He pulls his face from the ice and pats it dry. Tossing the towel around his neck, he goes into his bedroom and stares into the closet, surveying the contents. He selects his navy Dunhill blazer, a pair of tan slacks, and a pale blue shirt. He reaches in for one of three pairs of Gucci loafers, the pair that has held up the best. He never wears the others, but he keeps them because he likes the look of more.
It makes a certain kind of sense that he became an actor. His father owned the Pontiac dealership in their midsize Texas town. His granddaddy was a wildcatter in the oil fields. Each profession required its own brand of optimism and charm.
But Nick’s optimism has started to flag. His recent television pilot didn’t sell, and lately callbacks are few and far between. His second wife left him around the time his agent stopped calling.
While my father has been up and down on his luck several times since my mother left him, this time—broke and single again—he finally decides to track us down.
It had been sixteen years and my mother had hidden us well. We’d moved far from where my parents first met. She’d distanced us further with a new last name. So when Nick came looking for us again, he had to do some detective work.
He started with the California Department of Motor Vehicles. He told the clerk he was my grandfather. He said he couldn’t read the expiration date on his license. This was the late 1970s, before identity protection was a priority. The clerk happily looked up my grandfather’s license. No doubt my father said: “Now, darlin’,”—or “pal,” depending on the clerk’s gender—“what address do you have down there in your files? Let’s make sure you’ve got the right one.” And just like that, he had my grandfather’s latest address.
Address in hand, he called information and got my grandfather’s phone number. From there, my mother and I were just a step away.
I’m not sure what lie my father would have told if my grandfather, who despised him, had answered the phone. But when he called, my grandfather’s second wife was the only one home.
I bet it surprised Nick when a woman other than my grandmother answered. My grandparents were the type who seemed like they would stay together forever. But when I was still in elementary school, my grandmother had shown up at our door one evening. She’d made the three-hour drive from Fresno to Los Angeles. After thirty-one years of marriage, she’d left my grandfather.
She slept on our couch, slowly revealing the truth to my mother. My grandmother might not have wanted to see the world like her daughter, but she didn’t want to settle for a constrained life either. She’d been having an affair with my grandfather’s best friend, who was younger than my grandfather, had more money, and laughed more.
Ultimately, after staying with us for a few months and then getting an apartment of her own until the divorce went through a year later, she married him. She wore a powder blue suit, matching pillbox hat with a little veil, and an orchid wrist corsage. My mother made the three-tiered wedding cake.
My grandfather married again too. His second wife wasn’t as smart as my grandmother, and she had no reason to be wary of smooth-talking men who said they were old friends of the family. When Nick told her he’d gone to high school with my mother and wanted to catch up, she helpfully gave him my mother’s office number.
It was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I still spent my vacation working at my mother’s law firm. I’d graduated from stamping legal pads to reconciling bank accounts and messengering documents to the courthouse. When the phone rang that day, my mother and I had just finished lunch. We were sitting in her big office with a view of the Hollywood Sign in the distance. From across the desk, I saw her close her eyes as she took in Nick’s hello. Later, I would wonder how a person could so easily recognize a voice not heard in over a decade.
She stood up from her desk, pushing her chair back so it rolled across the plastic mat beneath it. “We don’t need anything from you,” she said. She was proud. Proud of all she’d accomplished. Proud of who we were.
Perhaps she’d always known this call would come and was relieved to finally get it over with. Perhaps she was grateful that he’d left us alone long enough for me to be almost grown. I think we’d both been waiting all those years for him to find us. All I can say for sure is that, as I watched my mother speak to my father, I wanted to know what he was offering. I wanted to know in the same way one is tempted by street peddlers whose coat linings gleam with deals too good to be true. As my mother stared out the window, she already knew how much I wanted to see him.
Cautiously, a few negotiating calls later, she set a time and place for my father and me to meet. It was her idea to be there, too, hidden from view. She would not come between us, but she would be there to protect me if things got out of hand.
“What do you think might happen?” I asked. Was it just that he could say something mean or upsetting? Or did she fear for my physical safety—imagine him clapping one hand over my mouth and dragging me away?
“I just need to be there,” she said.
Although I’d seen him on television, my father was not someone I would have recognized if I’d passed him on the street. Even on TV, I’d confused him with the young Nick Nolte in the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man. I’d wondered if he was the handsome major on the old Lost in Space show. But on the terrace of the restaurant where we met, I instantly knew him. And he knew me.
As soon as I came into the sunlight, he stood up. Was it his mother’s red hair he recognized or his own dark, squinting eyes? Maybe he glimpsed my mother in me—a resemblance that was becoming more pronounced the older I got. Did he see a quick mirage of her face in mine? He fingered the single button on his sport coat as he watched me walk toward him.
The time it took me to reach the table was excruciating, too long for him to be studying me. In his navy blazer and tan slacks, he was thinner than the beefy youth I’d seen posing in a championship baseball uniform. My mother kept a box of old photos on the living room shelf that had always put me in a black mood whenever I shuffled through them— her smiling homecoming princess face heading to her doom, his posturing bravado. Moving around the table now, his wiry frame made him seem slight even at the six feet I knew him to be.
