I SPRINTED DOWN THE STEEP WOODEN ESCALATOR OF London’s Kings Cross station, certain I was going to miss the train that would take me to the North of England—to a Christmas weekend at the home of my aunt Celia. My father was coming from New York and would be there with Carla and my baby half brother.
Eight years had passed since Daddy told me that I stunk, and I had no hard evidence that he felt much different today. I can’t say that I disagreed with him, either. I considered myself a failure, consumed by my problems, and angry that I gave them so much control of my life. But I couldn’t see a way out.
I was living in Jesse’s parents’ house in Hampstead. He and I had long broken up, but I remained quite close to his mother. Jesse was in New York, and I was poor, so I had taken up the offer of a room while I finished my second year at Central School of Speech and Drama. In fact, I had another love, a Spanish paint er named Pablo, whom I had met in New York but who now was back in Spain.
We had been together for almost five years, often in different countries, but we were young and full of self-important enthusiasm for our “art.” Pablo and I had frequent debates over which was more important: our romance or his painting and my acting. I might have chosen marriage, but long-term commitments made Pablo nervous. Soon after I reached England, he returned to Madrid. He said he was having a crisis in his work that could only be solved by going back to Spain. Then to Paris for a while. Then to Russia. Now, he was considering a trip to Chile. Even small commitments worried him. When we ate out together, he would agonize over what to order, turning pale and stammering at the waiter’s unavoidably direct question: “And what would you like sir?” That was Pablo, a smart, talented guy who had a chronic inability to make up his mind. Of course, who was I to judge?
Here I was, running for a train I half-hoped I wouldn’t catch. It had been awhile since I had seen my dad—about a year—and I had hoped the time away might heal all wounds. Instead, it had made them hurt even more. I not only couldn’t forget what had happened with Daddy that night in New Jersey, but as I grew older, the memories had become overwhelming. I couldn’t concentrate in some of my classes—particularly voice classes, when we were told to lie on the floor and breathe. Each time I closed my eyes, I saw my room in that majestic old house, my bunk bed, and my father’s silhouette. But how could I bring it up with him after all these years? And why? I had lived with my memories since I was seven. Why bring them up now, just because they were haunting me?
I made the train and convinced myself that it would be better this way. Enduring my father would be better than listening to him rant about my failure to show up for Christmas.
I found a seat next to a British businessman. His blandness appealed to me. I wouldn’t mind some blandness in my life. Whether it was a Spanish paint er or a middle-aged man in a Marks & Spencer shirt, I was always looking for someone to save me. From what? Myself, I assumed. I pulled out my copy of Look Back in Anger, which I was supposed to be studying for a scene we’d do in class. But the play lay in my lap as I stared out the window, wondering as I did every day if I might ever feel in control of my life, of myself. When I might start keeping the daily resolutions I had made for the last ten years. When I would finally stop bingeing and purging. I had made and broken so many resolutions that, at twenty-four, I felt exhausted.
My turmoil seemed so out of place in the serene countryside outside, the villages and soft English hills. I remembered how George Orwell described the same terrain when he was coming home from the Spanish Civil War in Homage to Catalonia—“all sleeping the deep, deep, sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.” Now I yearned for that sleep, or something like it, if only to escape the inescapable past.
The house where Celia lived with her husband and two young boys sat on the outskirts of the town of Newark. I couldn’t get over the name and how little this northern English red brick town shared with its American namesake. Newark was full of Victorian buildings surrounded by flat, misty, deep green countryside. The house itself was ancient, long and vast with a curved, red shingle roof, with parts of it from the sixteenth century and “recent” additions from the eighteenth and nineteenth. I stood outside with my aunt and uncle, hesitant to enter. Already I could hear my father’s voice from the sitting room. I couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying, but by the tone of his voice and the rhythm of his words, I knew he was telling a story that no doubt had engaged the small audience of relatives. At just the right moment, he would pause to puff on the long cigar I was sure he was smoking. Then he’d slowly exhale, making his listeners wait for the punch line, just as he had done with us growing up, just as he had done that night he told me he was leaving my mother.
“Come in, Jessie. It’s freezing out there.” My aunt took my hand. Celia was an intelligent, understated woman with a quiet sense of humor. I liked her. Besides the faint aroma of cigars, the house smelled like tea and toast with a hint of pine, the scent of the season. I followed my aunt into the sitting room, where my father perched on the sofa. I hadn’t seen him in months, but he looked the same. His hair was perhaps a bit shorter, his face a little puffier. But the big eyes were as prominent and intense as ever.
