When it was our turn, our nervous little group took our seats across from my brother, who bowed his head and seemed to excitedly await abuse as a monk awaits flagellation. There was an awkward silence, because no one could come even close to respectably matching the previous litanies. After a long interval, during which several of the audience members hawked and spat, I managed to timidly say, “Well I guess it was sort of irresponsible that you left your BMW where it could get stolen, and that you spent the insurance money on cocaine . . . um”—I looked around at the slack jaws of the audience, and, even though I knew I sounded like the worst spoiled princess on the planet, I forged ahead anyway—“and you
really
scared us when you dove into the indoor pool!” Mouths were dropping. “Yeah. And I can’t
believe
you slept with your girlfriend in front of the living room fireplace last summer, and that the butler walked in on you doing it.”
There might have been a round of very sarcastic applause but I couldn’t swear to it.
The following year Will was at the Johnson Institute, trading Hallmark cards and crying buckets and hugging big black football players and anorexic girls, and I did
not
go to family weekend; nor did I go to the one at Sierra Tucson. Or was that Hazelden? Maybe that was Edward—Lord knows he has a few treatment programs under his belt too. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Anyway, throughout his long, but ultimately successful, recovery process, Will found God—in the form of an Indian guru with a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation—and married his four-hundred-pound therapist.
Edward scraped through a series of high schools, at one point living in a foster situation in Boston and, when that didn’t work out, in Marblehead with my mother and the contractor (nightmare), and eventually coming to rest at the apartment on Fifth Avenue and living with our grandparents, where he was pretty much—no, make that absolutely—left to his own devices. Those included an unlocked wine cellar and a readily available supply of heavy-duty prescription drugs.
Edward had been smoking pot for years, but in New York he was turned on to coke, and then heroin. He claimed he didn’t have a habit because he snorted his drugs instead of mainlining them. His VanderBurden nose was perpetually scarlet and his hair was greasy and he hung out with people much older than he was. He was particularly close to a family that had a house near us in Maine. So close, in fact, that he was sleeping with the chatelaine, a wonderfully effusive and insouciant fifty-something-year-old free spirit who claimed to be a white witch. When I found out about it, it absolutely enraged me, and I felt guilty that I hadn’t been looking out for my very wayward baby brother. It was summer, and I was in Maine, so I marched next door to lambaste the cradle-robbing, pot-dealing sex maniac; but within five minutes, she got me to forget what I was there for. She had me drinking white wine with her (which her adorable husband brought us) and laughing cozily away in her hippie, crystal-strung bedroom that looked out past pine trees and flapping Tibetan prayer flags to the brilliantly blue ocean, and I swear if I had it in me to do it with women, I would have slept with her too. I was glad in a perverse way that my little brother had found someone to mother him, even if it wasn’t the generally accepted notion of mothering. In fact, I was jealous.
As for the real mother, she got fatter, and more into her Greek coins, and was asked to lecture at Harvard, which she never let us forget.
Me, I transferred from freezing cold Cornell, to Parsons School for Design in the city. Instead of drunken frat boys everywhere, boys in dresses were now the norm in my classrooms. I graduated, and started looking for a job. What I wanted more than anything was to work at
Mad
magazine. (
CREEPY
was long gone.) Flattered by my adulation for Alfred E. Neuman, the editor took pity and put me on the wait list, but it was like trying to get into the River Club; someone had to die first. I gave up and went to work at
National Lampoon,
though I considered it sloppy seconds. I was given the scarred desk belonging to the previous year’s art department grunt, who bequeathed me her gallon of Duco rubber cement.
My job basically consisted of gluing copy and photostats of photographs onto Bristol boards, hand-lettering the Foto Funnies and comics, and getting chased around the art director’s desk, which didn’t bother me in the slightest because sexual harassment was fun back then.
All of the articles in the once cool
Lampoon
dribbled with campy satire. Almost all of them were about sex—sex from a guy’s point of view, that is. The editor, then P. J. O’Rourke, would climb on top of his desk and yell, “I need big tits! Somebody find me some BIG TITS!” I couldn’t figure out if he needed them for personal use, or for business.
