My Father's Wives
Authors: Mike Greenberg
| My Father's Wives |
| Mike Greenberg |
The co-host of ESPN's Mike and Mike follows up his New York Times bestseller All You Could Ask For with this poignant story of one man's search to understand himself, his marriage, and his father.
Jonathan Sweetwater has been blessed with money, a fulfilling career, great kids and Claire, his smart, gorgeous, sophisticated wife. But there is one thing Jonathan never had: a relationship with his father.
Percival Sweetwater III has been absent from his son's life since Jonathan was nine years old. A five-term U.S. senator, now dead, Percy was beloved by presidents, his constituents, and women alike, especially the five women who married him after Jonathan's mother.
Jonathan hasn't thought about Percy or the hole he left in his life for years. Dedicated to Claire and his family, he's nothing like his serial monogamist father. But then Jonathan discovers evidence that everything in his marriage may not be as perfect as he thought. Hurt and uncertain what to do, he...
Everything I do in my life, I do for Stacy, Nikki and Stephen. So, this book is for them, as always. And, as it is a book about fathers and sons, it is dedicated to my dad, Arnold, with all of my love.
“Just accept as a fact that everyone of any emotional importance to you is related to everyone else of any emotional importance to you; these relationships need not extend to blood, of course, but the people who change your life emotionally—all those people, from different places, from different times, spanning many wholly unrelated coincidences—are nonetheless ‘related.’”
—John Irving,
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
PREFACE
I’VE BEEN STRUCK BY
lightning several times.
Three, to be exact: once in high school, once in college, the last time afterward. None of them was my wife, by the way. You don’t marry the girl who strikes you like lightning, because that doesn’t last forever and you never know what you might be left with when it wears away.
I assume it goes without saying I’m not being literal about the lightning.
I mean it the way they did in
The Godfather,
when Michael first sees Apollonia: Italian countryside, exotic beauty who doesn’t speak your language. That’s the woman who hits you like lightning but you don’t marry her, because life isn’t in the Italian countryside, life is back in New York, where your brother is riddled with bullets under a tollbooth. And the girl you’ve fallen so hard for can’t drive and doesn’t speak English; good luck with that.
So, I didn’t marry any of the women who struck me like lightning.
The first was when I was seventeen. Her name was Tabitha and she came to my high school after being kicked out of boarding school
for sleeping with a teacher. She was gorgeous, flaming red hair and green eyes, and furthermore she was almost entirely unsupervised, coming and going as she pleased in a chauffeured limousine. She was a year behind me in school but light-years ahead in every other way. Long story short: there was a biology class, there were frogs floating stiffly in formaldehyde, she couldn’t bear the smell, I dissected hers, and the next thing I knew we were having sex in the back of her car. It was in that limousine, with my school pants about my knees, that I first felt the lightning.
The second time struck a year later. I was a freshman at college and fell hard for a blond senior named Alyssa, who happened to be engaged to a medical student who lived hundreds of miles away. Alyssa toyed with me for much of the year, flirting, leading me on, allowing me to kiss her occasionally, no doubt driven by loneliness for her man and the pleasure she took in the way I worshipped her. Whatever the reason, I didn’t really mind; I found her so fabulous I was just happy to be around.
Toward the end of the year I was invited by a sorority sister of Alyssa’s to their formal dance and I accepted, even though I knew Alyssa and Phil would be there. I
wanted
to see them together, to put closure to it for myself.
The party was in the ballroom of a hotel, and several of the girls took a suite upstairs, away from the glaring eye of the university-designated chaperones. I was on a couch in the center of the suite, drinking Heineken from a bottle, while Alyssa seemed fidgety and sad and somewhat sloppily drunk. Then, it happened. When her fiancée got up to use the bathroom, Alyssa was quickly in my face, her nose an inch from mine. Her eyes were stunning—I can still picture them, vivid aquamarine—and despite her drunkenness there wasn’t a streak of red. I could smell the alcohol on her breath too, sweet and fruity, as though she’d been drinking margaritas rather than the beer we had in the suite.
“Am I making you uncomfortable?” she asked breathily.
“A-a-absolutely,” I stammered.
It was the opposite of what I meant to say, but I don’t think she was listening. She just stayed like that for what seemed like an eternity, like time had stopped, her lips so near mine I could taste them, wet and sexy.
Then I heard a flush. The bathroom door opened, and as quickly as she’d come Alyssa was gone, out of my face and out of my life. That was the last time I ever saw her. She and Phil disappeared into one of the bedrooms and didn’t come out the rest of the night. She graduated two weeks later. They were married within the year, and as far as I know they still are. But I can still see her eyes and smell her breath, and feel her lips not quite kissing mine. And when I do, it all looks and smells and feels like lightning.
The third time was in my early twenties with a model named Serena, who had a Jewish doctor for a father and an Indian mother who looked like a princess. The mother was stunning but drank like a fish and swore like a sailor, while her husband was patient and mostly silent, constantly monitoring his pager, ever aware of a pending emergency that never seemed to come.
