Lies My Mother Never Told Me (13 page)

Such was my state of mind when I met Andrew, at a Hamptons literary cocktail party over the Fourth of July weekend 1988, on someone's wide, sloping, perfectly tended green lawn that was straight out of
The Great Gatsby.
As the saying goes—we headed right for each other and crashed like two garbage trucks in a head-on collision; recovering from the impact, looking around at the mess, there was no way to tell whose garbage was whose.

Andrew was handsome in a clean-cut, LL Bean sort of way, his thick black hair cut very short and perfectly in place, he wore little round glasses, and was not the least bit threatening. We quickly found out that we had a great deal in common, and before leaving the party, exchanged phone numbers. He was twenty-four and I was twenty-seven; but he seemed mature for his age.

“How come you don't have a girlfriend?” I asked him the next night, when he came over to my mother's house with his acoustic guitar and serenaded me under the grape arbor. My sixty-year-old mother was out at a party. Memorial Day to Labor Day for her was just one party after another, sometimes two or three a night. By the time she got home she was usually so blotto any attempt at conversation was impossible. At least she had the good sense not to drive.

“Oh, I do have girlfriends,” Andrew said. “But they're indoor girlfriends.”

“What's an indoor girlfriend?”

“Well, they're girls I like to have sex with, but that I'd never take out in public.”

“Oh,” I said. This seemed like a strange statement to me, but I put it out of my mind. After all, I'd heard stranger things.

My mother took an immediate dislike to Andrew. Softer, more sensitive souls ran for the door screaming when confronted by her
ire, but Andrew had no idea he inspired such resentment in Gloria. She was an excellent holder of grudges, and she held a major grudge against Andrew's mother, Linda, a successful journalist and ghostwriter who lived down the street. In the early eighties Linda had written a nasty review of a fledgling local newspaper, the
Bridgehampton Sun
, that my mother had been hired to work on as the society page editor. The paper folded after one season. The review was pretty acerbic. Linda called Gloria a gossip hound, and the paper nothing more than a rag. My mother never forgave Linda. And, as any good Italian will tell you, that kind of grudge will be passed down from parent to child and across generations, ad infinitum.

But there was one thing you could count on with Gloria: she would never admit to having been offended. It was a question of pride; she would simply bad-mouth the persons who had insulted her behind their backs. So for the entire time I was with Andrew, she mostly sulked, ignoring him, as if he were beneath her contempt. And while I'm sure her close friends heard an earful, I was spared the worst of her tongue-lashings, and it felt wonderful—a bit like catching your breath in the quiet eye of a hurricane.

Gloria wasn't able to keep quiet about Andrew being a Republican. He believed in the death penalty but was pro-choice and campaigned tirelessly for a woman's right to choose. Just to raise his hackles, she would say things like, “Give them free abortions now, it's a hell of a lot fucking cheaper than paying for their trials and executions in eighteen years.”

“Now, Gloria,” he'd respond mildly, with a condescending smile, “there's no need for that kind of language.”

This would make her bristle like an old tabby cat. No one who knew her, absolutely no one, had the nerve to speak to her that way, and I giggled secretly in horrified admiration, because Andrew was totally impervious to her underhanded, or sometimes not so underhanded, attacks. He was like the Starship
Enterprise
with its deflector shields up. He simply did not allow himself to consider anything that contradicted his view of himself or the world. This rare and amazing ability carried over into every aspect of his life.

Andrew's parents had gotten divorced when he was two, and several years later, his mother remarried a man who, according to Andrew, hadn't liked him very much. His mother had two more children, daughters, and Andrew told me he'd been forced early on to take care of himself. He'd also learned to never accept defeat.

He thought he could badger me into curtailing my drinking, as if I were a child who'd been given too much freedom and only needed more discipline. At the time
I
certainly didn't think I had a drinking problem, and I didn't like being badgered; I thought he was a square, a lightweight who couldn't see that a sensitive soul like me needed an outlet for emotional stress. Andrew was not a drinker; he might have a beer or two or a glass of wine on special occasions, but his drink of choice was Diet Orange Slice. We argued over what shows to watch on TV and could only enthusiastically agree on
Star Trek: The Next Generation
. He liked the gadgets; I liked the political message.

