Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found Read online

  The next morning I came back up the hill from doing turds, as Cici called it—cleaning Blanca’s corral—to find Cici on top of a ladder in the middle of my room, leaning over backward with a staple gun in her hand. Four wide streamers of cheesecloth in ice-cream colors—pink, yellow, blue, and green—trailed from a board on the ceiling to fat bolts on the floor.

  “You like?” she said.

  She’d already done one side of the room. The four colors draped in stripes across the ceiling like a circus tent and fell all the way down to the floor.

  It was fantastic: girly and dramatic, but bohemian too, with light misting through the open weave of the cloth. Cici had been planning it for months, she told me, bringing back the fabric secretly on our trips to Puerto Vallarta. I knew she couldn’t have done it if the Madonna were still there. It had been the Madonna’s room and I a guest in it, as I had been in the Bhutan Room. But yesterday the Madonna, with all her masochistic sorrows, had been vanquished.

  I helped Cici put up the rest of the fabric, holding it high above my head so she could reach out, her long toes curled over the edge of the ladder step, and staple it into the angle where wall met ceiling. She cut neat edges above the doors and closets, but let the fabric fall over the windows like curtains. I could push it back if I wanted and hook it behind nails.

  In the center of the ceiling, over the board where the ends of fabric were stapled, she hung a little mirror rimmed in pink Venetian glass. It shot a thrill through me. I knew there was something shocking about a mirror on the ceiling, though I didn’t quite know why. The Chicksweeper had a giant one, the kind you’d put on a closet, reflecting his king-size bed and white shag rug. Collin and I thought it was hilarious. Mine was beautiful.

  It wasn’t really me, this fantasy bedroom—it was more like the room Cici had had when she was a girl, but even more extreme, more amazing. But since I didn’t know what was me, that didn’t really matter. It was mine, and best of all Cici made it specifically for me. The amount of effort she put into it announced that I was staying put. The billowing cloth covered every inch of wall, which meant there was no question of paintings, photographs, posters—no pressure to come up with a visible expression of who I was, or to make aesthetic choices that might be found wanting by Anjelica or Dad (even in his absence, I felt the shadow of his judgment). I was tired of things being serious and tasteful. The knobbly headboard that I couldn’t lean against was gone, and I had the twin beds that Aunt Dorothy had contributed to the house on Euclid. Here, in my beautiful tent, I might actually invite a friend to sleep over in the other one.

  In the meantime, our kittens loved to play with the loose ends of fabric that trailed on the floor under the beds. Mine was called Jinx, Collin’s was D’Artagnan Porthos Athos Aramis Rochefort Richelieu Louis XIV Green. (Green was Collin’s last name.) We’d brought them home from our neighbors’ house in the pockets of our jackets when they were tiny—too young to have been separated from their mother. As a result, they sucked their tails. Cici wanted to put hydrogen peroxide or quinine on them to stop the sucking but I refused, even though the tails looked revoltingly nipply. I didn’t feel guilty about having taken Jinx away from his mother, but I didn’t want to punish him for missing her.

  Anjelica had been living with Jack for as long as I’d been living with Cici. His daughter, Jennifer, was a year older than me, blond and pudgy like me, so that we could have been sisters. We found it funny that if Anjel and Jack married, I’d be Jen’s aunt.

  They took us to Aspen for two weeks, to ski. We made a perfect family: Jen and I sharing a bedroom, Anjelica cooking roast chicken and spaghetti Bolognese in the evenings, and Jack the ringmaster, the source of all excitement. Anjel mothered us, taking us shopping for ski clothes and putting sunscreen on our faces. Every day our ski instructor would bring us to a restaurant to meet them for lunch.

  “She’s a phenom!” Jack boasted to anyone who asked Jen how she liked skiing. I was happy for her, shining in her father’s eyes, even though I was far from being a phenom myself.

  I loved Jack’s voice. Like Daddy’s, it had a way of soaking into all the air in a room. But Jack’s voice was slangier than Daddy’s and had a dangerous edge. Everything he said seemed to hold a hidden joke; a joke that you were in on if you heard the grin behind the words. Dad’s voice made you his disciple; Jack’s made you his accomplice.

