“He didn’t think it a joke when you closed the letter accusing him of plagiarism in some of the recent manuals.”
My ears rang, my heart pounded, and my head spun. I couldn’t understand why she was challenging John. Did this mean Gemina was going to renege on its contract? Surely they understood this was the way he always wrote, and sometimes even spoke. He was highly educated, after all.
“We no longer require your services,” Abigail said crisply. “Your contract is being called, per the severance provision.”
“What about the monies due him?” I sputtered. I could hardly get the words out of my dry mouth.
Negotiations started. Abigail said the company position was that John had overbilled and was not due anything. John countered he would get a lawyer; he had receipts to prove his expenses. I added that we had copies of completed contracts with customers,
his
customers. Back and forth we went until we finally reached a settlement. Gemina would honor billings totaling slightly more than $11,000, but it came at a high price. John would have to resign, and my hopes for the future fizzled into despair.
“Sign this,” Abigail said. She slid a prepared resignation statement over to John. “By the way,” she added, “you can forget about the lease on the Red Skelton paintings. We don’t have a place to hang them. We’re just glad you never got an independent appraisal.”
I gulped, my stomach cramped, and my breathing went shallow. I wanted to throw up. I didn’t say a word; I didn’t dare.
The meeting was over. Back in the car I sniffled, fighting back tears of disappointment and humiliation. What would I say to Lothian? “John, you’ll have to call Center Art,” I said. “There’s absolutely no way we can afford the paintings now, and we need to get our money back on the pastel.”
“Hey, we don’t need Gemina. That’s why I started our company, Autograph Technological Systems,” John said. “I knew we shouldn’t have all our eggs in one basket. Maybe I can work something out about the art lease with our Santa Clara client, Claymark Computers.”
“Claymark Computers? The upstart company that can’t seem to get itself off the ground, let alone pay you?”
“It’s just taking them time to get established. That’s why they hired ATS to be their marketing arm. Their recent computer trial with Bechtel was quite impressive. Claymark computers are faster than IBM’s.”
My hands gripped the steering wheel, and I turned to John. “Promises don’t pay the bills. We’re behind in the car’s lease payment again. We don’t have a choice. You have to call Isaac at the gallery and cancel the paintings.”
“All right, all right,” he said. “I give up. I’ll call him in the morning.” John slouched into his seat, laid his head back, and closed his eyes.
On the way home, through the Caldecott Tunnel, past the luxurious homes in the green-and-brown hills of Orinda and Lafayette, my organizational mind began to work on how to use John’s talents to get him into an earning situation. I was desperate to solve our burgeoning financial problems, desperate to keep our financial ship from sinking. Then it came to me. “John, why don’t you use your psychology doctorate and work in education? You always tell me your thesis could help schizophrenics.”
He slowly opened his eyes and sat erect. “I told you,” he snapped, “they won’t give me the piece of paper until I do the seminars. Without the diploma I can’t get a job, and to get it they want me to teach one hundred hours for
free.
”
“But . . . but . . .”
“I won’t do it. I won’t play their game. I won’t be their slave. I have a different idea. I’ll contact the guy who leased the Mercedes to me. I think he’ll help with my plan to lease Claymark Computers to the government.”
I cringed, and gripped the wheel tighter.
Here he goes with another wild idea,
I thought,
another one of his back-alley deals that never are one hundred percent kosher—nothing illegal but always a little far-fetched.
And somehow they never seemed to work out—whether it was a job with an upstart company or with his grandmother or children, who still had not spoken to me. It always amazed me how he could flippantly go from one idea to another without so much as a second thought. Looking back now, I see this as another behavior on the psychopath’s checklist.
Fortunately John didn’t notice my apprehension. I wasn’t up for an argument about money tonight, especially because we finally had the promise of the Gemina check. “What should we have for dinner?” I asked as we turned up to our house.
