Lies My Mother Never Told Me (7 page)

A
S A CHILD AND TEENAGER
, I wanted to be an actor, and my father had been all for it, but he urged me to get an education first. He believed that knowledge was the greatest weapon against hypocrisy and cruelty. The problem was, the older I got and the more I learned, the more hypocrisy and cruelty I saw, and the less protected I felt, for he, my father, had always shielded me from hypocrisy and cruelty, and now he was gone.

 

I have a framed, yellowing copy of my first published oeuvre, a poem called “Fresh Fruit of Autumn Leaves,” which at five years old I had composed for my mother while we were having a bath. I was standing in her sunken tub, covered in bubbles. The idea came to me from the bubbles dropping slowly from my outstretched hands like leaves falling from a tree. My mother jumped out of the tub, grabbed a pen and paper, and asked me to repeat what I'd said. I was just learning to read and couldn't write yet. My father, so moved by this effort, sent my poem to the
Carolina Israelite
—why this publication, I'll never know—and they published it. Even at age five, I was not so easily fooled; the poem is no doubt a fine effort for a five-year-old. But I knew it never would have gotten published if my father hadn't been James Jones.

 

My eighth-grade English teacher at the École Active Bilingue, Mrs. Kessler, is also responsible for fueling my desire to write. At the beginning of the school year, she announced a short-story contest and said she would read the two winners aloud in class. I was one of them. My story was about a little girl's stuffed animals coming to life during the full moon and revolting against her cruel treatment by attempting to run away. The other winner was Peter Calahan, who wrote a story about two boys playing war with toy rifles the afternoon they find out their older brother has been killed in Vietnam. His story was much better than mine.

But mostly I like to blame Daniel Stern, the novelist and short-story writer who taught writing at Wesleyan. He was an old friend of my parents, and having taken a personal interest in me, he suggested Wesleyan as a good college for me. Once I was there, he urged me to register for his Composition 101 writing class. My first effort was a sensory exercise in which I wrote about walking to the school bus early one morning in Miami, and smelling the first raindrops hitting the hot asphalt. I was overcome by a feeling of lightness and warmth, before I realized it was the smell of Paris on a warm spring day, which just as quickly dissipated as I approached the school bus and found myself standing in a cloud of mosquitoes.

Danny pulled me out of the class and said, “You don't need Comp 101. I want you to write fiction.”

 

During the fall semester of my junior year, in 1979, I hit an emotional wall. But giving a psychological label to this beast—“depression”—doesn't begin to describe it. The cold sweats, sick stomach, dry mouth, shaking hands, emotional paralysis, and intense agoraphobia perhaps parallel most closely the downward turn of a cocaine binge, when the gathered partiers start running around frantically, looking under the sofa cushions and then through their wallets and then pooling their pennies to buy more.
Strangely enough, with cocaine, I could go right to bed when the drugs ran out, while my friends would gnash their teeth and be brought to tears by the need for more. For me, running out of coke was nothing—
nothing
—compared with this dread I lived with.

I decided to go back to Paris for the spring semester, thinking being back home would help me. But Paris was no longer home. The hostage crisis in Iran was at its peak. Everyone hated Americans. The exchange rate for the dollar was the lowest it had been in my lifetime.

I met a lovely Frenchman, a banker who could have solved all my problems. But on our second date in a restaurant on the quai across from Notre-Dame, after a little too much wine, he seemed to forget I was American and launched into a tirade about Americans being imperialists with a fascist agenda. Furious, I told him that the U.S. Army lost more than three thousand men on Omaha Beach alone on D-day. “And what for?” I said. “To save your sorry French asses because you couldn't do it yourselves.” His tough countenance collapsed, and the look of hurt and shame on his face made me feel suddenly terrible. I apologized, but it was too late. He never called me again.

 

It was a bad time to be in Paris, and I was running out of money. I called my mother and she called our good friend William Styron, who was coming to Paris to see his French editor about
Sophie's Choice.
She asked him to bring me $3,000 worth of American Express traveler's checks.

