There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me (36 page)

We loved each other on a level devoid of the complexity of a romantic relationship. People could not define it and we couldn’t care less. We confided in one another about the deepest, darkest secrets we held and about our love lives and relationships. We gave each other sound and honest advice. We were connected and I hated being without him.

It was also meaningful that David was a recovering addict and he understood my mother deeply. He helped me and I helped him. David had been battling addiction practically his entire life. He had been diagnosed as bipolar at a later age and was struggling to live a balanced life. A fight he would never win.

Like most addicts, he was gorgeously and attractively intense. I
was drawn to him like a moth to the flame. The difference, however, was that compared to my mother, this relationship was relatively stable and drama-free. He was actually feeling more contented and grounded by working on this show and by being with me, so much so that we all were able to take a bit of a breath. He was actively trying to lead a grounded and sober life. For the first time in my life I wasn’t acting as the codependent. I consciously refused to fall into the same trap that I had with my mother. I insisted I not be that person in his life. And because we were never romantic, it was easier to enforce this healthier connection. During our short life together he was mostly clean. Mom, of course, adored David. I always wondered if she saw in him her lost baby boy. But we never spoke of it.

David and I worked together, worked out together, and had meals together. We helped each other in every way we could think of, and we laughed harder than I had ever laughed in my life. Not since Gavin had I found a partner to laugh at life with in this way. David and I understood how the other felt and thought. He knew me and I knew him with a depth that felt healthy.

Andre was not jealous of David. David understood Andre. Between David and Andre I was satisfied. My life and my circle was small but happy. David filled in the emotional and intellectual gaps and it all seemed to be a rather well-balanced, not overly dramatic life. We had the most connected and enjoyable platonic relationship any two people of the opposite sex could have. I was working, I had found a home in comedy, and life was great.

Andre and I got engaged and the wedding was stunning. I had wanted David to be my maid of honor but decided against it at the last minute. I chose to have a female bridal party only.

We had the ceremony in a boiling-hot, tiny chapel and had the reception where most of us were staying, the gorgeous Tuscan villa in Big Sur, California. While taking some photos before the actual
wedding, Mom poked her head into the hallway from her room. I saw the look. I knew she would not do anything disruptive during the ceremony but it momentarily crushed me. I moved back to the opulent fantasy wedding and was determined to find the joy in the day. My dad cried in our photo together. I never got one with my mom. The wedding and reception went off without a problem, but I avoided Mom most of the night. I took photos with her table, then just danced. I’m sure she continued drinking but caused no scenes that I was aware of. That would come later.

The next day promised to be a fun and very relaxed event. We had a big western BBQ, and Mom arrived like the belle of the ball. She looked happy and radiant and entered with a grand air of fabulousness.

We were all departing. She was to take a ride down the coast with friends on their way to LA while Andre and I dropped off some relatives in LA and Vegas by plane before spending a mini honeymoon at a friend’s house somewhere in Florida. I had hugged Mom good-bye in the driveway of the beautiful hotel nestled in the midst of beautiful Big Sur and said we’d talk later that day when we arrived in Florida.

I remember being in the back-bedroom cabin of the equally beautiful private plane that we were using to fly out of Carmel and suddenly being overcome with fear and sadness. Gavin came into the cabin and I looked him in the eye, unable to speak. I could not form a sentence. I kept shaking my head as if I had duct tape across my mouth.

It hit me all of a sudden—I knew I had made a mistake. I did not want to be married. I wanted to have the wedding because I wanted everyone I loved to be together. I loved Andre but was not sure I wanted to live the life we had been living. I wanted to be a bride, but I should not have been married yet.

When we landed in Vegas, I called to tell Mom we were safe, but she was nowhere to be found. I tried her friends but they said she never showed up to go on the drive. Mom had disappeared. She never left with her friends—they had waited and then departed without her. She was MIA for four days in Big Sur.

