Chanel Bonfire (10 page)

“So who wants to go first?” Nat asked. There was a silence, then Nat said quickly, “Okay, I’ll go.”

We smoothed out the sand and sat in a circle. Nat placed the bottle down. On the first spin it pointed to Tommy.

“Hey, no way am I kissing you.” Tommy guffawed. We all laughed. I nervously wondered who was going to get kissed first. The bottle spun again and pointed at Robbie. I felt a shiver of disappointment.

Robbie lifted her face up, going in for the lip-lock, when suddenly gunshots rang out over our heads. Instinctively, we all ducked down, only to be hit with a huge searchlight beam and then surrounded by men in burnooses armed with rifles yelling in French.

“Halte!
Stop!
Cette zone est interdite!”
they shouted.

Squinting in the intense light, we all raised our hands like we’d seen in the movies. More men rode up on horses. They had rifles, too. Combining all our years of French to aid in translation, we figured out that the beach was off-limits at night and had to be patrolled to keep away the boats with drug runners on them.

“Oops,” said Robbie, her eyes wide.

“Pardonnez-nous, s’il vous plaît,”
uttered Nat meekly.

Tommy, scared shitless, was crying, ropes of snot coming out of his nose. “Omigod, they were gonna kill us,” he choked out.

“Qu’est-ce que vous faites ici?”
the men demanded.

“Nous sommes désolées, messieurs,”
I whispered.

The men then smiled, lowering their weapons and patting us on our heads, as if we were lost children. It then occurred to me that I had peed in my pants. We stumbled back to the hotel and went straight to our rooms, where Robbie and I sat watching Moroccan TV in French.

“I can’t believe I didn’t get to kiss Nat,” Robbie pouted.

“Yeah. Too bad.” Of course, I was happy because she hadn’t.

When Pop couldn’t find what he was looking for, we said a sad good-bye to the boys, regretting the kisses we never got to have, and headed off across the Atlas Mountains in the washing-machine car. After a dusty drive with many goat and camel sightings, we arrived at the eleventh-century walled city of Marrakech. Always a famously exotic city, Marrakech, in the late sixties and early seventies, was a symbol of every Westerner’s romantic, hashish-fueled dreams of North Africa.

We checked into the best hotel in the city, La Mamounia, just inside the city walls. La Mamounia was a rose-colored stone palace that had been built in the 1920s by a prince; it was surrounded by a lush two-hundred-acre garden. My sister and I had a room with a terrace that looked out over the agaves and bougainvillea and the palm, olive, and Savoy orange trees that surrounded the hotel.

With Mother and Pop we walked through the twisty streets of the city, with three or four children hanging on each arm, begging for money. Moving like a big protozoan, we toured Jamaa el Fna, the enormous square with snake charmers, chained monkeys doing tricks, and camels and donkeys for sale. From there we went to the souk, where the blue- and red-colored yarn dyed for carpets hung to dry on racks suspended over our heads. We visited the famous Koutoubia Mosque and the tombs of the Saadian, where the
sultans are buried with their wives and children. Then we went back to the hotel and swam in the pool with Petula Clark’s children.

“Go make friends with those blond girls,” Mother had urged as she narrowed her eyes, scoping out the situation. While Mother pretended to take pictures of us while we cavorted in the pool with our new friends, she was really photographing Petula Clark’s handsome Swiss husband, who was playing Marco Polo with us.

At dinner, we ate pigeon pie spiced with cinnamon, but only after Mother assured us it wasn’t the kind of pigeon you saw in Trafalgar Square. Pop laughed and ordered another bottle of French wine. The waiters sprinkled lavender-scented water on our hands at the end of the meal. We were like any happy family on an exotic vacation.

Then, Mother ran into an old flame from New York in the lobby, Eliot Wyden, and greeted him too affectionately for Pop’s liking. Mother had considered marrying Eliot for a brief time after her divorce from Pop. But problems arose when it turned out Eliot’s mother disapproved of a multiple divorcée saddled with two children. Mother decided that she couldn’t be married to a man who still cared what his mother thought, and besides, she didn’t want to give up her alimony.

