Fiction Ruined My Family (21 page)

In the middle of the main room there was a long, light blue couch I had gotten at the Salvation Army. Alongside it was an old mahogany end table that looked like it might have been stolen off a Coachlight Dinner Theater production of
Arsenic and Old Lace
. The couch faced a TV atop a white cube between the two windows.

Next to the couch was my desk, where I sat Stegosaurus, my aged Mac, one of those models that had a huge rear and took up your whole desk.

There was a small bedroom that fit only a bed. It had dark gray office carpeting. There was nothing on the walls in either room, a little decorating trick I had picked up from my father, who, since leaving our house in Bronxville, had never hung a single thing on a wall of his apartment. For my dad, walls were the bulletin boards of his mind, where he would tack up thoughts, story ideas, funny things his daughters had said. It was awful to visit him and see some comment you had made about the meaninglessness of work when you were a mother's helper on Nantucket in 1985 on his wall for all to see.

“Do you remember when you said that, Jeanne? Oh, that's a terrific line.”

I leaned closer to the wall outside his bathroom door. “‘Work is a wonderful spectator sport.' Yeah, I guess I remember that. Seems kinda dumb.”

“No, no, a great line! Particularly as it was uttered by a fifteen-year-old mother's helper in a swanky summer WASP hive.”

I decided what might be nice for my bedroom was some shelving for my clothes instead of a bureau. As I was clearly walking a new path of an entirely self-made life, I decided to build the shelves myself. I bought a bunch of plywood and nailed the boards together. This did not make shelves. They were more like plywood sculptures that clothing was placed atop. There was no recognizable shelfness to them. If they were the last surviving example of shelving to bring into the future as a prototype, shelves would be extinct.

 

 

 

 

ONE MORNING I WOKE UP after another big night of drinking and realized that I needed to take an Academy Award–nominated poop. Immediately. I grabbed some sweatpants off my plywood shelf sculpture and pulled them up super-quick. I also spotted a stinky gray running shirt that Julia had given me that was starting to get all holey and thin and pulled that over my head. I dash-dash-dashed into the living room and slipped on my flip-flops. Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck I gotta hur-rrrrrrrry. I opened my door and took a step into the hallway and saw the worst sight I could imagine—a closed door. FUCK. SOMEONE IS IN THERE. Mr. Chocolatay, probably. Jesus, Jesus Christ. What was I going to do? I popped back into my room and paced around nervously, trying to gauge how much time I had. Okay, be at the door, stay by the door so you can get in there right when the person comes out. Fuck! Fuck, I am not going to make it. My time is more limited than I thought. Fuck. After some advanced bum clenching there was officially no more time. An executive decision had to be made. I shut my door and darted over to the kitchen area where I looked for something to poop into. The garbage? Yuck. I'm not putting my butt on that gross container. What else? What else? The salad bowl? I like that salad bowl. I need that salad bowl. That's the only bowl I have, actually. There's gotta be something—what else can I—oh, Jesus—bags! Do it in a bag! I grabbed a plastic shopping bag, then realized I'd better double-bag this one, and so I quickly rustled them together, pulled down my sweatpants, hopped over to the stereo and turned NPR up loud for some white-people white noise, and then squatted with the bags pressed up to my ass and put the previous evening behind me. Pulling the bags away from my butt, I thought that, all things considered, Linda Wertheimer, it worked very well. I didn't want to ever have to do that again but the overall result was pretty successful. I felt almost . . . proud, if one can say that about pooping into plastic bags in your living room. Let's not get carried away, that was ridiculously close. I tied the bags together and then tied them together a second time. I didn't want to put them in my garbage. I felt this incident must be disposed of immediately and properly, so I put the bag on the floor and went to get dressed to go out. It was time for a little coffee anyway and I was out of milk. I was sure I could get this day back on track, damn it. I heard whoever was in the bathroom come out. I took off my sweats and threw them atop the shelf sculpture. I put on some white corduroys and slipped back into my black flip-flops. I walked over to the mirror in the closet to check out my tits in the ratty old running T-shirt. Was it still cute to walk around with no bra? Or was I supposed to have some respect for bra rules by this age. Fuck it. Maybe I still got it. Maybe I don't. Today might not be the best day to judge this.

