After Perfect (16 page)

A few weeks later, I was pulling out of the parking lot at Warner Bros. studios after auditioning for “cheerleader #3” on the TV series
Heroes
when Ralph Adler called. Why was he calling me? The letters to the creditors didn't work. I wasn't using QuickBooks to budget. I was broke; there was nothing to budget. The last time I had seen Ralph Adler was while I was working at La Scala.

“Ralph Adler's office.”

“Hi, this is Christina Prousalis, I'm returning Ralph Adler's call.”

“One moment, please.”

When Ralph picked up, he sounded frantic and out of breath. “Hey, hey, how are you?” he asked.

“I'm good! How are you?” I said nervously. I had a terrible feeling it was about my father.

“Good, good.” I could hear a door shutting in the background. His voice quiet and low, he said, “I want to ask you something . . .”

“Yes?” I said, my heart pounding.

“So, sometimes, on weekends, I like to do these triple-X video shoots, and I was wondering if you would like to assist me. I'll pay you five hundred dollars—cash—under the table, because I know you need the money . . .”

I almost lost control of the car. I had trusted him. I had sat in his living room with him, spilling my darkest secrets. He was a man my father's age—asking me to be in a porno! And not only that, but to have the audacity to offer me only
$500
? And what did the word
assist
mean? I imagined a dimly lit studio somewhere deep in the valley of Van Nuys. We're out in the backyard by the open swimming pool, the brown Burbank Hills in the distance. Ralph's standing there, wearing an open bathrobe while his flaccid penis dangles free, and I'm on my knees, naked, with a giant feather in my hand, tickling his little penis inches from my nose because his wife won't fuck him at home. And I can see his face smiling down at me, those clunky braces on his lower and upper teeth reflecting the sun as he opens his mouth to cum, the stretching of the rubber bands lengthening like roaring walrus teeth before he moans with pleasure and calls out my name: “
Christina!”

“I . . . I . . . I . . .
N
o!
” I dropped my cell phone, pulled over to the side of the Cahuenga Pass, a narrow road along the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains beside the Hollywood Freeway, swung open the car door, and threw up.

A flood of employees leaving Universal Studios and Warner Bros. slammed on their horns and flipped me off as they screeched by in their black Priuses. I pulled myself back inside the car. There was a two-day-old Coke still in my cup holder. I took a swig and called my mother.

“Ralph Adler is a pedophile!” I screamed in ever-escalating hysteria. My mother scoffed, as if this information was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard.

“Oh, honey, you have to realize he thinks you're sexy, that's all. You're over eighteen now. Get used to it.”

Get used to it?

Where was my mother? The woman who would do anything for her children? Who would kill for them; die in order to protect them.

“You are never allowed to see that man ever again!” I shouted back.

“Well, that's not going to happen,” she said. Her serenity was unnerving.

“Why?”

“Because he's dealing with our taxes and helping me find a divorce lawyer.”

Her words were too painful, overloaded with information. I felt too much and understood too little of how the reality around me was cementing itself into a story I didn't want to tell. I hung up on her. The reality of my parents. The reality of my age and my mother's implication that because I was legal, I was “up for grabs” by powerful men, so I'd better just accept it. My mother said the word
divorce
so casually, as though she wanted to quickly erase twenty-five years of a marriage. The possibility had crossed my mind a few times, but like every child wants to believe, I never thought my parents would ever divorce. I was convinced that all of the things they did were the things that happy couples do. They took vacations alone together! My mother wore sexy lingerie to bed! My father squeezed my mother's ass when he walked in from work each night! This, I thought in all of my naivete, was love and marriage, never having been privy to what was actually inside of it.

My tears turned to rage, with no words for the volcano awakening inside of me. I screamed so hard at the steering wheel that I thought the veins in my neck were going to explode.

I
rang the buzzer to Josh's building, mascara stains across my cheeks—the role of cheerleader #3 gone terribly wrong.

When Josh opened the door, he wrapped his arms around me. “You want me to go over there and beat the shit out of Ralph?”

