After Perfect (2 page)

It would be years before I put together the pieces, the truth about my father, and the truth about myself. I had no idea the day the FBI came that I was being propelled into a reality that would strip me of everything I ever knew to be true, where all my life the lie was the truth and the truth was the lie, how the silver spoon would be ripped from my mouth, and how, in the end, denial would fail to save me.

I wasn't there the day the FBI arrested my father. It was the narrative I created and replayed over and over in my head when my mother called me two hours later, as I had been fast asleep in my boyfriend's bed in sunny California.

B
lake placed his hand on my bare back as I glanced up at the blurry numbers of his alarm clock. I let out a groggy groan, still hungover from the night before, and switched sides of my pillow to face him; his sweet brown eyes looked at me. It was one of our last mornings to sleep in together before I headed back across town to finish my second semester of freshman year at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. We were nestled in the northeast corner of his father's mansion in Hancock Park, a high-profile neighborhood where rows of giant palm trees line the sidewalks of English Tudors and Mediterranean mansions. Home to consulates, studio executives, and movie stars—where old money lives.

Blake pulled down the covers as he kissed me and then pushed my left shoulder, turning me over on my back, exposing my naked body to the morning air, and I shivered as he kissed farther down my torso. My phone started ringing. It was the original Nokia ringtone, the one everyone hated—“do-do do do, do-do do do, do-do do do do”—it wouldn't stop. I would have ignored it, but my heart was pounding, and I had this feeling:
someone's died
. It was too early for a phone call. I put my fingers through Blake's wavy hair and whispered, “Sorry,” as I scooted up toward the headboard and grabbed my phone off the nightstand.

“Are you serious?” Blake quipped, stranded at the foot of the bed.

“Home calling.”

I answered. “Hello?”

“Honey?” It was my mother. Her voice was trembling.

“Hi, Mom,” I replied, my heart thumping out of my chest. I yanked the comforter off the bed, wrapped it around my body, and turned away from Blake, who made his way over to his turntables and put on his headphones, annoyed by my rejection.

“I have some bad news,” she said, her voice moving into a higher register, the way she sounds when she's trying not to cry.

“What's going on, Mom?” I just wanted her to get it out and over with.

“The FBI came to the house this morning. They arrested your dad on fraud charges.”

“What?” I wasn't sure I had heard correctly. “What do you mean, ‘fraud charges'?”

“You know Martha Stewart? It's—it's sort of like that.”

I knew by the way she hesitated that she was unsure of how to explain it. “You need to get a job as soon as possible,” she continued. “There's no money left. The bank is going to take our home.”

As my mother's words pierced through my conscience, I began stuttering from shock. Then I asked a series of my own hysterical questions: “Is he guilty?” “Is he going to be in the news?” “Is he going to prison?” “What do you mean, the bank is taking our home?” Each new question charged with escalating tears, and my mother didn't have an answer to any of them. She claimed to know nothing but that it would only be a matter of days before we would lose everything. She couldn't have known in that moment to what extent
everything
meant. Her intention of the word
everything
was used to imply material possessions. Houses, planes, cars, jewelry, clothing—the things that defined us, the things that made us worthy, the things we thought we needed—somehow, in the end, destroyed us. Neither of us knowing how lost we'd be without them, floundering in a world where love was no longer the answer. She couldn't have known what would painstakingly prove to be the greatest loss of all. All of those things we could never ever get back: ourselves, each other. Family.

I hung up the phone and wiped my tears. Blake took off his headphones and looked at me. “Divorce?” he said, buttoning his pants, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. His tone wasn't a question, more like he knew why I was crying and didn't need to ask because he'd been entangled in his parents' bitter divorce battle at the age of five, watching them rip each other's hearts to shreds; a childhood wound still raw and untouched given the way he would, or most of the time, wouldn't, talk about it.

“No,” I replied, staring into a blurred distance. Blake lit his cigarette, waiting for an answer—any answer to explain my sudden fugue state.

“The FBI came to my house this morning. They arrested my dad on fraud charges,” I said in a wave of eerie calm, as if the words had come from someone else, someone I didn't know yet.