“Treasure, it’s great to see you.” He stood and gave me a kiss. Carla peeled the baby off the Christmas tree and brought him over.
“Hi, how are you, Jessie? This is Nick.”
He was a strapping boy, and the chubby red cheeks and blond hair showed he hadn’t inherited Carla’s dark Italian looks. His blue eyes belonged to my father, just as mine did. And my dad gazed at him with paternal pride radiating from every pore.
“He looks a lot like you when you were a baby, Jessie.”
I felt awkward. My cheeks grew hot, and I hid them by leaning down and giving the baby a kiss on the forehead. He smelled of baby powder and shampoo.
That night I lay awake for a long time listening to the voices from downstairs, my father’s clearer and more distinct than the rest. It was cold in the room, and I pulled my nightshirt up over my chin, a habit that I had inherited from my mother. I remembered a photograph my dad took of her years ago, asleep with the sheet up to her mouth and clenched tightly between her teeth. I was her child too, and that gave me some solace.
The next day was one of preparation, of baking pies and Yorkshire puddings, of decorating. I tried to ignore how uncomfortable I felt there, chatting with Carla, my aunt, my uncle, and my grandmother. I played with Nick. Then I helped set the table for dinner. But when we sat down that night, something in me snapped. As Celia’s husband began carving the roast, I looked across the table. There Daddy sat, hungry, eager. Suddenly, the strong, strange taste in my mouth, that taste that made me gag when I wasn’t yet seven, came rising up fast, as if everything that had happened that night had happened just seconds ago. I tried to stop them, but tears filled my eyes and fell onto the red, holiday tablecloth. Everyone turned from the roast and toward me.
“I’m sorry. Excuse me. I’m sorry. . . .” I rushed from the dining room and up the stairs. Just in time I made it to one of the bathrooms, lifted the lid of an antique white porcelain toilet and vomited. The irony of what had just happened did not escape me. I was a bulimic who spent much of her time trying to make herself vomit. Now, my body—simply because I had been sitting across from him—had done it on its own. My tears surprised me because they wouldn’t stop. The taste of bile stayed in my mouth, and I felt cold. I reached up from the floor and pulled down a towel, which I wrapped tightly around me. I had to go back downstairs. Everyone was worried. But I gave myself a few more seconds. Finally, I stood and rummaged in the drawers for some toothpaste. I squeezed a blob and ran it over my teeth, then splashed water on my face, took off the towel, and hung it back where it had been. I did everything as slowly and deliberately as possible. But it felt as though I were looking at myself from a great distance, as if I were watching myself in motion. When I went back into the hall, my father was climbing the stairs.
“What’s wrong, Jessie? What is it?”
He seemed genuinely concerned, how he had sometimes looked when I was little and had fallen out of a tree or slid in the mud. Before I even realized the words were out of my mouth, I said, “How could you have done that, Daddy? That night in New Jersey. How could you have done that?”
He looked stricken, and his face flinched as if I had hit him. But he wasn’t confounded. I knew he remembered. He remembered as well as I did.
“Jessie, I am sorry.”
I felt a huge weight begin to lift. Maybe there was hope that this could be resolved in some way. Perhaps it would get better.
“Treasure, this is not the time to talk. We will talk about it; I want to talk about it, but not here, not with everyone waiting downstairs and worrying about you. We’ll talk tomorrow. Come to Mass with me in the morning, and on the way home, we’ll talk. I promise.”
We’ll talk! I felt more elated than relieved. Finally, he would own up to it. I needed more than an apology. He had told me that before. I needed to know that I had done nothing to deserve it. That I hadn’t asked for it. That the guilt I felt should be his, not mine. But we were going to talk!
He took my hand and led me down the stairs. Everyone at the table asked if I was all right, but they were much too embarrassed by my outburst to want to do anything other than ignore it. I would guess most of them chalked up my behavior to being an overly emotional American. This time, I sat next to my father, and he put his arm around me. We would talk, I just kept reminding myself. I ate very little, for once not thinking about every bite. My dad ate a lot and drank even more, but that was nothing unusual. I went to bed anticipating the talk we were to have in the morning.
The next day dawned cold, with a gusty wind and a light rain. My dad barely said a word on the way to church, and I was too hesitant to bring up anything until he did. The brick church was rather ugly, and I could tell the ser vice was not up to my father’s standards. He hated any Catholic ser vice that wasn’t full of ritual and solemnity. I have always wondered if it was ritual that he craved from Catholicism more than a relationship with God.
