Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (33 page)

Most of all, I would never have had a child with Jim if I’d known he was gay. I had a mother and father who loved each other deeply, as they loved me. As much as I wanted that kind of steadying love for myself, I wanted it for my child even more. So for people to say that mine was an arranged and cynical marriage was insulting and stupid. What woman in her right mind—and believe me, I
am
in my right mind—would while away the best years of her life with a man who cannot really desire her? Or who cannot respond wholeheartedly to her desire? Not only would I not knowingly have married a gay man, but I would never have allowed a gay man to father my child. A marriage between a straight person and a gay person is by definition unstable, and the last thing I wanted was for my daughter to suffer the consequences of a broken home, as in fact she has.

One of the only places I felt remotely at peace was at my computer—my own little Panama Canal, where I could control what got through to me and when it got through. During those first days, when even sleeping pills didn’t work, I would get up out of bed and wander over to my computer in the middle of the night. In the middle of one night—was it the day after Jim’s announcement? the day after that? who even knows?—I found an e-mail from Dan Mulhern, the husband of Jennifer Granholm, the governor of Michigan, whom I’d once met at a National Governors Association conference. He was writing to tell me that one of his staffers had, like me, discovered that her husband was gay and thought I might want to know about an organization called Straight Spouses Network.

I went to the Web site instantly and started to read up about the organization. It sounded suddenly familiar, so I found a photograph of its founder, and sure enough Amity Pierce Buxton, Ph.D., was the woman Diane Sawyer had been interviewing on
Good Morning America
. I wrote to Amity immediately at her Web site, and two weeks after Jim’s announcement, in one of my first trips beyond work or Drumthwacket, I met her at the Boathouse restaurant in Central Park. In public, I was still trying to disguise myself, and in general I was succeeding. Because I’m so tiny—barely five feet tall—when I have sunglasses on and my hair in a ponytail, I can pass for someone not quite old enough to vote. Still, though my disguise was pretty reliable most of the time, it was better not to push it and for me to keep moving, just in case. But Amity and I wanted to be able to sit and talk. During the past few weeks, I’d learned that it was easier to hide in plain sight than to hide indoors, so we sat on the deck outside the Boathouse, where we were able to talk comfortably and yet privately.

Amity offered me a great deal of support and comfort that afternoon, for which I was, and am, grateful. I still was in unrelenting pain, but at least I didn’t feel so alone. Amity mentioned to me that she had received hundreds of e-mails from spouses in my position and that many told her that through me they felt as if their anguished experience had been given a face. That knowledge didn’t end my pain, but I was consoled by knowing that at least it had done someone else some good.

Back at Drumthwacket, I continued to wander around the house, washed by waves of more despair, more anger, more pain, and more uncertainty. I couldn’t imagine surviving this calamity. I didn’t know how. While I was trying to deal with the betrayal and humiliation, Jim continued to act as if Jacqueline and I were no longer of any concern to him. At least, that’s what he did much of the time. It made me so angry. One day, after putting Jacqueline to bed, I tried to talk to him, to tell him what I was feeling. “My life has fallen apart,” I told him. “I sacrificed so much. I loved you, and now I have nothing.”

“I had dreams,” he said, by way of dismissing my feelings and turning the spotlight back onto himself. And then, addressing my feelings only to critique them, he added, “We can’t fall apart. We have to fight, we have to stay busy and make a to-do list.” How could he be so emotionally deaf? There was no point in talking to him.

I was on my own. Who else could I talk to? Aside from Amity Buxton, there was only one person I could even think of. A day or two earlier, I’d received a note in the mail from a childhood friend of mine who had discovered that his wife was a lesbian. We’d lost touch over the years, and I hadn’t known before of his situation. He had since remarried and was trying in his way to tell me that I would heal and recover.