We went out to Sagaponack every weekend and stayed in my mother's house. The recent, messy breakup of her relationship with Walker, who'd left her for a younger woman, had shaken her up, though she would never admit it. She was still in love with my father—his ghost filled the rooms of her house—and that had not left much space for Walker, who'd tried his best to get a foothold. He'd even hung framed pictures of himself with his parrots wherever there was wall space.

The arrival of fall brought a radical change to the Hamptons, for almost everyone left, all at once, after Labor Day. With Walker gone, Gloria had nothing to hold her in check. The house seemed to be crumbling around her. The brick path from the driveway to
the kitchen door was slowly sinking and became a river during storms, more frequent now at summer's end. The rugs smelled of dog and cat pee, the door handles fell off in your hands, and there were cobwebs hanging from the lamp shades and bronze Italian statuettes and vases that she'd brought from her own mother's house. When I mentioned the situation to my mother's live-in housekeeper, Mary, who was losing her eyesight from diabetes, Mary said, “I keep saying it, we got to get ourselves a maid.”

Mary had come up from Georgia as a migrant worker in the early sixties, following the crops, and had ended up staying in Bridgehampton. During the Hamptons property boom of the early 1980s, she lost her modest rental off the Sag Harbor Turnpike, and she'd been living with Gloria ever since.

As Andrew and I were returning to the city on the Hampton Jitney after one particularly difficult weekend, we hit some traffic. The sun was setting straight ahead, the same electric, vibrant red as the brake lights on the thousands of cars moving toward it in a slow, funereal procession. I saw in a flash the future unspooling like the highway before me. My mother was going to die—alone, drunk, with her house falling down around her, and I would not be able to stop it. Suddenly I felt I couldn't breathe and started hyperventilating myself into a panic attack.

Andrew took off his earphones and asked me what was wrong.

I told him I was scared, that I thought my mother was in real trouble, and the future seemed hopeless and terrifying. He suggested I give up my “crappy little bohemian apartment” and move in with him. “College is over,” he said. “I'll build you real bookshelves. The second bedroom can be your office. We'll take care of your mother. Things will be fine.” And then he added, as if it were completely simple, “I love you.”

I loved the idea of him. I loved the notion that my fragility could be bolstered by his invulnerability. I loved the idea of no
longer being alone, or lonely. His no-nonsense, slightly martial approach to life seemed to me the correct one; perhaps I was just seeing things all skewed. Maybe my mother really was fine and I was just causing myself anxiety over nothing. Immediately I felt better. He squeezed my hand. His common good sense seemed like a sensible reason to place all my fragile eggs in his shatterproof basket. In a rare flash of insight, I thought, At least, if I go with him, I won't end up like her.

“I love you too,” I said.

I moved into his apartment a few weeks later. No place felt safe to me, but his Upper East Side two-bedroom flat with central air and soundproof windows on a high floor seemed safer than most.

Andrew worked in the direct marketing department of one of the big banks. He was responsible for those mass mailings, which 90 percent of us threw away without opening, that we used to get before the Internet. His favorite writer was Dean Koontz, whose colorful, glossy hardcovers lined one small shelf in his closet.

He played the electric guitar and had a serious, sleek black “entertainment center” in his living room, including a huge TV with a zillion channels, a CD player, hundreds and hundreds of CDs, a guitar amp, and copies of the words to the songs he played so guests could sing along when he plugged in after dinner. He also had a smaller, older TV in the bedroom, which had a set of headphones attached, and I spent endless nights unable to sleep, watching
Miami Vice
reruns and other such emotionally calming shows until the wee hours of the morning.

