Fairy Tale Interrupted (11 page)

I finally gave in to the inevitable at his apartment on Orchard Street, the vilest tenement I’d ever seen. It didn’t even have a bathroom: the toilet was in the kitchen next to the stove, and he brushed his teeth and shaved at a sink filled with dirty dishes. I wouldn’t touch a glass in that place. But that’s where we had great sex for the first time. Unfortunately, the fun was short-lived, ending when Joey rolled over in bed and said, “You know, dude, I don’t really want a girlfriend.”

Just what every girl wants to hear right after having sex for the first time with a guy she likes. I got dressed and ran out
of his apartment faster than I would have if the place were on fire.

I was exhausted and humiliated the next day when Joey casually called to say hi. He was completely surprised that I was upset and had no idea what he’d done.

“Uh, you told me you don’t want a girlfriend,” I reminded him.

“I never said that,” he replied.

I let Joey convince me that I was overreacting, so I could stay in a relationship where we spent
a lot
of time making out and having sex. He worked two blocks from
George
’s offices, so we met downstairs around lunchtime almost every day to kiss and talk. In addition to great chemistry, we had great conversations—and there wasn’t a lot of that going on in the Under Acme scene. “I feel like a chick, I talk so much around you,” he’d say. Joey lavished me with compliments, telling me I was smart and had a stripper’s body. “You’re the coolest girlfriend I ever had,” he said.

Joey fit into a larger pattern I had of surrounding myself with good-looking guys. That included not only men I had dated but also my male friends. Frank was so gorgeous that even John remarked on “how handsome” he was the first time they met. Also everyone, John included, had a crush on Matt Berman, but I’m the one who became his best friend in the office. And obviously there was John.

It doesn’t take a shrink to figure out that I unconsciously gravitated toward good-looking guys as proof that I wasn’t as unattractive as I felt. If I could date a guy as attractive as Joey, I couldn’t be that bad-looking. That search for validation in others proved unfulfilling: it seemed that, no matter how much
weight I lost, how nice my clothes were, how blond I got, or how cute my boyfriend was, I couldn’t manage to feel good about my looks.

Several months into my relationship with Joey, he and I spent a weekend in Saratoga and Lake George. We hiked all day, then went out for dinner at a nearby pub. Over chicken and mashed potatoes, Joey told me how happy he was to have such a great girlfriend.
Me
. By the time I dropped him off at his apartment Sunday night, I was happy, too. I was falling in love.

That night, I lay in bed thinking about the next milestone in our relationship: Joey was going to spend Thanksgiving with my family. This was big—I hadn’t brought anyone home in a few years. My family was loud and ethnic, probably nothing like Joey’s liberal, Jewish neurosurgeon dad and fine-painter mom. I pictured my dad telling Joey how much he admired the Jews because “they stick together.” I shut out that nightmare by thinking about my mother’s out-of-this-world feast. She was an amazing cook—her food would counterbalance any political incorrectness on my dad’s part. Joey’s visit would be fine.

The anticipation mounted until a couple of days before the holiday, when, after an ordinary Friday-night date of dinner and a movie, Joey, propped on his elbow in bed and wearing the same Adidas shirt from our first date, told me he’d met another girl.

“I don’t know if I like her, but I want the freedom to find out.”

Joey never made it to Thanksgiving dinner.

I was devastated by the breakup, even though I recognized my hand in the situation. I said I wanted to find love in a real relationship, but I hadn’t exactly picked the best candidate. I
should have gone after a balding lawyer, not a hot rocker with girls slipping him their numbers every night.

I kept up my resolve to quit him, but a few weeks later, he began leaving voice mail messages at home and work, pleading for me to call him (“Call me back just so I know you’re okay”). When he sent me flowers at the office a few days before Christmas, I caved. “I miss you and I think I made a mistake,” the note read. When John saw who had sent the bouquet, he made his opinion known. “Are we going to get rid of that guy, or what?” he said.

