“What’s the difference?” I ask.
Jeanine, I know, exercises every morning and snacks on sweets all day. At the conference-room table, she gobbles dark chocolate.
“God almighty! What do you mean, What’s the difference? Because I wanted to know what I was dealing with. I wanted the truth. I’m the prosecutor. That’s who I am.”
“Would you have thrown him out?”
“I don’t know. I needed to know the truth.”
What wife doesn’t want to know if her husband is cheating? And yet this couple seems to have come to accept that their lives have diverged.
“Yes, the circumstances of our lives have caused us to move in different directions, but that core, my children, is still there.”
Didn’t they have a tacit understanding, she and Al? He’s great company, funny as hell, a partner in their shared strivers’ dream, but didn’t she expect to put up with a misdeed or two? Compromises are made, as married couples know. Didn’t she turn a blind eye to his frequent female dinner companions?
“See,” she says, “there wasn’t an understanding. If there were, why would I have cared?” And then, irresistibly, she slips into campaign talk. “I’ll tell you what, I’m a fighter. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t have started a domestic-violence unit, I wouldn’t have taken on the people I have taken on … ”
I interrupt. Is she relating that to the issue of bugging her husband?
“I’m backing into it,” she says. “I’m saying I’ve fought my whole life for what I believe in, and I was fighting for my family.”
“So you’re going to stay married? Going to keep the family together?
“Like everyone else, I’m working to keep it together. It’s not easy.”
“That is a good line. It’s also probably true,” I tell her.
“Can I tell you something? I’m not good saying things I don’t believe in.”
That seems like an invitation. “Do you love your husband?” I ask.
Jeanine has picked through the chocolates, taken those she wants.
“Of course I love my husband,” she says. “From the day that I met him.”
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