Never Enough (9 page)

“Two people from different worlds,” she wrote to him in an e-mail the next day, “brought together…feeling an overwhelming connection…discovering that one is truly the other’s soul mate…”

Michael brought Amity over again on Saturday. While Connie was watching the children, Nancy brought him up to the Blue Room again. This time, they stayed for three hours.

They quickly established a routine. They would see each other only on weeknights, after 9:30 p.m., after Connie put the children to bed. No more weekends: if she started to leave the children with Connie on weekends, Rob would surely find out. They talked by phone ten times a day. On nights when Michael didn’t come over, they would stay on the phone for hours. Fortunately for them, they had little need to e-mail.

Rob

ROB HAD TO FLY TO NEW YORK FOR ANOTHER SERIES OF
meetings about Tokyo at Merrill Lynch. He met Frank Shea for breakfast at Le Parker Meridien on West Fifty-seventh Street, on Thursday, June 26. Merrill Lynch had booked Rob into a room overlooking Central Park. He and Frank met at Norma’s, the hotel’s breakfast restaurant, which was famous for its thousand-dollar omelet filled with lobster and sevruga caviar, known informally as the “investment banker over easy.” But Rob restricted himself to orange juice, oatmeal, and whole wheat toast. He didn’t even eat much of that. His anguish over Nancy’s affair had taken his appetite away.

Frank’s first impression of Rob was of a tense, driven, but essentially gracious man who’d been confronted for the first time in his life by a situation that resisted quantification. No amount of number crunching could reveal what was inside a woman’s heart. Rob seemed tormented by uncertainty but very much in love.

He had called Nancy from Hong Kong just before leaving for New York. His daughter Zoe had answered the phone.

“Daddy,” she said, “Mike keeps bringing Amity over to play and I don’t like her.”

“Mike, the man who put in our big TV?”

“Yes. I don’t like Amity, she’s a pain.”

“When was the last time she came over?”

“Last night. And Mike sits in your special chair. I told him he shouldn’t sit there because it’s your chair, but Mommy says it’s all right because Mike’s her friend.”

“I’ll talk to Mommy about that, sweetie. In fact, why don’t you get Mommy now.”

When Nancy picked up the phone, Rob said, “I understand the stereo boy has been hanging around.”

“Michael? Oh, he’s brought Amity over to play a couple of times.”

“Michael? Since when did the stereo boy become ‘Michael’?”

“That’s his name, Rob. And he’s not a boy, he’s a man.”

“Who the hell is Amity?”

“His daughter. She’s five years old and very sweet and very lonely. Michael’s in the middle of a horrendous divorce and I suggested that he bring Amity over once in a while to play with the kids. They all adore her.”

“That’s not what Zoe says. Zoe just told me she’s a pain in the ass. And why is Michael sitting in my chair?”

“Wait a minute, Rob. Who the fuck do you think you are, Papa Bear? Michael can sit anywhere he wants in my house.”

“How about when he wants to lie down?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play dumb, Nancy. You’re fucking the stereo boy.”

“Stop calling him ‘the stereo boy.’ You sound pathetic.”

“You’re having an affair with that asshole!”

“How could you even think something like that, much less insult me by saying it?”

“How many times has he been over?”

“Twice. Big fucking deal.”

“Don’t invite him again.”

“It’s my house and I’ll invite anybody I want. You’re such an asshole. Michael is my friend and that’s that.”

“Your friend? The last time I saw him he was the guy from Prime Focus who was going to install the home theater.”

“If you could only hear how fucking ridiculous you sound. I’ve had enough of this conversation. Good-bye.”

Now, over breakfast at Norma’s, Rob said, “I don’t know what to do next, Frank. I wish I believed her, but I don’t. And the e-mails—they’re damaging, but they don’t
absolutely
prove anything.”

“My only word of advice, Rob, is you’d better be sure you really want to know what’s in her e-mails. I’ve seen plenty of cases where that’s caused more problems than it’s solved. Sometimes you’re better off not confirming every suspicion. Especially if you’re trying to hold the marriage together.”

“No, Frank. I’ve got to know. But once I
have
proof, what do I do?”

“A lot depends on your level of tolerance. Assume the worst: assume she has slept with the guy a couple of times. Is it worth busting up the marriage for that?”

“Maybe not. But who says it’s only going to be a couple of times?”