From this bizarre union sprang Serena: Blue eyes and skin the color of the inside of a malted milk ball. And brilliant. She only modeled part-time; the other part she spent at NYU seeking a postgraduate degree in architectural engineering even though she had no interest in pursuing it. That was her problem, and ultimately her downfall: too many options. Women that beautiful and intelligent have an almost unlimited menu from which to choose, which sounds like a blessing but is often a curse because they can never commit to anything. For every choice they make there is always debilitating uncertainty over the options left on the table.
For a few months, Serena chose me. I vividly remember the first time I saw her, in Sheep Meadow in Central Park; I was playing Ultimate Frisbee, she was lying on a blanket. I chased an errant toss that landed a bit too near her and just as I began to apologize the clouds
parted and it was as though the sun shone only on her, like a spotlight. The lightning stopped me in my tracks; I flung the disc back to my group and went immediately to her side. We had lunch and dinner that day and spent the night in her apartment, where in the candlelit stillness of her bedroom I said things so corny they sounded like lines from a movie you would walk out of.
Serena became an obsession. First, in a blissful way—I found myself whistling as I rode the subway. Then in an anxious way. And finally in a way that was just plain horrible. We had nothing in common. I was grounded, career-oriented, bursting with ambition; Serena was just bursting. Nothing satisfied her, not her studies, not her modeling career, and certainly not me. Her wanderlust bordered on maniacal. Once she told me how desperate she was to live in Asia; we were in a water taxi in Venice at the time.
We lived together for just over a year before she moved away, leaving me in her apartment, where I stayed until the lease expired. It was a damn nice place to live and a constant reminder of the great lesson of my youth: Lightning strikes are what they are, brilliant and flashy and electric, but also immediate, gone before the echo fades. To live in the reflection of the light seems exciting but ultimately is not a good idea. You’re much better off finding a safe place and watching the storm through a window.
That’s how I met Claire: Watching a storm through a window.
We were both leaving lunch in the same coffee shop when a sudden rainstorm took us by surprise; we found ourselves together under the awning, staring helplessly into the street. I was about to put my folded newspaper over my head and run three blocks to my office when she caught my eye, long and lean and elegant, hair darker than the black coffee in her Styrofoam cup. I wasn’t struck by lightning. I just knew I wanted to talk to her.
She went back inside the coffee shop to wait out the rain so I did too, took the seat next to her at the counter and ordered coffee. I was trying to think of a witty way to introduce myself when her mobile rang.
“Yes, Liz,” she said in an authoritative tone. “No, I haven’t seen Mandy. I haven’t seen her all week.”
I couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation. Behind the counter was a lot of shouting in Greek, and behind us waitresses snapped at customers to clear the way so they could deliver the omelets and grilled cheese sandwiches people were waiting for impatiently in crowded booths.
“I would love to help you, Liz,” the classy brunette was saying, sounding exasperated, “but I haven’t seen Mandy all week.”
There was a bit more back-and-forth about Mandy, which seemed to make the attractive brunette increasingly annoyed, until she finally just said, “Okay!” and then abruptly hit
off
on her mobile without saying good-bye. She shook her head and then turned to find me staring at her, completely busting me; in the commotion I had forgotten we didn’t know each other.
She didn’t look put off, though. She just smiled. “I’m sorry if I was talking loudly, it’s so noisy in here. I don’t suppose you’ve seen Mandy, have you?”
“Actually,” I said, “she came and she gave without taking, so I sent her away.”
Her smile grew wider. She had very pretty teeth. “You don’t hear people quote Barry Manilow every day,” she said, and extended her hand. “My name’s Claire.”
We sat at that counter for three hours, long after the rain had faded and the lunch rush waned and all the tables turned over time and again; we sat and chatted and drank the cups of coffee the counterman kept refilling. There was no lightning. Just the opposite; it was as though we had known each other all our lives, two kids who’d grown up together and now met for lunch once a month to catch up. When she finally looked at her watch and said she needed to go, she jotted her phone number on the back of the check and shook my hand. I went to the window and watched her hail a cab. There was something very elegant in the way she moved, the cut of her tan raincoat, the way
she slid into the back of the taxi. Clean and classy; as I went back to the counter to grab my briefcase, the sound of her voice echoed in my mind.
I smiled at the counterman. “Guess what, my friend,” I said. “I just met the girl I’m going to marry.”
He didn’t congratulate me, or even smile. He just looked angry. Which I didn’t understand until I looked at the check and saw that it was for one dollar; we had sat for three hours and ordered nothing but coffee. I folded a fifty-dollar bill into the palm of my hand and stuck it out over the counter. “Thanks very much,” I said as we shook hands, “and guess what: you’re going to forget me the minute I walk out that door, but I am going to remember you for the rest of my life.”
It would have made a great line in a movie. Actually, if it had been a movie things would have progressed almost exactly as they did. We had a few dinner dates, she met my mother, I met her parents, then we went to Hawaii and I proposed over a candlelit dinner in a romantic restaurant while she struggled to stay awake, drowsy from anti-seasickness medication. It would have made the perfect cinematic montage, little snippets of a relationship growing and marching forward: the dates, the families, the wedding, the children being born. Then, when the credits finished rolling, the next scene would show the husband boarding a private jet. Just before takeoff, he would take out his iPhone and compose a very brief e-mail.