I pulled out of La Boheme’s parking lot and had driven nary a mile when my cell phone rang,
“Hi it’s Natalie, I just want to say I had a really nice time tonight.”“Yeah, I did too.”
“Can’t wait for our next date.” Natalie said and hung up quickly.
I smiled . . . and yet, I reflected on the fact that we really didn’t speak too much at dinner. It was a lot of gazing into each other’s eyes. I wondered what, if anything, we had in common. Natalie’s salutary, pressurized speech still hit my ear wrong a hundred different ways, but I knew I was happy just being in her presence. On some level I must have known there was more chemistry than true connection between us; we didn’t talk about books, or movies, or music at dinner. I got that she liked and listened to one composer only: Mozart. Did she feel she had to have one classical composer in her pocket to trot out at dinner parties? Mozart is not my favorite composer—don’t get me wrong, Mozart was a genius, but he often left me cold. She didn’t discuss Mozart in any great depth either, beyond saying she loved him. I made a mental note of the narrowness of her interests in the world of art, music, books and culture, then dismissed those thoughts, because she had other qualities. She was so good looking for example.
The next morning I attended a new AA meeting at Fairfax and Fountain called Artists in Sobriety. It had been suggested to me by AA friends as a meeting I’d like. I made my way over Laurel Canyon then to Fountain and Fairfax where stood a church. I walked into this vast and highly populated space and saw everyone milling about. The meeting was mostly made up of actors and writers, people with varying degrees of show business clout. It was a very social meeting— the kind where Hollywood deals are made over coffee. I ran into several friends, friends I connected with more deeply than I did with all the other people in the myriad marginalized groups to which I belonged. There’s just something about being an addict among addicts that made me feel I was home. Addiction was in my DNA and it defined me in ways that nothing else did—Being gay, Jewish, or female left me with no such feeling of camaraderie for other gay, Jewish, females, but being an addict among addicts, now there I forged a bond. No other group—with the exception of psychopharmacologists— can spend so many hours talking about drugs. Yes, these were my people.
The speaker at the meeting stood apart from the crowd due to a brightly colored suit and tie; attire for this meeting was mainly ripped jeans and Doc Martens. Nonetheless he had a message to convey which I could relate to. While I remember little of this speaker’s pitch, I do remember him ending with an analogy to recovery by way of a quote by Martin Luther King:
”Free at last, free at last, thank god almighty I’m free at last.”
And I was free at last, after struggling with addiction from the age of thirteen when I first needed drugs to escape the black sorrow of my youth. I was free—with the exception of my obsession for Natalie.
I was out in all areas of my life as an addict and alcoholic. I told everyone I met that I was sober in AA whether it was appropriate to the conversation or not. This was not true about my sexual orientation though, especially where my mother was concerned. My mother led a show business existence and all, if not most, of her closest friends were gay, or famous, or famous and gay, or famously gay (like Liberace, an old friend). Yet she reserved any judgement she had around homosexuality toward everyone but me. When I’d tried once to come out to her, it didn’t go well. She locked the conversation away in a dark place and it would never be spoken of again until the end of her life. Many years later I came out to my mother in as direct a fashion as I could. Her first reaction was fury. I practically saw steam billow from her ears. She ran and told her friend Mary Jane that I’d said I was gay (Mary Jane was staying with my mother now that my mother had moved to LA to be closer to me). She was both despondent and furious.
Mary Jane said simply, “Well Frances honey, everyone knows it.” Which I’m sure only threw gasoline on the fire.
When a young person asks for my coming out story, I tell it this way for maximum comic effect: “I came out to my mother and then she died.” Which is exactly what happened, though the line from my coming out and her death is not quite so straight and direct. She had end stage heart disease and in reality died a few months after I came out to her.
As she lay dying in the hospital she said,
“Cara I need to talk to you.”
I wanted nothing that smacked of final talks and good-byes as I was terrified to let her go. I continued to read my magazine, but when she said, “Listen to me Cara, this is important.” I put the magazine down. I owed her her closure. My mother who’d been critical of me (and when I say critical I mean not so much critical as wanting to remake me in her own image: a fancy lady from Enid, Oklahoma) continued, “I want you to know you’re perfect. And if you want to adopt a baby like Jody Foster that would be okay with me too.” People know when they’re going to die, even while fighting death to the end. My mother died with her heels on as if off to a dinner party, which is the equivalent of a soldier dying with his boots on I suppose.
This talk would take place many years after Natalie was gone from my life, I was with a new woman, Julia, whom my mother loved as my “roommate,” but by invoking Jody Foster’s name she let me know the gay thing was okay with her and it didn’t matter anymore.
