Even at eight or nine years old, I understood that she and this man must be having a physical relationship, but I never saw them touch each other. No kissing, hugging, snuggling, lap sitting, even when I caught them off guard as I tiptoed into the living room, curious about their brandy snifters and the meals she made for him with names like coq au vin.
Their affair went on for three years. I knew that my mother and I—each in her own way—dreamed that one day he would leave his wife and children. Finally, he did separate from his family, moving into an apartment in Marina del Rey, where all divorced fathers seemed to live. From his deck, you could see white sailboats moored in a row of slips.
One school night we went to his place. While I did my homework, my mother made dinner in his efficiency kitchen. The two of them talked as he sat on a barstool across the counter from her, drinking scotch, still in his charcoal-gray suit pants, monogrammed shirt, and silk tie.
After dinner I watched television in his bedroom while they stayed in the living room sipping amber liquid. At some point I must have fallen asleep. I woke to the man sitting at the edge of the bed, telling me that everything was okay but my mother wasn’t feeling well. That we’d be staying the night.
Behind him I could see her standing in the hallway, her naked body so white it almost glowed. She weaved slightly. He called to her a soothing, “It’s okay. She’s okay.” I’d never seen my mother drunk. I’d never seen her out of control like that. But even in her condition she was compelled to check on me. He tried to block my view of her, wanting to protect us both.
I was never sure why she and the lawyer broke up, but I didn’t see her undone like that again until my father came back into our lives. I think now that’s why she kept men at bay during most of my childhood. It wasn’t that she didn’t want them, didn’t yearn to have them love her as much as I wanted such love. It was that the men she loved couldn’t be trusted. They said they loved you, but even after they left their wives they didn’t marry you. They said they loved you, but then they turned dangerous and possessive.
My mother was sheepish about taking up with my father again. Other than that first morning when I’d seen them on the couch, they kept their physical affections mostly hidden from me. But one night that same summer, when just the two of us were heading home from work and we stood waiting for the elevator, a bright drop of blood splattered to the marble floor between her feet.
“Oh my god,” she said. She dug in her purse for a tissue and wiped it away. “I’ll be back,” she said, heading for the ladies’ room. When she returned, she pushed the elevator button again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was so embarrassing.” She watched the light above the elevator door making its way to our floor. When at last it dinged and the doors slid open, we stepped inside. As the doors closed, she said to me, “It must be the IUD.”
She was only thirty-six at the time. It stunned me to think they could actually have another child if they wanted to. They could actually get married and do it all again.
Reading the Signs
IN THE BEGINNING, I HANDLED MY PARENTS’ REUNION by turning it into a story. We all did. Nick was no longer the villain, but rather he and my mother were star-crossed lovers.
From my mother’s point of view, if she ended up with my father it meant she’d never been wrong to choose him in the first place. Nick said they were like the twice-married movie stars Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner; that was before the actress drowned off Catalina Island and her husband became the chief suspect.
Knowing I would be leaving for college soon, I convinced myself that my mother might finally be taken care of— might finally have her life happily ever after so I could move on to find mine.
Like children playing house, we took on cardboard cutout roles: You be mother. You be father. And I’ll be the baby. My mother dragged out that box of mementos that used to be on our living room shelf—the one with the pressed prom corsages and the wedding album that had always depressed me. At some point, she’d stuffed it under her bed along with a pink suitcase filled with my old Nancy Drews and international doll collection.
Among the photos were a few of me as a baby when we still lived in Las Vegas. In one, all you could see were Nick’s arms holding me high above his head as he lay back on their bed. My mother had once told me that later that day he’d gone to Galveston, Texas, with friends. It was “Splash Day,” when the Texas beaches opened for Spring Break. He’d left my mother alone to care for me while he played beach blanket bingo with co-eds.
The three of us gazed at the photos together. Instead of hearing her stories about his jealousy and her bruises, they reminisced about the baby shower thrown for her by Nick’s friends. They left out the part about his not allowing her to invite her own friends. These were the scraps from which my parents and I created a shared history.
I began calling him “Dad,” even though the feel of the word in my mouth was as foreign as a new language. I’d find excuses to say it in the grocery store, at a ball game, at the dinner table. “Did you hear me?” I’d ask.
“I heard you,” he snapped one day. “But if you have to say something about it every time, what’s the point?”
Didn’t he know the gift I was bestowing on him—the honor of holding that title, especially now that I knew his return had always been about my mother? Perhaps those harsh words of his were the first sign of things to come.
The summer Nick came back into our lives, my mother had already scheduled our most ambitious trip yet—a two-week cruise around the Greek islands followed by another two weeks in Egypt. He began to sulk as our departure date approached. The night before we left, we opened the apartment door to find him standing on the welcome mat, hands tucked into the front pockets of his jeans, smirking as if we couldn’t have guessed who it was.
My mother—still wearing a silk dress from work—kissed him on the cheek and turned back to pondering her open suitcase on the bed. He followed close behind. As she flitted from dresser to closet, he grabbed her around the middle before she sailed by. From my perch on the velvet settee in her bedroom, I watched as he wouldn’t let go. “Will you stop,” she finally laughed, meaning it but also keeping her voice light.
