After Perfect (28 page)

“He says you don't have to be fluent in Greek,” I rambled. “He told me over the phone; he's been in touch with a lawyer over there. I'll be able to travel anywhere I want—all over Europe—buy property someday, if I want to. He's going to take us all on a family vacation there to apply in person at the US Consulate in Greece because it's easier and faster than applying here in America. It's so exciting, and I can invite you and the boys someday! Can you imagine all of us in our bathing suits and sun hats riding bikes along the Mediterranean Sea?!”

I looked like a strung-out Margot Tenenbaum, in a vintage fur coat I found at a thrift store for $30 and with my Birkin bag as we strolled beneath naked trees down the edge of McCarren Park across from old button and glove factories, now converted into chic, unaffordable apartments. Atticus, in his green skinny jeans and black director glasses, kept walking, ignoring me. Then he stopped in front of a park bench.

“Right here,” he said. Atticus sat down and pulled out a joint.

“Atticus,” I whispered, “not in public!” Drug-induced paranoia awakened my senses to all that was around me: coffee shops, vegan restaurants, hipsters riding their bikes in bow ties and skinny jeans.

“Oh,
okay
,” he replied with scathing sarcasm. “You'd rather have dual citizenship in Greece like a
criminal
, but you won't smoke a joint on the street in
Brooklyn
?”

Atticus jumped up from the bench. His usual comedic facial expressions melted into serious concern and annoyance. “Christina.” He never called me that. He put his hands on my shoulders, the move indicating I needed some sobering up, and swept his hair to the side.

“You are
not
signing that dual citizen contract, or whatever you're claiming it is,” he said adamantly.

“Why?”

“You have to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Thinking that this is normal and okay.”

Atticus was rarely ever serious, so this was serious.

“Normal? You want to smoke an
illegal
joint on the street!”

“Your dad took credit cards out in your name. He
used
you!”

“Why can't you just be happy for me?” My adrenaline was rising, my heart about to implode. “He's back and taking care of it.”

Atticus threw his hands up in the air and shot back, “He is a
criminal
, Christina!
Wake. Up.
He was in
prison
!”

This wasn't some revelation Atticus was having in the moment. I knew the words had been boiling up inside of him for a long time, ever since I'd told him. But I wasn't ready to hear them.

“You don't even know my dad!” I shouted back. “I was lucky to have a dad like him; he gave me everything! I had a fairy-tale childhood. It wasn't his fault; you don't even know the whole story!” I huffed in utter defiance. I didn't realize it, but I was speaking about my father as though he were dead.

“He loves me,” I said.

“Well, your definition of love is fucked. Look at that ridiculous purse,” Atticus said with disgust.

I held back my tears over all the debt I'd managed to forget about, knowing it was still lingering in the databases of banks and credit agencies. “This purse was a gift!” I didn't have any words left as I paced the sidewalk, feeling attacked for no reason until the truth spewed from Atticus's mouth like daggers: “You are in so much denial, Christina.”

Speechless before my explosive rage rolled through me, I screamed,
“Fuck you!”
at the top of my lungs, flinging the Birkin bag in the air. Atticus turned around and started walking back to the L train, dismissing my outburst with a calm sense of power, his boots steady on the sidewalk.

I panicked. “Where are you going?”

Atticus shook his head down at the sidewalk and kept walking. “I can't talk to you right now.”

“Where are you going?”
I stood there, panting in the cold air next to the open park, my heart palpitating, my warm breath like smoke. I didn't know where I was or where to go as I watched New Yorkers whisk by me with determined direction. I felt dizzy, a panic attack coming. I hadn't eaten anything in almost two days. I flinched as more human beings raced by me while I shuffled in circles, unsure of what to do, whom to call, or whom to trust.

