The Princess Diarist(11)
Despite the fact that almost everything was new to me then, it was crucial that I appeared to be a kind of nonchalant citizen of the weary part of the world—been there, done not only that but also this, and even that other one a few times later on. I could hardly be expected to do too much more.
Which is undoubtedly why a man might easily have assumed that I’d been around the block, without having any idea how I’d arrived at that block in the first place, or what sort of block it was that I’d been around, and was it lined with homes or trees? Was it an auction block? A city block? Or a chopping one?
I did my best to come off as this kind of ironic, amused, disenchanted creature. An often chatty, even giddy gal with little to no sense of fashion.
Simon Templeman, a British boy I had gone to drama school with, had been my only boyfriend till then, and he and I were together for close to a year before we actually slept together, i.e., had sex. But whatever I’d done or not done with Simon, that—along with some fooling around with three straight guys and kissing three gay guys—was basically the sum total of my earthling version of sexual experience (and an exciting preview of things to come).
Sure, I’d devoted a lot of time to exploring the world of foreplay. Mostly in the shallow end, though—the far reaches caused me, in theory, a certain amount of concern. What if I went there and never made it back? I don’t know even still what it was about sex that concerned me. Was it that once you gave up your virginity, that was it—you could never be a virgin again? Ever? Was it that my mother had been known as Tammy? Tammy the Girl Scout, the last one standing at the virgin sit-in, who raised me to be a very good girl, save my milk and not be a cheap cow no one wanted to buy? Or was it my father, the Olympian sex enthusiast?
Maybe it was the specter of the back of my first stepfather Harry Karl’s gray, withered hanging ball sack as he rose from the bed without pajama bottoms to yet again visit the bathroom. A ball sack available for my nightly viewing throughout my childhood and on into my adolescence. If that was what my future held—a facsimile of what I would someday have to hold tenderly—I would cling to my blessedly penis-and ball-sack-free present for as long as possible. And that possibility finally ended when Simon and I began.
? ? ?
i am someone who wants very much to be popular. I don’t just want you to like me, I want to be one of the most joy-inducing human beings that you’ve ever encountered. I want to explode on your night sky like fireworks at midnight on New Year’s Eve in Hong Kong.
Having famous parents doesn’t endear you to your high school classmates. I found this out one day in ninth grade when I overheard two girls walking behind me in the school hallway. One of them said to the other in an audible whisper, “See that girl just ahead of us? With that headband?”
“Yeah?”
“She’s Debbie Reynolds’s daughter.” There was a slight pause before she added, “She thinks she’s so great.”
Wow, right? Uncanny how she so perfectly nailed me straight out of the box. I just thought I was incredible.
Of course, most people want to be liked, I think, especially when you consider the lonely alternatives. Even the fringier members of society—gangsters, drug cartel types, garden-variety serial killers—even they want to be liked in their own endearing ways. They might want to be admired for their own particular brand of impressive awfulness, such as managing to elude the law for longer than anyone in their questionable line of work, or for the unique and even striking manner in which they slaughtered their victims. Clearly there are numerous methods that can be employed in one’s ravenous quest to be loved.
Given this desire for popularity, playing the role of “the other woman”—a home wrecker (or even an apartment or lean-to wrecker)—was not on my radar of things to accomplish in a lifetime. I can’t think of a single personality trait I have that lends itself to seeking out participation in a sordid situation of that kind.
It’s difficult to imagine a childhood less likely to make one pro-adultery than mine. When I was born, my parents, the handsome singer Eddie Fisher and the beautiful actress Debbie Reynolds, were known as “America’s Sweethearts.” The gorgeous couple with their two adorable little babies (my brother, Todd, came along sixteen months after I did) were the American Dream realized, until Eddie left Debbie for the recently widowed gorgeous actress Elizabeth Taylor, who, just to pile it on a little more, was a friend of my mother’s from their early days at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio. For those too old to remember or too young to care, it was one of the great midcentury tabloid feeding frenzies, and I watched it at very close range.
At the ripe old age of eighteen months I lost my father to an adulteress. I knew in my heart that the only rationale he could have had for leaving was because of how big a disappointment I must have been, and I wasn’t going to do that to some other kid. So it stood to reason that if I could disappoint my own father—if I couldn’t get my own father to love me enough to stick around or, God forbid, visit more often than one day a year—how was I ever going to get a man who didn’t have to love me like daddies were supposed to? (Hey, Envious Classmate, see how fucking great I thought I was?)
My first larger-than-life lesson was what it felt like to be on the clueless end of infidelity. So there was absolutely no way—zero!—that I’d carry on that evil tradition of hurting some lovely, unsuspecting lady.