Loose Diamonds (5 page)

The first sense I had that something was amiss was Felix. I pulled up one evening and parked my car. Felix was standing next to the Mercedes, smoking a cigarette and drinking from a silver flask. Even from a distance, he smelled like bourbon. He’d usually open the car door for you and engage in some pleasantry, often as pedantic as, “How are you this evening, miss?” but polite nonetheless and always formal. I waved but he didn’t acknowledge my presence, almost as if he was in another world. I decided not to engage. Shannon and I were just running down the hill for sushi. I had my car so, as far as I was concerned, his services wouldn’t be needed that evening. But it’s always a bad sign when the help starts misbehaving.

Shannon was ready to go. She didn’t even ask me in. She had on jeans, a t-shirt, a short Western jacket, and pointed boots with heels that made her look taller than she was. She looked like she was in a rush to get out the door. “Should we ask Honey if she wants to come?” I asked.

“She hasn’t come down for two days. She has a”— Shannon hesitated—“headache.”

“What’s wrong with Felix?” I asked.

Shannon whispered, “He hasn’t been paid.” That was the first hint I had that there was trouble. The second hint would be coming soon.

Shannon and I had an early dinner, and I dropped her off around ten and went home. At three in the morning, my doorbell rang. Let me just say, it wasn’t that unusual in those days for your doorbell to ring at 3
A.M.
—a musician in town, a couple of friends who were on their way home, someone who didn’t want the night to end. I lived in South Beverly Hills, which was centrally located and seemed to be on everyone’s way from everywhere at any time of the night or day. L.A. hadn’t gone into full-tilt alarm lockdown yet (that would happen a few years later), and I generally opened the door to see who was on the doorstep even if I wasn’t going to let them in.

Honey wasn’t standing on the doorstep. She was sitting on it, up against the wall, with her knees pulled into her chest like someone on the streets of London in 1912 trying to get shelter from the rain, except there wasn’t any rain. Her face was streaked with mascara and she looked as if she’d been crying for days. The Mercedes was in the driveway, but Felix was nowhere to be seen.

I can’t remember if I made her tea or poured her a shot of brandy. Probably both. I remember that I built a fire because it seemed like something normal to do, and it seemed like something homelike and cozy, and she curled up on the couch under a cashmere throw.

It was a long time before she started talking, sort of residual sobs. It was Max but it wasn’t what I’d expected. He hadn’t paid the mortgage. This surprised me as I hadn’t realized that
he
paid the mortgage, and it took me a while to get the details but I soon learned that it was Max, not Honey, who owned the house on “No Name Street.” And the first clue that there was trouble had been when a default sign was posted on their door. I sort of thought it was a “good news/bad news” story. At least she didn’t owe 1.2 million dollars on a house that I now realized she couldn’t afford to live in at all.

“Shannon thinks we should have an estate sale and sell all the furniture.”

“What good would that do?” I asked, not understanding the concept at all but realizing, in that moment, that the screwball comedy they’d been acting in had just turned into
Dinner at Eight
(without the light touch of George Cukor at the end).

“Well, Shannon thinks, at least that way, we could pay the mortgage. But it won’t work,” she said without even giving me a chance to comment. “He’s being investigated by the SEC.”

In those days, this sort of thing wasn’t commonplace—white-collar crime wasn’t splashed on the front page of the papers every day. Bernie Cornfeld and Robert Vesco (but I think they’d even been in business with each other, so it was hard to count them as two things). Everyone knew what a Ponzi scheme was, but SEC investigations weren’t commonplace.

“For what?” I asked. I wasn’t surprised when Honey didn’t answer me, although I was certain that she knew. Myriad possibilities ran through my mind, insider trading, RICO charges, money laundering . . .

“I’m not sure,” she said. And then she added, very matter-of-factly, “I think they’re going to seize his assets.” There was a finality to Honey’s tone, as if she was already considering her options. There was no sympathy in her voice, no seeming concern for Max’s predicament, as if in that moment, she’d turned on a dime. “And if he thinks I’m one of his trinkets,” she added, “he’s sadly mistaken.” It was a little startling. There was a determination in her voice I’d never heard before, or else some self-preservation gene had kicked in.

She straightened up on the couch and had another sip of brandy. She went into the bathroom and washed her face.

“Do you want to stay here tonight?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” she answered.

When I woke up the next morning, she was gone. The bed had been perfectly made and except for the brandy glass on the coffee table, I never would have known that she’d been there at all.

Three days later, the house on “No Name Street” was shuttered, vacant, empty. No sign that anyone had lived there before. Except that if you looked through the old-fashioned grate of the peephole, the black tiles of the staircase were visible as if waiting for someone to make an entrance from upstairs.