He seemed to feel no differently about sex than he did about going to the gym, and I came to think of it as a forty-five-minute vigorous workout with an attentive, if a little overbearing, personal trainer. Soon, however, this grew annoying to me and became a chore. The only time I felt like having sex with him was when I'd had too much to drink, and that was the only time he had no interest in me.

And I drank much, much more than he suspected, or than anyone suspected. When he saw at a dinner party that I'd had too much wine he'd comment pointedly, “I see we're going a little overboard tonight. Might want to taper down,” which would make me want to pummel him. Instead, I'd pour myself another glass. At least now I knew where I'd be waking up in the morning, and if I couldn't remember what I'd said the night before, Andrew would remind me in that mild, condescending tone he liked to use with my mother. He even wore the same small condescending smile.

 

Andrew asked me to marry him while I was standing behind my dad's pulpit bar, mixing a batch of martinis on New Year's Eve 1988. I was so baked I wasn't sure I'd heard him and had to ask him to repeat himself. I could feel my mother approaching from across the room. She had a peculiarly keen radar for drama, and this was high Kabuki indeed.

“Andrew just asked me to marry him,” I told her in a neutral tone, just to see her reaction. For an instant, a look of such horror crossed her face that I felt scared, then suddenly thrilled. I felt, in a sense, as if I were running across a burning bridge that was about to explode behind me.

But then she lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, blew out the smoke that curled around her like a ghostly octopus, and said with a shrug and twist of her lips, “I don't care. Do what you want.”

A prickle of heat started to spread through my chest, and I didn't like the way it felt. So I lit a Marlboro Light from my pack that was lying on the bar top. I turned to Andrew and said, “Yeah, okay, why not?” My heart began thundering in my rib cage. I had just committed an act of pure defiance and regretted it immediately, but come hell or high water, I was not going to back down.

Andrew's mother, Linda, was by now also standing just on the
other side of the bar, and she, who'd been married and divorced twice, said with alacrity, “Well, if it doesn't work out, you can always get divorced!”

The wedding, on May 27, 1989, was a veritable Hamptons event. All my friends from college and graduate school came. My godmother Cecile and her husband, Buddy—Irwin Bazelon, a brilliant modern classical composer—hired a string quartet for the ceremony in my mother's garden, and Andrew's mother hired a twenty-piece Dixieland band for the reception at the Bridgehampton Community House, where, incidentally, my dad's memorial had also been held. We were in the
New York Times
and all the local papers. It was a
Who's Who
of the Hamptons literary scene.

My brother walked me down the garden path, and I couldn't stop laughing. Jamie looked at me somberly and murmured under his breath, “You don't have to do this, you know.”

The string quartet played on and for some reason I kept thinking about the orchestra on the sloping deck of the
Titanic
. I responded, as if in a fog, “But we've already opened so many of the presents.”

Jamie's ears turned red but he didn't say another word. The ceremony is a blur in my mind. Later I watched the video with Andrew, sitting on his living room couch. It was a beautiful ceremony, bright, pale shimmering colors under the deep green trees of my mother's garden. But I had no idea who these people were or why they were getting married.

 

Andrew and I bickered. Not heated arguments, but nasty little squabbles. I was trying to finish
A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
, the most autobiographical of my novels, the one that most closely reflected my own childhood experiences in France. It was sending me into another bout of weighty emotional malaise, and I had a hard time getting from bed to desk.

Andrew, preparing for work in the morning, all spruced up and rosy in his suit and tie, said, “Why don't you give yourself a page quota? Say, ten pages a day. Then just write ten pages. What could be easier than that?” Problem solved, he wished me a good day and was out the door.

During this period, I read Bill Styron's
Darkness Visible
for the first time and was amazed to recognize many of my own symptoms in the depression he describes in this memoir. He connects the onslaught of his first major episode of depression with his body's sudden rejection of alcohol, that “magical elixir,” which he admits to having depended on for years, both for inspiration and to calm his anxiety. Yes, I thought, I do that too. I am a writer and I'm depressed and therefore I drink. Alcohol is a great thing, it gives me inspiration and quiets my fears. It is medicine and I need it.