The most important thing I learned at
National Lampoon,
other than perfect block letter penmanship, was how to snort cocaine. I say important, because the eighties were only a sniff away. On Friday afternoons someone would go around the various departments collecting money in a hat. At five we’d assemble in the editor’s office to drink beer and snorkel up the thirty or so chalky white lines laid out on his desk. Then we’d go back to work, wonderfully invigorated. Sometimes we’d use all that energy to pose for stupid pictures. As in no, that’s not really Jon Voight on page fifty-six of the October 1978 issue; it’s me.
It was fun for a while, but fun for minimum wage gets old fast, and besides, I don’t particularly enjoy drugs.
It figures I’d end up working in the porn industry.
At that time it didn’t matter where you got your design experience
—Soldier of Fortune, Crochet!
magazine,
News of the World
—only that you got it. A friend of mine was working at a downtown head-shop publication called the
Daily Dope,
and they needed a design assistant. I gratefully left the boy’s club of soft porn and anatomical jokes, only to discover more of the same at my new job. Except now all the naked, large-breasted women were having real sex, often with aliens.
I’d been working there for about a month when it came to my attention that the publisher of
Daily Dope
needed an art director for a new magazine, one that would be devoted to the review of adult films being put out in the nascent format of video. I wanted to be an art director. Porn didn’t bother me; hey, I’d seen sex before. I’d been around it pretty much all my life, in fact. As an observer, I was an expert—which made me perfect for the job.
Within three months I was fired for being too tasteful. Luckily, I had come into some of my trust fund, enough to buy a loft in Soho, and a lot of Stephen Sprouse and Azzedine Alaïa clothing, and enough to become a bona fide downtown painter. More importantly, I got myself a dog, an English bull terrier I named Pearl, and in her I found the true meaning of family.
And as for my grandparents, they continued to erode, and so did Burdenland.
In spite of its perfect address and immense square footage, the Fifth Avenue apartment now appeared dingy. In the forty years since they had bought it, the place had remained virtually unchanged from its original Philip Johnson reformation. Just about every piece of furniture in each of the twenty-one rooms remained in the exact spot where it had been photographed by
Vogue
during the fifties.
In Maine the sea still wore diamonds in the morning sunlight, and there was the childhood-familiar crush of the raked bluestone gravel under your feet when you walked the long path up to the dock. The house still smelled of roses and pine and woodsmoke and mold, but now you could catch a whiff of dirty adult diapers. Handrails had been installed at strategic points, and the yellow Saarinen womb chair had been replaced with a dung-colored Barcalounger. There were wheelchair ramps and potty chairs and the television was always on. I knew things were wrapping up when I noticed, on a routine snoop through the bomb shelter, that nobody was bothering to restock the Campbell’s. (Unable to keep up with the demand, Miss Pou had long since ceased to replenish the morphine, Seconal, and opium capsules in the medical kit.)
The estate in Mount Kisco saw a succession of scurrilous gardeners and live-in Portuguese couples who named their children after things they saw on television. The liberty my grandfather had exulted in when cocooned in his Tippler’s Bathroom eventually paled. Neither he nor his lifelong mixed doubles partner could even make it to the second floor, let alone down to the indoor or outdoor tennis courts. They still made the winter pilgrimage to Hobe Sound, and the summer one to Maine, but after a while my grandparents stopped going out to Mount Kisco, because it was just too much effort—for everyone.
It was hard not to take advantage of my grandparents. I started having weekend parties out in Mount Kisco, playing house big-time and cooking up huge meals with all the tomatoes and squash, and carrots and beans and peas, and herbs, and strawberries and beautiful flowers from the garden, because honestly, no one else was using them. My grandparents didn’t entertain anymore, they ate next to nothing, and the vast gardens were planted each spring as if they were still supplying their hospitality of the past. Everyone ran naked around the indoor pool, and swung like monkeys on the ropes in the Tippler’s Bathroom, and downed cases of Petrus and Cheval Blanc and Margaux and Yquem like they were bottled water. The staff of yesteryear would have tanned my hide, but no one was left at the helm. Chef Michel was long gone, and in his place was an Irish cook named Nora. Her assistant was a Honduran woman who had been promoted to the position from laundress. The chauffeur was an Irish boozer, and the gardeners were all American. Juan was hanging on by the barest of threads, and a sense of Basque loyalty. Captain Closson had been injured while working on the boat in dry dock and was consequently let go. For a while, Will and I would drive over to the other side of the island and take him out to breakfast, but he spoke of his enforced retirement with such bitterness, we were always relieved when we left him. Finally, on a summer afternoon, he went into the workshop behind his little house in Southwest Harbor, took down the shotgun he used to hunt bears on the mainland in winter, and killed himself.
