Shadow of the Dolls

by Jacqueline Susann

  Eventually she called Lyon, asking for money. Their lawyers met for three hours, at the end of which various financial arrangements were made. Their money was divided into seven separate accounts, three of which were held in trust for the children. There was an account from which all their shared bills would be paid: the mortgages, the taxes, the insurance, and the salaries for the household staff. There was an account in Lyon’s name only: half a million dollars free and clear. There was another account for Neely: a million dollars she could spend as she pleased. The rest of their assets, including their stock portfolio, could not be touched by either of them. The houses were heavily mortgaged, but the stocks, mostly high-growth tech investments, had multiplied in value many times over. There was no talk of divorce. Lyon made a down payment on a condo in Brentwood and lived there with rented furniture. He didn’t want to see anything that reminded him of his wife.

  No one heard from Neely except the bankers: any withdrawals of ten thousand dollars or more (of which there were plenty) required special approval. Photographs of her appeared occasionally in the tabloids. She was in Switzerland, getting injected with an experimental synthetic hormone that would reverse the aging process. She was in Greece, living on a yacht with some of the least popular members of the English royal family. She was in the Virgin Islands, hanging out with an aging rock-and-roll band who was recording a new album.

  As the months wore on, the photographs grew fuzzier and fuzzier. The information became less reliable. And Neely gained weight. Her publicist, kept on a generous monthly retainer, explained that Neely was taking some time to think about her priorities after an exhausting year in which her marriage had run aground. Her fans were sympathetic. Hadn’t she fallen apart before, and hadn’t she always come back? Every so often there would be a rumor: Neely had rented a sound studio somewhere in Ireland, Neely had reserved a week at Madison Square Garden, Neely had lost eighty pounds on the sleep cure and was planning a surprise appearance at the Academy Awards.

  She was away for over a year. She finally surfaced at Heathrow in August, waiting in line for a ticket to Kennedy.

  The clerk didn’t even blink at her passport.

  “Any way you could upgrade me to first class?” Neely asked. “I’d really rather fly in first class.”

  “First class is sold out,” the clerk said without looking up. She punched her keyboard. “There’s only one seat left on your flight. Unless you want to wait till tomorrow.” She handed Neely her boarding pass: 34D.

  Neely went to the bar and bought herself a martini. 34D! That wasn’t a seat, that was a bra size. She tried again at the gate, marching right up to the front of the line.

  “Excuse me, we’re all waiting,” someone said to her.

  “I can see that,” Neely said. She turned to the clerk. “Hi, I’m Neely O’Hara. I was hoping you could find me a seat in first class.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ll be with you in a minute, I’m in the middle of helping this gentleman,” she said.

  “It’ll just take you a second,” Neely insisted. “I’m Neely O’Hara. Maybe you didn’t recognize me. I always fly first class.”

  “I’m really sorry, but you’ll have to wait like everyone else.”

  Like everyone else: the three ugliest words in the English language.

  “You don’t understand,” Neely said. “This is really important.”

  But there was nothing available. She made her way through first class, hoping that if she walked slowly enough, someone might recognize her, someone whom she might be able to talk into switching seats.

  No one even looked up from their drinks. She squeezed into her window seat and rang for the flight attendant.

  “I’d like a bottle of Stoli with some mineral water on the side,” she said.

  “We’ll be bringing the cart through in about twenty minutes.”

  “But I always get a drink before takeoff.”

  “Welcome to coach,” someone yelled over from the bank of seats in front of her.

  She palmed a couple of pills. Someone behind her reeked of Obsession … they sat on the runway for twenty minutes … a baby started to cry … her legs were cramping up … takeoff was bumpy … Neely realized she wasn’t going to make it. They were going to have to let her off the plane … but they were already in the air … four more hours … she took another pill, and did her deep-breathing exercises.

  Finally the beverage cart came through. She ordered four bottles of vodka, just in case. There was an announcement about turbulence and keeping your seat belt fastened. The air reeked of diapers.

  Neely got up and wobbled toward the front of the plane.

  “Please,” she said to the attendant, “I have to be in first class. I’m not feeling well. I was supposed to be in first class. Can’t you find someone to switch with me? I’ll pay for their ticket. I’ll pay double.”

  The attendant asked whether she needed medical attention.

  “I don’t need a doctor, I just need a seat in goddamn first class!”

  Another attendant came over and they walked her back to her seat. The flight wasn’t even half over. The baby wouldn’t stop crying. She opened another vodka and turned her headphones to the easy-listening channel. They were playing one of her songs! She began to sing along.

  The woman next to her gave her a poke. “Do you mind?” she said. “I’m trying to sleep.”

  “In Las Vegas it would cost you a hundred bucks to hear me sing,” Neely said.

  “Another reason never to visit Las Vegas,” the woman said.

  They hit a bump and then another. It felt as though the plane were coming apart. She was going to die on this plane! The woman next to her began to pray. One more vodka … it was funny, when you really thought about it … it was the funniest thing in the world.

  At last they landed. They sat on the runway for what seemed like forever, waiting for a gate to become available. “We should just open the emergency exits and slide out!” Neely yelled. “Everyone in favor raise their hands.” The plane rolled up to a gate, and people began to shove their way into the aisle.