Banished to the opposite corner of the settee, he reached an arm my way, screwing a finger into my rib cage to tickle my side until I laugh-cried and clamped my elbow down to make it stop. He teased her about the men who’d be after her on the trip. When she rolled her eyes, he shrugged without making eye contact and said, “That’s okay, I’ll be here waiting.” Unbeknownst to me, after I went to bed, he asked her to marry him.
As we toured the Parthenon, tried ouzo, and took each other’s photo at Olympia, site of the first Olympics, she silently considered her answer. If she asked the oracle at Delphi for guidance, she didn’t share it with me. Only later did she tell me she would have accepted his proposal if it hadn’t been for what happened soon after our return.
Part of me wishes I could remember the exact moment Nick got comfortable enough to let down his guard. When did he decide he no longer had to sell us on the kinder, gentler him? Or maybe he just got tired of not knowing where he stood. My mother held all the cards as he waited for her to give him her answer.
School had started again, and Nick took to picking me up most afternoons. He’d take me back to his house to watch movies. The house was modest, but its location with a view of the Hollywood Hills made it special. From the driveway, you could also see Sunset Boulevard below.
Nick’s décor was mostly baseball memorabilia. Friends with many of the L.A. Dodgers—Garvey, Buckner, Yeager— he had winning bats and signed balls displayed in a rack over the television. Around them hung photos chronicling his life after my mother had left him. A brief stint with the Pittsburgh Pirates farm team, headshots from his modeling days in New York City, a Pan Am ad campaign he’d done with his second wife, who was also a model.
As Cool Hand Luke or The Great Escape flickered onscreen, we sat on his b
ig leather couch and ate from a stack of Sara Lee chocolate cream pies he kept in the freezer. He dissected Steve McQueen’s acting and John Huston’s directing. That’s when he explained how Paul Newman submerged his face in a bowl of ice each morning to stay looking young.
As he switched from pie to beer, he took to schooling me on other kinds of facts. In his precise Kilgore, Texas, diction, he’d say: “Here’s the thing, Andrea. The thing you should know. No one knows your mother better than I do. Not her parents. Not you. She has always loved me. Never stopped. Not since she was sixteen.”
I’d nod. The next day or the day after, he’d tell me again. “I never stopped loving her and it was the same for her.”
Each of these declarations was a tiny crack in the fragile story we’d all cooked up. During one of those conversations did my face give me away? Did I give him an “if-you-say-so” shrug? Longing to say, “But, but, wait, what about the fact that you were an asshole to her? What about how you bullied and threatened her?” Part of him must have known how much I wanted to say, “Nah ah, she loves me more.” But I bit my tongue.
Maybe I finally baited him. Perhaps as he got more comfortable, coiled more deeply into the corner of the couch, and drank not one or two beers but three or four, his placid veneer crashed under the weight of all the little cracks in our story. One thing I know for sure: Since the day I’d met him, I’d been both afraid and excited to see if the vicious man my mother had described would ever show himself to me.
One day, he did.
If I’d been paying attention, I might have caught the exact moment he wasn’t playing anymore. I would learn to recognize the signs soon enough. I would come to sense them the way a deer suddenly stills, looking up from the grass it’s been nibbling, ears pricked, sniffing the air for fire.
That first time, it likely started with a glance in my direction, as if he couldn’t quite believe the words that had just come out of my mouth. Disgusted, he would have looked away. He may have rapped his gold Tiffany signet ring against the brown glass of his beer bottle—reminding me that his gnarled hands had broken many faces. In the years to come, I would worry that those hands would pound me, too. The fear of that kept the air buzzing between us. I think he counted on it.
I would come to understand that the more he drank, the more injustices and hurts he internally catalogued: Why hadn’t I taken my shoes off when entering the house as he’d told me to? How dare I resent that he’d waited so long to show an interest in me. With his dead eyes and tense jaw, finally he would decide it was his turn to get back at me for these crimes. Then he would spring, saying whatever cutting remark came to mind. The uglier the better.
That first time he began to rage at me, he might as well have had me in his jaws shaking the life out of me. Accordingly, I went limp. I don’t remember everything he said. I can only offer examples from the store of barbs he hurled at me from then on:
“I bet you have those pale pink nipples. Am I right?” At seventeen, I would wonder if such nipples were bad, the least preferred.
“That shirt makes you look like a cow. Are you sure you’re not pregnant? Just fat, I guess.”
“You just don’t get it, do you? I’m a helluva lot smarter than you are.”
When he said these things, he’d stand over me—hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans, shoulders slouched and casual. Then he’d fling an arm out as if to say the hell with you as he delivered the final blow: “You don’t fuckin’ deserve to be in the same room with me.” He’d point at me. “Get out of my sight. Did you hear me? Get out of my sight!”
Later, I would boil with my own rage—didn’t he know he was the one who didn’t deserve me?
