After Perfect (32 page)

When I got up from the bed, the husband from the couple standing watching us said to me as I passed by naked, “You are so beautiful. Thank you. It's our three-year anniversary,” as though I had been a gift. And then it occurred to me: I wouldn't go on a private jet for $5,000 and have sex with a basketball player, but I would do it with someone else, in front of other people. For free.

I don't remember what happened after that. I don't remember driving back to the hotel where we stayed. I don't remember if I had broken the “no touching anyone else” rule. I don't remember falling asleep.

When I woke the next day, Jason suggested we grab a bite at the sports bar, Hamburger Mary's, before we drove back through the desert. I sat there staring at my undercooked cheeseburger. I wasn't very hungry. Jason mauled his like a lion across the table.

“So do you come here often?” I asked.

Jason swallowed, and then looked at his burger. “I mean, I would never take my future wife here,” he chuckled.

I suppose it was a silly question.

I picked up my burger. I set it back down. And I looked out toward the sun.

I
t was fall. The leaves were yellow, orange, and red as we sped down Georgetown Pike. My father accelerated, reaching forty-five miles an hour, and Mara sat next to him with her hand on top of his as he shifted his red Porsche Carrera into third gear. Chloe and I sat in the leather bucket seats behind them.

“Blowout!”
Mara cried. That was our code word for rolling down all the windows. He'd let us stand up and poke our heads out the sun roof, our hair whipping across our eyes.

“Faster, Dad! Faster!” we screamed, and before each shift in gears, my father yelled, “Hold on to your hats, girls!” jerking us forward as we belly laughed. And I remember watching the car's hood, bearing the Porsche emblem of a black horse on a gold, black, and red crest, swerve back and forth across the yellow lines, letting the world know we didn't need to live by any such rules.

W
hen I woke up, everything was white as I opened my eyes and squinted at the bright fluorescent ceiling lights. My mother was sitting in the chair by my side, and Liam stood behind her. I was in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai, just as my mother had been. An IV needle protruded from the back of my right hand, dripping fluids. I had told the doctor earlier that my head felt like thunder. All I remembered was Liam coming over and picking me up off the floor of Ellie's mansion and carrying me out to the car because I couldn't walk. I must have called him. He must have called my mother. I was throwing up violently and couldn't stop. It felt like my guts were unraveling.

The doctor didn't have a diagnosis. Maybe a bug, he said, but it didn't seem like it. I knew I was having a nervous breakdown. It had been a year and a half. It was the longest I'd gone without speaking to my father, without a letter, an email, or a phone call. It was 2010 now. I kept waiting for him to show up on my doorstep one day; to call on my twenty-fifth birthday. I would replay conversations over and over in my head of how it could go. But there was nothing. No card. No email. No phone call. He had vanished. Why couldn't I let him go? I had told myself I wasn't worth fighting for. Mara and Chloe never heard from him either. I blamed myself for it, that he didn't call on their birthdays because I had written the email to him about the Hermès Birkin bag. I didn't understand why he wouldn't at least fight for their love, when they hadn't confronted him like I did.

The debt was still mine to handle, with creditors still calling my cell phone. I didn't know how I would pay for the hospital visit. My driver's license was about to get suspended for failure to appear in court. I was flipping off officers, being pulled over for reckless left-hand turns, and speeding on a regular basis. I received a notice in the mail that my bail amount was $849, and if I didn't pay it, I was at risk of getting arrested.

It was hard coming home each night to Ellie's mansion. I couldn't relate to her on any level. I could see that money couldn't buy happiness, love, or freedom. Her father was always disappearing somewhere in the Middle East and couldn't be reached. People kept trying to take advantage of her. Everyone wanted to get to know her: Be a producer on my film! Start a production company with me! It was all bullshit. Damned if you have money, damned if you don't. Watching it, I was paralyzed by both ends, the juxtaposition of each where the solution was neither here nor there. I could see how money changes you, molds you and folds you, and when you have it, you still can't see any more truth than when you don't have it. And whether you're trying to attain it, or just trying to keep it, there still doesn't seem to be any understanding of what is real and what is not. So whom and what are you supposed to trust when you can't even trust the very thing that's dictating how you're supposed to survive? I couldn't think about it anymore—poverty and wealth—it was making me sick.

