Fiction Ruined My Family

by Jeanne Darst

  The guy was about as nice as they come. Nicer. Always the first one to show up for a cleanup day at his building or offer his Westphalia van to someone who needed to move. The kind of no-fuss guy who shopped for khakis at EMS on Broadway even though he was retail royalty, his great-grandfather having started the swankiest clothing store in New York. The way he saw it, EMS was around the corner, easier than going above Fourteenth Street. People who do things because they’re easy drive me nuts! Hard! Hard is what you want! That’s what makes it mean something. That’s what makes it real, dummy! His attitude toward my writing was similarly oppressive.

  “I think you should do whatever makes you happy. You’re an amazing writer. You should go for it.”

  Go for it. Go-for-it. I was doomed. My writing . . . doomed.

  Jed’s conversation was packed with clichés. Some of his most oft-used were: now you’re cooking with gas, let’s get down to brass tacks, and there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Jed would drop them casually and I’d think, What are you doing? Jesus, keep it down, looking around to make sure no one had heard him. He was a big reader but he read so goddamn freely. This looks good. My brother gave me this, I’ll read this next. No thought about what he should be reading. He just read.

  Part of my life was cohesive: waitress, member of a serious downtown theater company with a social conscience that taught AIDS education in prisons, schools, homeless shelters. We performed Brecht and Büchner. And then there was my after-work life, which involved a big loft in SoHo and fundraisers with his parents and dinner at ‘21.’

  Jed and I got our food from Dean & Deluca. Deep down I knew Dean & Deluca was not a grocery store. We watched TV on his big screen. This was terrifying to me. His couch was big and comfortable. Comfort? I’ll never be a writer. He had cable. Cable! Not one word will I write. He wanted to get married. He wanted kids. I loved him a lot. We laughed constantly. But just what kind of life was this guy setting me up for? I would go to the corner every day and buy the New York Times and read it with my coffee. By that time Jed had flipped on his big TV and was watching CNN. I’d try to block out the headline scroll, the dramatic language, the graphic photography but you can’t. TV is TV—it can’t be blocked out. It’s TV. Clenching the paper every morning I’d think, I’m trying to do something here! It’s TBA, but still.

  I was terrified that if I stayed with Jed I would lose something I wasn’t even sure I had. Focus? Drive? Talent? I can’t concentrate if it’s just gonna be fine and dandy around here all the time. How can anyone think in all this peace and comfort?

  I moved in with Jed and got a waitressing gig in Manhattan at a café called Le Gamin on Twenty-first and Ninth, and at the one in SoHo. The owners, Robert and Hervé, were completely bonkers, partiers, fun, super-French—they always took the staff ’s side against a customer. “Get ze ell out of ear. We doan need your bullshit, lady!” They were awesome. I liked to think waitressing at a French place had more, I don’t know what—je ne sais quoi?—than other restaurants. Besides the French owners, there was a cook from Mali and his wife who spoke no English, and many of our regulars were French. People speaking French around me made it less like regular old waitressing. I could be myself there because I felt like everyone who worked there was unhappy and had a good time being that way. Unlike an office atmosphere, where I felt I couldn’t wear something as daring as a bright orange cardigan—ooooh, bright!—at Le Gamin during a heat wave I waitressed in my vintage Betty Grable green bathing suit. The owners seemed to hire people because they were wild and funny and didn’t take any bullshit.

  Katharine called me one day and asked if I wanted to be on this late-night TV show she was producing called Last Call. There had been a law passed that it was now legal to be topless in New York State parks, beaches and the subway system. The woman heading up this change called it the top-free movement. The producers of Last Call wanted to do a segment on it and were sitting around trying to figure out who they could get, a normal person, someone who wasn’t in the sex industry, to ride the subway topless.

  “My sister will do it,” Katharine said.

  “How much?” I said when she called me.

  “A hundred and fifty.”

  “What? A hundred and fifty. No way. Five hundred.”

  “Jean, I’ve got to do this segment as cheaply as possible.”

  “You’re my sister. Aren’t you supposed to be pimping me out for the most money possible?”

  “I’m also the producer here, Jeanne. Two hundred.”

  “Four hundred.”

  “Three hundred. Final offer.”

