How to Cook Your Daughter (20 page)

To make matters worse, I worked part-time at a tea house in Hampstead—a shop filled with creamy éclairs, croissants, homemade cakes, and other delights. Putting a bulimic behind the pastry counter was like leaving a Vicodin addict in charge of the pharmacy. Often, the temptations overwhelmed me. My finger might skim the icing off a cake I was wrapping for a customer. Or I might pilfer a cookie when the boss wasn't looking. I sometimes ate crumbs off the floor. And on quite a few occasions, I rummaged through the large garbage bins in the back of the shop, cramming the half-eaten scraps of a patron's chocolate gâteau into my mouth. I hated myself for doing it, but I was used to hating myself by then. Instead of using the employee bathroom for purging, I'd simply wait until I got home. That way, I could have all the time I needed with my head over the toilet and my finger down my throat.

I gave up on resolutions; I knew I would never live up to them anyway. Most days I thought I would rather be dead, but I didn't have the guts to follow through.

Now and then I had a “good” day when I managed to resist bingeing, but they were few. Pablo and I talked on the phone from wherever he was. I wondered if things would be better if we were together. But I knew he wouldn't be able to help me. I had already told him years ago
about what my father had done. He seemed shocked and confused. He had always been enamored of Tony Hendra. “How am I supposed to treat your dad knowing this?” he asked me. I certainly had no answers. After all, I didn't even know how to treat my father. In the end, Pablo behaved as though no such thing had happened.

When Pablo and I were apart, he dated other women and I dated other guys—a Tango superstar visiting from Argentina who wore white linen suits and spoke no English; a nice Jewish premed from Yale who was working in London for a year, a cockney boxer, a musical prodigy three years younger who asked me to be his “first” (why not?) and, a motorcycle rider who turned out to be a coke head. By the summer, I was fooling around with an older married man. I met him in the North London wine bar where I waitressed. He wanted to set me up in my own “mistress flat” and would pay the rent and put me through school. In the diary I kept, I debated taking him up on his offer:

I ended up sleeping with Steve. The next morning, after he had already left, his wife called. She was looking for her husband. She said she found my number on a matchbook and asked me to leave him alone. They had a little girl. She didn't sound angry, just desperate. I got the feeling it wasn't the first such call she had made, and I thought of my mother and my father's many mistresses. I promised Steve's wife that I wouldn't see her husband again. As it was, he never called me after I gave in to his requests to spend the night. Gone were the flat and the school tuition, even if I had decided to take them. He avoided the wine bar, and in a fit of anger, I tried to pawn the Rolex he had left by my bed. The tough-looking pawn-shop owner laughed when I asked him what it was worth. It turned out to be a fake.

I had to get out of London. The pattern of my life had become so self-destructive that I knew it was time to leave. I had made friends and contacts in the two years at Central, and, because I had British citizenship through my parents, I could work in London. But I began to feel as though I were on such a downhill slide that getting away was the only thing that might help. I was too poor to see a private shrink, but I did attempt to see someone through England's National Heath System. The receptionist told me politely that it could take up to three months for me to get an appointment. If I waited three months, I might be under a double-decker bus.

To save on rent, I had left my flat and squatted, with permission, in a house in Ladbroke Grove that an old family friend, the comedian
John Cleese, was renovating. My mattress lay on the floor of an upstairs room, and the half-demolished kitchen had a working stove. In the dusty living room, surrounded by planks of wood and nails, sat a baby grand piano. It was the only piece in the room. Each morning, I would come down to find workmen tearing apart more and more of the house. I don't know what they thought of me in my white robe, making tea, surrounded by total destruction. At one point the house had no back walls and stood open to the London rainstorms. I didn't care. It had a roof (most of the time, anyway), and it was free.

Mine was not an unusual lifestyle for students at my school. In fact, I knew quite a few kids who “slept rough” as they called it, spending nights on park benches or in squats. I thought one boy must be well off because he had a car. Then I realized he lived in it. But all of us took a certain pride in the poverty of student life. We were still young enough to think that being poor was glamorous. One roguishly handsome, gifted actor carried his toothbrush, not a silk handkerchief, in the top pocket of his jacket. “You never know where you might spend the night,” he explained with a wink.

I was feeling poor but not glamorous. Disgusting, really. It wasn't so much my surroundings but the constant battles with myself. I made a desperate call to Pablo, who was in Madrid. “Please come get me,” I begged. He said he still loved me, but our on-again, off-again relationship—and my emotional crises—were too much for him. I could come to Spain. He would be happy to see me, he said. But he wasn't coming to England.