“Forget it,” I said.

I didn't insist because I knew that Ralph Adler's business partner handled Josh's family's money and that they had developed a lifelong friendship. When I told Madeline about it, she said, “I'm very surprised, honey; that does not sound like Ralph.” I was up against thirty years of money and friendship. I was not going to win that battle. And when I told Josh that my mother had said she was filing for divorce, he brought up therapy again. His family had started going to therapy together, and he said it was making him feel better. I finally caved and asked for a referral. Josh said he would call his mother and get one for me as soon as possible.

I changed the subject, and then I noticed another letter and a paper airplane from my father on his desk. He and Josh had started corresponding with each other apart from me. He was teaching my boyfriend how to make expert paper airplanes. It started a year earlier, just before Father's Day, when he started sending paper airplanes with each letter he wrote. I walked over and picked up the letter. “Enclosed is another rendition of N1TP. When I sat down to make it, I had not done so since I was 12, about 27 years ago. As I folded the wings and made the tail, it came back to me like it was yesterday. . . . If the airplane wants to dive, adjust the trailing edge up slightly, which will bring the nose (attitude) up and enable it to fly from LA to Herlong, if you do it right. I will look out on the Southern horizon for it! Best, Tom.”

The paper airplane was made out of yellow legal pad paper. My father had written “N1TP” (Number One, Tom Prousalis) on the side of the tail, which was the tail number on his King Air. Josh and I took the airplane out to the apartment balcony overlooking the courtyard swimming pool. “Would you like to do the honors?” Josh asked, handing me the airplane. Before I took it, I thought about the first time I flew in the copilot's seat with my father, searching for clues.

M
y Keds wouldn't reach the metal pedals and instead were dangling in the air. My father tightened the headset around my head, and I stared at all the buttons and gadgets, and the million little lights, red, yellow, blue, orange in front of me. He said words to the air traffic controllers like “Alpha,” “Bravo,” and “Charlie.” The steering wheel in front of him moved on its own. Left, and then right, up and down, like a ghost playing tricks. I tried to lift myself higher so I could see out the window, but I was too short.

“Dad, go sideways. Go sideways!” I yelled. Even at the age of seven, I was an adrenaline junkie. My father knew I got it from him. He loved it.

“All right, Bambina,” he said, “Better hold on tight to that steering wheel!” I leaned forward to grab hold even though I knew he was in charge. Until he let go.

“Dad!” I shrieked with excitement.

“You're flying, Bambina!”

“Oh, my, God. Dad, I'm flying!”

Before I knew it, my nose was pressed up against the glass window, my stomach flipped upside down, and I was wide eyed. We were flying sideways, just as I'd asked. The earth below me, like
Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood
, with little cars zipping down highways, and suburban houses in cul-de-sacs with swimming pools, when suddenly I felt a wave of nausea. I looked over at him. He was flirting with the female air traffic controller.

“Is N169 out of the question?”

“It is never out of the question.”

“Do you have any restrictions?”

The air traffic controller giggled. Her voice was annoying and robotic and had a slight southern accent.

“You're putting on a great show.”

“Dad. Dad . . .” I tried to get his attention. “Dad!” I felt my heart pounding louder and the back corners of my mouth getting watery until finally, “Dad, I don't feel so well—”

I sat and watched what was once my mother's homemade tuna fish sandwich ooze in between the colorful buttons.

“Roger that. This is N1TP approaching MNZ, I'm going to need a crew of men with buckets, mops, wipes, anything you have down there on the ground. My seven-year-old just barfed all over my control panel.”

I exhaled with relief as the wheels hit the ground. Yellow buckets and mops and crewmen from Manassas Regional Airport stood by ready to clean the mess I'd made. Flushed with embarrassment, I turned to my father. “I'm sorry, Dad.”

“It's okay, Bambina. You're just not ready to be a fighter pilot yet.”

I
snatched the paper airplane from Josh's hands. I pinched the bottom in between my pointer finger and thumb, closed one eye, and thrust the plane out over the balcony. We stood there amazed at how far it soared: twenty feet maybe, before it went careening sideways and plunged into the swimming pool.