  “Done. Oh, I want a bodyguard.” Not that my boobs were going to cause anyone to go insane, but boobs are boobs, you never know.

  “Fine. One bodyguard.”

  I met my sister and the film crew at the uptown E train at Fiftieth Street. A svelte brunet man ran up to me and waved a small lead pipe in front of my face like a sparkler.

  “Hi! I’m Craig! I’m your bodyguard!” and he did a little fancy dance step right there on the platform. I felt so safe. Katharine walked over.

  “Hi!”

  “Katharine—”

  Craig was dancing and jabbing his pipe into the air. Rehearsing. Katharine turned to me.

  “Okay, look, I called some bodyguards. No one was available. Craig is awesome. He’s danced for some really good companies.”

  “Brother. Fine.”

  The shoot went off without too much trouble. We had to duck the New York City police as we didn’t have permits, and we couldn’t film on a train with kids or a train that was too full. But it went fine.

  Jed wasn’t too eager for his family to hear about my shenanigans, particularly his grandmother. Jed’s family was so out of the regular work world that his mother, Diane, thought it was adorable that I was a waitress and said to me one day, excitedly, “So do you say, ‘Hi, my name is Jeanne and I’ll be your waitress?’”

  These were people who didn’t even ride the subway, let alone without clothes on national television. While Jed’s family lived on Fifth, my parents were living in filth.

  One day Dad was going for a run in his neighborhood in his grungy running uniform: holey T-shirt, jogging shorts à la 1971, red-white-and-blue sweatbands on his wrists and also around his head. He was on his corner waiting to cross the street and begin his run when a homeless guy at his side said to him, “It’s murder out there today.”

  And my dad said, “What do you mean?”

  “People don’t want to give anything at all. You getting much today?”

  My dad realized the guy thought he was a fellow homeless panhandler. My father thought it was funny but the story was met with some silence from my sisters and me when he told it. It was just too close. It’s one thing if some rich person thinks you’re homeless but when a seasoned pro thinks you’re one of them that’s another thing.

  My father blew through the house money in approximately two years. When you’re fifty-five years old with no job, no retirement money, no pension, you’d think you might want to at least buy a little apartment in Montclair, New Jersey, or somewhere, to live in. But he was going to hit it big with Stylebook. And now it was a nonfiction book on Fitzgerald. He was now taking temp work, borrowing a few bucks here and there. He borrowed twenty bucks from Katharine when she was a brand-new peon at a publishing house making around $12,000 a year, and after she gave it to him she got up in the middle of the restaurant and screamed, “You are the worst father ever! I hate you!” and walked out.

  As for my mother, she didn’t look homeless, but she was becoming less and less of a mother you could take out in public. She had a uniform: a black pencil skirt, gray cashmere cowl neck, long pearls which always got hooked on one breast, black stockings, stylish black heels (high), lit cigarette, jangly charm bracelets of her mother’s, and gold bangles and gold and platinum rings. She would no sooner wear silver than she would a candy necklace. This was what she wore when she went out, except sometimes sh
e lost part of her outfit.

  That summer Kate had a bunch of friends get married. By the fall, she needed to buy some wedding gifts and she wanted to hit the boutiques along Bleecker Street. She called Mom and they decided on lunch at Tartine and then some shopping. Mom was wearing her usual outfit. After lunch they hit a slew of stores up and down Bleecker. Coming out of Pierre Deux, Mom shrieked, “Oooh! Where’s my skirt?”

  Kate looked down and Mom was indeed missing her standard size-one black pencil skirt that she had been wearing earlier in the day. The rest of her uniform was intact: poof of faux-blond soufflé balanced on top of a gray cowl neck, long strand of pearls, black opaque stockings showcasing a pair of gams that would have made Ann Miller get a desk job, black undies underneath the stockings, and three-and-a-half-inch Joan & David black pumps.

  “Mom!” Kate yelled, totally startled and baffled. “Where’s your skirt?”

  “I don’t know, Kate. It was here a minute ago. Oh, for God’s sake.” Mom lit a cigarette to calm herself and focus on the case of the missing skirt.

  “Were you wearing it when we left the restaurant?” Kate asked, panicked, looking through her bag for something to tie around Mom’s torso.