A year before, while Bill, Rose, my mother, Jamie, and I were sitting in the back of a limo on our way to the L.A. premiere of the
From Here to Eternity
television miniseries, Bill turned to me and asked, “I need to know something for my book. How do you say ‘you have a hard-on' in French?” Eighteen years old, I promptly responded, without blinking an eye, “
Tu bandes
.” No
one in the car seemed to find this exchange inappropriate; when it came to literature and the writing process, art came first, above propriety and decorum, and everything else. Later, I found the reference in
Sophie's Choice
. Sophie says this to young Stingo, who gets a hard-on while lying next to her bathing-suit-clad form on the beach.

In Paris, Bill took me to dinner at a small, darkly lit
auberge-
like restaurant and ordered a bottle of expensive red wine. We drank two of these, and our conversation during the meal is hazy in my mind. He had been one of my father's closest friends, and I basked in a feeling of safety just being in his illustrious company. To eat well, drink well, and be cared for was a momentary reprieve in a raging storm. Toward the end of the evening, when we were sipping cognac, he asked me to go to bed with him. I laughed and said lightly, “But, Bill, I really think of you as family. And my father would roll over in his grave!”

And he replied, completely serious, “Let him roll.”

I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but really, sleeping with him was not something that had ever even fleetingly crossed my mind. “I love you and admire you so much, Bill, but really, that would be like incest.”

It was all said in a bon vivant tone, but I was in the middle of the worst emotional crisis I'd ever faced. I was never able to completely understand or accept the ramifications of this strange exchange. For me, the aftershocks went on for years and years. What was he thinking about? Was it a compulsion, an addiction, that drove him to suggest such a thing? One thing I know absolutely: if my father had known that Bill was going to proposition his nineteen-year-old, grief-stricken daughter, he would have beaten the living shit out of him, sick or not.

This was a turning point because I understood now how completely alone I was. My father's memory was not powerful enough to protect me. I longed to go home to Sagaponack.

 

It is worth going into more detail here on the way Gloria ran her household. After our father died, my brother and I were spoiled rotten in many ways. We didn't have to pay for anything or answer to anyone; on any summer weekend, we would throw all-night parties, free-for-alls with the inevitable skinny-dip in the pool, or dancing in the big kitchen with the music blasting, which didn't bother Gloria in the least because she'd be out at her own parties, or dancing right along with us, or passed out upstairs.

My mother was also capable of amazing generosity. In the summer of 1980, Max Mosolino, the second oldest of Gloria's nephews, who was around the same age as Jamie and me and had been living in a sleeping bag on the beach in Florida, called my mother in desperation. He told her about the unrestrained physical and emotional abuse he'd suffered at the hands of his mother, who was a serious drunk. Then his father, my mother's brother, Mark, left his wife and married another woman who was even worse, and that was who Max was running from. Gloria immediately wired Max money, and he arrived on a Greyhound bus. Max at the time was into bodybuilding, so his smallish head looked tiny on top of his massive shoulders and arms. Gloria helped Max get into Southampton College, got him a job as an apprentice on a local building crew, and just like that, he became a member of our family. A little while later, his youngest brother, Michael, who was around fifteen, showed up at Gloria's door, and she took him in too and got him registered at East Hampton High School. Not long after that, Anne, the youngest sibling and the only girl, moved in as well.

Michael and Anne, as the youngest, seemed to have suffered the most as their mother's drinking progressed. I told my mother I thought they needed therapy, but she thought that was a ridiculous overreaction and simply let us all run wild through her house. My mother was wonderful at grand gestures but truly abominable at follow-through.

Someone had to feed all these people, and my mother, while happy to pay the bills, wasn't volunteering, so with the help of Craig Claiborne's
New York Times Cookbook,
I took on the task. As soon as my mother saw I was preparing a meal, she'd pick up the phone and start inviting people over for dinner. For a long time I thought Claiborne's portions were all wrong. It took me years to realize that Jamie, Max, and Michael ate like six people by themselves. So I simply tripled Claiborne's recipes, but no matter how much food I made, it was all gone by the end of the evening. My ability to estimate portions when cooking has never completely recovered.