“Hello, darlin’.” He laid his hand on my arm as if I’d always been his. When he bent to kiss my cheek, there was something silvery in his scent—metallic yet honeyed, like sweet bells. I wondered if this was the cologne my mother had always spoken of. Despite the Gucci loafers and gold signet ring, his East Texas twang remained.
When he pulled my chair out, I remembered to half-sit until the seat was fully under me. My insides fidgeted while he stood behind me. What imperfections might he see back there? In the ladies’ room a few minutes before, I’d only thought to check my front.
Across the table, he chewed on the corner of his mouth, pursing his lips and smiling at the same time. Then he smiled wider. Under his gaze and the perfect white of his teeth, I sat straighter, the thin straps of my sundress going taut against my collarbones each time I took a breath.
As he watched me, the tip of his tongue darted to the inside of his cheek, poking it, making me think he was on the edge of speaking.
Unable to stand it any longer, I burst out, “What?”
“Well, all I can say is it’s a good thing I didn’t run into you in a bar. I might’ve hit on you.”
My mother would not have liked him saying that. Not at all. But I smiled. I’d always been a bit player in their story, but in that moment I stepped on stage. He seemed to be telling me that I not only measured up to her—someone he had also wanted—but I was worthy of being the product of the two of them, my larger-than-life parents. With that wrong thing, my father had said just the right thing.
As I sat eating my chicken Caesar salad and he his turkey club, he smirked between bites, taking me in. We talked about movies. He was delighted that I’d seen the classic Gregory Peck western Yellow Sky. “Everyone has seen Giant and Treasure of
the Sierra Madre. But Yellow Sky—now that’s an all-time great.”
He told me how, when he was in his twenties, On the Road had inspired him to hitchhike down to Mexico and out to New York City, where he’d crashed on Sammy Davis Jr.’s couch. “Betcha didn’t know that about your old man, did you?” Neither of us said the obvious—I didn’t know much about my old man, period.
He’d met the Beatles while shooting a movie in Copenhagen. Like Hemingway, he’d been to Spain for the running of the bulls. I didn’t know how much to believe, but I wanted to believe, and clearly he wanted to impress.
Then he leaned in conspiratorially. “Now, tell me, are you a good girl?”
“I get good grades, if that’s what you mean.”
“Oh, that’s right, you’ll be going to a fancy college pretty soon.” Wanting to impress him, too, I’d told him about my plans for after high school.
“And you do what your mother tells you, I suppose?”
“It’s not like that.” I took a sip of my iced tea. “She trusts me. She doesn’t need to tell me what to do.”
He nodded as if he understood, but I didn’t see how he could. What did he know about having a daughter?
“She was like that,” he said. “Did what her parents wanted. Until she met me, of course.” He said this proudly, laughing, as if I was supposed to find my mother’s downfall and his role in it endearing. “Not me, though. My folks had to get after me. Sent me to military school twice.”
“Somehow I knew that.”
He smiled, biting his cheek again. “But you know . . .” His gaze flicked toward me. “Those good girls.”
“What?”
“Those good girls—they’re the ones who really want it. They’re the horny ones.”
“Gross.” I felt my face go hot. I was giving him the reaction he wanted, and he was enjoying it.
“It’s true.” He laughed. “Ask her.”
It was the “ask her” that got to me as I watched my father gobble up another bite of sandwich. In all my mother’s stories, I’d always seen her as the lamb headed to slaughter. But behind my blush, I knew he was right. We good girls did want it—I knew that from afternoons I’d spent in my room with my boyfriend before my mother came home from work. It was he who’d had to stop us from going all the way, he who hadn’t been ready for the force of my good girl’s desire.
I imagined the secrets my mother must have kept from her parents. The way these secrets made her feel reckless but powerful too. And then I could see it, my mother as the young beauty in all her photos, my father’s breath on her ear, stirring her desire. The story of the lamb taken in by the wolf began to shift in my mind. The two of them, how amazed they were that his arm could circle all the way around her waist. How sometimes, in the middle of her undoing, he would draw back, awed just to look at her. The lamb’s teeth sharpened as she moved in to kiss him, his wolf ’s fur soft and plush to the touch.
I saw my mother then, the sixteen-year-old good girl greeting her parents, swinging schoolbooks onto one hip, her fine legs carrying her smoothly on her way. Secret pride in his desire for her making her smile. Surely, this was love.
It was only later, after they married and she was far from her parents’ house, that the arms that encircled her waist would sometimes refuse to let go, squeezing tighter until the lamb was wild with the need to breathe. He’d snap her head back, gripping her skull in one large hand. Who did she think she was, he accused through gritted teeth. All because she’d said hello to a valet who’d opened her car door or because she’d been late home from work. “But I love you,” she’d need to say again and again, the words like a lion tamer’s chair holding back the beast. “I love you,” she’d say again. Only then would his grip loosen.
When lunch was over, I waited in the ladies’ room until Nick left the restaurant. My mother, who’d been watching us from across the patio through the potted palms, green eyes narrowed, came to collect me.
On the way home in the car, after a long silence, I finally said, “He was nice.”
