Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales (10 page)

We made it through that week with minimal cannibalism and no divorce proceedings. I have the creators of Wii to thank. And like a meth addict going through detox, I had sweated out the idea that the five-star hotel was my only life raft.

But don’t get me wrong; on my deathbed, when my family and friends come to pay their last respects, I’ll be in the presidential suite. At the Four Seasons. In Nevis.

Chapter Thirteen

Ali in Wonderland

I
had always been skittish living with my friend Anne up in the Hollywood Hills. Two salient details led to repeated bouts with insomnia: one, the house was near where the Manson murders had taken place; and two, we were renting the house from Robert Englund (aka Freddy Krueger in the
Nightmare on Elm Street
series). One afternoon I was looking to store some broken speakers in the garage when I came upon a rubber Freddy Krueger mask and was so horrified I tried to break our lease. What was even more frightening was that the mask was more attractive than most of the men I was dating at the time.

The house was built into a hill that was straight up Laurel Canyon and off Wonderland Avenue. During the rainy months we carried our tea and yogurt from the kitchen to the living room through a heavy stream of mud. There was one bedroom upstairs, which was the clear winner, with a skylight and a view of the street, and a downstairs bedroom that smelled like mildew, was riddled with spiders, and had a sliding glass door that opened onto a pile of dirt. The upstairs bedroom could be a tree house in Costa Rica; the bottom bedroom looked like the dank basements where police find skulls of missing prostitutes. Anne and I did what all sophisticated and mature women would do to determine the bedroom assignment: Rock, Paper, Scissors. I lost. We decided to swap every six months, and I started in the dungeon first. I willed myself to be rational. What were the odds a mentally ill man would climb Laurel Canyon, target our house, and slit my throat? Better than I thought.

I decided to place the bed against the sliding glass door—a sort of modernist headboard. At night when I stared up from my bed, I could almost make out a patch of sky. Six months after moving in, I was lying in my bed next to my dog, Trout. Trout was the love of my life. He was a yellow lab mutt who went everywhere with me, forced me to exercise (HE took ME on hikes), and slept in my bed so I could spoon him like a pregnancy pillow. I often wondered, If Trout had been a man, would we have been soul mates? Would he look like Matt Damon? And then I would be disturbed by how icky that thought was. He was my pet! Plus, he had no money.

So Trout was in a deep, muscle-spasm-filled sleep, and I was trying to find the little patch of sky while mulling over how to tell a married Hollywood producer to stop leaving me filthy messages. Suddenly a scraggly, bearded face appeared directly above my head. He was peering in the glass door; he hadn’t noticed me yet. I sprang up and began screaming; Trout jumped up and began snarling. The demonic figure began fiddling with the door handle.

I ran out of the bedroom, taking every third stair as I raced to alert my roommate. “Anne! Anne! Call nine-one-one,” I belted as I tore through to the kitchen. I was wearing little boy shorts and a tank top, perfect slasher-film attire. I grabbed the only knife we had, a dull yard-sale bread knife. I would not be the slut who gets gored by a machete. Anne leisurely opened her bedroom door as if I had sung, “Coffee’s ready!”

Meanwhile, Trout was snarling and barking like he was in the middle of an illegal dogfight. “There’s a man downstairs! A man just broke in, and he’s going to kill us!”

Anne was still half asleep. “What do you mean, a man? Do you know him?”

This was not the time for Anne’s Harvard education to ignite some line of logical reasoning. “Call the police, or we’re gonna die,” I shouted as we heard my side table crash and Trout growling like he had a limb in his mouth. Anne ran to her room to call 911.

A minute later, all was quiet. Trout padded up and assumed his usual position by the back door. He was not going to chase the intruder into the hills; he needed to pee.

When the police finally showed up, they blinded me with their flashlights, as if the first thing on the agenda was to see if I was some paranoid actress strung out on diet pills. I showed them my room, which could have passed for a crime scene on
CSI
. The sliding glass door was wide open, and my underwear was strewn all over the floor.

“Any chance the dog did this?” one of the cops asked.

“He’s brilliant, but I’ve never seen him stand up and pull the sliding door open, he’s indifferent to my panties, AND I SAW THE MAN!”

“Could you have been dreaming?” the other cop queried while pretending to scribble on some official pad.

