Out Came the Sun

by Mariel Hemingway

  And yet, the kiss was more than just a kiss. Lesbian characters weren’t prominent on network television at that point, and certainly lesbian affection wasn’t. Two stations in small markets refused to carry the episode. Editorials were written about our national resistance to same-sex love, or about the liberal obsession with cramming alternative lifestyles down the throat of the audience.

  In the years since, the lesbian kiss has become a staple of television shows, especially during sweeps. But at the time it was unprecedented, and powerful. It followed me around for years. In fact, over the course of my career, it’s probably become the second-most-common point of contact for fans, after Manhattan.

  * * *

  “AKAPHANA BINA, RAPALA CARANAMA TA.” The woman was speaking rapidly, not making much sense. Her eyes were bright. She looked like she was in the grip of some kind of spiritual ecstasy.

  “Kids,” I said to Dree and Langley, “this is your Aunt Margaux.”

  We were in Idaho, at home, and Margaux was visiting. We hadn’t seen or heard much of each other for a few years: maybe during Christmas in Idaho or the occasional phone call. She was at a crossroads in her career, in the sense that she didn’t have much of a career left. Her modeling had tapered off: she had gotten older (though she was only forty), she had gained some weight (though she had lost it), and she had run into problems with alcohol and drugs (though she had gone to rehab). She had also become heavily invested in healing and spiritualism. She learned to be a hypnotist. She studied herbal medicine. At one point, she took an extended trip to India and came back speaking in tongues. When she passed through Sun Valley, she was still doing it. Angela, my father’s second wife, had a violently negative reaction to it: it embarrassed her, and she may have thought Margaux had made some kind of bargain with the devil. Dree and Langley loved it, or at least admired it as a kind of bravery. They laughed delightedly.

  Margaux wasn’t an easy aunt. She loved my kids, but she was awkward around them. It was almost like she was acting the role, which meant that her speech and her gestures were wooden and stilted the way they were when she did line readings. The fact that it was a family role made it even more uncomfortable for her. And there was also a second issue, which was that Margaux’s increasing immersion in New Age and self-help practices irritated me. It hit too close to home. It sometimes seemed almost like it was a parody of my own life. Over the years, I had gotten more deeply involved in spiritual and self-empowerment programs. I got involved in something called Self-Realization Fellowship, which was founded on healthy tenets of meditation and yogic principles, mindfulness and kindness to one another. The Fellowship was wonderful—affirming, free of manipulation—but in the wake of that, other kinds of people started to contact me: palmists, energy manipulators, past-life psychics, crystal manipulators. I went to all of them, did my best to feel whatever I was told to feel, concealed many of my visits from Stephen, wondered if I was in fact getting better or just pouring money down a hole. Spending time with Margaux made me think too much about the latter possibility.

  Then, one day, a woman I respected greatly told me about a medium in St. Louis. “She’s a conduit to the world beyond,” she said. “And through that she makes sense of this world.” I had been to ordinary psychics, not always completely seriously, and with mixed results—one told me that I would live a very long life, another told me that I would have three children, two daughters and a son—but the St. Louis medium was billed as something special. She had the power, I was told, to bring your whole life into focus. I made an appointment to go see her.

  The trip, on short notice, was immensely expensive, and I made up an excuse for Stephen: I think I told him I was scouting a role or meeting with the producers. Whatever it was, I made it sound like work, both necessary for household finances and boring for him to think about. And then I went off the grid: I flew to St. Louis and drove to the woman’s house, following a map the whole way. This was going to be my destiny, I told myself, a soul-clarifying moment: I was going to meet someone who would help me onto the right path and then help keep me there.

  I found the address, which was an unassuming ranch-style home in a suburban neighborhood. Perfect, I thought. This is exactly the kind of place where life-changing experiences happen: the places where you would least expect them. I pictured a pleasantly soft woman sitting behind a tidy kitchen table, holding my hand and seeing into the center of my soul. I parked the car on the street, walked up the path, and knocked on the door. There was movement inside.