But learning that there were others in my circumstance did not make me feel any better—most of the people I’d heard from were still suffering and still trying to make sense of their lives, even years after their spouses came out. Would that happen to me, too? Also, all of them had been able to deal with their betrayal privately. They could tell whom they wanted to when they wanted to, or they could choose to say nothing at all. Everyone—friends, acquaintances, and strangers alike—knew what had happened to me. My exposure—and my humiliation—was public.

Besides, as much as I tried to take solace in the fact that I wasn’t alone, that there were others who had suffered as I was suffering, I kept coming back to the realization that Jim must have deliberately deceived me from the beginning of our relationship. I had kept away from newspapers during Jim’s administration; but while I often find the press intrusive, I generally don’t believe they fabricate quotes, so the following interchange between Kari Schutz and
New York Times
reporter Michelle O’Donnell, published on August 14, 2004, two days after Jim’s announcement, was not only damning but at last made it clear why it was that Jim was so eager to keep Kari and me apart.

In a telephone interview, Ms. Schutz said she thought her former husband’s announcement [that he was a “gay American”] was courageous, and that it did not take her by surprise.

“We knew this was going to happen,” she said. “We are always in touch. He phones frequently, and always asks about our daughter.”

Ms. Schutz was asked if she was concerned about criticism of the circumstances surrounding the governor’s involvement with a former aide, Golan Cipel.

“We are just trying to support him in any way we can,” she said of the governor, adding that “he is totally dedicated to his family and his career in public service.”

When asked if she knew her husband was gay, Ms. Schutz, who has not remarried, answered that she filed for divorce because “the public life was not for me.”

“I wanted to return to British Columbia,” she said. “It is a different life here, and I was used to that.”

When asked if she knew that Mr. McGreevey was gay before their divorce, she said: “I’ll leave it at that.”

What more did I need? Jim hadn’t been some young man who had been confused about his sexuality, who had tried marriage with a woman only to come to terms with the fact that he was gay. Jim was forty-three when we married, and he had been married before. By all accounts, he had known of his preference for men for many years before our relationship. And despite his lofty stance about his desire to live an authentic life as a “gay American,” Jim’s coming out had been prompted not by soul-searching or by a desire to live his truth but by blackmail. His decision to look deeply into the mirror of his soul had come about only because somebody had already shattered that mirror. And now our lives were shattered.

Nothing was comfortable. Staying in Drumthwacket felt like imprisonment, being out and recognizable felt too exposed, and being out but in disguise left me with an edge of anxiety all the time. So all I could do was cry. One day when I needed to go to the bank, I told the trooper to take me to the drive-through. Jacqueline also needed diapers, so after the bank, we headed to Babies “R” Us, but once we pulled into the parking lot, I realized I couldn’t possibly go in, because I was sure to be recognized. Here I was, a mother who couldn’t even buy her daughter diapers!

I often went to Lori Kennedy’s to cry. But even there I found no peace, because reporters frequently waited outside her home hoping for a possible sighting of me and/or Jim. One of the days I went there, the trooper who was driving me told me that he would park and wait for me a block away to avoid being spotted. I thought it was an overreaction, but as it turned out, it wasn’t. Just an hour or so earlier, reporters had been there. Were they ever going to leave me alone?

I was still having telephone sessions with the therapist, and during one of them she asked me if I could think of anyone else who’d been in deeply personal marital turmoil while also being stalked by the media.

“The only person who comes to mind is Hillary Clinton,” I said. The former First Lady was now in her fourth year as a senator from New York.

“Well, then, why don’t you call her?” she suggested. “See what advice she might have for you about dealing with the media.”

It seemed like a good idea, so I asked Nina to get in touch with Hillary Clinton’s office. She did, and she was able to set up a time for me to talk to Hillary the following day. Nina and Freddie were spending the days (and Freddie the nights ) at Drumthwacket, and I was grateful for that, because they could distract Jacqueline whenever I broke down.

