Inside Out(10)
Nastassja’s mom may have been even less reliable than mine. It had fallen to Nastassja, from the age of twelve, to support them both. I wasn’t paying for my mother’s life (yet), but I understood the feeling of being responsible for the person who was supposed to be responsible for you. Emotionally, it felt like it was my job to keep Ginny alive. It was a sad but powerful thing Nastassja and I had in common. For a time, we were very close.
I decided to follow Nastassja’s example—I wanted to do what she did, and if that meant acting, then so be it. I learned by watching, observing, asking myself: How is this person doing this? What do you need to do to make this work—do you need to get an agent? (Not: I want to be an actor, mind you. But: How do I make this happen?) I went with Nastassja to her dance classes, trying to emulate her grace, and one night she took me along to dinner with Polanski. He tracked me down to invite me to dinner a second time months later, and I went with my mom. He was a perfect gentleman on both of those evenings, but he had been convicted of having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl. (I saw this dynamic all around me. Thirteen was a little extreme, but in my world, believe it or not, relationships with underage girls was the norm.) He expected probation following his plea bargain, but the judge saw it differently. Faced with imprisonment, Polanski fled the United States just a few days after that second dinner. He ended up making Tess in France; the film received three Oscars, and Nastassja won a Golden Globe.
I was disappointed when she moved out of the apartment building. It would be two decades before we saw each other again—unexpectedly, at Elizabeth Taylor’s regular Sunday lunch. When we embraced, it was like a homecoming. We knew each other in a way that no one else could.
MY DAD WAS living with Morgan in Redondo Beach, and we went to visit them—he wouldn’t let Morgan come to our place. Ginny was behind the wheel in the yellow Cadillac she had managed to hang on to from Diskin, with Landi along for the ride in back. I sat in the passenger seat, explaining to Landi the complicated history of my parents’ relationship, which I had put together from years of snooping around. For instance, I knew from poking through the metal fireproof box where documents were stored that my birth certificate was dated November 11, 1962, and that the date on my parents’ marriage license was February 1963—which at first I had assumed was a mistake: it should have said February 1962, nine months before I was born. But I’d since realized that they don’t make mistakes on that kind of thing. Obviously, it took Ginny a while to get divorced from that guy Charlie she was with when my dad went to college, so she could marry my dad, who got her pregnant with me, and . . .
I stopped. I turned toward my mother. And out of my mouth came the words, “Is he my real father?” Somewhere deep down, though, I already knew the answer.
She snapped, “Who told you that?” But nobody told me. Nobody had to.
A flood of questions came into my head. Who else knows about this? Everybody, as it turned out: all my cousins, even the younger ones, knew that Danny was not my biological father. I thought of all the times I’d told them about the ways I was like him, how I inherited my eye problems from him, my love of spicy food, and they had stood there, looking at me, knowing I was clueless, deluded. Why wasn’t I ever told? “Because your dad never wanted you to know,” Ginny said. “He made everyone promise because he thought you wouldn’t feel the same about him.”
Ten minutes later, we were at my dad’s impersonal stucco two-bedroom apartment. My mother dropped the bomb the second we walked in the door: “Demi knows.” In no time, she had a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and she seemed high on the drama of the situation—the power it had given her to hurt him.
He avoided meeting my eyes. He looked numb. It was only one in the afternoon, but he had likely polished off a six-pack before we got there.
Nobody asked me if I was okay, or if I had questions. Neither of my parents seemed to care about what this revelation meant to me.
They went into the bedroom and kept fighting, or maybe they started having sex . . . with them there was always a fine line.
I felt exposed and stupid and somehow dirty. So I did what they’d taught me to do when the shit hit the fan. I got in the car and took off. Not for good—yet. I had nowhere to go but back to my mother’s apartment. But I was practicing.
Chapter 4
Not long after the bombshell dropped, I was visiting my aunt Choc in Amarillo, Texas. I told her that I knew about my dad. “It’s about time,” she said. She’d always liked my biological father, Charlie, she told me, and had happy memories from the time she spent with him and my mother. “You know, he lives in Texas,” she added. “We could try calling him.” She did, and the next day he showed up at her door. I didn’t know what to feel or how to behave: he was a stranger, but he was my father. He was handsome, about five-ten, with brown hair, probably around thirty-five years old at the time. I looked to see where I might connect. In fact, my eye problem was something I’d inherited from my father—this father. He had been devastated, he told me, when my mom left him, and he had always wanted to meet me.
I was fourteen, and I wasn’t equipped to cope with this situation. And it only got worse: Ginny showed up. Never content to let drama unfold without her at its center, she got on a plane the second Choc told her that Charlie was coming. When she arrived, she whisked Charlie off into a room alone. I spent the entire day compulsively rolling joints and smoking them, acting like I was just fine and didn’t need a thing.