Chapter One DATE/TIME: 12/28/99, 9:02 A.M.
CONTACT: Viv
NUMBER: Home
MESSAGE: She'll be back in the office tomorrow -- Call when you get in -- how was your Xmas?
DATE/TIME: 12/28/99, 9:05 A.M.
CONTACT: Donna/Accounting
NUMBER: x145
MESSAGE: Why did we pay director's friend Roberta (can't read last name) $10k on Late Nights -- we can pay her; just need to know what she did on film?
DATE/TIME: 12/28/99, 9:09 A.M.
CONTACT: Billy
NUMBER: 323-555-7639
MESSAGE: What is David's cell #? Needs to talk to him about music for the play -- how was Xmas in Vermont?
DATE/TIME: 12/28/99, 9:15 A.M.
CONTACT: Gail M./MPAA Ratings Board
NUMBER: 310-238-0039
MESSAGE: Late Nights clip of D.H. is disapproved -- cannot say "fag" or "candy-ass" on broadcast; re-edit and re-submit. Call if ??'s
DATE/TIME: 12/28/99, 9:23 A.M.
CONTACT: Your sister Molly
NUMBER: Home
MESSAGE: Checking on you...Misses you and hopes you're ok after what happened at Xmas.
DATE/TIME: 12/28/99, 9:37 A.M.
CONTACT: Gary/Good Fun Promotions
NUMBER: You have # He's in St. Bart's til Jan. 3
MESSAGE: How many Late Nights hats do you want for Sundance? Late Nights condoms or thongs for cocktail party?
DATE/TIME: 12/28/99, 9:40 A.M.
CONTACT: Sara-Anne
NUMBER: Home
MESSAGE: How was Xmas? Call me! Has a Littorai Pinot Noir-Theriot vineyard.
DATE/TIME: 12/28/99, 9:49 A.M.
CONTACT: Babette (D.H.'s agent)
NUMBER: Cell: 323-399-3947
MESSAGE: Needs 6 tickets to opening night parties at Sundance & schedule of what/where they are/who'll be there; plse fax to her home; 310-299-3987; will studio provide a car?
DATE/TIME: 12/28/99, 9:50 A.M.
CONTACT: Dr. Niblack
NUMBER: VCA Animal Clinic
MESSAGE: "Little" is due for her shots.
DATE/TIME: 12/28/99, 9:55 A.M.
CONTACT: Eugene R. (think it was Eugene, director of Shades of Gray, but he wouldn't say)
NUMBER: No # (called from pay phone in Central Park?)
MESSAGE: Why aren't we listed in N.Y. Times "Movies to See in 2000"? "Porky's 5 in 3D" is listed and we're not? "What the F*@!" (left on voice mail)
DATE/TIME: 12/28/99, 9:59 A.M.
CONTACT: Tracie Mansfield
NUMBER: The Tonight Show
MESSAGE: Has a hole in sched. this week for 2nd guest -- who do you have in town (No to Eugene R; she already knows he's available -- he called her). P.S. how was your Xmas?
And this was all before ten.
Returning to your call sheet after Christmas is never fun, but this particular year was profoundly un-fun. Adriane, my turbo-charged assistant, was a machine. Like any seasoned Hollywood assistant, she knew how to get to the point of each call quickly and efficiently. Normally she'd e-mail or fax me the call sheet each day I was out of town, but not during the Christmas break. How was Christmas 1999? The worst in thirty years (the title previously held by 1970, when, to my horror, my older brother gobbled up the prearranged cookies and milk before my eyes while wickedly proclaiming there was no Santa Claus and, adding insult to injury, refusing to share the cookies).
Christmas 1999 was markedly worse, because from its start, from the cheek-kissed drop off at LAX by the trusty Adriane, I knew, I knew something was not right between David and me, even before I saw him lolling impatiently at the Delta Skycab podium wearing the same tolerant expression he developed whenever we flew back East. I knew it was going to be a bad Christmas. But I pretended I didn't know, because pretending is fun, even if you're not an actress. Besides, the capacity for make-believe is an elementary survival tool. It's the very essence of an alternative reality, which later will be achieved through drugs and alcohol, and later, by work and television, then still later, by therapy of course, and when that doesn't work, meditation or yoga, and then finally at the end of life, through religion or bingo -- depending on what kind of person you are. Pretending is as essential to human beings as food, water and credit. That is why, while driving my parents' car on Vermont's windy, frozen road, Rural Route 114, on Christmas Eve of 1999, in the face of the new millennium, I was pretending that nothing was really wrong.
David, my fiancé, was sullen, silent, uncomfortable. He had repeatedly deflected my questions, my attempts to root out the truth, with the deftness of a skilled goalie slapping a determined puck out of net territory.