If my life with John were as painful as the financial part of it, I knew I wouldn’t be with him, but there were compensations that balanced things out. John was helpful around the house. When he wasn’t traveling, he was a good sport and fixed dinner and cleaned the kitchen afterward. I needed this treat. My hours were crammed with work and school. John loved grocery shopping. I hated it. He indulged my passion for traveling and entertaining. Our photo albums were stuffed with smiling faces from birthday parties, camping and boating trips, bridge dinners with family and friends, and cocktail parties with Red Skelton and Anthony Quinn.
We also bonded over John’s health problems, which frightened us both. The previous September he had been transported by ambulance to the emergency room when he passed out at a John Denver concert. Recently he had precipitated a code blue at the hospital while he was having physical therapy. That incident kept him in intensive care for a couple of days. Overall, life was good, except when it came time to pay the bills. Four months later I sat with John at the barrel-top oak desk, trying to come up with a plan to increase his earnings. I grabbed a blank piece of paper and a pen.
“Let’s make a plan,” I said. “Where do you expect to get money from in the near future?” I wrote down John’s response: Gemina, Beneficial Leasing Corporation, Claymark Computers, ATS contract bid to U.S. Army Support Command, and Fort Shaftner, Hawaii. I knew this was not enough. I had to find a way to produce enough funds to take care of the current burgeoning financial obligations. “Can’t you get some cash now to pay off the current bills?” I asked. “Every card is at its limit and we’re behind two months on the house mortgage.”
I suggested adding to his Texas bank loan, where he said his military checks were automatically deposited, or getting a loan from his millionaire friend in Florida. I brought up having Judge Sullivan reverse the living trust on John’s Coconut Grove home so he could get a loan, or John trading interests in the houses he co-owned with his sister in Chevy Chase and Three Arch Bay. I mentioned that he could call his Grandmother Dannigan and negotiate something from the will with millions in it. With each proffer, he countered with reasons why it wouldn’t work, pointing out that the family proposals were definitely out because he still was getting resistance from them for having married me.
I slumped in defeat. I knew that the resistance from his family was real. Only last month I had felt their vicious sting once more. We had portraits taken of ourselves, John wearing a tweed coat with his naval aviator wings, and me in my tailored camel-hair jacket. I put several poses in envelopes and had sent them proudly to his grandmother and his four children as a peace offering. All came back within the month, marked NO SUCH PERSON AT THIS ADDRESS.
“Hey,” John said, brightening up. He reached over and grabbed my hand. “We can refinance the second mortgage on this house. Then when Jason pays me for the Danville house in nineteen eighty-nine, we can pay the whole thing off. That’s only five years off.”
“I don’t know. Our credit is extended now.”
“Don’t you remember when we got the second mortgage to buy Bryan out almost two years ago? The credit union said you could increase the loan at any time. All you have to do is quitclaim a fifty percent interest to me. That way we can use my holdings as collateral. We can make the loan for fifty-five thousand dollars, pay off all our bills, bring the house payments current, and pay off the second mortgage from nineteen eighty-two.”
I hesitated. How could holdings secure a loan when they were inaccessible? My throbbing head felt as if it were being squeezed in a vise. But I could see no other way out. “I’ll call the credit union tomorrow.” I sighed. “But only if you promise we’ll pay if off in nineteen eighty-nine.”
He turned around, smiling. “I promise.”
He was my husband now. I guess it didn’t matter if his name was on the mortgage.
“I have a surprise for you,” John said. “I was going to tell you later, over champagne, but I’ll spill the beans now. I’m starting a consulting firm . . . our own corporation. I’ll be the CEO and you’ll be the treasurer.”
“Just like that, a corporation?”
“I’ve met some folks knowledgeable about all branches of the military who can easily get government contracts. In fact, one is the rear admiral in charge of Treasure Island.”
With that, John was ready to move on: from Gemina, from Claymark Computers, from getting his psychology degree, from his family. John had no remorse. He immediately looked ahead, working out his next adventure. I didn’t realize what was happening at the time—he was being a typical psychopath with his lack of responsibility and his need for living on the edge. It was all a crazymaking puzzle to me. I kept trying to fit the pieces together and get John to be fiscally responsible, but I didn’t understand that some of the pieces were missing, and they would never be found.