Blake's eyes met mine. He inhaled his cigarette and then exhaled. He stared at me, thinking of what to say, the smoke lingering between us. Blake shook his head with confusion. “What?”

An instant sense of urgency kicked my system into overdrive. I leapt out of bed and kneeled down over my sprawled-out suitcase on the floor, searching for my favorite vintage 20th Century Fox T-shirt Blake had given me. I threw it over my head; the iconic gold block letters were faded from years of someone else's wear and tear. I jumped up, putting one foot and then the other inside a new pair of Seven jeans that Mom had allowed me to put on the credit card.

“I have to call my sister,” I blurted out, turning around in circles, disoriented, trying to button my pants, not remembering where I put my cell phone. I searched for it, throwing pillows across the bed, lifting the top of my suitcase and throwing it over my pile of clothes spewing from all sides, shoving Blake's skateboard upside down next to the door so it banged against the wall, and finally pulling the entire comforter over the bed with both hands, as if I were a magician getting ready to whip a tablecloth out from under the china. “Where
is it
?” I screamed. The comforter went flailing behind me with the sound of a pathetic thud as my cell phone hit the dresser and, at last, fell to the ground.

“Hey, hey, hey.” Blake rushed over, restraining me as I tried to get past him to pick up my phone. “Slow down. Breathe,” he said. I glared at him as he held my upper arms in place just below my shoulders. “Why don't we go for a drive?” he suggested, knowing that nothing he could say would fix the overwhelming confusion that overtook any chance of my having a normal day.

“Okay,” I said, and then took a deep breath, “but don't tell anyone about this. Not your dad—anyone.”

“I won't,” Blake promised.

I didn't know whom I could trust. I had known Blake for just over a year. We met at the Hollywood location of the New York Film Academy, a summer program that only the offspring of the affluent can afford, where students are given a vintage 33 millimeter film camera, all-access passes to the Universal Studios back lot, and a suite at the Oakwood Apartments, infamous for housing its rising Disney stars or the next Justin Biebers of the world. Blake was unfazed by it all. He broke all the rules, drove a fast car, smoked weed, had neon blue hair when I met him. He was the antithesis of Ralph Lauren, Ivy Leagues, and loafers—the guys I was surrounded by in Virginia. I was instantly drawn to him. He'd sneak me into forbidden places, like the haunted house from Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho
, where we once found loose nails from a previous film set, then climbed to the rooftop and carved our names into the rotting wood. Blake's carefree attitude came from being raised in a family of Hollywood lineage tracing back to the golden age. His father grew up next to the likes of Judy Garland and silent film stars such as Harold Lloyd, and was friends with Hugh Hefner.

One time at a private party at the Playboy Mansion when I was seventeen, I was pulled from the kids' table (yes, there was a
kids' table
) by one of the Playmates, who said to me, “Oh boy, when Hugh gets his eyes on you . . .” I remember staring down at my double-A-size breasts. “Oh, don't worry about that, honey; he'd take care of it,” she said, like it was no big deal, like just another trip to the grocery store. By the end of the night, I found myself being chased by wild peacocks in the backyard amid naked, spray-painted Playboy bunnies while fireworks burst through the sky.

I was on the edge of adulthood in a city where your wildest fantasies become distorted realities; where boundaries become blurred lines. A far cry from the rigidity of a nine-to-five in public service in our nation's capital for which I might have been destined otherwise. I longed to be a part of it all: the sex, the drugs, the rock and roll. Fame. My father had always told me I was going to be a movie star: a frail brunette beauty like Audrey Hepburn, he said.

B
lake and I climbed into my BMW—a gift my father had given me the day before my high school graduation. Covered in a red bow, and tucked in the windshield was a note that read “Dear Christina Bambina, you owe me an airplane, Love Dad.” Later I found out my father had sold his airplane to buy the car. Money had been tight, but I never knew. My family, we never discussed that sort of thing. I never, ever had to think about money. In fact, I was told it was rude to discuss money.