My mother saw how sick I was. Lost on the edge of defiance. After Mara had been hired by another tech company and moved in with a friend of hers, my mother spoke to Richard, and he agreed to let me stay in their guest bedroom until I could get back on my feet. The thought of living with my mother and Richard was horrifying—it was humiliating having to move back in with a parent—but it was either that or go to the homeless shelter downtown. I'd exhausted the only friends I had and was determined not to depend on any man I dated for money.

A few days into my stay, Richard offered me a job at his furniture factory filing paperwork and drafting up orders from clients. As I'd predicted, though, the company was on the verge of going under, struggling to make payroll, pay vendors, barely breaking even each month. It was a sinking ship I willingly jumped onto. On every block in West Hollywood, furniture and other retail stores continued going out of business. The Blockbuster across the street: gone. More homes with foreclosure signs and For Sale signs planted in grassy front lawns. The world as I knew it, like my past, was ending. Facebook and Apple were exploding, and Occupy Wall Street was all over the news. And all of the wreckage from my past was catching up to me.

I stuck out the job for a year despite feeling like I was in purgatory. Richard resented my upbringing, always reminding me of my poor work ethic and financial irresponsibility. I began to think he thought of me as a mere extension of my father. But I kept my mouth shut. I needed that paycheck; it was my only way out. I saved as much as I could. And I was grateful for the opportunity and was willing to withstand his comments about my father and me until I had enough money. I did nothing but eat, sleep, and work. I eventually got fired from the nightclub downtown for not being a “team player.” Then I got another job cocktail waitressing at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood part-time while I babysat friends of friends' kids when I could.

W
hen 2011 rolled around, I could finally remove my bad credit history. It had been more than seven years since I'd discovered the debt in my name. As long as seven years have passed from the time of the delinquency date—the date that my father had defaulted on payments—I could remove it. There were still two credit card debts that would remain on my report for another year and a half, but at least I could start cleaning up the mess. And compared with the rest of America at the time, my financial situation didn't look so bad. I finally qualified for my very first studio apartment in Hollywood. I collected my furniture out of the storage unit, cocooned once again by my childhood bedroom, yet I still wasn't happy. As I kept working at the factory, which continued to struggle and cause tension between my mother and Richard, I had no direction in life.

Most days it was painful to watch my mother in the role of Richard's wife, struggling to run the business with him. Not long after she'd left the hospital for her kidney infection, she developed a syndrome called fibromyalgia. Most doctors relate it to depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, where your body has chronic, widespread pain. I knew it was because of all the untouched grief inside of her—the same reason that I had ended up in the hospital. On the days when she wasn't at the factory, she'd be lying on the couch or sleeping in bed. I tried hard on a daily basis to forgive her for the choices she'd made, because even though I couldn't feel it yet, I knew that someday I would have more understanding of the truth. Of her truth. So I started by asking questions.

M
y mother and I sat across from each other at the cheap sushi place on Larchmont Boulevard.

“Mom, I need to ask you about Dad,” I said, pouring more sake into her glass.

She looked uneasy. “What do you want to know?”

“I want to know if there were signs. There had to have been signs, Mom.”

She paused and looked down at her plate of sashimi. “You know,” she began, “your father and I created a beautiful life. It really was a fairy tale . . .”

“I know,” I replied, even when now I suspected it wasn't true.

My mother took a deep breath. “Are you sure you want to talk about this?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” She took another sip of saki. “Well, there were little signs here and there that I . . . looking back . . . I think I chose to ignore or didn't think much of—red flags, I guess you would say. Like when we'd go to a dinner party, and he would tell people he went to Harvard, when he had only gone for a summer program one year. He went to Howard, the all-black university. But he would phrase it in such an ambiguous way that if you were to catch him in the lie, he could spin it and tell you something making you believe that
you
were the one who was mistaken.