“I hope this corporation thing works out,” I said. “We’ll need two admirals on board. Our ship’s beginning to sink.”
John looked at me and smiled. “I love it when you talk Navy,” he said.
TEN
The Admiral’s Wife
Six months later John and I waited near the military barricade at the entrance to the San Francisco Aquatic Park pier, next to Fisherman’s Wharf. It was Fleet Week. Excitement filled the air. A large crowd circulated, looking for the optimal spot to view the impending parade of ships and the Blue Angels’ exhilarating fly-by performance. I watched, feeling smug and privileged. For the second year in a row, we had been accorded an invitation to join the officers-only viewing stands at the end of the curving pier.
Late-morning sun warmed the cool October breeze and sucked the fog bank back under the Golden Gate Bridge and out to the Pacific Ocean. I was relieved. The show would not be canceled, as it had been in previous years.
As I soaked it all in, I reflected on how the Navy had slowly seeped into my blood, bringing me the excitement of a new life, one that exposed me to events far beyond my previous imaginings. It didn’t happen all at once, but grew gradually as John became more comfortable with being accorded his admiral status.
When I first met him, John referred to himself as Captain Perry and, surprising to me, seemed uncomfortable with the title Rear Admiral. I was proud of my man and what he had gone through in the service of our country. Hadn’t he lost a lung? Didn’t he have nightmares? Hadn’t he been awarded the Purple Heart and the Congressional Medal of Honor? So I encouraged him, prodded him, and cajoled him to use the rank he had earned. It made him seem more illustrious to me.
Now John introduced himself as Rear Admiral Perry; signed hotel registers and charge receipts as Admiral Perry; gained access to military bases as Admiral Perry. Our house had taken on a nautical theme. We acquired a WELCOME ABOARD doormat and an eight-foot-wide blue flag with the motto DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP in large white block letters. “Made famous by my relative, Oliver Hazard Perry, in the War of 1812,” he’d boast when asked about the flag. “I’m like him, in many ways. I’ve had to overcome a lot of adversities in my life.”
We were a Navy family. I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed seeing John enjoy it. Today, again, the Navy was in our life. One by one, our party straggled up to us . . . my parents with my sister Julie, and ten of our closest friends.
“Should be a hell of a show,” John said as he herded our group toward the MP at the barricade, who gave a crisp salute to John when he handed him the tickets.
“Guess what?” I announced with a big grin on my face, as we started to weave through the crowd. “We got to meet the Blue Angels at a reception on Treasure Island last night.”
“Really?” asked Marie Passini, a friend since high school.
“It was great,” I said. “We even got a framed photograph of the planes in flight autographed to Rear Admiral John Perry and signed by the guys who are flying today.”
I was bragging and didn’t care. I was just so proud of my admiral, of being the admiral’s wife. The event last night offered me proof that John was indeed who he said he was.
We meandered to the middle of the pier, selected a bleacher, and climbed to the top for a bridge-to-bridge view. Large, colorful signal flags draped the back of the bleachers and flapped in the breeze; military brass and public dignitaries mingled around the podium, and music from the nearby small Navy band filled the air. It was festive and exhilarating.
“I’ve a surprise for you all,” John yelled above the din. “After the Blue Angels perform, we’re going to take a cruise under the Golden Gate on a Navy ship.”
“We wondered if you were going to be able to top last year,” Marie’s husband, Mark, said.
“What happened?” my dad asked.
Mark leaned past me to talk to my dad more directly. “Last year, we were in a long line waiting to tour the
O’Brien,
and John marches up to the ensign and tells them who he is. Next thing we know, we’re walking past everyone, and they’re staring at us with that who-do-you-think-you-are look. When we got to the top of the gangway, the deck mate snapped to attention, pulled out his signal whistle, and blew it to indicate an officer was boarding. You should have seen the salutes.”
“We got to see some parts of the ship that were off-limits to the general public,” Mark’s dad said. “Being on board reminded me of my World War II service aboard a Navy ship.”