Fiction Ruined My Family (19 page)

As for my mother, she didn't look homeless, but she was becoming less and less of a mother you could take out in public. She had a uniform: a black pencil skirt, gray cashmere cowl neck, long pearls which always got hooked on one breast, black stockings, stylish black heels (high), lit cigarette, jangly charm bracelets of her mother's, and gold bangles and gold and platinum rings. She would no sooner wear silver than she would a candy necklace. This was what she wore when she went out, except sometimes she lost part of her outfit.

That summer Kate had a bunch of friends get married. By the fall, she needed to buy some wedding gifts and she wanted to hit the boutiques along Bleecker Street. She called Mom and they decided on lunch at Tartine and then some shopping. Mom was wearing her usual outfit. After lunch they hit a slew of stores up and down Bleecker. Coming out of Pierre Deux, Mom shrieked, “Oooh! Where's my skirt?”

Kate looked down and Mom was indeed missing her standard size-one black pencil skirt that she had been wearing earlier in the day. The rest of her uniform was intact: poof of faux-blond soufflé balanced on top of a gray cowl neck, long strand of pearls, black opaque stockings showcasing a pair of gams that would have made Ann Miller get a desk job, black undies underneath the stockings, and three-and-a-half-inch Joan & David black pumps.

“Mom!” Kate yelled, totally startled and baffled. “Where's your skirt?”

“I don't know, Kate. It was here a minute ago. Oh, for God's sake.” Mom lit a cigarette to calm herself and focus on the case of the missing skirt.

“Were you wearing it when we left the restaurant?” Kate asked, panicked, looking through her bag for something to tie around Mom's torso.

“I must have been, don't you think?” Mom asked, less concerned about her current state of undress than intrigued by the puzzle of it all, as if it were just another trick Will Shortz had up his sleeve for her. Two young women walked by Kate and Mom, locking eyes on Mom's stockinged rear.

“Jesus, Mom. Should we get a cab?” Kate said.

“Are you out of your mind? That's a brand-new Calvin Klein skirt!”

Kate began huffing loudly. “Well (huff), I don't (huff-huff), Jesus, Mom (huff), I mean, Jesus.”

“I went to the bathroom at Tartine and I'm pretty damn sure I had it on when I came out.” Mom parked her cigarette between her lips and began running her hands up and down her sides and under her sweater. She felt something in her sweater and pulled it downward and out popped one black Calvin Klein skirt. “Oh, for heaven's sake!” Mom said, cackling with delight. “Here it is, Kate!”

Kate cackled, too, as Mom pulled it over her hips and smoothed it down with her hand.

“I'd hate to think how many stores we were in since lunch,” Mom laughed.

“Yeah, I sorta thought of that.”

“Let's go have a beer at the White Horse.”

I took care of her Jack Russell, Emma, one weekend when she was in the hospital for one of her ailments. (She had surgery on both hands for carpal tunnel syndrome, which she believed she got from horseback riding; she had sciatica, a shooting pain that began at the base of her spine and ran down both legs—a horrific pain that she said was relieved best by a drink; and something called spinal stenosis. She always had a headache and could take four aspirin without water, crunching them up in her teeth like they were pistachios; she had high blood pressure; she had shingles; she had an ulcer that Eleanor claims is when Mom's interest in salt, coffee and spicy foods really took off. As for her beautiful blue eyes, she never let you forget one had a scratched cornea and one had a detached retina and she was legally blind. She also had “obtuse-angle” glaucoma, but she didn't need to smoke pot for it or anything, just to mention it whenever there was a break in the conversation. She was deaf in her right ear, she had depression, obviously, and took antidepressants.) Out on a walk, Emma pooped out a bunch of True Blue cigarette filters. When I told my mother about this, she just said, “Oh, that Emma. She just gets into everything.” Mom wouldn't acknowledge the dirty, depressing mess in her apartment, her cigarette-pooping dog or her drinking. Her dog walker talked to my mom and took Emma home with him for good one day. I think we all wished he could have taken Mom home with him, too.

Jed's family was normal compared with Mom and Dad. Then again, most people were normal compared with Mom and Dad.

 

 

 

Jed was also sober, which was adorable and exotic.