  And then the door opened, and all of my hope collapsed at once. The woman who greeted me was grossly overweight, eating even as she stood in the doorway. Her house was chaotic—I could see that from where I stood—and she didn’t seem to understand why I had come. Even when we were set up for our reading, at the kitchen table, which was the furthest thing from tidy, she kept shifting in her chair, to the point where I was worried it might break, and saying things that were radically disconnected from the things she had said a minute before, but just as pedestrian and worthless. “There will be a time of crisis,” she said. “You are going to need more assistance.” All the while she looked at me with a mix of appetite and contempt; she couldn’t conceal either emotion. It was a shakedown, pure and simple, routed through some jerry-rigged notion of the supernatural. I went to sleep there with one eye open, worried that something crazy would happen: robbery, kidnapping, a knife at my throat. And nobody knew where I was. I left the next day and slouched back into my home like I had after the Mellencamp incident: uneasy, guilty, even more insecure than before.

  * * *

  “HERE,” WOODY ALLEN SAID. “I have something for you.”

  I wasn’t dreaming. Woody and I were in an office in New York City, and he was offering me a part in a movie.

  I had followed Woody’s career for years. I was like any other fan. Except for one thing: in every movie of his I saw, there were roles I coveted. I loved the rhythm of the dialogue, the self-deprecation, the flashes of surreal wit. I asked for—you might even say demanded—a meeting with him.

  It had been years since I’d seen him. It’s possible that we hadn’t had a real conversation since I drove him to the airport in Idaho almost twenty years earlier. When I came into the room, he was sitting down, looking the way he had always looked, maybe a little older, maybe a little more frail. But he was nice to me. He was more than nice. We still had a friendly spark after all those years. He described the movie he was writing, Deconstructing Harry: it was about an aging writer who has to confront various figures from his past—old lovers, old rivals. It sounded perfect for me. Wasn’t I part of his past? He laughed. “Right,” he said. “There’s a part for you.”

  I went home and started fantasizing about the reunion. Deconstructing Harry, starring Mariel Hemingway? Deconstructing Harry, with a special appearance by Mariel Hemingway? I remembered going to the Oscars in 1980, watching Meryl Streep win. Every time the phone rang, I jumped. Was it Woody with the offer?

  When they finally got back to me, I was hugely disappointed. The part that Woody had for me was a few lines in one scene. I wondered whether he had some aversion to me because he felt strange about Manhattan, about what it had said about him: it was, after all, a film that centered on his character’s relationship with a young girl. When he’s talked about the movie, he has always been a little dismissive. He’d tell interviewers that it wasn’t his favorite. That upset me. My whole life shifted because of it, and he saw it as just another project? Still, I found a way to play it. I imagined that Beth, the character, was the mother of Tracy from Manhattan.

  I was in New York a long time, maybe three weeks, even though I was only filming that one scene. I watched the way he worked with other actors. His reputation now, of course, is that he rarely says anything to his actors, that he just wants them to act what’s on the page. But I remembered something different. When we did Manhattan, he was completely engaged. We talked extensively about my character and what I
was discovering about her. It wasn’t just me. He was the same way with the other actors. By Deconstructing Harry, he had lost most of his confidantes and defaulted to another version of himself—a wonderful director who was a better writer and knew it.

  The movie earned rave reviews for Judy Davis. In my mind, I was a complete failure. I had dreamed that Woody would restart my career, that he would relaunch me in my thirties just as he had launched me in my teens, but instead the experience just seemed to prove that I was destined to be out on the margins of the film world.

  17

  THE SILENCE IN THE LINE

  THE PHONE WENT TO BUSY SIGNAL and dial tone in my hand. “Hello,” I said, but there was no one there any longer.

  I was back in Ketchum, visiting my father and Angela for both homecoming and recharging. I did all the Idaho things I could: hiked, cooked, sat and listened to nature. The girls and I went out onto the north fork of the Wood River with friends and stepped into the cold water. The cold took my breath away, and afterward I stood on a large boulder and watched the wind vibrate the cottonwoods, mimicking the sound of rain.