“I was awake, I saw a man with a beard who looked like Jesus Christ. But mean.”

The scribbling cop looked up. “Any chance it was?” Both cops guffawed in unison. Anne had never heard or seen a thing, so she stood watching the exchange with a concerned and silent look, like she was at Centre Court at Wimbledon.

The next morning a cop with no gun or credentials (an intern or the Xeroxer, no doubt) came to dust for prints on the glass door. The actors in
Police Academy
do a better job impersonating the law than this guy. He said things like, “We’ll run the prints and see if we get a match.” But they never did. I probably never even rated a file.

M
y mother arrived a few days later. She had been in San Francisco for work and stopped in Los Angeles to visit. Over toast and fresh orange juice at the Four Seasons, I regaled my mother and brother with my near-death story. “Don’t you think it was just a neighbor who got lost?” my mother asked.

I had to embellish a little to convey the horror of the situation. “He was this deranged man with blood all over his beard, holding a knife.”

“Isn’t there an alarm?” my mother asked.

“Mom, the house could have been built by Habitat for Humanity—it barely has running water.”

“Well,” she answered, “this is an issue for your landlord. I believe contractually he has to put in an alarm.” She seemed to make sense; however, Robert Englund was in Transylvania filming a straight-to-DVD movie, and we had no forwarding number. “I think you should put in an alarm and bill him when he gets back.”

“Mom, I can’t do that. We would have to get his permission, and he’s away for the next six months. I mean, otherwise people would add guesthouses and water slides and just bill their landlord.”

My mother was adamant that I should be more equipped in case the serial killer or maybe a friend of the serial killer decided to pay another visit. I was secretly hoping she would yank me out of the house and spring for a condo on the tenth floor in Beverly Hills. Instead, my mother and I went to a local hardware store in West Los Angeles. She got a cart and started wheeling it around the home improvement section. She threw in locks, a flashlight, rope (to calf-rope him, rodeo style?), and a million other things until the cart was full. There was even a toilet plunger; I wasn’t sure if this was meant to double as a weapon. One of my favorite accoutrements was a knife she bought to hide under my bed. It was a knife used for gutting fish, sharp, with serrated teeth. My expertise in human disembowelment was minimal; I had no idea how I would use it unless I was in Guadeloupe and had a red snapper splashing on the line. She placed it under my bed along with a whistle and the rope. (What would I do first—blow the whistle, decimate his insides, or tie his ankles and wrists together?) I don’t think Anne, who was just upstairs, could even hear the whistle when we had our practice run.

The last thing my mother set up on the table next to my bed was a panic button. “This is very important. When you see or hear something, you press this button, and it immediately alerts the police.” I breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, something that was practical and a functioning lifesaver.

I
slept that night with my mother at the Four Seasons; I mean, why not, when given the choice? Plus, we were running low on shampoo and toilet paper. The next day she flew back to Washington, and I returned to Amityville Horror. The more the story got around, the more I was questioned. “Are you sure you saw someone? Maybe your mind was playing tricks?” My mind doesn’t play tricks. I saw a man that night, it was a fin in the ocean that time in Bermuda, and that guy Steve had eyes on his penis.

A few nights later, Trout and I were cuddling in my bed, my hand inches away from the knife as I mentally mapped out an escape route should a rapist come a-knocking. Anne was at her boyfriend’s house, so I was alone, the ideal target for any deranged caller. I finally nodded off, but was awakened just before dawn. Somebody was trying to break in on the side of the house. Trout kept snoring no matter how hard I nudged him (he had eaten a pack of raw bacon). The noise continued; my killer had come back, this time with Squeaky Fromme.

It escaped me, that morning, that it was the weekly ritual of trash pickup. I was normally asleep at this hour, and not on the alert for a cult murder scheme.

I groped around for the panic button and pushed it. I pushed it again and again. And then waited for the sirens.

The sun came up, cars started to drive up the hill, and Trout did his morning stretch. I was still trembling, my stomach in knots. Where were the police? The hovering chopper? The German shepherds patrolling the yard? Dear Lord, I was almost hacked to death!

I picked up the panic button. It was light and plastic. I shook it and pushed the button several times. I then read the back. The button was part of an elaborate home alarm system. Once a professional had installed the wiring, the main alarm, and created a password, the button (which required four AAA batteries) was then synchronized with the system. The button would trigger the alarm, which would alert the police via the system’s computer program.