On August 18, not even a week after Jim’s announcement, I left Drumthwacket for the day to visit several friends who had homes at the Jersey shore. My first stop was at the home of my good friends Jerry Casciano, our wedding photographer who became the governor’s photographer, and his wife, Lori. These days, Jerry lives an enviable life—in a comfortable home with his wife and child and work that matters to him. That weekend, though, he told me a story about his life that he’d never before shared with me. Several years back, his mother had died, a friend had wrecked his car, and he’d broken up with his girlfriend after investing all his money in her farm. “Within a two-week period,” he told me, “I was motherless, homeless, carless, penniless, and loveless.” He said he was sharing a story this personal to give me hope. “I want you to know that I recovered,” he told me, “and you will too.”

After visiting with Jerry and Lori, I headed to visit my friend Mona. I’d known Mona for years. In fact, it was Mona who had come to the hospital to be with me and watch the returns on Election Night 2001, the night Jim had been elected. While I was at Mona’s, Hillary Clinton called me on my cell phone. Right from the beginning, she was very compassionate. She asked how I was doing and warned me not to let Jim’s advisers make decisions for me, because they would have Jim’s best interests in mind rather than mine. She told me I should remember what was real and important, which was taking care of myself and Jacqueline. As for the media, she reminded me that they were just an intrusion and a distraction and not the point.

“You can’t do this on your own,” she said. “You have to get some support here.” She told me she would have someone call my office back with the name of a crisis manager. “Call me to talk or for advice,” she said.

I thanked Hillary for her counsel and her time. Her story was similar to mine in how publicly her husband had humiliated her with his adultery. But our circumstances were also different. Her marriage had not been based on a lie, and mine was. Nonetheless, I was grateful for the conversation. And for a moment, I thought that maybe this was an ordeal I could survive.

20. STEALING HOME

THE WEEK FOLLOWING JIM’S
announcement, I continued to feel a blinding pain, an emotional pain so intense that at moments it felt worse than any physical pain I’d ever endured. I could think of Jacqueline, and that was about it, and I couldn’t even do that in a steady way.

After the disaster came the aftershocks: the rubble, the dust, the search for signs of life. Toward the end of that second week, I was convinced—finally—that someone
was
alive, and quite possibly that someone was me. The awareness that I had not died gave way to the thought that maybe there was hope. Slowly I began to think of recovery and what I had to do to restore order. Jim and I had not discussed what would happen after he left office on November 15. If he was no longer governor, we could no longer live in the governor’s mansion. What then? Once I asked the question, of course, I knew the answer. Jim and I were not going to be looking for a home to live in together. That much was clear. And so, as I thought of the future, I was terrified. I knew I could engage a crowd of a thousand at a campaign rally, or raise a few hundred thousand dollars for charity in a day, or have a mansion renovated in a few weeks, but change a fuse? Turn on a furnace? Fix a leak? Forget it. I’d gone from my parents’ house to Jim’s house to the governor’s mansion. I was thirty-seven, almost thirty-eight, but I’d never lived on my own, much less had to buy my own home.

There was much that had happened to me that I’d had no control over, and much that would happen, but I could at least begin to find a home for myself. Taking action itself provided a kind of relief and distraction. So, one morning in late August, I asked Elvie to bring Meagan and Nicole down to Drumthwacket to spend the day with Jacqueline so I could go house hunting.

Lori Kennedy had been wonderful, and would continue to be wonderful, throughout this ordeal. Now she had arranged for a Realtor—Marty, her cousin’s husband—to look through the listings for homes in Union County, New Jersey, the county where my parents lived. Jim and I did agree that Jacqueline had to have access to a decent school system, and according to the Department of Education rankings, one of the towns on my short list had one of the better school systems.

I wanted to keep my house hunting private to avoid being followed by reporters. So, at my request, Lori asked Marty to find suitable houses and to arrange for me—and on occasion Jim and me—to visit them only when the owners were not present. We saw a few homes with potential, but after I’d viewed half a dozen or so over a week’s time, I was discouraged. They all required so much work—new plumbing, new wiring, a new roof—but Jacqueline and I needed a place to live, and I knew that I would have to make a decision quickly.