“Rob, she needs the lifestyle you make it possible for her to have. She’s not going to throw that away to go live in a trailer park. You can lay it on the line: ‘Stop seeing him or start seeing my lawyers.’ If it comes to that. I hope it doesn’t.”

Nancy

While Rob was having breakfast with Frank Shea, Nancy was driving into New York City with Connie and the children. Once again she’d booked connecting suites at the Surrey. Bryna O’Shea would be arriving from San Francisco the next day.

It had become Bryna’s tradition to vacation in late June and come back to New York to visit friends and relatives. Nancy was the friend with whom she spent the most time. They shopped in expensive stores and ate in expensive restaurants and stayed out late going to clubs, and they talked about how much fun they’d had when they were single.

Bryna got into New York only hours before Rob left. For once it wasn’t raining, but the first heat wave of the summer had arrived, bringing temperatures in the nineties and rendering the New York air as stagnant and gritty as Hong Kong’s. Rob was at the Surrey when she got there. He looked drawn and wan. She was shocked by how thin he was. Rob had always been fit. He’d even competed in a Hong Kong triathlon. Now he seemed almost frail. Even more than his words to her over the previous two months, Rob’s appearance made clear to Bryna the extent of his distress.

They had only the briefest chance to talk.

“You look like shit,” Bryna said. “What’s happening? Confrontation? Open warfare?”

Rob shook his head. “Nothing like that. We’ve barely talked. I just stopped by to see the kids. I’ll try to figure it out once I get back to Hong Kong, but it’s really weird to look at her and imagine her screwing some illiterate handyman.”

Bryna raised her eyebrows.

“All right, he’s not illiterate. And he knows how to stick a plug in a socket. And he’s sticking his plug in Nancy’s socket. And if I don’t get out of here right now I’m going to say or do something I’ll regret.”

“Stay in touch,” Bryna said.

It was only after Rob had left for the airport that Nancy told Bryna that she’d be going back to Vermont the next morning. She had to get back, she said. There was just so much to do, getting the girls ready for camp.

Bryna knew that wasn’t true. She knew Nancy never did anything to get the girls ready for camp. Connie did it all. There was another reason why Nancy was in such a hurry to get back to Vermont, and because Rob had been confiding in her Bryna knew what it was,
but
because Rob had been confiding in her she couldn’t let Nancy know that she knew.

For their one night out, Nancy wanted to go to the Odeon. In the mid-1980s, when Nancy and Bryna had been working and playing in the sandbox of the lower Manhattan restaurant and club scene, the Odeon had been the destination of choice for hip young martini-drinking, coke-snorting New York yuppies.

Without the Odeon, there might not have been a TriBeCa. Without the Odeon, the area surrounding West Broadway between Duane and Thomas streets might always have remained Washington Market. Jay McInerney set many a
Bright Lights, Big City
scene at the Odeon. After midnight, when those who’d come only to dine had been cleared out and the Bolivian marching powder was thick as pollen in the air, one might see not only McInerney, but John Belushi or Mary Boone or Bret Easton Ellis at the Odeon. It had been the epicenter from which had radiated the Wall Street greed and excess that defined the eighties and that lured Rob Kissel into the honeyed trap of investment banking.

Those glory days were long gone by the summer of 2003, when Nancy and Bryna ate dinner at the Odeon, but maybe it was a lingering aura of licentiousness that emboldened Bryna to ask the sort of personal question she knew Nancy despised.

“Are you having a fling?”

“God, no. Why would you ask something like that?”

“You seem different, sort of jittery, as if you wished you could be somewhere else. I know things have been rough with Rob. And I remember how we talked after we’d seen that movie with Diane Lane.”

“That’s just crazy,” Nancy said. “You should know I’d never do anything like that.”

And back in Vermont, Nancy decided she could not continue. Rob was already too suspicious. Nancy knew how obsessive he could be. He’d been hostile at the Surrey. She’d put nothing past him. She could even imagine him having her followed. And she was afraid of what he’d do if he ever found out the truth.

“I can’t see you anymore,” she told Michael in a phone call on June 27. “Rob’s too suspicious. I feel like he’s been spying on me. And who knows what else he might do? He has power, Michael. He has money. He might even come after you.”

“Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

“Well, I’m frightened. There was a look in his eye that really spooked me. It’s like he already knows and he’s just waiting to spring the trap.”

“We’ll be careful. We’ll be even more careful than we have been.”