“He's a junkie,” I proudly described my new boyfriend to my friends.

“
Was
a junkie. He's been sober for a year. He quit dope at the Chelsea Hotel, where he was living.” I'd really never known anyone who did drugs. When I told my parents about him, they just couldn't put it all together.

“His parents live on Fifth and Ninety-third and he was a junkie, you say? That can't be right,” my mother said.

“He's sober now,” I said, but they had no idea what that meant. “We're all sober, honey, until we start drinking” was their understanding of it. I barely knew what it meant myself, because my mom had never gotten any sober time outside of a rehab.

Mom loved to emphasize the fact that he was a junkie, I suppose, because it made her feel better about her own drinking. Drugs were really bad, she implied, as she sat in her crummy West Village place, chain-smoking and drunk most of the time now. At this point she was forbidden to drink at any family events—no one would be around her if she was drinking—so she began transporting vodka in her big bottle of contact lens solution, which Dad squirted in his eye one day: “God damn it, Doris, what the hell is in here?” But drugs? “We don't do drugs, sweet pea. We're from Ladue.”

Jed's sobriety never even registered with my dad. My dad registered Jew even though Jed was about a quarter Jewish, Jewish-ish, and had never practiced Judaism. They both liked Jed a lot, everyone liked him. But where my mom saw junkie my dad saw Jew and after giving me a book of poetry by Ezra Pound became concerned, chronically concerned, that Jed might consider having Pound's work around an insult.

“I hope to hell I haven't offended Jed with that book of Pound I gave you. Just love him up to World War Two, before he began the anti-Semitic radio addresses and all that. I'm not saying anything good about Pound after World War Two, but before the war, my God. Give it a try. Is the Pound going to be a problem for Jed?”

Jed, like many people, would have no idea that the poet Ezra Pound was the Mel Gibson of his day, nor would Jed even identify as a Jew.

“No, Dad. It's fine.”

Jed and I were on a Somerset Maugham kick, working our way through everything he wrote, his short stories (
Rain
), his novels,
Of Human Bondage
and
The Razor's Edge
. My father thought he was a total waste of time. “You might want to try Proust again, Jean-Joe. I know you struggled the first time around. Give it another try.” Or what? I always wanted to say. I liked
Swann's Way
. I did. I just pooped out. Jed took me to Paris and I brought it with me, that's how honorable my intentions were, that's what an incredibly well-intentioned kind of reader I am. I was going to read it on my first trip to Europe as I ate madeleines and shit. I like Proust. I honestly do, I just got sidetracked. Distractée.

Jed being sober and me not being sober was, at first, our act. He's sober. She's a big ol' boozehound! They're Jed and Jeanne, the yin-yang, sober-sloshed couple of the year!

 

 

 

 

I QUIT IRONDALE, the theater company Jed and I were members of. Eliot, the artistic director had cast me as a baguette in the latest production,
Danton's Death
, and I called him up at home one night, demanding to know what his problem was.

“Jeanne, I'm sorry if you're upset. I know crowd scenes aren't the most challenging. I'm sure you'd like to do more but at this point I don't feel you're ready to speak onstage.”

Not ready to speak onstage. I was twenty-five. Under Eliot's tutelage I would be speaking onstage by what, thirty? Perhaps speaking and walking and holding my head up by forty-two? While I knew he was some kind of grant-writing, socially responsible woman-hater, I was also becoming aware that acting was a profession that would be filled with a-holes making all the decisions. Casting people. I had an agent but I wasn't tearing it up in the world of auditions. When I would go in for auditions I never showed my ass or body because I'm . . . stupid? Years later I would read that when she was starting out, Francis McDormand, the coolest actress ever, would wear what she called “cutlets” on auditions. Things she stuck in her bra to make it appear she had breasts. I never booked anything. Maybe I was stupid or maybe I sucked. Maybe I really sucked.

After I quit Irondale, I went to a theater school on Fortysecond Street, where I wrote a play. This play went over big. Randy, the director of the school, came up to me afterward and said, “Jeanne, this play was awful. I expected something great from you. What happened?”

