The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [166]
Soon after he got to Washington, he met another woman, Anna DiBattista, a stylish blonde who was working in the defense industry. She knew he was married from the beginning—a coworker informed her—but O’Neill never let her know about his other women. Anna’s priest warned her, “That guy is never going to marry you. He’s never going to get an annulment.” And yet one day O’Neill told her he had gotten the annulment after all, which was a lie. “I know how much that means to you,” he told her. Often he spent part of the night with Mary Lynn and the rest of it with Anna. “I don’t think he ever stayed later than five or six a.m.,” said Mary Lynn. “I never made him breakfast.” In the meantime, he kept his relationship with Valerie in Chicago alive. All three women were under the impression that he intended to marry them. He was also obsessed with a beautiful, high-powered woman in the Justice Department who was married, a fact that caused him endless despair.
In an odd way, his protean domestic drama paralleled that of his quarry, Osama bin Laden. Perhaps, if O’Neill had lived in a culture that sanctioned multiple marriages, he would have created such a harem. But he was furtive by nature, thriving on dangerous secrets and innovative lies. His job, of course, gave him the perfect cover, since he could always disappear for days on some “classified” mission.
There was a side of him that sought the solace of a committed relationship, which he seemed closest to achieving with Valerie James. When O’Neill moved to New York, Val joined him. They got an apartment in Stuyvesant Town. He was so fond of her two grown children that friends mistook them for his, and when her first grandchild came along, and needed babysitting, O’Neill stayed home with the baby so Val could go to work. They settled into a routine. On Tuesday mornings, they left their clothes at the Laundromat and went for a run. Every Saturday morning, O’Neill would treat himself to a haircut and a hot shave. On Sundays, he and Val experimented with churches and sometimes explored the city on bicycles. Often when he came in late at night, smashed after entertaining cops from Venezuela or Uzbekistan, he would crawl into bed with a glass of milk and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. He loved handing out candy on Halloween.
But there was a restlessness in him that seemed frightened of simple arrangements. When Anna DiBattista got a job offer in New York in 1999 that threatened to complicate his life beyond reason, O’Neill actually pleaded for her to come. “We can get married!” he said. But when she arrived, he told her she couldn’t move in with him right away. He said there were “linguists” staying in his apartment.
With each woman, he lived a different life. He managed to keep his social circles separate, so one group of friends knew him with Val, another with Anna, another with Mary Lynn. He took them to different restaurants and even to different countries on vacation. “Jazz was his thing,” said Val. With Anna, he listened to Andrea Bocelli. “Our song was ‘Time to Say Goodbye,’” she recalled. Mary Lynn introduced him to grand opera. “He flew all the way from California when I invited him to Mephisto.” His politics were also flexible, tending to conform to the views of his companion at the time, a moderate Democrat