"What's wrong?" I asked again.
"Nothing."
"Come on, what's eating you? Tell me." He was as far away from me as the front seat of the Cadillac allowed.
"Nothing. I'm tired."
"David, you haven't said a word, you're tense, you're totally somewhere else, you didn't touch dinner, you couldn't leave my brother's house fast enough...please, tell me what is going on." I flicked on the wipers. It was snowing again.
"Alexis, I don't want to talk about it -- okay?" Ah-ha. Always a determined girl, I gripped my crowbar and pried away until the top finally creaked open the slightest bit. A waft of foul air escaped, ugly, gaseous truths begging for release: "Do you really want me to tell you? Do you really want to know?" His face looked at once defensive and angry, like I'd walked in on him smelling his own underwear. I took my foot off the gas and let the car coast into the turn, a long, unpaved driveway flanked by huge evergreens heaving with snow, a scene that, at any other moment in my life, would be soothing and picturesque, like Maria's approach to the Von Trapps' household in winter.
"I didn't want to bring this up over Christmas...but if you want me to get into it, I'll get into it."
The pine trees may as well have sprouted fangs and ripped themselves out of the ground. What could have been more terrifyingly tempting? We were at the bed and breakfast now, the charming, snow-covered, quintessential New England Christmas bed and breakfast, with its quilts and doilies, hearty fireplaces and old brandy, new gay proprietors and organic bran muffins. We had the smallest room. It was ten below and snowing as we exited the car and headed for the wreath-covered front door in silence. I loved it here. David had been the picture of vomit-ready misery since we'd left L.A. three days earlier. We trudged up the tiny, ancient stairs to our room.
He took off his coat and hung it on a wooden peg. I waited. He looked briefly at the snow outside and spoke. "Alexis, I didn't want to ruin your Christmas..."
I closed the latch on the 200-year-old door to our room and tried to hold in the tears while blocking out the truth that was headed my way. "You're already ruining my Christmas. Everyone in my family has asked me what's wrong. You've brought everyone down, you're obviously not having fun, it's making me tense and unhappy, David, I wish you'd just be honest..." But he said nothing.
"What the hell's going on?" I demanded halfheartedly, because being a woman, of course I already knew. I started crying. Sometimes, this helps. David sat down hard in the Yankee-backed chair with the happy couple in the sleigh painted on the seat, brushed aside the antique rag doll and looked directly at me.
"I can't...I can't marry you." He looked at the ceiling, then back to me with icy eyes. "Unless you convert."
Had this been a movie and not number two on the top ten list of horrible moments in my life, the music would have swelled, I would have backed slowly toward the door, then fled the inn wearing only a white cotton nightie as I ran wailing through the snow outside, and he would have followed, shouting my name desperately, and we would have collapsed together into a marshmallowy snowdrift, angry wrestling giving way to passionate lovemaking.
...Lex, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, he'd say. I love you just the way you are.
But it was not a movie, so David quietly removed his socks, and I stared at my engagement ring wondering if it would be the last one I ever wore.
This was the beginning of the end. The end was long, months really. Extracting myself intact from three years with the wrong man whom I'd wanted to be right required careful, structured planning, like removing that frozen woolly mammoth from its Siberian ice tomb. It took equipment, specialists, commitment, knowledge and dedication, but mostly the thing none of us have enough of and aren't willing to give: time.
The couples therapist we saw when we returned from Vermont was a waste of time, but at the beginning of the end you still have to try. When you're already engaged, you have to believe there's something worth saving. Otherwise what kind of person are you? It was odd meeting there in the middle of the day, in the Century City office building. We fell into each other's arms in Dr. Kreezak's waiting room, beside the watercooler and potted fronds, both sobbing frantically by the time she came to collect us.
"Well, I see you two have gotten a start," she said with a careful sense of humor. She looked like Talia Shire after her Rocky II makeover. Black hair, wide dark eyes, plum lips always half open, expensive skin. As we explained our situation (he was from an Orthodox Jewish family, I was a fallen Catholic now sampling agnosticism; he was an actor, I wasn't; his parents were wealthy, mine weren't; I had a job in an office, he had one in a bar; he had a dog, I had a cat), I got the odd feeling that she didn't know what to say to us and possibly felt guilty for taking our money.
"I love Alexis, and I want to spend my life with her," began David. "But my heritage is bigger than me." He settled into his chair and crossed his arms. His tanned, strong, muscular arms that had held me so many times, in so many places...
Dr. Kreezak looked puzzled. "I have to have Jewish children," David explained patiently.
"Alexis -- ?" she'd probed.
I had prepared my statement, knowing I would unravel the minute I got here, and I did. "I don't see why I have to c...