The night of that first outburst, my mother found me whimpering in Nick’s bathroom. She’d arrived and seen him passed out on the couch and me nowhere in sight. She’d finally found me sitting on the bathroom tiles, my back against the wall, still spent from sobbing and trying to make sense of the irony that I’d been out of his sight almost all my life.
After that, I understood better how my mother at sixteen had been taken in by him. I’d just as eagerly, just as willingly gone down those dark basement steps, hoping to find love at the bottom. I wanted this father of mine with my whole heart. But the Nick who at first had done everything he could to make me love him—that Nick disappeared that day. I rarely saw him ever again. Oh, the handsome charmer remained. It was just those dead eyes I had to watch out for.
Memory is a tricky thing. When I think of my parents getting back together, I remember all of it happening very fast. But when I line up the events that led to it—one domino next to another, I realize that my mother and father got married eight years after he came back into our lives. Eight years of dominoes clicking one against the other and finally crashing spectacularly.
After my mother found me in Nick’s bathroom, she broke it off with him. “I had no choice,” she said later. “I had to save us—twice.”
For years after that, they didn’t see each other. It was only when I was hundreds of miles away, and she thought she no longer had to worry about me, that she finally accepted my father’s proposal. By then I was twenty-five and had graduated from college. I’d moved to New York City and then to Santa Fe. By then, my grandmother had died. Sometimes I wonder if, had she still been alive, she could have talked my mother out of marrying him again.
My mother didn’t look me in the eye when she told me that she knew Nick was an alcoholic but she was marrying him anyway. She stared at the floor and wouldn’t own it, as if a force beyond her control pulled the strings. By then he was no longer going on auditions. Because of his alcohol-induced belligerence on television and movie sets, even his longtime agent and actor friends were reluctant to recommend him for parts.
When my parents remarried, I flew back to Los Angeles for their wedding—just a handful of us at the courthouse. Nick was so wasted after the ceremony that he mimed peeing in the set of fancy glasses I’d gotten them as a gift.
Maybe my mother just didn’t want to be alone anymore. Maybe she thought marrying him again would make right their original marriage. Maybe she thought it was okay because now that I was gone, he could only hurt her. Or maybe he really was the love of her life, and I never would understand because my father was right—he knew her better than I did.
Part II
Saviors
AUSTIN, TEXAS, WAS A PLACE MY BOYFRIEND WES ALWAYS went home to. We had been living in Santa Fe for almost two years when he decided it was time to return once again to his native city. This time, I went with him.
In Austin, we were staying with his friend Gene. Actually, with Gene and his wife. From the start, the wife had recognized us as moochers and didn’t want us in her guest room.
One morning, Gene quietly asked Wes if we would stay clear of the house for the evening because he and his wife were planning to have sex. They were trying to get pregnant, and he was coming home early because it was a good time of the month.
That night Wes and I snickered to each other in the car, which felt good because lately we hadn’t been laughing much.
Wes said, “God help us if we ever.”
“If we ever what?” I eyed him across the seat.
Without answering, he reached around the wheel, stabbing the key into the ignition. He listened to see if the engine would turn over. With the car safely idling, he looked at me as if he was still trying to decide, as he had with the car, whether he’d been saddled with a lemon.
While Gene and his wife tried to make a baby, Wes and I wound our way over Hill Country roads. Past the big houses in the grand gated subdivisions that stood in the middle of nowhere, but would one day be surrounded by more of the same—pale creamy buildings with gleaming hardware, over-sized doorways, and circular drives. Wes’s lawyer father lived in a house like that. When we came back to Austin, I think we both thought his father might give us such a house. I wondered if that was all it would take to end our troubles. If we had our o
wn house with guest rooms, would we be scheduling sex and making babies?
The road took us beyond the subdivisions to nothing, nothing but rolling hills and darkening lakes. All of a sudden through the car window, one of those breath-catching spots appeared like a painting—a slick of glassy blue beyond smooth white rocks. The kind of view that begs you to stop being you and disappear right into it.
But then Wes ruined it. Squinting one eye shut and pointing to a rocky cove, he talked about swimming there nude with girls as a teenager. I pictured him long-legged and brown, slipping out of his frayed cut-offs with girls who would do that kind of thing—swim naked with boys in the open, their breasts skimming the water, where others might see and judge. I knew that even now I was not such a girl, and knowing that made me pouty and reckless.
Each time the road curved, I looked over the edge and imagined the car flipped like a bug, almost wishing it. But two years before, when I was still living in New York City, if you’d asked me to make a wish, Wes would have been it.
Wes’s mother fixed us up. I didn’t realize until much later that she did it because she wanted me to fix him up.
Wes was tall and good-looking—a long drink of water. Attractive enough to be disarming but not so pretty as to be intimidating. He was a chef who’d been written up in The New York Times as an up-and-comer specializing in the new Southwestern cuisine craze. He was also too smart for his own good, capable of so much and therefore unwilling to do the work mere mortals never question. Admitted to the University of Chicago at sixteen, he’d lasted only a year before he’d gone home to the University of Texas. A few credits shy of his mathematics degree, he dropped out and found his way to cooking.
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