“No, Michael, I can’t do it. I won’t be able to see you anymore.” And then she broke down in tears. Before long, Michael began to keep track of how many times Nancy told him they could not continue their affair and how much time passed before she told him it was on again. This first time, it was three days.

“I’ve got to see you. I don’t care if he knows. He’s never let me do anything I’ve wanted to do, but I’m not going to let him keep me from seeing you.” But three days after that Rob called from Hong Kong to remind her that he didn’t want her seeing Del Priore anymore. She said she wouldn’t. He warned her that she’d better not. She got scared and called Michael.

“I
really
can’t see you anymore. We shouldn’t even talk. Suppose he’s tapping the phone? That’s the kind of thing he would do. He can be dangerous, Michael. And I’m getting the creeps.”

“I wouldn’t let anybody hurt you, baby doll.”

She loved it when he called her baby doll. “The phone is too risky. Even the cell. We’ll have to stay in touch by e-mail.”

Then Rob hurt his back and wound up in traction in a Hong Kong hospital. She called Michael the day she heard the news.

“It’s okay! He’s in the hospital. You can come over tonight!”

Rob

ROB HAD HAD A BAD BACK FOR YEARS, PRIMARILY FROM INJURIES
suffered while skiing too aggressively at Stratton Mountain. The Irish-born Park Avenue spinal surgeon Patrick O’Leary had operated on him in 1995, performing a laminotomy and discectomy between lumbar disks four and five on the right side. Five years later—in support of the theorem that the most likely outcome of back surgery is more back surgery—Dr. O’Leary did a revision laminotomy at L4–5 right and an excision of recurrent disk herniation in the same region.

But on his first weekend back in Hong Kong in the summer of 2003, Rob blew out another disk playing tennis. This was at L3–4, right, just above his earlier injury. He was crippled in an instant and in excruciating pain. At the hospital doctors admitted him immediately and put him in traction.

He remained there for a week. To be lying flat on one’s back in paralyzing pain in Hong Kong while reading secret e-mails between one’s wife and her new lover in Vermont was a distinctly twenty-first-century form of torture: electronic waterboarding, more or less. The exchanges he read were hardly pornographic, but they removed any lingering shred of doubt about the nature of Nancy’s relationship with Del Priore.

Discharged from the hospital, Rob spent the second week of July doing physical therapy three times a day. But even with that, and even using a cane, he wasn’t able to walk more than twenty yards at a time and found it almost impossible to go down a flight of stairs. He had no strength in his right thigh and, except for the pain he felt when he tried to walk, he was numb between his right knee and ankle. It seemed clear he would need another spinal operation.

He flew to New York to see Dr. O’Leary in mid-July. After all the X-rays and MRIs and ultrasounds and scans were completed and their results scrutinized by some of the highest-priced doctors on the Upper East Side of New York City, Dr. O’Leary scheduled surgery for early August. Although barely able to drive—he could only brake and accelerate with his left foot—Rob managed to get himself to Stratton the same day. He was motivated. He was angry. He was hurt. He was obsessed. He’d memorized dozens of lines from Nancy’s e-mails to Del Priore. He now knew she’d been lying to him. He now knew the truth.

He arrived at the house on the evening of July 18. It had been a perfect Vermont summer day: the sky clear, the humidity low, the temperature in the upper seventies. The loveliness of the weather could not have been more at odds with Rob’s mood.

That night, he called Bryna from the basement. “I confronted her,” he said. “Point blank. I told her I knew she was having an affair. I said her computer had a virus and for some reason it was copying me on her e-mails. I’d read them. So I knew. But it was over, I told her. She had to go back to Hong Kong right away. That item was not negotiable. Back to Hong Kong. Immediately.”

“What did she say?”

“First, she went ballistic about me being sneaky and spying on her. I said I wasn’t the issue: she was. Her and her affair.”

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t admit it, but she didn’t deny it, either. She said, ‘It’s not black and white. It’s not what you think. It’s complicated.’ I told her it wasn’t complicated, it was simple: she’d been having an affair and I’d caught her and now she was going back to Hong Kong.”

“Is she?”

“No. She told me Zoe is in day camp, Ethan has his playgroup, Isabel’s still up at Camp Vega, and she wasn’t going to disrupt their summers just because I was throwing a fit.”

“But those aren’t the real reasons.”