A few days later, I packed and headed to Paris and then to Madrid. My mother was now living with a war photographer—a man who would become her second husband. Conveniently, he had a loft in the same building as ours. She planned to meet me in Spain, and we
would go back to New York together. Pablo and I spent a few weeks traveling. We saw a Romanesque church in a small Andalusian village where we thought we might have our wedding. But I could tell we both had our doubts about whether that day would ever come. My mom joined us. Then, with the usual anxiety, I got on the plane to New York. It was good to be back, but I found that I hadn't left my problems in England.

I was once again in the same city as my father. I saw him and Carla, but I didn't dare raise what we had talked about at Celia's—and, of course, neither did he. I got a restaurant job, a few theater gigs, and made new resolutions about my bulimia. I started running every day and, though that didn't solve my eating problems, it seemed to help. Running became a way of escaping, of being in control if only for an hour or two. When I ran, I felt like a machine, freed of the guilt and self-loathing. I began to live for the early mornings.

I'd get up early, well before Mom, and head to the kitchen of the loft to make a cup of coffee that was strong enough to give me a mild heart attack. I'd down it fast, and tie my running shoes. Then I'd race down the familiar dusty stairwell of Twenty-five East Fourth Street, out the front door and into the usually freezing wind that came off Broadway and blew down the street. Rain might hit me in the face. The potholes might turn to miniature ice rinks. Snow, yellowed by dogs, might pile in heaps along on the curbs. But I would run. In me, my father's addictive personality came out not in a drug-and-drinking habit but in this solitary passion. One of my favorite routes was down Lafayette Street toward the Brooklyn Bridge. I ran through Chinatown, skirting delivery men as they unloaded heaps of bok choy and red cabbages from the trucks double parked in front of Chinese grocery stores. On to TriBeca, where hung-over kids emerged from the
clubs I used to go to myself. Past the all-night diner on Canal Street, where Krisztina and I had often gone to smoke and drink coffee at four in the morning. I ran through the weekend emptiness of the streets around City Hall until I made it to the bridge and up the wooden steps to the walkway that led to Brooklyn. The planks clattered under my feet, and the wind off the river was often so strong that it would blow me back toward Manhattan. I loved looking up at the spider web of cables that supported the bridge. When I got to Brooklyn, I turned around and faced the Manhattan skyline.

Other days, I headed uptown for a different scene. Along Madison Avenue, I ran amazed by the fur coats and high-heeled boots the Upper East Side ladies wore just to get their morning coffee or walk their tiny, yapping dogs. I crossed Fifth Avenue and followed it past the Metropolitan Museum of Art and into Central Park, where I joined other puffing, sweating New Yorkers as we casually tried to outpace each other along the six-mile route.

No matter where I went, I ran for miles, and I loved my dirty, worn out shoes, loved the feeling of pounding the pavements. I wasn't fast or graceful, but I was dedicated and obsessive. And I didn't feel ashamed about this.

I began traveling for regional theater, to Philadelphia, New England, Florida, wherever I could make a few bucks acting and get a shitty place to stay free. I actually liked going to different places and meeting a new cast. I felt hopeful whenever I stepped off a train (I refused to fly) or a bus in some place I didn't know—and some place that didn't know me. But my habits traveled alongside.

I was thrilled to be cast in a play at The Williamstown Theatre Festival in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. A few years before, when I was about twenty-five, I did my first play there. Mel
Gussow from the
New York Times
came to review it, and I was delighted when he gave me a good mention. I met my dad in a bar in New York on my day off. He never came to see one of my shows at Williamstown, but then I'm sure he was busy. I showed him the review and pointed to my name and the positive line about my acting. He nodded and didn't seem at all surprised. “I know Mel very well,” he said of the reviewer. “I'm sure he recognized your last name.”

Williamstown was a summer stock for stars. The 1992 main stage production featured Linda Pearl and Michael York in Ibsen's
A Doll's House
.
The Waiting Room
, for which I was cast, was being done in Williamstown's more experimental second stage. The play took place in different time periods, and I played a Victorian woman who had nervous ticks and was subject to fits of hysteria. It wasn't a stretch. Another character was a Chinese woman whose feet had been bound so tightly they were mush. Actor Kurt Fuller played a big-time, modern-day businessman making dirty money in pharmaceuticals. The plot centered on a woman with breast cancer. It was a comedy.

