Bush would not designate someone whom he did not consider eminently qualified and appropriate for appointment. Question: How could the President choose someone with no college degree? Answer: He chose Barbara as his wife. She has no college degree. A college degree is not an essential ingredient for good character and wisdom.”

Barbados on her mind, Joy wanted to go down to the tropics and check out the island. She’d look over the ambassadorial residence and see if there was a good school for Jessica. She told Sol, who didn’t think she should go. Not before she was confirmed. But she flew down, anyway. And she must have come home dissatisfied with what she’d seen, for sometime after her visit, Jeffrey, too, went down to check things out.

He definitely didn’t like what he saw. The ambassador’s mansion is too small for our family’s needs, he thought. And besides, it needs refurbishing.

After seeing it, he arranged with the State Department’s help to rent a second residence, a charming little house adjoining the ambassador’s mansion. That way, he figured, he and Joy would be able to house Jessica’s nanny separately, and they’d have enough space for his children from his first marriage when they came down to visit. He also indicated to the State Department that he’d fix up the mansion, make it more presentable, and pay for the redecoration out of his own pocket.

Joy was still working on the biographical papers she’d need to submit to her sponsors before her nomination could become official. One Monday morning, she traveled to Albany to work on the papers with Sol. He took her to his chambers once again, but this time during working hours, and, explaining to his staff that she was a relative and that she would be sitting at his desk and doing some work while he was at conference, asked the staff to take good care of her.

She looks dangerous, one of the staff members thought. She’s so decked out, it’s like she’s in battle dress for the war of the sexes.

It didn’t occur to him that Sol was having an affair with her. Sol, he believed, was the soul of rectitude when it came to marriage. He always said affairs weren’t worth it, always joked that the screwing you got wasn’t worth the screwing you’d get. Still, there was something troubling about the woman. Her clothes and jewelry fairly reek of money, the staff member thought. Her face and hair and outfit look as if they’d set her back by a fortune. And she was terribly ingratiating with Sol. Fawned all over him.

The staff member was relieved when, at lunchtime, Sol came back to his chambers and he and the woman left.

But then, after lunch, there she was again. In fact, she was there all week. Every morning, she’d arrive with Sol at ten A.M., sit in his chambers while he went to conference, go out to lunch with him, then sit at his desk while he went on the bench. Then, they’d leave together at day’s end.

Was Joy in love with him? Sol thought so. “She gave the impression of total commitment,” he remembered. “And total reliance. She didn’t write a letter, she didn’t go out, she didn’t do anything without calling me first and checking to see if it was all right. She used to call me seven, eight times a day. Drove my law clerks crazy—because no one else was allowed to do that. Some days I would take no calls except from Joy or my family. I used to say to her, ‘Joy, the one thing that’s going to break us up is going to be the telephone.’ She’d say, ‘Well, I can’t help it. I don’t get to see you as much as I want, so I have to speak to you on the phone.’” It sounded like love to him.

But was he in love with her? After the day he’d finally answered her familiar question, “How much do you love me, on a scale of one to ten,” by saying, “Ten,” she’d changed the question, next asking him, “But are you in love with me? How much are you in love with me—on a scale of one to ten?” The game embarrassed him, made him feel like a silly teenager. But the question began to haunt him. Was he in love with her? Certainly, they were doing the things that people in love did—not just the sexual things, but the romantic ones, the revelatory ones, the things that had to do with nostalgia and loss and history. She’d gotten him to drive her to Lake Hiawatha in New Jersey, where she’d used to visit her grandmother, Jeanette’s mother, when she was a little girl. They’d laughed in amazement to discover there was no longer a lake at Lake Hiawatha. He’d taken her out to Brooklyn, to the neighborhood in which his grandparents had lived and in which he’d spent his summers when he was a teenager, traveling up from the South to visit aunts and uncles and cousins. He’d shown her the crowded streets on which he used to play and told her how at night, he and the cousins had slept on cots scattered helter-skelter throughout the apartment, and he’d taken her out for cold cuts at a local delicatessen whose spicy smells and pungent tastes he had never forgotten. Had he ever taken Joan to his old neighborhood? Had she ever asked to see it? He didn’t think so.

At the end of April 1989, Sol and Joy attended a gala ceremony in Manhattan commemorating the first inauguration of George Washington. It was held under a sky raining balloons and confetti at Federal Hall on Wall Street, right where Washington himself had once stood, and every dignitary imaginable had flown into town for the occasion. The governor had come. And New York’s two senators. And the secretary of the army. And even the President. Joy, who had by then developed a solid friendship with Barbara Bush, had ridden out to the airport to meet the President’s plane and be part of his escort into the city. But Sol felt it was his show. He was one of the chairmen of the event.

The two thousand VIPs who were to take part in the ceremony—not just politicians but Hollywood stars, world-renowned writers, and the descendants of former presidents—had all been given reserved seats. But as a principal in the event, Sol had one of the best, and he’d arranged to have Joy sit alongside him, right in the middle of the dais. He was feeling splendid that day, proud and happy and complete, as if life had granted him everything he’d ever wanted. Joy seemed exceedingly happy too. When she saw Steve Ross, the chairman of Warner Communications, sitting way off in a corner, she whispered to Sol, “I’ve got a better seat than he does!” Then she went over to Ross to say hello. Sol saw her standing beside him and saw her take the silk of his tie between her fingers and begin fondling it. But it didn’t make him jealous. It just made him think how remarkable Joy was with men. How sensual she was. How sexual.

He wasn’t jealous, because she was his. The day was, for him, the pinnacle of their love.