I headed out my door, past the first old Puerto Rican woman's room, where she seemed to be sitting and staring at her refrigerator, then past the pothead's room where a waft of pot came out his half-open door, seeming automated, like a haunted house exhibit. Always in this house doors are open. It's one of the most bewildering traits of the Hispanic people. They could learn a thing or two from white people about the long-standing tradition of closed doors. Why the resistance to hiding things: drugs, drug problems, feelings, accidents? You don't see me pooping into plastic bags with my door half-open, do you? I kept going down the stairs to the second floor where I passed the room of the son, Nacho, seated on a folding chair, drinking a beer, watching a small television, which was sitting on another folding chair. I tried to scurry by unnoticed.

“Hello, Jeanne.”

I never got by Nacho unnoticed.

“Hey, Nacho,” I said, and quickly kept going with my bag of poop.

One more doorway to get by, the second old Puerto Rican woman. My head was down, but I couldn't help peeking up at the last second to catch sight of her lying on her big double bed. I ambled by with my poop, down the last set of stairs, past Mike and Nicola's apartment.

Out on Dean Street, it was a sunny morning or afternoon. I looked at my watch. Two twenty-five. I didn't want to leave my poop in my own building's garbage so I made a left and headed up Dean toward Smith Street. I was desperate for a coffee. And water. And an everything bagel with cream cheese. Turned out there was no garbage at the end of my block, so I kept going, sure there would be one at the next block's end. About midway down the block I saw some vague forms in skirts moving toward me, down Dean.

“Hey, Jeanne!” one of the shapes called out to me. It was a publicist named Vera who sat on the board of a nonprofit I was working for, the New York Women's Film Festival, which helped struggling upper-middle-class white women get their films made. Sometimes I wondered whether we shouldn't be helping other people get their films made, like middle-class white women or something.

“Hey, Vera, how are you?”

“I'm well, thank you. Jeanne, this is Martha. Martha is showing me some houses. I'm looking at brownstones in the neighborhood. Do you live here?” she asked.

“Yeah, the middle of the next block down,” I answered.

“Really? What number?” Vera asked.

I imagined Vera knocking on my door with a bottle of Merlot, surveying the wet wigs on the hangers outside my door.

“Two-thirty.”

“That's so funny! We're looking at two-twenty-nine. That must be directly across the street!”

I became acutely aware that my peers were buying brownstones while I was standing on the street hungover holding a bag of my own feces.

“Wow. I hope it works out. I gotta run, though, I'm late for something.” If there was one person I didn't want my shitbag breaking in front of, it was a publicist.

“I'll see you at the board meeting next Monday night. We still don't have mentors for three upper-middle-class filmmakers from Tribeca. I don't know what we're going to do!” She chuckled.

“We'll figure something out at the meeting. See you then.” I walked away from them, turning down Hoyt, wondering if my bag had smelled while I was standing there talking. No garbage at the corner of Pacific and Hoyt. Geez. I didn't want to throw it in someone's private garbage because I have had people yell at me for doing this and I was also afraid of someone connecting me with the poop. Finally there was a garbage at the corner of Smith Street and Pacific. I dropped the bag in.

 

 

 

A FEW WEEKENDS EARLIER I had spent the night up at Eleanor's house in Connecticut, and I had to have had about four scotches after dinner, which everyone thought was extremely odd. Apparently I had toddled upstairs and woken up Will, Eleanor's five-year-old, and said good night to him drunkenly. I had recently gotten this very short, very blond haircut which I thought said Jean Seberg or Mia Farrow in
Rosemary's Baby
. The next day Julia said to me, “You better watch out with that new haircut of yours. You're kind of reminding me of someone.” She didn't have to say Mom because I had caught it already when I saw myself in the mirror, bombed out of my mind.