I was nervous on the day of the first rehearsal. The rest of the cast had been flown in from L.A. and had already performed the play with great success. Only my part had been recast. The other actors had much longer résumés than mine. And almost everyone at the festival recognized Kurt from the movies he'd been in—
Wayne's World
, for one. When I walked into rehearsal, I had no idea who he was. I was from NoHo. I didn't go to see big Hollywood movies, though I had seen my father in
Spinal Tap
. I was used to the hole-in-the-wall theater spaces on Avenue A and sitting through intermission-less productions of
King Lear
in which the actors outnumbered the audience. I went to independent film festivals at the Angelika Film Center on Houston Street. I read a lot of subtitles.

But I was struck by Kurt nonetheless. He was so tall—all long legs and arms and huge green eyes. Twelve years older than me, he was balding but handsome. Charismatic. And funny, funny, funny. Self-deprecating and yet confident. Witty and sarcastic but still kind. That impressed me. Shocked me even. Funny people were not, in my experience, kind.

On that first day of rehearsal, Kurt was the only cast member who made a point of introducing himself. He seemed to understand how awkward I felt being the new girl. As he told me later, he also had fallen in love with me.

AS REHEARSALS CONTINUED, WE SPENT MORE TIME
together backstage. Kurt declined the festival's minimal housing (a bedroom and bathroom with a
very
shared kitchen) and rented a house on the town's golf course. He said he came to Williamstown more for the golf than for the theater. One day, he brought to rehearsal a Victoria's Secret catalog that had been sent to his rental house. During our off-stage time, he began reading it aloud to me in a sort of mocking announcer's voice.

“The bra top—our original sexy basic with very secret support. The genius is in what you
can't
see. Hidden bralette shaping for comfort. Our cleavage-enhancing padded push-up tops have removable pads and underwire cups. Be your best shape ever….”

Given that I played a Victorian woman, I wore a corset, and I giggled so much that the laces started to pop. This only made us both laugh harder. I doubled up in hysterics and the whole corset ripped up the back. After that, the wardrobe woman forbade Kurt to bring in any more catalogs. Seriously.

Despite what I now see was heavy-duty flirting, it never occurred to me then that Kurt was attracted to me. It didn't seem odd that he would miraculously turn up at the gym when I was working out, happen to eat at the same restaurant, or even stroll into the post office when I was buying stamps. I rode a bike all over town (being a city kid, I had never learned to drive), and I had no idea that Kurt was scouting the town for my chained-up, bright blue ten-speed.

A few days before the play was to open, I arrived at the theater to find that a large, gold bike with a very high seat had been locked next to the spot where I parked mine.

I went into the theater and peeked into the men's dressing room.

“Hey, you got a bike,” I said to Kurt.

“I got it yesterday. It seems like the best way to get around.”

“It is,” I said, as though I had converted him. “I'm thinking about going for a ride this afternoon. There's supposed to be a really nice lake about ten miles away. Do you want to come?”

“Sure,” he said, “but are there any dogs?”

“Any dogs? I don't think so. I mean, I don't know. I don't think there are packs of wild dogs roaming around Williamstown, Massachusetts, if that's what you're asking.” I chuckled. Kurt didn't.

“No. What I'm asking, smart ass, is if there are any dogs that are going to run out of their houses, come barking across their lawns, and bite me in the leg while I'm trying to ride away.” He said it in a sardonic, self-deprecating way. “That's what I'm asking, because in case you haven't noticed, Jessica, I am a tall man. I have a long way down to the ground. I don't need some mutt chasing after me because it can't tell a bike from a live animal. So I'm asking, are there any dogs?”

“I don't know, Kurt.” I smiled. “But I'll protect you.”

He returned the smile. “Very good then. Perfect. You ride in front, and we'll do fine.”

After rehearsal, Kurt and I climbed on our bikes and rode off down the tree-lined roads of western Massachusetts. We didn't see any dogs, but there were a lot of cows. And green fields full of hay. And tall maples and oaks. And sunshine, red barns, and chickens. We never found the lake, but it didn't matter.

After a few miles, we stopped at a general store to get drinks. I made Kurt stay outside while I went in. I told him he was so drenched in sweat that I was afraid the store-owner might get scared and call the paramedics. He laughed and sat down in the grass to battle the gnats.

