Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (19 page)

It seemed like the coastline was dissolving—and we were in the middle, on the front line. I stood at the huge windows, watching
the hungry waves eat up the beach. At high tide, they smashed and sucked beneath the house. Up the coast, Linda Ronstadt had students from Pepperdine University helping her sandbag her house; I pictured her in her Boy Scout hot pants and the students in regular Scout uniforms heaving away. Floating tree trunks and telephone poles thudded against the pilings. I’d lie in bed imagining one splintering and a corner of the house breaking off like a piece of cookie—the deck probably, and some of the kitchen with it.

I was sharing Griffin’s room now, as Tatum had come back. He had a king-size water bed, and we’d try hard not to move in our sleep so as not to send waves to wake the other. In my dreams, if I wasn’t driving endlessly to where Dad lay dying, I was adrift on an endless ocean, emotionlessly alone.

I got into Anjel’s car one morning, ready for school. I loathed my uniform, but it set me apart at Ryan’s house. I was a schoolgirl—not a thirteen-year-old glamour-puss; not a neglected, stoned surfer-child. Griffin and Tatum didn’t go to school. I did: I was normal. Plus, I was good at school.

Anjel swung her door closed and put the key in the ignition. She didn’t turn it. We sat there in the half-light of the garage, in the cocoon of the car, suspended between the house and the highway. The traffic roared outside the closed door behind us.

“What am I going to do, Legs?”

I looked at her face, expecting tears. I didn’t see any. She’d cried them all.

“Leave him.”

The answer was so obvious. But Anjel looked at me like I’d said something amazing.

“You don’t have to stay with someone who treats you like that.”

I didn’t want to stare at her, so I looked through the windscreen at the washing machine and dryer against the wall of the house, and the door into the hallway. I was half afraid that Ryan would come through it and see us sitting there talking. And he’d know what I’d
said. Actually, I hoped he would know, but that we’d be out of there first.

“I love you, Legs.” It seemed like the first time I’d seen her smile in months.

“I love you too, Jel.” She put her hand on the gear stick, as if she wanted to take some action and that was all she could manage in the small space of the car. I put my hand on hers. I couldn’t understand why she’d never thought of leaving Ryan before, and I didn’t know whether she’d do it, but at least I’d put the possibility in her mind. I felt like I’d given her a gift.

Gradually I seemed to be moving into Gloom Castle, because Griffin’s room at the Beverly Hills house was too small to share, and there was no question of Tatum—now that she was back—sharing hers. I missed Anjelica, and our expeditions to visit Jeremy in a bohemian section of Hollywood, with fancy old stucco buildings and a bookstore-café with swirly flyers on a pinboard, phone numbers everywhere. People seemed connected there, part of a web of things going on: not like the isolated compounds on the mountaintops of Beverly Hills. Jeremy’s paintings covered the walls of his one-room studio, colorful jungly African scenes, memories of his childhood in Rhodesia. One end was curtained off for his friend Tim.

“Tim can levitate,” Anjel told me almost in a whisper, the first time I met him. “He’s a master of TM. He can fly.”

I longed to see him fly, but it seemed rude to ask. I guessed it was something he did in private, behind the curtain. He was gentle, like a deer that you didn’t want to spook.

At the pharmacy in Beverly Hills, where Aunt Dorothy would take me to buy what I needed with the ten dollars a week she gave me, I saw the
National Enquirer
at the checkout. In the middle was a photo of Anjelica, with photos of Jack and Ryan on either side. Anjel’s head was lowered, her hair falling lank over her face as she
hurried into a doorway. The headline said she was back with Jack: and the photo arrangement had her skulking in his direction, with Ryan glowering behind her.

Anjel used to like taking me to Schwab’s drugstore and buying every trashy magazine, fashion magazine, and gossip rag on the racks. We’d get back to the beach house with twenty or thirty of them: the
National Enquirer,
the
Globe,
the
Star, Cosmo, People, Us, Playboy, Playgirl, Redbook, Harper’s Bazaar.
She’d dump them all on the bed in Ryan’s room upstairs, and we’d make our way through them, laughing at the gossip and comparing the horoscopes. I thought this was so chic and cool: it was sad to buy one magazine and take it seriously, but fun to buy them all.

