What Remains by Carole Radziwill Page B

legs unconsciously slack and relaxed, an easy smile—I sensed order. He suggested security and straight lines. In my world there were no guidelines, no footsteps ahead of me, no safety net below to catch me.
    In the hotel suite the first afternoon he was introduced simply as Anthony. Someone told me later in the secondhand way someone always did: John Kennedy’s cousin. Jackie Onassis’s nephew. His mother, Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill. Counting backward on the family tree. He carried it effortlessly, the weight of this name, while I was struggling to escape weightlessness.
    There was a buzz around him that he seemed unaware of, and later I learned to seem unaware, too. He moved around a room as though in a perfectly timed waltz, delivering the right lines to the right person, turning this way and that. He knew how to work around the heavy name and introduced himself immediately to anyone new, rolling his name off with unassuming ease. He instinctively knew to stand when a woman walked into a room.
    He had a steady calm about work: he approached it with an elegant balance of duty and fun. None of it—the hours, the crime, the politics of network news—seemed to affect him. You would never turn a corner to find him in heavy conversation—gesturing and whispering in the hallway. He seemed to transcend it, while still being part of the team.
    But he was also a bit reserved, distant. We worked side by side, on many occasions the only two people in the suite. Yet he was the one on the team I felt least connected to. It was my first time in Los Angeles. There was a pack of us in our twenties, with expense accounts, and we took advantage of it, going to different restaurants and bars every night, exploring the city. He kept apart from all of that, and I liked it about him. He was there to work on a project, and he spent his free time at the gym. We were comrades in arms, the whole bunch of us, for those three or four weeks, but he was the one I doubted I’d see again.
    One afternoon it was just the two of us in the suite—he reading transcripts, I logging tapes, and the television on low. A news anchor announced a birth in his famous family—his cousin had had a baby girl. I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t react, but a few moments later he got up quietly and walked to the bedroom. He closed the door, but I could hear him on the phone excited. Congratulations!
    I remember wishing that we had met covering the Gulf War instead of a murder story. Wished his mock-serious eyes and cocked eyebrow had met mine over the blast of rocket-propelled grenades. A war is sweeping and dramatic, with heroism and bravery. I picture soldiers doubled up in bunkers over Anthony’s deadpan impressions of Saddam Hussein. But we exchanged our first glances over two people shot dead eating blueberries in their den. The younger son stopping to reload his shotgun so he could finish off his mother, who was crawling away. It was great television. Beverly Hills, rich private-school kids shooting their parents. We met because this was a story people watched and advertisers flocked to, making it profitable for everyone. We were in the business of telling profitable stories. We would get to do the serious ones, but flashy murder and celebrity profiles would pay our salaries.

4
    Our courtship starts and stutters. We meet on the murder story and four weeks later board separate planes to fly back to New York. There is an inauspicious parting—me running up to the suite at the last minute to get something I’d left behind. “Shh.” He answers the door, finger to his lips. “My cousin’s here for the weekend. He’s sleeping.” I tiptoe in, keep my head down, and mumble something clumsy about lunch when we get back. But then I’m assigned to a story in Louisiana and become quickly reintoxicated with my job. Everything else, for the moment, is forgotten.
    It’s a documentary called Abortion: The New Civil War, and Buddy Roemer is the star. He