Lies My Mother Never Told Me (8 page)

“Don't become a writer,” Nelson repeated, leaning against me with his index finger pointed toward my face. He stared at me with great solemnity as we walked him up the dark footpath. The entire house was dark, except for a lonely yellow light that cast a small half-circle at the foot of the door.

“Well, then.” He turned away and started to climb the front steps, his back stooped, his steps heavy and labored. “Then go ahead and write, see if anyone cares.”

That was the last time I saw him. I went back to Wesleyan for my final semester. Nelson died on May 9, 1981—four years to the day after my father—having made no provisions for himself.

My mother told me over the phone that she was paying for Nelson's funeral. He had absolutely nothing left.

 

In the spring, right around the time I received my acceptance to Columbia's MFA Program in Writing, I got another call from Leo Bookman, the William Morris agent. He'd tracked me down in my student residence at Wesleyan. “Hi, Kaylie, it's Leo. Remember me?”

How could I forget?

“What are you doing for the rest of your life?” He'd been waiting for me to graduate from college so I could take up my acting career in earnest. I told him I'd meet him and talk it over in a month or so, when school was over.

In July, we met for drinks on the terrace of a brilliantly white, sprawling estate in Southampton that belonged to a friend of his. He was in tennis whites, and I wore a long and not too revealing sleeveless summer dress and espadrilles.

“So, are you ready to start taking this seriously?”

This estate, with its expansive, emerald green lawn and a view of the sand dunes and shimmering ocean beyond, made my mouth water with a vague but sharp feeling of longing. Perhaps I longed for my childhood, for exquisite meals on the bright, parasol-clad terraces of glamorous European hotels, or the feeling of safety when I remembered the summer and winter vacations we took, the hilarity of long meals at tables crowded with luminaries of the literary and film worlds. I had lost that life when I lost my father. Without him, those worlds had come to mean absolutely nothing to me but loss. And what would it cost me, to get it all back? My dad had warned me a long time ago that in show business, people
would flatter you, and if you were vain and stupid, you'd buy their lies.

I blurted out, “I'm going to Columbia for graduate school in writing.”

I could see that Leo was not impressed and probably thought this was an utterly ridiculous waste of time, but he tried to be patient with me. “Well, at least you'll be in New York. No reason you couldn't do both.”

Under his direction, in the early fall, I had some head shots taken, and went on a couple of auditions for commercials. One was for an acne cream, and as the bright lights and the merciless black eye of the camera trained on my face and I was asked to show great enthusiasm for how clear my face had become, I started to giggle.

I went home and called Leo Bookman. I thanked him profusely for his time and kindness, but told him I was going to stick to writing.

 

My mother was pleased that I was accepted into Columbia, and she urged me to “get around campus a little, meet some future doctors and lawyers.” When I pointed out that my father had once been a struggling writer who'd lived in a trailer, she looked at me as if I were completely insane. She fiercely distrusted anyone who had the hubris to even consider trying to make a living in the arts, except, of course, if they'd already found success. Then they were exempt from this harsh judgment. She was still convinced, and told me so at every possible occasion, that I'd never be able to take care of myself and was heading for a miserable life of drudgery and want, from which I could only be rescued by a very rich man. My mother, at this time, was financially secure, but she feared poverty obsessively. My father had indeed “written us out of debt,” and Gloria was able to live quite comfortably on my father's literary estate,
augmented by her salary at Doubleday, where she worked as an acquisitions editor. My mother always gave me money when I needed it. Always.

When it was time for me to start thinking about where to live in New York City, my mother did an incredibly generous thing: she lent me her one-bedroom apartment in the Delmonico on Park and Fifty-ninth Street, and for the three days a week she worked in New York, she stayed with her new boyfriend, Walker, in his mansard room in the Hotel des Artistes on West Sixty-seventh Street. She even allowed me to share her apartment with my college friend Carol, who had just started working for a Wall Street bank.

