In transcripts, Jeanine is at her wallpaper-peeling best. “What am I supposed to do, Bernie? Watch him fuck her every night? What am I supposed to do? I can go on the boat. I’ll put the fucking thing”—the bug—“on myself,” she tells Kerik. Al says he learned about this, like everyone else, from the media.

As it stands now, Al will likely get his wish. Jeanine’s political career will soon come to an end. There is a chance, of course, that the publicity could serve Jeanine. She would not be the first female politician whose husband’s escapades led to gains in the polls. Still, if Jeanine does exit politics, it’s not clear to Al that that alone will make things right at home.

“That’s something that I don’t know,” says Al. “At some point in time you sit down and you discuss what you want to be and what you want to do.”

“You’re against divorce,” I say.

“I’m not saying that,” says Al.

In Jeanine Pirro’s campaign headquarters, there’s a wall of articles chronicling her accomplishments and showing her in attractive poses, often featuring her legs, with an angular face. In person, she is softer, her features wrinkle-free but not sharp. She wears a smart yellow businesslike suit, one of half a dozen Armanis. Jeanine, I know by now, isn’t bland and disciplined; she’s not Hillary. She is, though, a practiced politician. And so she nods to my question, then answers another. I ask about what she calls the “smear campaign” against her, and she segues to her fighting spirit, which leads to her fight for women. “Whether I was the first woman to prosecute a murder case, first woman judge, first woman D.A., I always knew that women would benefit if I did well and would be hurt if I didn’t,” she tells me, as she’s told a thousand others. And so, in an attempt to steer her into something less rehearsed, I say, “You know I spoke to Al.”

Jeanine becomes alert, and quiet. She wants to know what Al said. It seems odd, of course, that she doesn’t know. But, then, Jeanine is accustomed to Al’s independent streak, even charmed by it. Indeed, thoughts of Al being Al seem to tickle her. He might be naughty, but he’s interesting. “Not a surprise that he didn’t ask my opinion,” she says with a smile. “I think Al needs to speak up for himself.”

Al believes her career has been hard on him, I tell her.

“No question,” she says. “We have persevered through some very difficult times. It’s been hard on both of us and hard on our careers.” She knows that Al wants her out of politics. “For years, he’s wanted me to go on television,” she says. Jeanine considered it. Al says she had an offer of over $1 million a year. “I want to be the one doing, not the one reporting on people,” she says.

“Has Al made peace with that?”

“Maybe not,” she says with a laugh. She’s got a deep, rich, engaging voice, a genuine laugh. “Maybe not.”

“How’s your communication these days?

She chuckles again. “In need of a little repair, I’d say.”

They seemed so close during the toughest times. During the tax-fraud trial, they walked down the courthouse steps hand in hand.

“Do I think that I would like to have more attention at home?” he asks. “Yeah. And, you know, if you’re not going to get attention at home, I think you really need to make some decisions about your future.”

“I wasn’t going to turn my back on my family because people felt that I would look better politically,” she says. “That’s not how I was raised … The sense of the family is the most important thing for me at all costs. My family is my family.”

“Including Al?”

“Al is my family. We’re a unit, and I fought hard to keep my family together. Look,” she tells me, “he’s my husband and the father of my children.”

For Jeanine, this has been the divide. Al was the love of her life—“I was crazy about him,” she says when she talks about their time in law school. Now he’s the father of her much-adored children. It might hurt Al—she knows it hurts Al—but it seems the deal she’s made with herself. And given this, I wonder why she flipped out last summer. Why talk about bugging her husband?

“I wanted to know. I needed to know.”

So she called her old friend Bernie Kerik, though he was under investigation himself.

“Why did I call Bernie? I wanted honesty and I wanted to know,” she says. “And you know what? I was angry and I said things I shouldn’t have. But you can’t change what you did; you can only learn from it.”

“Do you think Al had an affair?”

“I don’t know. I suspected it.”

Related:

• Archive: “Politics”
• Articles by Steve Fishman
• Table of Contents: Oct 23, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!