The answer was no. I called Joey and invited him to a Knicks game the night before Christmas Eve. John had given me a pair of tickets for his amazing courtside seats—the kind where you’re cheering next to Woody Allen or Spike Lee—and I wanted to impress Joey. It would be such an awesome night that he would ditch whoever he was dating and we’d get back together.

Our chemistry was still strong; we met at his apartment at the start of the evening and almost missed the game. As we sat down with our feet literally touching the court, Joey said, “I hope they don’t put us on the JumboTron.” I ignored his remark, thinking,
He’ll come around.

At the end of the night, Joey announced he had a Christmas gift for me, and my heart beat fast with the thought that maybe this was a pronouncement of some kind. I ripped open the lumpy, manhandled wrapping paper. Inside the little package was a brass Zippo lighter. Okay, not exactly diamonds or perfume, but all hope was not lost: there was a card—perhaps it held a meaningful, romantic sentiment. I read the one line: “Best of luck in the New Year, Joey.”

Best of luck?

On the phone with Carolyn the next day, I went off: “Who fucking says, ‘Best of luck in the new year’?”

“Why don’t you ask John?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“When we first started dating, John called me and, right before he got off the phone, said, ‘Don’t be a stranger.’ I was so pissed I called him right back and said, ‘Don’t you ever say something like that to me again.’”

Of course, for Carolyn, that worked. Her demands were met because John was respectful and a real man. Joey was a stoner who had to stop at home to smoke pot before we went to dinner and often called me “dude.”

Yet that didn’t stop me from giving it one last try when he called again on Valentine’s Day. Carolyn, whom I had tortured with Joey stories, begged me not to call him back. “Don’t do it,” she said. “Let him feel what it’s like to be lonely.” I tried my best, but it was goddamn Valentine’s Day. The holiday of hearts and flowers put fantasies in my head: maybe he was serious this time and had finally realized the error of his ways. I called his apartment and got the answering machine. My pulse quickened at the sound of his voice. “You’ve reached Joey and Lisa’s apartment, please leave a message.” I froze. What the fuck was wrong with me? Why was I so stupid when it came to men?

Carolyn later offered her own analysis while we engaged in one of our favorite activities: drinking white wine and smoking on the couch in John’s Tribeca loft, which she had moved into after
George
’s launch in September 1995. “Falling in love would be like jumping off a cliff for you,” she said.

I didn’t find her words terribly encouraging. Who wants to be told that it’ll be hard for you to ever find love?

“Really, truly falling in love means trusting someone,” Carolyn said. “And the person you trust most in the world, Rosie, is yourself.”

She was right. I didn’t really trust anyone. Though Joey didn’t do much to change that fact, it wasn’t entirely his fault. I kept the cycle of makeups and breakups going, as if I could will the relationship to work. But Carolyn didn’t bullshit. Just as she didn’t tolerate my putting myself down, she couldn’t accept Joey’s poor treatment of me.

“You are never going to end up with Joey,” she said. “You need someone who is smart, funny, and most of all, somebody who you respect.” Carolyn poured me another glass of wine and said, “No relationship is perfect. John and I have our fights. You know how inconsiderate he can be.”

John’s insensitivity was the biggest catalyst of their arguments. Carolyn would decline invitations from friends because John said he was coming home for dinner. So she would wait and wait and wait, while he worked late and went to the gym (without letting her know), and then waltzed into the apartment way past dinnertime. Carolyn was not only angry but also worried about him, which she had a right to be. Another classic scenario was when he would spring important information on her at the last minute, such as “Oh, by the way, the Whitney benefit is in two days” or “I’m bringing home a friend for dinner . . . right now.” She wanted to know why the hell he didn’t tell her sooner. It wasn’t mean-spiritedness on his part. He was simply as disorganized and clueless as a kid. Still, it didn’t make scrambling to accommodate him any less frustrating.

“Sure, I want to kill him sometimes,” she said. “But I respect him.”