He looked dark as we left Mass. Outside the wind was so fierce that we had to battle it. We trudged along the road that would take us back to my aunt’s, and my father’s continued silence troubled me. Finally, after a half a mile or so, he opened the subject.
“I know you want to talk about what you said last night.”
“Yes, Daddy, I do. It’s really bothering me.”
“Well, first of all, my advice to you would be to stop picking at your wounds, Jessie. It’s a bad habit to make other people responsible for your failures in life.”
My wounds? My failures? Mine?
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you are sitting around picking at old scars, bringing up history, so you can make excuses for yourself. If you have problems, they are yours, not mine. Stop being so self-involved. Much worse things have happened to children.”
I stared at him, incredulous, as we walked on. Where was he going with this? Where was the father who just yesterday said he was sorry?
“Think about the Holocaust, for fuck’s sake,” he continued. “Babies being gassed to death. And in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge bayoneting six-year-olds in the rice paddies.”
The Holocaust? The Khmer Rouge? What did this have to do with what he had done?
“Stop being self-indulgent for a change. You’re lucky to have the life you have. So think about that and stop blaming other people if you are a failure.”
I felt ambushed, unsteady. He had framed his argument masterfully. As always, he had left me little ground.
“I don’t think I had it worse than children in the Holocaust. That’s not what I’m talking about! I just want to get over this, so I don’t have to think about it anymore.” My voice wavered.
“Well, if you really want to do that, stop opening up the same cut over and over again. Leave it alone and grow up. Life is not always what you want it to be. Think about that.”
Life is not always what you want it to be . . . and that was true. It wasn’t. But I hadn’t had a choice, I thought. Not when I was seven. Not when he crawled into bed with me. Not when he pushed my head down and told me what to do.
I said nothing for the rest of that long walk. I just thought about what he said. I had never compared my pain to that of others. And he was right. Others had suffered worse. But he was simply trying to evade the most important issue—taking responsibility for what he had done. And until he did that, until he took responsibility, I could never feel that what happened wasn’t my fault. Until I stopped blaming myself, I couldn’t stop being ashamed. He had used the night to craft his response. I suspect he was proud of what he came up with.
I headed back to London feeling worse than when I arrived at Celia’s. I hated myself, not only for what had happened with my dad, but also because I couldn’t get over it. I felt weak and stupid, just as Dad told me I would. Bulimia took over my life. I loved school and acting, but there were days when I gave up, “bad” days when I would walk up to Hampstead High Street and buy pastries and chocolates. I took them home to my small room in a new flat I shared with some girlfriends, locked the door, and sat in bed eating and eating and eating. Then I would cry over the empty wrappers and bags until my regret pushed me into the bathroom to throw it all up.
To make matters worse, I worked part-time at a tea house in Hampstead—a shop filled with creamy éclairs, croissants, homemade cakes, and other delights. Putting a bulimic behind the pastry counter was like leaving a Vicodin addict in charge of the pharmacy. Often, the temptations overwhelmed me. My finger might skim the icing off a cake I was wrapping for a customer. Or I might pilfer a cookie when the boss wasn’t looking. I sometimes ate crumbs off the floor. And on quite a few occasions, I rummaged through the large garbage bins in the back of the shop, cramming the half-eaten scraps of a patron’s chocolate gâteau into my mouth. I hated myself for doing it, but I was used to hating myself by then. Instead of using the employee bathroom for purging, I’d simply wait until I got home. That way, I could have all the time I needed with my head over the toilet and my finger down my throat.
I gave up on resolutions; I knew I would never live up to them anyway. Most days I thought I would rather be dead, but I didn’t have the guts to follow through.
Now and then I had a “good” day when I managed to resist bingeing, but they were few. Pablo and I talked on the phone from wherever he was. I wondered if things would be better if we were together. But I knew he wouldn’t be able to help me. I had already told him years ago about what my father had done. He seemed shocked and confused. He had always been enamored of Tony Hendra. “How am I supposed to treat your dad knowing this?” he asked me. I certainly had no answers. After all, I didn’t even know how to treat my father. In the end, Pablo behaved as though no such thing had happened.