“And there were other times I'd catch him in little lies. Nothing big, but things like, I'd ask him if he had paid the gardener, and he would tell me that he did, but then I'd find out later that he didn't. Or that we were late paying this bill or that bill. We were always late on our payments for things. He was always pushing the envelope, always wanting more even when we couldn't afford it. And I felt I was always trying to keep up, always trying to keep everyone in the community happy who may have been upset with him, usually over money that we owed. I always felt I had to be perfect. But he never let me look at our finances. He never let me see the money. He treated me like one of you girls.

“And, you know . . . I was happy with that. I was happy to be Mom and organize ballet lessons, and pack your lunches, and plan benefits, and raise money for charity without having to worry about our own money, because I trusted him. I loved him. We married very young, and I always had believed that he would be a good husband and father in providing for me and for you girls. He always promised me that. And he did. But then things just seemed to get bigger and bigger, our balloon of wealth . . . it just felt, to me . . . it began to feel so out of control. But I had no control. You know, sweetie, I'm just a small-town girl from Long Beach. I would have been happy with a little house and white picket fence, but your dad, his dreams were bigger.”

When she said these things to me, I remembered that it was around the year 2000—right before the dot-com crash—when my father upgraded from a Beechcraft Barron twin-engine prop plane to the King Air, swapped his Porsche for the 911 Turbo, bought another Range Rover, and traded my mother's BMW for a Jaguar. And the year before that, he'd taken my mother to Paris, along with Joan and Bernie Carl. It must have been at the same time as the French Grand Prix, where my father and Bernie drove their vintage Ferraris, racing across the country while Mom and Joan followed in a limousine behind them. My parents were sitting at the top of the Eiffel Tower when my father handed my mother the jewelry box, the same jewelry box that held her ring all those years ago. Inside was a gold Baldwin key to the Nantucket house at 44 Liberty Street. A Victorian house that sat on an acre of land right near Main Street. We had always rented, but now, we owned. It was also around that time that my mother got her upgraded nine-carat diamond from Tiffany.

“So why didn't you leave him?” I asked.

“Why are you asking me all of this?”

“Because I want to know the truth.”

“Well”—she looked at me, treading lightly—“I did think about leaving him. But I was afraid to.”

“What happened?” I felt I was getting closer to something.

“Do you remember the summer in Nantucket? It must have been around '94 or '95, when we took you girls down to the docks and showed you that enormous yacht that came to town? The one everyone on the island was in a tizzy over because of how big it was?”

In the nineties, new money started rolling in on the island. Forget the old modest Victorians and cottages owned by local fishermen; compounds were being built for the families of bankers and tech executives. Flying into town on their Gulfstreams and Learjets. I remembered that trip down to the docks well. I was around nine years old when I stood next to my father, staring up at the
Naomi
.

“Girls, over here!” he yelled. The 167-foot yacht glistened in the afternoon sun as Mara, Chloe, and I carried bags of fudge from Aunt Leah's, the local candy store. As we walked down the dock to get a closer look, my mother explained how everyone on the island was gossiping about how tacky they thought it was and not representative of the island's humble beginnings. But my father loved it. “This is where Mom and I are going to party tonight,” he said, and then, “I'm going to buy one for Mom, and we're going to call it
Gayle Winds
—get it?” My mother whacked him playfully in the chest. He never did get the chance to buy her the yacht.

“I remember that,” I said.

“Well, a man named Jordan Belfort owned it. He had a party there that night, and I had never seen more cocaine, diamonds, and drugs in my entire life, and it scared me. Something felt off. And later that night, your father and I got into a huge fight about it. I told him I didn't want that man anywhere near you girls. Ever. I mean, this was a man who took us to dinner at the Chanticleer and threw twenty thousand dollars at the maître d' because he had forgotten to make a reservation. Everyone was high on quaaludes or something.”