Lies My Mother Never Told Me (9 page)

I was going to wait for him to finish college; I wanted to be with him for the rest of my life. But two years is a very long time when you're in your early twenties. Now I'd been out of college a year, and he was finding his own way, making different friends. The more independent he became, the worse I acted. Now he was slowly cutting ties, and the love story was coming to an end in a miserable, slow, grinding way, and neither Aidan nor I had the courage to walk away.

Every evening, as the sun began its slow descent and The Laundry's utensils and glassware glowed like dying coals in the fading light, the bartender would play a Stevie Wonder song that made me want to bolt out the door screaming.

If only I could have said these words to Aidan, rather than punishing him for being two years behind me in college, for not wanting to spend every single weekend with me. I was cruel and acted out in ugly ways. I slept with strangers. I slept with friends. I said terrible, unforgivable things to him on the phone and then hung up. I couldn't seem to get control of my emotions or my behavior.

I was overwhelmed by a feeling of exhaustion similar to what one might experience with a low-grade fever. I felt a constant, gnawing fear, as if I were back in third grade in Paris and no one was there to pick me up. And no matter how many drinks I had after my shift was over, or if I went out dancing with my girlfriends or not, or if I went to bed with a stranger or not, the next morning the discomfort and fear was still there, gnawing at me from the inside, augmented tenfold by the alcohol I'd consumed the night before.

 

One evening, the wait staff was all abuzz because John Irving, who'd recently moved to the area, was having dinner there with his girlfriend, Rusty Unger, whom I'd met several times through my mother. She waved to me now across the crowded and noisy restaurant and I waved back.

Toward the end of my shift, as I was standing with my arms crossed waiting for my last table to leave, John Irving approached me. He was dark haired, tanned to the color of cured tobacco, of medium height with wide shoulders and muscular arms.

“Hi, I'm John Irving.” He put out his hand and I shook it. “I just wanted to tell you that I loved your father's books, and it's an honor to meet you.”

I almost fell over. The Laundry was always crawling with movie-star hopefuls, directors, producers, all kinds of people who wanted to be seen at one of the “in” restaurants of the Hamptons. Which of them would ever go up to a waitress and say something like that?

Another night in mid-July, Richard Price came in with a friend, quite late. I waited on their table. Richard looked right at me and didn't recognize me as he ordered a bottle of champagne. Perhaps it was the uniform—white shirt, black pants, an apron—and the fact that my hair was tied back in a tight bun. He seemed to have dressed for the Hamptons, wearing a button-down shirt, the first I'd ever seen him in.

I brought their champagne and said, “Hi, Richard.”

He stared at me, dumbfounded.

“It's Kaylie,” I said. He continued to stare at me. Nothing was registering. “Jones,” I added, laughing, and took out my hair clip. “Recognize me now?”

“Holy shit,” he said. “You got me totally out of context here.” He introduced his friend. “She's one of my writing students at Columbia.”

I couldn't have invented a better scenario for myself. Before him stood a poor girl, struggling through this miserable job to make ends meet. And here he thought I was an overprotected rich kid. I gloated to myself at this amazing stroke of luck.

I got the phone number where they were staying, and after discussing it with my mother the next morning, we invited Richard and his friend Bob for dinner that night.

My mother's boyfriend Walker had recently moved in with seven birds—two macaws, an African grey, and four green finches that woke up the whole house every morning as soon as the sun rose. The African grey had spent the first year of its life in the laundry room of Walker's East Hampton house, and the parrot would imitate the machines' cycles, running through the
chugga-chugga-chugga
of the washer's watery spinning, and the
beep, whoosha-whoosha
and
wheeeep
of the dryer.

Three of us kids were living in my mother's house that summer—Jamie, who was getting ready to start graduate school in Washington, D.C.; my mother's nephew Max Mosolino, who was
attending Southampton College; and me. None of us could stand this boastful, arrogant Walker, but at least he kept Gloria from being lonely. Secretly, we'd each been attempting to teach the African grey new words.

When Richard and Bob arrived at cocktail hour, the macaws had been uncuffed from their perches and were striding importantly around the living room with their strange, awkward, splayfooted gait, staring threateningly at the guests out of the corners of their little black eyes, and squirting their weird, liquid shit that looked like Wite-Out all over my maternal grandmother the Dread Gertrude's very old and very bald Persian rug. Richard sat at the edge of the couch, and one of the macaws attacked his sneaker while the other tried to peck the Abyssinian cat, Pushkin, who fought back with a hiss and a left hook.

