Baby Steps (8 page)

Afterward, I was exhausted. Devon put his big arm around me and took me back to his mom's house and I fell asleep in his room. When I woke up, she made us lasagna and we sat and ate and talked about what a good decision it was, with sad faces and broken hearts.

I guess it's not surprising my friendship with Devon began to unravel after that. Lust tends to fade after the inevitable reality check that comes with its consequences, and his lust for me dwindled, until it was extinguished completely. I've often thought of Devon since then. Whenever I'm on television or in a movie, I wonder if he sees me and knows it's me. I wonder if he's wanted to reach out and then thought,
Why would she want to hear from me?
But when you go through something like that with someone, you never forget them. They become part of your soul. I've thought about him a million times, about our maelstrom of lust, friendship, love, and loss. I've thought of him almost as many times as I've thought about the baby I didn't have: the little soul whose presence became part of my soul, but not part of my life.

Years later, I told my mother how much I regretted having that abortion. She was surprised. She didn't see why I would regret what was so obviously the right decision for my life at the time. “You made a mistake, and this was the solution,” she said. But I still lament that whole sequence of events and can't help wondering,
Did something happen then to cause my infertility now? Did I make a horrible mistake? Did I damage myself? Did my stupid mistake ruin everything for me?
and of course,
Who would that baby have become?

How can I not ask those questions, again and again? It's a lust for absolution.

But I was young and I had a life to live, so I pushed the pain of the whole experience deep down into my heart. I went on to pursue my career as an actor, I was on a soap opera, and then I went to Los Angeles, where I met a very good-looking actor and encountered a new kind of lust.

He was brilliant and famous. I had a little-girl-style crush and felt completely sophomoric in my worship of him from afar. I was twenty-two
and new to Hollywood, and he had a girlfriend who was a model. Whenever I saw her, I thought of that line in the Alanis Morissette song “Ironic,” the one about meeting the man of your dreams, and then meeting his beautiful wife.

A few months after I met him, he and his girlfriend broke up, and he and I became friendly. I remember just how deep my obsession with him went. I spent hours, days, weeks, and all of my energy being there for him as he obsessed about his lost relationship. I was his pining, lovesick confidante and his shoulder to cry on. I was eternally and inappropriately supportive. He called me whenever he needed someone to talk to or to make him feel better. I consoled him because it was better than not being with him, but I should have known that I was the rebound girl.

My lust precluded my logic. I was flooded with emotions and those chemicals released in the heat of passion that delude you into believing you can be with this person forever and it will be perfect, even though everything logical in your brain tells you otherwise.

Emotionally, he was always somewhere else. He didn't really care about me, beyond needing a friend. Her things were still in the house, and his heart was still with her, so with me, he was like a ghost. For some reason, this made me want him even more. Why do we do that to ourselves? He became a symbol to me, of every man I ever wanted but was unable to have. I tortured myself by letting myself be with him for months. Then one day, I realized I had become like Devon, loving someone who would never love me back. When I realized that, my lust finally faded. It was over for me. For him, it had never started.

Over the next few years, I was in many other lusty relationships. I came to dread that feeling of obsession, whether it was in me or for me. Maybe because I was an only child and I tend to be internal and I like being alone, relationships scared me, and I ran away from a lot of them, although as soon as one ended, I was looking for another
one. I kept trying to fill a void in me that nobody seemed able to fill. It took me a long time to find that person who didn't push my panic button. That, too, is a story of lust.

I felt drawn to Ron from the beginning. He was hot. He was so hot, and my lust for him was so strong, that I questioned its validity. How could I have a relationship with a guy who made me feel like
this?
I didn't trust my lust. I thought I would do better and be more sensible with someone who was a friend first, who had a common background to mine, who was from a similar place, who had a similar kind of intellectual view of the world. That wasn't Ron. It freaked me out a little, how lusty we were together. This is how we met.

I had just decided to leave
Law & Order,
so I was doing a lot of talk shows about why I was leaving, what I would do next, things like that. Whenever someone starts or leaves a show, the media gets interested. A dear friend of mine named Lash Fary, who is everything his name suggests, was a customer of a well-known designer who owned a great men's clothing store called Lords. It was a very rock-and-roll, chic, luxurious, high-end kind of store, and although it was a men's store, my friend told me that the designer-owner of this store had some samples of women's clothing, and that I should go in and borrow something before my TV appearance on the Craig Kilborn show.

I went to the store with Lash and I'll never forget walking in the door. There beyond the counter was this dark, strikingly handsome man with black hair and brown eyes. He looked up at me and I could practically hear the soundtrack as every muscle in my body slowly and inexorably moved toward him, magnetized, in slow motion. He was disarming and quiet, which made him all the more mysterious, standing there in the dark corner of the dark store, smoking a cigarette. I wondered if that motorcycle parked out back was his. I remember thinking,
Who
is
this guy?

I had just gotten out of a relationship, so I was not in the mood or mode to meet anybody, but Lash told him who I was and he let me borrow a dress for my TV show appearance. I couldn't stop thinking about him. He was so sexy. Two days later, I went back to return the clothes. One of the shop specialties was leather, so before I fully realized what I was doing, I blurted out, “I think I want to buy some leather pants.”