My mother's apartment was furnished with her friends' castoffs—a brown velour fold-out love seat; a dry-bar made of some flimsy, pale wood; someone's old armchair; a large rectangular table of a light, lacquered wood and four caned chairs that looked like they'd come from some factory; and a few leftover odds and ends that had been stored in the basement of the Sagaponack house. It was a strangely appointed space, as if the persons staying there were only stopping by on their way to somewhere else.

For the next nine months, Carol and I turned the Delmonico apartment into party central, with people stopping by at all hours of the day and night. I'm still amazed we didn't get evicted.

 

I was certain I'd gotten into Columbia because I was James Jones's daughter. But at least graduate school would buy me two more years of study, to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I would continue to have health insurance, and as long as I stayed in school, I received more than $500 a month from my father's Social Security benefits.

On the day I registered for classes, the secretary in the MFA office told me that the acceptance committee read the applications blind, with no names attached. I'd been awarded a $2,000 fellow
ship on the basis of my stories, which the kind lady now tried to talk me into giving up, since she figured James Jones's daughter must be rolling in dough. At the time, I had what was left of my share of the money Hollywood had paid us in 1978 for the television miniseries of
From Here to Eternity,
starring Natalie Wood as Karen Holmes, and the then-unknown Joe Pantoliano as Angelo Maggio, which had aired in the spring of 1979. The money had paid for three of my four years of college and was also going to pay for my $8,000-a-year graduate school. But it was dwindling quickly, and I refused to give up my fellowship.

When asked to choose a writing workshop, I checked off Richard Price because the name sounded vaguely familiar. I hadn't done my homework and confused him with Reynolds Price.

Straight out of college, and barely twenty-one, I walked into my first class in Dodge Hall on the Columbia campus with my new notebooks and a dark and loose, unassuming shirt over jeans, and waited patiently for the teacher to arrive.

“Okay, then, let's get started.” This came from a pale young man sitting under the blackboard at the front of the room. He was very young, younger than at least half the students, and was wearing an old red T-shirt with one sleeve rolled up over a pack of Marlboros, his curly hair uncombed, a three-day growth of raggedy beard on his chin. We all stared at him. This was Richard Price?

Richard Price, who was barely thirty, had hit it big with
The Wanderers
, a first novel about the South Bronx. Of course, I didn't know this until I went to the bookstore later that day.

It was immediately apparent that he wasn't going to teach some wimpy college writing workshop; we were in the big leagues now. He was uproariously funny but mean as could be when he didn't like something. When he encountered what he saw as bad writing, he bit to the bone, without an ounce of compassion. Once, he held up a student's story—not mine, thank God—and shouted,
“This, this—
out the fucking window
!” And we all sat there in stunned silence as he chucked the pages across the room.

Two of the students he seemed to think the least of were Susan Minot and me. He seemed to think our privileged backgrounds had given us nothing to write about. He called our work “all dressed up and nowhere to go.”

Richard's attitude was reverse prejudice, as far as I was concerned. I thought Susan Minot was the best writer in the program. Her short story “Lust,” which later was published as the title story of an excellent collection, is still the best short story I've ever read on a young woman's search for compassion and intimacy in sexual encounters that do nothing, ultimately, but grind away at her soul.

 

My best friend at Columbia was Beverly Donofrio. We met at the first gathering, a party, and ended up as the only two dancing. Eleven years my senior, she was at thirty-two the mother of a fifteen-year-old boy, Jason. Bev was working on a book about growing up the nice Catholic daughter of a conservative Connecticut town sheriff, and getting pregnant and having a baby at seventeen. This book became the critically acclaimed memoir
Riding in Cars with Boys
, which later was a Hollywood film starring Drew Barrymore as Bev.

Bev and her son, Jason, lived on Avenue A and Twelfth Street, a drug-infested, perfectly terrifying neighborhood as far as I was concerned. When she invited me over for dinner, I would take a cab, have the cab drop me a block away, and pretend I'd taken the subway. Her buzzer was broken, so I had to call from a filthy pay phone on the corner, and she'd throw the key out the fourth-story window. An old gym sock would come spiraling down with the key in the toe, like a paratrooper with a broken parachute. One night, having had numerous bottles of wine with our pasta, Bev told me, “I was second in line for this two-thousand-dollar
fellowship. They tried to get this rich girl to give it up but she wouldn't. You think it was Susan Minot?”