There seemed to be such an easy answer to the question Could I write? Could I write plays and stories and be some kind of nonacting actor or performer? Could I be the next Elaine May? Could I do weird things like the performance artists I studied in college but perhaps not be so unfunny? The answer was: why bother? You've got this awesome, funny guy you love, he's rich, life is easy, you're good friends. Do this. Don't do what you don't know. You might fail. You might be alone. You'll definitely be broke. It seemed like an either/or proposition. I had no idea that people could be ambitious and happy, financially stable and creative, content and interesting, domestic and nonsuicidal.

Around year three of our relationship, Jed's sobriety began to wear on my nerves. And he began complaining about my drinking.

“You become a different person when you drink,” he'd say, pointing out what to me had always seemed like one of the benefits of drinking. He had a name for this other person. Queen Ida. Queen Ida was born one weekend in Kerhonkson, New York, at a friend's farm where I got looped on homemade moonshine that my friend's brother, a self-made redneck bluegrass music producer had whipped up while basting the pig he was cooking in a hole in the ground. Before we left New York for the weekend I had taken off my big toenail, ripped it clear off my foot, while getting out of the shower at our apartment. The pain was the worst I had ever known. My toe was a red, throbbing nerve member that could only throb and be elevated. I could not wear a shoe, and to put pressure on it, as in walk, was excruciating. So we drove up to this pig roast and I hit the moonshine. And then I decided to jump in the lake in the dark, whereupon Jed yelled at me and pulled me out. “You drunken maniac!” I limped around, gathering up my clothes, and put a towel around my head and went to find the family graveyard I had heard wasn't far away. Later that night the host, Brooke, gave me a cane of her grandfather's, and a persona was born: Queen Ida. The cane, the limp, the Hollywood head wrap, the drunken belligerence. The nickname grew faster than the toenail. We talked about her in the third person.

“Queen Ida was out last night,” he'd say at breakfast.

“Oh yeah?” I'd say, not looking up from my cereal.

“Yeah. She was a total pain in the ass. She was drooling and eating a chicken wing in bed. And then she thought she was gonna barf. I had to run and get a bucket.”

“I'm sure she just didn't eat enough, that's why she got so drunk.”

My friends and I took to calling Jed “Grandpa.” On a trip to San Francisco we bought him a key chain that said “Grandpa” on it. One weekend we went to California for a wedding and he forbade me to drink the whole weekend. It was honestly the worst weekend of my life.

 

 

 

 

IT WAS GETTING TOUGH to fit writing into my schedule. Between the drinking and the hangovers, there was just barely enough time to squeeze in sex with my ex-boyfriend and then running around trying to find the perfect turtleneck to wear in April without Jed suspecting I had a hickey underneath. I hated myself. I hated that I lied to someone I really loved. I hated that I wanted better sex than we were capable of having together. I thought if I was a better person I would be okay with mediocre sex. I thought only selfish people insist on fantastic sex all the time. I also thought that creative people must have mind-blowing sex. This was just what they did. Constantly. Sex and art are made from the same source material—insanity. They need hot, hot sex constantly or they become normal, noncreative people. Mostly, though, I couldn't get the writer ex-boyfriend out of my mind. Okay, he was a fitness writer, but he'd gone to Columbia's MFA writing program, briefly, and he was published. And I now lived two blocks from him. And he dedicated his book to me. A book about how to achieve great abs, but it was a bestseller. He was a gay icon, a straight icon, every guy wanted to be Alex. Or at least they wanted to be his stomach. The cover was a giant close-up shot of his sweaty six-pack abs. The dedication read “To Jeanne Darst, for almost killing me but in the end making me stronger.” Okay, it wasn't the Great American Novel dedicated to me, but it was the bible of the midsection. How was I to know the second-printing inscription would read “To Natalie Mayer, for almost killing me but in the end making me stronger.” I should have known. It's a terrible sign, Nietzsche-paraphrasing, a woman should never ignore this.

Back when we were dating he told me his father was a confidence man and that he worked for his dad selling fake concert tickets over the phone out of hotel rooms in Arizona during summers off from college. Alex was so broke it was ridiculous. For my birthday he gave me a package that consisted of: three library books (was I supposed to return these, or would he?), some hangers, an orange, and a shirt I had left at his house. You better believe the sex was incredible.