Maybe my mother didn’t know that? Perhaps she, like me, assumed the button would do what it was supposed to do and alert the authorities? Or maybe she was giving me a little piece of pretend plastic to ward away any other ghosts and goblins that might want to violate my overproductive imagination? Either way, as this was twenty years ago, somewhere in the hills of Los Angeles there’s an elderly serial killer with a walker hobbling loose.

Chapter Fourteen

French Kiss-Off

I
believe that every woman should sample all the different groups in the male food pyramid. That way, when you finally get married, you’re never enticed by the fantasy of the sculpted yoga instructor who “gets you” or the Brazilian ex-husband of a gallery owner you met once at a Ben Nicholson retrospective. You’ve been there, you’ve done him. Marriage is like being on a perpetual fast, in that you don’t have to waste all that time fantasizing about the curly fries if you’ve had them already. And barfed.

Thierry was a French director—to be specific, my director on an independent movie he was shooting in L.A. He wasn’t the unlaundered, bewhiskered Coen brothers indie type; he was dapper, wore Prada sunglasses, and swaggered around like he was the next Kubrick. He was a former fashion photographer who had grown bored of fornication with vapid models and long weeks in the Caribbean shooting perky breasts dusted with white sand. He was the privileged son of a Paris financier and possessed all the attributes of a spoiled European. At nineteen, he had a drug problem. When I asked him how it happened, he simply replied: “[
Strong French accent
] What do you mean, how? I was an artist!” Call me naive, but wouldn’t a sketch class or an investment in a kiln have done the trick? When Thierry’s parents discovered he was an addict, they sent him to Saint Lucia for a year to dry out. If I were smacked out, my mother would sit in a room with me reading
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
and spooning me cream of tomato soup. And it would take half the time.

It was in the second month of filming that I realized Thierry was smitten. I played a lawyer in the movie, yet he kept requesting that wardrobe dress me in lingerie. He pushed for nudity in ludicrous scenes, including my final argument to the jury. I finally relented and did a scene in a bubble bath wearing a skin-colored one-piece bathing suit. (Surprisingly, that scene was cut out of the movie.) On the last night of shooting he came knocking on my trailer door. An American man would have said something like, “Hey, can I take you out for a burger?” But the Frenchman opened with “[
Strong French accent
] I want to make love to you.” I explained I didn’t make sex with anyone who hadn’t logged in at least a hundred hours of chat time. But I have to admit, his persistence was seductive. We had a couple of intimate dinners (with no making sex).

The film wrapped, and Thierry flew back to Paris to edit. I was pretty certain that was that. I wouldn’t see him at any awards shows or press junkets; even Leonard the crafts service guy knew the movie was going straight to video. After the second week of shooting Leonard stopped passing out homemade enchiladas and just left a bowl of pretzels next to the restroom.

A couple weeks later, however, Thierry called and begged me to fly to Paris. It would be my first trip there as an adult. My mother was always telling me about the exquisiteness of Paris. She spent her junior year at Smith in France, and it was her Sputnik moment. I needed fashionable clothes, was obsessed with steak frites, and had never been to the Musée Rodin. And he was sexy. I also relished the idea of being unpredictable and unbridled. So I said yes. I figured I could keep the making sex at bay at least until I hit the Porte de Clignancourt flea market and collected more of those porcupine quill boxes. There’s no such thing as a free coach ticket.

The best part of the trip was the anticipation on the flight over. I wore sweatpants, but my carry-on held a revealing black Dolce & Gabbana blouse and fitted jeans. I was going to strut off the plane like Brigitte Bardot entering a party in Capri, just without the hair, the ass, or the boobs.

Thierry picked me up in a slate-colored, dented Citroën, something you could find on French eBay. His apartment was tiny, but mod (read: small), and featured black-and-white nudes of the Icelandic model he lived with before she told him she was pregnant with his baby and he kicked her out. I found the four-foot-high studio photographs of Lina’s perfectly manicured vagina slightly off-putting, but chalked it up to cultural differences. Maybe my vagina deserved at least a wallet size? The apartment was minimalist—bohemian chic with whitewashed parquet floors, and a rickety staircase that led to a loft bed. One tiny bathroom with a toilet the size of a four-quart stockpot and a shower stall so tight you couldn’t bathe a hamster in it.