Now that she was on the cover of the worst of them, it wasn’t funny or chic at all. I wanted to know what the
National Enquirer
was saying about her; I knew how vicious they were. But I couldn’t pick it up, couldn’t touch it, couldn’t buy it. I felt ashamed: because she was my sister, and they were making her out to be a slut; and also because I didn’t know she’d left Ryan and gone back to Jack, and I didn’t want Aunt Dorothy to know I’d found it out from a checkout-line rag.

The whole thing wasn’t fair. I knew what she’d put up with from Ryan, how patient and forgiving she’d been, how hard she’d tried to make it work. She was right to go back to Jack; I knew how kind and fun he was. (Conveniently, I forgot about her crying.) I prayed Aunt Dorothy wouldn’t see the
National Enquirer
. And of course she didn’t want to see it, because she didn’t want to talk about it with me. So she didn’t see it. It didn’t exist.

I wondered if I’d ever see Griffin again. I missed him: my comrade, my ally. I worried that I’d been his last hope, and I’d abandoned him.

I
’m in the back seat of a car, driving down a narrow street that turns a sharp corner to the left. The reddish brown buildings are high and solid, squaring off the right angle. I’m little, maybe four. It must be before Mum died. Is that her sitting next to me in the back seat? I’m not sure, but I’m not alone. And it’s not a taxi: the seat is low, and I’m craning my neck to see the tops of the buildings, which are crenellated with pointy arches and dormer windows. It’s silent: no talking, not even any engine noise from the car. I’m not sure how I know there is a corner—it looks like a dead-end street. Perhaps because we’re driving so fast we won’t be able to stop, and the road must go somewhere.

I know it’s London. That’s part of the memory.

When school finished for the summer of 1978, Anjelica took me to London. It was the first time I’d been back since moving to Ireland.

Everywhere we went I looked for that street. It was so vivid in my mind that I could have drawn it—but no street matched it exactly. I figured out, from the height and design of the buildings, that it must be in the West End. Stratton Street, off Piccadilly, was close, but it was one-way the wrong way; it bent right, not left. Could the traffic planners have changed it, or had my brain recorded a mirror image? It haunted me, that memory street. I was driven down it again and again, never turning the blind corner, never discovering the secret of what was on the far side.

I didn’t tell Anjel about the memory, or even ask in a roundabout way where that street might be. I didn’t know what its significance was, or if it really had any. Maybe it was just some random image that had stuck to a sticky spot in my brain. We didn’t go to Maida Avenue either. If she had wanted to take me, I would have gone with her—but I was relieved that she never mentioned it. That was the past, and the past was gone.

I had learned not to want what wasn’t there. I tried not to ask, or expect, of people what they didn’t have—or want—to give. Really, I tried not to ask or expect anything; that way I wouldn’t be disappointed, and whatever came to me would be a bonus, a treat. I wasn’t by nature a doormat, but I tried to look at things from the other person’s point of view. Circumstances were difficult. Everyone was doing the best they could.

We were in London because Jack was filming
The Shining
there. It was a six-month shooting schedule, so Anjel had to go. I felt it was especially important to her that she took me.

The
National Enquirer
had been right: Anjel did go back to Jack. But then she suddenly disappeared to Aspen, without him. I was at Jack’s house, with Jennifer, when I spoke to her on the phone and discovered she wouldn’t be back in time to help me with some bit of homework she’d said she would do with me.

I hung up the phone, in tears. Helena promised to help me with my assignment, whatever it was. That was when I stopped being afraid of her.

Soon after I’d first met Helena, I saw her in
Kansas City Bomber
on the little TV in my room at Cici’s house. Collin was a big Raquel Welch fan on account of
One Million Years BC,
and we both loved
Rollerball,
the sci-fi movie based on roller derby.
Kansas City Bomber
was the original roller-derby movie, and Helena was the villain who threw nasty fouls at Raquel Welch. Her viciousness in the movie fit so well with her wild black hair and tough Boston accent that for years I thought that was who she really was.

She had a tattoo on her left shoulder, its blue ink gone fuzzy with time, of a square cross, with the letters M–O–M above it. I’d never known anyone with a tattoo before; it looked fierce on her olive skin, even with the spaghetti strap of her nightgown falling over it. But gradually, I came to see it as a badge. She had no children of her own, but she looked after people.