What was wrong with me? I put my brain on the problem every day. I was convinced I had some terrible, terrible disease. Multiple sclerosis, brain tumor, throat cancer. Katharine and Henry had a book at their apartment called
Symptoms
, by Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld, that could take you from chapped elbows to cancer of the spleen in thirty seconds. I would spend hours at their house poring over every possibility of what could be wrong with me. I'm the kind of self-pamperer who will worry I'm going into anabolic shock if I haven't eaten in an hour and a half. I seemed to have a physical imbalance that felt as though it originated in the brain, so brain tumor was a frontrunner with tinnitus a close second. The symptoms: hopelessness, unbelievable morning thirst, shame, massive headaches on waking, nausea, profound feelings of regret about things I wasn't sure had actually happened, inability to pay my rent, self-pity, resentment toward the seemingly happy folks of the world, gastrointestinal tropical storms, and self-hatred. One morning I woke up and discovered bruises up and down my right arm. Big bruises. Like someone had punched me. And I remembered I had in fact been punched, repeatedly. By a musician. I thought it would be fun the night before to have a punching contest with this fairly diminutive local Brooklyn drummer. So we traded punches in the arm until I couldn't take anymore. Ha ha. That must have seemed hilarious to us both. The bruises and the swollen arm (which I hid for the week or so it took for them to go away) was a nice mural of what my life had become: a drinker's joke, risky, painful stunts meant to entertain those around me but which felt sad and pointless in the morning. This is why I left Jed? In a weird way I knew that, yes, this was why I had left Jed. For some awkward truth. When you leave a guy as great as Jed you'd better have something magnificent to take its place. I didn't have anything better than Jed and I knew my friends, my family, people I worked with were watching me thinking, This is what you left that nice guy, that nice life for? I left because I was hoping to find some truth about me. But was this it? The truth should feel better, should it not? It should float down from the sky and fit neatly in your little puzzle, you should hear a soft snap when it's in place. Or maybe not.

I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what disease in particular had a hold on me. Considering how much I smoked, I thought cancer was a tad obvious but a decent bet. Every time I lit a cigarette I imagined throat cancer and voice boxes and I couldn't enjoy smoking anymore. As soon as I put a cigarette out I'd grab a hand mirror and try to see the back of my throat. Red? Lumpy? White spots?

That Monday at the festival office I opened up the
New York Times
and saw that my cousin Thomas French had won a Pulitzer for feature writing in journalism. It was for a series he had written for the
St. Petersburg Times
called “Angels and Demons,” about the unsolved murder of three tourists, a mother and her two daughters, in Florida. Brownstones and Pulitzers.

 

 

 

WHEN MY SEASONAL JOB at the film festival ended, I began working for Donato Brunelli, this Hollywood film director who had just moved to New York. Every single photograph in his apartment, where I worked, was of himself with celebrities. Didn't he know anyone—was he not in regular contact with one single person—who wasn't famous? Where were pictures of his parents? Sisters? Brothers?

I was working hard to get to Paris to study with this director named Jacques Lassalle, who had been head of the Comédie-Française, a venerable theater that had been home to Molière. The French embassy had a program where they paid for one or two Americans a year to smoke with theater people in France. I spent months translating my passport and college records, faking my way through interviews in French with various people at the embassy, faxing letters to this very busy director. Often I was so hungover at Donato's that when I would answer the phone and hear the woman at the French embassy who was in charge of my grant, Beatrice Ellis, launching into rapid-fire French I'd have to hang up. She believed I was fluent. I had managed to convince her of this in order to get the grant, but I'm fluent only if I'm the only one talking. The minute someone answers me I'm lost. Perhaps this is how I function in English as well. I was eating all Donato's food and having guys sleep over and showing people his gun and his dildo, which I had found one day. The only highlight of working for Donato was getting to call my childhood hero Evel Knievel once, when Donato was away with various women whose last names he didn't know, to wish Evel a happy birthday. This was the kind of shit Donato thought was normal, having his assistant call to wish you a happy birthday. How thoughtful. Evel didn't seem to notice. Donato asked me to sell his Francis Bacon and I didn't know which painting that was, so I sent the wrong painting to Sotheby's Fall Sale. He'd bark things at me while putting on his jacket to head out the door to the airport like, “Get my L.A. house painted and see if anyone wants to buy it.” Slam. Oh. Okay. Any particular color? Oh, and sorry to bother you, but don't you have two houses in L.A.? Because I will sell the wrong house. Office hours were spent at Chinatown pharmacies getting him Valium. And then when he'd go to Los Angeles to shoot a commercial I'd take most of that Valium myself and eat all his fancy-boy food and pass out on his couch.