  “Hey,” Neely said. “You stepped on my foot.”

  “I didn’t feel anything,” the man said.

  “Oh yeah? Well, maybe you’ll feel this,” she said, pressing her high heel into his sneaker. On her way out she said goodbye to the pilot. “Thank you for the worst fucking flight of my life.” He sent a hand signal to the flight attendant, and she stepped forward.

  “Ma’am,” she said in a syrupy southern accent, “ma’am, do you need some help? Would you like us to call someone?”

  “Don’t touch me!” Neely cried. She went looking for her driver, then remembered she didn’t have a driver. She wasn’t sure where she was planning to go next. California! Of course! She would surprise Lyon. She couldn’t wait to see his face. So she was fat; he’d seen worse. He was still her husband, he had to love her. There must be plenty of flights going to Los Angeles. But first she had to find her luggage.

  The baggage claim area was filled with families hugging and kissing each other. There were children running around everywhere. There should be a rule, Neely thought, they ought to be on leashes. The bags came up the ramp and began circling around. All the suitcases looked the same. She grabbed a few that turned out not to be hers.

  “It was an honest mistake!” she yelled out. Finally she saw her bag. She went to lift it, but it was too heavy. She toppled over onto the carousel.

  “Whee!” she cried. People were staring at her and pointing. A woman in a navy suit and a man in a uniform came and helped her up.

  “Is there someone you’d like us to call?” the woman asked. “Someone in New York?”

  “I’m going to California.”

  They asked to see her ticket. She couldn’t find her wallet. Another man came over.

  “Stop crowding me,” she said. She began to feel dizzy. She sat on her suitcase. She felt as if she were about to black out.

  “Do
you know anyone in New York?” the woman asked again. “You really aren’t in any shape to fly.”

  Neely began to cry. Where were her pills? Where was Lyon? She had to get out of here. All these people were staring at her.… Then she remembered; it had been a long time, but she still remembered. She whispered the number to the woman: “212-555-9679.” Anne would come get her … Anne would take care of her … she always had.

  Lyon flew out from California to help Anne put Neely into rehab. They drove up to Massachusetts, listening to oldies stations all the way. Neely sat in the backseat and giggled.

  “I thought she would put up more of a fight,” Anne said to Lyon.

  “What choice does she have,” he said. On her first day back, Neely had been arrested for passing forged prescriptions at three pharmacies in Anne’s neighborhood under various assumed names.

  “I’m so fat now, I didn’t think anyone would recognize me,” Neely told the lawyer Anne had hired for her. It was rehab or jail.

  They were doling out pills to Neely, every hour on the hour. At the rest stops Anne accompanied her to the bathroom, to make sure she didn’t get into any trouble and also to keep her away from the newspapers. Pictures had been taken at the airport. The shot of Neely lying on the baggage carousel had made the front page of several tabloids. Her publicist had issued an unconvincing statement about a bad reaction to an over-the-counter flu medication. The late-night talk-show hosts were having a field day with Neely O’Hara jokes.

  They pulled up to the front steps. Neely began singing the theme to the old Dick Van Dyke show. “Dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah Dah-dum, De-dah-dum, De-dah-dum …”

  “Shut up, Neely,” Lyon said. He signed the papers quickly, without reading them.

  “You shut up,” she said. “It’s your fault I’m here. This never would have happened if I’d gotten laid properly.” She turned to the nurse and spread her arms wide. “Honey, I’m home!”

  It was harder this time around. By the end of the month she was clean. Her liver was shot, not from the alcohol, but from all the acetaminophen in the Vicodin. She had lost twenty pounds from the constant vomiting and diarrhea.

  “I feel terrible,” she whispered to her doctor. “Last time I didn’t feel this terrible.”

  The doctor explained what was different about recovering from an addiction to painkillers. And Neely had changed, too: she was older, and her body would not bounce back so easily.

  The clinic had changed as well. The arts-and-crafts room had been converted into a yoga studio. A nutritionist had overhauled the menu. The library was full of little books filled with bumper-sticker sayings. And worst of all, as far as Neely was concerned, was how much talking everyone was now expected to do. There were individual sessions with a shrink, plus group therapy, plus women’s group, plus family meetings. The list of rules had grown much longer. There was no sex allowed between patients, which was no problem for Neely: for the first time in her life, she felt too depressed and too disgusting even for that.

  Eventually she was transferred to a halfway house. Then there was a slip, and she was transferred back.

  “How long do I have to be here?” she asked Lyon.

  “As long as it takes.”

  “But I don’t have any money, it’s so expensive.”

  “We’ve sold some of the stock.”

  “Another month?” she asked. “I don’t think I can take another month of this. These people are so creepy.” She whined for another twenty minutes. Her therapist was a fool. Her roommate was a lesbian. She was more depressed than ever. “I want to come home for Christmas. Promise me I’ll be out by Christmas?”

  “No promises, Neely,” Lyon said. “I told you: as long as it takes.”

  She was there for a year.

  The only one who never flew back east for family therapy was Dylan. He had moved to Portland in early 1996.