I’d see Helena described in magazine articles about Jack as his housekeeper, but that was wrong: she was his rock, his anchor, his go-between with the real world. She used to say she didn’t know how old she was, because her parents, when they came to America, put different dates on different forms. I hadn’t believed Maricela when she said the same thing, but I believed Helena. As a little girl in occupied Greece, Helena had been a pet of the Nazi officers who had occupied her house, running messages for them. She told me how she’d been mesmerized by the blazing shine of their boots. In Boston after the war, when her family didn’t have a home, Helena danced at a Greek picnic and made enough for the down payment—and later made thousands of dollars a night belly dancing in Las Vegas. She’d met Jack at a coffee house in Hollywood in the early sixties, when he was still making B movies for Roger Corman. Years later, when she left her husband and needed a place to stay, he gave her the downstairs bedroom in his house, and later the house next door.

Helena distracted me from Anjel’s absence, and I began to hang out with her, helping her with whatever she was doing. Even when Anjel came back, the foursome that she and Jack, Jen and I had once made was gone. Jen would move to Hawaii with her mother within a year—but our spontaneous little family didn’t survive the interlude with Ryan. I sensed, without ever quite formulating the thought, that Anjel had been defeated.

She didn’t come back in time for the Academy Awards either. Jack was presenting the award for Best Picture, and he took Jen and me instead. Aunt Dorothy’s handyman Roberto picked me up from school early and drove me to Jack’s house, where I changed into a silk outfit patterned with tiny rosebuds that had been my Christmas present from Anjel. As I dabbed makeup that Anjel had given me onto the acne on my forehead and chin, I could hear him getting ready above me: water turning on and off, bare feet padding from bedroom to bathroom and back again, then the heavier tread of the pointed shoes he liked so much. The limo picked us up at two and, after we collected Jennifer, dropped us disappointingly at the back door of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Jack shepherded us to the two seats reserved for him, and disappeared off to spend the entire ceremony backstage.

Our seats were next to Pat Boone, whose daughter Debby was singing “You Light Up My Life.” I felt completely cheated. How could the Academy seat Jack Nicholson next to Pat Boone? Mrs. Boone looked pretty pissed off too, when Jack deposited two spotty teenage girls and headed off backstage. I didn’t have any sympathy for her. She should have been someone exciting, like Warren Beatty or John Travolta. Plus, I loathed that syrupy song, and it was even worse to have to listen to it with Debby Boone’s parents beside me. They left during the next commercial break, and two men in tuxedos filled their places.

In 1975, just after I’d met Jack, I’d watched the Oscars in the house on Euclid. “Come on, Jack!” I’d said silently to myself, willing him to win Best Actor for
The Last Detail.
Jack Lemmon won, for
Save the Tiger
. I blamed myself for not being specific enough so that God, or fate, would know which Jack should win. This time, as far as he was concerned, I would get the Oscars right: I would repay his trust—as he left us, by ourselves, with cameras on us—by behaving perfectly. If I’d been Tatum, I knew, I would have gone to the aftershow parties—but Jack put us in the limo and said good night, and I didn’t mind.

When I told one of the girls at school how generous he had been to give us his seats and stand for the whole four hours backstage, she laughed at me. Backstage, she said, was where all the fun was. I hadn’t thought of that—that there were rooms, and sofas, and a bar. For some reason I’d thought there was nothing beyond the wings of the stage. Still, it didn’t diminish the gift—and he had given it to me even when Anjel wasn’t there, and so very soon after we’d come back from Ryan’s house. I worried sometimes that he might feel I’d been a traitor, in accepting Ryan. But he never showed any sign of it, never mentioned Ryan at all.

A week after Anjel and I arrived in London, Bob Dylan played Hyde Park. Anjel was excited; it was a Sunday and Jack wasn’t working, so he could go too. I knew we’d get VIP treatment. We’d go backstage, maybe spend the whole concert backstage; we’d meet Dylan. I had the impression that Jack and Anjel knew him already.

That morning, when Anjel came upstairs to get me, I wasn’t dressed. I clutched my stomach. “I feel sick,” I said. “I can’t go.”

I made believe I was very upset to be missing it. “I’m sorry,” I said, seeing her disappointment and confusion. She knew I loved Dylan’s music. I was pretty sure she saw through my sickness, though she didn’t accuse me of faking it.

I couldn’t explain why I couldn’t face it. I didn’t want to be the invisible little sister that I’d been when we met the Lakers after a basketball game and I’d felt like a speck among those famous giants. Not
with Dylan, who had become a kind of totem of my closeness with Anjel ever since that day when we drove along San Vicente Boulevard singing along to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” If Dylan looked through me, I truly would disappear.