Eventually, Max moved to Connecticut and began to make a living as a foreman in a major construction company; and Michael and Anne moved into a small house down the street. But they were constantly over. Michael, who wanted to become a chef, would walk in and “borrow” cooking utensils and pots and pans, and never return them, so that, in the middle of boiling spaghetti, I'd be searching for the colander, and my mother would say, with total indifference, “Michael took it.” From then on, whenever someone couldn't find something in the house, someone would say “Michael took it,” and everyone would laugh.

 

Sometime in 1980, Nelson Algren moved into a little house in one of the less elegant neighborhoods of Sag Harbor, about five miles from my mother's house in Sagaponack. Nelson's illustrious career had spanned many decades. He'd written novels and short stories about the downtrodden, the poor, the merciless, and he was a World War II veteran. Today he is perhaps best remembered as the passion of Simone de Beauvoir's life. When he moved to Sag Harbor, he was alone and penniless.

The local writing community took great pains to make him feel welcome. He came to Christmas dinner at my mother's house that year. He was a heavy, red-nosed, balding, morose man, and
it was hard to imagine him eliciting such passion in Simone de Beauvoir. Recently, I found a picture on the Internet of Nelson Algren in his thirties. What a good-looking, strong, intelligent face! He resembles the young George C. Scott. No wonder Simone fell for him. Sartre looks like a pansy by comparison. But maybe Simone had had enough of sexy, brawny, tough young Americans by the time she got to Sartre.

In any case, I had just submitted my application to the Columbia MFA program in writing, and this became, for a while, the topic of conversation at the Christmas dinner table.

My mother's house was very popular with my friends and Jamie's, as well as with the older set, because my mother was an equal opportunity drinker—everyone was welcome to imbibe as much and stay as late as they wanted, and the next morning it was not unusual to find people passed out on the couch. That night we got blasted on excellent martinis, the Stolichnaya vodka a Christmas gift from a guest. Quite late, it was discovered that Nelson's ride had departed, and someone had to drive him home. Jamie was already asleep. Since I was the best drunk driver of the group and could still see somewhat straight, I was conscripted. Someone helped him into the car and I got in behind the wheel. That someone got in back, but for the life of me, I can't remember who it was. I can, however, remember what proceeded almost perfectly.

As I concentrated on the dark road that twisted through scrub oak woods, Nelson suddenly broke the silence. “Why do you want to be a writer?”

“I don't know if I want to be a writer,” I told him.

“Good,” he muttered. “Don't become a writer.”

“I'm just going to study writing,” I said, feeling that this was a worthy pursuit and who was he to tell me what to do.

“Good. Study all you want, just don't become a writer. It's a lousy, stupid thing to do. You start out thinking people are going to admire you and love you and respect you but really nobody
gives a shit. It's a terrible life. And look at you, you're young, you're beautiful. First of all, what the hell do you have to write about?”

I began vaguely, through my drunken haze, to take offense. I hated when older people who'd done things like survive wars told me I hadn't suffered enough, hadn't felt enough pain to have anything to say. Fuck them and their wars anyway!

“Well, I could write about losing my father at sixteen and what that was like,” I retorted, my voice getting a hard, defensive edge.

“Yes, that was terrible. But you don't want to stay in that for the rest of your life, do you? Why, you could do anything you want!”

“Well, but what if writing's the only thing I'm good at?” I responded, starting to cry now, feeling sorry for myself. “What if I do have something to say?”

“That's what they all think,” he mumbled, leaning up against the window, his breath fogging up the glass. “And even if you do, who's listening? Who cares? The novel is dead.”

By the time we pulled into his driveway, I was sobbing. “The novel isn't dead! The novel is not dead!” I kept muttering. He fumbled for the door handle. My friend in the back and I got out and came around to help him. I tried to wipe my face with my coat sleeve. I cried so easily when I was blasted; it was a great relief, unleashing all of my pent-up sadness.