after 24 hours of watching a hysterical michelle suffer, the yacht s captain gave her the number for a greek cell phone that mark had been secretly using ever since they had been on the yacht. michelle had no idea what would happen when she dialed that number, but she was desperate to hear her husband s voice. he answered rather happily, like 5:00 a.m., he said, hello? i was in shock. i said, hello? then he fumbled with the phone and he hung up. did he know it was you on the phone? oh, yeah. how did that feel? i was devastated. i felt like somebody punched me in the stomach. i couldn t understand why he would do that. as it turned out, michelle s husband had, as promised, given her a huge surprise, all right. he deserted her. for reasons she did not yet understand, michelle would have to return home alone.
greece, credit card statements were still coming in to their home in chicago. he s going to the biggest fashion houses across france and buying clothing and he s at casinos. and you re back and you can t even pay the water bill. right. and i m sitting there crying every night listening to our songs, you know, mourning his loss and he s in the south of france. his credit card tally in the south of france alone added up to more than $50,000. since there s no law against disappearing, michelle couldn t really go to the authorities. it seemed the only people even interested in finding mark weinberger were his creditors. but michelle wouldn t give up. on more than one occasion, michelle flew to europe in hopes of tracking down and confronting her husband. just me and a pair of handcuffs. i brought handcuffs because i figured if he saw me he might, like, be freaked out. i just wanted an explanation. she even came close once, arriving at a paris hotel just a day after weinberger h
we were bonding about medicine because i had just gotten through doing a stint in neuroscience at the university of chicago. we were just making jokes about the medical milieu. he was very funny. so you hit it off right off the bat? we went out to dinner. it was thursday. i spent all weekend with him and by monday i was enamored and smitten. within months michelle had moved out of her parents home and into mark s townhouse in chicago. the whirlwind was on, athens, miami, caribbean sunsets and french champagne. michelle, you look beautiful. for a southwest chicago girl whose father was a pipe fitter, this was head-turning stuff. just want to say this is the best vacation ever. i love you, baby. her new love was a philosophy quoting poetry writing renaissance man.
i didn t find out anything about diamonds until after he had left. diamonds, light, untraceable. just the kind of tip that s found in a book michelle discovered among mark s things after he left. michelle came to see that her husband had been planning his vanishing act for months. he had apparently packed two huge suitcases full of water filtration systems, gps equipment, language tapes. all types of bizarre things, and he shipped one of the bags to kahn and another bag to athens. a meticulous plan, perfectly executed, though even in hindsight michelle now remembered how nervous he had been on the day they flew to greece. he was yelling at everybody and he s, like, i have to make this flight. i m like, we re not going to miss the flight. we re not late. he was just completely uncontrollable in the airport. oddly enough, even knowing
he professed his love in a poem. you had an unbelievable life. it really was, yeah. like it was just so romantic when i first met him, it was awesome. and then things just got, like, exponentially more outrageous as time went on. outrageously good. yeah. for instance, instead of simply popping the question to michelle, mark flew her to rome. he had a driver bring her to meet him. mark dropped to one knee and presented her with an enormous ring while a group of minstrels he had hired serenaded them. i was crying and everybody in the piazza was clapping. it was a beautiful moment. their wedding in 2001 was actually a three-act extravaganza. first a small wedding in chicago s botanic garden held solely for the purpose of allowing michelle s father, who was dying of cancer, to walk her