Things could get really heated between them; for example, he would go crazy when she was on the phone all day while he was trying to get through, getting busy signal after busy signal since they didn’t have call waiting; or it upset him when Carolyn, a big-sister type to many people, would spend an entire week dealing with someone else’s problems, which took her attention away from John. But no matter the issue, John and Carolyn always defused the situation with a joke. They never took anything so seriously that they couldn’t laugh at themselves. That, combined with the respect Carolyn had for John (and vice versa), took their relationship from dating to seeing each other three nights a week to living together within a year. The evolution was natural—and completely unlike my tortured dating life. It was hard to believe, but John and Carolyn were the normal ones.

The press reported—over and over, well into their marriage—that when John asked Carolyn to marry him, she didn’t immediately say yes, as if there were strife in their relationship. But that’s not at all what happened.

When Carolyn called me on Monday morning after the Fourth of July weekend of 1995, she sounded like a little kid with an incredible secret.

“Rosie, are you ready for this?” she asked.

They had been at his house on Martha’s Vineyard for the long weekend, just hanging out, when John suggested they go fishing. “I wanted to go fishing like I wanted to cut off my right arm,” she said, laughing. But Carolyn agreed; she was always a good sport when it came to John’s activities—kayaking, scuba diving, ice climbing, she was game.

“He asked me to marry him out on the water, on the boat,”
she said. “It was so sweet. He told me, ‘Fishing is so much better with a partner.’”

“That’s amazing!” I said.

“Yeah, but I’ve been a nervous wreck ever since I got off that boat. We had people up for the weekend, and I had to pretend like nothing happened. I just don’t want anyone to know yet,” she said. In her voice, I could hear the jitters stemming from her excitement and also from her nervousness over how people would react when they found out.

From the start, Carolyn was worried that when their engagement went public, the media would tear into her—saying she wasn’t good enough for John. And she was right to worry, because that’s exactly what happened.

I stopped by their apartment later that night and she showed me the ring, a platinum band surrounded by diamonds and sapphires. As soon as I saw it, I realized:
That’s the secret package I picked up for John!

A couple of months earlier, he had casually asked me to pick something up at Maurice Tempelsman’s office. I assumed it was a gift for Carolyn, and I knew it had to be jewelry, because Maurice, who was Jackie Onassis’s longtime companion until she died, was a diamond dealer. But John was so nonchalant, it didn’t occur to me that I was picking up an engagement ring.

On the way out of Maurice’s office, I put the box into a plastic Duane Reade bag so as not to draw attention to it, then hopped in a cab back to the office. I certainly wasn’t getting on the subway carrying an expensive diamond something-or-other.

As soon as I got back to the office, I handed the Duane Reade
bag to John, who put it in a drawer, where it remained for almost a week. I regularly went into his desk drawers, and it drove me nuts to see that plastic bag just sitting there. I imagined him throwing away the bag by mistake and saying, “It was in
that
bag?” I was relieved the ring had made it safely onto Carolyn’s finger. A replica of an emerald and sapphire Schlumberger ring John’s mother had owned, it was not a typical engagement ring. But it was simple and beautiful.

Despite all the time we spent together, John and I never had a direct conversation about his engagement. After Carolyn called me to deliver the news, I knew him well enough not to race into his office and shout, “Congratulations!” In fact, I knew not to bring it up at all unless he did first, which he didn’t.

As far as he was concerned, news of the engagement was relegated to “girl talk,” and he wanted no part of it. He assumed, correctly, it was something Carolyn would tell me during one of our dozens of daily calls. It became clear that I knew when he came home and found Carolyn and me on the couch sipping wine and talking about her anxiety over their engagement becoming public knowledge. “Oh, brother,” he said. “Is this all we’re going to talk about?” That was typical John, avoiding drama.

If there was any ambivalence about their getting married, it was on my part. Although I was happy for them, I was also slightly bummed. It had nothing to do with them, and everything to do with marriage. Couples were never as fun once they got married. People said, “I do,” and then turned serious and boring. I hoped that wouldn’t happen to John and Carolyn, because I really liked hanging out with them.

The three of us went to dinner with Frank once in a while, but mostly I spent time with them individually. I liked having separate relationships with John and Carolyn, because each friendship brought me different things.