While we drank Diet Cokes, I told Kurt about Pablo, how our long distance relationship had gone on for years, and also about John, whom I was seeing in New York but whom I knew was too young for me. Kurt asked if both of them had a lot of hair. Then Kurt told me about the woman he was living with in California. She had just broken off their engagement for the third time. Eventually the cool of the late afternoon got us back on our bikes, and at the corner of Main Street and some lane named for a tree, it was time for us to part.

“Thanks for coming,” I said.

“Thanks for asking me,” Kurt answered.

There was an awkward moment.
Should I give him a kiss on the cheek? A hug?
I considered more but assumed we were just friends and opted for the hug. “Bye,” I waved, and rode off thinking what a nice afternoon we had had.

Kurt was thinking the same thing. But whereas I'm a waffler, he's a
man of action. He turned his bike around and took after me. As he began to catch up, he remembered later, he watched my legs (and my ass) as I pedaled along. Lost in a fantasy of what might happen if he ever caught me, he failed to notice a small tree branch that had fallen on the road. He hit it and went flying. His bike flipped and all six-feet, five-inches of his long body came smashing to the ground. He broke his wrist and bruised both his ribs and his ego. Completely oblivious, I rode farther and farther away. Kurt said later that he lay there in blinding pain, waiting for help and wondering if this might be an omen of our future.

The next day, he came to the theater with a cast on his wrist. His dreams of playing golf all summer were over. A week later, another actor broke his arm, so the play opened with two of the male leads in brilliant white plaster casts. It must have looked to the audience as if we had had quite a rigorous rehearsal process.

Opening night meant a party, which also meant a few glasses of wine. A few glasses of wine meant that when Kurt and I found ourselves alone in someone's spacious garden on a perfect New England summer night, we conceded we might be more than friends. And despite a cast that almost whacked me in the face, Kurt managed to kiss me.

He walked me to the Williams College dorm room that the festival had assigned me for the summer. We decided it would be better to wait before I visited his house or he spent the night on my single bed, never mind that his feet would hang off by at least a couple of inches. We both had concerns. He worried that, because I was younger, it might appear he was taking advantage of me. I worried that I might take it all too seriously and be really hurt when he flew back to L.A.—and to a woman who was still, technically, his fiancée. But I was grateful there was no wife or child involved. Kurt was a rare man—almost
forty and never married but not committed to remaining a bachelor. His most recent relationship had almost resulted in marriage, but his girlfriend called off the wedding at the last minute, and Kurt said it was probably best for both of them. No matter what happened with us, he told me, he was going to end his relationship with her as soon as he got home. I believed him.

I wanted more than the lovers I was used to. For once, I wanted someone that was solid, not confusing and not long distance. I knew Pablo was seeing someone in Madrid, but we still had never completely severed our relationship. I felt I had used people—and had been used by others. It was a habit I hoped to break. “All the men in your life are interchangeable,” one of my passing boyfriends once told me. “In the end, none of them means anything to you.” In a way he was right. But when you're unhappy with yourself, it seems impossible to really love someone else. You're searching for someone to save you, and too often, you become an emotional opportunist.

I was beginning to see that about myself, and I didn't like it. I had an instinct that Kurt was someone whom I should take more seriously than anyone I had met before. Still, I had only known him a few weeks. We held out for almost the entire run of
The Waiting Room
and then “made out like teenagers,” as Kurt now recounts it. The night before the play closed, I told him I wanted to go back to his house after the show. “Are you sure?” he asked. I nodded and smiled. By the end of the night, I wonder if he wished I had said no.

Our first time together became a scene of emotional high drama in the rented-out bedroom of a Williams College professor who had gone to Europe for the summer. After we had sex, made love, whatever you will, I fell apart. I was overwhelmed by shame. This was nothing new. But instead of hiding my emotions that night, I let them out. I
buried my face deep into the professor's pillow until Kurt finally pulled me up by the shoulders and turned me around.

“Jessica, what's wrong?”

“I feel so ashamed!”

“Ashamed of what? Of being here with me?”

“No, it's not you. It's me. I feel so horrible, so bad, like I am a bad, bad horrible person.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Things…things that happened, that I can't forget that make me feel dirty, stained, like I have a black thing on my soul that will never go away. Sometimes I just want to tear myself into little pieces.”

“What do you mean?”

“Some things with my father, and when we were here, together, I saw it in my head. I saw his face; I saw everything. And I just feel like it will never, ever go away.”