“Of course not. But I can’t just abduct her. Besides, she promised she wouldn’t see him again. She promised she wouldn’t even talk to him. And she’s certainly not going to be sending him any more e-mails.”

“Do you believe her? Do you really think she’ll stop seeing him? Even though you’re back in Hong Kong?”

“I don’t know. But at least I know how to find out.”

Rob flew back the next day. His back was killing him. He could still barely walk. On Sunday, July 20, he e-mailed Frank Shea: “Can you get someone up to Vermont for Monday night? There may also be afternoon situations. Nancy will be more aware, because I’ve asked her to come home early. I want her back here because I believe she’s having an affair. I told her that on the basis that her computer has a virus I’ve read a bunch of e-mails from her to Mike. I asked her not to see him nor talk to him and just come back to Hong Kong. This is a critical week to determine if she spends any meaningful time with him.”

An hour after sending the e-mail, he called Shea.

There was a fresh edge of panic in his voice.

“Can you do it, Frank? Can you have someone up there tomorrow night?”

“It’s already in place. Rocco Gatta will be going up tomorrow.”

“Look, Frank, my oldest girl is away at camp—that’s Camp Vega, up in Maine, I think I told you about it when we had breakfast—and the other girl is going to day camp. Nancy can easily arrange to have the nanny take the youngest out of the house all day, so it’s not just nighttime, do you understand?”

“Loud and clear, Rob. We’ll be watching all day.”

“And you’ve got to let me know, all right? I can’t wait for a summary at the end of the week. If they’re together, I need to know right away. You’ve got all my numbers, don’t you? My cell, the office, the Parkview number?”

“I’ve got ’em all, Rob. We’re on top of this. I’ve told Rocco to call me the minute something happens and I’ll call you the minute I hear from him.”

“It’s getting worse, Frank. The whole thing is getting more serious. I want to catch them in the act.”

Nancy

For two whole weeks, before Rob came to New York to see Dr. O’Leary, they had felt free. Nancy still kept weekends reserved for the children, and Amity didn’t come over again, but during the week the affair filled not only their nights, but, increasingly, as Rob would come to suspect, their afternoons.

Nancy called Michael just after July 4 and told him to take the afternoon off from work. He arrived at the house at 2:00 p.m. She was waiting in the driveway in full Bonnie and Clyde mode: reckless, thrill-seeking, ready to cut loose. “Let’s go for a ride,” she said.

This time he drove. “Where do you want to go?” he said.

“I don’t know. I don’t care. Let’s go somewhere and rob a bank.”

He looked at her as if she might be serious. She explained about the movie
Bonnie and Clyde.

The weather had turned hot and humid. Michael drove toward Manchester, but for once shopping was not what Nancy had in mind.

“Let’s go down to Bennington,” she said.

Michael got on Route 7 and drove south for twenty-five miles. They wound up in downtown Bennington, where North Street becomes South Street and where Main Street goes west. Muggy heat radiated from the dull brick of buildings that housed failing or already failed businesses. They stopped at a red light at the four corners intersection in the charmless center of the town.

“Which way?” Michael asked.

“I don’t know. Turn right.”

A block and a half later, she said, “Stop! Pull in here. I can’t wait another minute to make love!”

The Kirkside Motor Lodge was not exactly a destination resort. It was a blue-collar motel for a blue-collar lover. She went into the office and paid sixty dollars, cash, for the room.

Although Michael was finding her an eager and vigorous lover, he couldn’t shake the sense that for Nancy the act was merely prelude to the aftermath, when she begged him to hold her tightly and to protect her and to promise her that he’d always be there.

“Don’t worry, baby doll, I’ll be here,” he told her over and over again.

“Call me ‘baby doll.’ Call me ‘butterfly.’ I want to be your baby doll and your butterfly for the rest of my life.”

But later in the afternoon at the Kirkside Motor Lodge, with the air-conditioning window unit wheezing and rattling as it battled the heat, he called her Nancy.

She sat bolt upright in the bed.

“Don’t call me that when we’re in bed!
Don’t ever call me by my name when we’re in bed together!”

“Why not?”

“Because
he
calls me that and I hate him! With him, bed means pain and humiliation. He hurts me, Michael.”

“Physically?”

She began to cry even harder than she had in the parking lot outside the Riverview Café. Her whole body convulsed with her cries. Finally—Michael clocked it at seventeen minutes—her crying subsided into sobs.