Honey left town. I don’t know where she went. Shannon moved in with a friend in Hancock Park and started going to church every day. She talked about God a lot. Something had scared her, but I don’t know exactly what it was. I never really understood exactly what their dream was. Two months later, Shannon left Los Angeles, too. She said she had a rich cousin in Minneapolis and that she felt like going home and since her parents had died when she was little, it was the closest thing she had to home.

Max was indicted, although I’m not sure for what. And I hear he spent a little bit of time in a minimum security prison.

Honey called me six months later, “I’m he-ere!” she said, sounding a little Southern when she said it and as if she’d had a couple of glasses of champagne. “At the Beverly Hills Hotel.” This had a Southern lilt to it, too.

“How are you?”

“I’m in love,” she said, with an extra syllable in love. She didn’t tell me his name. “He’s Argentinian,” she said. “He’s in rocks.”

I didn’t know if she meant cocaine or jewels and, I think, I actually said it. “Cocaine or jewels?” as I remember her answer.

“Jewels, you fool, “ laughing a little bit because Honey got the joke. “I’d love you to meet him.”

I declined their invitation for dinner. Some little bell went off in my head about how the “high life” can turn on a dime. I never heard from her again. I hope she’s barefoot somewhere in South America with lots of children around her (I imagine her on a ranch with horses, taking trips every six months to a fancy clinic in Lausanne) and that she didn’t end up in a small town in Texas where the only oil in shouting distance is at the gas station on the corner, or even worse, a rich divorcée buying champagne by the case.

Six

Labor Day

T
here aren’t that many things that are a rite of passage, truly a rite of passage. A first kiss, that’s not really a big deal, it’s just a door opening to a second kiss. Or the fact that, now, you do kiss, if you know what I mean. Or for some of us loss of virginity isn’t such a big deal either except that you hope that you find someone better to sleep with the second time.

I don’t remember my first kiss. Oh, yes, I do. I was wearing red silk pinstripe hip-huggers that I’d bought at Paraphernalia. He drove a red Corvette and I’d lied about my age. He was sort of slick and creepy and a senior in high school, not my high school. And I think he parked, yep, actually parked on Mulholland. I should have known, just by the red Corvette, that he thought of himself as fast and had more than kissing on his mind. I didn’t. But maybe I’m just not a red-Corvette kind of girl. I remember being sort of pleased that we didn’t go to the same high school and that I would never have to see him or his red Corvette again.

I don’t remember my second kiss. I do remember the first person I was in love with (or thought I was in love with)—short-lived, as I moved to New York and he went to rehab. What can I say, it was L.A. and some things never change. In my own defense, I was not the reason that he went into rehab and I was fairly surprised at the substance he went into rehab for. I missed the signs and spent a long time thinking about how I could have missed the signs. What I took for a laconic, laid-back nature was really a heroin addiction.

I think a rite of passage is, certainly, the first time you experience the death of a friend. But when the first person I was in love with died of an overdose six years later, I refused to believe he was dead. For years, I was certain I would see him, just there standing on that street corner; over there across the street in front of that bakery; just there in front of us, walking down to the subway. But every time I got close, he was gone.

I’m not even sure marriage counts as a rite of passage because who knows if that’s a permanent state.

But having a child is a rite of passage, a defining moment that puts you in a forever altered state—motherhood and all the responsibilities that come along with it.

It had been blissful in the beginning—no morning sickness, no tiredness, no mood swings. This was aided by the fact that my first three pregnancy tests had been negative. The gynecologist didn’t believe me when I said that I had never wanted breakfast before in my life, therefore, I was certain I was pregnant. So, by the time it was definitely determined (after I’d run into my sister Delia at a luncheon and she took one look at me, and at the beach ball where my stomach used to be, and pronounced, “Oh my God, you’re pregnant”), and I twisted the doctor’s arm to do a blood test, please, instead of a urine test, I was already three months pregnant. In other words, the whole horrible period of tiredness and morning sickness usually present in the first trimester had not only not appeared but I could not psychosomatically manifest it, since I was already out of the first trimester. Except for the fact that I wanted creamed spinach for breakfast (or at least a spinach and Swiss cheese omelette and could recite every eating establishment in L.A. that had one); chili dogs for lunch (preferably Pink’s); and pancakes at midnight (Dupars is open all night), all of which I indulged in, I was perfectly fine. And so was she.

Until Labor Day weekend when there was record-breaking heat in Los Angeles, and even though I was seven and a half months or eight and a quarter months pregnant (depending on when you thought I got pregnant, which was difficult to determine), I still didn’t feel the least bit physically impaired . . . Note to anyone else who’s pregnant, beach volleyball is probably not a good thing to play, even for five minutes. But I have a really good serve and it’s really hard for me not to jump in, even though I jumped out after a two-minute stint. It had been so hot that we all felt like Mexican food was a good idea. Whether it was or not, I have no idea, but I woke up at five in the morning and could feel her doing a cartwheel in my stomach and kicking like a ballerina once she was done . . . and my water broke, six or three weeks early, depending on which reading of the ultrasound you believed.

