Leggy Blonde: A Memoir (21 page)

I was nervous. I went into my room, very unsettled. And then I got a text. “Are you okay?”

It was Reid. He was the only person from New York who’d figured it out and realized I was in the eye of the storm. Reid was thinking about me, and he was concerned.

I was happy to see his caller ID, and called him right back. We
talked for hours. I was touched and soothed, and felt other emotions I wasn’t accustomed to. I felt protected. His voice alone removed my fear and relaxed me. By the end of our talk—I didn’t want to hang up—I was laughing off the storm, and said, “Bring it on.” Reid was the human equivalent of a bulletproof vest.

As it turned out, Dad was right. The hurricane was a washout, a tempest in a teacup. There was hardly any damage to property, and zero casualties. I could have stayed in Miami for another couple of weeks. But I was itching to return to New York.

•  •  •

Harrison and I got back into the rhythm of the city. He started nursery school. For the first time since he was born, I had some free time. I started hanging out with Reid—as friends. During the week, in the evenings, he took me to SoHo House, a downtown club where he was a member. On the weekends, we met up with Harrison and Veronica, who got along so well together. Reid and I weren’t dating as much as play dating.

Veronica was a baby still, barely two, an adorable ragamuffin with sweet eyes and wavy hair. Harrison had white hair and chubby cheeks. Seeing the two of them playing on the floor together was adorable. She was just so cute. I felt a maternal pull toward her. The four of us became a kind of family. Reid and I took them to plays, museums, the park, and art festivals all around the city. I was thrilled to have someone to do kid stuff with after taking Harrison around alone for years. I scoured the papers for activities for us. It was tremendous fun. Reid didn’t try anything physical with me. We just kissed on the cheek good-bye after each play date.

Reid and Veronica always came to our apartment. He was still living
with his soon-to-be ex-wife. Their apartment was on the market. Until it sold and their divorce was final and they divided the profit, they both had to stay put. Both of their lawyers advised them that the first one to move out, or abandon the marriage, would lose the apartment value and custody of the child. He and his estranged spouse, Jane, slept in the same apartment but in separate rooms.

Reid kept me apprised about his divorce. It escalated steeply while I was in Miami, with hurled accusations and vicious arguments. The venom and fighting were far worse than anything between Harry and me. They had explosions over meaningless petty stuff, like taking a bite out of the cookie dough in the fridge. Reid’s spending every weekend with a separated mom who had a son close to Veronica’s age certainly didn’t improve matters.

Once I phoned Reid at the office and he said, “Aviva, you can’t call me during work.”

I was shocked. Harry used to call me dozens of times a day to take a break from his bank job. Reid, however, worked hard at work, which was a highly attractive quality. But we were just friends. Divorce buddies. That was it.

One afternoon he and Veronica were leaving my apartment after a particularly nice day together. The kids had just finished a half an hour of jumping-on-the-bed fun. I walked him to the door. Reid asked, “So, are you falling in love?”

I turned purple. Then he quickly added, “With Veronica?”

It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. Unbeknownst to me, my feeling had been changing from like to love. He must have sensed it, and put me on the spot. I was exposed and at a disadvantage. I had to tamp down those feelings quickly.

At our next play date, I asked him, “So, what’s your type? Because I have a friend I want to fix you up with.”

He frowned. “I like petite girls.”

Petite?
I was five ten. Well, that answered that.

“My friend Lori’s small. She’s single and would be the perfect wife for you.”

Reid acted peevish for the next hour and left early with Veronica. I was so blonde I honestly had no idea why he got so angry.

He cooled on me for a week or so. But then we were back to being a faux family again. We met up on Sunday for breakfast at a coffee shop with the kids and a baby-sitter. The kids were running around the place, leaving Reid and me, and the sitter, at the table. Reid launched a complaint. “I’m spending all this time with you, but I’m not moving on with my life,” he said.

I asked, “Do you mean, like, S-E-X?”

He laughed. “Aviva, I think the baby-sitter can S-P-E-L-L.”

She nodded, sipped her coffee, and said, “Yes, I C-A-N.”