T
hat summer, I met Liam, tall, dark, handsome, at a party in the Hollywood Hills. I told him I was a writer. I had started writing late at night to sort out my thoughts, searching for the things I couldn't see. Though I wasn't a writer in any professional sense of the word, which was how I had implied it, I said it because I wanted to appear smarter than I felt I was and because every time I said “actress,” I felt like a failure. Only later did I tell him I used to be an actress, and that's when he asked me if I wanted to audition to star in a horror film he was producing about biker gangs and exorcism. He said I would be perfect.

“She's an innocent college graduate who survives at the end, and you don't have to take your clothes off.” I gave him my number. I didn't believe he was serious. But a few days after the party, he called, insisting that he take me out to dinner and that I audition for the part.

Soon I was coming home to find care packages on my front doorstep. Books like
The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader
, with little notes tucked inside: “Christina, this is my version of a dozen roses. Love, Liam.” Or
Six Feet Under: The Official Companion
, with another note: “Christina, I'm sure you're thinking, this guy's romantic.”

Eight weeks later, we were filming in a little town outside of San Francisco called Petaluma. I quit my job at the nightclub to make $100 a day on an ultra-low-budget horror film. And before I left, I had been so excited about my father's release from prison that I even changed my name back from Christina Grace to Christina Prousalis—
to honor him.
The opening credits of the film would read “Introducing Christina Prousalis.” As if the movie star had arrived!

Most days I was tied to a chair, bound in Saran Wrap, being tormented by rockabilly aliens with pompadours and sideburns, screaming lines like “You're a monster!” while the stunt coordinator kept trying to look up my skirt. I should have caught on when he kept using me to demonstrate certain moves for other cast members. “Christina, come here.” He'd pick me up and throw me down on the mattress. “Good girl, Christina.”

I sent out mass emails to family and friends letting everyone know what a fabulous time I was having; how much I was learning about my “craft.”

But my week of fantasy stardom fell into a dark reality when I awoke one morning to a phone call from a high school friend of mine. One of our best friends, Stone, and his brother, Holt, had been killed in a car accident the previous night somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley. A summer thunderstorm hit, it was pouring rain, and a tractor-trailer couldn't stop, slamming into their car and pushing them underneath the truck in front of them. An explosion. Everyone went up in flames. I read later that they had to mill and repave the road the next day.

I sobbed, rocking back and forth on my bed with the phone pressed to my ear in my bleak motel room, thinking about our childhoods together, thinking about his parents. It was an unfathomable loss for the entire Washington, DC, community. Stone and his brother, they were doing something of substance with their lives. They were going to change the world. They were heading back to DC from Texas to attend a book party for historian Douglas Brinkley's new biography,
The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
. Stone had been his research assistant while at Rice University.

And here was I, sitting in a makeup chair later that morning, watching the makeup artist splatter fake blood across my face, my arms, my legs, surrounded by fake cars, fake knives, fake aliens, fake people. This violent depiction we call entertainment—yes, it was so
entertaining
. What was I doing here? Playing make-believe. Was this what I wanted? Was this the “dream”? Drained and swollen eyed, the thought of such a violent way to die permeated a deafening silence in me. The AD called my name to set, my body sick with violent visions and grief as she led me out into the empty field where for the final shot, we had to pretend that life as we knew it was ending.

After we wrapped, I hopped out of the white van. It was dark outside, and I walked toward the motel room of one of the supporting actors, who I knew had drugs. He handed me a prerolled joint, “Are you going to be okay?” he asked, after I told him what had happened.

“Fine,” I replied, the fake blood dry and cracking and flaking off my skin.

Suspended from the universe, I don't remember the walk back to my room before I opened the door, sparked the joint, and inhaled as much as I could to obliterate my feelings, sliding to the floor with my back against the door. Stone had been my first crush; the first person to say hi to me when I was new in the seventh grade and didn't have any friends yet. I sat behind him in Ms. Bowen's history class. I forced him to listen to Mariah Carey's hit single “Emotions” in the tutorial room when we were supposed to be doing our history homework. Instead, we danced on the tables while lip-syncing the lyrics. I taught him how to freak dance in his driveway. We could talk for hours over the phone. Why couldn't I have told Stone the truth when he'd messaged me on Facebook and asked how I was doing?