Natalie called me the morning following our first date and several times throughout the day. Check in calls. I called her too. It was clear to me we would become a couple (a couple of whats? you might ask.) Actually, Natalie called every day all day. I don’t know when she got her lawyering done. I was glad I was someone she was dating and not a client.
We had our second date at a small Italian joint on Melrose. I loved her face and couldn’t stop looking at it, which again begs the question: what did we actually talk about? Not much would be the answer. After our third date we went back to her place. Her apartment had a table, chairs, a sofa, but not one personal item. No books or photos. My house was covered with art, books, photos. Her apartment looked like a showroom. Her bedroom merely contained a bed. We made love that night for the first time. Her love making, like everything else she did, was flicky. The next morning as we lay in bed having coffee, her phone rang at seven. She sounded very annoyed with the person on the other end.
“I will call you from the office!” she shouted angrily into the phone. I felt bad for the person on the other end. It turned out that every time I slept over her phone rang at seven AM and the person on the other line was met with the same angry response.
“Who is that?” I asked after the third or fourth time.
“Nobody, a friend of mine.”
“Hmmm she’s an early caller,” I said.
Other than having a seven AM caller, I wasn’t suspicious of her. She was too committed to us being a couple and it seemed she had little time for someone on the side. Or was I the person on the side? The thought did cross my mind. Then she took a business trip to San Francisco. Natalie left on Friday and said she’d be returning Monday morning. I thought nothing about it until the steady stream of phone calls suddenly stopped. She wasn’t picking up my calls either. I finally heard from her Monday afternoon.
“What’s going on?” I asked warily.
“What do you mean?” Natalie replied.
“Not one phone call all weekend? You go from calling every five minutes to radio silence. . . you don’t find that a weird inconsistency?”
“No I was working,” She said.
“You’re always working! You always call!” I said, my anger mounting.
“Can’t I just focus on business one weekend?” she said defensively.
“No, it makes no sense.”
Then came a long pause and she uttered the words I’d feared most:
“Okay I was with Sue.”
Sue, the older woman I met on the staircase at the party! Sue was her girlfriend and I was the girl on the side, though, much to her surprise, she’d fallen in love with me. I was simply meant to be a revenge date.
I was half expecting this ironic twist, confirming the old adage: If something’s too good to be true, it usually is. It would have been less of an ordeal investing with Bernie Madoff.
“It’s dead with Sue! I gave Sue years! She’s not getting divorced from her husband.” said Natalie imbuing the comment with more emotion than a dead relationship called for.
Sue, it turned out, was a married mother of three from Tarzana California. It doesn’t get more middle-class suburban than that. Natalie had met the much older Sue in law school and wrecked the happy home Sue kept with her husband and children.
“So you’re punishing Sue via me! You never told me you were in a relationship Natalie. That’s jerky and a waste of my time. I’m leaving.”
I headed toward the door but she grabbed my sleeve not letting me get to her front door of the sterile apartment. The problem was I had fallen in love too and wanted to believe she was leaving Sue. I stopped putting up a fight and sat down.
“I’m letting Sue go.” she lied.“She’s not getting a divorce. Please Cara, don’t leave me.”
Of course as soon as I entered the picture suddenly Sue filed for divorce after six years of empty promises—and Natalie wasn’t letting Sue go. Hence the darting. She’d be standing next to me one minute and then I’d turn around and she’d be gone. Like a puff of smoke or a snake in the grass, which she was, and off to call Sue. She was a Houdini who could vanish on a dime and stay gone for two hours. Sue was crazy too, as it turned out, and broke into Natalie’s house once while we were at dinner. Sue left notes all over the house: At dinner huh??!! You LIED to me! read one note. And Dinner with Cara!!!??? read another.
Natalie, Sue, and I’d formed a toxic triangle with Natalie lying to both Sue and me simultaneously. I wrung my hands and gnashed my teeth always wondering where Natalie was. For years after, I trusted no one I dated. I still don’t. I am always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I would never put up with this now, but in my twenties and this being a first love, I was more flexible and had lower standards. Natalie, it turned out, was a pathological liar. Natalie was also a borderline personality—I seemed to be a magnet for them—and spent her vast stores of energy on gas lighting both Sue and me. Or was my self-esteem just so low I’d put up with behavior that most people wouldn’t?
There were other spooky things surrounding Natalie: She had a deep dark secret involving her brother that no one, not even Sue, would talk about. She and the brother couldn’t be in the same room. It was a family secret and not to be shared. It would be hinted at but never discussed. In short, she was a mess. A mess I couldn’t get over. But I remained sober through the entire ordeal. Not that I didn’t want to take something to calm myself down.
your writing continues to keep me on the edge of my seat!! I love reading each and every installment!