He pushed the menu away. “You called me a little while ago and asked me to do something for you and I did it.”
I began to protest, but he held up his hand. “Helen, really? We both know what I’m talking about. Don’t we?”
And I did.
2
Helen Lambert
Washington, DC, January 2012
At the end of January, Roger, my husband, told me it was over between us. We’d had our lawyers on hold, neither of us making a move toward a divorce despite being separated for a year. We’d tried therapy, living together, living apart, but nothing seemed to fix the broken pieces of us in a way that felt we were a going concern. Mostly, I’d felt abandoned by him for his first love, the Hanover Collection.
Roger was the chief curator and director of the Hanover Collection, a museum that contained more than three thousand French and American paintings, plus one of the largest black-and-white photography collections ever assembled in the US. But that is making the Hanover sound like a building, and it was much more than that. The Hanover Collection was my husband’s obsession. No space was good enough to house it, and there weren’t enough hours in the day for him to work on it. I’d find sketches of buildings and floor plans of new wings on napkins and errant paper scraps—even in the bathroom. It was difficult to get Roger’s full attention for any length of time for mundane things like fixing a broken dishwasher. For three years, Roger led an eighty-five-million-dollar capital campaign to build the perfect home for his collection—the success of this effort due largely to hiring Sara Davidz who was, apparently, a fund-raising phenomenon. Roger had managed to grow the museum’s attendance beyond 425,000 visitors, not bad considering the Hanover, a private institution, competed with the free Smithsonian museums scattered all over Washington. In a museum town, Roger Lambert was a king. A wunderkind in the philanthropy world—a mad genius—he was profiled in the New York Times and Washington Post style sections as well as The Chronicle of Philanthropy. He even gave a famous TED Talk on how grassroots organizers could raise money for causes they believed in. Now he’d shocked Washingtonians—arguably some of the greatest creators of museums—by working not with an American architect, but with a Japanese firm to build a block-and-glass contraption in the up-and-coming Waterfront area. The move to take the Hanover out of its location in the old Georgian mansion on Reservoir Road in Georgetown to the trendy stretch along Maine Avenue was one that, briefly, turned the museum world against him—the Washington Post labeling his treasured museum design as “an expensive travesty resembling stacked ice cubes.” As the stately, labyrinthine mansion in upper Georgetown remained empty, kids began to break the windows, forcing the historical society to board up the eyesore. And then Roger Lambert fell further out of favor.
Roger and I were a bit of a fixture in Washington. We were a couple well known for entertaining at our house on Capitol Hill. Each month, we’d host a dinner for someone we’d profiled in the latest issue of In Frame—like “bringing an issue to life.” Our dining room could fit sixteen people comfortably, so a seat at our monthly gatherings became a coveted invitation. Roger and I were careful with our guest list, mixing painters with politicians; mathematicians with musicians. Once a year, we might do an all-artists dinner or an all-politics dinner, but the fun thing we both enjoyed was curating an eclectic guest list with some tension. The invitation itself was a phone call from Roger or me, and you’d be surprised to find that people flew in from all over the world just to sit around our table. But our process wasn’t without problems. A renowned photographer once turned down an invitation by hanging up on me, saying we were “too bourgeois” (we were, a little, but that was part of the fun). Then a famous actor stormed out of our house because we sat him next to a scientist who didn’t know who he was. Unfortunately, our Maryland Avenue house wasn’t on a frequent cab route so he had to spend ten minutes in a glacial January waiting for a Nigerian cabdriver who also had no idea who he was.
But it all ended abruptly at the end of January when Roger took me to dinner at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant on Connecticut Avenue and told me that he’d fallen in love with Sara. In truth, this news wasn’t entirely a surprise. I’d first suspected then known about them, but I didn’t take her, or their fling, seriously. I thought it was a phase he was going through.
As he explained it, though, his love for Sara was a hopeless, terminal love—the kind he’d never known until she’d walked through the door. I nodded like a dutiful student in the front row of class, spooning my pho while he wore this wild look on his face—a look I hadn’t seen in years. I take that back—a look I’d never seen.
I’d met Roger at Georgetown University when he sat next to me in a class called American History Since 1865. It was a class no one wanted to take because the professor was famous for never giving out any grade higher than a C. Although a senior, Roger had registered for classes late, so he’d been forced to take it. As a political science major, it was a requirement for me, and I would be awarded the rare A grade. In those days, I wandered the campus with my red hair up in a high ponytail with Bettie Page bangs and sported a pair of cat’s-eye glasses and a thick volume of Robert Caro’s The Path to Power, one of several books he’d written about Lyndon B. Johnson, always tucked under my arm. At first glance, I found Roger annoying because he was never prepared for class, but he must have sensed I could be wooed by political maneuvering. That fall, he rigged the homecoming queen contest in my favor, feverishly stuffing ballot boxes and getting large droves of students to vote for me. It was such an LBJ move that, honestly, I was flattered. In the end, I was named a respectable second runner-up and Roger was rewarded for his efforts with a date that lasted ten years.
As I closed my eyes, I could still see our life together—the late nights dressed in our formalwear after a gala eating midnight breakfast at Au Pied de Cochon on Wisconsin Avenue; dinners at 2Amys and Pete’s in Friendship Heights, where we debated over which restaurant made the best pizza; buying a grand old row house on Capitol Hill that we could barely afford; driving to Charlottesville in Roger’s Jeep listening to House of Love’s Babe Rainbow tape until it wore out; and finally, him nervously proposing to me among the Barboursville Ruins during the intermission at Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
But there were bad times as well. Roger and I tried, and failed, to have a baby for several years. I suppose for me, this became my obsession. The monthly deliveries of Clomid had sat hopefully in the refrigerator next to the eggs. (The irony of that was not lost on me.) Our marriage had been five wonderful years and two not-so-great ones.
But the Hanover Collection and Sara had changed everything. Roger explained that he’d called his lawyer, who’d put in the paperwork to rush our divorce and that he hoped we’d be in court within thirty days to “finalize things.” I hugged him goodbye and went back to my own apartment, curled up in my bed, and with a primal, child-like focus wished Sara harm—or dead—I’m not really sure which anymore. I didn’t want to finalize things with Roger. I wanted him back. I wanted the gods to even the score. Now I know that I was sloppy with my wish. But we’ve all wished someone dead at some point, haven’t we? We don’t really mean it.