  I loved the way he called me Leggsington, and Jen Bimbooreen, and had nicknames for everybody: Curly and Whitey and Red Dog and Blackie and Beaner. Arthur Garfunkel was the G, or the Big G, or the New G. Warren Beatty was the Pro. When he called Anjel Toot, or Tootman, I felt I could actually see the bond between them. She was Toot, and he had christened her; she was singular and special, the way she was meant to be.

  The first time Anjelica took me to Jack’s house, she parked her little Mercedes in the open garage next to Jack’s big maroon Mercedes—called Bing, because it was the color of a bing cherry—and we went into the house through the kitchen. Jack was sitting on a sofa, in an area off the kitchen that wasn’t quite living room, leaning forward into the phone, as if telling a secret. He wore jeans and a white shirt, whiter than any shirt I’d ever seen. Near him was a hat rack covered in baseball caps—more than I’d ever imagined one person could own.

  “Toot,” Jack said as he hung up the phone, stringing out the word. He stood up to kiss her. It was the first time I noticed that Anjel was taller than he was.

  I spent many weekends at Jack’s house, with Jen. We had the living room to ourselves in the mornings, before Jack and Anjel got up. We’d do a heavy wooden jigsaw puzzle of a pig (Jack collected pigs, so there were pig-shaped things everywhere), or the strange silver robot figure that came apart into interlocking pieces, or we’d lie on the carpet out of the sun and play long games of Petropolis, which was a kind of special-edition Monopoly for millionaires. Some French count had given Jack a set: the properties were countries, with embossed leather ownership cards; the houses were solid silver oil derricks; and the hotels were oil platforms plated in gold. Also, we designed our houses. We drew endless floor plans, usually with exercise rooms (though neither of us was sporty) and always with a slide from the master bedroom down into the pool.

  Jack’s bedroom, upstairs, had a little balcony overlooking the pool. Often Jen and I would be swimming when Jack made his first appearance of the morning—folding back the hinged balcony railing, taking a running leap, and cannonballing into the pool with a wild whoop. Bozo, his black Labrador, would leap in after him, crazy with excitement, his nails clawing as he dog-paddled close to us. I shrank away from him, fearing the red welts Bozo’s nails raised on my arms.

  “Grab ’em!” Jack urged me. “Dance with the Big Bo!”

  Jack’s ability to play awed me. He didn’t play like a child; he played like an adult who knew how to have fun, like Jack: a bit wild, but always in control, abandoned to the moment, for just as long as the moment lasted and no more. He seemed to know exactly what he wanted to do, at any given second. He spent long hours upstairs in his room, reading—history and philosophy mostly, names like Hegel and Nietzsche that I’d heard of but hadn’t imagined anyone actually reading. He collected paintings to the point of obsession; and he was as delighted at discovering a new painter he admired, or a lesser-known painter such as Alma-Tadema or Bouguereau, as he was at acquiring a new Picasso or a Dufy. I was there when a moving truck arrived with a giant canvas of a woman smoking a cigarette, by an artist I hadn’t heard of named Tamara de Lempicka. There was only one wall big enough to hold it: the one opposite the stairs. Though the overall effect was cosmopolitan rather than mythical, I saw, in the woman’s faceted face and angled body, echoes of Dad’s Saint George.

  Jack bought so many paintings that they soon overflowed the wall space and had to be stacked against the walls of the Garfunkel Suite, as the maid’s room was known. Eventually, the room was so full of stored paintings that there was no room for Arthur Garfunkel to stay it in anymore.


  Usually I slept on the sofa in the TV room, which was soft and deep and enveloping. The room was always dark, blocked off from the sunlight glancing off the pool by thick curtains, so that it felt as if it was deep in the bowels of the house. The sofa was set up on a little platform so you could see over the projector mechanism of the TV, which crouched in the middle of the floor, casting three eyes—red, blue, and green—onto a screen which virtually covered one wall. A couple of armchairs squeezed in beside the projector, and the walls were covered with paintings. It was hard to tell, but I thought some of them were of Anjelica.