She was hooked up to more machines than I was. There was something monitoring her heart. I’m sure there was something monitoring mine, but hers was the one that got my attention.

The next three days spent in the ICU were a tiny preparation for how I would feel years later every time she or one of her siblings would pull out of the driveway in their cars on a Saturday night until they pulled back in, like I was holding my breath.

Hospital wards always seem a little surreal, as if time has slowed and each moment amplified. The air is hazy as if it’s been infused with residual drugs, or illness, or fear—the sound of a scream behind a curtain, a tragedy on the other side of the room. Through it all, if you are the patient, a self-imposed heightened sense of awareness kicks in, since not paying attention in a hospital ward can be like falling asleep at the wheel. I decided I wasn’t going to sleep until she was born. Not realizing, of course, when I made that decision that I was in for a 72-hour stint.

On the morning of the second day, a young woman was wheeled in who had gone into labor in her fifth month, way too early to go into labor. It seemed she was in a lot of pain and they put her in the bed directly across from me and closed her curtain. Every ten minutes, almost like clockwork, as if it was tied to a contraction, from behind the curtain she let out a scream, high and piercing, that lasted for 30 seconds. It was hard not to be worried about her, too. As I was staring at the myriad of wires, monitors, and machines a few hours later, with my best friend Holly at my bedside, there was a small commotion in the doorway of the intensive care ward. A flurry, I think you would call it, and in wafted—that’s the only way I can describe her entrance—Elizabeth Taylor, dressed in something long, white, and flowy, which perfectly matched the small, white, perfectly coiffed longhaired Lhasa Apso (or Shih Tzu—I’m not quite sure which one) she was carrying. I’d never seen a dog in a hospital before, but she was Elizabeth Taylor and it matched her dress. Her assistant was trailing behind with a cell phone in his hand, which, in those days, was almost as large as the dog.

It turned out that the young woman behind the curtain in the bed opposite me was Elizabeth Taylor’s daughter-in-law. And since Holly’s sister was also one of Elizabeth Taylor’s daughters-in-law, we threw the curtains open as if we were at some sort of odd labor party. The young woman was in a lot of pain and on a lot of painkillers, which seemed to permeate the air, and that, along with her screams, which now seemed to come like clockwork every four minutes or so, and Elizabeth Taylor’s soft, whispery comforting voice, the cell phone ringing intermittently, and the dog barking every six minutes or so, made the experience seem even more surreal. In between the screams, the woman would sit up and smile and wave at me and Holly, which only added to the oddness. She was in for a longer stint than I was, and she moved shortly into a private room. I recently ran into her and I’m happy to report that she and her son are both fine. She has no recollection of the “waving” incident—further to the theory that celebrity sightings mean more to you than the celebrity you’re sighting, no matter how slight or attenuated the celebrity might be. But at the time it seemed cozy, in its own peculiar way, and confirmed my opinion that L.A., in its own strange way, is a small town.

My daughter Maia was born 73 hours later by cesarean section. They put her in an incubator in the ICU. She was fine. She was perfect, a fact the doctors confirmed after they did a lot of probably unnecessary tests to determine same. I had an infection and they wouldn’t let me hold her until I’d been on antibiotics for two days. I remember the brown tweed wing chair in the ICU that I sat in as a nurse handed her to me, coddled in a soft white blanket so that only her face and one of her toes, which was pointing, peeped out. I remember the moment clearly, as it was a moment of a kind of peace and connection, coupled with a fierce almost primal feeling of protectiveness, that would only be repeated twice more in my life when my other two children were born. I have a picture of it, me in the wing chair and her in my arms, which I keep on my bedside table. Five days after she was born, we both went home.

Two weeks later, her father went out to a screening. I looked at Maia in her little wicker basket in our little house in Laurel Canyon and I realized that I couldn’t leave. You can leave your parents’ home—I know, I did that. You can leave a boyfriend or a husband. Done that, too. You can leave an apartment you don’t like or a city that doesn’t suit you. You can quit a job. But as I looked at my perfect child, sleeping peacefully in her wicker basket, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to leave for something like the next 21 years, not in any substantive way anyway. I had lost the ability to “walk out the door” (unless, of course, I took her and any of her future siblings with me). What no one tells you (or you probably wouldn’t hear if they did) is if you do leave, taking your one child (or three children) with you, the person you were married to won’t be far behind . . .