I spent the day in the room at the top of the house the production had rented for Jack. It had purple carpet, and fake gilt chairs upholstered in purple velvet, like the cast-off furniture from a sheik’s newly redecorated diplomatic reception room. Flat sunlight poured in through the windows that lined one side, curdling the purple dyes into hallucinogenic shades. There was a little portable TV on the floor, and a stack of classic movies on video that I watched one after another, all day long. Even though I was alone in the house, I clutched my stomach from time to time, as if to convince myself that I really was sick and couldn’t have gone.

Anjel brought me back a program. I kept it, and looked at it every day. On the cover, Dylan ringed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. His thumbnails were almost an inch long, thick and yellow like a bird’s talons. Behind them, his eyes were shadowed and dark. I stared into them, imagining I’d been there, imagining those eyes looking at me. Would they have seen me? They weren’t a normal person’s eyes; I knew from his songs that they saw things normal people didn’t see. I hated my cowardice for staying behind.

“Come on, Legs,” said Anjel one day soon after that. “We’re going jogging.”

I’d never known her to go jogging before, or do any kind of exercise just for the sake of it. Once, when we were cruising along Mulholland Drive with the top down, Anjel had yelled out at a fat jogger laboring along, “Keep going, sucker, it’s not gonna do you any good!” I thought that was hilarious. It confirmed—as if I needed confirmation—how glamorous and special she was.

I made a face. But I knew she was trying to look after me, make
me get outside, which was good for me, like Cici had. Left to myself, I’d just read all day. We had tried going to Hyde Park to play Frisbee, but that invoked the shade of Ryan, so we hadn’t done it again.

“We need to get healthy! It’s so great to be in London again, where the air is clean.”

The house we were living in was on Cheyne Walk, overlooking the river Thames—but with four lanes of heavy traffic in between. Trucks pounded along it twenty-four hours a day, belching diesel fumes. Every outside window ledge was black with the residue. It wasn’t possible that Anjel hadn’t noticed. I realized she didn’t want to, didn’t want to give it any importance. She meant the famous L.A. smog. London was for her, even more than for me, a special place, which had to be, in every way, better than L.A.—and which she wanted me to love.

I did what I was told, though with a bad grace. Truck drivers honked at us in our shorts. I felt ridiculous, jogging in place on the pavement as we waited for the light to turn green. Nobody jogged in London—especially not on the streets, especially not on that truck-choked arterial road. I was conscious of how American we looked. I hated it: hated standing out, hated looking different. Fortunately, jogging was never mentioned again.

Mostly we went shopping, browsing the stalls in Antiquarius, a vast antiques market on the King’s Road. Anjel told me that Mum had loved poking around in antiques shops. When we walked past the Chelsea Cobbler, she told me that Mum had had shoes made there. She pointed out these spots more in the manner of a tour guide at a holy site than as incidents from her own life with Mum. She didn’t want to tell stories of what they had done together, and I didn’t want to hear them. It would have made me feel even more insignificant, since they weren’t mine.

This was 1978, and the King’s Road was punk central. Mohicans glued into foot-long spikes, dyed black and blue and green; ripped jeans and leather and fishnets; chains and safety pins through the
skin. I’d never seen anything so extreme. I stared at them, trying not to let them catch me staring in case it made them mad at me. I envied them. They seemed so sure of who they were: punks. And where they belonged: right there on the King’s Road.

They were angry. That awed me: I’d wrung my anger out of me, and I didn’t know what it felt like anymore. I felt disembodied compared to them. And I felt that the genteel streets of Chelsea, where Jack and Anjel’s friends lived, were unreal compared to this. So was Los Angeles, where everyone went about in little personal shells with a wheel on each corner, insulated from the real world.

I’d also never seen so much physical deformity: bad teeth, gammy legs, people with growths on their faces or blind, thalidomide victims with stunted arms. They were on the buses, walking the streets. I decided it was one of the things I liked about London: people didn’t have to be perfect, they didn’t have to hide or all look the same. Or sound the same either: I loved the different accents, the chummy way people called me “luv,” the laughter and arguments spilling out of pubs, the cheering coming from behind the streamer curtains in the doorways of betting shops. Life wasn’t sanitized and wrapped in cellophane the way it was in L.A.

I loved that I could walk out the door of the house and go somewhere. At Cici’s house I’d had a canyon, with a mountainside and a creek, to wander; but since then I’d been marooned either on a beach or on a mountaintop, unable to go anywhere without someone to drive me. If where I wanted to go was farther than I wanted to walk, in London I could just stick out my arm for a taxi.