“Good Lord, Georgann, what are you doing here, of all places?” Eliot wetly kissed her cheek and thrust his big, floppy hands into the pockets of his Brooks Brothers blazer. I had always thought Eliot looked like a thumb. He was somewhat featureless and hairless.

“How is your mother, Eliot?” Mother was trying to postpone introducing Pop and wondering how to do so.

“She’s dead!” Eliot blustered cheerfully. “Hit by a taxi last year crossing Madison.”

“How awful. I’m so sorry,” Mother said, her eyes sparkling the way Holly Golightly’s did when she met Rusty Trawler, the richest man in America under forty.

“I would love to take you to dinner.”

Mother laughed, looking over her shoulder at Pop. It was a tempting offer.

“Why don’t you call me, Eliot, when you get back to the city?”

Pop looked furious and stomped off to the bar.

From that moment on, our meals together were either heavy with silence or fraught with sniping comments from the up-until-then happy couple. Robbie and I were on Pop’s side. It seemed to us that if Mother was sleeping in the same room with Pop, she shouldn’t flirting with some old boyfriend, or anyone for that matter.

One morning, Mother and Pop didn’t show up for breakfast. I went up to their room and knocked on the door. A little, round Moroccan woman in a pink maid’s uniform answered the door. She said nothing to me, but turned and went back to her work. The maid knelt on the white carpet, scrubbing at a dark stain. I noticed that a pane of glass in the French window that led out to the terrace was broken. A brown trickle led from the window to the bathroom. I could see blood on the sink and on some towels on the floor.

The maid looked up at me, clearly unhappy with the mess she had to clean up. I could hear my heart inside my head.

“C’est du sang. Très difficile à enlever.”
She shook her head and clucked her disapproval.

I was trying to stay calm and guess what might have taken place at the same time.
“Où sont ma mère et mon père, madame, s’il vous plaît?”

“À l’hôpital, mademoiselle.”
She said something about an accident.

“Merci, madame.”
I raced downstairs to the lobby, where I literally ran smack into Mother, looking as if she’d been up all night. She lifted a trembling hand up to her sunglasses and pushed them closer to her face. I searched her face and wrists but saw no blood or bandages.

“What’s happened? Where’s Pop?”

“He’s fine. We had an argument, that’s all.” I followed her into the bar, where she ordered a bullshot—a 1970s pick-me-up like a Bloody Mary, but made with beef bouillon.

“But I saw your room,” I whispered, standing next to her barstool, my eyes adjusting to the dark room.

“He punched his fist through the window. He was jealous about Eliot. He’d been smoking hash that he got somewhere. Thank God it’s all over now. Jesus, what a night.”

Mother lifted the salt-rimmed martini glass to her lips and sucked it down in one go. She then explained to me that even though Pop had no plans to leave his current wife, he didn’t want her seeing other men and she had no intention of
just being his mistress. So, they had reached an impasse and the deal was off. As a consolation prize, he had agreed to take out a life insurance policy in her name. This seemed to please her. She tapped on her glass, signaling the bartender for another. I didn’t understand adults. And suddenly I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be one.

Despite her numerous dalliances with men and women, many of them wealthier and younger than Pop, something special about him kept her coming back. And despite cheating on her, marrying one of her girlfriends, and possessing the means and the charm to capture any number of other women, Pop couldn’t leave Mother for good. Maybe she saw him as a lover and a father; maybe he saw her as the classic doomed beauty in need of a savior. I’d read enough Jacqueline Susann to guess at these motivations, but at fourteen I couldn’t possibly know. All I was sure of was that once again they had blown it—dangled a shiny idea of some kind of stable life for Robbie and me and then smashed it and left it for the maid to clean up.

I walked out of the tomblike darkness of the bar and into the Magritte blue of the Moroccan sky, where my bikini-clad sister lay on a chaise reading
Seventeen
magazine by the pool, looking like Sue Lyon sans lollipop in
Lolita
.