I felt so guilty it took me twenty-four years to tell her it was me.

 

At the end of our first semester at Columbia, our friend Dennis, who had the biggest apartment, threw the class party. I had terrible bronchitis, but there was no way I was going to miss the class party. I drank half a bottle of Mount Gay rum and pineapple juice before leaving (lots of vitamin C in pineapple juice) and brought the rest with me. Richard Price was sitting in the back room that had once been a maid's room, and like a psychologist receiving patients, took us in one by one for our end-of-term evaluation. I stood in the kitchen awaiting my turn, and drank several more Mount Gay rum and pineapple juices (for the vitamin C), then screwed up my courage and went in to talk to him.

I sat down in a chair across from the single bed where he was sitting and launched into my prepared speech.

“Listen, Richard, just because you had a hard childhood and came up on your own from nothing doesn't mean you have a right to judge everyone who didn't. I've had enough of people taking their shit out on me because I'm James Jones's daughter.” As this came flying out, it occurred to me that I'd had a few too many Mount Gay and pineapple juices, but it was too late now. “You didn't give me a chance,” I concluded in a softer tone, backpedaling furiously now. I opened my mouth to apologize, to explain that I was sick with bronchitis, when Richard said:

“You're right.”

All I could do now was sit there, mouth agape. Maybe he was just tired and didn't feel like arguing, because this capitulation was very unlike him.

He said, “Take my class again next fall. I promise I'll give you a chance.”

 

That summer I waitressed in a trendy restaurant called The Laundry in East Hampton. I was lucky to get the job. When I went for my interview, about nine people were waiting in line ahead of me. I knew the woman who was doing the hiring from the Spindrift Players, the theater group I'd been a member of all through high school. She gave me the job on the spot, even though I was much less qualified than most of the other applicants.

I was a lousy waitress and I didn't like the clientele, who were for the most part on the make, and cheap with tips. The depression I was now suffering from was as bad as any I'd experienced before. I began to drink even more because I couldn't stand the way I felt, but this did not help much.

My senior year of college, I had fallen in love for real, for the first time in my life. I had never truly believed that this could happen to a person in five minutes, and last for years and years, like being struck by a devastating illness. This young man, Aidan, this boy, really, was two years behind me at Wesleyan, though we were the same age. We'd met in September, in a mutual friend's dorm room during a party. He was little, only an inch or so taller than I. We sat down against a wall and started talking as if we'd known each other before, though we'd never met. A big guy bellowed, picked up a chair, and threw it across the room and I muttered,
“Quel con.”
What an ass. Aidan answered in perfect French,
“C'est vrai, il est con.”

He told me he'd spent his childhood in French Africa and later in boarding school in Switzerland. The party was too loud so we moved out into the lobby of the dorm and sat there talking until the next morning. He told me his father was in the State Department and they'd lived in some pretty hairy places, countries on the verge of revolution and collapse. Once, they'd gotten thrown out of a central African nation, were given twenty-four hours to pack up their entire lives. They'd had to leave their dog, which
had broken Aidan's heart. I could see the shadows of these experiences lurking behind his eyes, but his demeanor was calm and contained, and I thought, He's not afraid. When I started a thought, he finished it, as though he could see the pictures forming in my head before I could. He was not like anyone I'd ever been attracted to before. On Sunday afternoon, he called and told me in a low, calm voice he was feeling very strange. He hadn't slept and had butterflies in his stomach. “I think I'm in love,” he said, as if he'd just witnessed a fascinating phenomenon, like a lunar eclipse. On Monday, I learned that he was a collegiate wrestler. He was in training, and his weight class was 125 pounds. To me this was totally unthinkable, appalling; this was only a few pounds more than I weighed. I was so afraid he'd get hurt I refused to go to his matches. He said he didn't mind. His old girlfriend went, though, and told everyone she thought I was a selfish bitch. On the days he wrestled, I walked around in a daze, praying to every god I could think of to protect him from harm.