The African grey, stirred by the commotion, let loose in a bloodcurdling scream from its cage,
“SHUT UP, WALKER, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!”

Richard threw himself backward into the couch.

Walker jumped up and went over to the cage to admonish the bird. He accused me of interfering with his bird training and told my mother to get control of her brood of brats. My mother laughed, lit a cigarette, and murmured to no one in particular, “I don't care,” and sat there, giggling, her head enveloped in a shroud of smoke. This made me uncomfortable, so I lit a cigarette as well.

“I've seen a lot of things,” Richard said in his deadpan way as he recovered his breath, hand over his heart, “but this—this is definitely new.”

We stayed up talking late, and Richard told me to get a paper and pen, he was going to give me a reading list. He said, “You're educated, there's no question. You have a good grasp of the classics. Now I'm going to give you
my
reading list.” He wanted me to read all these books between now and his workshop in the fall.
On the list were John Rechy's memoir of hustling in New York,
City of Night
; Toni Morrison's
Sula, Tar Baby
, and
Song of Solomon.
Also
Last Exit to Brooklyn
, by Hubert Selby Jr., who had been a mentor of Richard's; as well as
The Basketball Diaries
, by Jim Carroll, about his youth in upper Manhattan and his struggle with heroin addiction. The list was long—James T. Farrell's
Studs Lonigan
, William Kennedy's trilogy,
Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game
, and
Ironweed
—all books I'd never read.

I went to the bookstore the next day and ordered them all. For the rest of the summer, I immersed myself in Richard's favorite books and found there were all kinds of wars raging on our planet, and there were as many kinds of cruelty and evil as paths to redemption and grace. My love for Aidan haunted me like a low-grade fever, and the only time I felt any kind of peace was when I was reading about other people's tragedies.

 

Aidan and I broke up for good in the beginning of October. For the first and only time in my life, I punched a girl in the face and knocked her down, on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, because she'd slept with Aidan and I'd considered her one of my best friends. I knew it was a revenge fuck on his part, but that didn't help. The next night I went out drinking with a Hamptons crew I knew from the summer. They were rich kids, just the kind of kids from famous, powerful families that my mother wanted me to associate with. I was not at my best. I was unbathed, in an old black T-shirt and black jeans, and already three-quarters tanked-up. We started at Isabella's, on the corner of Columbus and Seventy-seventh, and ended up many hours later barhopping up Second Avenue. One of their number, a fellow named Arthur, wore black lizard cowboy boots and an elegant sports jacket, and had cocaine, which he blew into my nose through a tiny cocktail straw in the stinky, hot, and close bathrooms of the various bars we visited.

When the bars closed we went back to his apartment and talked about death and the endings of relationships, and was suicide a viable option or not, until sometime the next morning, which was a Sunday. The garbage trucks were making their rounds, one of the most forlorn sounds I've ever heard. We took some Valium that he kept in the medicine cabinet, and before we passed out, I told him about Aidan and tried to explain that the pain of losing him seemed to me just as bad as when my father died, and I couldn't seem to separate the two events. Arthur dug through a drawer and pulled out a yellow legal pad containing his father's suicide note, written in a hasty and crooked hand. We both cried a little and I became afraid of this sudden, rushed intimacy.

Later, I went home and wrote, in one sitting, a story based on that night for Richard's next week's class. It was a blow-by-blow description of Arthur's and my all-night binge, and the feeling of running from one bar to the next and not being able to outrun the fear or the pain, and the sound of the Sunday-morning garbage trucks forcing us back to reality, like hitting a brick wall at full speed.

Our class met the afternoon of Halloween. Richard said my story was one of the best he'd ever read in a workshop, and gave me several names of magazine editors to send it to. For the first time, I believed I had a real chance. Richard had been my harshest critic.

I went straight from the workshop to a party at an apartment with a huge second-floor terrace overlooking the annual, wild Halloween parade on Christopher Street. All the people at the party were bankers, and I tried to explain what had happened to me that day, but their faces remained blank and mildly perplexed and they quickly changed the subject. So I found myself a folding chair, drinking my way through a bottle of Mount Gay rum as every possible costume pranced by below. There was a six-foot-four Grace Kelly in a silver evening gown with a diamond-
encrusted tiara, a hairy chest, blood dripping from her temple, and a broken steering wheel around her neck. The entire crew of the original
Star Trek
Starship
Enterprise
marched by on stilts and I screamed down, “LIVE LONG AND PROSPER!”