A
few days later, I was staring at a list of doctors, their metal signs plastered on the wall, one above the other with a button next to each. I was ten minutes early and had been thinking long and hard about what I would say to my mother. She had agreed to a therapy session. I thought about how I would convince her that she was still in love with my father, and that she would need to stop all communication with Ralph Adler; I didn't care that he was helping her pro bono. I pressed the button and watched the red light turn on.

Sheryl was a friend of Madeline's, petite with frizzy hair, and she sat on top of a square pillow to make herself higher while she held a yellow legal pad and folder in her lap, to scribble down our insanity as proof. I sat down on the gray couch across from her and waited to the sound of a ticking clock before ten minutes from the start of the hour had gone by.

“Do you know where she might be?” Sheryl asked, concerned.

“She'll be here. She's just late for everything,” I explained, even though it wasn't true. My mother was never late for appointments.

I checked my phone. No messages.

“Would you like a piece of candy?” Sheryl held out a bowl of Jolly Ranchers.

“No thank you.”

The sound of a ticking clock.

Ten more minutes had gone by, and the sun had set. Sheryl stood up to light a scented candle on her desk. I dialed my mother's cell phone for the third time.

“Hi. You've reached Gayle Prousal—”

I hung up. The pit of my stomach was twisting and turning.
She's not coming . . .

“Well, I guess it's just you and me, dear,” Sheryl said.

I looked down at my phone, praying one more time that I would see “mom cell” pop up on the screen. It was the moment that solidified the severance of our relationship—the moment I realized that she was gone, checked out, moving on. The betrayal hit me with such force. Intellectually, I understood that our new worlds were pushing us in different directions for our simple need to survive, but, still, I didn't want to accept it; I wanted to
correct
it. I thought that if I could remind her how much she loved my father, if I could remind her how happy we were once, she might just hang on a little longer until he came home. I was so determined to get her to prove to me that my childhood perception of them was real, so that I could hold on to a part of the illusion of all that was true and listen to the denial that was keeping me afloat.

When I told Sheryl about Ralph, she suggested that I take action and tell his business partner the truth. I Googled “accountant code of ethics.” I compiled a list of every moral and ethical code that I thought Ralph broke. Then I picked up the phone and called his business partner. I would stand up for myself if no one else was willing to. The man was flabbergasted, speechless, flustered on the other end of the phone. He stuttered, “Well, well, no, that can't be. I've known Ralph thirty years; he would never do something like that.”
Why does everyone think I'm making this up? If I wanted an excuse for attention, I would play the “Daddy's in jail” card.
I insisted I was not making it up. I listed the codes of ethics I believed Ralph had broken and said it was also sexual harassment.

“I will look into it,” his partner said before hanging up abruptly. A few weeks later, I received a letter in the mail written by their legal team. Something along the lines of “We are sorry that you are unhappy with our services and feel that it is best that both parties part ways.” I flushed the letter down the toilet right after I read it. Ripping it to shreds in sheer rage, I had never felt more isolated, more voiceless, and repressed by blatant lies. There was no hope, no use in keeping it. I thought I would never see Ralph Adler again, or his business partner; there would never be a lawsuit, there would never be any kind of real admission or apology, and I never ever wanted to think about that day or be reminded of it ever again.

I had read that this was typical: the reason why so many women do not report sexual harassment, for fear that no one will believe them. And that is exactly what happened.

When my mother called me back a few days after my first therapy session, she apologized. “Honey, I forgot. I'm so, so sorry.”

I never believed that she forgot the therapy appointment. I knew she didn't want to sit there in front of Madeline's friend and spill all her deep, dark secrets. “We'll go another day,” she promised. Whatever innocence was left inside of me died that day. I gave up. I didn't care anymore because I didn't think anyone else did. My instinct to want to protect myself had been dismissed so that each time I tried to do it, or thought about doing it, it felt wrong. I had normalized Ralph Adler's behavior and anything like it. Just like my mother did.