The few days I was in Paris, I played the kind of role I was never cast as—the sensuous ingenue. We watched a Woody Allen marathon in the rain one Sunday afternoon in the sixteenth arrondissement, ate Ethiopian food with our hands, and exchanged lascivious glances as we browsed French bookstores. We improvised Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller even when we made sex. French men are absurdly romantic, for a time, before they lose interest and hop onto the next glistening lily pad. Thierry would whisper lines to me like, “I’m hungry for the food of your love,” and “I’m going to take you to the moon,” while I gorged on coq au vin and mustered up enigmatic replies like, “Please pass the bread.”

By the time he drove me to Charles de Gaulle Airport a week later, we were in real pretend love, Hollywood-style. Back in Los Angeles, I felt too European for my circle of friends. After all, I had been in Paris for a week, and my boyfriend’s French lineage dated back to Marie Antoinette. I needed to be with Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve and the people of my new tribe. I needed to smoke more and eat unpasteurized cheese that smelled like feet. I bought
French for Dummies
and started over-gesticulating.

I
began the ritual of flying back and forth from L.A. to Paris as if I was commuting from Scarsdale to Manhattan (and my credit card bills were showing it). I knew the market, shops, and cafés in Thierry’s neighborhood and became an independent American in Paris (within a hundred-yard radius). I delighted at the illuminated Arc de Triomphe at night, wept walking through the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and wondered if my mother tried the same steak tartare from Closerie des Lilas, or wore a flowing gown on the back of a motorcycle. She probably experienced many of my adventures, just without the sex.

The first red flag in the torrid love affair was raised at a farm in Normandy, where we’d driven for a romantic weekend. I was struck by the impulse to ride a horse bareback down the beach (I’ve always been obsessed with “Dover Beach,” the poem about the battle of Normandy—“where ignorant armies clash at night”). Thierry rolled his eyes, content to recline in the inn’s Pratesi sheets. I was so relentless, however, that he called an old friend, Etienne, who happened to own a horse farm nearby. It turned out Etienne was a retired, straight hairdresser who used to trade Argentinian models with Thierry like baseball cards.

When we arrived at the estate, I explained to the overly groomed men that I hadn’t ridden in years, didn’t have proper riding boots, and was envisioning a plump pony like the kind at petting zoos or kids’ birthday parties. Suddenly an enormous black horse was led out, so gigantic, I expected hundreds of tiny Greek men with swords to come popping out of its rib cage. This uncastrated equine specimen was being trained for the Olympics.

“He’s a beauty,” I said, “but there’s no way I can handle him.” Believe me, this horse would have had Catherine the Great double-crossing her legs.

Thierry lifted his Prada sunglasses onto his highlighted hair: “[
Strong French accent
] What are you saying? I made all this effort! We are here! Get on the horse!”

I tried to block out my mother’s voice in my head (“Trust your gut”), as every fiber in my body bellowed, “Get the hell out of there!” With the help of three stable boys, I was hoisted onto the back of the mighty stud. The horse had two reins, which meant he was such a force he needed four leather belts just to pull his head back. The horse’s head being the size of an Acura. Holy
Merde
! (
Shit
in French.)

I started at a slow pace with a sleepy walk around the ring. “Come on, work him,” Etienne kept yelling at me. I gave the horse a gentle kick, but he didn’t react. The horse knew I was a feeble female without the resources or strength to even comb his mane. I could sense his contempt. Etienne kept yelling. “Let’s go, let’s go, he’s full of blood!” Again I kicked; again, nothing.

Etienne and Thierry walked up to the fence. “[
Strong French accent
] C’mon, ride the damn horse,” Thierry chimed in. I made the universal clucking sound that means “Move your ass” in horse. I kicked him so feverishly he reluctantly picked up the pace to a trot, purposely scraping my outside leg against the wood barricade in the process.

“Yes! He’s full of blood!” (I never knew what Etienne meant by that; a tick is also full of blood.) The horse started cantering faster and faster until, unprompted, he turned to approach a five-foot jump in the center of the ring. “Whoa!” I whispered, pulling back the reins until my biceps shook. He snorted, flipping his head back as he continued his mad gallop. I could feel his torso rise as my inner thighs simultaneously slipped down the back of the saddle. My head hit the ground with such force, the sand felt like solid ice. I couldn’t breathe for thirty seconds. My skull throbbed; my back was numb.