When Pablo and I were apart, he dated other women and I dated other guys—a Tango superstar visiting from Argentina who wore white linen suits and spoke no English; a nice Jewish pre med from Yale who was working in London for a year, a cockney boxer, a musical prodigy three years younger who asked me to be his “first” (why not?) and, a motorcycle rider who turned out to be a coke head. By the summer, I was fooling around with an older married man. I met him in the North London wine bar where I waitressed. He wanted to set me up in my own “mistress flat” and would pay the rent and put me through school. In the diary I kept, I debated taking him up on his offer:
It’s hard to be moral in the traditional sense when one of the greatest moral taboos, incest, has been part of your life. Maybe I am so immoral because I have to find a way to accept what happened to me, to normalize it. I can’t normalize it if I make everything into “morals.” Also, what’s the big deal about marriage? Everything seems so secondary in the face of incest, a much more horrible and confusing sin than infidelity. Growing up in such a fucked up house hold has made me a complex person morally. In one sense I feel guilty about everything; in another I have no strict sense of morality as such. My father transgressed every boundary of morality; why shouldn’t I do the same? Why shouldn’t I get my own back on morality and treat people with the same lack of morals as I was treated? Why be the victim? Why not victimize other people? All these feelings though are ugly feelings because they come from anger. Anger that I was fooled, that I went along with it, that no one told me what it was about or what would happen to me.
I ended up sleeping with Steve. The next morning, after he had already left, his wife called. She was looking for her husband. She said she found my number on a matchbook and asked me to leave him alone. They had a little girl. She didn’t sound angry, just desperate. I got the feeling it wasn’t the first such call she had made, and I thought of my mother and my father’s many mistresses. I promised Steve’s wife that I wouldn’t see her husband again. As it was, he never called me after I gave in to his requests to spend the night. Gone were the flat and the school tuition, even if I had decided to take them. He avoided the wine bar, and in a fit of anger, I tried to pawn the Rolex he had left by my bed. The tough-looking pawn-shop own er laughed when I asked him what it was worth. It turned out to be a fake.
I had to get out of London. The pattern of my life had become so self-destructive that I knew it was time to leave. I had made friends and contacts in the two years at Central, and, because I had British citizenship through my parents, I could work in London. But I began to feel as though I were on such a downhill slide that getting away was the only thing that might help. I was too poor to see a private shrink, but I did attempt to see someone through England’s National Heath System. The receptionist told me politely that it could take up to three months for me to get an appointment. If I waited three months, I might be under a double-decker bus.
To save on rent, I had left my flat and squatted, with permission, in a house in Ladbroke Grove that an old family friend, the comedian John Cleese, was renovating. My mattress lay on the floor of an upstairs room, and the half-demolished kitchen had a working stove. In the dusty living room, surrounded by planks of wood and nails, sat a baby grand piano. It was the only piece in the room. Each morning, I would come down to find workmen tearing apart more and more of the house. I don’t know what they thought of me in my white robe, making tea, surrounded by total destruction. At one point the house had no back walls and stood open to the London rainstorms. I didn’t care. It had a roof (most of the time, anyway), and it was free.
Mine was not an unusual lifestyle for students at my school. In fact, I knew quite a few kids who “slept rough” as they called it, spending nights on park benches or in squats. I thought one boy must be well off because he had a car. Then I realized he lived in it. But all of us took a certain pride in the poverty of student life. We were still young enough to think that being poor was glamorous. One roguishly handsome, gifted actor carried his toothbrush, not a silk handkerchief, in the top pocket of his jacket. “You never know where you might spend the night,” he explained with a wink.
I was feeling poor but not glamorous. Disgusting, really. It wasn’t so much my surroundings but the constant battles with myself. I made a desperate call to Pablo, who was in Madrid. “Please come get me,” I begged. He said he still loved me, but our on-again, off-again relationship—and my emotional crises—were too much for him. I could come to Spain. He would be happy to see me, he said. But he wasn’t coming to England.
A few days later, I packed and headed to Paris and then to Madrid. My mother was now living with a war photographer—a man who would become her second husband. Conveniently, he had a loft in the same building as ours. She planned to meet me in Spain, and we would go back to New York together. Pablo and I spent a few weeks traveling. We saw a Romanesque church in a small Andalusian village where we thought we might have our wedding. But I could tell we both had our doubts about whether that day would ever come. My mom joined us. Then, with the usual anxiety, I got on the plane to New York. It was good to be back, but I found that I hadn’t left my problems in England.
I was once again in the same city as my father. I saw him and Carla, but I didn’t dare raise what we had talked about at Celia’s—and, of course, neither did he. I got a restaurant job, a few theater gigs, and made new resolutions about my bulimia. I started running every day and, though that didn’t solve my eating problems, it seemed to help. Running became a way of escaping, of being in control if only for an hour or two. When I ran, I felt like a machine, freed of the guilt and self-loathing. I began to live for the early mornings.