That same year, Ann Rose didn’t show up for my grandparents’ forty-something annual New Year’s Day party, where her presence was even more acutely required, due to the faltering condition of the host and hostess. (The regulars may have been dropping like flies, but that show would go on until the final exit.) When Miss Pou failed to rouse Ann Rose on the telephone, she went over to her apartment. She found Ann Rose dead on her sofa, drowned in an ocean of her own regurgitated blood.
And as for the poodles, one dried up completely and was borne off to heaven on an updraft, and the other fell into the pool and was drowned.
No one wanted to take responsibility. My grandparents’ two remaining sons were non compos mentis: Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham was only allowed to visit the apartment once a week, when he came to take tea with his mother on Wednesday afternoons; Uncle Ordway was finding it impossible to be even quasi-normal. When he wasn’t enwombed in his honorary sheriff ciborium watching porn, or
The Blue Lagoon
(he was still fixated on Brooke Shields), he lay in bed surrounded by newspapers and periodicals, reading and underlining and clipping articles written about the ills of inherited wealth and the sorrows of the incapacitated children of the rich, which he had his secretary send to everyone.
My brothers were also helpless: Will was focusing on himself, floating along the path of sober, vegan spirituality up in Maine, examining his navel through multiple courses and work-shops to see where things went wrong. Poor Edward was trying to be the son his grandfather wanted him to be, wearing Huntsman suits and feigning an interest in the world of finance, but he was still just a teenager. Plus he was so doped up and wasted all the time, he was incapable of being anything to anybody. I’m surprised he still has all the parts of his body.
I wasn’t any more accommodating; when they were in the city, I’d see my grandparents maybe a couple of times a month, and I always spent part of the summer with them up in Maine, but selfishly I had zero interest in becoming involved with the minutiae of their deteriorating lives. I was way too busy. It was the 1980s, and I was a Soho party girl having a blast in New York. As much as I loved my grandparents, I consciously adopted my grandmother’s Christian Science frame of mind toward the situation.
Miss Pou was up to her eyeballs. My grandfather was getting as crazy as a coot, and he kept firing everyone, including Miss Pou when she wouldn’t do things like book the Chinese polo club to fly over for a match on the (nonexistent) polo field in Mount Kisco, and Miss Pou kept rehiring everyone, with raises in salary and concessions all over the place.
It was becoming the reign of the nurses. You’d walk into the living room at night and they’d be lounging there, thumbing through magazines and reading the mail. My grandmother, once so vital and idiosyncratic, was now allowing her functions to be monitored alongside those of her genuinely ailing husband. Everything was meticulously recorded: time and body temperature, time and blood pressure, intake of fluids (legitimate ones), output of urine, intake of solids, number of poops. With nobody to deny them, the nurses soon took to making wardrobe decisions, and my grandparents were presented in clothing so radically different from their usual style that if it had been somebody else’s relations, it would have been hilarious. Like tracksuits—navy with white piping for him and pink for her. The only pink I’d ever seen my grandmother wear, besides her Playtex girdle, was her quilted velvet bed jacket. The Mainbocher luncheon suits, the Dior dresses, the chic Balenciaga jackets with three-quarter sleeves, the cashmere appliquéd sweaters from Belgium, the Givenchy evening gowns were all shoved to the back of the closet. The nurses took my grandmother shopping at Macy’s and gave her a makeover in pale, suburban old lady trouser suits, lace-trimmed polyester dresses in pastel colors, and Reebok sneakers, all of which my grandmother was too puzzled by to refuse. The flag over Revlon’s headquarters flew at half-mast when the stockpiled Cherries in the Snow and Love That Red were replaced with Maybelline peach-toned lipstick.