Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (18 page)

I imagine she felt taken for a patsy. Of all the people around me, she seemed to be the only one who was putting my interests first—she who wasn’t related to me, who had met me only a few years before, who was being vilified by Dad—and she was powerless. She was being accused, I think, of lax morals; but her home was stable and Collin and I knew our place in it. She gave us rules and responsibilities and made sure we felt loved. She may have had many lovers and minimal clothes, but she had an iron sense of right and wrong where children were concerned.

By her standards, Dad had virtually abandoned me—and though he had left me with her, he would back anyone against her. My real father (who had after all only met me once since Mum’s death) was unwilling to accept commitment, even in the emergency circumstances that Cici laid out for him. And my sister, heedless and headstrong, was insisting on taking me into a circle where, Cici knew, there were no rules for children at all.

I dimly understood Cici’s qualms, but I didn’t care. If Anjel wanted me, I would be there. I sensed that she felt a chance of making us all a family: her and Ryan, his children and me. I hadn’t had a place at Jack’s house, except on weekends, but at Ryan’s—especially with Tatum away—I fitted in. I knew how much Anjel wanted to fill the loss of Mum for me, though she never said it in so many words. But every casual mention of Mum added another filament to the cord that united us, and nobody else: the Soma girls. We’d both lost our mother, but we had each other. What was broken for me was broken for her too. I was coming to realize that it had broken long before Mum died.

I
was sitting on Tatum’s bed in the beach house with Griffin, talking. In her absence, it was my room—and like Griffin’s it was big enough for a king-size bed and nothing else. No bookshelf, no desk. Suddenly Anjel ran in and slid open the closet door.

“Don’t tell him I’m in here,” she whispered to us. She looked really afraid. She was shaking. “If he asks, don’t tell him, please.”

She squeezed in behind Tatum’s Rive Gauche–scented clothes. I could barely see her bare feet behind the ranks of Maud Frizon shoes. My heart started to race. I didn’t know how close behind her Ryan might be. I couldn’t hear footsteps; but maybe he was being quiet, to surprise us all. From inside, Anjel slid the door closed.

Griffin and I made an instant, silent pact not to even look at the closet. I hoped we’d be brave enough to keep Anjel safe if Ryan came in looking for her. How could we stand up to him, if she couldn’t?

I hadn’t heard any arguing or fighting from upstairs. I wanted to
know what had happened, but I didn’t dare talk to Anjel through the closet door in case Ryan was listening outside, waiting for me to give her away.

Five minutes passed. Griffin and I forced out casual words, waiting for the crash of the door slamming open. I imagined Ryan, as big as a bear in that small room, tearing open the closet door…And then? I wasn’t sure. I tried to keep my breathing slow and steady so that whatever happened, I’d be prepared for it.

I knew he didn’t have any reason to be so angry. Anjel couldn’t have given him one: both because she was too good to have done anything bad enough to deserve this, and because she knew him well enough to be afraid of his temper. I also knew he didn’t need a reason. He enjoyed the power.

I heard a grating creak. The closet door was sliding open, catching in its runners. My eyes caromed from the closet to the door and back again as Anjel pushed Tatum’s clothes aside and came out.

Her eyes were swollen and red. From crying, I thought—not from being hit. She was still shaking.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

She didn’t answer. I hugged her. She hugged me back, tight. I felt I was the only person she had to rely on—and I wished I was stronger, that I could go upstairs to Ryan and face him down, scold him and shame him for scaring my sister like that.

I never thought for a second that she was overreacting. I was afraid of him too. He had a way of coming up behind me and placing his hands on either side of my head, over my ears. I had to relax into it, because the next thing would be a sharp twist as he cracked my neck. It was supposed to be affectionate, and he did it to everybody; but however good it felt afterward, to me it was a reminder that he was strong enough to break my neck if he chose to.

One day when I got back from school (a friend of Tatum’s had been hired to drive me), Anjel wasn’t there. Griffin was in his room watching TV, looking hunted.

“Allegra!” A barking shout from above.

I went to the foot of the stairs. “Yes, Ryan?”

“Bring me some soup. And a Coke.”

Soup was always Campbell’s tomato. Coke was always on ice, with half a lemon squeezed into it.

I heated the soup, poured it into a bowl, put the tall glass of Coke beside it, carried the tray upstairs, and set it on the bed in front of Ryan. He took a spoonful.

“Where’s the pepper.” It wasn’t really a question.

“Sorry. I’ll go get it…”

He stood up. He seemed bigger than usual. I took a step back. His hands were clenched into half fists.

“Get down those stairs before I throw you down.”