Mom being missing added to my anxiety about all of this being a terrible mistake. I felt stuck and hoped it was just because I felt like marriage meant leaving my mother more profoundly. Truthfully, however, I believed my professional life was finally opening up and I was entering a new phase and I wasn’t ready to settle down. I had been so afraid that Andre would leave me if we didn’t get married. I feared that if I had not said yes to his proposal he would have cut me off emotionally and it would have been over. I needed more time with him and I did love him, and I wanted the idea of being his wife.

My life and career were just beginning and I had wanted to know that I could have been OK alone before saying yes to marriage. I suddenly felt terrified and my mom was nowhere to be found. Gavin told me it would be fine and that it was just scary because it was new.

We finally arrived in Florida and walked into a house belonging to a business associate of Andre’s. The place was a dilapidated seventies ranch house on the Intracoastal that had not been used in years. Yes, we would not be bothered, but that was because nobody would want to be anywhere near the place. There was really nothing to do and it was not relaxing or in any way honeymoon oriented. It felt run-down and I got even more depressed. I could not find my mother and I felt really lost instead of settled.

Mom finally resurfaced. I was told she had wandered around Big Sur drunk and alone. Apparently she believed either nobody would care or that it would serve them right to be worried—she could do anything she fucking well pleased. She was Teri Shields and she was
born into this world alone and would leave it alone. She answered to no one.

The hopelessness and loneliness of the addict will never cease to amaze me. She hated being alone yet perpetually isolated herself in the alcohol. She ended up back home in New Jersey, and the cycle of my trying to keep tabs on her resumed yet again. Maybe I, too, was addicted.

•   •   •

Life on the show continued, and for the next two years Andre and I saw very little of one another. I was working so hard on the show and he was really working hard playing at various tennis tournaments. He alienated me when he lost and was on to the next tournament after he won. We did not experience much of our lives together and I had no idea we were really drifting apart. I then began to experience the other side to being an athlete’s girlfriend and now wife: the side that gets shunned after a loss. Somehow I was made to feel it was my fault. I’d get the silent treatment or a projection of disdain that cut to my core. Sometimes he would not even look at me or speak to me when he lost but instead became even more isolated. In the past he had been more open, but he was changing drastically. It felt hateful at times, but I waited it out. Navigating someone else’s moods was a task I knew all too well. This would be a piece of cake. I almost liked it, quite honestly. It was familiar and the hint of martyrdom was not a bad fit.

Overall, the marriage was just existing, but if it felt somehow not what it was supposed to be, it was easy to avoid dealing with it. I maintain that it was not due to a lack of love as much as it was a lack of life. David gave me advice. When I told him I thought I needed a relationship that had more mutual interests and desire for intellectual discourse and shared references, he said he worried I would regret my decision to move on. I wasn’t saying I was some highbrow scholar
whose intellect was being hindered or stunted. I was saying that it was becoming evident that Andre and I had less and less to talk about. Without an immediate trauma through which we needed to navigate, we floundered a bit. We had love, but it did not seem like that was enough. I always thought love was enough. But the truth was we were growing past one another. And I’m not sure if we individually enjoyed how the other liked to live.

I mentioned it to Mom on the phone one night and she made some snide comment about Perry. I said I was not married to Perry.

“Really? Are you sure about that, my dear?”

Wow. Every now and then, Mom came out with a zinger like this that made you realize how much she really did intuit. She was often not productive or helpful with her knowledge, but she had it in her arsenal, perpetually at the ready, just when it was needed.

It was at about this time that I adopted an older female pit bull. She had had litters of puppies and was older and slower and needing a home. Andre had said, “If you go get a dog, you are getting a dog for yourself only. Not for me.”

Well, I’ll show him
, I thought.

David said I should focus on this dog. He grew up with dogs and would help. He said I had him and the dog and the show and my health, and my mother was relatively safe so life was not bad. He was right. What more did I need?