Kurt looked at me. There was no sarcasm, no effort to find a witty line. “Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked, gently.

“I can't.”

Kurt paused for a moment. Then: “How old were you?”

“Around seven. The first time, around seven.”

He sighed and moved toward the end of the bed with his hands over his face. “Oh God.”

“I feel ashamed.”

“Listen to me.” His hands were back by his side and his voice seemed almost angry. “You have
nothing
to be ashamed of. You were a child. It was
not
your fault. It was your
father's
fault, completely and utterly. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Not. One. Thing.”

There they were…the words my father would never say. That's all I had wanted him to tell me—that
he
was to blame, not me. And here they were, coming from this other man who barely knew me. A man who didn't know how badly I needed those words. A man to whom I explained so little but who knew so much.
Daddy, why couldn't you just say that? Why?

“I wish I could believe that,” I said through my tears.

“You can because it's true. Did you tell your mom?”

“No.”

“I think you need to tell someone exactly what happened. It doesn't have to be me, but you need to tell someone. This isn't something you can get over by yourself, Jessica. You need help.”

I knew he was right, and I wondered if maybe I should tell him about my bulimia too. It was a secret that I'd never told anyone. But I realized how much I was laying on Kurt. He seemed like someone who could handle anything, but even I could see that all these revelations might be a bit much for a man I still was getting to know. I didn't want to ruin my chances with him and send him off to L.A. thinking I was too messed up.
If I wanted to see him after the summer
, I thought,
I'd better keep to myself a bit more
.

In the morning, Kurt took me to breakfast, held my hand along the streets of Williamstown, and then sat backstage during intermission with his arm around me. I never felt for a moment that what I had told him changed his feelings toward me. I was grateful. We didn't really talk about it again, but we didn't need to. I suddenly felt very close to him.

The play ended. Kurt began packing to go back to California. And I started to doubt the wisdom of saying so much to a man
whose life was all the way across the country. I took the taxi with him to the local airport, said good-bye, and tried to believe him when he said we would see each other soon. I felt small and lonely on the ride back and thought of him sitting in his cramped seat and wondering if he might be better off with a woman who had a less complicated life. I stayed to do the outdoor production of Shakespeare's
As You Like It,
but it wasn't the same without Kurt there. He called every day. He told me he'd left his fiancée. But still, he seemed far away.

I went back to New York and started looking for a job. Kurt and I made plans to meet in Washington, D.C., at the end of October. We had a wonderful weekend, and I met his close friend Rudy Maxa. But I went back to New York, and Kurt started work on a series in L.A. A few weeks later, I was letting myself into my studio apartment when the phone rang. It was Pablo.

I wasn't surprised that he was calling. I hadn't seen him in a year, but we still talked now and then. The last I had heard from him, he was involved with someone and was planning his life in Spain. But now…now, he was coming to New York—to see me. And he was wondering if we might be able to work things out. He even mentioned the subject he had always avoided—marriage.

I told Pablo that I had started seeing someone who lived in L.A. But he seemed as determined as I seemed confused. When he hung up, I decided that I needed to be honest with Kurt. I had no idea how I felt about Pablo's tentative proposal. I just knew I needed to tell Kurt. I called him on his car phone as he was driving to work on the freeway. I told him what Pablo had said.

“Listen, I have to pull over. Just wait. Do not put the phone down. Do not put the phone down!”

I heard the screech of brakes and “watch out, asshole!” Then sardonic Kurt was back on the line. “Okay, great. So this guy with all the hair is turning up in New York to get you to marry him, and I am not even there. He'll speak to you in that goddamn Spanish accent, and it will be good-bye to Kurtie.” I could tell he felt hurt—and angry.

“Kurt, I've known Pablo for nine years. You're in L.A. I'm here. I don't know what to do.”

“I'll tell you what to do. Do not make any decisions. Do not do anything until I get there. If he's coming, so am I. I am going to finish this job here and then get on a plane to New York. Don't say you will marry him until I get a chance to prove to you that you should marry me.”

His decisiveness amazed me. Within a week, both Pablo and Kurt were in New York. Pablo stayed with a friend; Kurt took a hotel room. Pablo arrived first. He was happy to see me again, but as soon as the glow wore off, I could see his indecision creeping back. The image he had created of me during our time apart and the reality he now faced were very different, and he started hedging. He wasn't ready to leave Spain. I would have to live there if we were married. Maybe I should come to Madrid with him for a few months and we could see how things went?