I sensed, without thought, that the sight of fear in me might make him snap, as if I were accusing him of something. So I went with calm, mute obedience. The stairs were wood slats, and I tried not to let my feet make too much noise. I didn’t look back. With each step down, I expected to feel the blow of a china bowl on the back of my head, and hot soup scalding me.

I made it to the corner where the stairs doglegged. I heard Ryan leave the upstairs landing and go back into his room. Then I ran.

I didn’t know where to go. I was too scared to get the pepper and go back upstairs. I didn’t think he’d come downstairs after me, but if he did, I didn’t want him to find me in Griffin’s room. I wasn’t sure if he’d dare hit me, but he might well hit Griffin instead. I didn’t want to stay in the living room, right underneath him, where the stairs came down; he’d think I was spying on him, or maybe I’d make some noise that would set him off again. I could go outside onto the beach, but that felt exposed, with nowhere to hide or run to, and the ocean was stormy. Anjel would be back soon, and she’d worry if I wasn’t there.

So I sat on Tatum’s bed, nervously doing my homework. The window was a slit high up on the wall, like a jail cell, too small to climb out of. If I heard Ryan’s footsteps coming downstairs, I decided, I’d run for
the back door and just stay on the edge of the Pacific Coast Highway until Anjel got back. Cars could see me; I’d be protected there.

I heard the garage open, and Anjel’s footsteps. I caught her eye through the open bedroom door.

“How is he?” She sounded wary. He must have been in a bad mood when she left.

“He wanted soup and I forgot the pepper. He threatened to throw me down the stairs.”

She nodded. Her face was gray and cloudy. She looked like someone going to execution as she headed on down the hallway.

The important thing was that he hadn’t thrown me down the stairs. He would come out of this bad mood, and everything could carry on as before.

Ryan used to boast that his birthday was the same day as Hitler’s. It was in mid-April, on the cusp of Aries and Taurus, which seemed significant to me. If you were neither one thing nor the other, you could be anything—or both. The cosmic tides acting on the fluids in his brain meant that he and Hitler shared something. That explained his dark side—even that he seemed to be proud of it.

His moods alternated: a few days wonderful, a few days demonic. When he was in a good mood, he was the nicest person in the world, and it was hard to hold the bad side against him. He picked me up from school and took me shopping: to Maxfield Bleu, to a boutique on Sunset Plaza—where he bought me a beautiful off-the-shoulder chiffon dress, brown-speckled like a bird’s egg—and to Maud Frizon for shoes. Other days, we would all go to his favorite car wash, on the gay part of Santa Monica Boulevard opposite the store Ah! Men! (I loved that name), and get burgers from the burger stand and buy handpainted hairbrushes and glittery things from Oray’s Salon across the road.

Or we’d all sit on his bed and watch TV. I was working on flirting and I practiced my look on him: not turning my head, but swiveling my eyes ninety degrees to the side. It hurt.

“One day you’ll drive men crazy with that look,” he said. Exactly the response I wanted.

One night we went out to dinner, and then drove up to the front of the Whisky nightclub. Ryan got out, spoke to someone, then came back and drove around the corner. We went in through a side door near the kitchen, and straight up to the balcony. We were given a table at the edge, with a good view of the stage—and Griffin and I were placed at the back, where we couldn’t be seen from below. Toots and the Maytals were playing. Anjel and Ryan danced in place at the table, so I did too. She rolled her hands around each other the way John Travolta did in
Saturday Night Fever,
so I did too. It was harder than it looked; the beat tripped me up and my arms wouldn’t do what I wanted them to. So I gave that up and just stepped from one foot to the other. Ryan grinned at me. He pulled a little vial from his pocket and took a toot of coke with the tiny spoon that was chained to the lid. He didn’t bother to hide it. He was untouchable.

Even at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, when we went to see Joan Armatrading in concert, he barely hid it: just leaned down a little for the toot. We were sitting at one end of a row of seats, with real people—not in some special place reserved for movie stars, where the law didn’t apply. I was afraid he’d be seen; but I didn’t want to look around since that would make us look guilty.

The little vial was with him always: when he was driving, when we went to the movies, or when we were just sitting around on his bed watching TV. He bent down to it as casually as Cici would put a stick of gum in her mouth.

I didn’t always know who would be picking me up from school: sometimes Ryan, sometimes Tatum’s friend Esme, sometimes Roberto, who worked for Aunt Dorothy, to take me to Gloom Castle for a few days. Sometimes Anjelica.

I was happiest when I saw her little gray Mercedes waiting for
me, the car that Jack had given her for her twenty-third birthday. The fact that she still drove it meant to me that she still loved him, that somehow, behind it all, he was the permanent one.

“Dad’s in hospital, Legs,” she said as I got in. “He couldn’t breathe.”