One day I took the dog into the gym on the Warner Bros. lot to meet my favorite staff members and she wandered away. I dropped the leash and knew she’d be fine. Soon a man brought her back to me, asking if she was mine. I was flustered and began explaining that she was, indeed, mine, because my husband had not wanted a dog but I had adopted her anyway. I must have said “my husband” twenty times. He must have been like, “I get it, you’re married. I’m not hitting on you. I just thought the dog was lost.”

I ran back to my dressing room and called my single girlfriend
from college and told her I had met a guy she should go out with. “What’s his name?”

“I have no idea.”

I never got his name, but later learned it when he and David and I would work out in the gym together. He was a writer and had an amazing sense of humor. We all became friends. I didn’t think anything more of it at the time—I was totally cut off from my feelings. I was not technically lonely, but I was not happy, either.

•   •   •

Andre and I were supposed to take my upcoming hiatus and go on a yacht trip that Andre had won at a charity auction. I dreaded going and thought it would be a mistake. He came to LA to take me out for sushi, and I said I didn’t think the boat trip was a good idea because we would be pretending and we needed to figure some stuff out.

He said I would go with him to Vegas, then, and he could train. I did not want to go to Vegas, either. I would stay in LA. He looked at me and asked me if I thought we would ever want to go on vacation together again. My throat closed and the tears came out in hot, thick sheets of salty, blurry despair. I could not talk and needed to leave at once. As I left, I saw Liam Neeson sitting at one of the tables. I could not have cared less.

Andre and I drove home in silence and then he asked if I was happy. I told him no.

He did not say another word to me. He pulled in the driveway and disappeared upstairs. It was quiet and I began to panic. Suddenly I felt I was with my mother when she’d disappear and go guzzle from some hidden bottle of vodka or sneak out into the garage and take the car quietly out to drive to a bar. Sure enough, it was happening. He was leaving without a word.

Panic rising, I ran outside. His old convertible car was loaded and
he was getting in the car to drive away. I begged him to talk to me. I explained that this was when a couple was supposed to fight, and scream, and sleep in separate beds, and cry and get back up and talk all night and get closer. Plus, it was starting to rain torrentially.

“Please don’t do this. Don’t drive away. Where are you going?”

“Home.”

He drove off and I began to weep. The rain kept coming down and I was actually getting nervous for him. I knew the roads would be bad and this all felt so wrong. I would be lying if I said that I really wanted him to turn around and come back to make it all right, but I did not want to not try. I would never forgive myself if I did not try.

I called his cell repeatedly and he never picked up. I used to do the same thing with my mother, except we didn’t have cell phones, so I would instead call her friends and restaurants and bars looking for her. I had slipped right back into all my old codependent habits.

Finally, Andre phoned from Barstow and said that the rain was so bad he had to stop. I half wanted him to come back, and I was also just so relieved he was not in an accident and had pulled over to spend the night.

I took an Ambien and went to bed. The next morning Andre called me and said he had something to tell me. My heart sank. I was instantly so scared, and I could feel my chest start to compress as if a vise was being tightened. I sat down in the window on a little window seat–like area in the kitchen.

He said he was about to tell me something he had never wanted to tell me because he had feared I would leave him. Then why tell me now? I thought. What was it? What had he been hiding? Had he had a child with his ex-girlfriend or somebody more recent for that matter? Was he sick? Was he having a long affair? Was he gay? All sorts of ideas flooded my brain.

I never could have guessed what he would say. He explained to me
that for the whole first part of our relationship he had been addicted to crystal meth. I was shocked but immediately got hurt and insulted that he had not come to me at the time. I was the codependent queen! That was how I related to the world. I was the one who supported him unconditionally when he told me he was basically bald and had been wearing hairpieces most of his adult life. I took all of his innermost fears and had tried to quell them. Why should this have been any different? I would have been his biggest advocate and supporter in both the addiction and in his recovery.