I’d get up early, well before Mom, and head to the kitchen of the loft to make a cup of coffee that was strong enough to give me a mild heart attack. I’d down it fast, and tie my running shoes. Then I’d race down the familiar dusty stairwell of Twenty-five East Fourth Street, out the front door and into the usually freezing wind that came off Broadway and blew down the street. Rain might hit me in the face. The potholes might turn to miniature ice rinks. Snow, yellowed by dogs, might pile in heaps along on the curbs. But I would run. In me, my father’s addictive personality came out not in a drug-and-drinking habit but in this solitary passion. One of my favorite routes was down Lafayette Street toward the Brooklyn Bridge. I ran through Chinatown, skirting delivery men as they unloaded heaps of bok choy and red cabbages from the trucks double parked in front of Chinese grocery stores. On to TriBeca, where hung-over kids emerged from the clubs I used to go to myself. Past the all-night diner on Canal Street, where Krisztina and I had often gone to smoke and drink coffee at four in the morning. I ran through the weekend emptiness of the streets around City Hall until I made it to the bridge and up the wooden steps to the walkway that led to Brooklyn. The planks clattered under my feet, and the wind off the river was often so strong that it would blow me back toward Manhattan. I loved looking up at the spider web of cables that supported the bridge. When I got to Brooklyn, I turned around and faced the Manhattan skyline.
Other days, I headed uptown for a different scene. Along Madison Avenue, I ran amazed by the fur coats and high-heeled boots the Upper East Side ladies wore just to get their morning coffee or walk their tiny, yapping dogs. I crossed Fifth Avenue and followed it past the Metropolitan Museum of Art and into Central Park, where I joined other puffing, sweating New Yorkers as we casually tried to outpace each other along the six-mile route.
No matter where I went, I ran for miles, and I loved my dirty, worn out shoes, loved the feeling of pounding the pavements. I wasn’t fast or graceful, but I was dedicated and obsessive. And I didn’t feel ashamed about this.
I began traveling for regional theater, to Philadelphia, New England, Florida, wherever I could make a few bucks acting and get a shitty place to stay free. I actually liked going to different places and meeting a new cast. I felt hopeful whenever I stepped off a train (I refused to fly) or a bus in some place I didn’t know—and some place that didn’t know me. But my habits traveled alongside.
I was thrilled to be cast in a play at The Williamstown Theatre Festival in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. A few years before, when I was about twenty-five, I did my first play there. Mel Gussow from the New York Times came to review it, and I was delighted when he gave me a good mention. I met my dad in a bar in New York on my day off. He never came to see one of my shows at Williamstown, but then I’m sure he was busy. I showed him the review and pointed to my name and the positive line about my acting. He nodded and didn’t seem at all surprised. “I know Mel very well,” he said of the reviewer. “I’m sure he recognized your last name.”
Williamstown was a summer stock for stars. The 1992 main stage production featured Linda Pearl and Michael York in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The Waiting Room, for which I was cast, was being done in Williamstown’s more experimental second stage. The play took place in different time periods, and I played a Victorian woman who had nervous ticks and was subject to fits of hysteria. It wasn’t a stretch. Another character was a Chinese woman whose feet had been bound so tightly they were mush. Actor Kurt Fuller played a big-time, modern-day businessman making dirty money in pharmaceuticals. The plot centered on a woman with breast cancer. It was a comedy.
I was nervous on the day of the first rehearsal. The rest of the cast had been flown in from L.A. and had already performed the play with great success. Only my part had been recast. The other actors had much longer résumés than mine. And almost everyone at the festival recognized Kurt from the movies he’d been in—Wayne’s World, for one. When I walked into rehearsal, I had no idea who he was. I was from NoHo. I didn’t go to see big Hollywood movies, though I had seen my father in Spinal Tap. I was used to the hole-in-the-wall theater spaces on Avenue A and sitting through intermission-less productions of King Lear in which the actors outnumbered the audience. I went to in de pen dent film festivals at the Angelika Film Center on Houston Street. I read a lot of subtitles.
But I was struck by Kurt nonetheless. He was so tall—all long legs and arms and huge green eyes. Twelve years older than me, he was balding but handsome. Charismatic. And funny, funny, funny. Selfdeprecating and yet confident. Witty and sarcastic but still kind. That impressed me. Shocked me even. Funny people were not, in my experience, kind.
On that first day of rehearsal, Kurt was the only cast member who made a point of introducing himself. He seemed to understand how awkward I felt being the new girl. As he told me later, he also had fallen in love with me.