  “It’s the land o’ plenty,” he told Judd. “Plenty of music, plenty of cheap apartments, plenty of willing women.” There were plenty of drugs, too. He was living off the money he had gotten from Lyon and Neely, and from filming occasional videos.

  Jenn called him the day before Thanksgiving. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “The usual,” he said. “Where are you?”

  “Wyoming.”

  “What’s in Wyoming?”

  “A shoot for Gloss.” She asked if he was free for Thanksgiving; she had met a man who was flying to Portland out of Jackson, and there was room on his plane. “I know it’s last-minute. I guess you have plans.”

  “No plans.” He gave her the address.

  She arrived on Wednesday afternoon. They drove to a strip mall and got high in the car before heading into the supermarket.

  “This is the biggest supermarket I have ever seen,” Jenn said. “What kind of stuffing do you want? I never knew there were so many kinds.”

  “The stuffing is the best part,” Dylan said. They picked up a small turkey breast, a few jars of gravy, and six bags of stuffing. By the time they got to the register, their large cart was full. Jenn got out her credit card.

  Dylan’s apartment was smaller than she expected. There wasn’t much furniture: an old sofa, a card table with four mismatched folding chairs, a king-size mattress lying on the bare floor. The bathroom was filled with things that women had left behind: toothbrushes, makeup, tampons, nail polish remover.

  “Why don’t you throw this stuff out?” Jenn asked.

  “You never know who might be coming back,” he said.

  The first night they ordered in pizza. Dylan didn’t remember Jenn being so talkative. After two beers there was no stopping her.

  “When I see the pictures, half the time I barely recognize myself. You wouldn’t believe how much retouching they do. They fix our skin, and they change the shapes of our bodies, it’s amazing, they can do anything with computers: put highlights in your hair, add cleavage, lengthen your legs, anything. Makes me wonder why they make such a fuss about what we really look like.

  “And that’s not even what the clothes really look like! If anyone buys clothes based on what they see in a magazine, they’re in for a big surprise. The stylist takes this tape and these clamps and pulls it all in from the back till it looks the way they want.

  “I thought Jackson would be fun, but it was just boring. There’s nothing to do there except shop for ugly silver jewelry. Of course in the photographs they’ll make it look really glamorous. But I couldn’t wait to get out.”

  “Well,” Dylan said. “I’m glad you came.”

  “A family Thanksgiving,” Jenn said. He gave her a sleeping bag and she curled up on the sofa.

  Dylan fell asleep first. She watched him for a while. She wished she hadn’t talked so much. She turned out to be more nervous than she expected. He wasn’t like the men she usually spent time with; she was used to a world where all she had to do was look pretty and the man did the rest. Tomorrow, remember to shut up, she said to herself, shut up shut up shut up. On Saturday she was flying back to New York. Two more nights. Two more chances to make him fall in love with me.

  She had coffee waiting for him the next morning. Dylan watched television, Jenn did the cooking. She found an extra bedsheet and draped it over the card table.

  “The cornbread stuffing is the best,” Dylan said. He hadn’t put on a shirt. Jenn could barely bring herself to look at him. “You know, I don’t think my mother ever cooked a single Thanksgiving dinner the whole time I was growing up.”

  “She was so busy,” Jenn said.

  “Busy fucking up,” he said. “You know she ran through over a million dollars in less than a year? And if you ask her how, she says she doesn’t remember. And it wasn’t just the drugs. She would go shopping to cheer herself up, she would drop like twenty thousand dollars in one afternoon at Armani, and then a few weeks later she’d have gained all this weight and nothing fit anymore, so she’d go out and do it again. She would buy all this jewelry, and then when she was high
she would give it away. And the money she spent on pills. That stuff is more expensive than cocaine. You know where some of it comes from? People steal it from their own families. Someone has some horrible disease, or they’ve been in a car crash, whatever, and their doctor prescribes all this stuff for them, and then someone in their own family, someone who is theoretically taking care of them, steals it for resale. Brutal. The government can say whatever it wants about this,” he said, waving at the bag of marijuana, “but the pill business is much worse.”

  “It’s a sickness,” Jenn said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Don’t make excuses for her. She’s a bitch. You had it easy.”

  “My mother isn’t exactly perfect,” Jenn said.

  “Isn’t she? Lyon thinks so. ‘Miss Perfect,’ that’s what he calls her.” He got up to put in a new CD. “What do you want to hear?” he asked.

  “Whatever you want.” All he ever played was Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen.

  “She ever going to marry that guy?” Dylan asked.

  “Nope. If you ask me, they’re permanently engaged. It’s been years, right? I think they only got engaged because everyone knew they were sleeping together.”

  “How old is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, your mother is still a fox. I saw her on TV last week, she looks good.”

  “Stop!” Jenn said. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “You have good genes. You’ll hold up well.”

  “I guess.” She had read somewhere that men always wanted to meet the mother, to see how their future wives would age. Consuelo Casablanca, she thought.

  The turkey made them sleepy. They fell asleep on the bed, too tired to turn off the television. When they woke up it was almost dark.

  “What do you want to do,” Dylan asked.

  “I don’t know. Go see a movie?”