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 li
ved 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?
But I felt it was too late for us, that as much as I had loved him once, I had never really been intimate with him, not the way I was with Kurt. And there was the issue of my father. Pablo seemed afraid of what had happened to me; Kurt faced it head on. If I married Pablo, it would be unmentionable, and I would bear it on my own. If I married Kurt, there would be no taboos, particularly this one. I had never lived with him, known his family, seen his house, or met most of his friends. But I knew I needed him.
Pablo went back to Spain alone—and relieved, I suspect. Kurt stayed and formally proposed one afternoon while we were running side by side on the hotel gym’s treadmills. We decided to get married straight away and gave ourselves two weeks to plan the wedding. After that I would move to Los Angeles, since I had little to offer in New York besides a studio apartment.
My mother seemed happy to hear I was engaged. My father was not. He favored Pablo. He knew Pablo admired him, and he sensed Kurt never would. It wasn’t as though Kurt were antagonistic toward my dad when they finally met, but he wasn’t warm either. Before we went to have a drink with my father and Carla one evening, Kurt warned me what to expect. “Jessica, I will meet Tony if you want me to,” he said. “I will even try to be nice. But there is only so much I can fake with a man who is capable of doing what he did to his own daughter. I don’t like him, and I will never, never trust him.”
Privately, Dad made some not-so-subtle attempts to dissuade me from marrying Kurt, telling me what a better match Pablo would be. I was under his influence enough to almost believe him. But a voice in my head, for once louder than my father’s, told me I was making the right choice. Dad said he would only pay for the wedding if I got married in a Catholic church—a ridiculous demand given that my father was divorced and had married Carla in the garden in New Jersey. Besides, Kurt was Jewish. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t want him to pay for the wedding anyway. I wanted the day to be only about Kurt and me. My mom paid for part of it, and Rudy, with his connections, got us the second best suite at the Mark Hotel on Fifth Avenue for the price of a room at a Holiday Inn. It helped that it was Christmas Eve, not a big night for tourists or weddings.
The ceremony came five months after Kurt and I had met. My mother and father were there, keeping their distance. Carla was invited but said she couldn’t leave her children at Christmas, perhaps an excuse to avoid being in the same room with my mom. Rudy was best man; my sister, Kathy, was my maid of honor, and Krisztina, Iana, and other old friends were there too. Kurt and I found the Universalist minister by calling an 800-number.
My father announced to the congregation that he had had Kurt “investigated” before allowing us to marry. I assumed he was joking. Then he began reading a Biblical passage of his choosing—one that he hadn’t told me about.
As he read from the “Song of Solomon,” my stomach turned. “Thy two breasts are like two young roses that are twins, which feed among the lilies,” he announced. And then: “I sleep, but my heart waketh. It is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled, for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.”
He didn’t stop. “My dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of her mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her. The daughters saw her, and blessed her; yea, the queens.”
And then: “How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes. I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof: now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples; and the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.”
“I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me…”
I tried my best to smile, but I couldn’t believe my father failed to make the connection that was so obvious to me, to Kurt, and to my friends in the room that knew. I began to feel nauseated, as I usually did when those memories flooded back. I looked toward Kurt and felt better.
Anyone looking through the wedding album might think Kathy and I were two happy sisters with our happy parents. Sometimes, the thousand words a picture speaks are better if not truthful. Kurt and I stayed at the Mark that night. Early on a snowy Christmas Day, Kurt awoke to find his bride gone. I was up at 6:30 A.M., had procured a cup of coffee from the downstairs staff, and was tromping through a snowy Central Park in my running shoes. It was the first of almost 3,700 mornings since we got married that Kurt has woken up alone.
My new husband now faced his greatest challenge yet: getting me to L.A. We were set to leave on New Year’s Day, but on New Year’s Eve, I made the mistake of talking to a friend about the harrowing trip she had just taken from Florida. They had flown through a thunderstorm. “I was sure the plane was coming down,” she told me. “The sky was blazing. I saw lightning strike the wings, and the whole plane bounced up and down. They even had us take our emergency positions!”
I looked mournfully at Kurt, as if to say, “How can you subject me to a plane trip, you heartless man!” But he was oblivious. The next morning, I started getting edgy. I looked pale and cringed at the mention of the trip. My mother recognized the signs and took me aside. “Jessica, you had better get on that plane, Kurt is not someone who will take a lot of nonsense.”
She was right. A few hours before the flight, as we were getting ready to leave, I started weeping, saying that I was scared to get on the plane and wanted to take the train instead. Kurt looked at me as if I were crazy.
“I’m getting on that flight,” he said, matter-of-factly. “But if you’re nutty enough to spend three days in a train instead of five hours in a plane, fine.”
He didn’t seem angry at all. He simply kissed me on the cheek, went out the door to get a cab to the airport, and arrived promptly in Los Angeles five hours later. I spent seventy-two hours by myself on a scruffy leather seat looking out of an Amtrak window and feeling like the biggest idiot in the world. Kurt picked me up from Union Station. He looked rested and chipper. On the way to the car, he made cracks about how I was a mail-order bride and suggested that next time, I might want to travel by covered wagon.
Kurt took me back to my new home, a townhouse in Santa Monica, long enough for me to drop my bags.
It had been more than twenty years since I had left L.A. behind, heading out of Laurel Canyon in the VW with my parents. Now, I found the city vast and hard to understand. Was it a city, a suburb, or a mass of strip malls with sun and palm trees? We drove north to Carmel for a honeymoon and came back to Santa Monica on the afternoon of January 16. That night I went to sleep in Los Angeles for the first time in twenty-two years. Early the next morning, at 4:30 A.M., I awoke to the sound of breaking glass. The bed tossed and bounced exactly as it had when I was five. This time I recognized straight away that Daddy wasn’t playing a trick on me. The earthquake, we found out later, had registered 6.7 on the Richter scale. I had left L.A. after one major earthquake to return years later, just in time for another.
Being in L.A., being married, and having a person like Kurt in my life made me want to change, to make a real commitment this time. My bulimia was the most obvious place to start. Kurt still didn’t know, and though I hadn’t told him the truth, I rationalized that I hadn’t really lied about it either. He just hadn’t asked. I had been trying to control my eating for years. This time I was determined to get a handle on my problem. Eating disorders are tricky; you can’t just cut food out of your life, as you might with drugs or alcohol. You have to find a way to manage what you eat.
I made a vow to change once and for all. For the first couple of months in L.A., I stuck to a diet and did not binge. I felt in control for the first time I could remember. But controlling what I ate—precisely and obsessively—became my new addiction. Starving myself made me feel “clean” and “good.” I was proud of not being bulimic anymore, but after a few months in which I dropped twenty pounds off an already thin frame, my sense of being worthy and virtuous became hollow. I had traded bulimia for anorexia.
I’d had an illusion as a bulimic that if I could master my eating, I was of value to myself. What I came to realize after I became anorexic was that I didn’t value myself any more than I had before. Food was not the issue. I knew that. It was my past, my self-loathing. In one sense, trading bulimia for anorexia seemed a positive step, if only because I realized my problems needed real attention this time. Anorexia was the end of the line. If I had stayed wrapped up in the cycle of bingeing and purging, I might never have hit that wall.
How to Cook Your Daughter Page 20