Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(35)
Nino and I only talked about sex. We’d been to swing dance clubs and martini bars all over London, but we were just friends. After a series of failed relationships in the States with men who’d been remarkably like my father—addicted, adoring, creative, yet essentially self-absorbed—I’d promised myself to stay single and focused on work for a year. Relationships only diffused my focus; months would pass, my attention fixed on the inevitable ebb and flow of closeness, my ideas rattling around in my head rather than taking con crete shape, my creativity sapped. I was twenty-eight, and it all seemed such a chaotic time, those years I’d spent in San Francisco dating and having relationships, fitting in exhibitions here and there while trying to figure out how to make a living and still be an artist. Now, in London, looking ahead into the glaring light of my bright future, I was finally on the right path, and I wasn’t going to let anything get in my way.
Hari and Camilla sipped their drinks. They’d met in acting school. Back at my flat on Wandsworth Bridge Road, we’d sat in my conservatory, with the rain hitting the glass roof, pouring one drink after another. In the States I could hardly drink without feeling ill, but here it seemed I could drink as much as I wanted. It felt as if I’d somehow outrun myself.
Hari smiled over at me and tipped his drink back. I felt lucky to have such a good friend in London. We shared an extended network of friends back in San Francisco, the closest thing to family some of us had ever known. Everywhere I’d ever lived, my friends had been my surrogate family, but nowhere more than in San Francisco. Our crowd threw Mexican “family dinners” every Sunday night, with platters of catfish and black beans and tortillas—a tradition that Hari and I had decided to continue with our London friends.
“Tomorrow,” said Hari, “we’re going to get you a bike.”
A bike would help; I didn’t own a car. Only I was nervous about navigating London’s fitful traffic, riding on the opposite side of the road. “I won’t have to wear one of those masks for the fumes, will I?”
Camilla laughed. “With that amazing hair?” she said. “A crime!”
In celebration of my new expatriate identity, I’d cut off my long, blond hair in favor of a layered sixties bob. Together with the thick black eyeliner, fake lashes, and the high, lace-up boots I’d adopted, the effect was a throwback to Andy Warhol’s silver foil-lined Factory. Astride my new Raleigh three-speed, I’d be a cross between Edie Sedgwick and some rave-babe bike messenger.
Nino took my hand and led me onto the crowded dance floor, pulling me in close, his warm hands on my waist. I caught my reflection in the tilted mirror behind the stage—watching that London hipster with the shock of platinum hair groove—and thought for a moment I’d spotted someone else entirely.
It felt so liberating, leaving behind my family and the failing business, as if I’d shed a too-tight suit and could at last move freely. Walking down a London street, I sometimes imagined myself in the final jailbreak scene of Midnight Express, feeling as if at any moment I might bolt into a run, my sense of buoyancy too much to contain.
As if to test my resolve, my father had begun appearing in public with a young woman named Elisa Keys. He called me in London to tell me that his new girlfriend and I had attended Grosse Pointe South High School together. He seemed proud of this.
Not recognizing her name, I couldn’t recall her face.
I responded as I did with all bad family news. First I felt an intense wave of panic, then shut it out. It was a distant storm. My family’s ship might be sinking; my own, though, was just setting sail.
One day my cousin John, who would soon be the new CEO of the family company, called me, fraught. “Franny, you have to do something about your father and that woman.”
Before my father married her, I knew he meant.
“John, what can I do?”
While John worried about our family’s public image, I ruminated about my father’s health. I heard my father was drinking again, after eight years of sobriety. He and Elisa had met at Sparky’s, a preppy bar in Grosse Pointe where he sat one evening having dinner. Someone told her he was “Eric Stroh, of Stroh’s Beer.” She sat down next to him at the bar and asked the bartender, “Stroh’s! Do you serve that crap?”
“I happen to make that beer,” my father told her.
And they were off to the races.
All the years growing up at the mercy of his alcohol-driven mood swings came back to me in flashes of pain, and I partitioned myself off even further from the barrage of bad news.
As the weeks passed, I found I had no tolerance for the Elisa reports from other family members. The frequent calls were becoming a distraction. London was my golden chance to finally get away, to become independent, and I was determined to circumvent this landslide of family drama.
“What should we do?” Whitney asked too often, the transatlantic static engulfing his voice. “I heard she quit her job at McDonald’s when she met Dad.”
“Just ignore it,” I advised. “I’m sure it won’t last.” My father had told me he would never marry again. And I simply could not picture him with anyone except my mother, certainly not with a high school peer of mine, whoever she was.
Even my mother did not take this relationship seriously. “I saw them having lunch at the country club,” she called me to announce. She paused ceremoniously. “I don’t think you have to worry, Frances; I saw the girl. Dad is just enjoying himself.”