  At my father’s house, we knocked on the door, and we heard him call from inside. I imagined the room before I went in: yellow patterned chintz curtains, leopard-printed settee with gold legs. What I couldn’t have imagined was my father. As long as I had known him, he had worn fishing shirts and khakis. Now, he was in a smoking jacket, green golf pants, and monogrammed velvet slippers. “Sit, sit,” he said. The gaudily dressed grandfather who had once been my fisherman father beamed. The kids all crowded around him, and soon enough he had them transfixed with a story about the war, and how he had parachuted into Normandy to do OSS work but had gotten sidetracked by fly-fishing instead. It was a good story, but a story I had heard. I went to help Angela in the kitchen.

  As I went into the kitchen, the phone was ringing. “I’ll get it,” I said.

  There was a female voice I didn’t recognize on the other end, speaking softly and deliberately. She asked if I was Mrs. Jack Hemingway, and I explained that no, I was Jack’s daughter, and I would be happy to put my father or his wife on the telephone. The voice spoke to me instead. “Your sister has just been found dead,” the woman said.

  “Muffet?” I asked. I flashed back to when she was running through downtown Ketchum wearing only a scarf.

  “No,” she said. “Margaux.”

  “Are you sure it’s not Muffet?” I asked again. “Joan?”

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  They were calling from California, from the L.A.P.D. I listened numbly. Margaux had been found dead at home, in bed. She had a back problem, so her legs were propped up, and there was a cushion under her knees. There were candles going. Their first guess of cause of death was accidental overdose: she was taking Klonopin for her alcohol-induced epilepsy, and she had taken too many, maybe in combination with various herbal remedies whose potency people didn’t exactly know. “I’m sorry,” the woman said.

  I didn’t hang up the receiver. There wasn’t just silence on the line. There was silence in the line. The phone went to dial tone and busy signal in my hand. I had spoken to Margaux a week before. She sounded almost normal. We laughed about old stories and about ourselves. She was trying harder to listen to me, to ask questions rather than performing. I was trying to be compassionate, to think about her challenges rather than judging them. Maybe we’ll get through our difficulties, I thought. I knew we would never be best friends, but it had started to seem like our relationship would keep getting better, that we could build on it through our thirties and forties and beyond. That had seemed like a comforting idea, and then suddenly it was gone. I didn’t hang up the receiver. There was silence in my hand.

  My father was in the kitchen. Angela had brought him in and turned the TV to CNN. Margaux’s picture came on the screen, with two dates separated by a dash: the year of her birth and the present year. He stood close to the set and then stood farther back and leaned against the counter. He looked small in his smoking jacket. I looked at him and he looked back at me, though he couldn’t meet my eye. I knew how he felt. The whole situation seemed surreal. There were many times when it seemed like Margaux was at the end of her rope, or when she made us feel like we were at the end of ours, but now she had gone beyond the end, and there was no coming back. All the air went out of me and then out of the room, and I saw her distantly, objectively: a woman in a bed, no longer living, candles burning around her.

  Stephen and I flew to California and visited the coroner’s office. We did everything that my father couldn’t handle doing: identified the body, filled out paperwork. At first, the coroner judged the death as an accidental overdose. Margaux was detoxing from alcohol and taking anti-seizure medication, and mixing it with various herbs.

  As we were leaving, an assistant coroner tapped a spot on the paper where cause of death was listed. “It’s still under investigation,” he said.

  “Investigation?” I said. “Why?”

  “We have to look into the possibility of suicide.”

  I flinched. The thought had crossed my mind, but not in any conscious way.

  “Please call us,” I said. “Call when you find anything out at all. We need to know before you release it to the press.” A few days later, with no call, they released a finding of suicide. A friend called because she had seen it in the newspaper.