  “I must have been, don’t you think?” Mom asked, less concerned about her current state of undress than intrigued by the puzzle of it all, as if it were just another trick Will Shortz had up his sleeve for her. Two young women walked by Kate and Mom, locking eyes on Mom’s stockinged rear.

  “Jesus, Mom. Should we get a cab?” Kate said.

  “Are you out of your mind? That’s a brand-new Calvin Klein skirt!”

  Kate began huffing loudly. “Well (huff), I don’t (huff-huff), Jesus, Mom (huff), I mean, Jesus.”

  “I went to the bathroom at Tartine and I’m pretty damn sure I had it on when I came out.” Mom parked her cigarette between her lips and began running her hands up and down her sides and under her sweater. She felt something in her sweater and pulled it downward and out popped one black Calvin Klein skirt. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Mom said, cackling with delight. “Here it is, Kate!”

  Kate cackled, too, as Mom pulled it over her hips and smoothed it down with her hand.

  “I’d hate to think how many stores we were in since lunch,” Mom laughed.

  “Yeah, I sorta thought of that.”

  “Let’s go have a beer at the White Horse.”

  I took care of her Jack Russell, Emma, one weekend when she was in the hospital for one of her ailments. (She had surgery on both hands for carpal tunnel syndrome, which she believed she got from horseback riding; she had sciatica, a shooting pain that began at the base of her spine and ran down both legs—a horrific pain that she said was relieved best by a drink; and something called spinal stenosis. She always had a headache and could take four aspirin without water, crunching them up in her teeth like they were pistachios; she had high blood pressure; she had shingles; she had an ulcer that Eleanor claims is when Mom’s interest in salt, coffee and spicy foods really took off. As for her beautiful blue eyes, she never let you forget one had a scratched cornea and one had a detached retina and she was legally blind. She also had “obtuse-angle” glaucoma, but she didn’t need to smoke pot for it or anything, just to mention it whenever there was a break in the conversation. She was deaf in her right ear, she had depression, obviously, and took antidepressants.) Out on a walk, Emma pooped out a bunch of True Blue cigarette filters. When I told my mother about this, she just said, “Oh, that Emma. She just gets into everything.” Mom wouldn’t acknowledge the dirty, depressing mess in her apartment, her cigarette-pooping dog or her drinking. Her dog walker talked to my mom and took Emma home with him for good one day. I think we all wished he could have taken Mom home with him, too.

  Jed’s family was normal compared with Mom and Dad. Then again, most people were normal compared with Mom and Dad.

  Jed was also sober, which was adorable and exotic.

  “He’s a junkie,” I proudly described my new boyfriend to my friends.

  “Was a junkie. He’s been sober for a year. He quit dope at the Chelsea Hotel, where he was living.” I’d really never known anyone who did drugs. When I told my parents about him, they just couldn’t put it all together.

  “His parents live on Fifth and Ninety-third and he was a junkie, you say? That can’t be right,” my mother said.

  “He’s sober now,” I said, but they had no idea what that meant. “We’re all sober, honey, until we start drinking” was their understanding of it. I barely knew what it meant myself, because my mom had never gotten any sober time outside of a rehab.

  Mom loved to emphasize the fact that he was a junkie, I suppose, because it made her feel better about her own drinking. Drugs were really bad, she implied, as she sat in her crummy West Village place, chain-smoking and drunk most of the time now. At this point she was forbidden to drink at any family events—no one would be around her if she was drinking—so she began transporting vodka in her big bottle of contact lens solution, which Dad squirted in his eye one day: “God damn it, Doris, what the hell is in here?” But drugs? “We don’t do drugs, sweet pea. We’re from Ladue.”

  Jed’s sobriety never even registered with my dad. My dad registered Jew even though Jed was about a quarter Jewish, Jewish-ish, and had never practiced Judaism. They both liked Jed a lot, everyone liked him. But where my mom saw junkie my dad saw Jew and after giving me a book of poetry by Ezra Pound became concerned, chronically concerned, that Jed might consider having Pound’s work around an insult.

  “I hope to hell I haven’t offended Jed with that book of Pound I gave you. Just love him up to World War Two, before he began the anti-Semitic radio addresses and all that. I’m not saying anything good about Pound after World War Two, but before the war, my God. Give it a try. Is the Pound going to be a problem for Jed?”