“You touch me so tenderly,” she said. “You care about how I feel. You don’t know, you don’t know how awful it’s been.” And again she started to cry so hard she wasn’t able to speak.

Eventually, she said, “I’m sorry. You’re going to think that all I ever do is cry. But you don’t know how much you mean to me, Michael. I’ve been living in hell and now you’ve come to rescue me.”

“What do you mean?”

“When Rob calls me by my name, the way he says it…it terrifies me. Because I know what it’s going to lead to.”

“What?”

“He beats me. He abuses me. He forces me to have sex.”

“Baby doll…”

“He gets drunk and he snorts coke and he comes after me with his fists. He’s broken my ribs. He doesn’t care. It’s gotten worse and worse and I don’t know what to do. I don’t have anyone to confide in. I’m so afraid, but I can’t leave. We’ve got this whole life in Hong Kong and everyone says we’re the perfect couple and I can’t just walk away from everything.”

Michael didn’t know what to say except that he would always be there for her. He held her gently for a long, long time. Then they drove back to Stratton so she could feed the children dinner. She picked up burgers, fries, shakes, and McNuggets at the McDonald’s in Manchester on the way.

During the days and nights that followed, Nancy said no more about being abused. “I don’t want to talk about it. Don’t ask again” was her reply when Michael brought it up. For the most part, her spirits were high. She loved her tattoo. She took to driving her Corvette instead of the Lincoln Navigator. She told Michael she was desperate to see where he lived, so they spent an afternoon and evening in his Hinsdale, New Hampshire, double-wide.

On days when she couldn’t wait until 9:30 p.m. to see him, she’d book a room at a nearby inn or motel and meet him in the late afternoon, leaving Connie to care for Zoe and Ethan. She’d use her credit card to reserve the room, but when she checked in she’d pay cash so the charge would not appear on a monthly statement.

She didn’t want to use the same motel twice, so they wound up driving around like researchers for a travel guide. The Londonderry Inn, the Inn on Magic Mountain, the Greenmount Lodge, the Snowdon Motel, Dostal’s—they could have written their own book:
The Adulterer’s Guide to South-Central Vermont.
This was their idyllic phase, when Nancy could articulate her visions of their future.

“I never want to leave Vermont,” she told him. “I’ve found a peace within me from being here, from being with you. I want to take a drive in the fall when the leaves have changed color. Fall is my favorite season. We’ll pull over somewhere and take a walk through the leaves. The air, it’s so crisp. Don’t you think everything smells so great in the fall? That’s why I love wearing suede—because I love the way it smells.”

One day, in a motel, Michael wanted them to take a bubble bath together. Nancy couldn’t bring herself to do it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s because of how I feel about my body. When you spend years of someone telling you how horrible your body looks…I just can’t shake it. I’m not sure I ever will.”

They still weren’t able to spend whole nights together. Nancy had to get back to the house before the children went to bed because she was afraid that if she didn’t, one of them would mention it to Rob. And when they were at the house Michael couldn’t stay over because she couldn’t risk having the children see him in the morning. Connie was a different story. She was sure that Connie knew by now, but she was also sure that Connie would never say anything, because if she did Nancy would fire her, and if she didn’t have a job she couldn’t stay in Hong Kong for more than two weeks. She’d have to go back to the Philippines and poverty.

“I love the first snowfall,” she told Michael. “It’s so clean. Can’t you picture us sitting inside, nice and cozy, a fire going, the snow falling outside? It could be a Saturday afternoon and we’re just being lazy. We’ll bring some more wood in for the fire, we’ll be listening to music, maybe I’ll draw or paint. I miss painting. You can write. I like to picture you writing…a novel maybe, then getting it published. The clothes have finished drying. I’ll take them out of the dryer. I love hot clothes, fresh from the dryer…”

He kept calling her “baby doll” and “butterfly.” He bought two pairs of blue crystal hearts and gave one to her. That way, each of them could hold two hearts together. To show her gratitude, she went to the Movado store in Manchester and bought him a $7,200 Concord Impresario watch.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever felt safe with,” she told him. “I’m in love. I’ve never been in love before.”

One day she noticed that Michael wasn’t wearing the watch. He was embarrassed to tell her why. Finally, he said he’d told his brother Lance about the affair, but Lance had been born again and told Michael he was immoral. More to the point, he told Michael he was fired. They argued. Finally, Lance said that Michael could keep his job in return for the watch.