I exhaled as the smoke billowed toward the blue Birkin bag sitting on the motel desk. Where had all of my friendships gone? I had pushed everyone away. Hiding in shame, the depth of my pain, reaching for the sky, my heart numb and high.

That bag: it looked so fucking stupid.

I
held on to the red string, wobbling inside the bar the next night, my entire body aching, but I was drunk enough to the point where I stopped feeling the pain. I walked up to Liam and the cast, who were taking shots of whiskey. I had ripped the red string off the end of a balloon outside on the back patio and watched as it soared up into the sky before meeting its fatal pop. I grabbed Liam's wrist and began wrapping the red string around it. Then I took my wrist and tied the other end of the string around it. I wanted him attached to me, so close that we could breathe only each other's air.

We stumbled up to my motel room, attached at the wrists, the string nearly cutting off our circulation, trying to take off our shirts every which way, leaving them loose and hanging in the middle of the string, our pants and underwear strewn about the floor. I shoved him onto the bed as we thrust forward together. “You can never leave me,” I said, abandoned, scared, closer to the truth. I slammed our wrists against the headboard. Liam grabbed the back of my head, so it bobbled back, meeting my unconscious, masochistic, spellbinding need to feel everything and nothing, enraptured in self-denial.

“I'm not going to abandon you,” Liam whispered as we fucked each other for the first time so I could bind myself to him with nothing but misplaced gratification of trauma and pain.

When the film ended, Liam took me wine tasting in Sonoma Valley. He showered me with lavish dinners and lied to the concierge of a quaint inn in Glen Ellen so that we could stay in the honeymoon suite. I knew it wasn't right. I knew deep down that I should have never gotten myself into that relationship, that my motives were all screwed up and selfish and wrapped up in pain, and maybe his were too. It was at dinner one night that I told Liam about my father. He listened intently and then confided that he had taken his father to court over money. After Liam was accepted to Brown University, the only school he ever wanted to go to, his dream was shattered when a few months before first semester, the money in his account was gone. His father, a prominent brain surgeon, blew through the money on drugs and, shortly afterward, tried to kill himself. As a result, Liam couldn't afford to enroll. “I sued my father,” he said, his resentment palpable. “That bastard stole my college tuition. I wasn't going to let him get away with it.” He was communicating the truth to me through his own story. But it was like listening with a thin, invisible blanket over my brain, the denial preventing the dots from connecting.

A few days into our trip, Liam wanted to take me canoeing down the Russian River to clear my head.

We pulled up to the wooden house along the dirt road to pick up our canoe paddles and life vests when my father called me. “My client sent a bad check, Bambina. It'll be just a few more weeks before I can send you money.”

The next day was August 1. I'd have to tell my roommates I couldn't pay rent. It was the first time that I knew I wouldn't be able to pay my share. I sat paralyzed, staring at my cell phone. It was a mistake to make the film with no job waiting for me back in Los Angeles. I couldn't see beyond the fantasy of “stardom,” of making my father proud, of wanting to prove to everyone “I've made it.” And after the loss of Stone, and all that it represented—the loss of friendships and a life that was no longer mine—none of it mattered, and I ran to what I thought was safety when I knew that it wasn't the truth.

“Okay, Dad. Thanks for letting me know.”

It suddenly occurred to me that every time I spoke to my father over the phone, each time I tried to ask him a question about something, I hung up feeling more confused than when I had initially called trying to sort things out or understand exactly what was going on with him and his “work.” I was perpetually lost in a circular loop of ambiguity, making me feel unable to understand anything.

Liam turned off the car and turned to face me.

“Everything okay?” he asked, tapping the brim of his yellow LA Lakers cap so he could see me.

Liam had been skeptical all along, far from fooled by the man my father was. Here was his chance to serve me with the truth, and because of my recent fight with Atticus, a small window had already been cracked.