Normally, the store's tailor would do the measuring, but he obviously sensed some chemistry between us, so he thrust the measuring tape into Ron's hands and quickly ushered himself out the door, leaving Ron standing there, awkwardly holding the measuring tape and staring at me. I stood there like a deer in the headlights, my blue eyes blinking, thinking,
Oh no, he's not really going to measure my inseam, is he?
I immediately became self-conscious of my thighs.
Can't he measure my brain first?
I thought.
I know I don't have any cellulite on my brain!

But this was happening. This dark mysterious man knelt down in front of me (why oh why had I worn a miniskirt!) and began measuring. I'm not sure he even knew how to use a measuring tape, but there he was on his hands and knees, measuring the inside of my thigh from ankle to crotch with a quiet shy confidence that made me both uncomfortable and thrilled. As we made conversation in this ridiculous situation, I could tell it was a conversation that would continue.

The next day, he called my friend and asked if I was single. Gee, I wonder why. I just met the guy and he'd had his hand up my skirt! But how could I resist? We went for drinks and admitted we were both recently out of relationships. We liked each other, but we were cautious. We would take our time. We had all the time in the world.

Ron and I had a mutual admiration and respect. We were balanced together, in a way I hadn't really experienced before. We had both passion and peace. I didn't feel off-kilter with Ron. I wasn't obsessed
and I wasn't annoyed, but I was strongly attracted. The more I knew him, the more I began to think of him in terms of a possible future father of my child. I could see myself as the mother of his child. It felt right.

You know how, during those first three months of a relationship when you're having a lot of sex, you are lying there postcoital and you make the mistake of saying some silly girly thing like “I want to be a mom someday,” and then you practically clap your hand over your mouth because you know you are never, ever supposed to say that to a man?

When I accidently said that, he replied, “I want to be a dad.” I couldn't believe what I'd heard.

I sat up. “What did you say?”

My baby lust was complex and full of wanting to make up for the abortion, to give Ron what I couldn't give Devon, to pass on to someone else what I'd learned from my mother, to enact all those someday-when-I'm-a-mom principles in my life, to bestow on someone the gifts I knew I had. One of those gifts was a great force of love that had to go somewhere. It was too much for a partner, too much for a friend, too much for a parent. It was mother love, and I knew I had to give it away to someone. Whatever pieces it was made of, I had it, and it seemed maybe Ron had it, too.

Not everyone has this particular lust. It's not a requirement, it's just a quality. When I hear a woman say, “I don't want to be a mom, I'm content doing what I'm doing,” I feel such admiration. That person has done some deep digging if they realize motherhood isn't for them. I feel the same way about people who say they don't want to get married, or they've realized they need to end a difficult relationship. They've seen beyond or above lust—at least the lust to do what everyone expects. Just remember what lust really is: a force meant to fill a void. It isn't a reason to do something. I would come to realize
that fulfilling my baby lust was not about fulfilling my own needs. It was ultimately about sacrifice, and as it turns out, sacrifice is the opposite of lust.

In the end, I have this to say about lust: If you think you have it, dig deep. If you are on this journey with me, you probably know baby lust inside and out, and you probably know other lusts, too. I urge you to learn the emotional landscape of your lust and not to follow it blindly. People can get hurt. This is no time to lie to yourself or give up on who you really are. If you have baby lust, ask yourself:

Are you willing to give up part of yourself?

Are you willing to relinquish your freedom?

Are you willing to sacrifice your heart on the altar of motherhood?

Are you willing to change everything about your life?

If you can push past lust's deceptive curtain to apprehend your true, genuine desire, and when you know that your deepest desire is to be a mother, despite the pain and worry and sacrifice and heartbreak you know that will entail, despite the fact that it might not happen the fairy-tale way you imagined, then that's what you have to do. The natural way, the high-tech way, adoption, or through some other means that unfolds in your own life—whatever it is, you can make it yours. When you identify the true source of your lust, you won't waste so much time buying into the illusion that you really want something else.

I love the word “lust.” It's a good word.
I'm lusty.
I like the sound of that.
I have a lust for life.
This is the upside. Yes, you have the overwhelming urge to fill a void, but lust also gives you energy and direction. It gives you passion and fire. It might mislead you. It might strap rose-colored glasses over your eyes, then rip them off at the most inopportune times. It might convince you that you want ice cream or sex or a particular lover or a baby, when what you really want is affection, connection, distinction, or the reassurance that you are living
your life the way you are supposed to live it according to the rest of the world.

The objects of my lust, once I achieved them, never solved my problems because the voids they were meant to fill will not be filled by anything external. The objects of my lust never made me into someone perfect, but that's okay. Perfect is boring. Lust is beautifully flawed, and given a choice, I'll always choose beautifully flawed over boring. That's why lust will always be with me. I've come to terms with that. Maybe someday I'll have no more attachments to this life. Maybe someday I'll be pure spirit. But until that day, I will live with my lusts and I will understand that in some ways, but not in every way, they define me.

You can't exactly trust lust, but you can't exactly live without it, either. It's not easy. It's not black and white. But it's part of being a human being on this planet, so you might as well learn to deal with it. And I believe lust can ultimately be useful, if you let it guide you without letting it hijack your life. Lust tempered with a healthy dose of common sense might even push you to achieve your deepest desires, and even if those desires don't “fix” you, they can certainly make your life richer.