  Jed, like many people, would have no idea that the poet Ezra Pound was the Mel Gibson of his day, nor would Jed even identify as a Jew.

  “No, Dad. It’s fine.”

  Jed and I were on a Somerset Maugham kick, working our way through everything he wrote, his short stories (Rain), his novels, Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge. My father thought he was a total waste of time. “You might want to try Proust again, Jean-Joe. I know you struggled the first time around. Give it another try.” Or what? I always wanted to say. I liked Swann’s Way. I did. I just pooped out. Jed took me to Paris and I brought it with me, that’s how honorable my intentions were, that’s what an incredibly well-intentioned kind of reader I am. I was going to read it on my first trip to Europe as I ate madeleines and shit. I like Proust. I honestly do, I just got sidetracked. Distractée.

  Jed being sober and me not being sober was, at first, our act. He’s sober. She’s a big ol’ boozehound! They’re Jed and Jeanne, the yin-yang, sober-sloshed couple of the year!

  I QUIT IRONDALE, the theater company Jed and I were members of. Eliot, the artistic director had cast me as a baguette in the latest production, Danton’s Death, and I called him up at home one night, demanding to know what his problem was.

  “Jeanne, I’m sorry if you’re upset. I know crowd scenes aren’t the most challenging. I’m sure you’d like to do more but at this point I don’t feel you’re ready to speak onstage.”

  Not ready to speak onstage. I was twenty-five. Under Eliot’s tutelage I would be speaking onstage by what, thirty? Perhaps speaking and walking and holding my head up by forty-two? While I knew he was some kind of grant-writing, socially responsible woman-hater, I was also becoming aware that acting was a profession that would be filled with a-holes making all the decisions. Casting people. I had an agent but I wasn’t tearing it up in the world of auditions. When I would go in for auditions I never showed my ass or body because I’m . . . stupid? Years later I would read that when she was starting out, Francis McDormand, the coolest actress ever, would wear what she called “cutlets” on auditions. Things she stuck in her bra to make it appear she had brea
sts. I never booked anything. Maybe I was stupid or maybe I sucked. Maybe I really sucked.

  After I quit Irondale, I went to a theater school on Fortysecond Street, where I wrote a play. This play went over big. Randy, the director of the school, came up to me afterward and said, “Jeanne, this play was awful. I expected something great from you. What happened?”

  There seemed to be such an easy answer to the question Could I write? Could I write plays and stories and be some kind of nonacting actor or performer? Could I be the next Elaine May? Could I do weird things like the performance artists I studied in college but perhaps not be so unfunny? The answer was: why bother? You’ve got this awesome, funny guy you love, he’s rich, life is easy, you’re good friends. Do this. Don’t do what you don’t know. You might fail. You might be alone. You’ll definitely be broke. It seemed like an either/or proposition. I had no idea that people could be ambitious and happy, financially stable and creative, content and interesting, domestic and nonsuicidal.

  Around year three of our relationship, Jed’s sobriety began to wear on my nerves. And he began complaining about my drinking.

  “You become a different person when you drink,” he’d say, pointing out what to me had always seemed like one of the benefits of drinking. He had a name for this other person. Queen Ida. Queen Ida was born one weekend in Kerhonkson, New York, at a friend’s farm where I got looped on homemade moonshine that my friend’s brother, a self-made redneck bluegrass music producer had whipped up while basting the pig he was cooking in a hole in the ground. Before we left New York for the weekend I had taken off my big toenail, ripped it clear off my foot, while getting out of the shower at our apartment. The pain was the worst I had ever known. My toe was a red, throbbing nerve member that could only throb and be elevated. I could not wear a shoe, and to put pressure on it, as in walk, was excruciating. So we drove up to this pig roast and I hit the moonshine. And then I decided to jump in the lake in the dark, whereupon Jed yelled at me and pulled me out. “You drunken maniac!” I limped around, gathering up my clothes, and put a towel around my head and went to find the family graveyard I had heard wasn’t far away. Later that night the host, Brooke, gave me a cane of her grandfather’s, and a persona was born: Queen Ida. The cane, the limp, the Hollywood head wrap, the drunken belligerence. The nickname grew faster than the toenail. We talked about her in the third person.