“Oh, I didn’t think he’d be anything but captivating.”
“You didn’t?”
She looked at me. “It’s his way.” Turning back to the road, she seemed to see all the miles behind us and all the miles ahead. “He takes you in with casual charm and easy persuasion.” She seemed surprised that I hadn’t understood this.
I didn’t mention the way he sat across from me with his knowing pursed-lip smile. The one that made me look away and laugh. I didn’t tell her what he’d said about hitting on me. But as we drove on, I played the scene in my mind. I pictured myself mingling in the kind of upscale bars my father no doubt frequented. Despite my pale skin and baby-fat features, in my imagination I was smooth and comfortable. From among the tanned California girls with their bare midriffs and slim white pants, he chose me.
I took up with my father hungrily, in the way of new romance. Even my appetite evaporated like that of someone in love. I grew very thin in a matter of days. My mother gave me time off from my summer job to be with him. While she worked, Nick took me to ball games at Dodger Stadium, where we sat in box seats. We went to The Daisy on Rodeo Drive, The Ivy on Robertson, Dan Tana’s on Santa Monica Boulevard, and the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He knew everyone everywhere. We never sat down to eat. He was always just “stopping by to see a buddy.” He’d keep his gold-rimmed Porsche aviators on and order a beer. He’d introduce me proudly, saying, “Isn’t she pretty?” Sometimes, he’d buy me a Coke and say, “Get something if you want,” but I wasn’t hungry.
I was sated in a way I had never been. He was my Rosetta Stone, the clue I’d been missing all my life. Here was the source of my athleticism, quick temper, and big feet. Here were my brown eyes with flecks of green staring back at me. As close as I’d always been to my mother, I never felt we were cut from the same cloth. My grandparents had often compared us: As a child, my mother had been a delicate, quiet reader lost in books for hours, but my childhood nickname had been “Motor Mouth.” “We always knew exactly where you were,” my grandfather would say.
While my mother’s early teenage years looked like an episode of Happy Days, mine seemed more like an ABC After-school Special. She had been valedictorian and homecoming queen. Her portrait hung in two photography storefronts—the beauty in the window that the most popular boys in school rushed to ask out.
I struggled through anything that wasn’t a humanities class, and I’d had one boyfriend. He was the only guy who paid real attention to me in a high school where cool girls were blond and bronzed. Bespectacled and with the beginnings of a dark, downy mustache, he sat in the back of our honors classes making sex jokes with his friends. The other girls called him a “perv.” I kept my make-out sessions with him secret not only from my mother but also from my friends before finally dropping him, ashamed of what I wanted to do with him.
If he had been more acceptable in the eyes of my peers, would I have been as embarrassed by what I wanted? Was it my worry over being “loose?” Or was it that I didn’t have a more appealing partner in crime the way my mother had? I’ve often thought if I had known we were so alike—good girls who could be overcome by their desires—I would have felt more comfortable in my own skin long ago.
I had figured that the reason my mother didn’t keep me from seeing the man we’d been hiding from for so long was simply that she’d gotten tired of being on guard. That she thought he could no longer hurt us. But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all.
It took about a month before they could stand it no longer. A month before I understood that the days I’d spent with my father had been an odd kind of foreplay to the time when my mother would lie beside him again.
It started with a dinner to which I was not invited. I’d learn later that he’d been asking her out almost since that first call. She’d held him off but eventually agreed. “We just need to talk,” she told me. “Clear the air.”
I didn’t hear th
em come in after dinner. But the next morning, I just knew what I’d find. I crept out to our living room and there they were—entwined on our couch. She would tell me later that the couch—rather than her bed—was her concession to me. But I also saw it as a last-ditch attempt to deny what she’d been wanting all along.
Seeing them together, what I wanted was to hurt her. I slipped out the front door and ran. I wanted her to wake up, find me gone, and worry. I hoped she’d be sick about it.
When she finally found me a few hours later, I was sitting on a park bench. I hoped she’d searched all over, racked her brain to figure out where I’d gone, called all my friends looking for me.
She approached carefully, the way you might close in on an unbridled horse.
“You said you hated him.” I spoke without looking at her.
“I know,” she said. She moved closer.
“You said he was violent and vicious.”
“I know,” she said. She continued to creep forward until she sat beside me.
On their date, Nick had taken her to an Italian place popular with celebrities. He’d taken me there as well. When she scooted closer to me on the bench, she put her arms around me, sideways, her face very close to mine. As she tried to draw me in tighter, I smelled her breath reeking of garlic.
“Your breath. It’s horrible,” was all I would say. Quickly, she pulled back.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said again, both of us knowing her breath was the least of it.
I’d so rarely seen my mother with a man. I’d known her to have only one other real romance, back when I was in elementary school. He was a married lawyer who came to our apartment after I was supposed to be in bed for the night. Before he arrived, she would change from her secretary dresses and pantyhose into what she called a hostess gown or lounging pajamas—elegant clothes my Uncle Don, who managed a department store, got her at a discount. I remember in particular a pair of beautiful raspberry-colored pants and a matching blouse with rhinestone buttons.
I'm the One Who Got Away Page 5