It felt like an ultimatum. If he wasn’t going to have S-E-X with me, he wasn’t going to spend so much time with us anymore. I started to get nervous. I did not want to be without this responsible, stable, calm, kind, protective, wonderful man.

Reid went to California for a week on a business trip. I had a lot of thinking to do. Neither of us was divorced yet. I was still wary of getting deeply involved. Now that we were such great friends, sex could bring us extremely close, which was scary enough, or it could destroy the friendship we had. My two closest friends who knew Reid, Krissy and Genifer, convinced me to go for it. When he came back from California, it was late October. He had a Halloween party to go to that night, and met me first for a drink. He had a ghost mask with him.

“We should give this a try,” I said. “But we’re not going to be exclusive. We are never going to get married. And we’ll always be friends first.”

He smiled and asked, “Can I kiss you now?”

Purple face again. After months of being friends, the sexual turn was too sharp. I said, “Go to your party. We’ll kiss next time we see each other.”

And that was exactly how it happened. We went on a date—no kids—and then came back to my place. We finally kissed and moved from the couch to the bedroom. Slowly, we got undressed and climbed under the covers. Reid rocked. (I would write more here but my children may Google this.)

During our next encounter, as I entered the bed, Reid asked, “What’re you doing?”

“I’m . . . isn’t it obvious? I’m getting into bed.”

“You left your leg on.”

As I had every single other time I’d had sex. “I like to keep it on.”

“Absolutely not,” he said. “We don’t need it.”

To this day, I don’t know if he said that for his pleasure or mine. The prosthesis had always been like wearing a big boot in bed. I’d never once even tried to take it off, or thought how rubbing up against it during sex would affect my partner. Reid was honest with me. And I was brave for him. I unlocked my leg, rolled down the sleeve, and was naked, really and truly naked, with a man for the first time in my life.

It was a revelation. I felt free, lighter than air. From that point on, when I got in bed with Reid, I’d just fling my leg off.

The sex was always amazing. After two weeks of having the time of our lives together, I said, “Remember when I told you we were going to date other people and that I didn’t want to marry again? Well, I changed my mind.”

It was all he needed to hear. Several months later, Reid called the
kids into the living room, and presented Harrison and Veronica with matching kiddie rings.

“These are brother and sister rings,” he said.

Harrison really got into it. He proposed siblinghood to Veronica. “Will you be my sister?” he said. Veronica let him put the ring on her finger and she returned the favor. I died of sweetness right there. After their little ceremony, they went off to play.

Then Reid took another ring out of his pocket. This was no kiddie ring. It wasn’t a big honking diamond either, which was a relief. I wasn’t a fan of diamonds. They make other women really happy, and that is great for them. Diamond engagement rings hadn’t worked out too well for me the last two times.

Reid’s ring was from the jewelry store Seaman Schepps. It had a center gemstone of yellow kunzite, with yellow citrines on each side. It was chunky, cool, and fun, not a serious, staid, predictable diamond. I loved it.

Reid got right to the point. “Aviva, will you marry me?” he said in the same no-nonsense voice he’d used to ask for my phone number at Bed Bath & Beyond nearly two years earlier.

I said, “Yes! Just as soon as I’m not married to someone else, I’ll marry you!”

The ring fit perfectly. The yellow stones were instantly calming.

It hit me that the greatest thing Reid could give me was a sense of calm. He represented stability, and security. What turned me off initially was what attracted me the most in the end. Along with being the first man to see me completely nude, he was also the first I called a friend before a boyfriend. He was the first who wanted to protect me. I felt like I was in high school all over again, like the luckiest girl in the world. Not only was I marrying a handsome, kind, brilliant
man, but he was so unspoiled, so different from anyone I had ever known. He was a real man with elegance and level-headedness. He put us all first and still does unconditionally. This was not a man who would travel a lot, or take Vegas trips or strip-club nights out. Reid was a solid, honest family man. And there was a huge bonus: Veronica. What a lovely, sweet, giving child who would be not only my daughter but Harrison’s sister. We would be a happy blended family. I just knew it.