When they examined him they found an aneurysm in his aorta: a bulge in the artery wall like a balloon. If it burst, he would die, as his father had in the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Anjel and I talked only a little on the way to the hospital. She told me they’d made him quit smoking, cold turkey, to give his lungs a chance to strengthen before the operation. He’d had emphysema for nearly twenty years by then, and sometime in the 1960s he’d been given five years to live. Anjel told me how she remembered meeting him at Victoria Station in London after Mum died, nearly nine years before. He’d taken the train from Rome because his lungs were too weak for him to fly.

He was on the eighth floor of Cedars-Sinai, the VIP floor, holding court as usual. Aside from the hospital bed and the high-mounted TV, the atmosphere was just like the hotel rooms that I was used to seeing him in: a sofa of people discussing his next project, a pile of scripts and books, Gladys in a straight chair taking notes. Except for the bland curtains and furniture and waiting-room art on the walls, it could have been a French king’s levee. When the nurses came in to check something, Dad tolerated them graciously. When someone lit up a cigarette, he leaned over defiantly to inhale the smoke.

Maricela was there. She disappeared as soon as we arrived.

It was a balancing act between aneurysm and anesthesia: the longer they waited for Dad’s lungs to strengthen, the higher the risk the aneurysm might burst and kill him instantly. They waited a week. I spent the day of the operation wondering whether, if Dad died, they would call me immediately or wait till school was over. The sight of Anjel’s little car in the driveway at three o’clock reassured me. If Dad
was dead, she wouldn’t have been able to drive, or if she had she’d be standing outside the car to embrace me.

Dad was in intensive care. I’d never seen anyone look so ill. His skin was blue and dirty-looking. The bags under his eyes hung to the sides of his face.

“Hello, girls.” His smile was weak. And then, to the nurses: “My daughters.” A formal introduction to assert his control of the situation, or a boast? I wasn’t sure which.

Every day Anjel picked me up at school and drove us down Sunset, to Beverly Glen, along Santa Monica Boulevard, and into the parking lot entrance between the twin towers of Cedars-Sinai. I began to dream about that drive, like a scene from a movie with the sound turned off, Anjel and I side by side framed by the windscreen and the top arc of the steering wheel under her hands, a rear projection of green lawns and trees and nondescript corner stores rolling past the windows on an endless loop. We never arrived. We were both anxious in those dreams, as if we’d be driving for our whole lives and Dad would die just before we got there.

We took Dad for walks down the corridor of the VIP floor, Anjel supporting one arm, me supporting the other. It was carpeted, wide and silent; the nurses’ station reminded me of the reception desk at Dad’s business manager’s office. Spaced out along the walls, a little too far apart, were small, ugly paintings by famous artists: the ones that nobody wanted to look at, I figured, so that’s why they’d been donated for tax deductions. There was something grotesque about these million-dollar paintings in a hospital. I wondered if the VIPs felt better knowing they were dying within twenty feet of a Picasso.

Dad was very grumpy; I guessed the bad-paintings-by-the-best-painters thing annoyed him. All they gave him to eat was baby food, like Jell-O and squelchy lasagna, and 7-Up with the bubbles stirred out. Anjel solved this problem by getting takeout from Chasen’s. When Dad was discharged, she convinced Ryan to lend him the
beach house to recuperate in. It was November. We’d have Thanksgiving there.

Anjel cooked a turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans. I hoped desperately that it would go well, for her sake, but I knew from the start that it wouldn’t. Dad was in a foul mood: he didn’t like Ryan, especially in comparison to Jack, and hated being beholden to him for the loan of the house. He also, of course, disliked holidays that were centered around eating. Maricela was her usual silent, inscrutable self. Ryan sulked—because, I figured, he resented being a guest in his own house. The sky outside—which was inside too, thanks to those huge windows—was suffocatingly overcast. Lee’s Bars Stools and Dinettes pounded south, as usual, through a malevolently still ocean.

I hated the meanness. Anjel had tried so hard, and Griffin and I were the only ones who appreciated the work she’d put in, or valued what she was trying to create: goodwill, warmth, togetherness. Dad was sick, so I cut him a bit of slack, but Ryan had no excuse. Anjel wanted a family as much as I did, and she was doing all she could to make us one. And they were spitting it back in her face.

It rained hard that winter: apocalyptic rain. The sandstone cliffs above the Pacific Coast Highway started to crumble. Huge clods tumbled down, threatening to cut off Malibu from the city. Houses slid down the hillside as the earth collapsed away. The templelike Getty Museum, with its Roman balustrades, hung on the edge. I wondered if I’d see it fall, on the way to school or back again: the museum breaking into its separate blocks of marble, paintings and sculptures skidding across the highway, a Greek arm here, a Cubist canvas there, and people screeching to a halt and diving through the traffic to grab a fragment of mosaic or Vermeer.