  Jack’s pals came over to watch the Lakers’ road games. I didn’t really like basketball, but I liked watching it with Jack. On the screen, fuzzy, washed-out giants in yellow uniforms pounded up and down a court while Jack yelled at them, jumping up and down like them, cheering as loud as if he were in the stadium. His pals pounded the air and cheered too—a little less loudly, a little more decorously, like backup singers. It reminded me of Dad: another king, another court.

  When Jack’s friends gathered in the evenings, Harry Dean Stanton would sing Mexican songs. I watched intently for the moment when he moved to pick up the guitar. I couldn’t understand the Spanish words, but they were full of torment. As Harry sang them, his voice seemed to catch on barbed hooks of heartbreak as it slid between one note and the next. I lost myself as I listened. The liquid of his voice picked me up and washed through me.

  Harry Dean didn’t laugh loud and crack jokes, like the others. When he spoke, his Kentucky drawl was slow, as if weighed down by the melancholy of centuries. I had to lean close to hear him. His narrow, drooping face reminded me of the farmer in the painting American Gothic. He wasn’t part of the basketball crowd. He loved to play Scrabble, and so did I; and though I was a child, we started a regular game that lasted as long as I lived in L.A.

  Anjel had her place in Jack’s court, though she was not quite the queen. He was the only sun; she held the inner orbit. She was still in her early twenties, much younger than Jack. It seemed natural to me, as Dad’s daughter, that she would defer to him. What happened was what Jack wanted, and everyone was there to service him. I loved the circus quality of his house, with people dropping in and out, and the coven in the kitchen—Anjelica, Jack’s secretary Annie, and Helena, who lived next door—making grilled cheese and tomato in the toaster oven. It was familiar, though I didn’t quite recognize it: a California version of St. Cleran’s.

  That Jack was somewhat remote felt right. Like Dad, he descended to have his needs met, then ascended again. I wasn’t close to him in the sense that we did anything special together, or shared heartfelt emotion; but he treated me exactly as he treated Jen, and she was his daughter. I watched TV with him, swam, laughed at his jokes. That was all I wanted: to be included in the nucleus of his world.

  Jen and I went together to Portland, Oregon, where he was filming One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and to Billings, Montana, where he was filming The Missouri Breaks. I knew Anjel was happy that Jen and I were such good friends, and I was doubly glad to be pleasing her. From Billings, we went on a day trip into Yellowstone. Jack drove. On the way back, Jack suddenly said, into the silence of the speeding, tired car, “Another day, another twenty-five thou!” I thought this was one of the wittiest things I’d ever heard and repeated it to everyone I knew. I was slightly baffled when nobody got the joke, but I didn’t care; they were outsiders, and I was in. I’d even arrived on the set and found I already knew someone: Harry Dean Stanton, his face bumpy with mosquito bites and the mournful echo of the Mexican songs I loved to hear him sing shimmering around him.

  The set rumbled with the unseen presence of the film’s other star: Marlon Brando. Like thunder so distant that some sixth or seventh sense registers only an incalculable disturbance in the air, Marlon’s proximity made people jumpy—even Jack. He was, I knew, considered the greatest actor alive; he was certainly the most famous person ever to have visited St. Cleran’s, and County Galway had still been talking about it a decade later. Though Marlon wasn’t even on set the first few days I was in Montana, Jack seemed nervous, thrown a little off his axis. I was surprised, because I knew Marlon lived on the hill above Jack’s house and shared a driveway off the main road, and they were friends. (The following year, Marlon would play an April Fool’s joke on Jack, telling him he was selling his house to Sylvester Stallone unless Jack could come up with some huge sum of money to match it.)

  In two years of visiting Jack’s house, I hadn’t met Marlon. In Montana, in 115-degree heat, with grasshoppers splashing up at every footstep, I did.

  “Look at his eyes, Legs,” Anjel whispered to me. “He has violet eyes.”

  I looked at them furtively, not quite daring to look into them when he was looking at me. They weren’t violet; they were bluey-gray.

  I’d failed a test. I didn’t belong in this company. Living on the grand scale, like Dad and Anjelica, meant mythologizing the great people. I knew that Dad would have agreed that Brando had violet eyes. If you were special, you saw what was special in other people—and even if you weren’t quite a god yourself, you could recognize a god when you saw one. That marked both of you out from the ordinary. I knew I wasn’t playing the game; I couldn’t play the game. It was a flaw in me that couldn’t be fixed: I was prosaic. I wished I wasn’t, but I was.