After what felt like hours, I cautiously sat up. I naturally assumed Thierry and Etienne would be running toward me with horror and shame on their faces. I needed to let them know I was alive. I stood up, dusting the evidence off my jeans, and glanced over to where they had been standing in judgment. They had vanished.

I walked toward the gate to witness the two men charging behind the horse, pleading for it to stop as if in some unrequited love drama. If, God forbid, I had been paralyzed from the neck down, I would still be horizontal in the sand outside a baroque village in Normandy today.

A
nother autumnal weekend Thierry suggested we go to Madrid. There was a black-tie ball at the Ritz-Carlton, and his friends were all going. The gala was basically prom for thirty-year-olds. There was champagne and dancing, and I was content being his armpiece while he switched off between French and Spanish in heated debates about football. (I kept snorting under my breath, “It’s called soccer.”) And everyone was overly cologned; I had to restrain myself from pointing out that if they showered, they wouldn’t need to douse themselves with Eau Sauvage. Thierry took me out to the balcony. I thought we were going to share a cigarette or throw tapas on the people below, but he pulled out a velvet box and smirked. “[
Strong French accent
] I want you to be my wife,” he commanded.

Oh, shit. Now here’s the thing about being proposed to in a city you don’t know, in a country you’re not familiar with, filled with people you’ve never met. You could get stranded in a
Not Without my Daughter
way. It was easier for me to say yes, enjoy the rest of the evening, and figure out an exit strategy later. What if he stole my passport? I couldn’t find an ATM? The rest of the evening culminated with his friends frantically hugging us and raising glasses. I was relieved; because of the time difference, we couldn’t ring my family with the news. Later that night I threw up all over the polished marble bathroom. “Bad oysters,” I said, not that I had had any.

And then it was Thanksgiving, and I was off to Virginia to spend a cold and dreary week with my family at my mother’s farm, complete with a red barn and a pond full of slimy carp. I was looking forward to sleeping most of the day, not having to wear makeup or shaving anything. My fantasy was rudely interrupted one morning when Thierry called to inform me that he was flying to Virginia to formally request my hand in marriage. I had forgotten about the whole engagement thing because I hadn’t told a soul and was hoping it would just disappear. I thought it would be rude to RSVP no thank you to my own wedding, so I relented and scribbled down his flight info.

Just before I picked him up at the airport, I confessed to my mother that he had proposed. She raised her right eyebrow. “Well, we’ll just see about that.” Which in Mom-speak meant, “Fat chance.”

A
n hour later Thierry and I drove up the ramshackle road to the farm. The foliage was dead, the pond frozen in a murky sheet, and the neighbor’s foxhound yelped insistently at our car, as if sensing that a European poseur had entered the premises. My family all sat at the kitchen table in anticipation of this François Truffaut character I was bringing home. My older sister was nine months pregnant and wearing pajama bottoms and her husband’s sweater covered in toddler spittle. (My brother-in-law was dangling off the tail of a helicopter in Patagonia, shooting a documentary.) My younger sister had a ratty blanket draped around her shoulders, like a Civil War soldier, as she sipped PMS dried raspberry leaf tea (homemade, of course). My older brother was still asleep, and would be for some days. And my mother was busying herself with chores like beeswaxing an old farmhouse table and clearing out cheap glass vases from Valentine’s Days gone by. She looked like a normal housewife going about her business, but I knew what was happening. She was preparing for war, sharpening her metaphoric swords and stockpiling her ammunition. Tidying up is my mother’s way of mobilizing for battle.

Thierry walked in wearing a black Gucci suit, cashmere coat, checkered scarf, and sunglasses. It was dark outside. My mother gave him the once-over and whispered to my sister, “Is he blind?” I tried to smooth out the awkward meet and greet and scurried up the stairs to take his caramel leather suitcase to the guest room. (My mother was well aware of the shenanigans that went on when we had overnight guests, but she dutifully subscribed to the school of “If I don’t see it, it doesn’t exist.”) Thierry presented my mother with a bottle of Dom Pérignon with a note, “For a weekend of toasts.” Oh, Lord.