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

looking for him, but he couldn’t find him.
    Then I tried to reach him by cell phone, but there was no answer. I felt a terrible sense of loss and sadness. We’d been together for a year, and yet on a night such as this, Jim and I had not been together, or seen each other, or even spoken.
    I went home, and by the time I got into bed an hour later, I still hadn’t heard from him. I cried myself to sleep.
    The next day, my thirty-first birthday, I was exhausted and upset. I didn’t even want to get out of bed. I finally heard from Jim later in the day. He wished me a happy birthday, and the day after that, when we had dinner, he brought me a bouquet of flowers. He told me he’d been exhausted and upset on Election Night.
    That made two of us, though I didn’t say so.
    The next day, New Jersey’s
Star-Ledger
ran an interview that had taken place with Jim the day after the election. I read about Jim calling his estranged wife to tell her about the loss and how “bummed out” she was for him. This troubled me. Why had he called her but not me? I felt worse because this followed another story a few days earlier, describing how well they got along during his visits to British Columbia to see his daughter. The report depicted them holding hands while taking walks with their daughter. I began to have doubts. Was he playing games with me? Was he still in love with Kari? That apprehension stayed with me.
    But Jim McGreevey gay? It never crossed my mind.

 
     
    4. LIMITED ENGAGEMENT
     
     
    BEFORE THE SELF-DESTRUCTIVE AND feverish eruption of his admitted relationship with Golan Cipel, Jim had years of low-grade symptoms, a mild rash of sexual secrets, though I only found out later, after he had resigned. Jim was known to have a taste for strippers, women who worked at New Jersey clubs much like the fictional Bada Bing! where Tony Soprano and his buddies liked to hang out. This yen for strip joints, whether real or meant to create the impression that he was straight, was part of Jim’s life long before he knew me, even long before he knew his first wife, Kari. When the story about these visits broke (and again, this was after Jim’s resignation), it was reported that Kevin McCabe—mayoral aide to Jim, later his labor commissioner and best man at our wedding—often accompanied him. The press also reported that Jimmy Kennedy, Jim’s good friend, sometimes went with him on these outings, which could take place any time of the day or night, supposedly as a way for Jim to blow off steam that built up on the campaign. Much later, when a reporter asked about these side trips with Jim, Jimmy said, “As far as I’m concerned, he was like every other guy that I knew. Sometimes when people are in politics, they want to give the impression to everybody that they are a regular guy.” This is a regular guy?
    In addition to favoring strip joints, Jim was also said to patronize prostitutes. One in particular, a woman named Myra Rosa from Perth Amboy, announced to anyone who would listen that Jim McGreevey had been her client for a couple of years, maybe as early as 1995. She told the police as much in a tape-recorded statement. On October 21, 1997, just two weeks before the election, a reporter from the
Star-Ledger
asked Jim directly about the prostitute’s claims. Jim is reported to have burst into tears, and the story was quashed, only to surface again in 2004.
    Apparently, Jim’s sleazy encounters with women were only a cover for his sleazy encounters with men. As I later learned, his past was littered with casual sexual encounters, visits to gay clubs, public parks, and truck stops, although how he concluded that one set of adulterous, career-destroying secrets could protect him from another remains beyond my grasp.
    I knew none of this. I was looking in the wrong place, insofar as I was looking at all. The only person I considered any sort of threat was Jim’s first wife, Kari, though she was thousands of miles away in British