  And then, a few months after Dad left, Cici’s brother died.

  Stephan was the baby of the family, her only younger brother. I had met him once, when Aunt Dorothy took me and Collin to San Francisco for the weekend for Stephan’s graduation from law school. He seemed sad and dutiful; I got the impression that law school was such a serious business that one should never laugh again. (Aunt Dorothy told me frequently that I should become a lawyer.) She kept Stephan’s wedding photo on top of the TV in her bedroom—he was handsome and golden in a white suit with embroidered flowers—even though he and his wife were already divorced. She talked about his ex-wife often, as if pretending they were still married would make it so. Often she said of her two older sons, “I wish Bob [or David] would find a nice girl and settle down,” even though it was obvious to both Collin and me that nice girls held no interest for the Chicksweeper, and girls of any kind held no interest for Bob at all.

  Stephan had been flying a glider, and it crashed into a mountain. Cici’s friend Dyke Debbie the tennis pro told me it was suicide. Aunt Dorothy insisted always that it was an accident. The day the phone call came, I stayed in my room with Collin, watching TV, on our side of the swinging kitchen door, while Cici’s friends took charge. That night, we were sent to stay with her friend Joey.

  I didn’t like Joey, with his too-curly, too-long hair and gold chains. I felt him looking at me when Collin and I came back through the living room after taking our nightly Jacuzzi. (The Jacuzzi was off Cici’s bedroom, sunk into the floor of its own glassed-in room, T-shaped with lots of levels and curved places to lie molded in concrete. After Anjelica brought Jack to see it, he ordered one exactly the same for himself.) I didn’t want to go to Joey’s house, but under the circumstances I didn’t see how I could protest.

  Joey set out a sheet and pillow for Collin on the sofa, and gave me his bed in a bachelor bedroom of dark gray sheets, black metal furniture, and a deep pile rug (though nothing as ludicrous as the Chicksweeper’s). I woke up in the middle of the night to find him in bed beside me. His chest was bare. Was he naked? My breath started to come short and panting, my heart thumped so loud that I was afraid the noise of it, cannoning through the molecules of air, might wake him. I wondered if it was okay that he was in bed beside me and felt quite sure it wasn’t, then decided I was being ridiculous. It was his bed. It was kind of him to let me sleep in it.

  There was no way I could go back to sleep with him there beside me. Morning was a long way away. I worried about offending him if I got out of bed. Would it be tantamount to accusing him of molesting me? That wasn’t fair. He hadn’t so much as brushed again
st me by accident.

  I got up and went into the living room. I lay down on the floor next to Collin’s sofa, feeling like I was protecting him: his older sister, there beside him if he should wake upset because his uncle was dead. I was desperate to fall asleep quickly. If I was asleep when Joey woke and realized I wasn’t in bed anymore, it would prove me innocent of fear and suspicion; a suspicious, frightened person wouldn’t, obviously, be able to sleep. But my mind raced in circles around the picture of me sleeping, and vulnerable.

  Joey came out of the bedroom. He was wearing pajama bottoms. I knew immediately that he’d been wearing them all along, and I felt my face flush hot. Of course he wouldn’t have betrayed Cici’s trust—especially at a time like this.

  “What are you doing on the floor? You’ll be more comfortable in the bed.”

  “I’m fine here,” I stammered. “I want to be next to Collin.”

  “I’m not going to touch you,” he said. There it was—he could read my mind. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “I’m not,” I said, backpedaling desperately. I didn’t want him to tell Cici that I didn’t trust him, because she would think that meant that I didn’t trust her. “You know…Stephan. I just want to be with Collin.”

  Collin was waking up by this time, befuddled and sleepy. I shushed him in what I hoped was a concerned-looking, big-sisterly way. Joey shrugged and went back to bed.

  I didn’t tell Cici, of course. I didn’t tell anyone, such as Aunt Dorothy or Anjelica, because I didn’t want Cici to look bad—or worse, give them the idea that I wasn’t safe with her. I was supposed to be no trouble. No harm had come to me. I think Joey told her, though—because soon afterward he disappeared from our lives.