Marvin Gaye blasted from outdoor speakers, and every time I hear certain Marvin Gaye songs even now I am transported back to that night. For a few hours I felt like I had crossed in victory some important finish line and now stood looking back over my shoulder at the past and forward into the future, and realized I'd become a writer. It also occurred to me that if my father had lived, I would never have written. His death had broken me, and it was only through reading and writing that I had begun to heal myself.

 

A few weeks later my mother and I had dinner with Rose and Bill Styron at Elaine's. I thanked Bill again for bringing the American Express traveler's checks to Paris, but my heart skipped a beat at the shrouded memory of what he'd proposed to me that night. I also realized that though I was angry at him, I still loved him. He was one of the few direct connections I still had with my father, and I had wanted so much to learn about writing. I hadn't told a soul about that night, certainly not my mother. Bill now said with a chuckle that bringing unsigned traveler's checks had been totally illegal, and the bank teller had had to get the manager, with whom Bill had gotten a little sharp.

I told Bill about the story I'd written for Richard Price's class. I told him how Richard had interpreted as sexual the cocaine being blown up the girl's nose through the tiny cocktail straw. “What's so strange,” I told Bill, “is that never occurred to me at all.”

He thought about this for a while, nodding, then told me the following story.

There was an expert on Faulkner who wrote a long, convo
luted article about the wisteria growing up and around the house in
The Sound and the Fury.
The expert had gone on for dozens of pages on the symbolism of the wisteria, how it represented the disintegration of the family and how the family was choking itself from within. When Faulkner was asked about it, he replied, “There was wisteria growing outside the house I grew up in, so I put it in the story.”

I often share this anecdote with my writing students because it illustrates perfectly the writer's unconscious mind at work, and what a mess critics like to make of it.

This is a story of my mother's that sometimes made people laugh so hard they fell out of their dinner chairs.

 

When my father went to Vietnam in 1973 to do a series of articles for the
New York Times Magazine
, my mother took Jamie and me to Klosters, Switzerland, for two weeks during our winter vacation. She booked two rooms in a quaint if not quite elegant bed-and-breakfast chalet at the edge of town. Gloria shared a room with me, and Jamie had one down the hall. The hotel had two entrances, one on the ground floor right off the main street, and one around the corner and up a flight of stairs that led into the second floor. Never one for details, Gloria counted the floors to our room and never looked at the number on the door.

One night, after having gone out partying with her very good friend Irwin Shaw and his entourage at the Chesa Grischuna, Irwin's favorite hangout, an old-style, more elegant and more expensive hotel in the center of town, she came back to our hotel very, very late and very, very drunk. She went in by the second-floor entrance. She counted two flights, slipped into the unlocked room, and dropped her mink coat, her boots, her après-ski wear, her bra and panties on the floor, and got into bed, totally bare-assed naked. I was a light sleeper (“You know, Kaylie is such a neurotic”), and she was afraid I'd wake up and never go back to sleep. After a little while she started to hear a very loud and
guttural snoring and reached over to feel if I was all right, and instead, felt a man's hairy chest.

“Kaylie?” she cried out.

A German matron sat up suddenly on the other side of her husband, switching on the light.
“Was ist das?”

The wife, upon seeing a naked woman lying on the other side of her husband, started screaming. Gloria tried desperately to explain that she'd made a mistake, but she couldn't speak a word of German. She tried English, then French, to no avail.

The Germans saw no humor in this. Finally, Gloria covered her large breasts with one arm, slipped out of the bed, gathered up her discarded clothes, put her mink coat over her naked body, and tiptoed quietly out the door.

Unfortunately, she forgot her purse, and was caught. While an hour earlier she'd been afraid to wake me up, she now woke me by shaking me wildly and, in fits of uncontrollable laughter, told me the whole story. For me, the funniest part was seeing her so vulnerable.

The next morning, the big-boned Switzerdeutsch
hotelière
said to Gloria in a thick accent, “Madame, zese sings may happen at other hotels, but not at mine. Ve have no zuch behavior here, this is not the Chesa Grischuna.”

It took the careful diplomacy of Marian Shaw, Irwin's ex-wife who also still lived in Klosters, to intervene on Gloria's behalf and calm the
hotelière
down.