“So, where were they?”

“They had breakfast in their room,” I lied. Despite Robbie’s knowing-nymphet demeanor, I was still trying whenever possible to spare her the dirty details.

On our way home, Pop sat in the airport bar sullenly
drinking until our flight was called. I felt sorry for him. Sitting on his barstool, he seemed lost somewhere far away, like the little boy who had everything except the one thing he really wanted. Mother sat with us at a little café table, flipping through Italian
Vogue
, sipping white wine. She glanced over at him every couple of minutes, a faint smile curling up one side of her mouth.

After our return from Morocco, Tracy Turner came sashaying up to me in the hallway after gymnastics class.

“Hey, are you auditioning for the spring musical?” I noticed that she’d got blond streaks in her hair over the break, making her look even more like Farrah Fawcett.

“I don’t know, are you?” I asked.

“Yeah, I thought it would be fun. Wanna go to the tryouts together?”

“Sure.” We ran down the hall to sign up for a time slot. The show was
Bye Bye Birdie
, a zany 1960s show about an Elvis-type crooner who’s drafted into the army. I was too afraid to sing at the audition but got cast in a nonsinging role as a kooky old lady, Mrs. Peterson, in a pillbox hat with my hair sprayed gray. Tracy played one of the cute bobby-soxers, in a ponytail, saddle shoes, and a poodle skirt.

Being onstage, even in a small part, was an amazing experience. I recognized that wonderful smell and breathed it in deeply—it took me back to the days at the Guthrie, and North Carolina, and of course my father. Acting became a
way to be with him, to bring his faint memory back. The performing part was new and a bit difficult at first. I was always a little nervous before stepping onto the stage, but once I got out there, I found it exhilarating. I felt right at home, and my nerves vanished. I absolutely adored it and decided I would keep doing it, no matter what part I’d have to take.

A couple of shows later, I had a bigger part and acted with Lauren Bacall in the audience. We were doing
Inside a Kid’s Head
, and her son Sam Robards played my boyfriend.

Mother came to see me for the first time and brought Yul, the polo player. When they came backstage afterward, Mother was in a low-cut, sexy Givenchy black dress and Yul wore his dirty jodhpurs and riding boots fresh off his horse, looking like an ad for a men’s cologne. Even Lauren Bacall was staring at them and wondering if the glamorous couple were special “somebodies.” Through the years I would gradually become accustomed to being upstaged by Mother, but it was Lauren Bacall who made me first realize Mother hadn’t come to the play just to see me—she had come to be seen. And everybody looked.

Even though she experienced excitement and adventure partying all over Europe, Mother still craved more attention. The flame that was kindled at the trailer park, back when she was a small-town celeb in the local paper, still burned.

Encouraged by her singer friend, Marian Montgomery, Mother began to dabble with writing again—songs this time. Working together, they composed a song that Marian sang
on the BBC. Mother was thrilled when we watched Marian on the telly, in a long, white, fluffy dress, and a picture hat, sitting in a swing, singing their song “Summerhouse.”

Through Marian, Mother met the film director Silvio Narizzano and his lover, Win Wells, who was an actor, writer, and Silvio’s muse. Mother instantly bonded with Win because he was from Kansas City. He was very flamboyant, dressed in tight, pastel-colored trousers and flowered shirts, unbuttoned to the navel. Silvio was more refined and classy, in jeans and a tweed coat. Win and Silvio wore wedding rings and would sometimes have horrible fights at our flat. Robbie and I would hear them screaming at one another in the living room—a crazy blizzard of curses and epithets.

“Bastard! What are you? Some kind of sadist!” Win would scream at the top of his lungs. Robbie and I would give each other the “uh-oh” look and settle in for the storm.

“Calm down, darling!” Silvio would shout.

“Calm down! I never want to see you again!”

“Boys! Please!” Mother would yell. “I can’t hear myself think!”

At some point Win or Silvio would throw his wedding ring across the room or out the window. When, inevitably, they made up, Robbie and I would be called upon to hunt for the ring underneath furniture or out in the street.