  I was back in Idaho by then, and the phone stayed in my hand the way it had when I heard about her death. I was overwhelmed, so I did what I always did. I went for a walk. With Margaux dead, maybe by her own hand, I took the longest hike I could. I felt completely numb. It was a form of shock—you know you’ve been shot, and you’re intellectually aware of the pain, but your mind hasn’t connected all of your body’s dots. I had been that way with my mother, and I demanded something different of myself with Margaux — because I was older, because I should have known better—but I couldn’t deliver. I sat on a rock and looked at the sky, and then I looked at the ground.

  When emotions came, they weren’t exactly feelings of grief. I had thoughts of panic to start with. Oh shit, I thought. She’s gone. Mom’s gone. Is it my turn now? In the wake of that, I felt hugely guilty. I felt bad that I hadn’t reached out more. Why wasn’t I more perceptive? Why wasn’t I kinder? We had talked a week before, but we should have talked a day before, and maybe that would have saved her. She had never directly addressed her depression, though I knew that she was often in a frustrated frame of mind. But who could have possibly known where it would lead? She probably didn’t even know.

  I stood, sat down, stood again. I tried to recover a good memory of Margaux, but everything I remembered was complicated. She was never easy, not when we were older, not when we were kids. When she came through the door, everyone gasped a little. We all braced ourselves for her, and she sensed that, and it just emboldened her. Margaux was locked and loaded all the time.

  In the weeks following her death, though, the picture filled in a little bit, and what I learned surprised me. In talking to her friends, to people who had worked with her, I heard about a lighter, sweeter person, someone who was generous and kind and not at all maddening. When she came through the door, they were happy to see her. It was the opposite of my mother. With her, I desperately wanted the outside world to look beyond her bitterness and negativity and see the kind person beneath the surface, the woman who sat with me and laughed at the television, the woman who sacrificed herself for her family. With Margaux, the outside world apparently saw nothing but that kind person. That made me angry—how come nobody else suffered with her the way that we did?—and then guilty all over again. And then it just made me sad.

  The tragedy of Margaux’s death was that it offered the strongest proof yet that my family prevented people from becoming who they actually were. As a child, Margaux was constantly judged for not living up to the standard of elegance and refinement that Muffet set, covertly by my father and overtly by my mother. I was scar
ed of her. And so she became that monster because it was the only way for her to remain part of the family she loved. Inhabiting that role was a survival strategy. But what happens when people don’t survive? I mourned my sister not because she was a fully formed person who was lost to the world, but because she was anything but that. She didn’t get the chance to finish.

  My father never accepted the idea that her death was a suicide. He didn’t talk about it much, but when he did, he talked about it as an accident. And there were still plenty of loose ends, not just for him but for all of us. The absence of a note, for example. Mar-gaux was bigger than life. When she was in a good mood, she was self-absorbed and funny. When she was in a bad mood, she was self-absorbed and brooding. But she was all about effect. Her whole life was about getting attention. A Margaux without a dramatic exit made no sense. And yet, whether or not it made sense didn’t matter. It had happened. She was gone.

  * * *

  “YOU’RE TOO CLOSE TO THE EDGE,” I said. I was talking to a drinking glass on the counter. I reached over and tipped it. It felt to the ground and shattered. “Good,” I said. “Good riddance.” Then I went for the vacuum cleaner.

  For the first time in my life, I was openly angry. The fights between me and Stephen would start the same way they always had, with a great dinner party and then a period of silence. Any time before, I would have just gone upstairs and gotten into bed, trapped between the fear that things were falling apart and the fear that they weren’t.

  But after Margaux died, I wasn’t willing to let the silence settle over us. “Why are you being so quiet?” I’d demand. “What the hell is the matter with you?” Or: “I’m so sick of your whining about your business. If you want to do something, then do it.” Or: “Maybe our lives would be better if you weren’t so goddamned focused on me. I don’t need you to call me every fucking hour.” Sometimes, Stephen fought back. More often, he absorbed my anger, got colder and quieter, and then left the house to run errands or take a long drive. That was a form of jujitsu, and it meant that I was left alone again. In the house by myself, still fuming, I would do two things: break things and clean fiendishly. I made sure to break only certain things, of course: I was obsessive-compulsive even in rage.