M
om’s last vestige of normalcy was cooking breakfast for my dad. Mom had never been a morning person, but now that it was her most lucid time of the day she seemed to enjoy making eggs for her husband. Those breakfasts kept her holding on to the real world by a thread. When she stopped doting on George, that was it. Her last connection to a normal life was severed.

My father hired a full-time caregiver for her. She could no longer dress or feed herself. And yet, Mom still managed to give both her caretaker and Dad the slip, and sneak out to find alcohol. The nurse would say, “I turned my back on her for just a second.” She was like a hyperactive toddler in her pursuit of wine. Once my mom went to a bar and picked up the news broadcaster John McLaughlin (a resident in the building) and brought him to our apartment as if she had intimate plans! John brought my mother home to safety and obviously was not reciprocating her hazy overtures. John and I became lifelong
friends. He and I would have great talks on the beach together about politics and my mission for amputees.

The building in Florida was sort of like a country club. Everybody knew everything. My mother was the building’s alcoholic. She stumbled down the stairs, down the street, and went into the bars. Members of their community would help her home, or call the police. More than once, she wound up in the elevators naked. People constantly asked us, “Why don’t you
do
something?”

My father, brother, and I had forced her into five or six treatment centers, put her on medications, pursued dozens of sponsors, got her therapy, searched the house daily, hourly, for her stash. We’d begged and bribed her to stop drinking. Nothing took. She would go through the motions, or walk out of treatment and appointments, and start guzzling again as soon as she could get her hands on a bottle. People who judged had no idea how determined this woman was to drink. The final option was to go to court and prove she was a danger to herself. Then we could have put her in an involuntary lockup facility. My father just couldn’t do it. He said, “She’ll never get out. I won’t do that to her.”

Doctors told us that even if she stopped drinking immediately, her brain wouldn’t recover. The damage was permanent. If she got sober, she would still be delusional. What’s more, if she stopped drinking cold turkey, she might have a heart attack like Amy Winehouse. Stopping alcohol abruptly was more physically dangerous than stopping heroin abruptly. Serious alcoholics needed alcohol to physically survive. Every road was a dead end.

What was the lesser of two evils? If we refused to let her drink, Mom sneaked out, ran into traffic, menaced the neighbors, sometimes verbally attacking them, and took the police away from other duties. If Dad gave her alcohol, she’d stay put, but he’d be directly contributing to the disease that turned her brain to mush. Dad made
the difficult decision to just give her alcohol. When she left the apartment, she was risking not only her safety but the safety of others. If she drank at home, she was only endangering herself, maybe. He convinced himself that by supplying her with wine, he was protecting her from the fatal heart attack. That was his logic. He gave her cases of wine to keep her in check. Mom would still hide her bottles and drink secretly. The habit was so ingrained that even when it didn’t matter anymore, she kept up with the pretense.

We argued about it. I knew he had his reasons, but giving alcohol to an alcoholic seemed like exactly the wrong thing to do. I pushed for involuntary rehab. But I knew that, too, would be awful. Mom was confused, and could barely speak. She didn’t always know who we were, or where she was, what she’d done yesterday or last week. Whole days would go by and she’d sit in Dad’s office without moving or speaking. She would grind her teeth a lot, very loudly. She sat in the dark, an outline, a shadow of the great beauty and doting mother she used to be. She’d had impeccable style and taste, despite having grown up with nothing. She was always kind and treated every single person she met with great sweetness and dignity in part because she never forgot where she came from. This stunning, elegant, talented, beloved woman was brought down by addiction.

Even in the worst of her dementia, Mom had moments of clarity. During one lucid glimmer, I said, “If you don’t go to a treatment center, you’re going to die.”

She barely glanced at me with blank eyes and said, “Maybe I want to die.”

One of the final-stage symptoms of Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome was apathy. Mom had stopped giving a shit. This was the end of hope. It fell way below rock bottom and there was nothing we could do about it.

•  •  •

“Your mother has a stomachache,” said Dad. He called me at home in New York. Reid and I were newly engaged.