Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [91]
The show was happening the Saturday night before Easter Sunday in Palm Beach. The weird factor was sky high. Formal invitations had been sent out. There were one hundred and fifty guests expected for drinks around the pool, then dinner for a hundred and fifty on the patio. Caterers were running around setting up. There was valet parking, a stage had been built, gardeners were hanging extra vines on the house to make it look nice, a piano was brought out to the white tent–covered performance area, there was a lighting person, a piano tuner, and a DJ for dancing after my show. This was a show that began in my living room in Brooklyn as a way to raise my rent money.
I got out of my sick bed about twenty minutes before showtime and put on my fishnets, high-heeled gladiator boots, bustier. I tailored the open to the setting, wearing a crazy Palm Beach hat and Lilly Pulitzer hot pants, making jokes about tax day and Easter. All the tanned oldies in their blue blazers and penny loafers were with me, really laughing, but after the open I noticed people were making repeated trips to the bar and getting quiet, aka drunk-sleepy. By about halfway through, a third of the audience was asleep. I could have given a shit, really. I wanted the chance to perform my show for a demographic that simply was not going to find me at an experimental jazz club on the Lower East Side. So what if half of them didn’t get the jokes or fell asleep? It was unusual and house theater, which I loved, and most important I got $3,500 for doing my show for one night. I could live on $3,500 for two months in Brooklyn and it made me feel like maybe I could make money as a writer.
The next day we headed to the airport. Nick had to go back to L.A. and I was going with him. We didn’t talk extensively about where we would live. He owned a house in Los Angeles. I had a landscaping job in Brooklyn. I wasn’t going to win this one. As we were waiting for the plane to take off I thought about how my mother left the world so slowly, so achingly, with many false starts, much suffering for herself and my dad and my three sisters. And here was this kid who popped into the world as easily as my mother had left painfully. I am getting on a plane to go to Los Angeles and have a baby, I told myself, as if it was simply my next gig. I could do that.
Right after we got to Los Angeles, I began vomiting out our car window, into a bucket by our bed, next to taco trucks while Nick got a couple al pastor. Then, as I gripped the plastic blue bucket that now rested at my side like a pug in a Goya painting, it hit me: I live in L.A. I vomited several more times. It seemed like in order to grasp the fact that I was pregnant I had to first figure out where the hell I was. I called my friends in Brooklyn. They confirmed my theory.
“You live in L.A.”
“Yes, my pal, you live in L. fuckin’ A.”
Nick drove everywhere for the first trimester, partly because I was liable to get sick but also because I felt that if I didn’t drive, then I wasn’t really there. And if I never figured out where anything was or how to get anywhere, we’d just have to move back to New York where I could be pregnant along with Katharine, who was four months pregnant with her second child. She was due in August, I was due in December. After I’d been there for a few weeks I figured it was time to call Dad and tell him I was pregnant before Katharine or Eleanor let it slip.
“Hi, Dad. It’s Jean. Yes, I’m still out in California. Nick and I have some news. I’m pregnant.”
“And getting married?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Nick and I had talked about getting married and he wasn’t that excited about the idea, he hadn’t been divorced that long, but I wanted to get married, which surprised me. It’s not that I had always thought marriage itself was bad, what I thought was that marrying the wrong person was bad, really bad. That’s what will leave you wanting to jump off a chaise longue to your death. And I thought that if you had a lot of kids, I don’t know, more than two