Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage by Dina Matos McGreevey Read Free Book Online

that.

 
     
    3. FIRST ENCOUNTER
     
     
    WHEN I THINK OF all that happened during the eight years of my relationship with Jim McGreevey, the beginning—how I met him, how I fell in love with him—is the hardest story to tell, or at least to tell in the right way. When love goes out the door, courtship stories may go into the attic, never to be told again. It’s no fun to recount the birth of a love that died a horrible death. My sadness and, yes, my anger, cast long shadows and obscure much that was hopeful and happy. But if I don’t tell this story carefully, Jim will look like someone you wouldn’t trust to feed your cat over the weekend, much less someone who was the repository of so much trust, public and private. And if that’s the man who emerges, what does that say about my judgment in marrying him?
    Jim was devastated when his wife left him without any warning, and therefore he came to doubt his ability to read the emotions of someone he loved. Ironically, he put me in the same position, so that now, because I failed to read him, I’ve come to question my own ability to read anyone I might love. It was my own extreme sense of privacy that kept me from asking questions I would have considered intrusive if anyone had asked them of me. I know that now. And I know that it was my tendency toward privacy (not to mention my steadfast loyalty) that allowed Jim to keep secrets from me and ultimately led to a marriage in so many ways counterfeit. Also ironically, the person I was most suspicious of was Jim’s first wife, Kari. That was a tragic red herring. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
    Jim and I first met in October 1995 at the Armory, a Perth Amboy restaurant. The dinner was in honor of a Pretender. The irony isn’t lost on me. Jim, as both a state senator and the mayor of Woodbridge, was a guest of honor, but the real Pretender, if that’s not too much of an oxymoron, was the Duke of Braganza, heir to the Portuguese throne, who was honored annually by a local Portuguese-American organization. This year the dinner was being held in Perth Amboy, a town near Woodbridge.
    I noticed Jim when he came in. I didn’t know who he was, but I thought he was handsome in a Tom Hanks kind of way, despite his old-fashioned barbershop haircut. He had a wide, easy smile and exuded a kind of warmth that seemed to extend to each person in the small group he was talking to. It was early in the evening, and things were just getting started when Manny Viegas, a friend who took an avuncular interest in me, came over.
    “I want you to meet someone,” he said. “Come with me.”
    Manny, like me, was an officer in the Portuguese-American Congress. He and his wife, Grace, lived in Woodbridge and had invited Jim to the event. Manny was a kind man who had been happily married for many years and had two children my age. He knew a lot of people in the community and wasn’t shy about putting them together, so I was pretty sure that his “someone” was a guy he was trying to fix me up with.
    “Meet someone? I don’t think so, Manny,” I said. “Not tonight.” It was a festive evening, and I was dressed for it, but I really wasn’t in the mood to be fixed up.
    “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “See that good-looking guy with all the women around him?” He gestured in Jim’s direction.
    “I see him,” I said. “Who is he?”
    “Jim McGreevey, the mayor of Woodbridge.”
    I knew Jim McGreevey by name and reputation. I’d heard he was an ambitious politician on the fast track to somewhere interesting. I’d also heard he was charming and good-looking. When I saw him that day, I had to agree. I remembered that a guy I’d dated while at Rutgers—a poli sci major named Frank—had told me about Jim. Frank and I had gone our separate ways years earlier, but because we were both active in local Portuguese-American political circles, our paths often crossed. Frank was working for Senator Frank Lautenberg at the time. Jim, in pursuit