Blake drove, and I sat in the passenger seat and called Mara, who was starting her junior year at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Mara and I had always been close. Even after she left for boarding school when the the academic pressures at the National Cathedral School for girls became too intense and my parents decided it would be better if she finished high school in the Swiss Alps, where there were more snow days than school days. I never understood the choice to go from the culturally eclectic boarding school in Switzerland, with Saudi princes and princesses, and the future successors of oil tycoons, to the finest breeding ground for the next Mr. and Mrs. George Bush. I suppose there wasn't a difference. Either way, she was my cool big sister who taught me how to freak dance and who cried when Kurt Cobain died.

The phone rang, and I knew I would feel better once we talked.

“Hey,” she said. Her voice was raspy, as though she had been crying.

“Hey.”

“Did you talk to Mom?”

“Yeah, and I just talked to Dad.”

“You did? How?”

“Mr. Carl bailed him out. He's going to call you when he can.”

Bernie Carl was one of my father's wealthiest friends, a banker. He and his wife, Joan, a Washington socialite, and their three children were close family friends. We traveled together on each other's private planes, spent summers in Southampton, Nantucket, and St. Barths, and Thanksgivings in London and Scotland.

“What else did he say?” I wanted to know everything.

“He said it's all a misunderstanding and that the government is trying to make an example out of him.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. “Okay,” I said. “Have you talked to Chloe?”

“No, she's at school. I don't think she knows yet.”

Chloe was a freshman in high school. She had become an avid lacrosse player with more friends than anyone could keep track of and a bit of a wild card, as no one ever knew whether she would bring home an A on an exam or hijack the Range Rover when our parents left town. Once, when she was five, she decided to swing from the gold chandelier in the family room with her best friend. Like two monkeys swinging from tree branches. The mischief ended in a near-fatal accident when the chandelier came crashing to the floor, shattering lightbulbs across the room. She and her friend were lucky they ran away unscathed.

I never spoke to Chloe that day, and it would be years before she would ever talk about what it was like for her when she found out about our father's arrest.

Mara was rambling on about possible job options already. “Stripping?” she joked. Was it a joke, though? It was too overwhelming. I told her I had to hang up. For once, I didn't want to keep talking.

Blake pulled the car over somewhere near the top of Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive. We got out, and I hurdled the metal guardrail along the cliff and sat with my feet dangling over the edge. Blake hopped over and took a seat next to me. He pulled out a joint from his pocket and sparked the end.

“Here,” he said, passing it to me. I took a long drag, hoping that in minutes I would be numb to the world.

I squinted, looking out over the hazy Los Angeles skyline. The Hollywood sign was barely visible in the morning fog; its alluring presence waiting for the sun to shine before it mocked the dirty streets of Hollywood. It would be hours before the hustlers readied their star maps for tourists, before the dancing Elvis and Marilyn Monroe impersonators sweated beneath their costumes, proclaiming their dreams of stardom next to a lone “Jesus Save Us! I Repent!” sign held by some angry protestor, each praying that one day they'll be noticed.

Had I known what was to come, I would have been on my knees in the dirt praying for the answers, because the power of money—the loss of money, the need for money, what we would do for
more
money—would rip through my family, denying any chance of a resurrection. With each passing day, losing who I was and not knowing who I would become. I didn't know how any of it would happen, how the truth would unravel, and how it would unravel me.

I passed Blake the joint. I thought about the possibility of my father being guilty. “But he wears Tommy Bahama T-shirts,” I declared. “My dad. He wears Tommy Bahama T-shirts.” Blake and I bent over laughing. Laughing so hard my stomach hurt.

My mother and father met in the heart of the aftermath of political unrest in the 1970s, when Washington, DC, was the place to be. The Vietnam War had ended; the civil rights and women's rights movements were breaking barriers leading to a more just and equal society, creating a glimpse of change and promise for a more prosperous future. My mother grew up along the canals of Long Beach, California, running barefoot and drinking chocolate malts from Hof's Hut Bakery. She longed to be a part of history, eventually leaving her beach town life behind to work on Capitol Hill for Republican congressman Robert Lagomarsino. A few months later, she met my father. They fell in love and were married six months after. When I was a little girl, I asked my mother over and over again to tell me their love story.