Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [99]
“Who gives a shit about Zelda?” I want to shout, occasionally, when I can’t take it anymore, when I miss Mom, when I can’t see why she had to die just because these two couldn’t seem to face up to some truths in life: that people need money to live and just might have to work from time to time and that if something like booze is killing you, you might have to give it up. Your only brother just died. Who cares about Zelda, Dad. Mom slept with mice running over her bed. And I have a son.
It can only be some kind of literary defense mechanism located in the prefrontal cortex, perhaps one that the psychiatrists and neurosurgeons have yet to discover. A part of the brain that says, “You! You, grief! You, fear! You, sadness! You, loneliness! Have you read Tender Is the Night, grief? Did you know that the Divers are based on my friend Honoria’s father and mother, Sara and Gerald Murphy? Did you know Honoria and I were going to take a trip to Europe to find some of Gerald’s lost paintings? Come over here, it’s much more interesting over here, no one will find you over here, peacefully reading in this cozy part of the brain.”
NOTE TO SELF
WE LOVE OUR BABY. But sometimes it seems like this might be the only thing we have. We don’t see anything the same. Whenever I pull out anything of my mom’s he acts like I’m trying to set the table with silverware from the Titanic. I think silver oyster forks and long mint julep spoons are fun, but then destruction doesn’t scare me—it’s part of me—whereas for him it’s just too weird and frightening. I’m dragging him down. This is why he stopped painting, traded it for real estate, so he wouldn’t have to live like this, and now look what I’m doing. Crazy mom! He picks at me constantly about my writing—which I’m trying to turn into a book. Working on a book—yeah, right. Killing my credit score is more like it.
When I was doing Sally on the Mount in Los Angeles, Marisa Tomei came to the show, and naturally she thought I was a genius and took a bunch of us out afterward to a hotel rooftop where we enjoyed seriously preferential treatment, and a large man from the hotel stood by our table for unknown reasons.
Now, a year and a half after that night with her, Nick feels, is quite insistent, that I send my book to Marisa Tomei.
“You’re not even trying to get published! I don’t know why you don’t send that thing to Marisa Tomei.”
“Well, for starters, she’s not a publishing house, babe, she’s an actress.”
“Oh, gimme a break. You see? You don’t even want to sell your book!”
“I can’t . . . I just can’t explain it to you, can I? Marisa Tomei is not going to publish my book.”
“People don’t take over two years writing a book! Why don’t you send it in?”
“It’s not ready.”
“That’s what publishers do, Jeanne. They figure out the ending. Just send it in. They’ll finish it.”
HUDSON AND I GO BACK to New York whenever we can, increasingly without Nick. He doesn’t seem to want much to do with New York or anyone there anymore. We go out for ice cream with my dad one night. He’s seventy-eight and a sub in Brooklyn public schools. He wouldn’t consider teaching when we were kids, and now he’s subbing in high schools. But the thing is, he really likes it. He told the black kids in school that his mother was black, telling them stories about Ella Voss, his nanny. I can’t imagine what kids think of him, what they think of him saying his mother was black. I think it’s hilarious but also I can’t believe schools actually employ him. I ask him if Grandma Darst and Ella Voss got along. He says they did, and for the rest of the conversation refers to Grandma Darst as “your white grandmother.”
He tells me he was working for the Census Bureau but he got fired because twice he was walking home at night and dropped all the papers, the data he had collected during the day. He says he retraced his steps trying to find the papers but never did. We walk to the ice cream place and sit outside on picnic benches across from Prospect Park. His front